CY, the "Osama" thing is beneath you. I'm surprised that you'd even bother with that.

I agree, the Obama Osama thing sounds like something a guy strung out on Oxycontin would say.

But I can't argue that Louisiana's been grossly mismanaged by Democrats for decades. Corruption seems to be their mother's milk.

"Osama" thing is beneath you.

You'll have to take that up with the guy who started it...can I refresh your memory as to who that might be?

You can refresh my memory if you'd like, Avenger; I don't know who started it. Whoever it was, however, is really immaterial. My experience is that CY has generally kept himself apart from the spittle-flecked, namecalling herd. That's one of the reasons I keep coming back here.

I don't know who started it.

Ted Kennedy.

It appears Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), a frontrunner for the Democrat Party presidential nomination, has stolen a page from the campaign playbook of Segolene Royal, the French Socialist Party candidate who lost the French presidential election to Nicolas Sarkozy early last month.

In a Bob McCarty Writes™ post May 4, I reported that operatives of Senator Obama and his chief rival, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), would be paying close attention to the results of the presidential election in France. A day later, I wrote and published a post about Royal’s warning to her countrymen — or, as she would say, “country-persons” — only 48 hours before election day that violence would erupt in the streets of France if she lost. And it did.

Now, according to an Associated Press report, Obama tossed out words like “Katrina” and “Rodney King” before accusing President George W. Bush of doing nothing to defuse a “quiet riot” among blacks that threatens to erupt just as riots in Los Angeles did 15 years ago.

Sounds like a threat to me. Moreover, it sounds like he’s targeting the same segment of the Democrat Party base at which people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton tend to direct their oft-divisive, race-bating efforts, such as “No Justice, No Peace!” Worst of all, it sounds as if he’s hoping those targeted will actually resort to violence so that he — Obama — can try to lay the blame for the social unrest at the feet of Bush and, more importantly, his Republican opponent in the 2008 general election.

If I was Senator Clinton, I would be eating this up, satisfied that the junior senator from Illinois had blown his chance and, in so doing, improved hers.

Primary source:

Many of the folks in this room know just where they were when the riot in Los Angeles started and tragedy struck the corner of Florence and Normandy. And most of the ministers here know that those riots didn't erupt over night; there had been a "quiet riot" building up in Los Angeles and across this country for years.

If you had gone to any street corner in Chicago or Baton Rouge or Hampton -- you would have found the same young men and women without hope, without miracles, and without a sense of destiny other than life on the edge -- the edge of the law, the edge of the economy, the edge of family structures and communities.

Those "quiet riots" that take place every day are born from the same place as the fires and the destruction and the police decked out in riot gear and the deaths. They happen when a sense of disconnect settles in and hope dissipates. Despair takes hold and young people all across this country look at the way the world is and believe that things are never going to get any better. You tell yourself, my school will always be second rate. You tell yourself, there will never be a good job waiting for me to excel at. You tell yourself, I will never be able to afford a place that I can be proud of and call my home. That despair quietly simmers and makes it impossible to build strong communities and neighborhoods. And then one afternoon a jury says, "Not guilty" -- or a hurricane hits New Orleans -- and that despair is revealed for the world to see.

Not all what the AP characterized, is it. More of a "We've got to give people hope for a better future," kind of a message; "get folks to believe in the system and make the system work" thing, rather than race-baiting. You don't have to agree with the message, but Obama is clearly not race baiting - the AP is race baiting you.

First, why is he bashing Bush? Bush's own base hates him and agrees that he is totally incompetient.

Now to Louisiana. I live here and at one time lived in NO. For as long as I can remember, the Democratic party has kept a segment of NO in the stone age. They have thrown any welfare program they can think of at these people except the type that would allow them to advance. The reason for this is that they would keep them in certain neighborhoods that they could control and thus have a ready pool of voters. By their control of the 9th ward alone, they were able to shift any state wide vote that they desired. The danger came when the 9th ward and the various project were flooded. Now people were unleashed that you can not imagine. I know these people as I work at the charity hospitals. They see nothing wrong with murder or taking anything they desire. As long as they were confined to their areas, the politicians were very happy with the status quo. This is one of the major reasons that the cops left NO and no one would go in for relief work. The other reasons have to do with the incompetient mayor and governor that we have then one of the worse presidents in history. Notice that Mississippi was hurt worse than NO and has pretty much the same race mix yet they are recovering.

You might ask, why don't we change? The reason is that we can't. The politicians have a lock on segments of our population and promise them favors for thier votes. Thus only criminals are in our state and many of the city governments. If Jindal can keep his mouth shut about abortion this time, he might have a shot at the governor. But that is one small victory.

Basically what is wrong with the Black population today is racism. But not the type of the 50's. This time it is the racism of blacks against whites and anything else in our culture that would necessitate their getting ahead on their own. NO is not rebuilt for the very reason that blacks will not get up off there rears and go clean the neighborhood, their own house or repair a thing. We send church groups to houses of people that could easily do the repair of their homes themselves yet refuse to do so. During the hurricane one phrase that was screamed out in despiration sticks with me--"who is going to take care of us now?"

Should anyone be surprised Obama is just another race hustler? Does anyone remember that his campaign used court documents of a sealed divorce case to discredit his opponent? Can anyone imagine what would have happened had a conservative uttered anything like this?