NEWS FLASH!

I typically try to avoid the news. More times than not some headline or breaking news flash pisses me right off and sends me on a major tangent. Recent news has done just that.

• Former US Senator Jessie Helms died and folks have gone buck wild celebrating his life and legacy. Personally, I take issue with honoring a man whose entire life was dedicated to hatred of people who weren’t blond and blue-eyed like him. Jesse has been recently described as “charismatic”, “a leading voice of the people”, a “conservative icon”, and a “courageous champion”. Folks are falling all over themselves not to speak ill of the dead and to find something nice to say about ole’ Jesse. The hypocrisy has just been too much for me to handle.
  
  If Jesse’d had his way, I’d be pickin’ cotton during the day and servicing massa’ during the evening. In truth, Jesse Helms was a sanctimonious bigot, a card-carrying member of the KKK, and one of the more elite white supremacists to grace the face of the earth. Jesse was a good ole’ boy who believed that only white, heterosexual Americans had a right to expect opportunity and justice. The rest of y’all could go straight to hell and right up to the moment he took his last breath he didn’t have problems with telling you so.
  
  I’d give my life savings to have a little Mexican woman surface and claim to be Jesse’s long lost love child. I’d give even more to have the DNA prove it to be true. Wouldn’t that be some fodder for all them Jesse-lovers out here acting like the man was the next best thing since the coming of the Messiah!

I should have turned off the television and burned my newspaper right then, but no, Deborah had to keep watching and reading, this little ditty sending me right over the edge!

• New Orleans now has themselves a brand new, state of the art, insectarium. It’s a right smart 23,000 square foot bug museum to entice some tourism. This brand new home for 35,000 dead and mounted critters and another 50,000 living insects and arachnids (some touchable and edible!) cost $6 million in private donations and another $20 million in PUBLIC funds. $20 million in public funds approved by some brain-dead committee and dick-less politicians who’d think housing bugs was far more important than housing displaced citizens.
  
  Hurricane Katrina delayed the museums opening by some two years. It seems that 80% of the original building was flooded and damaged and they had to start all over again. It didn’t cross anyone’s mind though that maybe since Katrina did happen that $20 million might be better spent elsewhere. New Orleans has folks living in tents on contaminated land and no one had the common sense or the decency to say, hey, let's reallocate that $20 million and spend it on some lumber, drywall, and aluminum siding for two-legged folks!
  
  Maybe it’s me but I would have preferred to see PUBLIC money that those displaced tax payers funded, be spent on 2,300 homes with 1,000 square feet of living space. But hey, what do I know. I like people. In my opinion, bugs, insects and anything else that crawls with antenna, multiple legs and more than two eyes, deserve nothing but a short trip to hell on a cloud of RAID.