Bloody Gretna...

The people who let 40 people die in a flooded nursing home are being charged with negligent homicide. Looks like a whole police department should be next. And while they're at it, the City Council should be brought up on civil rights charges.

If you arrived here late, the one route which could have provided an escape path for those stranded at the Superdome and the NO Convention Center was the Crescent City Bridge. Unfortunately for those hapless men, women, children and old people, mostly of color, the Crescent City Bridge leads to a suburb of NOLA called Gretna. The bridge was barricaded by Gretna PD cops with shotguns and police dogs. Eyewitnesses have confirmed this is what happened.

Let me break it down for you this way:

Burn Gretna Burn
(with apologies to my homie Chuck D)

Burn Gretna burn I smell a riot goin' on
Blocked the bridge, now my brothers and sisters are dead and gone
Get me the hell away from this TV
All this news and views are beneath me
Cause all I hear about is shots ringin' out
And the motherfuckin' sheriff wouldn't let us escape
Makes me feel something a lot like being raped
So I rather kick some slang out
All right fellas let's go hand out
Gretna Louisiana or would they not
Make us all look bad like I know they had
But some things I'll never forget yeah
And the city council said it was ok
To turn my brothers and sisters away from Gretna, LA
The joke is over smell the smoke from all around
Burn Gretna burn

Since the Los Angeles Times has one of the nastiest registration regimes of any newspaper short of the Wall Street Journal, I took the liberty of making a PDF of this very important story. (114Kb) To add insult to injury, the Gretna City Council has gone on record now stating they approved of the actions of their Police Department when they sealed up the Crescent City Bridge. They are now circling the wagons, Apartheid South Africa style. It's all in that article.

Racist assholes, the lot of them. Yeah, they have Black people living there, too, but I am willing to make a wild guess that there weren't any Black people in on that decision.

BTW: Dubya's speech last night was a load of garbage, and a whitewash over the big news about the rebuilding of New Orleans: Karl Rove is going to be Dubya's pointman during the rebuilding process. Chew on that awhile. :P