Rob, at Say Anything blog, on the FedEx discrimination suit

This story had not surfaced in my usual haunts, but Rob, writing at the Say Anything blog, tells about the class action suit against FedEx. Rob says that FedEx is being sued for not lowering their standards:

FedEx is getting sued for allegedly favoring non-minority employees for promotions and raises.

SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) — A federal judge has certified a class action lawsuit alleging that FedEx Corp. discriminated against minority workers.

The suit was filed in 2003 by eight current and former employees. It seeks millions of dollars in damages and an end to the company’s alleged discriminatory practices.

The class action case, certified Wednesday, includes an estimated 10,000 current and former hourly workers and about 1,000 low-level management employees in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Wyoming and parts of Texas.

When I did consulting for FedEx in Memphis, I was impressed by what an equal-opportunity company it was. Memphis is largely minority (black) and FedEx had been a way for them to improve their standard of living, and move into better position by growth in the company.

Michael Heraghty on Gadgets

We have been looking at start.com and Gadgets from Microsoft, so I was interested to see them mentioned by Michael Heraghty.

Michael writes:

I’ve seen the most interesting development to occur in web development so far this year and it’s from … gasp! … Microsoft.

Before you choke on your sushi, check it out: Microsoft “Gadgets” on Start.com lets you slide rectangular containers of text (widgets, I’m told) around the screen, and snap them into new positions.

The site is a portal, a little like Google News or MyYahoo, but with the innovative interface as described — which does not require Flash or any other plug-in. (It works in Firefox too.)

The technology Microsoft Gadgets employs is similar to AJAX — the combination of JavaScript and dynamic server calls used by Google in many cool applications of late (Gmail, Google Maps, etc.). Apparently the new Windows will allow you to drag Gadgets from web pages and drop them onto your desktop, unless I’ve misunderstood the information on the Gadgets weblog.

The downside is that the web pages generated using Gadgets are neither accessible, standards-compliant nor search-engine friendly. But they look cool and the design is clean … so Gadgets could have potential.

Charles Johnson writes about the pirates who raided Britain

Students of 17th Century naval history know about this already, but Charles Johnson points out a post about a book called "White Gold", which tells the story of the Salley pirates and their ilk. They were so brazen and strong that they raided Britain to take slaves:

Melanie Phillips’s Diary: Britain’s 200-year jihad.

On my travels for the past few days, I have been reading a book which tells the story of a quite astonishing part of British history of which I was previously unaware. In ‘White Gold’, Giles Milton records the appalling details — gleaned,it appears, from a wealth of historical documents including diaries and letters — of a seaborne Islamic jihad against Britain which lasted for no less than two centuries.

From the early seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, thousands of British men women and children were kidnapped by Arab corsairs and sold into slavery in Morocco where they were kept in conditions of unspeakable barbarism. The astounding thing is that these British victims were not merely seized at sea where they ran the gauntlet of such pirates in places such as the Straits of Gibraltar. They were actually abducted from Britain itself.

This is the sort of history that is so nasty, that contemporary "history" ignores it, as they don't want to offend anyone.

Duane Patterson, at Radio Blogger, tells about how Ray Nagin moved to Dallas

Duane Patterson, blogging at Radio Blogger, tells about Ray Nagin, mayor of New Orleans, and how he moved his family to Dallas. Duane is Hugh Hewitt's producer for his syndicated radio show.

If I hadn't seen and heard this with my own eyes and ears, I would have thought it was too good to be true. Just about five minutes ago on Wolf-TV, Ray Nagin, the beleaguered Mayor of New Orleans, found himself the subject of an impromptu press conference. After the Congressional testimony today by former FEMA head Michael Brown, in which Nagin's performance during the Katrina crisis was largely criticized, the press wanted to get Nagin's reaction.

Now before I let you in on the audio I heard, let's go back to September 13th, on Fox News Channel's Special Report with Brit Hume. Brit reported that it had been learned that Mayor Nagin, a mere week after the storm hit, had moved his family to Dallas, enrolled his daughter in school there, and had already purchased a house in Dallas. He was still going to be the Mayor of New Orleans, but have his primary residence in Dallas. Here's a link to the report from the 13th. We ridiculed that for several days, but it has fallen from the public consciousness. Until today, that is.

Kevin Aylward, at Wizbang, unmasks the fake Republican

There is a guy who periodically pretends to be a Republican at protests. Kevin Aylward, writing at Wizbang, unmasks him.

Jeb Eddy joins thousands of demonstrators to protest the war in Iraq on Saturday. Associated Press photo by Noah Berger The only problem is that he's a complete fraud.

Crockspot at Conservative Underground was the one who first used a little Google-fu to debunk this guy's con job. The San Francisco Chronicle has fallen for this guy's act on more than one occasion, which should hardly come as a suprise.

Shock & Blog has more links to the Google evidence against Eddy.

Ed Morrissey says the GunScam is the next Canadian flap

Ed Morrissey, writing at Captain's Quarters, thinks that what he calls GunScam (the registration program mess) will be a problem for the Liberal government in Canada. The Liberals seem to be adept at buying votes and capturing the tenor of the Canadian people, but they seem to be inept at government and administration.

The Winnipeg Sun reports that the Conservatives in Canada await more than just one report next winter that could alter the trajectory of Canadian politics. While Judge Gomery writes his report on the Sponsorship Programme, the auditor general has quietly performed her investigation into the controversial gun registry that the Liberal Party imposed on its citizens, and the results could produce some uncomfortable moments of its own for the Grits and the Martin government:

Critics of the gun registry are eagerly awaiting Auditor General Sheila Fraser's "Canadian Firearms Program" audit which is scheduled to be released in February -- if we're not in the midst of a federal election campaign.

Fraser isn't doing interviews about the audit, which has been underway for months.

The last time her office attempted to look into gun registry spending was 2002 and the results were explosive. In fact, her team was forced to abandon its attempts to follow the spending on the gun registry because of the absence of records.

"The information on cost recovery provided to the government changed as the program developed," Fraser wrote at the time.

Marc Cooper on the anti-war movement

Marc Cooper is sympathetic to being against the Iraq war. He writes about the current state of the anti-war movement, and its issues. Marc believes that the only way for an anti-Iraq war movement to succeed is to gain the support of a majority of the Democratic party:

Thanks to C-SPAN, I watched at least some of this weekend’s anti-war demonstrations with a great measure of ambivalence and even wonderment. To be honest, I watched for about 20 minutes until I began to overdose on the shrill rhetoric from a bunch of shouting nobodies on the rostrum. Like it or not, they were the voice given to the sea of people who actually turned out.

Perhaps as many as 200,000 people or more participated in rallies from coast-to-coast with the largest gathering taking place in Washington.

No question that there is a growing frustration and even dread about where the war in Iraq is leading – if anywhere. Or if it has been worth the bloodshed until now. And the demonstrations were a good opportunity to manifest that mounting discomfort.

That said, there are only two ways the anti-war movement can achieve its goals. Either through what the Europeans calls “extra-parliamentary” methods i.e. the disruption of business-as-usual and rendering the country ungovernable. Or through a political strategy by which there is a strategic shift in The Establishment.

