During the Super Bowl, when Cardinals wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald made a key play, NBC's cameras caught his father in the press booth, working the game for the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder. Papa Fitzgerald acted remarkably stoically to his son's on-the-field wizardry and Al Michaels quipped, (and I'm paraphrasing), "No cheering from the pressbox--that's the sign of a true journalist."

I don't know if anybody else interpreted it the same way, but to me, that was was a short sharp rebuke to just about everybody in NBC's news department in 2008.

But when old media wasn't overtly cheering, they kept rockin' in 2008, as one of Glenn Reynolds' readers notes:

What Katrina taught the media was that they could hurt Bush by lying. What 2008 taught them was that they could help Obama by not reporting at all. What will 2009 teach them? I shudder to think.

Me too.

John Hinderaker adds:

A basic reality of our time is that our mass media are monolithic, and what they choose to report (or not report) depends on what fits the narrative they are pushing on the public. If our reporters and editors wanted to portray Obama as clueless and out of touch with ordinary Americans, he has given them ample opportunity to do so. But because they are Democrats and he is a Democrat, they have no desire to tell that story. So "let them eat steak" is not a theme you'll be seeing on the evening news.

Lovers rarely kiss (up) and tell.

Update: "Sometimes the mask slips." And, as happens very occasionally, more than one mask slips.

Headline via the The Sundries Shack, which asks, "Has anyone seen FEMA lately?"

It seems we have people dying by the dozens in the midwest, where they've been freezing to death for a few days. Local officials are calling out the Federal government for its notable lack of response.

But Bill Quick (found via Instapundit) believes that "'Where's FEMA?' is not the appropriate question":

The appropriate question is, "Where is the mainstream media, screaming in one united voice, that the absence of FEMA demonstrates the utter fecklessness and failure of the current President and all his policies?"

Plus his barely concealed racism, of course.

This might be a good time for those who have pledged "to be a servant to my president" to head out there, rather than bitching about the contractors working next door. On the plus side though, to the best of my knowledge, no one on the left has actually been rooting for the snow and ice, unlike previous meteorological disasters:

Sherman Frederick, the publisher of the Las Vegas Review Journal writes, "As our president said, it is time to grow up":

There is a growing faction of the American left that seeks revenge more than righteousness.

Intolerant of dissenting views, this faction thinks as comedian Janeane Garofalo does that some members of the opposing political party should be "jailed." Terrorist acts (such as mailing envelopes of white power to Mormon temples because the gay marriage vote in California went the church's way) are seen by this faction as understandable and acts of legitimate political expression.

There is also an ugly racial component to it. We first saw it with Obama's pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who said, among other things, that white America had deliberately inflicted black Africa with AIDS.

When the Rev. Wright first hit the national stage, we hardly knew what to make of his irrational and separatist statements. Consequently, we pretty much ignored the substance of Wright's racially divisive rhetoric and focused on it as a day-to-day political story. It made us more comfortable, I think.

But in light of the things we saw at the inauguration, it may be time to revisit the dangers of intolerance and hate -- no matter the color of the person who makes them -- and nip this ugly mean streak in the bud.

He's absolutely right, but he lost me with that last sentence. Nip it in the bud? This isn't exactly a new development: Garofalo's shtick dates back to 2003. The origins of the black liberation theology that fuels Obama's former spiritual advisor date back to the 1960s, not coincidentally, the terrorist heyday of Bill Ayers and other paramilitary Obama supporters. Radical payback for opposing views isn't exactly new, either.

Back in mid-2004 with an election year in full swing, Charles Krauthammer coined "the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release":

The loathing goes far beyond the politicians. Liberals as a body have gone quite around the twist. I count one all-star rock tour, three movies, four current theatrical productions and five best sellers (a full one-third of the New York Times list) variously devoted to ridiculing, denigrating, attacking and devaluing this president, this presidency and all who might, God knows why, support it.

How to explain? With apologies to Dr. Freud, I propose the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release.

The hostility, resentment, envy and disdain, all superheated in Florida, were not permitted their natural discharge. Came 9/11 and a lid was forced down. How can you seek revenge for a stolen election by a nitwit usurper when all of a sudden we are at war and the people, bless them, are rallying around the flag and hailing the commander in chief? With Bush riding high in the polls, with flags flying from pickup trucks (many of the flags, according to Howard Dean, Confederate), the president was untouchable.

The Democrats fell unnaturally silent. For two long, agonizing years, they had to stifle and suppress. It was the most serious case of repression since Freud's Anna O. went limp. The forced deference nearly killed them. And then, providentially, they were saved. The clouds parted and bad news rained down like manna: WMDs, Abu Ghraib, Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, Joe Wilson and, most important, continued fighting in Iraq.

Stripped of his halo, the president's ratings went down. The spell was broken. He was finally once again human and vulnerable. With immense relief, the critics let loose.

The result has been volcanic. The subject of one prominent new novel is whether George W. Bush should be assassinated. This is all quite unhinged. Good God. What if Bush is re-elected? If they lose to him again, Democrats will need more than just consolation. They'll need therapy.

The media's pressure cooker would pop yet again the following year: as Mickey Kaus wrote at the time, Katrina allowed them to go nuclear on Bush without sounding unpatriotic, unlike their GWOT and Iraq-bashing coverage.

So this isn't exactly a new development in politics--this is merely SOP for the American left.

The newly airbrushed White House Website trashes President Bush over Katrina--and Drew M. at Ace of Spades HQ is not a happy man. Can't say I blame him.

Yes, Americans just love their presidents and immediate staff to be partisan and petty. Bad first step, fellas.

The Gray Lady sadly notes:

Representative William J. Jefferson was defeated by a little-known Republican lawyer here Saturday in a late-running Congressional election, underscoring the sharp demographic shifts in this city since Hurricane Katrina and handing Republicans an unexpected victory in a district that had been solidly Democratic.

The upset victory by the lawyer, Anh Cao, was thought by analysts to be the result of a strong turnout by white voters angered over federal corruption charges against Mr. Jefferson, a black Democrat who was counting on a loyal base to return him to Congress for a 10th term.

A majority of the district's voters are African-American, and analysts said lower turnout in the majority black precincts on Saturday meant victory for the Republican.

With all precincts reporting, Mr. Cao, who was born in Vietnam, had 49 percent of the vote to 46 percent for Mr. Jefferson, who had not conceded as of late Saturday night.

To paraphrase The Sweet Smell of Success, the cat's in the bag, and the bag's in the freezer.

Taken back-to-back, the last two paragraphs of the Times article are a hoot:

Mr. Cao, 41 and known as Joseph, fled Vietnam at age 8 after the fall of Saigon. His father was a army officer who was later imprisoned for seven years by the Communist government. Mr. Cao, who has never held elective office, has been an advocate for the small but prominent Vietnamese community here and has a master's degree in philosophy from Fordham University.

"Knocking Jefferson off is something you don't want to bet on," Elliott Stonecipher, a Louisiana political analyst, said Saturday night. "These elections continue to show us that there is a smaller, different and more progressive New Orleans that is emerging."

So electing a Republican who mercifully escaped Vietnam after American liberals of the 1970s left the nation to be slaughtered by the Vietcong and who ousted one of the most infamously corrupt Democrats of recent years counts as a "more progressive New Orleans"?

Hey, fine with me! It's rare that the Times sees a move to the right as progress, but I'll take it.

Update: Over at The "Moderate" Voice, Jazz Shaw makes a cheap shot that moves by so quickly, it's worthy of the drive-by legacy media:

Ed Driscoll doesn't seem terribly interested in a post-racial society, but will take a win in the GOP column any day of the week.

Hmmm--how does Jazz know I'm not "interested in a post-racial society"? Isn't a Vietnamese immigrant becoming a congressman in a district in which, as the Times article I quoted above notes, "a majority of the district's voters are African-American" actually a perfect example of a post-racial society?

Found via Theodore Dalrymple, leftwing author Tobias Wolff writes in England's Grauniad:

When I see someone being rude to a waiter, or blocking the road in a Ford Expedition, or yakking loudly on a cell phone in a crowded elevator, I naturally assume they voted for George W Bush. And - this is really mean, I know, really unfair and unreasonable and inhumane, and I scold myself for this, believe me, but - when a tornado tears off a few roofs in Texas, I think, serves you right!

But of course:

How would we have viewed the last four years if they had been under President Kerry? Found via Betsy Newmark, that's the topic that David W. Rohde of The New Republic explores.

Betsy adds:

He goes on the theorize that the Democrats wouldn't have done as well in the 2006 congressional elections without the spur of the anti-Bush vote. And then the financial collapse would have occurred on a President Kerry's watch. He doesn't mention, but we could add in that Kerry would never have supported General Petraeus's strategic changes in Iraq and so would have presided over a humiliating retreat for the United States in the Middle East. And I would also add in that it's hard to imagine a President Kerry endearing himself to the American people after four years of seeing his lugubrious, yet pompous demeanor for four years.

And of course, Hurricane Katrina, the cudgel that the media used to break the back of the Bush Administration in 2005 and during the midterms of 2006 wouldn't have been deployed by the media against their own man.

So where does the GOP go from here? PJTV explores Conservatism 2.0 later today.

After the 2004 presidential election, the left started billing themselves as "The Reality-Based Community"--as opposed to those faith-based Christianist God worshipers on the other side of the aisle.

And yet, the left isn't above asking a higher power if He'd be willing to invoke a little smiting of his own from time to time...

(Earlier vlogulations found here.)

Considering how the media exploited Katrina "to talk about Iraq without talking about Iraq" to "damage Bush politically for a long, long time" as Mickey Kaus wrote in September 2005, there's a fascinating sense of schadenfreude in this story. In late summer of 2005 Kanye West was first dubbed by Time magazine as "the smartest man in pop music" and two weeks later then blurted into an open microphone during a fundraiser telethon for victims of Hurricane Katrina on NBC that "George Bush doesn't care about black people."

Today, West was arrested at LAX:

Hip-hop star Kanye West has been arrested in Los Angeles on charges of felony vandalism after a heated confrontation with photographers at the city's international airport.

West was taken into custody at LAX airport on Thursday after a photographer's camera was reportedly smashed to the ground during the struggle.

According to celebrity website TMZ.com, a still photographer was attempting to take pictures of the rapper at the American Airlines terminal when he was confronted by the star.

According to a TMZ videographer, "West rushed the (photographer) and grabbed his camera. A struggle ensued and the still guy was screaming, 'Police, help!'"

The website reports West took the camera and threw it to the ground, breaking it into pieces.

The videographer reportedly approached West with his camera rolling when the rapper's bodyguard walked up to him, demanding he hand over the camera.

West's assistant allegedly intervened, grabbing the equipment and smashing it to the ground.

West was reportedly stopped by police before reaching security checkpoints in an attempt to board his plane after the confrontation.

He was allegedly restrained by authorities during the initial police investigation, when he discovered the incident had been recorded, shouting, "Give me the f**king videotape."

West and his assistant are being held on $20,000 bail.

Video here.

Incidentally, "Give me the f**king videotape" seems to be quite a timely catchphrase at the moment.

I just recorded a brief segment for PJTV's September 11th show. I had tons of notes prepared, since I didn't know how long I'd be on, so I'm reprinting some of them here in the form of a blog post on 9/11's impact on the culture war:

9/11 changed the culture quite remarkably, but it did so in ways that may not have been expected. Back in 2004, the great Charles Krauthammer wrote a piece in which he referred to "the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release":

The loathing goes far beyond the politicians. Liberals as a body have gone quite around the twist. I count one all-star rock tour, three movies, four current theatrical productions and five best sellers (a full one-third of the New York Times list) variously devoted to ridiculing, denigrating, attacking and devaluing this president, this presidency and all who might, God knows why, support it.

How to explain? With apologies to Dr. Freud, I propose the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release.

The hostility, resentment, envy and disdain, all superheated in Florida, were not permitted their natural discharge. Came 9/11 and a lid was forced down. How can you seek revenge for a stolen election by a nitwit usurper when all of a sudden we are at war and the people, bless them, are rallying around the flag and hailing the commander in chief? With Bush riding high in the polls, with flags flying from pickup trucks (many of the flags, according to Howard Dean, Confederate), the president was untouchable.

The Democrats fell unnaturally silent. For two long, agonizing years, they had to stifle and suppress. It was the most serious case of repression since Freud's Anna O. went limp. The forced deference nearly killed them. And then, providentially, they were saved. The clouds parted and bad news rained down like manna: WMDs, Abu Ghraib, Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, Joe Wilson and, most important, continued fighting in Iraq.

Stripped of his halo, the president's ratings went down. The spell was broken. He was finally once again human and vulnerable. With immense relief, the critics let loose.

The result has been volcanic. The subject of one prominent new novel is whether George W. Bush should be assassinated. This is all quite unhinged. Good God. What if Bush is re-elected? If they lose to him again, Democrats will need more than just consolation. They'll need therapy.

The pressure was released during the 2004 election cycle, but when John Kerry lost, it mutated further into a virulent strain that was only fully released after Katrina. As Mickey Kaus very presciently noted, Hurricane Katrina gave the media a way to talk about Iraq without talking about Iraq:

I'm not saying Bush and the Feds don't clearly deserve major grief for not getting today's National Guard aid convoy into downtown New Orleans a couple of days earlier. Some people are probably dead as a result. But the commentators on Washington Week in Review seemed a little too happy when proclaiming this a "debacle" that will damage Bush politically for a long, long time. And I don't think they were happy just because Bush has suffered a blow. I think it's because the hurricane and its New Orleans aftermath at least seemed to solve a big problem for anti-Bush commentators and politicians. Previously, they couldn't grouse about the Iraq War without seeming defeatist (and anti-liberationist and maybe even selfishly isolationist). Even the Clintons never figured a way out of that trap. But nature has succeded where they failed; it has opened up a way out, at least temporarily. Now Bush opponents can argue, in some cases quite accurately, that without the Iraq deployment aid would have gotten to New Orleans faster. And 'if we can [tk] in Iraq, why can't we [tk] in our own South?' They aren't being selfish. They are just asserting priorities! In short, Katrina gives them a way to talk about Iraq without talking about Iraq. No wonder Gwen Ifill smiles the "inner smile."

In a very real sense, 9/11 also created the Blogosphere and the idea of partisan journalism--and I don't mean that in any sort of pejorative sense--which began with Matt Drudge and Fox News in the mid 1990s, and Rush Limbaugh's national radio show nearly a decade earlier, and began to become an increasingly accepted element outside of the conservative media.

In 2004, the New York Times admitted what was obvious to all concerned--that it was a liberal publication; and a year prior, Eason Jordan, then of CNN, admitted that his network had shilled for Saddam Hussein. The pressure cooker that Krauthammer refers to led directly to some incredibly sloppy thinking, such as Dan Rather's MemoGate at CBS, and the rise of MSNBC, an openly hyper-partisan division of an otherwise staid establishment liberal news operation like NBC. This morning, MSNBC nobly ran the videotapes of The Today Showfrom 9/11, when all was chaos and uncertainty except for the two towers and the Pentagon being hit. But yesterday, as Kathryn Jean Lopez noted, Keith Olbermann of MSNBC said:

The television networks were told that the Convention would pause, early in the evening, when children could still be watching, for a 9/11 Tribute, and they were encouraged to broadcast it.

What we got was not a tribute to the dead of 9/11, nor even a tribute to the responders, or the singularity of purpose we all felt. The Republicans gave us sociological pornography, a virtual snuff film.

In addition to hyper-partisanship, 9/11, also fueled (if you'll pardon the carboncentric pun) the rise of environmentalism in the media. Julia Gorin, whom I've interviewed for PJM Political on XM, had a piece in the Christian Science Monitor in 2006 in which she talked about environmentalism as a sort of Freudian displacement for the War On Terror:

Tough language is borrowed from the war on terror and applied to the war on weather. "I really consider this a national security issue," says celebrity activist and "An Inconvenient Truth" producer Laurie David. "Truth" star Al Gore calls global warming a "planetary emergency." Bill Clinton's first worry is climate change: "It's the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it."

Freud called it displacement. People fixate on the environment when they can't deal with real threats. Combating the climate gives nonhawks a chance to look tough. They can flex their muscle for Mother Nature, take a preemptive strike at an SUV. Forget the Patriot Act, it's Kyoto that'll save you.

That's why in 2004 we got "The Day After Tomorrow" - so we could worry about junk science that may or may not kill us in 1,000 years instead of the people who really are trying to kill us the day after tomorrow.

While the hawks among us worry about preventing the Armageddon that's coming, our modern-day hippies just want to make sure the planet is pristine when it does. In fact, the more menacing terrorism becomes, the more some people seem to worry about the weather. Scared and unsure how to fight terrorists, they confront "climate change," which only requires spending trillions of other people's dollars on something that may not need fixing or may not be fixable. No wonder some of these people chain themselves to trees - they think money grows on them.
Why are these people so worried about the environment, anyway? It's not like they're living on this planet. Speaking of which, scientists have recently discovered global warming on Mars. See that? Martians need to stop driving those darn SUVs!

Notice that the undercurrent in all the doomsday rhetoric is America as chief culprit in the axis of enviro-evil (just as it is in all the world's turmoil). Having found a warm and fuzzy cause to snuggle up against in this big, bad, scary world, the enviros pick a fight with the one guy they're not scared of: America.

Such displacement also helps to explain the conspiracy theories and "trutherism." For a very long time, ABC had no problem running someone like Rosie O'Donnell as part of their daytime programming, who in the course of five years went from publicly claiming support for President Bush in the early stages of 9/11 to literally telling ABC viewers not to trust what they had just heard on Good Morning America and other news shows.

The events of the morning of September 11, 2001 have changed the culture in ways that few could anticipate that morning, and will continue to do so, no matter who wins in November.

"Not that anybody wanted there to be a hurricane, of course. Good heavens, no. But if there had to be one, the timing was fabulous."

--Clive Crook, the Financial Times.

"Did God intend Gustav to help one party or the other? We do not know. He did not respond to our requests for comment."

An addendum to the last post: Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Don Fowler issued an apology for his Wolcott/Moore-style joke rooting for Hurricane Gustav.

As Glenn Reynolds writes:

What's interesting is that the apology came before the story was picked up by the traditional media. It was just blogs and Drudge, but it forced a public apology.

200,000 or so unwanted YouTube views within the span of a couple of days will do that to you.

Greetings From Minneapolis! I have arrived; the convention may now proceed. Unless of course it doesn't.

But if it does (and hopefully that means that Hurricane Gustav's force will have greatly diminished before hitting land), this clip should aired on the Xcel Jumbotron in prime time and referenced by several candidates in their speeches:

Ed Morrissey asks:

This also prompts a question of ethics, which all of us should consider carefully. Should private conversations between politicians get videotaped surreptitiously like this? If so, then perhaps Fowler and many, many others should take better care about having a laugh at the misery of others, even among friends.

Plenty of traditional liberal journalists have turned off the record remarks of politicians and celebrities into major stories. (Which is ultimately part of what earned them their "drive-by media" sobriquet from Rush.) As Roger Ailes noted several years ago:

Jimmy Carter's famous confession that he sometimes had lust in his heart for women other than his wife was uttered to a Playboy magazine journalist as he was leaving Carter's home at the conclusion of the formal interview.

And there are numerous additional examples of such moments, a few of which are described in the above link.

But as is its wont, the Internet amps these sorts of moments not up to 11, but 1100. George Allen's Senatorial re-election in 2006 was sunk by his "Macaca" gaffe, which was part of a coordinated effort by the left to videotape Republican candidates during every possible appearance (and then some), waiting for any sort of gaffe that could be turned into a YouTube clip and exploited by a friendly news organization such as the Washington Post, which ran over 100 stories on Allen's gaffe in the space of about less than three months, in which he apparently mispronounced his campaign staff's nickname of the young mohawk-haired James Webb campaign operative assigned to tape him.

Whatever the explanation, Allen's gaffe, given massive exposure from the Washington Post and other quarters in the MSM ended his senatorial career, which ultimately lost GOP control of the Senate, and sank Allen's presidential ambitions. In its wake, Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos gleefully wrote:

Every appearance by a top Republican official or candidate should be recorded. Every one of them.

All it takes is one "Macaca" incident to transform a race or create one where one didn't exist. As the Montana incident blogged earlier today showed, a video can knock out prospective candidates before they even enter.

And this is no longer about finding one big blunder to put on a campaign commercial. It's about using video and (free) technologies like YouTube to build narratives about opponents, using their own words, at their own events.

A couple of years ago, Jonah Goldberg wrote:

Liberals are geniuses at unleashing social panics because A) it never occurs to them that their motives are anything but pure and B) because they are almost exclusively focused on short term tactics. And yet they are invariably shocked when these moral frenzies come back to bite them.

The "tape 'em all, let YouTube sort it out" philosophy began on the left, but its eventual boomerang was merely a matter of when, not if.

AP reports, "Dam breaks near Grand Canyon; hundreds evacuate."

Currently on Drudge:

EARTHQUAKE HITS LOS ANGELES... PRELIM MAG 5.8... FELT IN DOWNTOWN, WEST L.A., SAN FERNANDO VALLEY, ORANGE COUNTY.. DEVELOPING...

Earthquake map of California here.

Very preliminary AP report notes, "The late Tuesday morning jolt was felt from Los Angeles to San Diego, and slightly in Las Vegas."

More from CNN:

A magnitude-5.8 earthquake has struck just east of Los Angeles, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The quake's epicenter was about 2 miles southwest of Chino Hills and about 5 miles southeast of Diamond Bar, the USGS said. Chino Hills is about 30 miles east of downtown Los Angeles.

The center was about 7.6 miles deep. In general, earthquakes centered closer to the Earth's surface produce stronger shaking and can cause more damage than those further underground.

A 5.8 magnitude quake is considered by the USGS to be "moderate," which can cause slight damage to buildings and others structures. About 500 can happen globally each year, the survey says.

CNN's Ed Lavandera was at Disneyland with his family and felt the temblor. He said the shaking lasted about 5 seconds.

More detailed AP report here.

Tim MacMahon of the Dallas Morning News, who's out in Southern California to follow the Cowboys' training camp loses it: "EARTHQUAKE!!!"

Update: 12:30 PM PDT: Welcome Instapundit readers.

More from AP:

In Orange County, about 2000 detectives were attending [a] gang conference at a Marriott hotel in Anaheim when a violent jolt shook the main conference room.

Mike Willever, who was at the hotel, said, "First we heard the ceiling shaking, then the chandelier started to shake, then there was a sudden movement of the floor."

Chris Watkins, from San Diego, said he previously felt several earthquakes, but "that was one of the worst ones."

Delegates and guests at a cluster of hotels near the Disneyland resort spilled into the streets immediately after the quake.

