Thanks

John Edwards left the campaign for the Democratic nomination today. He did it in New Orleans, Louisiana, the city where he announced his campaign. I supported him, & will still write his name in at Wisco's primary. He was the only candidate that addressed what is truly right about America & what is truly wrong about America. He understood the unimaginable cruelty of the Bu$hCo administration's attitude towards New Orleans. & while a backward thinking commenter below somehow thinks that C-Ray had/has a lot more money & power than the federal government, Bu$hCo effectively abandoned New Orleans. The local pols aren't even important, frankly, since this was a national disaster, not some tragic local tornado destruction. It's easy to rebuild the local Log Cabin Pizza Place or Let's Kill Us Some Deer Sporting Goods & Liquor Emporium. It's harder to rebuild a distinct American culture of the kind that New Orleans developed over the centuries. & this is not to say that the culture existing in NOLA pre-Katrina didn't need some deep fixing, it certainly did, but it's hard to fix the schools, for example, when the whole community is not behind that fixing. It's easy to have good schools in Whitefish Bay, WI, where the median income for a family is $95,744. Yes, that's pretty close to a hundred thousand a year. In NOLA, by contrast, the median family income, pre-Katrina, from the 2000 census, was $27,133. The poverty stats are interesting as well. Whitefish Bay had 3.2% of its citizens living below the poverty line. NOLA had 36.38% of its citizens below the poverty line. & in that range of folks below the poverty line the highest percentage was 61.4% among families with a female as the head of the household & with children under five. Now I know that I am comparing rutabagas to eggplant here, a small, upper Midwestern suburban city with a large, multi-ethnic southern port city. But my point is that Bu$hCo deliberately ignored NOLA because it is predominately black, poor, & Democratic. It is a bright blue spot in an otherwise dismally red state. Bu$hCo's response was the response of a racist, of someone who just doesn't give a shit about poor people. Parse it anyway you want, but don't blame a ReThug turned Democrat, that would be C-Ray, for the disaster. He was a ReThug, you know, the responsible cable television exec. Anyway, back to Mr. Edwards. He went to New Orleans today & gave this speech. I hope Clinton or Obama listens not only to this speech, but to much of what Edwards had to say. He, alone among all the initial Democratic candidates, had the mettle to smack the Rethugs down, he does understand just how awful the present administration is. I can only hope that whoever wins the nomination & then the presidency would have the ovaries or balls to appoint him as Attorney General. Then we will finally make the criminals in the Bu$hCo mafia pay all their debts to society, a society they are/were hell-bent on destroying.