Your home has been destroyed by a hurricane. You’re living on an Air National Guard base on Cape Cod, a thousand miles from home. The U.S. government gives you a $2,000 check. Do you …

• save it for, um, a rainy day?
• use it as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to get out of the hole that is New Orleans* and start over in a city with a future?
• spend it on booze and lap dances?

You know the answer! From the Boston Herald:

… reporters witnessed blatant public drinking at a Falmouth strip mall by Katrina victims living at taxpayer expense at Camp Edwards on Otis Air Force Base. And strippers at Zachary’s nightclub in Mashpee, a few miles from the Bourne base, report giving lap dances to several evacuees.

… An assistant (strip) club manager, who gave his name only as Michael, acknowledged yesterday that the strip joint is popular with people from Camp Edwards.

… On Oct. 5, the Herald observed a virtual parade of evacuees from a bus stop in the Wal-Mart parking lot in Falmouth to nearby liquor stores. Some emerged and openly swilled from brown-bagged containers, while others poured booze into jugs or plastic cups and casually sipped drinks at the Wal-Mart bus stop.

Has anyone checked the air base cable bill to look for purchases of, shall we say exotic, videos? What does the per-capita lap dance budget work out to, anyway?

Perhaps we’re too quick to judge. A commenter at California Conservative offers “You can take the people out of New Orleans, but you can’t take the New Orleans out of the people!” Let’s hope nothing happens to Las Vegas. Salt Lake City would never be the same.

—
H/t: Catallarchy. California Conservative also has links to some other reports of misused funds.

See our Survival Kit: New Orleans Style for another example of refugee-evacuee-whatever practicality.

* Stop the flaming; I lived there.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 18th, 2005 at 11:06 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Funny ... to us, Your Tax Dollars In Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.