Fun with Gunz

New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin and police superintendent Warren Riley clown around with firearms. But the ordinary citizen can't be trusted with them.

The most corrupt police in the nation

Here is a video about the rampant corruption of the New Orleans city government and its police force. After Katrina the government of the city of New Orleans ordered their police to confiscate privately owned firearms. The NOPD complied with the order with gusto. Police took advantage of the opportunity to loot firearms from the citizenry most of which wound up in the officer's private collections or were sold by the cops to pawn shops or gun stores throughout the Southeast.

Not only this but police from other states flocked to the area when they found out that it was open season on pretty much anything they wanted.

There is no excuse for this behavior and there is no forgiveness for this behavior. Every cop who behaved in this way deserves death and only death. Each and every one of them should be stood up against a wall and have his brains blown out by a firing squad.

If I were to encounter this kind of thing in the aftermath of a natural disaster I would resist with deadly force even if I knew that I would be killed. When cops do this kind of thing they stop being the enforcers of the law and become just another filthy criminal street gang and cops who act in this way have no rights which any civilized person is bound to respect.

Laissez les bons temps rouler!

NEW ORLEANS, June 20 — The former president of the Orleans Parish School Board pleaded guilty in federal court on Wednesday to taking $140,000 in bribes from a political operative thought to be the older brother of Representative William J. Jefferson, who has been indicted on bribery charges.

The operative is not named in court papers, and government lawyers have refused to identify the source of the bribes to the former schools president, Ellenese Brooks-Simms. But a person close to the investigation who asked not to be identified said it was Mose Jefferson, the congressman’s brother. Mr. Jefferson, also identified in local news reports as the one making the bribes, did not return phone calls.

Mose Jefferson has been one of the congressman’s chief strategists for more than two decades, a hardball-playing organizer of his campaigns, according to local consultants, and a discreet but powerful presence in one of New Orleans’ ruling political families.

Corruption! In New Orleans!

I am shocked. Shocked I tell you. Next thing you'll tell me is that there's gambling in Las Vegas or pornographic movies being made in Los Angeles.

Madame John's Legacy

One of the famous buildings in New Orleans' French Quarter is Madame John's Legacy at 623 Dumaine St. It is one of the only French colonial residences surviving in the Mississippi Valley. It is now the property of the Louisiana State Museum system and is open to the public. The upper floor houses an art gallery and the ground floor contains exhibits tracing the history of the site.

The name "Madame John's Legacy" comes from the short story Tite Poulette by author George Washington Cable. Cable wrote vivid colorful stories about life in New Orleans before the Civil War and was a pioneer in the use of vernacular language.

The portrait he painted of life in the old French colony was so unusual to the readers of the Northern newspapers in which they were originally serialized that a New York paper sent a reporter to New Orleans to see if such people and places really existed. He wrote back that such people and places did exist and that the building described as Madame John's Legacy was real, although it was inhabited not by "quadroons" but by a "nest of Italians who sell fuel by day and are up to God only knows what kind of nefarious activities by night".

One of the first things one notices when walking through the house is how small the rooms are, that and how they interconnect without hallways. This gives the interior of the house a maze-like quality. The next thing one notices, of course, is the artwork. The exhibition on permanent display is titled: Goin’ ‘Cross My Mind: Contemporary Self-Taught Artists of Louisiana.

Of all the work displayed there the most striking, in my opinion, is that of "Prophet" Royal Robertson. Here is Robertson's bio from Dilettante Press:

"Prophet" Royal Robertson was born in Baldwin, Louisiana, between 1930 and 1936. He left school in the eighth grade. In his late teens, he left Louisiana and traveled along the west coast for several years. He returned to Louisiana to care for his aging mother and then married. After nineteen years, Robertson's marriage soured, and his wife left him, an event which continued to haunt him until his death in 1998. Although he had already trained as a commercial sign painter, in 1978 he began studying studio art via a correspondence course he saw advertised on the back of a matchbook. Soon thereafter he began decorating his house inside and out with hundreds of drawings and signs denouncing the "treachery" of his former wife and most other women as the source of all male difficulties, most specifically his own. His fury gradually took on the status of a mental illness, in which he imagined himself to be the victim of an evil worldwide female conspiracy with science-fiction overtones. Robertson had keen interests in astrology, numerology, and religious cults of all kinds.

Robertson died in 1998 but not before he was able to reconcile with his children. Robertson's work is still available and his magic marker, colored pencil and ball point pen drawings on poster-board generally sell for between $400.00 to $800.00.