The problem is that the current movement is the current anti-war movement is inept and ineffective:

This is a failure not only of the Democrats themselves, but also of the clearer-thinking folks inside the peace movement who ought to know better. I have said it before, so why not again? These more moderate voices need to resist the political blackmail of true-believers of the ANSWER variety and simply push them out of the leadership of the movement. At least they must if they want that movement to be something beyond an impotent theater of self-expression.

I can anticipate some of the reaction to this notion. “Oh, Marc,” I will be told, “Who cares what the idiots on the stage said? You don’t really think that the scores of thousands who came to Washington actually listened to the speeches from the stage, do you?"

My answer: Of course not. There aren’t five hundred people in America, let alone a hundred thousand, who could sit or stand through more than five minutes of that drivel.

But wouldn’t it be nice if there were antiwar speakers on that platform – just two or three instead of 45 or 50—whose words could inspire not only the protestors, but also move other millions into some deeper sort of reflection and action?

Wasn’t that the case in the great 1963 civil rights march on Washington? Have you ever in your life met a single person stupid enough to say that the only important thing that day 42 years ago was merely showing up in D.C. because it really didn’t matter what Martin Luther King actually said? That no one was really listening?

Why do we accept such a miserably lower standard for the anti-war movement?

TangoMan, at Gene Expression, has a good piece about President Clinton and our present goverment financing

TangoMan has a piece at Gene Expression that is rather provocatively titled "Semantics - The Threshold Necessary To Be Called A Liar".

For the last few days I've been involved in an ongoing debate with Steve Verdon and one of his readers, Victor, on whether President Clinton is a bald-faced liar for making this statement:

On the US budget, Clinton warned that the federal deficit may be coming untenable, driven by foreign wars, the post-hurricane recovery programme and tax cuts that benefitted just the richest one percent of the US population, himself included. "What Americans need to understand is that ... every single day of the year, our government goes into the market and borrows money from other countries to finance Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, and our tax cuts," he said. "We have never done this before. Never in the history of our republic have we ever financed a conflict, military conflict, by borrowing money from somewhere else."--emphasis added Clinton added: "We depend on Japan, China, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and Korea primarily to basically loan us money every day of the year to cover my tax cut and these conflicts and Katrina. I don't think it makes any sense."

After a few rounds of back and forth it looks like we've adopted two differing interpretations of what "financed" means. Steve and Victor argue from the default position that there have always been significant foreign debt holders of US Securities, and their default hypothesis must be refuted entirely by accounting for 100% of the debt sourcing. To account for less than 100% automatically implies foreign contribution, and even an insignificant foreign contribution, falsifies President Clinton's statement. I'm interpreting "financed" to mean the costs of the entire endeavor, not simply a minor part of the endeavor. This seems to be the more common usage, such as "I financed my house with a $600,000 mortgage from the bank" being a true statement even though I received a $5000 loan from my father-in-law in order to help with the downpayment.

Later in his piece, TangoMan has a table of figures about percent GDP, tax rates, and related information for wars from WWII on that I found interesting reading.

Power glitch (UPDATED)

We are located on the southeast side of Dallas. We just experienced a major power glitch that reset everything. One computer rebooted and the other shut down. The alarm clock was reset and my wife's CD player was started, playing one of her meditation pieces. The wind is picking up, and we may yet see some Rita action. Hopefully, it won't be too bad.

We had another power glitch and the computer on which I am blogging came up only with great difficulty. The problem seems to be the high winds we are seeing. Within five miles, many of the electrical wires on on poles, near trees.

Duane Patterson has the transcript of Hugh Hewitt's conversation with the Beltway Boys

Duane Patterson, at Radio Blogger, has the transcript of Hugh Hewitt's conversation with Fred Barnes and Mort Kondrake (the Beltway Boys on Fox News Channel). The Beltway Boys have been pre-empted for the wall-to-wall Rita coverage. There is a good bit of coverage of the flap over the illegal disclosure of the Maryland Lt-Governor's credit report. This was engineered during Senator Schumer's watch:

All right. Now I want to play for you two a cut of Chuck Schumer talking at the discussing of his vote yesterday, and then come back to Chuckaquiddick, which is sweeping through the DCSS. Here's Chuck Schumer:

---

HH: Now Fred Barnes, his concern for privacy, evidently, did not extend to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, where two staffers have been furloughed, though with pay, for illegally using the social security number of Lt. Gov. of Maryland Michael Steele, to fish his records. How big of a problem is this for Schumer and the Democrats?

FB: Well, it should be a big problem, and we don't know the extent of it yet, whether there were other Republican Senate candidates whose credit they looked into, and we'll see. Naturally, the excuse is always well, it was a couple of over-anxious, or over-eager young people on the staff that did it. That usually...I don't know all the facts in this case, because it just started to be investigated. It was just exposed. That usually turns out to be wrong. Higher-ups know.

HH: You know, Morton Kondracke, it strikes me as odd that the director of research at the DCSS is considered young, and this would be the first time in her life she'd ever tried this tactic. Doesn't that seem odd to you?

MK: You know, I know even less about the facts of this. How old is she?

HH: 28 or 29.

MK: Well, that's not too young.

HH: Yeah, she previously worked for John Edwards. She previously worked for David Brock at Media Matters, which is a Soros op-fit. She previously worked...she's from Wesleyan, and she's worked on Sam...yeah. And so, the idea that the director of research at the DCSS is a young staffer, that just doesn't seem to me to be the ordinary way you would refer to the director of research.

MK: Yeah, unless you're trying to make them too young to be responsible.

What we really like are sullen Black Canadian leftists

In today's Globe and Mail, there is an "for pay" opinion piece by Ken Wiwa provocatively labeled as "The winds of American political anger are rising". Ken's photo looks fittingly sullen, as a good leftist should. I would hazard a guess that the rising anger is among leftists who making a lot of noise, but getting no traction. They keep shifting topics, hoping that they can make progress with one of them.

My favorite lefties

Marc Cooper still is my favorite leftist intellectual. He is a thinking person, not someone who is trying to win, regardless of the means. Michael J. Totten is my favorite center-left intellectual. He is a former leftist, who moved to the right, after September 11th. Susan Estrich is my favorite Democratic strategist. I used to not like David Corn, editor of the extreme-leftist magazine The Nation, but I have grown to respect him more than I used to, thanks to the events of the last 6 months, and due to Marc Cooper's recommendation. My favorite Democratic politicians are the Connecticutt duo, Joe Lieberman and Chris Dodd. In Dallas, Mayor Laura Miller is my favorite liberal Democrat. I happen to be center-right, but I used to be center-left, prior to Jimmy Carter. In 1980, I couldn't imagine voting for Reagan, so I voted for the liberal independent, John Anderson. Like Condaleeza Rice, Jimmy Carter changed my politics.

Our buddies at the ACLU are at it again

Clayton Cramer has a piece on his blog about the efforts to lower or eliminate the age of consent. The intent is to make homosexual relations with children legal. Apparently, they want this even if the child is not consenting. This was pointed out by Prof. Volokh.