Update: 2:06 PM PDT News video at Hot Air; Ed Morissey notes that the quake has been revised slightly downward to 5.4 on the Richter Scale, adding:

I'm a native Angeleno, and I know what a 5.4 quake means... mostly nothing. If it had occurred on the Whittier-Newport fault or under LA, it might have caused some damage, but this quake's epicenter was in Chino Hills--at least 60 miles out of LA to the east. What's in Chino Hills? Mostly dairies and farms, with a smallish bedroom community. At best, we're talking about making some cows nauseous.

My Remy Martin 1738 didn't budge from the shelf during a 5.6 magnitude quake near San Jose last October, though as Duane Patterson suggests, "For those dairy farmers that inhabit much of Chino Hills, plates might make a fine Christmas gift. Yes, the cows are fine, too."

When the levee breaks, Obama, you've got to move--and attempt to pin it on John McCain.

(Via Greg Pollowitz; Spike Lee could not be reached for comment.)

TigerHawk notes:

The flooding in eastern Iowa has reached the point of catastrophe. Towns are overwhelmed, businesses destroyed, and crops are gone. A fifth of the corn and soybeans are gone. Fox News is calling it "Iowa's Katrina." Here is a gallery of aerial photographs at the web site of the newspaper I used to deliver every afternoon, the Iowa City Press-Citizen.

The thing is, though, the people of eastern Iowa seem to be stepping up in the Iowa stubborn way. I have seen any number of man-on-the-street interviews, and nobody is complaining. They all seem to be working to solve their problem, which is not surprising because Iowans do not complain about tragedy. They complain about hot weather and dry weather, but not tragedy. And I have looked for reports of looting and come up empty so far.

Katrina has become a metaphor for many things beyond natural disaster, including governmental and individual incompetence (depending on your point of view). In Iowa there is a 500 year flood, but the people are not paralyzed, whining, or looting. There will be no massive relief effort from around the world, and nobody will step up to help Iowans except for other Iowans. Yet years from now, there will be no Iowans still in FEMA camps.

Meanwhile, Iowa-based LibertyPundit has asked for your help; if you can hit his tip jar, please do so.

Kate of the Canadian Small Dead Animals blog, who is actually vacationing in Beijing this week, writes that "Watching CCTV coverage of the massive Chinese quake aftermath (as best I can, considering the language gap) one can't help but notice how 'sanitary' the images are":

While there's plenty of footage showing collapsed buildings and roadways, crushed cars and landslides, the "rescued" quake victims dragged from the rubble before Chinese television cameras are uniformly limp, dazed, and amazingly clean. If one were of a suspicious nature, one might suspect there was some staging going on.

There also seems to be a lot of footage of soldiers moving supplies around in an orderly, efficient manner.

It seems all very reassuring, as I'm sure was intended. There is no question that the death toll will be both staggering and under-reported.

A totalitarian regime papering over its country's ongoing crises during an Olympic year? Maybe I should have called this post, "Recreate '38".

The New TeeVee blog embeds a video uploaded to YouTube taken during the midst of the horrific Chinese earthquake yesterday and notes:

The devastating earthquake in China today is just the latest crisis to showcase YouTube’s role as a primary source of firsthand accounts of breaking news. Last year, the video-sharing site gave us glimpses of the wildfires burning in southern California and of pro-democracy demonstrations in Myanmar. Now a video shot by a student shows us what it was like during China’s earthquake.

Meanwhile, Virginia Postrel adds:

From initial reports, the Chinese earthquake sounds pretty terrible. With magnitude of 7.9, it was 10 times as strong as the 1989 San Francisco quake and, according to U.S. Geological Survey stats (but not the LAT), more powerful than the 1906 quake that leveled San Francisco. And San Francisco, in either case, was much less populous than Sichuan province, which has 100 million people.

As bad as it was, however, the Sichuan quake would have been much worse had it occurred a few decades ago, when China was less open and prosperous and, thus, less resilient. As this MSNBC video points out a weaker 1976 quake killed a quarter million people. Back then, the Chinese government tried to suppress news of the quake, a stark contrast to today. Reading between the lins of this LAT report about local concerns, however, it seems Chinese government officials still don't quite know how to channel the charitable giving that inevitably follows such a disaster. But the Red Cross seems like a good start.

Back in 2001, in the aftermath of an Indian earthquake that killed 20,000, Jonah Goldberg also discussed the comparison between earthquakes in developed democracies and elsewhere:

Modern buildings have a tendency to fall down less than squalid tenements or shantytowns. Especially when you're rich enough to make them quake proof.

So again you ask, why is this relevant?

Well, if you listen to what the anti-globalization protesters are saying at the World Forum in Davos, Switzerland, or at my local coffeehouse, you'd get the impression that they have the best interests of poor people at heart. Of course, it turns out they don' t.

Globalization is generally something rich people are against and poor people are for, which is funny since rich people are supposed to be greedy and poor people are supposed to be content. This is true about both certain conservatives and liberals but for different reasons. Conservative anti-globalists and trade unionists fear what globalization will do to people inside our borders. That creates problems to be sure, but it's not nearly so evil as a certain breed of liberal nostalgia which wants to make the world safe for righteous tours of impoverished lands where noble savages still live in huts and starve with surprising regularity.

Okay so maybe most of them don't live in huts, but they do live in a crushing poverty that so many liberals think is preferable to being forced to eat at McDonalds or drink Starbucks coffee.

Modern buildings are also often a good place to be during hurricanes, much to the chagrin of some on the left.

Update: Via Instapundit on its brand new Pajamas-centric URL, Business Week explores firsthand earthquake blogging. That's something I'll be happy never to do again, and mine was nowhere near as severe as what Chengdu just went through.

Last year, there were 409 tornadoes:

"So far some 730 tornadoes have touched down this year, more than double the number for all of last year."

—ABC's Bill Weir on yesterday's Good Morning America, who--of course--blames the "more than double" increase on global warming.

I doubt Cindy Crawford would argue with those calculations.

(Nor would this fellow, but for different reasons.)

So I'm sitting with my wife, having dinner in our favorite local Italian restaurant, minding our own business, when at about 8:05 Pacific time, this interrupts and really harshes our collective mellow:

The U.S. Geological Survey reports that a 5.6 earthquake based in the Alum Rock area of San Jose hit at approximately 8:04 p.m.

Bay residents as far away as Sacramento and Sonoma reported feeling the tremor.

There were no immediate reports of major damage or injury.

The USGS reported at least seven aftershocks, all measuring less than magnitude 2.0.

USGS seismologist Steve Walter said the quake hit the Calaveras fault.

Drudge had the police gumball on for a time, and the local television stations will spend the rest of the evening making a huge deal about it, but in Milpitas, a suburb of San Jose, and seven miles from the quake's epicenter, things seem to be in pretty darn good condition: the electricity's on in the house. The cable modem is (needless to say) working. The books are all on the shelves, and none of the Remy Martin 1738 hit the floor.

No nuke, no foul, right?

Update: Earlier today, I had interviewed Virginia Postrel for this week's PJM Political on XM. And apropos of tonight's shakin' all over, here's one of my favorite columns from her, on "Resilience vs. Anticipation".

FEMA fakes a press conference--but why?

I was about to add this as an update to the post below on Hollywood's attitude towards America and war, but it's worth branching off on its own. Allahpundit writes, "Wildfire victims getting what’s coming to them, says [George] Carlin":

No need for grandiose outrage here. He’s been saying stuff like this for decades. In fact it’s a core part of his act, which is why he’s allowed to skate. I offer the clip not as fodder for indignation but because it’s a nice little window into Carlin’s persona: the bitter hippie, broken-hearted by the failure of the 60s, whose idealism has since decayed into a cynicism so black and weary that revanchist, schadenfreudean sentiments like this now escape his lips without the slightest stutter. And of course it’s all paired with the most touchy feely, cringemaking New Age back-to-the-land nonsense about being “in balance with nature” the way the Indians are. Thus the paradox of the malignant self-styled humanist: We need to join hands and tap into the spiritual creatures within — and if we don’t, then he hopes your house burns down.

In his look at Rupert Murdoch's ever-growing media empire, Steve Boriss writes:

Businessman Murdoch knows that success is about keeping customers happy — an obvious idea that is thoroughly rejected by the journalism dogma that pervades his competitors. This dogma insists that audiences are not customers at all, but “citizens” who must be provided with a pure stream of objective truths that only journalists know how to create. Moreover, this truth-flow is thought to be so precious and necessary to this country’s survival that journalists must be independent of pressures from anyone or anything — no pressures allowed from government, employers, business competition, corporate takeovers, advertisers, even the demands of their own readers with their questionable judgment and taste for sensationalism.

Unlike today’s journalists, Murdoch will respect his audiences’ tastes and seek to fulfill their needs. If he sees an opportunity, he will not hesitate to offer news that is sensational, titillating, or compatible with viewers’ worldviews. He will provide them with handsome men and strikingly beautiful women to look at. He will draw them in and make them feel good about being a part of a community, delivering news that makes them proud to be an American, a stockholder, or a conservative. He will not run news that is negative, cynical, and despairing, or that runs-down cherished institutions to which his audiences identify.

The attitudes displayed by "Bobos In Paradise" such as Carlin, and journalists such as Bobby Caina Calvan and Rebecca Aguilar all stem from the same mid-sixties wellspring of nihilism-cum-narcissism--which means such a worldview is now well over forty years old. In contrast, what Boriss describes as Murdoch's attitude towards his customers, while not always clearly reflected in his product, is a surprisingly refreshing change of pace. Naturally though, it's those who would benefit the most from adopting it who are, by their very nature, far too cynical to notice.

As Hugh Hewitt writes, the legacy media would love turn the southern California fires into Katrina Mark II, but "they don't have that chance given the accessibility of thousands of observers and lots of local media to the actual facts on the ground."

"Trust but verify" may have worked fine for the Gipper and the Soviet Union, but when it comes to the MSM, verify, and even then don't trust 100 percent.

Update: "Harry Reid Blames California Wildfires On Global Warming...Before He Denies He Said It", which sounds very much like the Democrat Senate majority leader is inadvertently attempting to transfer Iowahawk's "Top Scientists Warn: Sea Gods Angry" routine onto dry land.

Bryan Preston compares and contrasts; Glenn Beck loses it.

Jesse Walker of Reason has a list of helpful hints for those hoping to win their own Nobel Peace Prize--"Al Gore did it--you can too!"

Update: Kathy Shaidle brings it all back home:

Another Alfred -- Nobel -- endowed his famous prize as a "Winchester House" style conscience sop. He'd invented dynamite, to blast away rock during mining. Naturally, dynamite's until-then-unmatched ability to blast away human beings was discovered shortly thereafter, to Nobel's eternal shame.

Luckily, he didn't live to see the prize handed out to Arafat...

If Al Gore is a decent man, thirty years from now, having finally admitted he was wrong about global warming, he will endow a new prize, to be presented annually to a man or woman who tried to undo the incalculable damage done by An Inconvenient Truth.

I hereby nominate Bjorn Lomborg as its first recipient...

Meanwhile, I can think of no better way to commemorate this special occasion than by directing you to two other sites:

* re-read Hugh Hewitt's classic litany of Gore's lies, "Gorelero", which only goes up to the year 2000.

To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, read the whole thing, follow the links, repeat the dosage.

Jonah Goldberg has a must-read piece in NRO today. Two years on, he describes how a devastating hurricane and a near-universal institutional case of BDS caused one of old media's most infamous moments:

Few of us can forget the reports from two years ago. CNN warned that there were “bands of rapists, going block to block.” Snipers were reportedly shooting at medical personnel. Bodies at the Superdome, we were told, were stacked like cordwood. The Washington Post proclaimed in a banner headline that New Orleans was “A City of Despair and Lawlessness” and insisted in an editorial that “looters and carjackers, some of them armed, have run rampant.” Fox News anchor John Gibson said there were “all kinds of reports of looting, fires and violence. Thugs shooting at rescue crews.” These reports actually hindered rescue efforts, as emergency crews wasted valuable time avoiding phantom snipers.

TV reporters raced to the bottom to see who could moralistically preen the most. Interviewers transformed into outright scolds of administration officials. Meanwhile, the distortions, exaggerations and flat-out fictions being offered by New Orleans officials were accelerated and amplified by the media echo chamber. Glib predictions of 10,000 dead, and the chief of police’s insistence that there were “little babies getting raped,” swirled around the media like so much free-flowing sewage.

It was as though journalistic skepticism of government officials was reserved for the White House, and everyone else got a free pass.

It was very much a throwback to the most lurid days of America's newspapers during the Hearst-era of yellow journalism. Or as I wrote back in October of 2005:

In 1981, Janet Cooke was a Washington Post reporter who wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning story of an eight year old heroin addict. She was eventually forced to return the prize, when when it was discovered that Cooke cooked the books and invented Jimmy out of whole cloth. (Walter Duranty's Pulitizer is still on the books, incidentally.)

Asked about Cooke in an interview, new journalism pioneer Tom Wolfe replied:

It reminded me of when I first went to work on the New York Herald Tribune and they were still laughing over the ship-of-sin scandal from prohibition days. An informant had told the Herald Tribune that there was a ship of sin operating outside of a three-mile limit off of eastern Long Island. On board you could get liquor and dope and sex. So the Tribune sent a reporter out. He didn't find the ship, but he did find a saloon in Montauk, and he phoned in about five days' worth of the most lurid stories in the history of drunk newspapermen. Half of New York City gasped and the other half rushed out to eastern Long Island to rent motor launches, until it was discovered he had made up the whole thing. These things happen about every three or four years; some reporter gets caught piping a story out of his skull...Phony stories are going to be written every once in a while, so long as you give reporters the trust that you have to give them.

Especially when you send them down to New Orleans to report on the aftermath of a hurricane when there's a conservative president in office.

Around that time, Hugh Hewitt told PBS's News Hour:

Well, [Keith Woods, dean of the faculty at the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists in Florida] just said they did not report an ordinary story; in fact they were reporting lies. The central part of this story, what went on at the convention center and the Superdome was wrong. American media threw everything they had at this story, all the bureaus, all the networks, all the newspapers, everything went to New Orleans, and yet they could not get inside the convention center, they could not get inside the Superdome to dispel the lurid, the hysterical, the salaciousness of the reporting.

I have in mind especially the throat-slashed seven-year-old girl who had been gang-raped at the convention center -- didn't happen. In fact, there were no rapes at the convention center or the Superdome that have yet been corroborated in any way.

There weren't stacks of bodies in the freezer. But America was riveted by this reporting, wholesale collapse of the media's own levees they let in all the rumors, and all the innuendo, all the first-person story because they were caught up in their own emotionalism. Exactly what Keith was praising I think led to one of the worst weeks of reporting in the history of American media, and it raises this question: If all of that amount of resources was given over to this story and they got it wrong, how can we trust American media in a place far away like Iraq where they don't speak the language, where there is an insurgency, and I think the question comes back we really can't.

And yet, despite all that, as Jonah notes:

During last week’s bonfire of Katrina navel-gazing, there was virtually no mention of the hyperventilating and inaccurate media reports, even though these facts are by now well-established. Terms such as “rape gangs” and “snipers” do not appear in virtually any of the mainstream media’s retrospectives. It’s as if it never happened.

Why? I think the answer is complex, but three factors are surely involved. One, the media are often good watchdogs of government but rarely of themselves. While recycling old complaints about government is permissible, dwelling on your colleagues’ failures — or your own — just isn’t done.

Two, the media have convinced themselves that they did a wonderful job of covering Katrina, showering themselves with awards in response. Dan Rather spoke for his colleagues when he said, “Everybody across the board did such a good job.” It was one of the “quintessential great moments in television news ... right there with the Nixon-Kennedy debates, the Kennedy assassination, Watergate coverage, you name it.”

One could argue that each of those moments demonstrated fundamentally-flawed coverage on the part of television networks that claimed at the time to be throroughly objective and unbiased, during an era when the American public still largely believed such journalistic traits were possible.

CBS's Don Hewitt later admitted that through lighting, make-up and camera angles, he gave Kennedy preferential visual treatment in his first, now legendary debate with Nixon. As James Piereson wrote in Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, when compared with the facts of the event, the media's biased narrative in the immediate aftermath of Kennedy's death was in its own way as muddled as their decades-later Katrina coverage. And television's role in Watergate was largely through the passive airing of static congressional hearings. The real legwork was done by two newspaper reporters who were unknowing patsies of an FBI turf war battle spearheaded by "a disaffected sidekick of J. Edgar Hoover, an old-school G-man embittered at being passed over for the director's job when the big guy keeled over after half-a-century in harness", Mark Steyn wrote in 2005.

Those flawed earlier moments reveal both the big three networks' biases, and in CBS's case, there's a direct line from Don Hewitt giving JFK a friendly video assist to CBS's Dan Rather inventing phony documents to attempt to give a much later JFK his own helpful leg up.

The distributed citizen journalism of the Internet came to national prominence (and earned its nickname) as a result of catching that last imbroglio, but it helped that it was one big easy-to-follow story involving one superstar anchorman, not the thousand tiny cuts of the media's New Orleans debacle.

Of course, Dan Rather still can't understand what--if anything--he did wrong in September of 2004. And as Jonah notes, the rest of his comrades don't believe they made any mistakes a year later. History (and a Cuban-exile) says otherwise about Dan. In the age of the Blogosphere, what will the general public's perception of the legacy mass media during Katrina ultimately be?

Nicole Gelinas writes "Two years after Katrina, New Orleans desperately needs law and order":

As Reverend Nguyen The Vien, pastor of one of eastern New Orleans’s churches, told me earlier this year, “We’re here and we’re rebuilding”—with or without federal assistance. Indeed, Nguyen and his parishioners seemed to treat the subject of government help almost as an afterthought: it may help pay the bills if it ever arrives, but it’s not expected. After Katrina, neighbors fixed up Nguyen’s church under his direction so that they would have a “home base” for eating, sleeping, and showering. Then they set to work rebuilding houses, one by one. Residents of many other neighborhoods—white, black, and Asian—have done the same. As New Orleanians have found out the hard way, the work is backbreaking, but not impossible.

What individual New Orleanians can’t do by themselves is fix the city’s long-broken attitude toward criminal justice. Over and over again during my February trip to New Orleans, I heard how demoralized residents feel when they buy and install new appliances, pipes, and furniture for their flooded-out houses, leave for a day or two, often to temporary homes—and return to find their hard-earned new handiwork ripped out and stolen.

For generations now—and this is the city’s deepest problem—New Orleans has hobbled along without a real law-and-order presence. Criminals graduate from petty crimes to burglary to drug-dealing to carrying illegal weapons to gang robberies to murder, and face few consequences at any stage. The police, and especially the prosecutors, are ineffectual. Since Katrina, things have gotten much worse, in part because criminals, finding life difficult in cities that enforce the law, have returned to the Big Easy in numbers disproportionate to those of law-abiding citizens. Mayor Ray Nagin doesn’t try to fix things, perhaps because, as he often says, he believes crime is a social problem, rooted in a lack of opportunity for poor youth.

The Bush administration has deployed extra federal law-enforcement agents to try to get the worst criminals off the street. The state of Louisiana, meanwhile, has sent the National Guard to patrol half-empty neighborhoods. But just as the U.S. military can only do so much in Iraq when Baghdad’s local government is ineffective, the federal government can’t do much in New Orleans until the city’s local government changes its attitude and behavior. Residents have no reason to think that criminal behavior has predictable negative consequences, because Nagin and New Orleans district attorney Eddie Jordan have failed to make clear that people who commit crimes in New Orleans will be prosecuted.

But President Bush can use federal dollars to try to convince them to do it. In his speech in New Orleans on Wednesday, Bush should announce that he’s ready to ask Congress for $500 million over two years to overhaul New Orleans’s police and prosecutorial forces. But he also should say that the money is contingent on a pledge from Nagin and Jordan that their city’s Number One priority will be law enforcement. Bush should also tie the federal money to measurable results: rational arrests (from quality-of-life crimes all the way up to homicide), effective prosecutions, and, ultimately, fewer crimes.

It’s an enduring mystery why Bush hasn’t used the Katrina disaster to show the world that America can rebuild a major city using a bedrock conservative principle: law and order first. Democrats are welcome to propose the same idea, of course. Obama, Edwards, and Clinton have all mentioned New Orleans’s crime problem in their recent speeches. But they often tie it to a lack of staff and equipment in the city after Katrina—as if it’s a question of rebuilding something that was lost, instead of building from scratch the most essential component of any city’s success. Until politicians understand that basic difference, spending more money—or bragging about past billions spent—while tolerating intolerable conditions in a first-world city is nothing short of disgraceful.

Paging Mayor Giuliani--your next stump speech awaits.

Pretty amazing color footage of "Galloping Gertie", the Narrows Tacoma Bridge disaster of 1940:

It makes a dramatic companion piece to these more placid color still photos from the first half of the 20th century.

In "Dead On Arrival", Jonah Goldberg writes the postmortem for Live Earth:

"If you want to save the planet, I want you to start jumping up and down. Come on, mother-[bleepers]!” Madonna railed from the stage at London's Live Earth concert Saturday. “If you want to save the planet, let me see you jump!”

You just can't beat that. What else could capture the canned juvenilia of a 48-year-old centimillionaire — who owns nine homes and has a “carbon footprint” nearly 100 times larger than the norm — hectoring a bunch of well-off, aging hipsters to show their Earth-love by jumping up and down like children? I suppose she could have said, “Now put your right foot in / Take your right foot out / Right foot in / Then you shake it all about…. That's what climate change is all about.”

Actually, I think the “Hokey Pokey” makes more sense.

But, hey, I don’t want to bash Live Earth, which is not to be confused with Live Aid (1985, dedicated to eradicating African famine) or Live 8 (2005, promising to relieve African nations’ debts). So with the African continent so well-fed — and debt-free! — who can blame the Celebrity Concern Industry for moving on to its next big success?

The avowed point of Live Earth was to ... can you guess? That’s right: raise awareness about global warming. Considering the energy required to put on the show, the nine Live Earth concerts doubtlessly raised more CO2 than awareness. NBC’s three-hour televised version got trounced by “Cops” and “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” Moreover, surely most of the people who attended or tuned in already knew about global warming before they saw the video tutorial about Ed Begley Jr.’s eco-friendly home and sanctimony-powered go-cart.

Still, if fans had somehow missed the global-warming story entirely, imagine how befuddled they must have felt while listening to Dave Matthews sing the glories of cloth diapers. And, assuming they didn’t hit the mute button when Czech supermodel Petra Nemcova came to the stage, one wonders what any climate-change ingenues might have made of her remarks. The model, who nearly was killed in Thailand by the 2004 tsunami, explained that she “didn’t feel hate toward nature” because of the tsunami. “I felt nature was screaming for help.”

Maybe Petra was simply trying to fly under radar with a subversive Iowahawk reference...

"Floods are judgment on society, say bishops".

Not hurricanes?

Clayton Cramer asks, "Remember in 1984, where Winston's job was to revise newspapers of the past to keep up with the ever changing present?"

This is very interesting. A couple years ago, during the Katrina disaster, I linked to a CNN report and quoted it:

Overnight, police snipers were stationed on the roof of their precinct, trying to protect it from gunmen roaming through the city, CNN's Chris Lawrence reported.

