Katrina victims? Ha! We're the REAL victims!

Every once in a while I like to dip into the weird world of right-wing e-mail forwards and see what's making the rounds. It's been ages since the inspiring tales of Bush's pious, Christian nature, and the most prominent these days are (still!) attacks on Katrina survivors. And yes, they're still finding bodies in the Ninth Ward.

The content is the same in all cases. Those evacuated from New Orleans are at best leeches and at worst homicidal, drug-addicted psychos. But this pair of e-mails, still circulating at the end of April, purport to show that the last thing these folks want is an honest day's work.

Last weekend FEMA, the City of Austin, and the Texas Workforce Commission set up a job training/hiring, interview job fair for Katrina evacuees to be held at the ACC campus on Webberville Rd. in East Austin. Evacuees complained that they did not have transportation so the city of Austin and FEMA provided transportation. Nine buses and vans ran from four locations in Round Rock and five locations in Austin. The vehicles were brought to their residents. Drivers knocked on their doors and did everything possible to reach potential job seekers. At the end of the day, the nine vans and buses transported a total of one person. Not one person per bus --- one person. The cost to FEMA was $7800.00.

There was a job fair in Austin in February, and buses were used to transport people there, with just one person taking advantage of the $7000 deal. So they must be scum, right? Nope.

The job fair was actually quite well attended, reports the American-Statesman, noting that "more than 200 people showed on a rainy, 30-degree day, many commenting on how helpful the resource agencies were."

The real reason no one took advantage of the free transportation, city officials say, was inadequate publicity. Due to a bureaucratic SNAFU involving miscommunications between FEMA and the city of Austin, confirmation that the federal agency would reimburse the cost of the shuttles came at the eleventh hour, so arrangements weren't finalized until the day before the event was to take place. Most of the people who could have used the transportation weren't even aware it was available.

Once again, it was a case of FEMA to the rescue, in their inimitable style. Most of us are savvy enough these days to completely ignore e-mail forwards, but the practice still seems to be alive and well on the far-right.