Professor Volokh has been engaging in all sorts of troublemaking lately--including this post pointing out that it is not dirty politics to claim that Justice Ginsburg, back when she worked for the ACLU, argued for lowering the age of consent to 12:

Yet then-existing federal law set the age of consent at 16. If the Ginsburg report had only intended to make the law sex-neutral, it could have done so without suggesting a new age of consent, or endorsing a proposed federal bill that lowered the age of consent. Yet the Ginsburg report's proposal recommended the replacement of a sex-specific age of consent of 16 with a sex-neutral age of consent of 12. It seems to me quite fair, and not a "smear," to fault the report for suggesting this change.

Clayton concludes:

So the question is: does the ACLU recognize a "compelling governmental interest" in preventing adults from having sex with children? Notice that this footnote is attached to a set of decisions in which the ACLU has not recognize a compelling governmental interest in regulating anything. UPDATE 2: I just noticed something else interesting about the ACLU's brief in defense of Limon: they are arguing that a minor has a "liberty interest" in having sex free of government compulsion. If they were defending a minor against a criminal charge, this would be at least plausibly related to the question--but in this case, they were defending an adult against a criminal charge. There might well be an equal protection argument based an adult's "liberty interest," but they were defending the adult--not the minor. The ACLU was arguing for the right of a minor to have sex--but it was really the right of an adult to have sex with a minor who apparently said, "No." This is even more monstrous than I first noticed.

Daniel Drezner on Chinese mercantile policy

Daniel Drezner writes about a speech by Robert Zoellick, who is Deputy Secretary of State. He spoke about Chinese Chinese economic policy, and effect it has had on business, government, and attitudes about China. The predatory approach to business by China has alienated people and business, when it need not have been that way:

Hey, Beijing -- wanna be a stakeholder?

This evening, Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick gave a speech outlining what the U.S. would like to see from China:

For the United States and the world, the essential question is – how will China use its influence?

To answer that question, it is time to take our policy beyond opening doors to China’s membership into the international system: We need to urge China to become a responsible stakeholder in that system....

There is a cauldron of anxiety about China.

The U.S. business community, which in the 1990s saw China as a land of opportunity, now has a more mixed assessment. Smaller companies worry about Chinese competition, rampant piracy, counterfeiting, and currency manipulation. Even larger U.S. businesses – once the backbone of support for economic engagement – are concerned that mercantilist Chinese policies will try to direct controlled markets instead of opening competitive markets. American workers wonder if they can compete.

Maybe Robert Reich would like us to have competitive bidding on refurbishing New Orleans

On Marketplace, Robert Reich was complaining about a lack of competitive bidding on the Iraq war and on Hurricane Katrina recovery. Perhaps for New Orleans, we should let them conduct a multi-month competitive bidding process. Nothing happens until a company is chosen through this process, sometime in a few months.

We are starting to panic over Hurricane Rita, now at Cat 5

We hear that roads out of Houston are jammed with cars heading north. Our rumour mill in Houston says that water and batteris are in short supply. With Rita at Category 5, we are starting to panic, even as far north as Dallas.

Images do not show in Microsoft Word 2003 documents: the answer

I was extremely skeptical that this could be the solution, but it was. I was not able to see images in a Word 2003 document. I had searched with Google, and the answer was that I needed to upgrade the video driver. I could not see how this should be a help, but I started to research my machine. It is an almost-new HP Compaq box with the Intel 910GL Express Chipset Family. I went to the Intel site and downloaded the driver and installed, and then rebooted the machine at the end. When I opened the Word 2003 documents, I could see the images. How about that!

This is classic: Don't get stuck on stupid

Duane Patterson, writing at Radio Blogger, has the transcript of Lt-General Honore's press conference that made the phrase "Don't get stuck on stupid" famous (you say that you have never heard the phrase?). He also has a link to the mp3 file. Here is some of it:

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin held a press conference a little bit ago, and started losing control to a media pool assembled that was showing signs of panic, due to the previous incompetence in the region by the local and state government. Lt. Gen. Russel Honore stepped in and literally took over. Here's what he had to say:

09-20honore.mp3

Honore: And Mr. Mayor, let's go back, because I can see right now, we're setting this up as he said, he said, we said. All right? We are not going to go, by order of the mayor and the governor, and open the convention center for people to come in. There are buses there. Is that clear to you? Buses parked. There are 4,000 troops there. People come, they get on a bus, they get on a truck, they move on. Is that clear? Is that clear to the public?

Female reporter: Where do they move on...

Honore: That's not your business.

Male reporter: But General, that didn't work the first time...

Honore: Wait a minute. It didn't work the first time. This ain't the first time. Okay? If...we don't control Rita, you understand? So there are a lot of pieces of it that's going to be worked out. You got good public servants working through it. Let's get a little trust here, because you're starting to act like this is your problem. You are carrying the message, okay? What we're going to do is have the buses staged. The initial place is at the convention center. We're not going to announce other places at this time, until we get a plan set, and we'll let people know where those locations are, through the government, and through public announcements. Right now, to handle the number of people that want to leave, we've got the capacity. You will come to the convention center. There are soldiers there from the 82nd Airborne, and from the Louisiana National Guard. People will be told to get on the bus, and we will take care of them. And where they go will be dependent on the capacity in this state. We've got our communications up. And we'll tell them where to go. And when they get there, they'll be able to get a chance, an opportunity to get registered, and so they can let their families know where they are. But don't start panic here. Okay? We've got a location. It is in the front of the convention center, and that's where we will use to migrate people from it, into the system.

This sounds like satire, but is probably true

Ed Morrissey writes about the "porn squad" being setup in FBI, according to the Washington Post. It sounds like a bad joke or satire, but I can imagine it is for real. Ed takes a dim view of this sort of thing, as do I. The FBI needs to be keeping us safe from terrorists, not from porn.

Today's Washington Post reports on a new priority given to the FBI by the Department of Justice and its chief, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Instead of counterterrorism, the FBI will now focus on adult porn as a threat to families, using its resources to pick cases that could meet the community-standards threshold of obscenity for prosecution:

Early last month, the bureau's Washington Field Office began recruiting for a new anti-obscenity squad. Attached to the job posting was a July 29 Electronic Communication from FBI headquarters to all 56 field offices, describing the initiative as "one of the top priorities" of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and, by extension, of "the Director." That would be FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III. ...

Yesterday's "The Sloan Sessions"

Yesterday morning, Scott Jagow seemed to be fishing for Alan Sloan to say that the Federal government should raise taxes to pay for the Hurricane Katrina recovery effort. Alan Sloan said that if he were in charge, he would essentially put it on the credit card and figure out how to pay for it later. I see that the APM Marketplace web site has figured out how to turn that into a negative, as they are constantly in Bush-bashing mode.

Marc Cooper's Hero: Salvador Allende

Jack Kelly notes that a book is being published in England that indicates that Salvador Allende was a KGB agent:

Salvador Allende, was in fact controlled by the KGB, says a new book about to be published in England. According to an excerpt published in the London Sunday Times yesterday:

BY FAR the most important of the KGB's contacts in South America was Salvador Allende Gossens (codenamed Leader by the KGB), whose election as President of Chile in 1970 was hailed as “a revolutionary blow to the imperialist system in Latin America”....