One New Orleans police sergeant compared the situation to Somalia and said officers were outnumbered and outgunned by gangs in trucks.

"It's a war zone, and they're not treating it like one," he said, referring to the federal government. ...

One of my readers ran into that posting of mine--and noticed that the CNN report at that link no longer said anything like that. It was much, much more upbeat. Nothing about the police snipers on the roof. Did I copy the wrong link? Did I have a brief attack of delusion, and make something up?

The earliest archived version on the Internet Wayback Machine of the article that Clayton is referring to is dated December 10th, 2005, three months after the story originally ran. If that date is correct (and I'm not familiar enough with the Wayback Machine's inner workings to know if retroactive airbrush touch-ups and other types of post-facto rejiggering are possible), it sounds like it may have been revised sometime in the fall of 2005, after news agencies first began to realize (largely thanks to bloggers, and those who were actually on the scene) that Katrina wasn't their finest hour of reporting after all.

(Although try telling Big Media that: as recently as last month, while Hugh Hewitt was discussing NBC's Weekly World News-style hyping of Virgina Tech shooter Cho Seung-Hui, he noted, "Steve Capus...the president of NBC News, who I debated on Monday about the quality of Katrina coverage, which he called one of the media’s finest hours".)

Of course, all sorts of things can vanish down the Memory Hole at CNN and Big Journalism in general from time to time, particularly when an expeditious course correction is required.

Tough to argue with this:

Sixty-four-year-old Vivian Westerman rode out Hurricane Katrina in her 19th-century house. So terrible was the experience that she wanted two things before the 2006 season arrived: a backup power source and a gun. “I got a 6,000-watt generator and the cutest little Smith & Wesson, snub-nose .38 you ever saw,” she boasted. “I’ve never been more confident.” People across New Orleans are arming themselves - not only against the possibility of another storm bringing anarchy, but against the violence that has engulfed the metropolitan area in the 19 months since Katrina, making New Orleans the nation’s murder capital.

"The cutest little Smith & Wesson, snub-nose .38 you ever saw"? Man, Tammy Bruce fans are everywhere.

No, that's not an intense NFC/AFC interconference pro football game; it's an interesting comparison of two recent natural disasters of biblical proportions and the responses therein. Don't miss it.

(Via Maggie's Farm. And for an equally interesting comparison of regional responses to less severe natural disasters, flashback to this great Virginia Postrel article from the mid-1990s.)

Update: Speaking of Denver, they'll be having another Blogger Bash on February 16th. If you're in the area, don't miss it--as they say in their ad, You--Yes You! You Control The Bar Tab!

And speaking of which, sadly belated best wishes to VodkaPundit's Stephen Green--get well, and start blogging again, soon!

Another Update: "Seneca the Younger" of Flares into Darkness shoots out the Denver/New Orleans meme:

A few minutes Googling revealed that it was actually written about a blizzard in North Dakota, right after Katrina. I'm almost positive I got it by email then, although I haven't tried searching my email for it; in any case, it's in itself a bit of an exaggeration, since North Dakota (and Colorado) called out the National Guard, and ND also solicited and got a disaster declaration from the Federal Government. (The link it to a Snopes article; you can find details there.) On the other hand, while it's an exaggeration, it's got a touch of sense to it; there was no sign of the paralyzed dependency that we saw in New Orleans. We bitched about the snow, but we didn't ask where FEMA was to help people stranded in the snow.

As "Seneca" writes, "It's kind of interesting to watch it go past. It's very interesting when you think about the 'plastic turkey' and similar stories --- it's a demonstration of how a good story, a 'meme' propagates".

I'm reasonably sure the Blogger Bash is real, though.

Bryan Preston of Hot Air has a long, detailed post analyzing how Republicans lost the midterms:

What cost the GOP its majorities in Congress and statehouses? Nancy Pelosi and her wing of the Democrats are running around as though the elections validated their hard left view of the war and the world, but according to James Carville’s Democracy Corps, this election did no such thing.

What cost the GOP its power? Iraq? Foley? Look at page 6 of Democracy Corps’ post-election report. The GOP’s fortunes fatally cratered in the Fall of 2005, and were recovering ever since minus a couple of blips this year. What happened in the Fall of ‘05?

Katrina. That storm turned out to be the hurricane that changed history.

As Preston writes, "Combine 9-11 and Katrina, and the Bush administration has had to deal with two of the worst disasters in American history, one brought on by foreign aggression that was years in the making, and one the wrath of nature."

Near the start of the media's wretched Katrina coverage, which had painted the Superdome as the site of numerous rapes, and had fictitious snipers shooting at rescue helicopters, Mickey Kaus presciently noted that, "In short, Katrina gives [the media] a way to talk about Iraq without talking about Iraq." And they milked it for all that it was worth. Preston adds:

There’s a lesson in all of this, that’s an old one but an important one to remember: Demagoguery wins, and more so when it comes in the middle of a horrific disaster. Also, lies do indeed travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. By the time the story of New Orleans buses surfaced (only to be buried by the AP and ignored by the national media), the disaster had been framed as a Bush failure and the damage was already done. The media’s later mea culpa did nothing to change the basic narrative that already had a life of its own.

Which confirms something that Peggy Noonan wrote in August:

The other day ABC News's Internet political report, The Note, argued that President Bush, in his then-upcoming veto statement and other presentations, had better be at the top of his game if he wants his party to hold on to Congress in 2006. "[Mr. Bush] is going to need to be focused and impressive, not easy pickings for the Rich-Krugman-Dowd-Stewart axis."

As I read I nodded: That's exactly true. What was significant is that The Note did not designate as Mr. Bush's main and most effective foes Pelosi, Dodd, Reid, Biden, et al. Mr. Bush's mightiest competitors are columnists and a comedian with a fake-news show.

This is one reason the media is important. (Not "are important." Language evolves; usage changes; people vote with their tongues. It's not the correct "return to normality"; it's the incorrect "return to normalcy." It's not "the media are" it's "the media is." People see the media as one big thing.)

One big reason the media is important is that they change things. And they lead. On 9/11 itself it was the media--anchors, reporters, crews sent to the scene, analysts--that functioned, for roughly 10 hours, as the most visible leaders of the United States. The president was on a plane; the vice president was in the bunker and on the phone. It was on-air journalists who informed, created a seeming order, and reassured the public by their presence and personas and professionalism.

So they're important. But very recently it seems to me they're important because it is from the media that Mr. Bush's most effective opposition--attacks on his nature and leadership, attacks on his policies--comes. Among the Democrats an op-ed columnist has more impact than a minority leader.

It is common wisdom that newspapers are over. But when the most powerful voices against a powerful president at a crucial time are op-ed jockeys, newspapers are not over. Or perhaps one should say paper may be over, but news is not.

Rich Lowry has further election postmortems, here.

Update: Related thoughts on Republicans and the media, from a Hollywood (conservative) perspective.

Another Update: Dr. Helen explores the psychology of the big-screen TV:

My patients, regardless of political party, often come in and parrot to me the news they hear on tv without question. You know, the Dems are great, the Republicans evil and such. When I watched the news just now with Nancy Pelosi and Wolf Blitzer, it seemed that they were right in my media room, talking to me personally. TV encourages people to think by linking images in their brains. Are these images stronger and more persuasive on a big screen with high def like the new ones out than they were on the smaller less clear ones? Now that tvs are getting cheaper and cheaper as well as bigger and clearer, will the emotions of viewers become even easier to manipulate? And if so, how will that play out in a medium that is captured by the liberal media? As tv's get bigger, clearer, and cheaper, will we start to see blue everywhere?

That sounds like an environment tailor-made for a story like Katrina, which, while, as Kaus noted, was a way for the media to "to talk about Iraq without talking about Iraq", also had a similar fog-of-war type environment. It gave the media the opportunity to craft the most lurid stories possible, along with enormous amounts of plausible deniability afterwards.

Life (as always) imitates Iowahawk--In late December of 2004, the word's most famous squirrel smoker satirically wrote:

Washington, DC - Pointing to the devastating weekend Indian Ocean tsunami that left over 24,000 dead, an international blue ribbon committee of climatologists and ecoscientists today issued a stark warning that man-made pollutants have increasingly "make water spirits angry."

The blunt conclusion prefaced a 2300 page meta-analysis of hundreds of scientific studies and computer models detailing links between human industrial activity and wrathful eco-deities. Entitled "Fire Bad: Fire Very Bad," the report warns that the planet faces additional catastrophies unless drastic regulatory action is taken to appease Earthen-furies.

"Unclean money devils anger sacred water spirit Tai-Waku," explained Martin Knudson of Scripps Oceanic Institute. "He now call angry to son the whale, 'make slap with anger-tails! Bring vengeance-surf to villagers!'"

While most empirical evidence supports the theory of wrathful whale-tail slappings, some scientists are exploring alternative hypotheses for the weekend tsunami. Ecobiologist Jane Geary of UC Santa Cruz points to mounting evidence that the ocean spirit-world may have been driven to gastrointestinal rage by gas-guzzling SUVs.

"Thunder-wagon make smoke cloud of greenhouse gas," explained Geary. "hungry Tai-Waku eat smoke from thunder-wagon, pass giant wind with mighty fury."

Peter Novak, chief science officer of the Sierra Club, dismissed Geary's "Divine Fart" theory, arguing it was more likely that SUVs had triggered the tsunami via a spirit underword sexual encounter.

"Wheels of thunder-wagons wake up Big Earth Spirit-Mother, make to crazy tingle in hairy child-place. She now go to water lair of Tai-Waku, make big angry love on tectonic plate," said Novak. "Big Earth Spirit-Mother say, 'if ocean rocking, don't come a-knocking.'"

Although they disagree on the precise causes of the wrathful spirit world, scientists were largely unanimous in recommending immediate global regulatory action. Remedial steps suggested in the report include ratification of the Kyoto treaty, elimination of automobiles, volcanic altars for virgin sacrifices, creation of a sustainable urine-based economy, and improved faculty dental benefits.

"If not act now, it too late," said report editor Paul Erlich of Stanford University.

Erlich, whose 1978 best seller "Ice Time Come Soon" is widely credited with saving millions of lives by warning of the massive age of glaciation that threatened Earth during the 1980s, said inaction might anger the spirit world further.

"Me not know when Tai-Waku make wrath again," said Erlich. "Me need more grant money."

Seamus Heffernan, the senior policy executive of "ICE", England's Institution of Civil Engineers, emailed me a link to his review of An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's recent agitpropumentary, in which he spotted a similar "Fire Makes Sea Gods Angry" moment from the former vice president:

Lack of panache aside, Gore does outline his case clearly and powerfully. He explains the basics of the science around climate change (bare bones version: greenhouse gases trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere prevent the escape of the sun’s heat) and, in the film’s only real chuckle, drives this point home with an educational clip from Matt Groening’s Futurama.

Having now hooked his crowd, Gore goes to work outlining the real life examples to drive the reality of the situation home. The Darfur droughts, flooding in China, the melting ice caps, the baffling weather all are explained

Unfortunately, this is where Gore loses some of his credibility. He is most certainly safe on many of the examples he cites, but cannot resist going for the glamour shots. Standing before a giant photo of Mount Kilimanjaro, he laments its disappearing snow peaks. Unfortunately, Kilimanjaro has been losing snow for over a hundred years through a reduction in 19th century precipitation, not global warming. Ouch.

Gore goes one worse when he attempts to use Katrina (and accompanying gut-wrenching footage). It was easily the film’s most crass political moment. Katrina was a disaster, and even more crucially for Gore, an American disaster whose wounds have not yet come close to healing. In his rush to exploit this, he neglected homework from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which said that “No systematic changes in the frequency of tornadoes, thunder days, or hail events are evident in the limited areas analysed". In addition, the "challenges globally in tropical and extra-tropical storm intensity and frequency are dominated by inter-decadal and multi-decadal variations, with no significant trends evident over the 20th century." In other words, the jury is out on whether or not global warming made Katrina any worse.

By claiming Katrina was unquestionably caused by global warming, he deftly shifts the blame for its severity onto the current administration (after all, they’re hardly big fans of the global warming hypothesis). Gore lets himself down by both grossly misstating the facts about hurricanes and climate change, while clumsily making the other aim of this film clear: the 2008 elections. Perhaps we should expect no better from a man who was quoted in Grist Magazine as saying it is ‘appropriate’ to overstate the facts related to climate change.

Perhaps.

In his latest "Citizen Journalist" video blog for Hot Air Jeff Goldstein asked Linda Seebach of The Rocky Mountain News her thoughts on this piece by Jeff Jarvis from last September. It was written at the height of what we now know to be the media's painfully botched coverage of Hurricane Katrina:

If we nitpick the facts and follow some rules some committee wrote up, we’ll be safe; we’re doing our jobs. No, sir, our job is to get more than the facts. Anybody can get facts. Facts are the commodity. The truth is harder to find. Justice is harder to fight for. Lessons are what we’re after.

Tim Russert lost sight of the story because he was embarrassed that bloggers caught a guest on his show with facts that were wrong. Russert’s proper response should have been to fix those facts quickly and clear but still pursue the real story. Instead, he chose to shoot the messenger who embarrassed him with the bloggers. He lost sight of his real mission.

The media was more than willing to jettison facts while covering Katrina, because it had a larger purpose in mind. Echoing something that Mickey Kaus spotted almost immediately last year in Big Media's Katrina coverage, Jonah Goldberg writes, "The anti-Bush chorus, including enormous segments of the mainstream media, sees Katrina as nothing more than a good stick for beating on Piñata Bush’s 'competence'":

The hypocrisy is astounding because the media did such an abysmal job covering the reality of New Orleans (contrary to reports, there were no bands of rapists, no disproportionate deaths of poor blacks, nothing close to 10,000 dead, etc.). It seems indisputable that Katrina highlighted the tragedy of New Orleans rather than created it. Long before Katrina, New Orleans was a dysfunctional city in a state with famously corrupt and incompetent leadership, many of whose residents think that it is the job of the federal government to make everyone whole.

The Mississippi coast was hit harder by Katrina than New Orleans was. And although New Orleans’ levee failure was a unique problem — one the local leadership ignored for decades — the devastation in Mississippi was in many respects more severe. And you know what? Mississippi has the same federal government as Louisiana, and reconstruction there is going gangbusters while, after more than $120 billion in federal spending, New Orleans remains a basket case. Here’s a wacky idea: Maybe it’s not all Bush’s fault.

And, as we now know, it also wasn't Bush's fault (or Cheney's, or "some star-chamber neocon", as Jonah writes) that Valerie Plame was outed. Fred Barnes writes:

It's as if a giant hoax were perpetrated on the country--by the media, by partisan opponents of the Bush administration, even by several Bush subordinates who betrayed the president and their White House colleagues. The hoax lingered for three years and is only now being fully exposed for what it was.

Last week, the Washington Post declared--three years after much of the starboard side of the Blogosphere--the Plame story a non-starter. Roger L. Simon has a detailed, thoughtful post on the implications of the Post's admission, and reading it, you can understand how these two seemingly disparate stories intersect, along with several other examples of the media's post-9/11 obsessions:

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Ray Nagin, class all the way:

On a tour of the decimated Ninth Ward, [New Orleans Mayor Ray] Nagin tells Pitts the city has removed most of the debris from public property and it’s mainly private land that’s still affected – areas that can’t be cleaned without the owners’ permission. But when Pitts points to flood-damaged cars in the street and a house washed partially into the street, the mayor shoots back. “That’s alright. You guys in New York can’t get a hole in the ground fixed and it’s five years later. So let’s be fair.”

Charming. As Allah writes:

A “hole in the ground.” “Fixed.” They were the tallest buildings in the United States, where nearly 3,000 died in a savage attack against our people on our soil. At least he got the length of time right without insulting the dead.

I’m fine with criticizing the politicians for dithering over rebuilding the Twin Towers, and especially fine with criticizing that monstrosity Trump called a “pile of crap” that was supposed to replace them. But calling Ground Zero a “hole in the ground” that’s still not “fixed” is, well, about par for the course for the king of the memorial motor pool.
But you know what? Nagin can be a total failure and run his mouth all he wants. It won’t matter. He still has a constituency that’ll back him no matter how many buses he leaves parked when the next storm hits.

Meanwhile, Real Clear Politics looks at "What the Media Missed" in its coverage of Katrina--which was plenty (when it wasn't inventing plenty of stories as well).

Austin Bay writes:

In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina I recorded a commentary for NPR’s Morning Edition that assessed the National Guard’s rapid response effort. I contended only the US could respond as quickly and successfully to the destruction of a major city. That commentary drew loads of flak.

However, according to Lou Dolinar at realclearpolitics.com the Katrina after-action reports demonstrate that the national media’s reporting (particularly television reporting) was impressionistic falderol, missing the big story of Katrina and missing the indicative details. National Guard units (from Louisiana and other states) and out of state responders got to critical areas in south Louisiana quickly and in force. They focused on search and rescue first– which is what they are supposed to do.

As Austin suggests, read the entire article.

Vanity Fair contributor Marie Brenner was recently quoted as saying:

[B]loggers often put forth the news with a partisan slant, she said, and "more and more Americans now receive their news through these partisan channels."

As opposed to the partisan channels of the legacy media itself.

Update: Jeff Jarvis has some prescient related thoughts:

At every journalism seminar like this, someone asks whether readers will trust a reporter covering an election after knowing how the reporter votes or what party she belongs to. I argue that the readers wonder and speculate about this anyway and so once it is out in the open, then the discussion can turn to the reporting: ‘Having said that I’m a liberal, now you can judge my work on its completeness, fairness, and accuracy.’ There is no agenda worse than a hidden agenda.

Of course, to be fair, it's not like Vanity Fair's agenda is all that hidden these days.

Will Collier of VodkaPundit attends the first post-Katrina New Orleans Jazz Festival. Just keep scrolling.

Back from New Jersey; regular blogging to resume tomorrow.

In the mail today was a Guitar Center flyer, with a page devoted to the "Music Rising Limited Edition Les Paul":

Following a visit to New Orleans late last week, U2's The Edge announced today the unveiling of Music Rising, a campaign to raise funds to replace the lost instruments and accessories of the musicians affected by the hurricanes that devastated the Gulf Coast region two months ago. Lead partners Gibson Guitar and Guitar Center Music Foundation have spearheaded the initial effort by collaborating on the design, manufacture and sale of an exclusive Gibson guitar with all proceeds going directly to the Music Rising program. The guitar will be available through Guitar Center. The instrument captures the essence of the Gulf Coast's musical tradition. A very limited quantity will be produced with all proceeds benefiting Music Rising and a pledge of $1 million in support. The Gibson Music Rising guitar features hand-painted designs using the colors of Mardi Gras. Each guitar will be individually painted and handmade so no two will be alike.

I know it's for a worthy cause, but...yuck! It's definitely painted in the colors of Mardi Gras, though: that top looks like the byproduct of what the French Quarter's streets are covered with after a particularly hard partying Fat Tuesday.

So what should a great Les Paul look like? Pretty much exactly like this.

(And this is what one should sound like, incidentally.)

Newsbusters discovers more interesting numerology on the left this week:

As was reported yesterday on NewsBusters, Democratic Senator John Kerry wasn't challenged on the Today show after he claimed that 53% of Americans don't graduate from high school. Well on this morning's Early Show, New Orleans Democratic Mayor Ray Nagin made an equally silly claim, "50% of all residents in the United States live along the Gulf Coast." I listened to the soundbite several times to ensure I heard him correctly.

As Tim Graham writes, "This must be why Louisiana and Mississippi are always picking our presidents".

AP reports:

The congregation of First Emmanuel Baptist Church drove from Baton Rouge, Houston and other points far and wide on Christmas, then walked past collapsed buildings and piles of storm wreckage to worship in their old church for the first time since Hurricane Katrina.

"This means everything. We've come home," said Lila Southall, the minister's wife. "My house is gone but I'm still home for Christmas."

Incidentally, tomorrow is the one year anniversary of the much deadlier Indian Ocean tsunami.

Update: "Asia marks one year to the day since tsunami hit, sweeping away 216,000 lives".

I know, I know, I like to kid. Of course they won't. Mickey Kaus hit it spot-on while it was occurring:

I don't think they were happy just because Bush has suffered a blow. I think it's because the hurricane and its New Orleans aftermath at least seemed to solve a big problem for anti-Bush commentators and politicians. Previously, they couldn't grouse about the Iraq War without seeming defeatist (and anti-liberationist and maybe even selfishly isolationist). Even the Clintons never figured a way out of that trap. But nature has succeded where they failed; it has opened up a way out, at least temporarily.

The aftermath is obvious, though, as The Only Republican In San Francisco notes (and geez, what a great name for a blog!):

The LA Times now reports that the deaths in NO were not disproportionately among the poor. The storm, and the response, did not discriminate.

Add this to the fact that black folks died in proportionally smaller numbers than whites. Quick stats are that black folks comprised 67% of the population but represented 59% of those who passed. White folks comprised 28% of the population but represented 36% of the deaths.

Everything you read about Katrina was wrong, and was, sorry, racist. An enormous amount of PR damage was done to the US, and race tensions were fanned without any factual basis. Will the MSM address this?

Pajamas has more, and Glenn Reynolds writes:

Hmm. Bogus reporting that inflames racial tensions. This could be as damaging to society as violent videogames. We need Congressional hearings!

What a slam dunk that would be for Republicans. And it'll never happen: they don't call 'em the Stupid Party for nothing.

Update: Greg Hanke emailed me a prediction he made on September 10th:

The MSM will never acknowledge that they exploited the situation to bash President Bush. Liberal bias means never having to say you're sorry.

But of course!

Meanwhile, Keith D. Milby writes:

Hurricane Katrina might have caused more damage than first realized. It appears that extensive damage might just now be coming to the surface that was done by the media coverage and that same coverage now seems to be causing damage to the media.

* * *

After all of this, how can the media ever be trusted with the facts. One can only hope that the media gets whats coming to it. If for no other reason than to rectify it's shameful reporting in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, so that it never happens again. If one award is given to any reporter for this shameful episode it will truly be a disgrace.

Like the Oscars, which was set up by the film industry in the 1920s to give itself awards for its own product, so many media awards are simply a self-congratulatory circle jerk. So I won't at all be surprised when the awards for Katrina coverage start rolling out--if indeed, they haven't started already.

Another Update: Instalanche! Welcome Glenn Reynolds' readers. For lots more on Katrina and the media, click here and just keep scrolling.

The Anchoress links to a powerful essay by Marvin Olasky on the racism displayed by the MSM in their coverage of Hurricane Katrina and writes:

When the retrospects of 2005 are playing, later in the month, the story of Katrina will be told again. Will the press tell it straight, even unto admitting just how shoddily they had done their jobs? Or will we get the racism rehash?

I can't tell if she's asking this rhetorically or not, but c'mon--the job of the press is to write the first draft of history. The one that never, ever, ever changes, no matter how much evidence is presented to the contrary.

