Red Beans & Rice

Well, tonight I cooked up a big ole pot of red beans & rice, not nearly as good as the red beans & rice I've had at any one of a dozen joints in the Quarter, but there you go. I've been sitting here eating the beans with hot sauce and drinking Abita beer, thinking a little about other nights and other places with cold Abita, once up on the levee with a bunch of shooting buddies, convinced — so amazingly stupid! — that even though we drank in the valley of the shadow, we were the baddest dogs in the neighborhood! Hell, I'm lucky I survived my impetuous youth.

Heard from Paul Gomez of OPS from his home in Baton Rouge on a shaky cell connection. He came through in good shape and has been running media types into the Big Easy (yes, that's how the Great Hair Brigade was stand there surrounded by prowling jackals and not sweat bullets!). He says fellow trainer SouthNarc and his fellow SWAT officers have been the "law east of the Mississippi" for the last week, holding the line using a couple of SouthNarc's tracked vehicles after most of the LEO vehicles were destroyed in the storm. HATS OFF TO THE MEN AND WOMEN HOLDING THE LINE!

Paul says the two things that stood out to him were the absolute collapse of communications — just like 9-11 — and the lack of advance planning for what to do with the dead bodies. WAY too much reliance on cell phones, which work just fine as long as the cell towers are not under water, and way too many bodies.

I'm sure you saw this over at InstaPundit, but go ahead and let yourself get pissed off all over again. While people were dying in New Orleans, FEMA had 1000 of the top firefighters/paramedics/rescue personnel in ATLANTA in a SEXUAL HARRASSMENT CLASS!

Not long after some 1,000 firefighters sat down for eight hours of training, the whispering began: "What are we doing here?"

As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters - his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week - a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta. . . .

The firefighters, several of whom are from Utah, were told to bring backpacks, sleeping bags, first-aid kits and Meals Ready to Eat. They were told to prepare for "austere conditions." Many of them came with awkward fire gear and expected to wade in floodwaters, sift through rubble and save lives.

"They've got people here who are search-and-rescue certified, paramedics, haz-mat certified," said a Texas firefighter. "We're sitting in here having a sexual-harassment class while there are still [victims] in Louisiana who haven't been contacted yet."

Ah yes, the illusive liberal! God forbid one of these genuine American heroes should say "something inappropriate" while hauling some drowning person out of a flood! Am I the only one who thinks that if there's a tree still standing in New Orleans, these FEMA mental midgets should be hung from it?