Hat tip: Herb Meyer at the American Thinker.

Marc Cooper says that we shouldn't be deporting legal immigrants

Marc Cooper comments on the bad law passed under President Clinton that causes legal immigrants to be deported when they do the wrong thing. I can understand the idea behind it, but when you look at how it has been applied, it seems wrong. Marc writes:

Journalist and writer Celeste Fremon – known as commenter "Rosedog" on this blog—has turned in yet one more of her moving, insightful feature stories on those who have fallen between the cracks of the modern American foundation.

Writing in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times Magazine , she artfully tells the story of “Javier” – a thirty year old Mexican born father and husband whose entire family has suffered the ingrained irrationalities of the U.S. immigration apparatus.

Marc concludes:

Before any conservative starts mouthing off about how wonderful this horrid, little law is…you might want to go back and read all of Fremon’s article. When evidence started mounting about how heartlessly stupid this law was, liberal Congressman Barney Frank introduced a measure to remedy it. The Republican Senate killed it a first time. And then when it was making headway a second time, the nationalist backlash to September 11^th blocked it again. Then conservative California Congressman Darrell Issa of all people, himself from an immigrant family, indicated he might come on board and give the fix a bi-partisan boost. He was last seen wavering. But there’s still some hope that this national embarrassment can be taken off the books. We can do better than this.

James Pinkerton writes at TCS about Tony Blair on Kyoto

Jim Pinkerton has a pieceat Tech Central Station about what Tony Blair said about climate change issues at President Clinton's meeting. Jim says that Tony Blair stated that no country, at this date, is going to restrict its economic growth. It is just not going to happen.

Some interesting happenings in the world

Wretchard, writing at the Belmont Club, has a rundown on some interesting happenings in the world, starting in Iraq. There are some major offensives underway, and Wretchard notes that American casualties are down. There is an election in Germany, and an election has just occurred in New Zealand (land of the Ultra Left). This gives you the flavor:

The early results from New Zealand indicate that Labor will retain office, although it may require entering into coalitions with smaller parties. Labor kept its share of the vote, but the opposition gained nearly twenty percent from 2002. One problem facing Labor is that in order to get a majority, it needs to coalesce with the Greens, but some of the smaller parties are so antipathetic to the Greens that they will refuse to join the coalition unless they are excluded from cabinet positions. In all probability, the New Zealand Labor Party can only keep power by making contortionist deals.

It is actually possible for the conservative coalition to form a government provided it were willing to coalesce with the Maori Party. The media calls it unlikely. Yet Don Brash, head of the Nationals said in his post-electoral speech a few minutes ago that he was willing to form a coalition government with "all New Zealanders". One of the interesting subplots of election day was the light plane circling the capital threatening to crash into the Sky Tower, one of the city's highest buildings. It is said to have been forced down by a helicopter. This highlights the near-abolition of the New Zealand Air Force by Labor.

Jack Kelly points out a piece by the Anchoress

Jack Kelly points out a piece by the Anchoress that suggests that the Republicans should have gone along with Hillary Clinton's demand for a commission to investigate the Hurricane Katrina disaster response.:

the Anchoress thinks, when GOP senators defeated Hillary Clinton's call for an independent commission to investigate Katrina disaster relief operations:

Aside from not wanting to have to listen to this woman bray, down the road, as she is campaigning for the White House that she - and she alone - was “trying to get to the bottom of the systemic failures which created such catastrophic conditions which were exacerbated by an uncaring and racist Republican administration blahblahblah…” I want to see the commission formed because I want to see laid out the stark differences between how the state and local governments of Alabama and Mississippi performed as opposed to how the same officials performed in Louisiana. I want the contrasts made plain, for all to see.

I want Mayor Nagin to testify as to why hospitals and nursing homes were not evacuated, why the citizenry were not evacuated even after Max Mayfield of the National Hurricane Center and the American President both called him and prevailed on him to order a mandatory evac well before Katrina struck.

I want to see Governor Blanco testify as to why she did not allow FEMA and Federal help to come into her state, even as they were on the ground in Mississippi and Alabama - helping black folk as well as white - at the invitations and behests of the Governors of those respective states.

I want the head of the State HSD office to explain - under oath - how it was that the Red Cross and the Salvation Army were not permitted into NO, where thousands were trapped in the Superdome and the Convention Center, and elsewhere, to disperse the food, water and supplies there were standing by, ready to hand out. I’d like to hear the testimony of those relief workers.

Michelle Malkin and Bryan Maloney on the Air America saga

Air America seems destined to crater in a particularly nasty way. Bryan Maloney and Michelle Malkin have an update on what is known about the lastest details.

What Air America has failed to disclose is that at least one other of its officials held a key job at Gloria Wise. Yesterday, we confirmed with Martta Rose of Rubenstein Public Relations, which is representing the Boys & Girls Club branch, that Air America's Vice President of Finance, Sinohe Terrero, worked at the inner-city charity as finance director from 2000-2002 under Cohen. Though he left Gloria Wise for Air America before the controversial loan scheme was initiated, it strains credulity to believe that Terrero was completely in the dark about what kinds of things Cohen and his former colleagues were doing.

The city Department of Investigation has undoubtedly explored these ties by now.

But somehow, Air America neglected to mention Terrero's employment with Gloria Wise in its public statements addressing the deepening scandal and the two government probes of the financial transactions between the two parties. Go figure.

So, what did Terrero know? When did he know it? Did Air America ignore his warnings and is he now paying the price? Terrero, as we first reported last week, has apparently resigned. Both Air America and Terrero have failed to return repeated calls and e-mails seeking comment, but we hear the radio network is preparing to acknowledge Terrero's departure in the midst of another cash crunch and a thicket of legal crises.

Paul, at Wizbang, has a good piece about Governor Blanco on CNN

I must admit that I feel sorry for Governor Blanco of Louisiana. She is obviously beyond her capabilities to function. Paul, writing at Wizbang, has a piece about Governor Blanco's visit to CNN. She and Mary Landrieu have problems. Governor Blanco's are even bigger than Mary Landrieu's problems, as are more immediate:

For all of you who keep blaming Bush and trying to protect Blanco, I'm afraid I have some bad news for you. Blanco got caught on tape by CNN admitting she did not ask for Federal Troops. When she didn't think the cameras were live, she made the startling admission to her press secretary.

AND that's not even the worst of it....

Why didn't she ask for federal troops? As Blanco explained to her press secretary as she wiped away tears, if troops came in, they would "put good people in jail."

She was more worried about the "poor looters" than she was the victims. This is outragous. SHE WEEPS AT THE THOUGHT TO THROWING LOOTERS IN JAIL!

Then she tells her press secretary, "I really need to call for the military, I mean, I really should have started that in the first call." BUSTED!

When Miles O'Brien asks her what day it was she asked for Federal troops, she tried desperately to stammer her way thru the answer like a 9th grade foreign language student trying to mumble their way the the oral part of a final exam. When pressed for an answer, Governor Blanco breaks down and has an Admiral Stockdale moment, replying:

"I don't even know what day it is."