A Pajamas Media round-up titled "What will Neo Orleans look like?" states that the one sliver of a brightspot from Katrina is that it gives New Orleans a chance to quickly modernize its infrastructure for the 21st century.

Not germane to the above topic, but certainly to Katrina itself, Michelle Malkin examines the real reasons for the failure of the 17th Street Canal levee in New Orleans.

Division of Labour links to an interesting graphic tracking the relocation of Katrina survivors.

UPI paints a Katrina-like picture of South Florida after Hurricane Wilma's devastation:

MIAMI, Oct. 24 (UPI) — Hurricane Wilma's race across South Florida and the Keys left at least seven people dead and millions without power.

The eye of the hurricane hit the west coast at dawn near Naples. Wilma, which subjected Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula to almost three days of battering, moved so fast that by 1 p.m. the eye was northeast of Palm Beach.

But the powerful storm packed winds of up to 120 mph. It lost a little power as it moved overland but sustained winds of 105 mph were recorded in West Palm Beach.

By Monday evening, seven deaths had been reported, The New York Times said. Gov. Jeb Bush warned residents to stay inside, reminding them that many hurricane-related deaths occur after a storm has passed.

The dead included a man in Coral Springs, near Fort Lauderdale killed by a falling tree; two men in Collier County, one crushed by the roof of his house and the other dead of a heart attack, and a woman killed in a car crash while trying to escape the storm, the Times reported.

The Miami Herald said that a man in Palm Beach County died when he tried to move his car and a woman died of heart failure after being crushed by a glass door.

New Orleans Saints owner Tom Benson has been looking for a reason to leave the Big Easy for years; has the combination of Katrina and sell-out crowds in San Antonio created the Perfect Storm for Benson?

SAN ANTONIO (AP) -- Mayor Phil Hardberger reiterated his resolve to bring the Saints to San Antonio permanently, saying he wanted to close the deal before next season begins.

Hardberger, part of a sellout crowd at the Saints-Falcons game Sunday in San Antonio, said Sunday that Saints owner Tom Benson agreed to serious talks with him, probably at the end of this season.

Benson ``understands that we will sit down and talk,'' Hardberger was quoted as saying in a story in Monday's San Antonio Express-News. ``That is his desire as well. I'm pretty comfortable in saying he wants to be here.''

Attempts to reach Benson by telephone Monday were not successful. Team spokesman Greg Bensel declined comment.

The Saints are under contract to play at the Louisiana Superdome through 2010, but certain provisions allow them to opt out before a Nov. 29 deadline.

Gov. Rick Perry watched Sunday's game with Hardberger from Benson's suite and said he agrees the Saints should relocate to the Alamo City and is open to the state offering some type of financial assistance.

Damage to the Superdome by Hurricane Katrina prompted the Saints to practice in San Antonio and play three games in the city's 65,000-seat Alamodome. Four other games were moved to Baton Rouge, La., where ticket sales have been sluggish.

Can Texas handle three NFL teams? California and New York certainly manage to.

Or not.

Ed Morrissey looks at yet another big media enviro-scare that wasn't:

Remember the "toxic soup" that flooded New Orleans, the one that the media widely reported was so polluted that mere momentary exposure could burn the skin and create potentially mortal illness for Katrina victims? As with the widespread gunfire, rapes, and murders, the toxic soup turns out to be another media myth. The Washington Post reports that an extensive look at the floodwaters reveals that its composition appears equivalent to floodwaters anywhere else.

As Ed writes:

Of course, this is good news for the people of New Orleans who had to suffer from exposure to the water, but other than that, it makes little difference. The damage caused to structures comes from the water itself, as well as the mud and silt that come along with it. The rot that sets into structures throughout the basin will likely require total or near-total reconstruction efforts.

It does, however, demonstrate the toxic combination of hyperbolic media and sensational events. Not content with reporting the news that happened before their eyes, media outlets had to reach beyond the news to report events that never happened, all without doing even basic research to determine the veracity of their reports. How difficult would it have been for NBC or the New York Times to get a test of the water before unleashing reports on the so-called toxic soup? How about getting reporters to verify accounts of rapes and murders by the score before airing such rumors to a repulsed nation?

Yes, that would be a good first step. As I wrote last week:

I wonder which version history will ultimately remember--the media's Weekly World News-style first draft, or what actually happened. Sadly, something tells me it will be the former.

(With apologies to Peter Gabriel for mangling the title of what's actually a pretty nifty song.)

Tammy Bruce has a simple suggestion for New Orleans' Mayor Nagin.

(Via Roger L. Simon, who demands that I eat more sushi. Can't argue with that--though precise implementation risks violating the independent contractor clause in my Pajamas Media agreement...)

Iowahawk writes:

America's sociologists are perplexed: despite damage that surpassed New Orleans, why was there no looting in Mississippi? Magnolia Stater and Katrina survivor JSS3 sends some photo data that may help solve this mystery.

Heh.

In 1981, Janet Cooke was a Washington Post reporter who wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning story of an eight year old heroin addict. She was eventually forced to return the prize, when when it was discovered that Cooke cooked the books and invented Jimmy out of whole cloth. (Walter Duranty's Pulitizer is still on the books, incidentally.)

Asked about Cooke in an interview, new journalism pioneer Tom Wolfe replied:

It reminded me of when I first went to work on the New York Herald Tribune and they were still laughing over the ship-of-sin scandal from prohibition days. An informant had told the Herald Tribune that there was a ship of sin operating outside of a three-mile limit off of eastern Long Island. On board you could get liquor and dope and sex. So the Tribune sent a reporter out. He didn't find the ship, but he did find a saloon in Montauk, and he phoned in about five days' worth of the most lurid stories in the history of drunk newspapermen. Half of New York City gasped and the other half rushed out to eastern Long Island to rent motor launches, until it was discovered he had made up the whole thing. These things happen about every three or four years; some reporter gets caught piping a story out of his skull...Phony stories are going to be written every once in a while, so long as you give reporters the trust that you have to give them.

Especially when you send them down to New Orleans to report on the aftermath of a hurricane when there's a conservative president in office.

Tech Central Station continues its thorough job in analyzing Katrina and its aftermath. Click on over to read their coverage.

On Tuesday, I linked to several new media critiques of its predecessor's failures in covering the real news of Katrina. Matt Welch has a must-read interview with a public affairs officer for the Louisiana National Guard, who was at the Superdome for eight days, during the height of the period that the media portrayed in such lurid terms. He says. "There's a whole bunch of [laughs] stuff out there that never happened at the Dome, as I think America's beginning to find out slowly".

Welch begins his piece by writing:

We are now into Week Two of elite news organizations' re-evaluation of the New Orleans horror stories they helped transmit to the world in the first seven days after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. It was known already by September 6 that tales of evacuee ultra-violence in refugee centers like Baton Rouge and Houston were both false and strikingly similar to one another, but it took much longer to begin clearing the muck from the Big Easy.

I wonder which version history will ultimately remember--the media's Weekly World News-style first draft, or what actually happened. Sadly, something tells me it will be the former.

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

John Hinderaker of Power Line writes that the death toll in Louisiana is now "More or less" complete:

Authorities have completed the search for bodies in New Orleans, with the total known dead in all of Louisiana at 964. This compares, of course, to the claim that there were 10,000 killed in New Orleans alone, which was made by the city's mayor and repeated endlessly in the media.

I still don't see any sign of a meaningful self-examination by the media of its failed reporting of Hurricane Katrina.

And there won't be one from the legacy media. But fortunately, in its successor, Hugh Hewitt, Mark Steyn and James Bowman have that covered.

Hugh had perhaps the most damning quote in his appearance on PBS's News Hour, something that should give big media pause, but perhaps it's too sclerotic in its aged form to notice:

Well, [Keith Woods, dean of the faculty at the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists in Florida] just said they did not report an ordinary story; in fact they were reporting lies. The central part of this story, what went on at the convention center and the Superdome was wrong. American media threw everything they had at this story, all the bureaus, all the networks, all the newspapers, everything went to New Orleans, and yet they could not get inside the convention center, they could not get inside the Superdome to dispel the lurid, the hysterical, the salaciousness of the reporting.

I have in mind especially the throat-slashed seven-year-old girl who had been gang-raped at the convention center -- didn't happen. In fact, there were no rapes at the convention center or the Superdome that have yet been corroborated in any way.

There weren't stacks of bodies in the freezer. But America was riveted by this reporting, wholesale collapse of the media's own levees they let in all the rumors, and all the innuendo, all the first-person story because they were caught up in their own emotionalism. Exactly what Keith was praising I think led to one of the worst weeks of reporting in the history of American media, and it raises this question: If all of that amount of resources was given over to this story and they got it wrong, how can we trust American media in a place far away like Iraq where they don't speak the language, where there is an insurgency, and I think the question comes back we really can't.

Indeed, to use the successor media's most popular adverb.

As Stephen Hayward explained in The Age of Reagan and David Frum in How We Got Here, in 1970, fresh off of championing civil rights for Americans, and then condeming those of the Vietnamese via the anti-war movement, the left turned, in great numbers, to focusing on environmentalism, taking then-needed reforms to extreme measures as an anti-business cudgel. "The 'snail darter' gambit", as Steven Den Beste dubbed it three years ago:

Someone planning to build a dam on your favorite river? Want to stop them? Find yourself some obscure fish living in that river and then get it declared an endangered species. Is the snail darter really all that important? Hell no. It was never about the snail darter. It was about opposing development.

Trying to force someone to stop logging? Wood is good; wood is useful; wood is consumed by this nation in immense quantities. It's not clear that the way it's being harvested now is the best there could be, but that's not what our friends really want. What they want is a complete stop to logging.

If they say "Stop the logging!" they'll get ignored. They've tried that for years. Then they discovered some magic words: "Spotted Owl." (And then a miracle occurred...)

Found via Power Line, the Wall Street Journal looks at the movement's natural consequences, in a piece titled, "The Lawsuit That Sank New Orleans":

After Hurricane Betsy swamped New Orleans in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson stroked its citizens ("this nation grieves for its neighbors") and pledged federal protection. The Army Corps of Engineers designed a Lake Pontchartrain Hurricane Barrier to shield the city with flood gates like those that protect the Netherlands from the North Sea. Congress provided funding and construction began. But work stopped in 1977 when a federal judge ruled, in a suit brought by Save Our Wetlands, that the Corps' environmental impact statement was deficient. Joannes Westerink, a professor of civil engineering at Notre Dame, believes the barrier would have been an "effective barrier" against Katrina's fury.

All this was reported in the Los Angeles Times on Sept. 9. The reactions of environmental advocates and federal agencies show why we would be a lot safer if the federal government did a lot less.

Speaking for environmentalists, the Center for Progressive Reform called the charges in the Los Angeles Times "pure fiction" because the judge stopped construction only until the Corps prepared a satisfactory environmental analysis. The Corps instead dropped the barrier in favor of levees that were less controversial, but which failed. So, the Center argues, fault lies with the Corps' bumbling rather than with the environmentalist lawsuit.

That's not fair. The Corps cannot stop a project, conduct a lengthy study, go back to court, and then be sure it can pick up where it left off. Large federal projects ordinarily cannot proceed unless executives and legislatures at several levels of government agree on the same course of action at the same time. That's why litigation delay can kill necessary projects. However responsibility is apportioned, but for the lawsuit, New Orleans would have had the hurricane barrier.

But the snail darter was saved! C'mon--which is more important??

Update: Hugh Hewitt writes:

Louisiana wants $40 billion in Army Corps of Engineer projects. Whatever the final cost, it will be in billions, and the Senate Republicans should insist that as part of the package, reforms in the federal Endangered Sprecies Act --similar to this that are poised to pass the House-- be included in the appropriation so that the notoriously expense-increasing and private property rights destroying ESA not delay or increase the costs of these projects or other Corps projects across the country. A simple tightening of deadlines widely abused by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service when the Corps "consults" with that agency under the ESA would be a huge step forward.

I agree.

I know Jonah Goldberg dreams of the days when we lance volcanos with, as Dr. Evil would say, frickin' lasers, people. But I didn't realize, until Greg Hanke sent me a link to his post, that NOAA, the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, is bombarded (so to speak) every year with requests to nuke hurricanes.

Man--I like Sterling Hayden as much as the next guy, but still!

If you're one of the folks who wish that someone would go all Strangelove on Katrina and Rita, Greg and NOAA both explain why that would be a spectacularly bad idea.

In some sort of thankfully rare harmonic convergence of idiocy, two television news veterans simultaneously go coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs, as Hugh Hewitt notes. First up is Dan Rather:

I am going to have to ask the Columbia Journalism School folks about the "new journalism order." Before long, Rather will be blaming the Bilderbergers for the forged docs.

Of Captain Dan The (now retired, thank God) Newsman, Roger L. Simon writes:

'Honest' Dan Rather comes back from the dead to set us straight in an 'emotional' speech about the media at Fordham Law.

"It's been one of television news' finest moments," Rather said of the Katrina coverage. He likened it to the coverage of President Kennedy's assassination in 1963.

"They were willing to speak truth to power," Rather said of the coverage.

I'm not even going to comment on that bizarre statement, but you've got to hand it to Dan. If most of us had been caught lying like he had on national television, we would have moved to South America by now.

Speaking truth to power is certainly a concept that Ted Turner has never heard of. Whether it's Cuba, the Soviet Union, or Iraq, Turner's never met a totalitarian regime he didn't want to prop up with sympathetic coverage.

And these days, North Korea is no exception. One man's Hell on Earth is another man's fun vacation getaway, as Ted describes Kim Jung Il's rotting death trap of a country to Wolf Blitzer, who walks a thin line between being absolutely incredulous, but respectful towards the man who founded the network that employs him:

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I noticed Newsweek's cover yesterday when I saw it on the supermarket checkout stand. As Howard Kurtz describes it:

The fact that most of those left behind in the New Orleans flood were poor and black is being treated by the press as a stunning revelation -- "A National Shame," as Newsweek's cover put it.

Actually, Newsweek itself has no shame, and they certainly aren't lacking in chutzpah, either: he who writes fake-but-fake Koran in toilet stories and puts American flags into garbage cans on magazine covers has no business trying to mau-mau collective guilt out of the rest of America.

Meanwhile, Ed Morrissey has additional thoughts on the media's decade-long lack of coverage of New Orleans' crushing poverty:

Kurtz wants to know why these stories don't get news coverage -- stories like poverty and race, and political appointments gone awry. I think he already knows the answer: most news media do not have the energy or resources to devote to stories that complex or long-term. Even newspapers, which supposedly exist to give more depth and analysis to the news, too often only go after the most superficial of stories, because those can get efficient handling. A reporter can quickly go over the details of the extant issue and then drop it for the next big issue of the day. Poverty and race have too much complexity for any serious treatment, and lower-level political appointees bore readers until they screw up. Columnists supposedly should take up the slack, but the columnists have the same problem as the newspaper regarding the subject matter and a much larger obstacle in terms of resources.

How will this resolve itself? The blogosphere will probably provide the solution. People who find these subjects fascinating will devote themselves to researching them and documenting their findings, and journalists might use the blogs themselves as resources. Beltway blogs already give closer scrutiny to midlevel appointees than the media does, and again, reporters with a sense of survival will eventually learn to nurture that kind of research and the blogger who performs it.

In the meantime, however, the holier-than-thou reaction to the supposed novelty of Bush addressing race and poverty looks more like hypocrisy coming from the nation's newsrooms. If poverty has slipped off the radar screen, they need to start reporting honestly and intelligently on the issue.

Don't hold your breath.

Yesterday, I noted that with all the insane quotes that have been in the air since Katrina hit land at the beginning of the month, "The Silly Season", ordinarily purely a summer event to keep the press busy during an otherwise slow period of real news has extended deep into September. I sagely wrote, "Hurricane Katrina has rightly pushed [Cindy] Sheehan's ravings into the background".

Evidently, I spoke prematurely (and just now, far too adverbially). In order to form The Rosetta Stone Of Silliness, all of the disparate elements converged today, as Cindy posted on (but of course) Michael Moore's Website:

I don’t care if a human being is black, brown, white, yellow or pink. I don’t care if a human being is Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, or pagan. I don’t care what flag a person salutes: if a human being is hungry, then it is up to another human being to feed him/her. George Bush needs to stop talking, admit the mistakes of his all around failed administration, pull our troops out of occupied New Orleans and Iraq, and excuse his self from power.

Just think--it was only a couple of weeks ago that the press was castigating President Bush for not sending troops into New Orleans fast enough. Now the heroine they've created wants them out of there.

Meanwhile, Power Line's John Hinderaker catalogs Cindy's association, not just with Michael Moore, but with an ex-Black Panther and Communist:

Who is Cindy's "new friend" Malik Rahim? He is conventionally described as a "veteran of the Black Panther Party in New Orleans," and was recently a Green Party candidate for local office there. But the truth is somewhat worse. Rahim is a Communist. Here is a speech he gave to the Communist Manifesto conference in December 1998; it begins:

I'm here on behalf of two revolutionary freedom fighters that have spent the last 26 years in solitary confinement in Angola, a state prison in Louisiana. I met these freedom fighters as a political prisoner in 1970. I was in a shoot-out with the police in New Orleans as a member of the Black Panther Party.

The Communist Manifesto conference was reported on by the Workers World Party ("Workers & oppressed peoples of the world unite!"). The Workers World Party is currently the most active Communist group in the United States, in its own name and through its subsidiaries International ANSWER and the International Action Center, which is headed by former attorney general Ramsey Clark.

Hinderaker concludes:

The question is, why is she not just a hater, but a famous hater? Obviously, because she was a mainstream media darling throughout the summer. But where are the media, now that her cover has been blown? A curtain of silence has descended. Once again, the American press accepts no accountability for misleading the American people, and it has no intention of correcting the fictitious record that it, alone, created.

You know--you could really get the wrong impression of the press. Even though they're completely non-biased and neutral, it's almost...why, they sort of seem to agree with her viewpoint!

Nahh--I'm sure it's all just an optical illusion.

On Fleet Street, summer is often referred to as "The Silly Season". Real news is slow, but since the newspage is a vacuum that demands to be filled with something, plenty of ridiculous, hyped-up--silly--news stories take their place.

Earlier today, Glenn Reynolds linked to a piece by National Review's John Derbyshire on a sensitivity training program required by FEMA before firemen and paramedics could be sent to New Orleans and Mississippi to actually do the work they're trained to do. Shortly after his post went up, Glenn looked back and updated his post with, "Derbyshire's curriculum is satire. Sadly, I had to read it twice to be sure."

Lately, there's been a lot of that going around, isn't there? I know the categories on my blog to document that sort of thing have been getting quite a workout lately.

As with Hurricane Katrina, the real story driving Derbyshire's mock training program (itself based on real news), the underlying issues behind them are serious. But the response to them by the left and bureaucracies badgered into being responsive to their rococo sensibilities has been so overblown, that they've driven vast swatches of the left into self-parody.

It started in early August with Cindy Sheehan. Her initial story was a sincere one: grieving leftwing mother whose son was killed in Iraq after volunteering not only to serve there, but to reenlist for a second tour of duty in the Army. But between the discovery that President Bush had already met with Sheehan a year ago--a meeting she herself said was surprisingly comforting, and then her frequent speeches and posting of incendiary tinfoil rhetoric about her son dying for oil and expanding "American imperialism in the Middle East" and "Israel out of Palestine" on leftwing Websites, her ranting hyperbole simply canceled itself out.

While Hurricane Katrina has rightly pushed Sheehan's ravings into the background, it unleashed a new round of excess. This one combined (combines? It's still playing itself out to a great extent) similar hyperbole with a sort of punitive moping by vast swatches of the celebrity and media left. As usual though, their contempt is aimed at America that many on the left already loathe and feel didn't meet their lofty standards with its response to Katrina's devastation. Despite the fact that hundreds of millions of dollars in aid has been raised in two weeks time, and thousands of volunteers, National Guardsmen, and other carefully sensitivity trained-relief workers, were quickly mobilized and are on the ground helping. And despite the fact that nothing that could have been done would have caused many who work on Hollywood soundstages or in Manhattan broadcasting booths to say, "Wow, you know what? This is the sort of thing that really makes me feel proud to be American."

And then add to it a rather unique proposed "memorial" to Flight #93, the gaseous emanations of a Senate that would rather hear itself speak than interview a nominee to the Supreme Court, and yesterday's latest seemingly annual attempt to derail the Pledge of Allegiance. You have to wonder: Summer is winding down.

But when does the Silly Season end?

Update: In an essay titled, "The Racism Charges Won’t Wash", Heather Mac Donald writes, "The Katrina donations--$788 million-worth--are colorblind". If only Hollywood could understand that.

Currently up as the lead post on Instant History, the Weblog that catalogs important past Time and Newsweek covers and their accompanying stories, is this prescient excerpt from an article on New Orleans whose subhead reads, "If it doesn't act fast, the city could become the next Atlantis". That was five years ago. And needless to say, the city didn't act--fast, or otherwise.

Here's more:

"If a flood of biblical proportions were to lay waste to New Orleans, Joe Suhayda has a good idea how it could happen. A Category 5 hurricane would come barreling out of the Gulf of Mexico. It would cause Lake Pontchartrain, north of New Orleans, to overflow, pouring down millions of gallons of water into the city. Then things would really get ugly. Evacuation routes would be blocked. Buildings would collapse. Chemicals and hazardous waste would dissolve, turning the floodwaters into a lethal soup. In the end, what was left of the city might not be worth saving. 'There's concern it would essentially destroy New Orleans,' says Suhayda."

Read the rest of Instant History's excerpt, which concludes with a link to the entire piece.

Back in April, in a post titled, "Absolutely Fabulist", I wrote:

"Fabulous" is a word that has become primarily known for meaning great or wonderful or marvelous. But as Webster's' online dictionary notes, its primary meaning is:

resembling or suggesting a fable: of an incredible, astonishing, or exaggerated nature [fabulous wealth]

It's telling that the synonym that Webster's recommends for the word is fictitious.

So let's look at how Webster's definition of the word applies to the mainstream media's coverage of Hurricane Katrina.

In a post titled, "No Accurate Death Toll Estimates Please, We're The MSM", Paul Mirengoff of Power Line writes:

James Pinkerton thinks Hurricane Katrina demonstrates that reports of the death of the MSM were greatly exaggerated. He's right. The MSM was able to write the first draft of this story in a biased and misleading fashion, to the detriment of President Bush. Blogs and other new media were unable to prevent or counteract this. As Pinkerton puts it, "the MSM got there firstest with the mostest."

However, though the MSM may have been able, in the short term, to trim two or three points from the approval rating of a president who can't run for re-election, there's a good chance it did so at a lasting cost to its diminishing credibility. For it seems likely that the one piece of critical concrete information the MSM supplied about the hurricane -- the estimated death toll of 10,000 people -- will prove to be wildly excessive.

