FEMA has cleaned up its act as well as they could over the past three years, but of course news continues to come out about fatcat busnessmen taking every advantage to exploit government contracts ~ and, of course, every instance of "emergency response" is a near-perfect opportunity to rip off the taxpayer.

I'm sure that think-tank hirelings, columnists being paid under the table, and talk-radio demagogues will continue to blame the victims for waste and overspending, not the campaign-contributing corporations who are the major abusers of the system.

I wonder if those nasty bigmouths will be any kinder to Texan hurricane victims than they were to us Louisianans. (As recently as this year's Midwestern flooding, they were still on their soapboxes denouncing us and pretending that Iowans would be less dependent upon emergenccy funding than we've been.)

This latest population to be wiped out by flooding is only slightly more Caucasian than us in next-door Louisiana, but it's much more Protestant and less Catholic, and their gay minority is less visible. It should be more difficult for the dittoheads of the world to demonize a group they see as "their own" than they did us "un-American" Blacks, Catholics, and gays in Louisiana.

Of course, Louisiana voted for Bush, pretty overwhelmingly, in the last two elections, with rural white Louisiana expecially receptive to the neoconservative message. But the talkshow assholes liked to pretend that the 15,000-20,000 poor black folks left behind in New Orleans during Katrina ~ and more specifically, the couple-hundred lawbreaking looters ~ were more representative of our population than the 80,000 homeowners who evacuated at their own expense and, in many ases, lost everything they owned. Now that similar numbers of Texans are having the same experience, I'm curious to see how the right-wing hate-and-fear industry will respond.