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Obama: "Let Them Eat Steak"
By Ed Driscoll · February 1, 2009 11:51 PM · Oh, That Liberal Media! · Run To Daylight · The Perfect Storm
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. Obama Dozed, People Froze!
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?"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: This Isn't The First Time The Pressure Cooker Popped
By Ed Driscoll · January 25, 2009 10:54 AM · Bobos In Paradise · Hollywood, Interrupted · Liberal Fascism · Oh, That Liberal Media! · Radical Chic · The Memory Hole · The Perfect Storm · The Return of the Primitive
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.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.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. And Speaking Of Classless
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. "In Louisiana, Voters Oust An Indicted Congressman"
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.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.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? Appetite For Destruction
By Ed Driscoll · November 19, 2008 05:39 PM · Bobos In Paradise · The Perfect Storm · The Return of the Primitive
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: Mirror, Mirror
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. New Silicon Graffiti Video: "Like A Hurricane..."
By Ed Driscoll · September 18, 2008 02:17 AM · Ed TV · The Making of the President · The Memory Hole · The New Puritans · The Perfect Storm · The Return of the Primitive
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.) "Smartest Man In Pop Music" Arrested At LAX
By Ed Driscoll · September 11, 2008 04:57 PM · All You Need Is Ears · Hollywood, Interrupted · The Memory Hole · The Perfect Storm
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.Video here. Incidentally, "Give me the f**king videotape" seems to be quite a timely catchphrase at the moment. 9/11 And The Overculture
By Ed Driscoll · September 11, 2008 02:28 PM · Bobos In Paradise · Democracy In America · Oh, That Liberal Media! · The Future and its Enemies · The Memory Hole · The New, New Journalism · The Perfect Storm · War And Anti-War
![]() 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.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.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."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. Quote Of The Day II
By Ed Driscoll · September 2, 2008 12:32 PM · Oh, That Liberal Media! · The Making of the President · The Perfect Storm · The Return of the Primitive
"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. Quote Of The Day
"Did God intend Gustav to help one party or the other? We do not know. He did not respond to our requests for comment." Like A Hurricane
By Ed Driscoll · September 1, 2008 05:34 AM · An Army Of Davids · The Making of the President · The New, New Journalism · The Perfect Storm
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. The Macaca Boomerang
By Ed Driscoll · August 30, 2008 09:09 PM · An Army Of Davids · Liberal Fascism · Oh, That Liberal Media! · The Making of the President · The Memory Hole · The New, New Journalism · The Perfect Storm
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.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. When The Levee Breaks
By Ed Driscoll · August 17, 2008 04:29 PM · The Perfect Storm
AP reports, "Dam breaks near Grand Canyon; hundreds evacuate." By Ed Driscoll · July 29, 2008 11:53 AM · The Perfect Storm
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.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.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." To Paraphrase Robert Plant (Or Maybe Memphis Minnie)...
By Ed Driscoll · June 21, 2008 07:05 PM · Muggeridge's Law · The Making of the President · The Perfect Storm
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.) Iowa: Whining, Looting, Inaction Not Allowed
By Ed Driscoll · June 17, 2008 01:25 PM · The Perfect Storm
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.Meanwhile, Iowa-based LibertyPundit has asked for your help; if you can hit his tip jar, please do so. Potemkin Earthquake?
By Ed Driscoll · May 13, 2008 01:09 PM · The Future and its Enemies · The Memory Hole · The Perfect Storm
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.A totalitarian regime papering over its country's ongoing crises during an Olympic year? Maybe I should have called this post, "Recreate '38". Talk About First-Hand Reporting
By Ed Driscoll · May 12, 2008 11:19 PM · The New, New Journalism · The Perfect Storm · The Return of the Primitive
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.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.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. Math Is Hard!
By Ed Driscoll · May 11, 2008 04:03 PM · Muggeridge's Law · Oh, That Liberal Media! · The Assault On Reason · The Perfect Storm
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.) Well...That Was Fun
By Ed Driscoll · October 30, 2007 08:27 PM · The Perfect Storm
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.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". Hollywood Nihilism, Part Deux
By Ed Driscoll · October 24, 2007 09:01 PM · Bobos In Paradise · Hollywood, Interrupted · Oh, That Liberal Media! · The Perfect Storm · The Return of the Primitive
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.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. "How Many Bodies Are In The Qualcomm Freezers?"