It will do the MSM and its apologists no good to say that they were merely setting an upper limit. People will remember the frightening number, not the weasel words that may have accompanied it. Nor, as Glenn Reyonolds suggests, will it be much use to say, as some have, that the number came from Mayor Nagin. It was the MSM's reliance on the ravings of Nagin that served as the springboard for the "blame Bush" coverage. The MSM hitched its wagon to an incompetent, hysterical mayor in full CYA mode. It will have to live with the consequences. The main consequence is that the MSM appears to have gotten the single most important fact about Katrina wrong. The public is likely to remember.

Well, some will at least.

Someone known for telling fables is a fabulist. And recently, several bloggers have been discussing the media's willingness to openly embrace fabulism and run with it: CNN's Jonathan Klein (the man who gave the Blogosphere its dress code) calls it "storytelling". Ace of Spades pungently describes CNN's "storytelling" as consisting of:

some sort of hybrid of news and strong dramatic narrative. You know--kind of made-up fictitious s*** with a pleasing emotional resonance.

In a way, it's curious to see the media moving further and further way from the appearance of objectivity. As Newsweek's Howard Fineman wrote a couple of months after President Bush was reelected:

Read More »

"Shanna, they bought their tickets, they knew what they were getting into. I say, let 'em crash!"

That's actually a line from an actor appearing on a mock "Point/Counterpart" television news spoof in Airplane!, that benchmark comedy movie. But quotes just as inane about hurricane Katrina and its aftermath are being heard every day on real TV news shows, as John Hawkins notes.

(...At least, I think it's the real TV news. Malcolm Muggeridge noted in the early sixties how hard it was to tell the difference between satire and reality, a trend that--as the quotes John has compiled illustrates--has only accelerated since.)

Update: This remark is late to the competition, but something tells me the judges will allow its entry...

Another Update: Betsy Newmark has some thoughts on John's assemblidge of quotes and concludes, "The media is happily driving a wedge between the races and they should be truly ashamed". They're not: the key word in that sentence is "happily"; Michael Graham's Redneck Nation foreshadowed exactly what the media's tone would be covering Katrina.

OK, I'm convinced: Mark Steyn has cloned himself, or has dozens of tiny Laotian tots in his basement doing his typing. There's no way one guy can turn out as many great columns as quickly and consistently as Steyn does. Here's his latest, on the media and Katrina:

'Flood That Released America's Demons", said the Sun on Saturday. Underneath the arresting headline was a column by Jeremy Clarkson, and, after the usual good-natured knockabout - "Most Americans barely have the brains to walk on their back legs" - he turned to the desperate scenes being played out in New Orleans: "On the streets you've got some poor, starving soul helping themselves to a packet of food from a ruined, deserted supermarket. And as a result, finding themselves being blown to pieces by a helicopter gunship. With the none-too-bright soldiers urged on by their illiterate political masters, the poor and needy never stood a chance. It's easier and much more fun to shoot someone than make them a cup of tea.

"Especially if they're black."

I have to agree with Jeremy there. It is easier to shoot someone than make them a cup of tea. Especially if you're the US Marine Corps and you're making tea for some Brit columnist: don't forget to warm the pot. Pour the milk before the water - or is it the other way round? Who the hell can stay on top of it all? Easier to pull out the .44 Magnum and say: "Go ahead, punk, make my Earl Grey."

So, instead of Special Forces rappelling down with steaming samovars of PG Tips strapped to their backs, the helicopter gunships blew the poor needy starving blacks to pieces.

Hmm. I must have dozed off during that bit on CNN.

I'll leave it to future generations of historians to settle the precise moment at which Hurricane Katrina finally completed its transformation into a Kansas-type twister, and swept up the massed ranks of the world's press to deposit them on the wilder shores of the Land of Oz. But for a couple of weeks now they've been there frolicking and gambolling as happy Media Munchkins, singing and dancing "Ding Dong, The Bush Is Dead".

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the storm is exhausted, meteorologically and politically. Power has been restored to the whole of Mississippi (much quicker than in Euro-style big-government Quebec during the 1998 ice storm, incidentally), the Big Easy is being pumped free of water far ahead of anybody's expectations, and, as the New York Times put it: "Death Toll In New Orleans May Be Lower Than First Feared".

No truth in the rumour that early editions read "Than First Hoped".

Do I even have to say, read the rest?

As Joe Pesci, wearing David Ferrie's orange fright wig and a pair of Lee Press-On Eyebrows screamed to Kevin Costner, playing screwball New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison in JFK, "It's a mystery! It's a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma!"

(Via Glenn Reynolds, who appropriately dubs it, "Conspiracy theory a-go-go".)

Richie Havens, earning a few extra bucks doing voiceover work sang as the theme of a memorable ad campaign for Amtrak about 20 years ago, "There's something about a train that's magic". Evidently the city of New Orleans didn't agree:

Nagin did not tell everyone to leave immediately, because the regional plan called for the suburbs to empty out first, but he did urge residents in particularly low-lying areas to "start moving -- right now, as a matter of fact." He said the Superdome would be open as a shelter of last resort, but essentially he told tourists stranded in the Big Easy that they were out of luck.

"The only thing I can say to them is I hope they have a hotel room, and it's a least on the third floor and up," Nagin said. "Unfortunately, unless they can rent a car to get out of town, which I doubt they can at this point, they're probably in the position of riding the storm out."

In fact, while the last regularly scheduled train out of town had left a few hours earlier, Amtrak had decided to run a "dead-head" train that evening to move equipment out of the city. It was headed for high ground in Macomb, Miss., and it had room for several hundred passengers. "We offered the city the opportunity to take evacuees out of harm's way," said Amtrak spokesman Cliff Black. "The city declined."

So the ghost train left New Orleans at 8:30 p.m., with no passengers on board.

Amtrak was created by the federal government during President Nixon's administration--so it's not too late for the media to spin this one as yet another fault of a Republican president.

Speaking of media failure, Tom Maguire quotes what might go down in history as Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco's most famous utterance:

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.

Certainly no one in the New York Times' building, Maguire observes.

Armed and dangerously narcissistic, Sean Penn swings into double-barreled action.

No sign of the horrible red cup of doom, though.

CNN's situational ethics swing into action again. Glenn Reynolds writes:

THE PRESS WANTS TO SHOW BODIES from Katrina. It didn't want to show bodies, or jumpers, on 9/11, for fear that doing so would inflame the public.

It's amusing to go back and look at the media's mindset back then:

"The question is, are we informing or titillating and causing unnecessary grief?" ABC News chief David Westin told the New York Times just days after the Sept. 11 attack. Explaining why his network decided not to show any pictures of people leaping to their deaths at the World Trade Center, he said, "Our responsibility is to inform the American public of what's going on, and, in going the next step, is it necessary to show people plunging to their death?"

If it wasn't necessary to show people plunging to their death, why is it necessary to show them after they drowned? (Or as Scott Ott parodies a CNN spokesman, "Our viewers have a right to see the decaying flesh of each and every citizen who perished from lack of federal government assistance".)

Incidentally, has anybody asked Mayor Nagin or Governor Blanco what they think of this?

It's even more astonishing, coming from a network which for over a decade whitewashed images of Saddam Hussein's atrocities, just to maintain a "LIVE FROM BAGHDAD" line chromakeyed on the screen while their reporter spoke in front of Saddam's Ministry of Information. Broadcasting the same lies from Saddam Hussein's propaganda ministers they could have just as easily have picked up on any news wire and reported from CNN's facilities in Atlanta--along with some thoughts on what the true story might be.

I wonder if next time Hugh Hewitt has someone high up at CNN on his show, he could ask them, "In light of your decision to show the bodies of Katrina victims, do you think it was a mistake for networks like yourself to hide the images of victims of Saddam Hussein or 9/11? Really? Well, why didn't you at least show the latter on its fourth anniversary?"

Which is tomorrow, incidentally.

Update: Speaking of Hugh, in his latest post, he writes:

There are many failures to be investigated in the aftermath of Katrina, including why the evacuation left as many as 100,000 in the city, why the prepositioning of law enforcement and national guard in the Dome and Convention Center was inadequate, why relief supplies from the Red Cross and Salvation Army were blocked, and why FEMA seemed so slow to take control from the locals obviously overwhelmed by the size of the storm and its devastation.

But there's at least a day of hearings on MSM's role in this fiasco as well, from the question of the responsibility of flooding the area with reporters who, while they encourage people to "take cover" or evacuate, are in fact doing neither, to the relentless peddling of the most sensational of stories and estimates.

It will be interesting to see if Congress will have enough of a spine to include the media in its hearings.

Another Update: In a post titled, "The MSM Have Gone Insane", John Podhoretz writes:

If leaders of the mainstream media -- from my old friend Jim Kelly of Time magazine to Jonathan Klein of CNN genuinely think the American people want to see bodies of corpses caused by the levee floods, they have really, really lost it. Instapundit points out that they chose to stop showing horrifying images from 9/11, like the jumpers, because they were worried about inflaming people. But these images are likely only to cause people to be physically ill at worst, and the loss of privacy they will represent to those who died will cause the viewing public to blame the media for showing them in the first place. Parents will not be able to watch the news in their own house, or bring newspapers and magazines into their houses....If the MSM want to continue to have a cow about the unfairness of not being able to show bodies returning from Iraq, by all means let them make a scene about that. But this is a bizarre and repulsive twist on that.

Exactly. Jim Geraghy recently wrote:

A certain friend – won’t say his name, but it rhymes with “Shmam” – is getting really, really fired up about this, says he’s angrier now than at any point during last year’s campaign.

If there’s anything we’ve learned from the ugly during-and-post-Katrina debate, it’s that these folks with whom we disagree so strongly... well, they’re gone, Shmam. Assimilated into the Kosorg Cube. There’s no point in arguing with them. They have concluded the disaster is Bush's fault, and nothing you say will dissuade them. Certainly not this report that the state government refused to allow the Red Cross to bring food, water, blankets and hygiene products to the Superdome and Convention Center right after the hurricane hit.

I was talking to a wise, politically connected blogger yesterday, who reminded me how much of the American population doesn’t follow politics, particularly in an off-year, and doesn’t look at events like this through a political prism. And they don’t think much of us who do.

The vast majority of Americans aren’t watching the scenes of horror on their television, the pictures of despair in their newspapers, and looking for someone to blame. They want to see these people helped.

The “it’s all Chimpy McHitler’s fault” crowd is small, yet somehow has persuaded the high mucky-mucks in the Democratic party that they’re worth listening to.

Sounds like they've done a pretty good job on the media as well.

Update (9/11/05): Wow, quite a Blogosphere troika: Welcome InstaPundit, Hugh Hewitt and Andrew Sullivan readers.

The Wall Street Journal explains how the private sector ran rings around government (in all its levels) before and during the early days of Katrina:

Wal-Mart mined its vast databases of past purchases to compile lists of goods most desired after a hurricane. (Among the top items? Strawberry pop tarts.) Because of its advance logistics planning, the big retail chain was able to quickly move in to devastated areas with mini Wal-Marts to hand out goods. Other firms leveraged similar supply-chain capabilities; Pfizer dispensed pharmaceuticals via Wal-Mart and other retailers. "What companies do is solve problems," says Johanna Schneider, an executive director at the Business Roundtable.

Granted, a FEMA is never going to operate with the agility of a FedEx. FedEx and the others perform at this level 24/7; that's the nature of competition. That said, surely there are lessons here worth learning and attempting to transfer to the public sector. And we don't mean three years from now after another round of reassessment and performance reviews. The challenge of reconstruction is now. It wouldn't hurt if the responsible public agencies asked the private participants in the rescue operation for some pointers on getting the next job done on budget and on time.

Last week, Professor Bainbridge had a post on outsourcing disaster relief; certainly sounds worth trying.

Jim Geraghty explains how America (including New Orleans) works to novelist Ann Rice, who feels (can't say she's thinking, when she writes), "To my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us", in the midst of a nationwide outpouring of charity and support.

I've spent the last week trying to decide on a category to round-up my various posts on Katrina, last year's Indian Ocean tsunami, and other weather-related subjects. I'm not crazy about "The Perfect Storm" as a category name--I didn't really want something that specifically tied into one form of weather, especially when I've blogged about non-storm related natural occurrences, such as snow and earthquakes (and how they impact their respective cultures), but for now, it'll do.

Click here and just start scrolling if you want to read some or all of the 79-and counting Katrina and other weather-related posts.

Thomas Sowell compares and contrasts the declining morality of ordinary citizens during three city-wide crises over the last forty years--two New York City blackouts of the '60s and '70s, and New Orleans at tbe beginning of this month:

During good times or bad, the police cannot police everybody. They can at best control a small segment of society. The vast majority of people have to control themselves.

That is where the great moral traditions of a society come in -- those moral traditions that it is so hip to sneer at, so cute to violate, and that our very schools undermine among the young, telling them that they have to evolve their own standards, rather than following what old fuddy duddies like their parents tell them.

Now we see what those do-it-yourself standards amount to in the ugliness and anarchy of New Orleans.

In a world where people flaunt their "independence," their "right" to disregard moral authority, and sometimes legal authority as well, the tragedy of New Orleans reminds us how utterly dependent each one of us is for our very lives on millions of other people we don't even see.

Thousands of people in New Orleans will be saved because millions of other people they don't even know are moved by moral obligations to come to their rescue from all corners of this country. The things our clever sophisticates sneer at are ultimately all that stand between any of us and utter devastation.

Any of us could have been in New Orleans. And what could we have depended on to save us? Situational ethics? Postmodern philosophy? The media? The lawyers? The rhetoric of the intelligentsia?

No, what we would have to depend on are the very things that are going to save the survivors of hurricane Katrina, the very things that clever people are undermining.

New Orleans can be rebuilt and the levees around it shored up. But can the moral levees be shored up, not only in New Orleans but across America?

Assuming we don't take Denny Hastert's initial advice and stencil a giant, NASA-like "ABANDON IN PLACE" sign on New Orleans, we're bound to see numerous cases of what blogger Val Prieto dubbed "Omnipotent Tourist Syndrome" in Cuba, and Matt Welch described thusly:

Oh, the crumbling, no-longer-beautiful houses! Ah, the lovely two-feet-deep potholes, and rickety Chinese bicycles (because the 50-year-old Chevys and 30-year-old Ladas don't work, and at any rate there's no gas). How people can derive pleasure from evidence of the suffering of innocents is beyond me, and few sights are more unseemly to my eyes than seeing a Lonely Planet-waving travel snob whine about how some current or formerly misgoverned hellhole has been "ruined" by all that yucky reconstruction, material success, and (worst of all!) tourism. Oh how pretty!

A similar enviro-Luddite moment is sure to come during the rebuilding of New Orleans. In other words, the desire to maintain the crumbling ruins of New Orleans, rather than rebuild them with sound, functional buildings.

Actually, it will be interesting to see how modern environmentalism (and its accompanying lawyers) slows the progress of rebuilding the city--whose progress will be infinitely slower than the amount of time that it took to rebuild the World Trade Center after 9/11.

Err, what's that you say? Construction has just barely started after four years?

Exactly.

Frank Martin looks at what's to come in Louisiana--"Lawyers. Lots and Lots of Lawyers":

The people who lived in New Orleans have suffered and they will continue to suffer, but the suffering doesn’t end there. The “Food Chain” of suffering doesn’t end until the last lawsuit is settled out of court. Our children will have kids of their own before that happens.

Remember, everything is just "a problem" until someone checks their tires one day and finds dioxin, asbestos, or PCB’s and someone else discovers that its been driven all over town, then it’s "a real BIG problem". Every miscarriage, every cancer victim, every case of autism in the lower Mississippi will result in a lawsuit against the City and State.

For those of you who find yourself mystified at the attitude and behavior of the Governor and Mayor as of late this little problem might help you understand one reason why they are acting so odd(besides the fact that they were odd before the Hurricane). The real problem we now face isn’t the potential decontamination costs its that there isn’t enough money in the world to cover all those lawsuits and the threats of lawsuits. Do the words " Federal Superfund" spring to mind? Yeah, it does me too.

Add to this ‘witches brew’ of lawyers and potential lawsuits is a history of political corruption that goes back centuries in Louisiana. This corruption was overlooked and in some cases downright tolerated so long as it was kept within the family but what Katrina has done is bring attention to the outside world of a true American shame, the plight of the people who previously lived below sea level on the lower Mississippi. What the Mayor, The Governor and every official in Louisiana above "city dog catcher" is looking at is the one thing they have rarely seen in their careers and that is scrutiny by the press, by lawyers who will be crawling through every transaction looking at every relationship, trying to find every bit of corruption they can find. Insurance companies as well as a whole host of Federal agencies are about to lose a great deal of money and its always been my experience that people will leave you alone so long as you don’t mess with their money, but if you mess with their money, they will make it their lifes work to see that you pay for your error.

Once the Lawyers start finding corruption it will be very much like the effects of a second flood only this time, it’s a flood that will sweep away the Democrat political machine that has run Louisiana since the Civil War.

To the Democrat party, its as if they just lost a capital city in their domain during wartime. Think of it like the impact of the fall of Atlanta on the Confederates during the Civil War. Louisiana just lost its last solid Democrat voting districts, and any part of the existing Democrat machine that is still standing is about to be tied down in a Gulliverian web of lawsuits and Federal corruption charges which will surely come as a result of the floods.

Katrina didn’t just end a way of life in the lower Mississippi, but it has brought an end to a way of doing business in Baton Rouge.

In the end, It wont be 'conservative values' that will have beaten the Democrats, it wasnt the "Reagan revolution" and it wont be the Bush family.

It will be the lawyers.

Read the rest. This sounds like a spot-on preview of the next phase of Katrina's aftermath--and one that's probably being completely ignored by the current coverage by what Hugh Hewitt calls CNN and its clones: "The Hysterical News Network".

In his syndicated Newhouse column, James Lileks writes that we should consider Katrina as a dress rehearsal:

According to the choir of professional carpers, President Clinton spent half his two terms personally drawing up plans for new levees -- when he wasn't sneaking around Afghanistan in camo paint trying to apprehend bin Laden.

By contrast, the Bush Junta sent 100 percent of the National Guard to Iraq, which meant the 12th Airborne Plunger Brigade couldn't descend to the Superdome with jetpacks and unstop the overflowing toilets. Doesn't matter that New Orleans had hundreds of school buses unused for evacuation -- blame the feds who cut matching funds for bus-driver instruction back in 1927.

This level of incandescent lunacy isn't new. In the '90s there were people who believed that Clinton would use Y2K to herd us into FEMA-run gulags to have bar codes tattooed on our necks, but these people confined themselves to rants at 3 a.m. on Art Bell's radio show. By 2006 their ideological heirs on the left will be the evening lineup of MSNBC guests.

If we learned anything we can take away, it's this: You're on your own. At least keep an emergency kit on hand, the sort of thing Tom Ridge proposed, and which made the smart set hardy-har-har because it contained duct tape.

Don't rely on the government. Four years after Sept. 11, it's apparent that some local governments are not well-oiled machines when it comes to disasters -- more like a box of sand and busted gears. Blame for that can be promiscuously distributed.

Lesson two: The next terrorist attack will not unite us for a warm, hug-filled fortnight. The hard left won't wait 24 hours before blaming Bush, and the country will enjoy the sight of prominent pundits angrier at the president than at the men who nuked Des Moines.

If an attack should happen during the term of President Hillary Clinton, they'll still blame Bush -- and if she wishes to retain her moderate credentials, she'll be canny enough to repudiate the lot. They'll be stunned. They'll be hurt. After all the free-lance hating they did out of the goodness of their hearts! Where can they turn now?

The guy who took over for Art Bell still takes calls.

And there's always Olbermann.

Craig Newmark (a.k.a, Betsy's husband) had a dream--an awesome dream, as Lionel Richie would say--about how the press would have reported Katrina if Bill Clinton were still president. Keep the melody to "Kumbaya" going in your head as you read it...

Tech Central Station has new items online in their section devoted to Katrina and its aftermath.

In a feat of investigative reporting that made Woodward and Bernstein green with envy, Michael Graham, the author of Redneck Nation, blows the lid off of what was previously one the most closely held secrets of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (or maybe that should be Vast Right Wind Conspiracy...):

Hurricane Katrina was a racist.

"Katy," as we called her in the labs of Halliburton, Inc., was unleashed by the Bush Administration and its evil minions in the oil industry using a super-secret, high-tech weather machine originally developed in the labs of Nazi Germany and passed down through the Skull and Bones Society at Yale. Just ask John Kerry—he knows all about it.

Of course Katrina hit New Orleans and its predominantly black population, and largely avoided the mostly white residents of the "Redneck Rivera" of the Florida panhandle. Don't you remember how Katrina started out hitting Florida, then swung around the entire state in order to get a clean shot at the Big Easy? All part of the plan.

The folks in the Congressional Black Caucus know. They know that Katrina (why not "Catherine?" No "K," of course) was created by the Bushies to accomplish two key goals: disrupt oil supplies so when the US finishes stealing all the black gold from Iraq, the prices will remain high; and kill lots of black people, who historically tend to vote Democrat, so the GOP can dominate the South.

Those blacks who didn't die were to be disenfranchised by being labeled "refugees," one of the most insulting and racist terms in the English language, so demeaning it has often been used in the past to describe Jews.

See how the conspiracy all fits together?

No? Well, read the rest.

Update: Related, if less satirical, thoughts from Jonah Goldberg.

John Hinderaker of Power Line writes:

Major Garrett of Fox News is reporting that the Red Cross "had prepositioned water, food, blankets and hygiene products for delivery to the Superdome and the Convention Center in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, but were blocked from delivering those supplies by orders of the Louisiana state government, which did not want to attract people to the Superdome and/or Convention Center."

Explosive, obviously, if true. Hugh [Hewitt] has interviewed Garrett, who says the report comes from "sources at the highest levels of the Red Cross."

Of course, FEMA is no great shakes either:

Not long after some 1,000 firefighters sat down for eight hours of training, the whispering began: "What are we doing here?"

As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters - his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week - a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta. . . .

The firefighters, several of whom are from Utah, were told to bring backpacks, sleeping bags, first-aid kits and Meals Ready to Eat. They were told to prepare for "austere conditions." Many of them came with awkward fire gear and expected to wade in floodwaters, sift through rubble and save lives.

"They've got people here who are search-and-rescue certified, paramedics, haz-mat certified," said a Texas firefighter. "We're sitting in here having a sexual-harassment class while there are still [victims] in Louisiana who haven't been contacted yet."

What we're they being taught that they wouldn't already know as firemen? Apparently this.

Update: The Political Teen has video of Garrett's Fox News segment about the Red Cross being blocked by the Louisiana state government.

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, I was working in a bank. I'll never forget one of the 30-ish tellers saying something like, "that's the problem--you younger folks don't have as much history as we did, back when there was Vietnam, Watergate, the Oil Crisis, the Iranian Hostage Crisis...."

Flashforward to the present, where Tom Maguire writes he's got all the history he needs right now, thankyouverymuch!

