Christmas Thieving Season

Ho, Ho, Ho. This Christmas the thieves in New Orleans don't want sugar plums or even a new Xbox game. Nope..they are furnishing their own gift this year, and it is an unusual one by most standards. These days cooper is even more valuable than that gold watch uncle Harry will get for Christmas.
The thieves that have flooded into ruined New Orleans are stealing copper pipes this Christmas We have been flooded by Christmas visits of not Santa Claus, but of illegal immigrants and criminals of all sorts, and they want our copper. Authorities here have reported more and more thieves are stealing, and in many cases, ripping out from flooded or rebuilt homes, businesses and schools, the copper piping and wiring in those buildings.
Because of an increase in the value of copper prices internationally, the many vacant and un watched tracts of homes and apartments, and a huge surge of un licensed scrap dealers in town (dealers who buy the copper from the thieves rarely ask them where they obtained it), there is a good chance that both new and old copper piping will be stolen from those buildings.
So Santa need not bring copper to the thieves of New Orleans this Christmas. They have already looted enough as is. Police here report a huge number of arrests for the thefts. For example, just last week one old school in the city that had been under water during Hurricane Katrina and been left abandoned after, had thousands of dollars of copper piping stolen from it. Yesterday a local woman and her 16 year old son were arrested after being caught removing cooper pipes and tubing from a vacant apartment complex. Hehe Mom wanted copper pipes for Christmas.
The list of thieves caught is growing, but the prize for best 'Christmas Copper Thief' may go to the two men who were arrested the other day and admitted they spent the past two months stripping cooper out of a total of 58 abandoned homes. What the Hurricane didn't take, those two did. The problem is that most of the old homes (80% of the city flooded) are loaded with valuable copper. Since copper is a essential building material used in plumbing pipes and electrical wiring it's value here is great.
Many of the people arrested for the thefts have been contractors or people posing as them, and illegal immigrants who are pouring into the area by the thousands now. It's easy. They simply pull up in trucks, enter the vacant building and start stealing. Any person who notices the workers believes they have been hired to repair the building, so few of the thieves are ever apprehended. To help stop the Christmas copper thieves police have asked local scrap yards to check identification of and even videotape transactions when they buy copper from sellers. But because of that, more and more of the copper is being trucked out of town and sold there. Sigh..just another of the thousands of strange ramifications of Hurricane Katrina here in New Orleans.
That's bad karma here for the holidays, but how about Christmas problems elsewhere. Santa may not be coming to Maine this year, at least not on a beer label. The Maine Bureau of Liquor Enforcement has rejected three beer labels proposed by a Massachusetts beer maker, Sheraton Brothers, because it allegedly depicts Santa in a vulgar manner.
One of the labels reads "Santa's Butt Winter Port" and shows jolly Santa from behind, checking a list and drinking a beer, his huge butt sitting on a wooden barrel. This supposedly violates the Maine rule that ads can not contain "undignified or improper illustrations". But the Maine Civil Liberties Union is suing the Bureau and State of Maine on behalf of the Shelton Brothers Brewing company, claiming its right to free speech was being violated. It is strange that the picture of a fictional character would cause so much furor and that his image would need to be protected as much as a real persons would.
But the Bureau is saying that to show Santa that way would be harmful to any children who saw it (let's hope the kids aren't drinking any beer). So what do you think? Should the beer labels be banned or does the company have the right to show Santa's big butt drinking it? A simple, Ho Ho No or No No No vote will suffice.