The Bridge to Gretna

The bridge to Gretna being blocked by police has gotten a lot of play, as it is very sensational. At Just One Minute, the blogger has a piece that supplies more information on the subject. The story has been cast in the worst light, and perhaps that is deserved:

Missing from the story so far - on whose authority was Police Chief Lawson acting? Per the Times, police from three jurisdictions were involved:

Arthur Lawson, chief of the Gretna, La., Police Department, confirmed that his officers, along with those from the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office and the Crescent City Connection Police, sealed the bridge.

By Wednesday the New Orleans police effort had switched from rescue efforts to a crackdown on looting; by Thursday evening, Governor Blanco had made her famous comment that National Guard troops were on the way, "locked and loaded", and trained to "shoot to kill". Although I doubt that anyone from the Governor's office will rush forward now to claim responsibility for blocking the bridge, it may be that Lawson and the other district cops were simply following someone's idea of a crowd control plan.

In any case, Chief Lawson looks well positioned for his re-election run (as a Democrat), if these comments of this school board member from neighboring Jefferson Parish are any indication:

Mark Morgan, a member of the Jefferson Parish School Board in Louisiana, fled to Memphis from the New Orleans area with more than a dozen relatives when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast.

He has since returned to Louisiana, but several of his family members remain in Memphis.

...Morgan, elected to the parish school board in March 2004, responded to questions from The Commercial Appeal by e-mail early last week after returning home.

Q: As we speak (on Monday), what is the state of conditions in your immediate area? A: The City of Gretna is closed to the public and had been set up as a command post for the National Guard, FBI and other regional law enforcement offices, as well as local government. We have power, water, and have had food shipped into the compound.

Our police chief, Arthur Lawson, is the only reason we are secure and have supplies. He used personal contacts to secure our security and well-being.

Ed Morrissey on the 10,000 casualy number for New Orleans

The New Orleans major Ray Nagin's number of 10,000 dead, at this date, has the flavor of being pulled out of the air. The toll could rise, certainly, and it was a nasty surprise to find 45 dead in an abandoned hospital. Ed Morrissey comments, today, on the situation.

CQ reader Pajamaguy points to this Washington Post report about the gruesome discovery of 45 bodies found at a New Orleans hospital that appear to have been abandoned patients that drowned in the flood. While that story may well wind up as one of the most disturbing -- who would have left 45 helpless people to die? -- the Post buries the lead past the jump. Only 279 deaths have been confirmed, and it doesn't appear at this point that the toll will escalate much further:

The city braced for more grim discoveries as the receding waters allowed search parties to reach isolated buildings. But the death toll -- 279 for Louisiana -- was still far below the initial prediction of the city's mayor that 10,000 perished.

"It's hot. It smells. But most of the houses we are looking at are empty," Oregon National Guard Staff Sgt. James Lindseth, 33, said as his platoon, inspecting for people dead or alive, worked its way through dank and broken homes that had been in the water a few days ago.

That prediction by Mayor Ray Nagin may yet still come to pass as more of the city emerges from the floodwaters. At this point, though, it will provide yet another example of the hysteria that finds its home with the unprepared and the passive, those who want others to do the work that should have already been done by themselves. The figure got a lot of press play because of its spectacular nature and because of the official status of the man proclaiming it.

This was just another sign that the city government had melted down by Tuesday, and the mayor had lost touch with what was happening, even though he was in charge.

I was silenced yesterday mainly due to my fixed wireless internet access having an outage. I’m not sure if they think that they had an outage, but I directly connected the wire to the radio to my wife’s computer, and had no connection. It was more than just my wireless network not working right. Worse yet, my provider no longer has technical support outside of banker’s hours (well, 8am to 5:30pm). I have wondered if the hardware they now advertise that they use from Motorola is the problem. They never used to say what they used for their system, and I know that they made some changes to the radio tower in the last few months. I cannot afford to not have a connection, but the problem is that the only real alternative is cable, and the cable company is “bad”. They will charge a premium monthly charge since we do not want to switch everything to cable (phone, television, and internet access). This morning, after rebooting my router, I had a connection again. I had rebooted last night to no avail.

Clayton Cramer says that

Clayton Cramer watched the Discovery Channel's "93: The Flight That Fought Back". He says it was good. I wasn't so sure, so I didn't watch, as Clayton's wife chose, as well. Clayton writes:

I was expecting a dramatic presentation, but it was a surprisingly effective mix of interviews with family members and friends, dramatic re-enactments, and actual video and audio from radio transmissions, phones, and surveillance cameras. In some places, the narrator (Kiefer Sutherland) was careful to tell us that we don't know exactly what happened, but this is one possible reconstruction, based on the cockpit voice recorder, and what loved ones tell us was consistent with the personalities of those involved.

My wife chose not to watch it; she thought it would be too painful. She was probably right. I found myself in tears in places. These were ordinary people put into extraordinary circumstances, and they responded in an extraordinary way. They sacrificed their lives (which they suspected were probably already lost) to make sure that flight 93 wasn't used as a missle. Brave men and women should not be forgotten.

Ace has a good piece about CNN and the media

Ace, at Ace of Spades HQ, has a good piece about CNN "telling stories". This is Jonathan Klein's latest vision. Ace writes:

Jonathan Klein, he of the "pajamas" remark (one year and one day ago), says that CNN's future lies not with news reporting but "storytelling," some sort of hybrid of news and strong dramatic narrative. You know-- kind of made-up fictitious shit with a pleasing emotional resonance.

Well, here's some storytelling in action:

The TV news networks, which only a few months ago were piously suppressing emotional fireworks by their pundits, are now piously encouraging their news anchors to break out of the emotional straitjackets and express outrage. A Los Angeles Times colleague of mine, appearing on CNN last week to talk about Katrina, was told by a producer to "get angry."

That's from liberal hatchet man Michael Kinsley, writing in the LA Times, so I kinda doubt he's lying to serve his master Karl Rove (Our Satanic Father, Who Art Commuting Between Hell and the White House).

Now, of course, the point of "storytelling" is to exclude the extraneous. Stories need a point, and they need a tight and clean plot -- "narrative arc," as they say -- to be potent. They cannot ramble, contradict themselves, or be full of nonessential side-thoughts that distract too much from the central narrative arc. Heroes may be flawed and villains may have some redeeming qualities, but it's always hazardous to not be clear who is who when trying one's hand at "storytelling."

Washington Post on Chaos in the New Orleans City Government

The Washington Post has a long article about chaos in the New Orleans city government. It started when the head of the National Hurricane Center called the head of the New Orleans suburban emergency management head on Friday night, before the hurricane hit. The Post writers Susan B. Glasser and Michael Grunwald have done a great job documenting the events and identifying the actors.