My favorite Robertson work is a colored pencil and magic marker drawing of the artist on his knees with two angels hovering his head discussing how his treacherous wife had maliciously ruined him, broke his heart and left him with nothing. The work is entitled "I Was So Hungry, Lord, and There Was No Foods".

Maybe they should give the honest people their guns back?

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- With tourists streaming into town for Mardi Gras celebrations, a spasm of gun violence left two people dead and seven wounded _ more bad news for a city struggling to rebuild itself and its tourism industry.

Officials noted the bloodshed did not occur near any of the parades Thursday night to celebrate Carnival, which culminates Tuesday in Mardi Gras.

The two unrelated shootings were not random or part of a robbery, and the victims were all targeted, Sgt. Joe Narcisse said.

In the first shooting Thursday evening, three people were shot, two fatally, in a car parked in the Ninth Ward, far from the heart of the party. The survivor _ the car's driver _ told police he knew and had given a ride to the man who shot them, Narcisse said.

Another shooting wounded six people, one critically, early Friday at a Mid-City nightclub. The gunman escaped in a stampede that followed.

"Once again it's a situation where violent crimes are taking place in inner-city neighborhoods and traditional hot spots," said Mary Beth Romig, spokeswoman for the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau. "The truth is, Mardi Gras continues to be one of the safest times for tourist to be here."

Well, the city government has been trying to get as many people as possible who fled Katrina to come back. It looks like they have succeeded. New Orleans is still a chocolate city.

First identify the problem

From The Washington Post:

NEW ORLEANS, Jan. 11 -- Thousands marched on City Hall here today, cradling photographs of slain relatives and waving signs demanding better policing and leadership, in a show of anger and anguish over the wave of violent crime that has beset their neighborhoods.

Even in a city long accustomed to violence, the rise that began with the repopulation after Hurricane Katrina and came to a crescendo last week when six people were killed in a 24-hour period has stunned many.

Katrina washed a great deal of filth out of the city and the city's political leadership has been moving heaven and earth to get them back. What did they think would happen? Especially since they have also moved heaven and earth to disarm the city's population of honest citizens.

I'm sorry but I just can't have any sympathy for a city that just reelected "School bus" Nagin. If the people of New Orleans desire a better and safer city it is in their power to create one but they must jettison the current political culture and the underlying political/social philosophy which built it.

The piper ALWAYS has to be paid

NEW ORLEANS, Dec. 5 -- A young woman shot to death in her home Friday morning became at least the seventh New Orleans homicide victim of the new year.

The victim, whose identity was not released, was said to be in her early 20s. Her house in the Uptown section of New Orleans had been ransacked; police did not know whether anything had been taken.

Five of the shootings, all unrelated, occurred within a 14-hour span Wednesday night and Thursday morning. Also, a body with signs of physical trauma was found Wednesday wrapped in a rug. That death has not been classified.

The spate of killings dashed hopes that the city's police chief was right on New Year's Day when he said he believed the violence that has plagued parts of the city for months had been brought under control.

History lesson: In the aftermath of Katrina The mayor and the chief of police sent the NOPD, those who had not run away, joined the looters and who really existed (rather than just existed on paper so that corrupt officials could pocket their pay), out to confiscate the firearms of legally armed citizens.

When questioned about this they denied it and when ordered to give the illegally seized guns back by a federal judge they have dragged their feet.

They have claimed all sorts of procedural and practical reasons why they can't return the property which they stole, but the real reason is sample.

The city itself no longer has control of the stolen guns. They were divided up among the police who actually did the stealing. Every one of the firearms is now in the collection of a New Orleans cop, or one of the cops from other areas who came to the area to help out. Or in the collection of some corrupt (is there any other kind?) New Orleans politician who had a friend on the force. Or they have been sold to a gun store or pawn ship or transferred to some criminal gang that pays NOPD protection. Even the cheap "Saturday night special" junk guns have some dollar value or are useful to corrupt police as "throw downs".

What New Orleans is going through now is the inevitable result of a corrupt political/police culture, a judicial system steeped in the politically correct idea of the criminal as victim of society, a large minority population which has always had the government there to take care of them, and therefore never had to learn responsibility and self reliance, and a civilian population which has now been rendered defenseless in a very public way.

Under those circumstances crime and violence could not do anything but skyrocket!

If Ray "School Bus" Nagin and his police chief want to turn the situation in the Crescent City around there is one way to do it. Go on TV and encourage the honest citizens to arm themselves. Open the police range for civilian practice and declare "open season on criminals".

Do this and New Orleans will become a model of law and order. Fail to do this and deep ordering the body bags.