More on New Orleans, faulty pumps...

Some must-see sites on this week's 'toon:

• Toni McElroy and Kevin Whelan of ACORN point out that the best way to help New Orleans is to finally have a conversation about poverty in America. They and Gulf Coast Reconstruction watch have proposed some shocking common sense ideas to move the rebuilding process forward, like actually sending some money down to the shattered school system and halting the demolition of livable public housing. Perhaps we might even think about hooking a few people up with some health insurance. The New Agenda for the Gulf Coast report also points out that the amount of spending waste in the rebuilding effort could exceed $1 billion this year due to the awarding of low- or no-bid contracts.


• Of course, I suppose these ideas are only common sense if you're not a dead-hearted Republican "bootstrap" jerkweed like Newt Gingrich, who is so utterly consumed with his own white-bread existence and so completely unaware of the effect that poverty and racism have on society that he makes idiot comments like this.


• So, what really got me pissed off to do this cartoon was the AP story last week that 34 brand-new, heavy-duty pumps built by former Jeb Bush business partner J. David Eller's Moving Waters Industries are... you guessed it... faulty! Not only that, but the Army Corps of Engineers installed the pumps even though they knew the equipment would fail during a storm. And, of course, a story like this would not be complete unless MWI was also under investigation on allegations of fraud and misappropriation of taxpayer money... which they are.
  
  See some of the prior links for more information, and Fix the Pumps has some good info on this insane story.


• NOLA.com has a series on Louisiana's disappearing coastline... I'll come back to that in a later 'toon.


• I've been reading Max Weber's Politics as a Vocation... hadn't read this one before (I do vaguely remember reading The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in college). I'll probably come back to this one in a later 'toon, too.
  
  Anyway, he has the strangest idea that "responsibility" is an important qualification for political leadership, and that the only person who should be allowed to "put his hand on the wheel of history" is one who will "do justice to the responsibility that power imposes upon him."
  
  How odd...