I found these at Octavia Books and found I couldn't give enough of them as gifts this season:

Do you deserve a good karma check or a bad karma check?

It's a valid question.

The checks in the book are for good deeds - such as complimenting your waiter on good service or giving a thank-you to someone who really helped out in a pinch - and for bad - stealing a parking space someone's been waiting for, having a private conversation on your cell while you're in a public place. Just depends on the situation.

I already have a darned good idea as to who's getting a bad check. It would certainly be better in someone's stocking than a lump of coal these days (in the only episode of According to Jim I could tolerate, a running joke is explaining coal to kids who don't know much about it: "It's a black rock that burns." "Cool!" Kinda misses the original intent of the act...).

Granted, it's a long post I'm referring you to, but it is well worth the read. Check out what the Zombie says in that link about where the recovery money is really going and how it is affecting us all. Don't worry if it takes you awhile to digest it. Take that time, wrap your head 'round what's being said...then think about this:

If the money wasn't used to bail out HANO, if it was meted out in a transparent manner and wasn't flagged for irregularities in the awarding of contracts for various city projects that are now on hold - wasn't, wasn't, wasn't - think of all the things the proper management of it could have freed up in terms of the current city budget crisis. All the mess that could have been avoided had the Walking Id in the mayor's office been more competent and less of a stonewalling schmo. A big bad karma check goes out to him and his minions for doing what he has accused Lee Zurik and various bloggers of doing:

You're hurting the recovery, man. Stop it.*

The good karma checks? They will go out to you for insisting on the following:

City Council can pull this back into play in a special session and bring all these items back into question.

As it stands right now, Nagin may be setting up an 83 million dollar black hole with little to no oversight. There’s very little to stop him from…oohhh….let’s say….sliding the Municipal Auditorium plan into Economic Development category for the LRA operating budget.

This is up to us, the citizens, to stop this boondoggle before it happens and leaves the next administration in a lurch. If you’re as concerned about this as I am, please contact your city councilperson and demand that they bring the LRA budget back to the table for further scrutiny.

And don't forget about contributing to Ride Hamilton's recovery. There's a major amount of good karma on ya right there for that.


*Yeah, I know, I just linked to nola.com on that one. Only really derogatory remark in the comments for it concerns Lee Zurik's eyebrows. I'm gonna burn for that linkage, I know.