The City of Louisiana

[jamesq]

I was going to post a big damn blog about the destruction of New Orleans, but this about sums it up for me: http://media.putfile.com/OlbermannSwings

*** Late edit ***

I thought I'd add Mark Morford's take on the whole thing and also show you this wonderful photo I found:

Comments

[jamesq]

Many years ago I worked for Office Despot. They sent me to San Francisco on a junket for sales training. I was there for a week and got to know some of my fellow sales weasels during that time. One of then was from Eugene Oregon, who told me about the bipolar nature of US politics. Me and a fellow from Saskatchewan in turn told him about Canadian politics. There was a Federal election going on at the time so we gave him an overview of the parties involved:

1) The Liberals (closest to your Democrats, but slightly more to the left - in Canada there pretty much dead center).

2) Progressive Conservatives (closest to the way the Republicans have been historically, but not recently)

3) The New Democrats (farther left then the Liberals, would never get elected in the States, but manage to get 5-10% of the seats here)

4) The Reform Party (closest to the way the Republicans under Bush Jr. are now).

5) The Bloc Quebecois (regional party dedicated to Quebec separation, a topic that, as an American, you are lucky to avoid).

And those were the ones that managed to get seats in Parliament. To round out the assorted nut clusters we have:

6) The Rhinoceros Party. Among their other promises, they wanted to level the country by bulldozing all the mountains into all the low bits so you could "coast from coast to coast". God I miss them.

7) The Natural Law party, which wanted to teach the nation Yogic flying so that we could usher in a new age of world-wide peace and harmony. Unlike the Rhinos, they were serious.

8) The Communist Party of Canada and

9) The Marxist-Leninist party of Canada. They're two parties because they had a schism in the 50's or 60's over whether the old Soviet Union was justified in sending the army in to thump any of the satellite states that got uppity.

10) The Canadian Heritage Party, Try to imagine the Republicans if they were run by Pat Robinson.

Eugene Oregon thought we were making this shit up.

In the intervening 15 years, some of these parties have vanished, some new ones have appeared (The Alberta Separation Party - aka the whiney bitch party), some have merged - the Reform became the Conservative/Reform Alliance Party, later simply the Alliance Party after someone told them what the acronym was. Eventually they merged/absorbed/bullied the Progressive Conservatives and are now simply the Conservatives.

Canadian Politics is fun!

Fantasy and Reality

[http://users.livejournal.com/-grog-/]

Reality being what it is, even the most fevered imagination won't come up with anything quite as bizarre.