Mississippi wastes housing grant on resort

This is what happens when idiots like Haley Barbour are allowed to run anything more advanced than a game of Candy Land.

Almost 3 years after Hurricane Katrina, tens of thousands of people in Mississippi are still holed up in FEMA trailers. So how does the Magnolia State plan to spend $600,000,000 in federal grants that it received for housing? Mississippi plans to spend this money expanding a state-owned port to include a resort and a casino.

All that money! Wastage bastage!

Housing activists are not amused. Nonetheless, HUD is expected to approve the Barbour administration's misappropriation of the money.

Haley Barbour has consistently favored Big Business over the state's people, but his excuse for diverting the hurricane funds is that the resort will create jobs. Of course, they're mostly horrible jobs. Because it's a resort, most of these jobs will be at the lowest-paying rung of the service sector (in a work-for-less state, no less). Probably none of them are good factory jobs.

Mississippi already got waivers of the rules that required housing funds to be spent on poor and working-class residents - so the poorest Mississippians were already getting fleeced.

Barbour now claims the housing money was intended for the port all along - but that contradicts his own 2006 Senate testimony. Obviously he was either lying then or he's lying now.

Surprised? I'm not.

(Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22805282)