I have been chiding my kids, over the years, that they are living through entirely too much history. Do folks still remember the once-momentous Clinton impeachment of 1998? The Florida recount of 2000? (We do!). Both were eclipsed by 9/11 and the war in Iraq.

And now we have the flooding of New Orleans and the destruction of the Gulf Coast, which will, I Boldly Predict, roil American politics for years or decades as people rethink the roles of local, state, and federal government.

He's got some suggestions on how that will play out. In the meantime, Glenn Reynolds has a roundup of excellent suggestions that will, sadly, largely go unheeded by the various levels of government as to how to plan for the next disaster.

In "Solid Rock", Mark Knopfler wrote and sang, "When you point your finger 'cause your plan fell through, you've got three more fingers pointing back at you". Yesterday, James Taranto wrote:

New Orleans's Mayor Ray Nagin is up for re-election in February 2006, Gov. Kathleen Blanco and Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu in November 2007, and Sen. Mary Landrieu in November 2008. All four are Democrats. When they point the finger at the federal government for whatever went wrong in the Katrina response, remember that they are fighting for their political lives.

Of course, while Taranto's a more articulate political writer, Knopfler can still run rings around him on the Stratocaster.

Meanwhile, in more early '80s pop culture referencing, Jonah Goldberg notes that life (and Randall Robinson) imitates C.H.U.D.

Virginia Postrel writes:

Two Fort Lauderdale-based companies have put together a simple but powerful site that lets Katrina survivors register so loved ones can find out their fate. Katrina.im-ok.org works with phone numbers, avoiding spelling problems and name duplications.

Tom Foster of CompuNex Corp., which did the programming, sent me an email asking blog readers in Dallas (and presumably other cities with a lot of refugees) "to take their portable laptops and wireless air cards and put them to work." I'm not exactly sure of the best way to connect readers' wi-fi cards with displaced hurricane victims, but consider this a solicitation. Check out I'm OK's site for more background.

Sounds good to us; we just added them below the Red Cross on our sidebar.

Meanwhile, Silicon Investor has links to other Katrina-related missing persons sites.

In Tech Central Station, Philip Klein compares Rudy Giuliani's handling of 9/11 with his counterpart's efforts in the Big Easy last week, and concludes:

Given the events of the early part of this decade, there is a strong likelihood that whoever succeeds President Bush will face at least one national crisis. Handicappers of the 2008 election have been debating whether conservatives would ever allow the Republican Party to nominate Giuliani as their presidential candidate, because he holds liberal views on abortion and gay rights.

But in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, even the most ardent social conservatives should examine whether in the hierarchy of issues it is more important to choose a leader who would best be able to respond to an event such as a biological attack, which would require split-second decision making to save lives. There is simply no politician in the nation who has proven to be a better leader in times of crisis than Giuliani. That's why America needs him.

A lot can happen over the next three years. But right now, the job is his if he wants it.

Update: It's Giuliani-A-Go-Go at Patrick Ruffini's! His Guiliani Wire is one stop shopping for all things Rudy.

The Return of the Primitive was the title of an Ayn Rand book on the post-McGovern left. I borrowed it to use for my category on some of the more extreme examples of the flight from reason that's an ongoing part of much of today's society.

Frankly, it's not a category I use very often. But since Katrina's hit land, it's gotten a workout. And it's not a coincidence that in his latest Chicago Sun-Times column, Mark Steyn refers to a phenomenon called "re-primitivized man":

Anyone watching TV in recent days will have seen plenty of "re-primitivized man," not in Liberia or Somalia, but in Louisiana. Cops smashing the Wal-Mart DVD cabinet so they can get their share of the booty along with the rest of the looters, gangs firing on a children's hospital and on rescue helicopters, hurricane victims being raped in the New Orleans Convention Center. . . . If you're minded, as many of the world's anti-Americans are, to regard the United States as a depraved swamp, it was a grand old week: Mother Nature delivered the swamp, but plenty of natives supplied the depravity.

Not all of them, of course. But it doesn't really matter if it's only 5 percent or 2 percent or 0.01 percent if everybody else is giving them free rein. Not exactly the most impressive law enforcement agency even on a good day, the New Orleans Police Department sent along some 80 officers to rescue the rape victims trapped in the Convention Center, but were beaten back by the mob. Meanwhile, the ever more pitiful governor was, unlike many of her fellow Louisianans, safe on dry land but still floundering way out of her depth, unable to stand up to the lawlessness even rhetorically or to communicate anything other than emotive impotence.

With most disasters, it's a good rule to let the rescue teams do their work and leave the sniping till folks are safe. But in New Orleans last week the emergency work has been seriously hampered by actual literal sniping, as at that hospital. The authorities lost control of the streets. Which one of Tom Ridge's Homeland Security color codes does that fall under?

After Sept. 11, many people who should have known better argued that it was somehow a vindication of government.

* * *

One thing that became clear two or three months after "the day that everything changed" is that nothing changed -- that huge swathes of the political culture in America remain committed to a bargain that stiffs the people at every level, a system of lavish funding of pseudo-action. You could have done as the anti-war left wanted and re-allocated every dollar spent in Iraq to Louisiana. Or you could have done as some of the rest of us want and re-allocated every buck spent on, say, subsidizing Ted Turner's and Sam Donaldson's play-farming activities. But, in either case, I'll bet Louisiana's kleptocrat public service would have pocketed the dough and carried on as usual -- and, come the big day, the state would still have flopped out, and New Orleans' foul-mouthed mayor would still be ranting about why it was all everybody's else fault.

Those levees broke; they failed. And you think about Chicago and San Francisco and Boston and you wonder what's waiting to fail there. The assumption was that after 9/11, big towns and small took stock and identified their weak points. That's what they told us they were doing, and that's what they were getting big bucks to do. But in New Orleans no one had a plan that addressed levee failure, and no one had a plan for the large percentage of vehicleless citizens who'd be unable to evacuate, and no one had a plan to deal with widespread looting. Given that all these local factors are widely known -- New Orleans is a below-sea-level city with high crime and a low rate of automobile ownership -- it makes you wonder how the city would cope with something truly surprising -- like, say, a biological attack.

Oh, well, maybe the 9/11 commission can rename themselves the Katrina Kommission. Back in the real world, America's enemies will draw many useful lessons from the events of this last week. Will America?

All in all, sadly, I wouldn't bet on it. But David Brooks is certainly right: "Rudy Giuliani, an unlikely G.O.P. nominee a few months ago, could now win in a walk". And for good reason.

Update: Related thoughts from Roger L. Simon, and a related video illustrating Steyn's point, via Charles Johnson.

Another Update: Mark Steyn also has a column on New Orleans in England's Telegraph: "The Big Easy Rocked, But Didn't Roll".

Glenn Reynolds writes, "Like Bob Hope In World War II, Sean Penn is able to take a devastated nation and make it laugh". Click on over to read the details and see Spicoli in full maritime action.

Originally, the New Orleans Saints planned to have their home opener against the Giants in the Superdome, where they play all of their home games. Katrina changed all that. The Giants already agreed to allow the game to be played in the New Jersey Meadowlands. And in an effort to bring greater publicity to ongoing flood relief efforts, the NFL has decided to play the game on Monday night along with the previously scheduled Cowboys-Redskins battle, turning the night into a football fanatic's dream, as AP reports:

The Giants-Saints game, driven from New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, will be played as part of a nationally televised doubleheader starting at 7:30 p.m. EDT on Monday, Sept. 19.

The game, already moved to the Giants' home in the New Jersey Meadowlands, will begin on ABC, then be switched to ESPN at 9 p.m., when ABC goes to the regularly scheduled game between Washington and Dallas in Irving, Texas. In New York and Louisiana, as well as other parts of the Gulf Coast, ABC will continue to carry the Giants-Saints game, switching to Redskins-Cowboys when the Saints game ends.

NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said other details, such as ticket sales, will be announced soon.

``We appreciate the leadership of ABC and ESPN in helping us turn this particular Monday night into far more than a prime-time football doubleheader, making it part of the overall Gulf Coast relief effort,'' commissioner Paul Tagliabue said in a statement released by the NFL. ``The New Orleans Saints know the importance of rising to help meet the Gulf Coast's extraordinary challenges, and we salute them, too.''

The NFL said fund-raising efforts for hurricane relief will be intertwined in the telecasts of both games.

The Cowboys/'Skins game is scheduled to include the induction of the Cowboys' famed "triplets" at halftime.

Over 200 members of New Orleans' finest have quit their job and gone home--and according to the New York Times, "two have committed suicide".

As a commenter on Little Green Footballs wrote, unlike 9/11 and New York, I don't believe we'll be seeing any NOPD hats sold at department stores in the next few months.

But don't complain about the cops to Louisiana's Senator Landrieu:

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.

Just updated my post earlier today linking to Mickey Kaus's theory that Katrina allows the left "a way to talk about Iraq without talking about Iraq", to also include a flashback to Charles Krauthammer's "Pressure Cooker Theory" essay from August of last year. It's well worth revisiting in light of this past week's ratcheting up of Bush Derangement Syndrome (which of course, was another spot-on Krauthammer coinage).

RedState.org posts an excellent timetable of early events in New Orleans and concludes:

There will be a time for the settling of accounts, and that time is not now. When the time comes, we’ll find that the oversight was been more grievous, and deadly, and immediate, than failing to conduct a four-year feasibility study. It is time, as Brendan Loy says, for “No more lies; we saw this coming.” For failing to evacuate New Orleans until the last minute – despite the clear warning signals and a danger many times greater than in any other coastal American city – history will remember the hapless duo of C. Ray Nagin and Kathleen Blanco – and not kindly.

Meanwhile, Nicole Gelinas of City Journal has another excellent essay, this time on the vicious looters of New Orleans--and their victims.

Junkyard Blog has an amazing post-Katrina overhead shot of a parking lot in New Orleans with 255 unused buses visible:

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.

Read the whole thing.

Tech Central Station has new items online in their recently created section on Katrina and its aftermath. Click on the banner below to read the articles there, including Nick Schulz's memories of President Reagan's visit to the Big Easy.

Mickey Kaus has a great take on the Katrina-related Bush-bashing by the media and the left (sorry to repeat myself):

I'm not saying Bush and the Feds don't clearly deserve major grief for not getting today's National Guard aid convoy into downtown New Orleans a couple of days earlier. Some people are probably dead as a result. But the commentators on Washington Week in Review seemed a little too happy when proclaiming this a "debacle" that will damage Bush politically for a long, long time. And I don't think they were happy just because Bush has suffered a blow. I think it's because the hurricane and its New Orleans aftermath at least seemed to solve a big problem for anti-Bush commentators and politicians. Previously, they couldn't grouse about the Iraq War without seeming defeatist (and anti-liberationist and maybe even selfishly isolationist). Even the Clintons never figured a way out of that trap. But nature has succeded where they failed; it has opened up a way out, at least temporarily. Now Bush opponents can argue, in some cases quite accurately, that without the Iraq deployment aid would have gotten to New Orleans faster. And 'if we can [tk] in Iraq, why can't we [tk] in our own South?' They aren't being selfish. They are just asserting priorities! In short, Katrina gives them a way to talk about Iraq without talking about Iraq. No wonder Gwen Ifill smiles the "inner smile."

As the Professor writes, "Yes, I think he's got that exactly right".

Update: A Charles Krauthammer essay of late August 2004 is worth revisiting, for his "Pressure Cooker Theory" of the far left. It was written to explain how the Bush Derangement Syndrome (an even more famous phrase he also coined) of the election came to be:

The loathing goes far beyond the politicians. Liberals as a body have gone quite around the twist. I count one all-star rock tour, three movies, four current theatrical productions and five best sellers (a full one-third of the New York Times list) variously devoted to ridiculing, denigrating, attacking and devaluing this president, this presidency and all who might, God knows why, support it.

How to explain? With apologies to Dr. Freud, I propose the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release.

The hostility, resentment, envy and disdain, all superheated in Florida, were not permitted their natural discharge. Came 9/11 and a lid was forced down. How can you seek revenge for a stolen election by a nitwit usurper when all of a sudden we are at war and the people, bless them, are rallying around the flag and hailing the commander in chief? With Bush riding high in the polls, with flags flying from pickup trucks (many of the flags, according to Howard Dean, Confederate), the president was untouchable.

The Democrats fell unnaturally silent. For two long, agonizing years, they had to stifle and suppress. It was the most serious case of repression since Freud's Anna O. went limp. The forced deference nearly killed them. And then, providentially, they were saved. The clouds parted and bad news rained down like manna: WMDs, Abu Ghraib, Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, Joe Wilson and, most important, continued fighting in Iraq.

Stripped of his halo, the president's ratings went down. The spell was broken. He was finally once again human and vulnerable. With immense relief, the critics let loose.

The result has been volcanic. The subject of one prominent new novel is whether George W. Bush should be assassinated. This is all quite unhinged. Good God. What if Bush is re-elected? If they lose to him again, Democrats will need more than just consolation. They'll need therapy.

Unfortunately, they never received it. And as Mickey Kaus notes above, Katrina allows the left's pressure cooker to explode--at full Category Five strength.

"John Wayne-ing it" was Vietnam-era speak for what was once described as "gung ho" in World War II--"Let's John Wayne it up the hill" was a line used in Michael Herr's great Dispatches, I think.

UPI reports that the mayor of New Orleans is happy that Army Lt. General Russel Honore, a Louisiana native has been put in charge of the Army's Task Force Katrina. Furthering his newly found credentials as the anti-Giuliani, Mayor Ray Nagin dubbed Honore "one John Wayne dude":

NEW ORLEANS, Sep. 3 (UPI) — A Louisiana native with experience in floods has been put in charge of the Army's Task Force Katrina, winning praise even from New Orleans' unhappy mayor.

Lt. Gen. Russel Honore is "one John Wayne dude," Mayor Ray Nagin said in an interview this week with radio station WWL.

Stars and Stripes reports that Honore, who hails from Lakeland, La., led the 2nd Infantry Division in Korea from 2000 to 2002, dealing with flooding at many bases every year during monsoon season and supervising the installation of flood control measures.

Nagin said that sending Honore was the one thing he could give President Bush credit for -- "he came off the doggone chopper, and he started cussin' and people started movin'!"

CNN reported that Honore has also ordered National Guard troops and even police officers in New Orleans to keep their guns pointed down. The general told CNN that he is most concerned with getting food, water and other necessities to the thousands of people still trapped in the city.

"If you ever have 20,000 people come to supper, you know what I'm talking about," he said. "If it's easy, it would have been done already."

Presumably the paraphrased quote above highlighted in bold means that Nagin doesn't want to give President Bush credit for calling and personally appealing for a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans before the hurricane actually hit.

Update: More thoughts on Nagin from James Panero.

TechWeb reports that DirecTV has adopted channel #100 (which I think normally shows "learn how to control your DirecTV set-top box" sorts of programming) into an information channel on Katrina:

DirecTV Inc. on Friday said it has launched a 24-hour Hurricane Katrina information channel that broadcasts a continuous stream of email messages from family and friends of hurricane victims.

Available on channel 100 of the satellite-TV service, the program also provide information on road closures throughout the Gulf region, which was heaviest hit in Monday's storm; the location and phone numbers of special needs shelters in Louisiana and shelter openings throughout the Gulf Coast.

In addition, the channel lists counties and parishes in the Gulf region that are able to assist evacuees, insurance company contact information and relief agency contact information, including phone numbers for the Red Cross, Salvation Army and Feed the Children.

DirecTV, a Los Angeles unit of News Corp., will scroll at the bottom of the TV screen text messages from family and friends separated by the hurricane and its aftermath. Emails sent to katrina@directv.com are reviewed by DirecTV staff and then posted on the channel. A text message also can be sent via cellular phone directly to text code "48433."

Bob Marsocci, spokesman for DirecTV, said the company launched the channel to help address the difficulty victims have had in contacting loved ones. DirecTV has more than 14.6 million subscribers nationwide.

"Watching the news headlines, it became clear that besides the basics of food, shelter and clothing, there was a lack of communications, so we decided to launch a dedicated channel," Marsocci said. "Communication is of vital importance with 10s of thousands of people out of their homes."

DirecTV plans to keep the channel up for "as long as necessary," Marsocci said. The company plans to install its DirecTV in shelters, based on recommendation from federal officials and the Red Cross. Service already has been installed in the Houston Astrodome, which is housing 10s of thousands of victims.

DirecTV isn't the only company trying to help Katrina victims reach loved ones. Internet service provider Earthlink Inc., based in Atlanta, said Friday it has launched a Web page for people to submit their own names and location, and search the submissions of others.

Meanwhile, the Pajamas Media beta-site has suspended its member profiles for the weekend, and is providing information on Katrina as well.

"More Than 3 Dozen Countries Pledge Assistance"

We've been tracking this week where the New Orleans Saints will be playing their upcoming NFL season. AP reports that the rest of the season is still up in the air, but the game that was originally scheduled to be their home opener, against the Giants on September 18th (after opening the season in Carolina), will be on the Giants' home turf, the New Jersey Meadowlands:

The New Orleans Saints, driven from the Superdome by Hurricane Katrina, will play their home opener against the New York Giants at Giants Stadium.

It is not clear, however, when the game will be played.

NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue said Friday the game, scheduled for Sept. 18, is being moved to the Giants' home in East Rutherford, N.J.

The New York Jets, who share the stadium with the Giants, are scheduled to play at home against Miami on Sept. 18. As a result, the Giants-Saints game most likely will be played Saturday, Sept. 17, or the following Monday.

The league said it was possible the game could be played as part of a doubleheader Sunday, with the one game at 1 p.m. and the other at night. The Jets are now scheduled to start at 4:15 p.m.

``We are in the process of working out the specific arrangements, including the day and kickoff time and plans for television coverage,'' Tagliabue said. He added that information on tickets will be announced in a few days by the Giants.

He said the Saints and Giants had agreed to donate part of the gate receipts from the game to the hurricane relief fund.

The Saints, who spent the past week on the West Coast, are moving their headquarters to San Antonio for the immediate future. The Alamodome in San Antonio, which holds 65,000, had been considered a strong possibility for the game.

James Taranto and Rich Lowry have some thoughts on race and the news coverage of Katrina, and what Lowry describes as the coming racially-fueled battle over its reconstruction.

Update: "The smartest man in pop music", as crowned by Time magazine has some related thoughts on the subject...

Charles Johnson writes, "Messages from people in New Orleans who desperately need help are being posted at the NOLA View weblog".

Earlier today, I donated to the Red Cross via Amazon.com (After busting Amazon's chops yesterday, it seemed the least I could do to make up for it.)

Feel free to click over and do the same--or choose from another of the charities on Glenn Reynolds' list. Every little bit really does help--as Austen Bay said the other day, "There's no America out there except America to respond to [Katrina]. We've got to do it ourselves."

Update: Bumped to top. Just copied the Red Cross logo from Amazon and and pasted it into sidebar on the right, along with a link to the Red Cross relief page.

Click on it early and often.

Technorati Tags: flood aid, Hurricane Katrina.

Neo-Neocon has some thoughts on New Orleans' lack of preparation for a disaster that--in typical 20/20 hindsight--now seems inevitable:

This lethal stew of prohibitive cost, corruption, competing ideas about what was necessary, and denial that something so dreadful was likely enough to justify all that expense, proved to be a deadly mixture that led to the shocking lack of preparedness. As blogger "Laurel," who fled the New Orleans area with her family just before the hurricane hit writes, it was "The day I thought would never come." And if a day will never come, why spend billions of dollars in a very poor state to prepare against that day?

Read the whole thing.

Update: Will Collier has some related thoughts that are well worth reading.

The Lone Star Times Weblog has exclusive photos and posts from inside the Houston Astrodome, where many of the survivors of Katrina who spent days in the New Orleans Superdome have de-camped.

They also note that the Craigslist Internet bulletin boards in Houston and New Orleans have pitched in to help, and its readers are posting available housing.

"Shanna, they bought their tickets, they knew what they were getting into. I say, let 'em crash!"

Patrick Ruffini looks at the "Hurricane of Hatred". Here's but one example.

Michelle Malkin's latest posts are must-reads, as she continues her incredible job of blogging Katrina's aftermath. Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt has a two-part series with excellent recommendations for rebuilding the area and returning some semblance of normalcy to its people.

Micheal Ledeen compares New Orleans with Venice and Naples:

New Orleans is one of a handful of cities that are defined in large part by the recognition that it can all come to an end most any day. Joel Lockhart Dyer wrote that "New Orleans is North America's Venice; both cities are living on borrowed time." New Orleans and Venice are both subject to the vagaries of the water gods, and both have acted sporadically to fend off their seemingly inevitable fate. But their basic response to the looming disaster has been defiance, a ritual assertion of life in the face of the inevitable, and an embrace of human frailty that echoes the frailty of the city itself.

Carnival in Venice, albeit more so in the past than today, has much in common with Mardi Gras, including the use of masks by the celebrants, who thereby throw off their daily identities to participate anonymously in the licentious celebrations. Thomas Mann knew what he was doing when he wrote Death in Venice, in which a proper German professor (pointedly named Aschenbach, the stream of ashes) hurls himself into bawdy Venice to recover his repressed sexuality and creativity. Similar characters abound in the works of Tennessee Williams, who lived many years in New Orleans, the setting for both A Streetcar Named Desire and The Rose Tattoo. William Faulkner also found New Orleans a congenial place for his creative labors. And in both cities, the bacchanals are religious, celebrating both sin and the hope of redemption thereafter, as if a sinner were more attractive to the Almighty than a virtuous soul, at least on that day.

Moreover, Venice prefigured the most likely cultural and political destiny of New Orleans, no matter whether the long-anticipated catastrophe came or not: a slow slide into monotonous ritual, a city transformed into an historic theme park, more frequented by tourists than defined by the energy of its inhabitants, an anachronistic curiosity like Florence, where one focuses on things past, not present or future.

But there is much that separates them. Venice is a northern city, and New Orleans is profoundly southern. A German like Mann might find Venice to be incredibly warm and sunny, but no knowledgeable Italian would. And the presumed naturalness and spontaneity of Venetians could only be taken seriously by someone from even farther north. New Orleans, on the other hand, incarnates the south. New Orleanians are perversely proud of the slow tempo of their daily life, of the absence of industry, and of the fascinating spectacle of human foibles and failures that seems at one with the city. The Italian city that most closely matches New Orleans is Naples, not Venice. Naples also faces destruction — volcanic destruction, from "Vesuvius the Exterminator," as the poet Verga once wrote — and Naples, too, is noted for a lively, and often lawless style of life, along with great literature, art, cuisine and music. Unlike Venice, Naples is every bit as southern as New Orleans, and the European stereotype of the Neapolitan is very much like the American image of New Orleanians: lazy, happy, spontaneous, and unrepressed, slow-moving but quick-witted, and very happy with the food.

Read the rest.

Tech Central Station has created a new section devoted to coverage of Katrina. Click on the banner below to read the articles there:

Some incredible photos of the aftermath of Katrina, over at the Digital Irony blog.