September 11, 2001

I was stopped in traffic on I694 headed east towards Brooklyn Center (Minnesota), listening to Bob Edwards on Morning Edition on the local NPR station. We heard the news the a twin-engined plane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers. They were not sure what had happened, or how big the plane had been. When I got to work, a co-worker was reading the CNN site, and told us that a second plane had hit the other tower, and we heard rumours about the Pentagon. We knew then that a terrorist attack had happened. Our customer (we were almost all contractors) sent us home at 11am, and we didn't know if we could return to work the next day or not. We found out that one of our co-workers had been forced to stay in Canada, while returning from Britain. In another case, an Indian guy's parents, coming to visit and making their first flight, had been caught the same way. We did get to go back to work, but our access cards were disabled for a day or two, while the customer decided if it was safe to give us access. All of a sudden, security had become an issue.

I'm listening to Ann Althouse's podcast

I have been listening to Ann Althouse's first podcast. It was fun to hear her speak. She is not afflicted with the "ah", "uh" phenomenon. She is capable of speaking without the annoying breaks and pauses that I produce. She is currently one of my favorite bloggers. I would not have guessed how she pronounces her last name. It sounds to me something like "altus".

Ed Morrissey has more to say about Governor Blanco

Ed Morrissey has a post called "Katrina: Incompetence Distilled". It focuses on what we have learned about what happened on the week of the hurricane. This part is very ironic:

The New York Times has a feature story in its Sunday edition that supposedly looks at the frustration of coordinating the local, state, and federal responses to Hurricane Katrina. However, the article by a crew of Times writers instead inadvertently encapsulates the incompetence of Louisiana's governor Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, in a single anecdote that also calls into question the ability of the four reporters to properly investigate their subject matter.

The scene: three days after Katrina's landfall, and a day after the levees broke. The place: Baton Rouge. The setting: the state's command center for emergency response.

The governor of Louisiana was "blistering mad." It was the third night after Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans, and Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco needed buses to rescue thousands of people from the fetid Superdome and convention center. But only a fraction of the 500 vehicles promised by federal authorities had arrived.

Ms. Blanco burst into the state's emergency center in Baton Rouge. "Does anybody in this building know anything about buses?" she recalled crying out.

Marcellus Andrews on Marketplace

I heard Marcellus Andrews, on Marketplace, from American Public Media, deliver a bitter commentary with racist overtones. His premise was that New Orleans would be rebuilt without black people, that they would only be there to be exploited and provide services to white people. The city would be gentrified and poor people would be priced out of the market. This is the link. It was as if Marcellus Andrews totally ignored the outpouring of support and aid to people from New Orleans. At least since the last election in 2004, there has been an increasing leftist political edge to Marketplace.

More on Louisiana govermental hijinks from last week

Ed Morrissey writes more about Hugh Hewitt and Major Garrett talking about the Louisiana governor and mayou from last week. This is the key information with which Ed concludes:

Garrett also got the interview with Marty Evans on camera, which Fox has apparently broadcast. Now we have both major aid groups going on the record to state that the feds had them both ready to render aid before the flooding occurred -- and that the state officials would not allow them access to the victims. The combined assets of the Red Cross and the Salvation Army could have assisted the Superdome and the Convention Center easily, as well as most if not all of other shelters within the city.

The suffering and deprivations that caused the revulsion of the nation did not result from a lack of response from FEMA. While FEMA may have struck a few discordant notes, especially its tone-deaf chief Michael Brown, the truth is that they prestaged most of the necessary materials for the relief of New Orleans, counting on the city to follow its own emergency operations plans. When that failed, the key NGOs FEMA uses tried on several occasions to get the aid to the victims, only to have all their efforts blocked by Louisiana. The city failed to provide transportation to those who lacked it for the mandatory evacuation, and the state refused to allow the aid workers to go to the centers where the state and city urged the victims to congregate.

No amount of spin will overcome the heads of the Red Cross and the Salvation Army telling this story.

Ed Morrissey has more on New Orleans and Louisiana blocking aid

Ed Morrissey, writing at Captain's Corner, has more about the City of New Orleans and the State of Louisiana blocking aid to refugees. This is perhaps the most bizarred aspect of the whole matter. You need to read the whole thing, but in conclusion, the latest updates by Ed:

It's worth noting that the Red Cross agrees with the decision to make the Superdome available to those residents seeking refuge from the storm, an endorsement of Nagin's decision to open the arena. However, to open the Dome and then refuse to allow the Red Cross to stock it with the supplies necessary to keep the people inside healthy makes no sense whatsoever.

It's also worth noting that the Red Cross gets more access to the detainees at Guantanamo Bay than the people still stuck inside New Orleans.

Once again, we have more evidence that the problems in getting relief to Louisianans stuck inside the New Orleans basin directly relate to decisions made at the state and local level, not federal -- and that the people in charge of the overall effort have been and continue to be Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco. The meme blaming Bush for Hurricane Katrina continues to fall apart, even without wide coverage of the facts by the Exempt Media.

UPDATE: Video at Ian Schwartz's blog.

UPDATE II: Let's see if we can't paint the picture for Rev. Bobby K in the comments. FEMA positioned their assets in the area prior to the storm hitting, but not inside the impact zone, as that would have rendered them useless afterwards. A major component of that comes from the Red Cross. The Red Cross expected that either the local authorities would get the last of its citizens out of New Orleans or allow them to set up their relief provisions inside the city. To this day, the city and state have done neither, nor have they allowed the federal government to take control of the relief effort to make these decisions themselves. That means that the Red Cross personnel (and the relief provisions that FEMA helped them stage) have no way to reach those in the city anywhere, including the Superdome, the Convention Center, or any of the other shelters in New Orleans. Until Nagin and Blanco allow them to go to the victims or act to bring the victims out to them, the residents will not see any relief supplies except that dropped to them by air, a dicey proposition at best when facing toxic flood waters.

Ed Morrissey on the New Orleans evacuation plan

Ed Morrissey has the scoop on what we know about the New Orleans evacuation plan and the Governor of Louisiana's actions. ABC news is now looking at the situation:

At least one major media outlet has finally noticed that New Orleans had an emergency response plan for hurricances and evacuations that somehow never got implemented. ABC News yesterday asked why Mayor Ray Nagin not only did not follow the plan, but actively sent non-evacuees to a site that had no preparations to handle them:

New Orleans' own comprehensive emergency plan raises the specter of "having large numbers of people … stranded" and promises "the city … will utilize all available resources to quickly and safely evacuate threatened areas."

"Special arrangements will be made to evacuate persons unable to transport themselves," the plan states.

When Hurricane Katrina hit, however, that plan was not followed completely.

Instead of sending city buses to evacuate those who could not make it out on their own, people in New Orleans were told to go to the Superdome and the Convention Center, where no one provided sufficient sustenance or security.

ABC also asked Governor Kathleen Blanco's office about their response to the evacuation. They responded that they never asked for evacuation assistance from the federal government as part of their interaction with FEMA, only for assistance with shelter and provisions. They assumed that the city of New Orleans had followed its own evacuation plan.

The State of Louisiana was part of the problem

Kevin, writing at Wizbang, says that the State of Louisiana was impeding the operation of the New Orleans Police Department during the disaster:

In a bit of information that I could not verify, but was linked by Chris Regan at JunkYardBlog, this Behind the News article by former reporter Jon Christian Ryter indicates that Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco abandoned the NOPD.

