Fresh Loaf

How’s that for a headline, eh?

Tomorrow night at the Capitol, thousands of people will gather as part of the Atlanta Tea Party, one of more than 500 scheduled on Tax Day. There, outside one of the most beautiful and useless buildings in the state, the crowd will complain about something that’s been going on for years — gross misuse of taxpayer dollars and business-as-usual politics. Emceeing this affair will be Sean Hannity, Fox News’ angriest white man.

Turns out Hannity and some of the various dignitaries who’ve signed on for the event might not get the warmest of welcomes. A tipster tells us that some members of the state Libertarian Party — have they gone rogue?!? — have printed more than 600 signs that scold the talk show host and politicians for turning their heads during Bush-era bank bailouts and excessive spending. (Even if you disagree with their policies, Libertarians have an incredible sense of humor. The Allen Buckley radio ads during the U.S. Senate race gave that grueling contest a much-needed jolt of excitement.)

(UPDATE: Just spoke with Daniel Adams, chairman of the Libertarian Party of Georgia. He wanted to stress that these signs were made by individual party members and not endorsed or approved by the party. Adams says the state party is co-sponsoring Atlanta’s April 15 protest to show support for the grassroots movement that’s organized these events. He says the website listed on the signs is a mirrored site belonging to the national party, not that of the state’s.)

The aforementioned tipster was kind enough to pass along PDFs of the signs, which I’ve posted after the jump. You can download them all here. Print ‘em out and join the crowd! It’ll be fun!
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This week’s Don’t Panic explains why Cyclone Nargis has killed and will continue to kill so many Burmese.

I compare Nargis to Hurricane Katrina in the story, sticking to the geographic and meteorological similarities.

Yesterday New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist Lolis Eric Elie noted the similarity between the Burmese junta’s reaction to Nargis and the Bush Administration’s reaction to Katrina:

A snippet:

Of course our federal government neither offered nor accepted much relief for victims of the federal levee failures.

As the journal “Foreign Policy” put it, “When France and dozens of other countries pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and supplies to the relief effort, their donations should have helped ease the crisis. Instead, one year after Katrina battered the Gulf Coast, none of the money given to the federal government has made its way to evacuees.”

Read the whole column if you have two minutes.

(photo illustration by me and NASA. mostly NASA)

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From Saturday’s Washington Post. Emphasis mine:

“President Bush plans to call Chinese President Hu Jintao in coming days to seek his help pressing the Burmese government to accept more disaster assistance, U.S. officials said yesterday.”

No hurry. There are only 1.5 million lives at stake.

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Today, the AJC has an excellent story about a Fulton County man who flew to and from Europe despite being infected with a rare and exceptionally dangerous strain of tuberculosis.

Worthy of another front-page story is the fact that the man discovered an unlocked backdoor into the United States.

The infected man evaded the U.S. “no-fly” restrictions, returning to the United States by flying from Prague to Montreal on Czech Air and driving from Canada.

Did the American keepers of the “no-fly” list tell Czech Air about the man? Did they tell Czech passport-control officials? Did they tell Canadian passport officials? Did anyone even bother telling the U.S. agents on the Canadian border? Who knows?

The precise nature of the screw-up is as yet unclear, but the bottom line is this:

It’s been almost six years since 9/11 and the United States still can’t even stop an American citizen using his own passport from getting on a plane in a friendly country, or stop him at the border.

Other than admiring my shoes, what exactly is the Department of Homeland Security doing with its $40 billion annual budget?

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