Earlier day, we noted that longtime New Orleans-based musical legend Fats Domino was missing. Charles Johnson happily reports that he's been found, alive and well.

From AP, this news isn't very surprising:

NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue says it's unlikely the Saints will play in New Orleans this season after the devastation Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath inflicted on the city.

``At this point you have to proceed on the assumption ... that they may be unable to play in New Orleans at all for the entire season,'' Tagliabue said Thursday in an interview with CNBC.

``If things evolve in a positive way, then that would be something that we could adjust to. But our assumption is that for planning purposes, we should assume it will be difficult if not impossible to play in New Orleans at all this year.''

The Saints will move into a hotel in San Antonio, Texas, this weekend and practice in San Antonio in preparation for their regular-season opener at Carolina Sept. 11. They have spent this week in San Jose, Calif., and played their final exhibition Thursday night in Oakland.

But it still hasn't been decided where they will play their regular-season opener Sept. 18 against the New York Giants or play the rest of their games.

Tagliabue says that one possibility is the Alamodome in San Antonio, which seats 65,000. He also noted that the NFL would be donating one million dollars to the hurricane recovery effort.

If you're reading this via broadband, click here for a large, detailed aerial view of New Orleans, post-Katrina. Found via The Corner, where Byron York writes:

This is the best aerial photo of New Orleans that I have seen. It shows the vast areas that are underwater, shows the Superdome, and shows that the area most tourists are familiar with, the French Quarter, appears largely dry.

That's reassuring--getting tourists back will be vital for New Orleans' rebuilding.

Update: In comparison, here's an overhead "before" photo.

While we've been focusing on Louisiana and Mississippi, this Newhouse article says that Alabama was also hard-hit by Katrina:

Hurricane Katrina's powerful east side unleashed a stinging assault on Alabama's coastline Monday, pushing water over roads and up rivers, toppling trees and killing power to thousands of residents.

An oil rig broke free from its moorings and struck a large suspension bridge, forcing its closure; beach areas rebuilding from last September's Hurricane Ivan were awash again; scores of roads were closed; and everything from fish camps to multimillion-dollar homes along the low-lying areas of Mobile Bay took on water at an alarming rate.

As powerful wind gusts burst into downtown Mobile, large rectangular pieces of foam-core insulation flew through the air like playing cards being flung from the upper stories of the RSA Tower, which is under construction as Alabama's tallest office building.

Where vacationers and conventioneers normally sip mint juleps in the historic Grand Hotel in Point Clear, more than nine feet of water swamped the lobby. The resort underwent a $50 million renovation in 2003.

In Washington County, meanwhile, two people died in a wreck attributed to heavy rains from the storm.

Gov. Bob Riley announced Monday evening that he received approval from President Bush to declare parts of southwest Alabama federal disaster areas. The disaster declaration means federal and state assistance will be available to help governments in Mobile, Baldwin, Washington, Clarke, Choctaw and Sumter counties recover costs for debris removal and other hurricane-relief efforts.

"I think we'll find that Mobile County experienced the most hurricane damage since Hurricane Frederic," Randy McKee, head of the National Weather Service's Mobile office, said, recalling the 1979 storm that is the local benchmark for destructiveness.

Read the whole thing.

Update: Michelle Malkin has a post which reminds us that it's "Not Just New Orleans" that's been hit.

Another Update: Speaking of which, welcome to Michelle's readers.

I was a little uncomfortable with James Taranto's comparison in his latest "Best of the Web Today" column, comparing the Gaia-worshiping "Fire Make Sea Gods Angry!" left with the New Orleans looters. After examples from the usual suspects (Cindy Sheehan, Molly Ivans, Robert Kennedy Jr., the New York Times), Taranto writes:

Some people respond to a horrific natural disaster by taking cheap shots at their political opponents. Others respond by stealing TV sets. The underlying impulse knows no boundaries of social class.

This hateful post on a popular leftwing blog, however, really does seem to be verbal equivalent of a looting.

As Charles Johnson writes, "This is where the left has ended up, on their journey into hatred".

Is there a journey back out? All of their writing is being cataloged on the Internet; a few years from now, will anyone remind them of what they wrote and said and ask them, "how on earth could you say such things?"

Update: In a sharp and welcome contrast to others on the left, former President Bill Clinton is taking the high road, working with Bush #41 once again, as they did after last year's tsunami, and delivering some well-deserved smackdown to CNN's Suzanne Malveaux.

(Via Michelle Malkin, who, as she has been all week, is loaded with Katrina-related links today.)

Another Update: Arthur Chrenkoff has rounded-up numerous additional examples of hurricane exploitation in action.

One More: Lorie Byrd writes, "New Orleans Is The New Iraq For The MSM"; Hugh Hewitt writes that this is a replay of the left's dreadfully heavy-handed tactics at Paul Wellstone's funeral--and will have similar blowback in terms of the public's reaction.

Unlike Hugh, I think it's waaay too soon to tell how all this will play out. But I do think it's worth comparing the left's remarks to similar ones made shortly after 9/11. We tend to think of that immediate period as being a time of national unity, but it was also politicized by the far left very early on as well: National Review Online kept a running "Kumbaya Watch" for a month or two afterwards cataloging the most ham-handed examples; a few of the folks who advanced them wound up this year being highlighted in Bernie Goldberg's 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America book.

But what was different back then was the immediate reaction by the left to the lunacy in its midst. As Mark Steyn noted earlier this summer shortly after the 7/7 bombing in London:

For a few brief weeks after 9/11, back when Americans were celebrating the heroism of the brave passengers who rose up against their hijackers on Flight 93, it seemed as if the last words of Tod Beamer — ‘Let’s roll!’ — might indeed roll back the enervated multiculti squishiness of the age. In those days Michael Moore was an irrelevant fringe figure, a ‘well-known crank, regarded with considerable distaste even on the Left’, as Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate, assured us. Three years later, garlanded with Oscars and Palmes d’Or, Michael Moore was sitting alongside Jimmy Carter in the presidential box at the Democratic Convention.

The mainstreaming of ‘well-known cranks’ like Moore is one reason the Dems have become such reliable losers every other November. Reacting to Karl Rove’s recent assault on American liberals as unreliable on national security and war, big-time Democrats huffed indignantly that this was an outrage given their support over the Afghan campaign. OK, but even taking that at face value it was three and a half years ago: what have you done since? Bitched about Abu Ghraib and Gitmo and whined that Jacques Chirac doesn’t want to be friends any more. These days, heavyweight Dems lumber on to the Senate floor to do Noam Chomsky impressions: the other day it was Dick Durbin of Illinois comparing the US military at Guantanamo with Nazis and the Khmer Rouge.

And now it's shouting that President Bush and Haley Barbour conspired to flood the Gulf Coast.

When I linked to Steyn's article on July 8th, I wrote, "Just as with 9/11, 7/7 gives the left a chance to hit the reset button and rethink their world view. Will they do it?" Sadly, that last sentence turned out to be more rhetorical than I could have possibly imagined at the time.

Via "Best of the Web Today", former New Orleans resident and current City Journal author Nicole Gelinas has some thoughts on rebuilding the Big Easy. She writes that the city's infrastructure was rather shaky long before Katrina hit:

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Fats Domino (his real name is Antoine Domino) is a 77-year old living legend and rock and roll pioneer. At least, hopefully he's still alive--he's been reported missing in New Orleans, where he's resided for many years.

Update: Found!

"I had always hoped that Haiti would become more like New Orleans, but what's happened is New Orleans has become more like Haiti here recently."

--Bill Quigley, New Orleans law professor, who's still there, along with his wife, who is an oncology nurse still serving her patients at Tenant Memorial Hospital. He paints a grim, firsthand picture.

Update: A New Orleans-based doctor also has a firsthand report that's well worth reading.

Another Update: Vodkapundit has another letter from the scene.

Maybe the Air National Guard and medivac choppers needs someone to ride shotgun on their helicopters:

The scene at the massive New Orleans arena is chaotic as authorities attempt to evacuate the thousands who had massed inside because of Hurricane Katrina.

The airborne evacuation of the sick and injured was put off temporarily following a report of a shot being fired at a military helicopter, although the federal government said it doesn't know about any such incident.

The air ambulance service that was supposed to transfer some of the worse-off evacuees said it won't fly near the dome until security is restored.

As Jonah Goldberg writes:

Looting for personal gain is reprehensible and should be swiftly punished. But when people fire weapons on doctors and rescue vehicles, it is a sign of profound moral decay more grotesque than words can describe. That these images are being beamed around the world is a source of deep shame. Even copkillers like Mumia Abu Jamal can have a perverse morality to them, in the sense that in their worldview cops represent oppression or some such. I think that's an attitude that runs the gamut from profoundly misguided to profoundly malevolent and copkillers should get the death penalty, period. But shooting people as they try to save the lives of babies and old women is an act so base and vile that it cannot even support the veneer of a pernicious ideology. This is so depressing.

Indeed.

Speaking of helicopters and other aircraft, this seems like a logical use for them as they're flying through the area.

Thinking of loading up the SUV with supplies and heading down to the Big Easy? Don't, says FEMA.

The other day, Power Line had this interesting item:

The Pew Research Center has published an interesting survey on the political parties and religion. The finding that is getting the most press is that only 29% of respondents view the Democrats as religion-friendly, down from 40% just a year ago.

In general, the public seems to view the parties and their attitudes toward religion as mirror images. Almost exactly equal numbers think the secular anti-religion forces have too much control over the Democrats, and the religious conservatives too much control over the Republicans. In almost exactly equal proportions, respondents see the Republicans more concerned with protecting religious values, and the Democrats more concerned with protecting individual freedoms.

In one critical respect, however, this parallel breaks down. The public is equally divided on the question whether conservative Christians "have gone too far in trying to impose their religious values on the country." But in answer to the slightly more specifically worded question whether liberals have gone too far in trying to keep religion out of schools and government, 67% answer "yes," and only 28% "no." This amounts to a national consensus; it is noteworthy, too, that the numbers are even more stark among black respondents: 75% think liberals have gone too far in trying to keep religion out of schools and government.

These numbers have to be very troubling to the Democrats, but, given the centrality of these issues to the party's activists and donor base, it's hard to see the Democrats making much of a change.

Actually, the results of this Pew Poll shouldn't be very surprising to anyone who's read Rod Dreher's seminal "The Godless Party" article during the past few years.

But while many on the far left are self-declared atheists, man seems fairly obviously hardwired to want to believe in some sort of higher being. In the late sixties and early seventies, rock stars such as Pete Townshend, George Harrison, and Carlos Santana were more than willing to abandon western religion for a variety of eastern versions. For a while, it became the norm for superstar guitarists to have their own personal guru or avatar. (Jimmy Page went as far as he could in the opposite direction, but to each his own was certainly a key facet of the 1960s.) Madonna's Kabbalah worship is essentially a variation on this phenomenon.

But these days, the modern far left seems to want modern religions, created in the 20th century (see Hubbard, L. Ron). This is also true in the case of another movement with its roots in the late 1960s, environmentalism, as Jonah Goldberg writes:

A great many people tried to pin the 2004 tsunami on global warming too, even though that wasn't even theoretically possible (it was caused by a deep-sea earthquake). Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth in Britain, spoke for many when he proclaimed, "Here again are yet more events in the real world that are consistent with climate change predictions."

But I also think there's something much deeper going on. It cannot be disputed that not just the activists but millions of normal people honestly believe these self-fulfilling prophecies which explain virtually every kind of weather — except nice weather of course — as the comeuppance of man. And, the key word there is "prophecy."

It's become something of a cliché to say that environmentalism has become a religion, but that's because there's something so obviously true about it. The cant, the ritual, the creation myths all feel more religious than scientific. Within the environmentalist worldview there's "an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all," observed Michael Crichton in a famous speech on the subject.

Secular, "scientific" liberals understandably titter at televangelists who pray away hurricanes or claim that this or that calamity is God's retribution. But as unpersuasive or unhelpful as much of that theater may be, there's at least a serious theology somewhere underneath all the posing. Save for the cults of "deep ecology" and Wicca, environmental theology seems slapdash.

They could start by getting their own theodicy, one that would try to reconcile natural disasters with their faith that Mother Nature is such a nice lady. Rejecting Tennyson's description of nature as "red in tooth and claw" they opt for a nurturing but wounded Mommy Nature. Were it not for man's folly, she would be rocking us to sleep in her gentle arms every night. God, it seems, is a deadbeat dad in this whole scheme and man ultimately has all the power. Indeed, George Bush (with the aid of Haley Barbour, of course) could eliminate catastrophes with the stroke of a pen.

Those who study theodicy spend a lot of time on the book of Job, which tackles God's willingness to do harsh stuff to people who don't have it coming. Despite his hardships, Job never abandons God because to do so would be to abandon hope.

Environmentalists, it seems, need their own book of Job. Because as it stands right now, Mother Nature's ways are not mysterious, but entirely contingent on the output of fossil fuels. And, ironically enough, all of their hopes lie in George W. Bush. Which sounds just a bit like their version of Satan worship.

Hey, that was Page's shtick, 30 years ago!

For New Orleans residents, the plight of their football team is the absolute least of their worries. However, nationally, they'll receive quite a bit of attention this fall: as ambassadors for their devastated city, their presence on television this season could do quite a bit to keep the city in the spotlight--and additional relief funds coming in from both viewers at home, and those who attend their games in person. However, where the Saints will play their home games is still very much up in the air:

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Michelle Malkin writes that "The World Comes Around (Sort Of)" to helping rebuild the Gulf Coast, although England--with notable individual exceptions--sounds like it's taking its characteristic reserve and understatement just a little too seriously.

Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds has a list of charities you can contribute to.

It really is fascinating to compare Katrina with the December tsunami. In terms of media coverage, they've been disappointingly similar. But so far, in terms of corporate and celebrity relief, they've just been disappointing. Michelle Malkin wonders why Amazon.com hasn't posted any sort of announcement of support or relief:

Just saw this on Information Week. Amazon.com says it doesn't plan on helping with the Katrina relief efforts. The article notes that other tech companies are not jumping in to help:

[M]ainstream Web sites that had jumped to pull in money for the tsunami victims showed no evidence of repeating it here in the U.S. for Katrina's. Amazon.com, which raised more than $14 million for the American Red Cross in January via a donation link on its home page, didn't have one as of mid-day Monday. Nor did Google, Yahoo, MSN, or eBay, all of which hustled earlier in the year to put up donation links on their portals. (Google slapped up an "Information about Hurricane Katrina" link on its Spartan home page, but that led to news sources and stories.)

An Amazon spokesperson said that the online retailer had no plans to post a donation link on its site. "Each case is different," she said. "The Red Cross has essentially given over its entire site to donations. The tsunami came out of the blue, so it was an 'all hands on deck' situation, but the Red Cross has been getting ready for this and getting its message out there for several days."

2pm EDT update: Yahoo! posted this relief link. Reader/blogger Scott G. says Cisco is helping and passes along this info from the company's Intranet site...

"The recovery effort to aid communities devastated by Hurricane Katrina is growing and the response from Cisco started as news of the disaster began reaching employees. Volunteer teams in RTP and San Jose formed and will receive specialized training before they travel to the affected area. The volunteers will receive assignments and begin recovery work when they reach the site.

All donations from regular employees made to the American Red Cross in I-Give will be matched by the Cisco Systems Foundation up to US$10,000 per employee. The minimum individual employee gift is $50.00 in order to receive a match from the Cisco Foundation.Donation will be focused on immediate humanitarian relief efforts to assist local victims of the disaster."

Elsewhere, Michelle writes:

Question on many readers' minds:

Where are Hollywood and the Live Aid people?

Well, at least NBC is stepping up to the plate.

Update (5:08 PM PST): Amazon finally has a button on their homepage linking to the Red Cross.

Echoing the sentiments of one of our posts yesterday, James K. Glassman looks like the exploitation of Katrina by Gaia-worshipers:

Giant hurricanes are rare, but they are not new. And they are not increasing. To the contrary. Just go to the website of the National Hurricane Center and check out a table that lists hurricanes by category and decade. The peak for major hurricanes (categories 3,4,5) came in the decades of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, when such storms averaged 9 per year. In the 1960s, there were 6 such storms; in the 1970s, 4; in the 1980s, 5; in the 1990s, 5; and for 2001-04, there were 3. Category 4 and 5 storms were also more prevalent in the past than they are now. As for Category 5 storms, there have been only three since the 1850s: in the decades of the 1930s, 1960s and 1990s.

But that doesn't stop an enviro-predator like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from writing on the Huffingtonpost website: "Now we are all learning what it's like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence which Barbour and his cronies have encouraged. Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and - now -- Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children."

Or consider Jurgen Tritten, Germany's environmental minister, in an op-ed in the Frankfurter Rundschau. He wrote (according to a translation prepared for me): "By neglecting environmental protection, America's president shuts his eyes to the economic and human damage that natural catastrophes like Katrina inflect on his country and the world's economy."

The bright side of Katrina, concludes Tritten, is that it will force President Bush to face facts. "When reason finally pays a visit to climate-polluter headquarters, the international community has to be prepared to hand America a worked-out proposal for the future of international climate protection."

He goes on, "There is only one possible route of action. Greenhouse gases have to be radically reduced, and it has to happen worldwide." In other words, thanks to Katrina, we'll finally get Kyoto enforced. (He might start at home, by the way. Europe is not anywhere close to reducing CO2 to Kyoto standards. In fact, the U.S. is doing much better than many Kyoto ratifiers.)

Ross Gelbspan, in a particularly egregious, almost giddy piece in the Boston Globe that was reprinted in the International Herald Tribune, wrote that the hurricane was "nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service Katrina, [but] its real name was global warming." He also finds global warming responsible for droughts in the Midwest, strong winds in Scandinavia and heavy rain in Dubai. The reason for all this devastation, of course, is that the Bush Administration is controlled by coal and oil interests.

And the Independent, a widely read British newspaper, reported today that "Sir David King, the British Government's chief scientific adviser, has warned that global warming may be responsible for the devastation reaped by Hurricane Katrina." King contended that "the increased intensity of hurricanes is associated with global warming."

The Kyoto advocates point to warmer ocean temperatures, but they ought to read their own favorite newspaper, The New York Times, which reported yesterday:

"Because hurricanes form over warm ocean water, it is easy to assume that the recent rise in their number and ferocity is because of global warming. But that is not the case, scientists say. Instead, the severity of hurricane seasons changes with cycles of temperatures of several decades in the Atlantic Ocean. The recent onslaught 'is very much natural,' said William M. Gray, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University who issues forecasts for the hurricane season.'"

Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt writes that Katrina shouldn't be exploited by ratings-worshipers either.

Update: Geez, speaking of exploiting Katrina...

There's an absolutely horrific-sounding thread on Free Republic.com tonight, which begins with this post:

It is with heavy heart I write this...

I have finally reconnected with my best friend who is a paramedic who was sent from Georgia 2 days ago to Gulf Port, Mississippi before the hurricane hit.

He just reached me within the last 10 mins via emergency cell phone to tell me he was alive.

Thousands of bodies have been discovered throughout Mississippi in Gulf Port, Waveland,Hancock County,Bay of St.Louis.

They are hanging in trees and they are pulling them out 30 at a time. Entire families found drowned in their homes and washing up on shore.

The stories he could tell me were brief. National Guard is on the scene and arresting anyone seen on the streets.

The numbers are staggering and what I have been told tonight will shake people to their foundation as the numbers will be coming out in the next 24-hours of just how many people have actually perished in these and 3 other beach communities.

More to follow....

Hopefully, regular readers here know that I'm not someone who believes in Salinger's Law--"if it's on the Internet, it must be true!"--and that's one post I hope is as wrong as humanly possible.

Sadly though, that may not be the case. South Mississippi's Sun Herald reports, "Hundreds feared dead" in Biloxi. Haley Barbour, a man I've never noticed to be a big fan of hyperbole, had this to say:

After touring the destruction by air, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said it is not of case of homes being severely damaged, “they’re simply not there...I can only imagine that this is what Hiroshima looked like 60 years ago.”

Meanwhile, New Orleans' mayor is indirectly quoted as saying, ala this article's headline, "Entire City Will Soon Be Underwater".

Even allowing for the media's "Hurricane Porn"-style hype, this is terrible news coming out of the Gulf Coast.

Glenn Reynolds has a list of charities involved in Katrina-related relief efforts.

Give whatever you can.

The mainstream media are of course totally objective and without bias or ideology. Just ask Jack Cafferty of CNN, who had this snarky exchange with Wolf Blitzer:

WB: It's...what can I say. It's a horrible situation. Did you ever think in our lifetime a major American city like New Orleans, population a half a million, could be in a disaster situation like this?

JC: No, you don't think of it. But then, if you look back at the history, Wolf, I guess in a way, they were sort of were living on borrowed time. 1965 was the last big hurricane. The Army Corps of Engineers went in and built those levees to withstand a Category 3 storm. Apparently, that was all the technology and/or the budget would allow at the time. And Category is not as strong as it gets. And one day, two days ago, the unthinkable happened. And you know, like I said, they've been living on borrowed time. You have to wonder, watching these pictures and listening to these accounts, if we'll ever see the City of New Orleans as we all remember the Big Easy. And where's President Bush? Is he still on vacation?

WB: He's cut short his vacation. He's coming back to Washington tomorrow.

JC: Oh, that'd be a good idea. He was out in San Diego, I think at a Naval Air Station, giving a speech on Japan and the war in Iraq today. Based on his approval rating in the latest polls, my guess is getting back to work might not be a terrible idea. That's not the question of this hour, however.

Duane Peterson has an audio clip of the exchange, and comments:

What an insufferable jerk. First of all, today is also the 60th anniversary of V-J day. The speech obviously got upstaged today by events in the Gulf Coast, but the speech was a really important one, linking the resolve to re-build Japan with the resolve necessary to rebuild Iraq into its own version of a freedom-loving democracy. Bush wasn't on vacation today, and Cafferty knows it.

Second, when Bush is on "vacation," that doesn't mean it's like a vacation you or I take. He still gets briefings all through the day every day. He still has to make decisions every day. Cafferty either knows it and took a cheap political shot in the wake of a catastrophe, or he's an idiot.

Third, Bush had already declared the areas hit as disaster areas before the storm ever got there. Once it was determined that the storm was going to be a monster and strike near New Orleans, Bush made the decision so that the relief dollars and federal assistance, including FEMA, was in the pipeline by the time the storm was happening. Once again, Cafferty's cheap shot was really low, because Bush did as much as he could do, short of issuing an executive order outlawing the storm from arriving.

Fourth, if Bush was in Washington, would that make life any easier for the people affected by the storm? What if Bush came to down to see for himself. Would that help in the relief effort underway? Is Bush supposed to drop down the line of the Coast Guard helicopters and help pluck roof-bound refugees to safety himself?

