One quick local item to fly your way, first. We talked several weeks ago about the Jimboy’s restaurant going into the old Denny’s building in the Glenbrook Basin and how a couple other nearby fast food places were remodeling to keep up with the competition. Well, Jimboy’s is open now, and in typical Grass Valley fashion, it’s a traffic nightmare. The parking lot is too small to maneuver your pickup, and the cars have to line up and wait to get out. Wrong design; wrong place. This is not a review of the food, only of the parking lot.

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This is one of those weeks when there really is only one news story. I’ve been away from my usual news sources for most of the past week, but it’s impossible not to know about the impact of Hurricane Katrina. I want to say, first, that I do not believe that the US government caused the hurricane or manipulated its movement in order to increase the price of gasoline or to punish that sinful southern city.

That said, we can move on to talk about the US government’s response to what happened in New Orleans. A much larger area was hammered by the hurricane, but that’s not unusual and not unmanageable. Having an entire major city up to its knees, if not its shoulders in rancid seawater is an unprecedented catastrophe. As usual, all I know is what I read in the papers, but what I read in the papers is that the US government has been not just useless, but a serious roadblock to fixing the immediate problems. We don’t even know yet about the long range problems.

We know that the top US officials were on vacation and playing golf while New Orleans was and still is soaking. We know that the guy who thinks he’s President took a flyover and said, "Yep, that’s a flood alright." We know that countries all around the planet, from Cuba to Russia, have humanitarian relief sitting on the runways ready to fly, but the US government won’t let it fly, and we know that a thing called the Federal Emergency Management Agency is blocking humanitarian relief from within this country. In other words, mother nature may have dumped this tragedy on us, but the US government is making sure that it brings the maximum grief to as many people as possible.

Are these people just asleep at the switch? In a way, yes. In the minds of the people in charge in Washington, it’s really far more important to be killing people and stealing oil in Iraq than it is to save some lives in New Orleans. Although most of the National Guard troops in the south already are deployed in Iraq, the feds managed to find some to send into New Orleans to attack looters, most of whom were just trying to get some supplies for survival. The most poignant quote I read was, "We need food and water, and they send us men with guns."

I suspect there’s an element of that conservative, states’ rights thing involved. The other side of states’ rights is states’ responsibilities. I imagine the Bush gang thinks the hurricane really isn’t the federal government’s problem. "Y’all can drain that water yourselves. We’re up here cleaning out the safe, so don’t bother us." The media also is being managed to minimize the flak. Just like in Iraq, if you want the body count, you have to go to European news sources. The mainstream American media won’t tell you how many people are floating dead in the water in New Orleans. But Bush blinked. He said he was ordering an investigation into the federal government’s failure to respond to the hurricane damage. That means the gang knows they have a little problem on their hands. I expect a report in about a year saying that no one could have anticipated the disaster, and all federal authorities did everything they possibly could do in response.

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The final word on Pat Robertson’s rallying call to assassination. Richard Kim in The Nation wrote that Robertson may have saved the life of Hugo Chavez. No one would even consider killing him after a bozo like Robertson advocated it.

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A few words about the Strawberry Music Festival where I was holed up for most of the past week. Two themes dominated the event. The first, of course, was New Orleans. The subdudes cancelled their appearance because their homes were under water. Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks came on short notice to fill that spot in the schedule. Two themes dominated the festival. First was New Orleans. Every musical performer sent their musical prayers in that direction. When the Houston Jones band played Randy Newman’s song, Louisiana, there wasn’t a dry eye in the place.