No Crony Left Behind? SSLS*, George.

President Bush, spoke in New Orleans today at a charter school on the second anniversary of Katrina’s landfall in the Gulf Coast region of the United States of America.  The President of the United States just used an appearance in New Orleans on the Katrina anniversary to push a school choice agenda for his many privitization school-for-profit crony donors. I kid you not.

The AP, via NYTimes:

The front page of The Times-Picayune advertised a scathing editorial above the masthead: “Treat us fairly, Mr. President.” It chided the Bush administration for giving Republican-dominated Mississippi a share of federal money that it said was disproportionate to the lesser impact the storm had there than in largely Democratic Louisiana. “We ought to get no less help from our government than any other victims of this disaster,” it said.

“There’s always a more blessed day in the future and that’s what we’re here to celebrate,” said Bush.

Like his last three visits to New Orleans, including last year’s anniversary trip, the president chose a charter school as his main backdrop. This time, it is the Dr. Martin Luther King Charter School for Math and Science, where Bush could combine hurricane comfort with a favorite and controversial subject: the need for competition and choice in public schooling.

“This town’s coming back,” he said after visiting with educators and students at the school in the hard-hit Lower Ninth Ward. “This town is better today than it was yesterday and it’s going to be better tomorrow than it is today.”

No big money GOP money crony left behind, eh, George?  SSLS.*  There’s a silver money lining in every failure, I suppose.

To be fair to the folks at the MLK School for Science and Technology, this looks like an independent group that has pulled this school together because their community desperately needed it in the aftermath of Katrina and the many governmental problems they were trying to navigate to get anything going.  That George Bush would use these people as a photo-op backdrop to push his charter school crony agenda is as unseemly as it is idiotic, given that these folks at the MLK school had to pull this school together by their bootstraps and sheer will in the face of massive Bush Administration failures across the board to follow through on their many unfulfilled promises.  The gall of the people in the Bush Administration never ceases to amaze me.

(*Still Smells Like Shit.)

[Photo of "no poop" sign via Auntie P.]

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