Blanco's advisers told her that the remaining 7,000 National Guard troops left in Louisiana were not enough to secure the city of New Orleans, and that it was not in her best political interest to use them until they could be reinforced since they might get hurt, or worse, hurt or kill a civilian they were charged with protecting. Instead, she let Nagin's 1,500 New Orleans cops fend for themselves in a city that had been tacitly surrendered to looters and thugs.

Not only were the police undermanned, they were deaf... From an overlooked Federal Computer Week article:

Operation of the New Orleans police radio system in the wake of Hurricane Katrina has been plagued not only by floodwaters but by a lack of natural gas to power generators.

Not only that, Louisiana State Police turned away repair technicians when they attempted to reach the city, according to an on-scene report the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials International relayed to Federal Computer Week.

...Radio repair technicians attempting to enter the city were turned away by the state police, even though they had letters from the city police authorizing their access, [Dominic] Tusa said.

Michael J. Totten writes about FEMA

Whether this is really true or not is anyone's guess, but the momentum is such that Michael Brown is sure to be fired from his position as head of FEMA. Michael J. Totten is sure that he should be fired. For me, all we have is anecdotal stories that appear to be unfortunate. Michael writes:

People were ready and willing to help while FEMA repeatedly, chronically, habitually, said no. Taken as a whole these failures read like something out of the Soviet Union, where fishing crews – for example – were forced to let entire catches spoil and rot because they didn't have specific orders from Moscow to send the fish to places where hungry people could eat them.

It wasn’t enough that FEMA repeatedly obstructed aid coming into the city. Michael Brown also went onto the air and blatantly lied about what he did and didn’t do.

The editorial board at the New Orleans Times-Picayune busted him:

In a nationally televised interview Thursday night, he said his agency hadn't known until that day that thousands of storm victims were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He gave another nationally televised interview the next morning and said, "We've provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they've gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day." Lies don't get more bald-faced than that...

Lousiana voters can decide if the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of their state did a good enough job to deserve re-election or if they ought to be fired. Only Congress can fire George W. Bush, but he isn't eligible for re-election anyway.

But Michael Brown was never elected. He never will face an election. He can only be fired by the president. He needs to be fired. Now. He had no prior experience running an operation like FEMA, but he got the job anyway. Hey, he might have done a great job. His inexperience might not have been a problem at all. There was always a chance he would rise to the occasion. But he did not. Now that we know how he performs on the job, it’s time for him to go. One man’s ego and job security is not more important than disaster relief during emergencies. There will be more emergencies. There always are.

If the president looks hard to find the very best man or woman for the job, the odds that Michael Brown will end up being the one are at - if not somehow below - absolute zero.

Jack Kelly points out a piece about emergency management and local authorities

Jack Kelly, writing at Irish Pennants, has a piece that links to an explanation of the relationship between FEMA, local authorities, and disaster management:

There is a first rate

article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette today about the relationship of FEMA to local governments, by Craig Martelle, a former Marine major who was trained by FEMA in disaster management.

The key to emergency management starts at the local level and expands to the state level. Emergency planning generally does not include any federal guarantees, as there can only be limited ones from the federal level for any local plan. FEMA provides free training, education, assistance and respond in case of an emergency, but the local and state officials run their own emergency management program.

A good piece on Michelle Malkin's blog about New Orleans

I learned a great deal about what happened in New Orleans from a piece written by Bryan Preston on Michelle Malkin's blog. I come away with the impression that New Orleans has been a failed city in the sense that Zimbabwe is a failed state. Why was the local response in New Orleans so abysmal? I suspect now that for the same reason that the Wilmer-Hutchins school district, in the Dallas area, failed: the local community can only elect a certain type of leadership, who lack the skills to actually administer an organization. Bryan concludes:

We can't lay all of the blame for this sorry state of affairs at Mayor Ray Nagin's feet (though he's almost entirely to blame for the city's pathetic response to the current crisis). He's only been in office for three years, and to his credit he has tried to reform the city's government. But the fact is that a school system that doesn't even know how many employees it has won't be in a position to reach bus drivers when they're needed to ferry thousands of people out of the path of a hell storm like Katrina.

New Orleans' city government was an abscess. I say "was," by the way, because for all intents and purposes it ceased to exist some time last week--probably at about the same time the local officials realized that their multiple failures were bound to lead to major loss of life. Its emergency management czar, one Terry Ebbert, squealed about an absence of command and control over the relief effort, when it was his job to establish that command and control. The police department is two-thirds gone after about 1,000 officers deserted in the face of the flood and the looters--some of whom were police officers themselves. Mayor Nagin sent up a profanity-laced diatribe against the federal government that should have been delivered in front of a mirror. The abscess at city hall failed its citizens. It is guilty of gross negligence leading to death for many of its most vulnerable citizens. As the wretched condition of its school system demonstrates, long before it collapsed last week, the municipal government of New Orleans was a total and unmitigated disgrace.

Paul, at Wizbang, on "Katrina: The First Draft of History"

Paul writes at Wizbang about "Katrina: The First Draft of History":

Katrina: The First Draft of History

(note this will be at the top for a few hours, check below for more content)

I don't have time to explain... but trust me... when the history of this thing is written, Gov Blanco will be near criminally liable.

From a Wapo article I didn't take time to link. (google is your friend)

Behind the scenes, a power struggle emerged, as federal officials tried to wrest authority from Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D). Shortly before midnight Friday, the Bush administration sent her a proposed legal memorandum asking her to request a federal takeover of the evacuation of New Orleans, a source within the state's emergency operations center said Saturday.

The administration sought unified control over all local police and state National Guard units reporting to the governor. Louisiana officials rejected the request after talks throughout the night, concerned that such a move would be comparable to a federal declaration of martial law. Some officials in the state suspected a political motive behind the request. "Quite frankly, if they'd been able to pull off taking it away from the locals, they then could have blamed everything on the locals," said the source, who does not have the authority to speak publicly.

Paul has an update and conclusion:

UPDATE: Thanks to Anachronda, (who btw we still owe money to I think) the Wapo had a correction, she declared the SoE Monday- still fully 3 full days after Bush declared a Federal SoE. (end update)

Nagin is not without his warts... While he did save hundreds of thousands of lives, his abject stupidity should not and will not be ignored. He not only did not understand the strength of this hurricane but he failed to execute a long standing plan properly.

But when all is said and done, Kathleen Blanco killed thousands of people. When she met with Bush and Bush tried getting control of the situation she told him she needed "24 hours to think things through."

Blanco's lack of ability to think on her feet was evident in the debates she had during the election... now it cost lives... (More on this with video coming.)

I am too busy to post more right now but watch it play out... Blanco screwed up. (So did Nagin and I haven't decided on Bush, but we know Blanco blew it.)

AND BTW- I hate to disappoint the race baiters, but this is not racism... It was stupidity, pure and simple.