Nice going, Jack. You're the first moron in the media that supposedly has credibility to inject politics into what could turn out to the be greatest natural disaster this country has faced, and you did it while the disaster is still unfolding.

Ironically, the media has the all-too-recent Indian Ocean tsumani as a template for their coverage. And once again, they're making the same mistakes they did nine months ago.

Incidentally, Matt Drudge is reporting that the Navy's been called into help. How long before there's a repeat of this classic groaner?

Update: Ed Morrissey observes Old Europe acting as equally reactionary as old media. Frank Martin's response?

Over the history of the United States our answer to the needs of the people of other countries as they face natural and man made disasters is “how can we help”.

The European answer is a shrug, the words "you deserve it" and a giggle.

And that my friends, is what makes us who we are and who they are.

Exactly.

James Panero of The New Criterion writes that the New York Times is keeping their photo captions sleek, short and streamlined--lest they actually properly label a photo of a looter wading through the aftermath of Katrina.

"Top Scientists Warn: Fire Make Sea Gods Angry!" was the title of a satiric post by Iowahawk written shortly after the global warming ghouls came out to Monday morning quarterback the causes of the horrific Christmas tsunami last year. And James Taranto notes today that they're at it again with Katrina.

As Duane Patterson, Hugh Hewitt's Generalissimo wrote last December:

You'll forgive me if I and the family and friends of the victims of this disaster don't want to subscribe to agenda-driven eco-political junk science right now. If the Earth's temperature were one degree cooler at the poles, and the ice caps were a foot thicker, this earthquake would still have happened. The tsunami would still have been just as deadly.

These people need prayer, aid, and comfort right now. They don't need to hear about fluorocarbons and CO2 levels could possibly, maybe, if the trends continue, make the effects of something this catastrophic even worse.

I'm beginning to think these eco-freaks are not even human anymore. They're robotic. It doesn't matter who lives or who dies. Whatever happens in the world, they must spin it into a way that suits their agenda, which is Earth-worship.

Reuters, shame on you...Again.

This time it's the Boston Globe and the Huffington Post, but we certainly concur with the rest of Duane's sentiments.

Update: In a post titled, "The Reactionary Party", David Cohen writes:

The cold winter and spring of 2005-2005 was obviously problematic for global warming enthusiasts. The answer the crafted was that global warming causes cooling, too. So, if it's hot: global warming. If it's cold: global warming. The left has truly become the reactionary party: any change is bad. Of course, static weather over the long-term could only result from human interference in the environment, but that would be good interference.

I have to admit, though, that my weather-cynicism, finely honed by years of the local news spending days covering blizzards that never happen, let me down this time. New Orleans and Mississippi seem to have suffered a tragedy as bad as the worst projections of the tv weather ghouls. This Wiki page, found via Michelle Malkin, offers links to aid agencies and fundraising events.

Don Singleton has some related thoughts and links.

Will Collier has some thoughts on Hurricane Katrina's immediate aftermath, and the dangers of snap judgements:

As the storm moved north yesterday, a number of commentators, both online and in the major media, were already starting to yowl that the pre-storm predictions of mass destruction were overblown and unwarranted. After all, they said, the thing went through New Orleans, and look--the city's still there. There's no 'giant bowl of toxic gumbo' (to paraphrase many, many comments). Heck, I can see the Superdome on CNN, and it's beat up, but it's not an island or anything!

With one of the major levees failing this morning, several parishes under water (few of which could be reached by people with cameras yesterday), an entirely unknown death toll, hundreds of people trapped by flooding, and untold devestation on the Mississippi and Alabama Gulf coasts, it's starting to look like the instant post-storm criticism was itself premature.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune has, for the first time in its history, published an electronic-only edition today--a notably ironic achievement, since almost nobody in the city has electricity, much less internet access. It's in .pdf format, and it's heartbreaking.

He's got several links in his original post, so click over to read it.

Michelle Malkin has been doing an incredible job blogging Katrina. This post, which contains many links, has a gut-wrenching overhead view of an extremely flooded New Orleans. In its follow-up, Michelle explains that the military is stepping in to help.

Meanwhile, California Yankee has a list of ways you can help Katrina's victims.

Daniel Drezner and Michele Catalano each look at what happens when television news lets its emotions get the best of itself and substitutes hyperbole for serious coverage of hurricanes. TV of course, is built on such emotionalism, but as Glenn Reynolds writes, decades of hype has its price:

God supposedly looks after fools and drunkards, and after watching some of the coverage from Bourbon Street, I'd say He will have his hands full tomorrow. But though some people might want to, in the words of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, "think of it as evolution in action," I think there's another issue here: The wages of hurricane hype.

News outlets generally, and cable news channels in particular, tend to overhype hurricanes. But while I hope that this will just be another case of media hysteria, I can't help feel that the previous wolf-crying played a major role in people's complacency.

If things turn out as badly as feared, complacency won't be a problem for a while. But I hope that people in the press will remember the wages of crying wolf in other contexts. Too much hype, and people tune out.

That's a cautionary note for other media to remember as well, of course.

Update: Welcome, Daou Report readers.

Michelle Malkin has another post on Hurricane Katrina that's loaded with linkage. It's titled, "The Destruction Begins", but ends on a reassuring note:

Fox News Channel's Shep Smith reports from the scene that "The French Quarter looks very good...New Orleans got lucky again..."

But not that lucky--portions of the roof have blown off the Superdome.

Will Collier updated his post on Hurricane Katrina (which we linked to earlier today) to include a National Weather Service forecast. I don't think I've ever read a more frightening forecast in my life--it sounds akin to waiting for an atomic bomb to drop. Will describes it as "very grim reading", which if anything, is an understatement:

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When Nina and I visited New Orleans last year and drove around the surrounding Louisiana countryside (sampling the odd drive-through daiquiri bar along the way...), we noted several roads with signs indicating that they're Hurricane Escape Routes.

They're getting used this weekend, Will Collier writes:

If you're in the area, get out, and do it now. This is not just another hurricane that might turn away and hit Galveston or Mobile instead. You can't afford to take that chance this time.

For everybody else, get ready to help. I don't mean to be a harbinger of doom here, and I'm certainly hoping that Katrina fizzles out, a la Dennis, but there's a very real possibility that this could be our tsunami.

Glenn Reynolds has more; and these guys are probably getting a workout today as well.

Mark Steyn uses the catch phrase from the new Batman movie, "It’s not what you feel inside that counts, it’s what you do that defines you", as a springboard to write on the "vast ongoing Tsunami Tshakedown":

A couple of days [after seeing Batman Begins] I read that Oxfam had paid the best part of a million bucks to Sri Lankan customs officials for the privilege of having 25 four-wheel-drive vehicles allowed into the country to get aid out to remote villages on washed-out roads hit by the Boxing Day tsunami. The Indian-made Mahindras stood idle on the dock in Colombo for a month as Oxfam’s representatives were buried under a tsunami of paperwork. Aside from the ‘tax’, they were charged £2,750 ‘demurrage’ for every day the vehicles sat in port.

This was merely the latest instalment in what’s becoming a vast ongoing Tsunami Tshakedown Of The Day retrospective — you can usually find it at the foot of page 37 in your daily paper, if at all. Fourteen Unicef ambulances sent to Indonesia spent two months sitting on the dock of the bay wasting time, as the late Otis Redding so shrewdly anticipated. Eight 20ft containers of Diageo drinking water shipped via the Red Cross arrived at the Indonesian port of Medan in January and are still there, because the Indonesian Red Cross lost the paperwork. Five hundred containers, representing one quarter of all aid sent to Sri Lanka since the tsunami hit on 26 December, are still sitting in port in Colombo, unclaimed or unprocessed. At Medan 1,500 containers of aid are still sitting on the dock.

The tsunami may have been unprecedented, but what followed was business as usual — the sloth and corruption of government, the feebleness of the brand-name NGOs, the compassion-exhibitionism of the transnational jet set. If we lived in a world where ‘it’s what you do that defines you’, we’d be heaping praise on the US and Australian militaries who in the immediate hours after the tsunami struck dispatched their forces to save lives, distribute food, restore water and power and communications.

Instead, a fellow Quebecker of my acquaintance sneered, ‘Can you believe those Americans? A humanitarian disaster strikes and they send an aircraft carrier!’ Er, well, yes. Because for large-scale humanitarian operations it helps to have a big boat handy. It seemed unlikely to me that even your average European politician would utter anything so fatuous in public, but Clare Short came close. The sight of Washington co-ordinating its disaster relief efforts with Australia, India and Japan outside the approved transnational structures was too much for her. ‘This initiative from America to set up four countries claiming to co-ordinate sounds like yet another attempt to undermine the UN,’ she told the BBC. ‘Only really the UN can do that job. It is the only body that has the moral authority.’

Whether or not it has ‘moral’ authority, the UN certainly can’t do the job. It becomes clearer every week that Western telly viewers threw far more money at tsunami relief than was required and that much of it has been siphoned off by wily customs inspectors and their ilk. If you really wanted to make an effective donation to a humanitarian organisation, you’d send your cheque to the Pentagon or the Royal Australian Navy.

Read the rest.

Matt Drudge currently has an above the masthead link to information about a 7.0 earthquake which occurred 90 miles off the coast, near the border between California and Oregon. He seems to be updating his homepage regularly, so click over for more details.

We're close to San Jose, (450 miles south), and needless to say, didn't feel anything. There was a tsunami warning, but it's been canceled.

Paul Thomasch of Reuters looks at moblogs, short for mobile weblogs:

Cranking out a column after a presidential debate or publishing a prize-worthy photo of the next catastrophe just got a whole lot easier -- no matter where or who you are.

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others have started to offer simple-to-use tools that let anybody with a digital camera or personal computer create blogs and produce homemade news.

When twinned with new technology like camera phones and handheld computers, it's now possible to publish pictures or jot notes from anywhere: the street, a beach, a restaurant. Seconds later the information is posted to a Website for the world to read -- and suddenly you've got a mobile web blog, or moblog.

"Text messaging and camera phone have put two powerful storytelling tools in the hands of millions of potential correspondents around the world," Robert Niles, editor of the Online Journalism Review at University of Southern California's journalism school, said in an e-mail exchange.

"So it is now inevitable that when something newsworthy happens in public, someone will be there to document that event online instantly."

The recent tsunami in South Asia gave evidence of moblogs' power and widespread use. Shortly after it struck, dispatches began appearing on blogs, often beating mainstream media to the unfolding story. One such blog was Waveofdestruction.org, created by Australian Geoffrey Huntley and made up of video and photos taken at the scene.

Naturally, this being Reuters, there's no mention in the piece of Glenn Reyolds or Pajamas Media, each of whom has been looking to make laptops, digital cameras and camcorders the centerpiece of one man reporting.

CNN shows the final photos taken by a Canadian couple vacationing at Khao Lak, a Thai resort, when the tsunami hit on the day after Christmas:

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Watching South Jersey get dumped with 10-inches of snow, I can't help but think of this classic piece by Virginia Postrel on how the weather creates very different mindsets in Silicon Valley and the East Coast.

Power Line says that the BBC is avoiding coverage of the superb US and Australian naval efforts in relieving the effects of the tsunami to keep the spotlight on the EU and (especially) the UN.

The BBC slanting the news--who'da thunk it!

How bad was the damage caused by the tsunami?

Just click on these horrific before and after aerial photos of Sri Lanka's Kalutara Beach.

Jerry Bowyer of Tech Central Station writes about a seemingly bizarre disparity. Last week's tsunami caused an enormous amount of death and distruction (150,000 people killed, and five million more homeless), but it made barely a ripple in the world's financial markets:

Tragically, it's because, economically speaking, the people who were washed away were, for the most part, not connected to the rest of the world. They were born, lived and died isolated from the world economy and largely forgotten by it. Their absence didn't affect world markets, because their presence had never affected world markets. Why is this a tragedy? Because if they had been connected to us, I think many of them would still be alive today. If they had spent the last 30 years trading rice or computer programming services or transcription services for dollars, then they would have been able to trade dollars for modern road-building materials, well built buildings and tsunami warning systems.

And yet, many on the far left in the US and Europe have been increasingly vocal about not providing these underdeveloped nations such modern infrastructures.

Arthur Chrenkoff looks at the top 12 dumbest tsunami quotes--so far.

I'm surprised that this one from September didn't get an honorable mention as a sneak preview of what was to come 'round Christmastime from the chattering classes.

Update: I had been meaning to link to this recent Frank Martin story where he sternly rebuts a colleague who said, "See, this is why George Bush is so dumb, there's a disaster in the world and he sends an Aircraft Carrier..."

Since Frank explains in detail why that's such an idiotic statement, this post seems like a good place to mention it.

The Wall Street Journal looks at what could possibly be the Next Big Thing for the Blogosphere: video blogging. It's gotten quite a jump start in popularity as a result of the Indian Ocean disaster.

As I wrote last month:

By 2008, expect lots of one or two-man online TV stations--or at least bloggers with lots of multimedia content. And when they start to catch on as personalities, I'd be very, very scared if I was a TV producer.

(Of course, the smart producers will try to co-opt the best of them--and their audience.)

Kofi Annan swings into action on tsunami relief--after skiing in Jackson Hole, Wyoming for three days.

Charles Johnson wonders (for about a nanosecond) if Kofi will receive the same treatment the Washington Post gave President Bush earlier this week.

Here's a round-up of a few year-end stories on this, the last day of 2004:

Cathy Seipp looks at the wacky year of big media in general.

Thomas Hibbs says it's been a Passionate year for film.

Patterico notes that it hasn't been the best of years for the L.A. Times.

The Media Research Center has their awards online for "The Best of Notable Quotables For 2004".

PoliPundit looks at the year's highlights and lowlights.

Commentary has an extremely good overview of the both party's presidential races.

Jeff Jacoby looks at 2004 in terms of political hate speech.

Jonah Goldberg looks at 2004 from his own unique perspective; "really hot green women" from Star Trek make an alas, all too brief cameo appearance.

RatherBiased lists their "Top Ten Media Stories of 2004".

All of which taken together is why Hugh Hewitt recently wrote that the year "brought doom to legacy media". Meanwhile Power Line makes a point that we've been making for over a year now:

No one blog can cover everything and many blogs, such as ours, deal primarily in opinion. But one can envisage a blogosphere that readers rely on to obtain essentially everything they now get from a newspaper or a newscast. The basic facts of a story would come from links to news services. The analysis would come from specialized blogs or non-specialized blogs that happen to have expertise in the subject area. The op-ed type opinions would come from the opinion blogs. I actually think we're pretty close to having such a blogosphere, although that's clearly a matter for debate.

Thus, the blogosphere is likely to replace the MSM for a growing number of consumers. Many others will continue to check out the MSM, but regard it much more skeptically (that is, take it much less seriously) than they have done in the past. It will be up to the MSM to decide whether it wishes to respond to these developments by undertaking radical change.

Finally, Peggy Noonan notes the hubris of journalists who write big "year in review" stories in mid-December, on the assumption that it's going to be a slow month and all of the big events of the year can safely be wrapped up (you know, like me):

The biggest story of the year happened just as big-thinking journalists went on vacation after filing their "Ten Biggest Stories of 2004" pieces. Life has a way of surprising us.

I thought the other day of Harrison Salisbury, and his response when asked what he'd learned after a lifetime as a reporter. "Expect the unexpected," he said. And of course we do, in the abstract, but when a story like this comes along in the particular, with maybe 80,000 dead, maybe more, we are aghast. And should be. Call it the force of nature or the hand of God or both; call it geological inevitability or the oldest story in the world (life is tragic) reasserting itself on a broader-than-usual level--however you see the earthquake and the tsunami, it reminds you that man is not in charge.

First there was the "it's global warming's fault" story in Reuters. Now, The Washington Post invents another biased angle:

Bush's decision at first to remain cloistered on his Texas ranch for the Christmas holiday rather than speak in person about the tragedy -- showed scant appreciation for the magnitude of suffering and for the rescue and rebuilding work facing such nations as Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and Indonesia.

Betsy Newmark demolishes the WaPo's take:

Note the lack of specific proper nouns to put names to those critics of Bush. Instead you get these generic words like "complaints" and "skeptics." In fact, let me translate what these words mean in journo-speak. They mean "bored journalists sitting in Crawford with nothing to write about and ticked off at spending their holiday at a dinky town in Texas." A secondary meaning is "foreign service diplo-weenies who have despised President Bush since he took office and are happy to bash him for anything and everything."

This helpful translation service will help you read Reuters' report on Bush's announcement that, contrary to the implication that he didn't care about the disaster, the US has put together a coalition of nations to organize aid efforts to the region.

Guys, when you're dealing with a story of this magnitude, why not write the first draft of the news straight--and then after the dust has settled, things have calmed down and we can clearly examine who did what, draft the editorials and opinion pieces that offer your slant on how the various players performed.

Update: Charles Johnson and his readers also have some thoughts.

For the first two years of its life, our blog ran on software provided by Blogger.com. It wasn't perfect, but it was quick and easy to set up, and got the job done.

How quick is it to set up? Via Hugh Hewitt, we find that there's already a South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Weblog, with news, ways you can help, and links to photos.

The New York Times writes:

For vivid reporting from the enormous zone of tsunami disaster, it was hard to beat the blogs.

The so-called blogosphere, with its personal journals published on the Web, has become best known as a forum for bruising political discussion and media criticism. But the technology proved a ready medium for instant news of the tsunami disaster and for collaboration over ways to help.

They're absolutely right. And as the Professor writes, "Nice to see people noticing".

And Todd Pearson notes:

Instapundit and the Moderate Voice, among others, are acting as traffic cops to get the wider blogosphere directed to the bloggers on site. It is truly fascinating to witness.

Indeed, to coin a phrase.

How bad and politically loaded has Reuters' coverage of the terrible earthquake and tsunami gotten? Almost as bad as this satire by Iowahawk:

Washington, DC - Pointing to the devastating weekend Indian Ocean tsunami that left over 24,000 dead, an international blue ribbon committee of climatologists and ecoscientists today issued a stark warning that man-made pollutants have increasingly "make water spirits angry."

The blunt conclusion prefaced a 2300 page meta-analysis of hundreds of scientific studies and computer models detailing links between human industrial activity and wrathful eco-deities. Entitled "Fire Bad: Fire Very Bad," the report warns that the planet faces additional catastrophies unless drastic regulatory action is taken to appease Earthen-furies.

"Unclean money devils anger sacred water spirit Tai-Waku," explained Martin Knudson of Scripps Oceanic Institute. "He now call angry to son the whale, 'make slap with anger-tails! Bring vengeance-surf to villagers!'"

Read More »

Glenn Reynolds has lots of links, and notes that a tsunami warning system could have saved many. Meanwhile, John Derbyshire puts the tremendous deathtoll into perspective:

In Sri Lanka alone, 3,000 people are known dead -- a 9/11-size death toll, in a nation with one tenth our population.

Yesterday's earthquake was an enormous 8.9 on the Richter Scale. Strangely enough, central California had a 6.5-scale quake last year around this time.

Update: The Wall Street Journal (subscription may be required to view) lists some of the staggering details of yesterday's quake:

The quake struck in the Indian Ocean off the northern tip of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, and measured 8.9 in magnitude, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The tsunamis, created by the force of the quake, soared as high as 30 feet in some places and radiated out across the Indian Ocean before crashing ashore in at least eight countries.

Late Sunday, the unofficial death toll exceeded 10,000, according to the Associated Press. The countries hit worst were Sri Lanka, India, Indonesia and Thailand. Deaths and missing persons were also reported in Malaysia, Bangladesh, the island nation of Maldives and Somalia.

* * * The quake was the biggest recorded since a 9.2 magnitude earthquake hit Alaska in 1964 and the fifth biggest since 1900, according to U.S. Geological Survey officials. Seismologists said it was caused when tectonic plates shifted and tore along a 1,000 kilometer stretch of the seabed.

Towering waves cut a wide swath of death across the region. Hundreds of bodies were found on beaches along India's southern state of Tamil Nadu, and more were expected to be washed in by the sea, the AP reported officials as saying. In Indonesia, which suffered at least 4,000 deaths in the sparsely populated region of Aceh, bodies washed inland by the ocean were left wedged in trees.

Update: The quake is now listed at 9.0 in magnitude by the US National Earthquake Information Center.

San Jose is awfully far from San Diego, and I wasn't even aware of a quake until I read Glenn's post, unlike the Christmas week quake near San Simeon, which I definitely felt. But several San Diego-era bloggers noticed this one, and The Professor has links to them.

Very Late Update: 10/30/07: This post is from 2004. For those searching for details on today's earthquake in San Jose via Google, click here.

Very Late Update: 7/29/08: The above post is from 2004. For those searching for details on today's earthquake in southern California via Google, click here.

At least three dead in the city of Paso Robles, California.

Minor damage to Vanderberg Air Force Base.

Pacific Gas & Electric, said about 40,000 customers were without power after the quake triggered rockslides that brought down power lines near San Luis Obispo, but no damage was reported at PG&E's Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, about 100 miles from the epicenter.

Buildings in San Jose and other parts of Silicon Valley swayed.

In San Francisco, the upper floors of the 20-story federal courthouse swayed for about 30 seconds.

Very Late Update: 10/30/07: This post is from 2003. For those searching for details on today's earthquake in San Jose via Google, click here.

There was an earthquake, 6.5 on the Richter scale, at about 11:15 in San Simeon (home of the Hearst Castle). I typically blog out of my home office in a San Jose suburb 130 miles or so away, and I definitely felt it. My office chair began to feel like it was pivoting on the joint that connects the wheels to the bottom of the chair, and then I noticed the Venetian blinds swaying a bit back and forth.

Here's a map of the epicenter, as well as details of the quake.

UPDATE: Drudge has the police gumball on, and links to this report.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Police gumball off, but he's doing continuous updates. Blogger's being a bit hinkey, but it was like that before the quake, when I uploaded the post below.

A THOUGHT: Hey, this Internet thing seems to be holding up pretty good. Of course, it was designed to handle much bigger bangs than this one.

ANOTHER OTHER UPDATE: Here's a report from the AP wire.

The Bay Area just had a 5.2 on the Richter scale earthquake.

For my wife and I, it felt like a short, slight rolling feeling, followed quickly by a longer rolling motion. The whole thing was over in about 30 seconds, with no obvious damage to our, or our neighbor's houses. The local news of course, is probably still covering it. As my wife said to me, they treat an earthquake that causes little or no damage, and no deaths with about the same coverage a snow storm back east would get that cripples traffic, kills people, and closes schools.

The last earthquake I felt here was about two years ago, on a Sunday while my wife, "Group Captain Lionel Mandrake" (on his first "tour of duty" in the Bay Area) and I were at a local theater watching "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon". I always refer to that as "the movie that had everything": screaming toddlers, loud adult patrons, cell phones ringing, and in the middle of it all, a 3.0 earthquake--which was more of a quick THUMP than this rolling quake.

Speaking of snowstorms and earthquakes, here's Virginia Postrel's take on them--and interestingly enough, how they influence how California and Boston do business.