Now this is just wrong…

Katrina aid recipients may have to pay back millions | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle

NEW ORLEANS — Imagine that your home was reduced to mold-covered wood framing by Hurricane Katrina.

Desperate for money to rebuild, you engage in a frustrating bureaucratic process, and after months of living in a government-provided trailer that gives off formaldehyde fumes you win a federal grant.

Then a collector announces that you have to pay back thousands of dollars.

Thousands of Katrina victims may be in the same boat.

Here we have out-sourced and privatized every phase of the Federal Government and when they get it wrong it’s the citizens that are supposed to pay the penalty. Now I have nothing wrong with going after the cheats who planned to defraud, but, overpayments on the part of the contractor should come out of the pocket of the contractor not the folks who lost everything…Incompetence in government…Leading to incompetence in the handing out of contracts…

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Happy Birthday Vincent

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media
It’s the birthday of Vincent Van Gogh, born in Zundert, Holland (1853). He painted sunflowers, starry nights, wheat fields, and self-portraits, and his work was just beginning to be acknowledged when he committed suicide at the age of 37. When he was 20, he went to work for an art dealer in London, then went off to Brussels to study to become an evangelist, and then went as a missionary to the coal miners in southwestern Belgium. One day he decided to give away all of his worldly goods and live like a peasant. But his religious superiors thought he was having a nervous breakdown. They kicked him out of the mission, and he had to go home.