Stoke the fire: More people to tar and feather

Charles Rice and Veronica White, who obviously colluded in getting a hurricane cleanup contract worth tens of millions for Omni Pinnacle. Rice was Mayor Ray Nagin's CAO until June of this year. He hired White as the city's Sanitation Director. White signed the deal with Omni Pinnacle. Nagin is either a dunderhead or equally guilty of patronage. Omni Pinnacle wasn't the cheapest bid. We deserve an explanation, and the contract out ought to be rebid by an independent board.

Jim Bernhard, whose job as chairman of the state Democratic Party wasn't attractive enough to keep him from going to work for the Shaw Group in their $300 million hurricane cleanup, and

Joe Allbaugh, who earned his job as a lobbyist for the Shaw Group when he worked as "George W. Bush's chief of staff when Bush was governor of Texas, and ran Bush's successful 2000 presidential campaign. Allbaugh then served as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency under Bush until 2003." So the guy who is responsible in large part for the disastrous FEMA response (although Michael Brown gets the dunce crown for that affair) gets a sweet job in private disaster recovery services. I guess that's one way of creating a job for yourself.

Again, I think we'd start to see an end to this behavior after a little tarring and feathering in Jackson Square, and then a day in the stocks (if they last a day).

There are more people deserving of public ridicule and punishment in this Times-Picayune story.