The latest attempt to destroy President Bush

The latest attempt to destroy President Bush, which some see as succeeding, is to attack the handling of the hurricane relief. John Hinderacker, at Power Line discusses the situation:

Meanwhile, the insanity continues. The Democrats know that in order to defend itself against their onslaught, the administration will have to criticize the people who really bungled the job--the Governor of Louisiana, the Mayor of New Orleans, and other local officials. So, earlier this morning Senator Mary Landrieu threatened President Bush with violence if he does any such thing:

Louisiana Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu threatened President Bush with physical violence this morning on ABC's Sunday morning news program "This Week". "If one person criticizes our sheriffs, or says one more thing, including the President of the United States, he will hear from me - one more word about it after this show airs and I - I might likely have to punch him - literally," says Landrieu.

For the first time, the Democrats and their allies in the MSM (to the extent one draws the distinction) believe that they have the administration on the run, in a way that could destroy President Bush. Destroying the President is the goal they have pursued passionately since January 2001. In that regard, nothing has changed in 4 1/2 years. The administration, it seems to me, has two choices: defend itself, or suffer crippling damage from which it likely will never recover.

Clayton Cramer on New Orleans

Given what we know now, the lack of evacuation prior to Monday is even more perplexing. We see the pictures of the school buses flooded out that could have been used to move people even prior to the hurricane hitting on Monday. Clayton Cramer has a good bit to say about the whole business:

Some stayed because they either didn't have a car, or they didn't have a large enough car to get the whole family out. I read one news account where this poor family had a Chevrolet Cavalier--but more than five people, and they were worried about being ticketed for not everyone belted up. (If that sounds silly, remember that poor people, and especially poor black people, tend to be quite fearful of the police, and sometimes with good reason.)

This last group is what makes this story so disturbing. It turns out that there were plenty of buses that could have been used by the New Orleans government to evacuate people in this last category before the hurricane struck--and had they done so, it would not only have saved lives, it would have saved money as well. Junkyard Blog has a bunch of pictures of these buses that were allowed to be destroyed, rather than used for evacuation:

With the improved resolution we count 255 buses in that one lot. That means at a capacity of 66 on board, 16,830 New Orleans residents could have been evacced out in one trip. Even if you have a lower capacity per bus, say 50 per bus, you're still getting nearly 13,000 out in one run. In an emergency mandatory evacuation, you could probably get away with putting more than 66 on each of those buses.

When we said that the buses are now expenses instead of assets, this is what we meant. Not only are those buses ruined, their disuse resulting in lives lost, but now they're spilling oil and gas out into the already polluted water. A spark near that slick could cause yet another fire and a whole new set of explosions.

Maybe there was some good reason why these buses weren't used to evacuate poor people from New Orleans before the hurricane, and it is very possible that many would have refused evacuation, anyway. Mayor Nagin's administration has a lot to answer for about this.

Just One Minute on New Orleans

The blogger at Just One Minute has a piece about New Orleans. He has many quotes and comments. He concludes with this:

More on the challenge of rebuilding New Orleans from Donald Sensing.

And the 17th Street failed levee described in the Times is interesting - the Times pretends that underfunding of the New Orleans levees began with Bush, and glides past the news that the levee that failed was recently upgraded.

The Captain has more, and Ezra Klein makes sense with his point that partisan blame can be cast in all directions.

Let me throw in my own guess - eventually, the contractor who upgraded the 17th St. levee will be investigated, and the contract will be found to have been influnced by poltical intrigue. In Louisiana!

Powerline on New Orleans

Powerline has posted some emails from readers. I have to agree with John Galvin about New Orleans and Louisiana goverments. New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin is a motor-mouth who let looting start, uninterrupted on Tuesday. Rumour has it that some police joined in. There was apparently the attitude that the only relief needed was to let the people loot businesses and homes. New Orleans city government really did melt down and the governor can only wring her hands and wish that she had made a plan. This is what John Galvin had to say:

From John Galvin:

The blame for the New Orleans disaster is 100% on New Orleans and Louisiana. This was NOT unforeseen. A cat 4-5 Hurricane has been expected for DECADES. There was NO planning for such an event. 1: The levees were only built for a Cat 3, at most most. No gat a Cat 4 storm and the levees failed, as would be expected. See US News of 7/18/05 http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/050718/18neworleans_2.htm Despite all the fancy words, a levee is just a big, thick reinforced concrete wall. Why couldn’t the state of Louisiana use its hefty oil and gas revenues to build better walls around it’s most important city? 2: As soon as the flood water came, New Orleans gov’t simply melted down. There was, and is, NO working chain of command. There was no plan to evacuate people who did not have cars. There was no provision for food, water, sanitary items, etc at either the Superdome or Convention Center. Compare NO gov’t in the flood to NYC gov’t on 9/11. compare NO to San Francisco or LA wheh they have the wholly expected earthquakes. Compare NO to Florida just 1 year ago, with 3 major hurricanes.

3. The state of Louisiana had NO plan for a flood in NO either. We saw their governor talking about “trying to come up with a plan for this” and “trying to come up with a plan for that” You don’t “try to come up with a plan” AFTER a FORSEEN disaster. All this would be understandable if something unexpected like an earthquake hit NO. But a hurricane and rising waters?

The military is in New Orleans and they evacuating trapped people

There are photos of Blackhawk helicopters rescuing people from roofs in New Orleans. The military is there and has been operating. What is inexplicable is the behavior of New Orleans city government. The fire department has been operating as you would expect. The police, in the vital first day or so stopped enforcing the law, in many cases. By Wednesday, we saw video of police arresting looters, but Tuesday was the critical day when anarchy spread and the looters armed themselves. We also must ask why, when we know what crimes were being committed at the convention center, why something was not done about it. That is on top of why food and water were not sent to the Superdome and convention center, if that is really the case. That is the charge: that people were sent to both places and then abandoned without police protection and food and water.

Marc Cooper says that the MSM is afraid to mention race about the New Orleans disaster

Marc Cooper writes that a missing aspect of the New Orleans disaster is that the overwhelming majority of people effected are black, but that the mainstream media are afraid to mention that fact. Affluent people had the means to flee, but many poor people were forced to ride out the storm and flood, because they couldn't afford to leave before the storm.

Among the catastrophic destruction along the Gulf Coast, we now have gangs of looters roaming New Orleans and not only stealing food, water and diaper but also guns. I’m not sure what I would do if I were desperate for food and drink. Smashing into an abandoned Wal-Mart doesn’t seem out of the question as an act of basic survival if no other aid is available.

But looting the homes of others and loading up on semi-automatic rifles and 9mm Berettas is beyond the pale and says something very ugly about our species. Very ugly.

There’s another dirty, little secret about the scenes we are watching. A secret because a feckless media can’t bring itself to say what is dead obvious: much of the area devastated by Katrina is among the poorest parts of America. Millions of people who were victimized by this disaster simply didn’t have the material resources to flee. To where? And with what money?

The disaster area is also one with a very high density of African-Americans. What percentage of New Orleans is black? Try 67%. Some of the affected counties are, in fact, more than 85% black.

Yet, race and class are completely missing from the massive media coverage of Katrina.

Slate’s Jack Shafer, fortunately, takes the issue head-on and serves up a good whipping of American journalism. Shafer surmises that the race/class blackout is a sort of latent racism born of fear. Fear of what he calls a “Campanis Moment.”