According to the National Hurricane Center, the summer of 2006 will usher another devastating storm season, with at least dozen named disturbances headed our way. And while the Army Corps of Engineers feverishly completes levee repairs before the Mississippi River and Lake Ponachartrain endeavor to commingle their fluids like, say, Jesus and Mary Magdalene, President Bush has begun his own emergency preparations by stocking the White House pantry with canned goods and filling sand bags with soil federal agents have excavated from Jimmy Hoffa’s burial site. One can only imagine what awaits New Orleans, which nearly a year later has yet to recover from Katrina. Though the confluence of nature and man is always hard to predict (some scientists are claiming the ozone hole is actually shrinking), recently re-elected Mayor Ray Nagin seems to have the benefit of a crystal ball. Months before his run-off victory over white Lt. Governor Mitch Landrieu, Nagin prophesized that New Orleans “will be chocolate at the end of the day.” And so it is, despite the fact that half of the city’s citizenry remains ex-situ.

A goodly number of the other half, it comes to light, are simply rotting away in local jails. The diaspora of witnesses, jurors and other statutory accoutrements has exacerbated a situation already plagued by a dearth of habitable courtrooms and able defense attorneys. Ironically, many inmates arrested for petty crimes and misdemeanors (such as violating curfew or listening to the Dixie Chicks below the Mason-Dixon line) would by now have completed their sentences. Unperturbed, Nagin has vowed to reconstruct “a majority African-American city… the way God wants it.” Omaha, on the other hand, is having second thoughts.

Either way, the story is just delicious; if ABC’s version holds true, Hastert gets raped in jail, if not he gets raped by the administration.  One thing’s for sure, The FBI won’t find any hard evidence in Denny’s fridge; his corpulence betrays the fact he’s eaten allthe contents, including, no doubt, the light bulb and lettuce crisper.  Yet there’s more.  A FBI linguist turned whistleblower swears that transcripts she was hired to translate show that Hastert received tens of thousands of dollars from Turkish officials in return for political favors such as scuppering a 2000 House resolution acknowledging the Armenian genocide of 1915. 

The Turks, nee Ottomans, adamantly disclaim involvement in the death of hundreds of thousands of Armenians, and would rather blame the Spaniards and their despicable flu. To be fair, there are indications of contagion; denial, nowadays, is everywhere — even the phone companies are getting into the act. With lawsuits piling up and Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) threatening hearings, Bell South brazenly contradicted USA Today by saying, “We have not provided bulk customer calling records to the NSA.”  The chorus then joined: “Verizon was not asked by NSA to provide, nor did Verizon provide, customer phone records.”  What with all the lying and weaseling going around, you’ve got to admire the Border Patrol.  These guys are men of action. Undeterred by the arrival of 6,000 National Guardsmen or the construction of a privately funded fence, authorities approached a car that was picking up illegal aliens on the U.S. side of the border. Sensing pursuit, the driver made a sharp turn and sped towards Mexico, but was shot multiple times before he could reach Tijuana.  As all 16 occupants were being taken into custody, one agent glared contemptuously at the bullet-riddled coyote who lay dying in the street.  His partner then spat a brown rivulet of coffee and tobacco into the gathering puddle of blood and declared, “Badges — we don’t need no stinkin’ badges.”

A new law proposed by Nebraska’s only African-American state senator, Ernie Chambers, has divided Omaha’s schools along racial lines — black, white and Hispanic. “Black people, whose children make up the majority of the student population,” argued Chambers, are merely “establishing a district over which we would have control.” Yeah, except that old Ernie also wants control over expanded tax revenues that accrued when wealthy white schools were forcibly annexed into the Omaha system. Tensions are high on both sides; yet white parent Darold Bauer blithely dismissed one major regional employer’s concern that the program would “increase racial tensions and segregation.” “I’m fine with that,” sniffed Bauer, “because my kids won’t be bused.”

Yet, Nebraska is by no means out of the woods. As Attorney General Jon Bruning notes: “the state may face serious risk due the potential constitutional problems.” Just last year, for example, the Supreme Court struck down California’s policy of segregating prisons. In the majority opinion Justice O’Connor wrote that the specter of interracial violence notwithstanding, “We rejected the notion that separate can ever be equal . . . 50 years ago in Brown v. Board of Education, and we refuse to resurrect it today.”

Perhaps in Ernie Chambers’ cogency or Ray Nagin’s prescience one could find a golden ticket to the Willy Wonka factory, but Congressman William Jefferson (D-LA) wasn’t taking any chances. Jefferson struck his own deal with an African member of the International Cocoa cartel. According to the FBI, the Congressman was caught on tape accepting a $100,000 bribe in connection with a Nigerian investment scheme. The cash was later recovered in Jefferson’s freezer, stuffed into an empty box of Fudgesicles. Despite a plethora of evidence (and the fact that an aide has already pled guilty and promised to testify), the New Orleans legislator professes his innocence and clings fast to his post on the House Ways and Means Committee. Though asked by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to resign, Willy declared, “I will not give up a committee assignment that is so vital to New Orleans at this crucial time.” Maybe Pelosi’s failed choreography would have won over accompanied by the Grateful Dead’s Peggy-O:

Sweet William he is dead, pretty Peggy-O

Sweet William he is dead, and he died for a maid

And buried in the Louisiana country-O

Given that Jerry Garcia, lest one forgets, is unquestionably dead, Pelosi instead attacked the Justice Department for overstepping the bounds of executive privilege by raiding Jefferson’s Congressional office in the Rayburn Building. These limits, she opined, “were designed to protect the Congress and the American people from abuses of power, and those principles deserve to be vigorously defended.” Oddly, Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) joined the rebuke, and assured, “These constitutional principles were not designed by the founding fathers to place anyone above the law.” While Republicans would be expected to relish an ethics crisis finally cropping up on the other side of the aisle, Hastert personally complained to the President and demanded the FBI return all seized materials.

So the question begs: why would Hastert voice such a strenuous objection? Senator David Vitter (R-LA) offers a plausible answer: “These [are] self-serving separation of power arguments… congressional leaders are trying to protect their own from valid investigations.” Heady words indeed, yet they ring true to a polity subjected to years of warrantless domestic spying and for whom the capricious designation of “enemy combatant” renders moot the rule of habeas corpus. Well, as fate would have it, ABC is reporting that sources in the Justice Department say they are investigating Hastert in connection with the ever-widening Jack Abramoff scandal. Hastert has issued a categorical denial the while his deputy chief of staff, Mike Stokke, characterized the “leak” as retribution for the Speaker’s harsh criticism of the FBI. “ABC News got this from somewhere,” Stokke averred, “I don’t think they made this up.”