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. "3. Kill A Lot Of People, Then Stop"
By Ed Driscoll · October 12, 2007 08:55 PM · Bobos In Paradise · The Perfect Storm · War And Anti-War
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.To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, read the whole thing, follow the links, repeat the dosage. Storm Of Malpractice
By Ed Driscoll · September 5, 2007 12:12 AM · Oh, That Liberal Media! · The Memory Hole · The Perfect Storm
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.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.)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.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.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? America's Most Dangerous City
By Ed Driscoll · August 28, 2007 03:45 PM · The Future and its Enemies · The Making of the President · The Perfect Storm · The Return of the Primitive
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.Paging Mayor Giuliani--your next stump speech awaits. A Bridge Too Far
By Ed Driscoll · July 31, 2007 11:07 PM · The Perfect Storm
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. Fire Make Sea Gods Jump
By Ed Driscoll · July 10, 2007 10:03 PM · All You Need Is Ears · The Assault On Reason · The Perfect Storm · The Return of the Primitive
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!”Maybe Petra was simply trying to fly under radar with a subversive Iowahawk reference... Down The Memory Hole At CNN
By Ed Driscoll · May 15, 2007 04:13 PM · Oh, That Liberal Media! · The Memory Hole · The Perfect Storm
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: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.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 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? (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. Lock And Load In NOLA
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. Denver Versus New Orleans: Denver Wins
By Ed Driscoll · January 7, 2007 12:30 PM · The Perfect Storm
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. A Mighty Wind
By Ed Driscoll · November 16, 2006 11:15 AM · Democracy In America · Oh, That Liberal Media! · The Perfect Storm
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.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."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. Fire Make Sea Gods Angry, The Sequel
By Ed Driscoll · October 2, 2006 02:12 PM · The Future and its Enemies · The Perfect Storm · The Return of the Primitive
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."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.Perhaps. It's All About The Narrative
By Ed Driscoll · September 4, 2006 05:12 PM · Oh, That Liberal Media! · The Perfect Storm · War And Anti-War
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.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.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: Read More » Hole In The Head
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.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). Legacy Media Katrina Reporting = Impressionistic Falderol
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.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. If You Take Your Pick, Be Careful How You Choose It
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. The Spewage Rising Limited Edition Les Paul
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.) Germans? Pearl Harbor? Part Deux
By Ed Driscoll · February 2, 2006 11:21 AM · Democracy In America · Oh, That Liberal Media! · The Perfect Storm
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". Churchgoers Mark Christmas in New Orleans
By Ed Driscoll · December 25, 2005 01:30 PM · The Holiday That Dare Not Speak Its Name · The Perfect Storm
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.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". Will The MSM Learn From Their Botched Katrina Coverage?
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.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.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. It May Be A First Draft, But It's Written In Stone
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. Well, It Certainly Worked In Berlin And Tokyo
By Ed Driscoll · December 1, 2005 09:41 AM · The Perfect Storm
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. When The Levee Breaks, Momma You Got To Move
By Ed Driscoll · November 30, 2005 09:11 PM · The Perfect Storm
Division of Labour links to an interesting graphic tracking the relocation of Katrina survivors. Seven Dead, Millions of Floridians In Darkness After Wilma
By Ed Driscoll · October 24, 2005 10:54 PM · The Perfect Storm
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. When The Saints Go Marching Out
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.Can Texas handle three NFL teams? California and New York certainly manage to. Redddd Raaaaain, Reddddd Raaaainnnn isss Coming Down!!!
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.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.) A Modest Proposal
By Ed Driscoll · October 11, 2005 05:40 PM · The Perfect Storm
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...) Home Security
By Ed Driscoll · October 9, 2005 07:48 PM · The Perfect Storm
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. Ship of Sin, Superdome of Spin
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. TCS On Katrina Updated
Tech Central Station continues its thorough job in analyzing Katrina and its aftermath. Click on over to read their coverage. "There's A Whole Bunch Of Stuff Out There That Never Happened At The Dome"
By Ed Driscoll · October 5, 2005 12:05 AM · Oh, That Liberal Media! · The New, New Journalism · The Perfect Storm
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.) "The Question Comes Back"
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.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.Indeed, to use the successor media's most popular adverb. The Lawsuit That Sank New Orleans
By Ed Driscoll · September 26, 2005 10:53 AM · Bobos In Paradise · The Future and its Enemies · The Perfect Storm · The Return of the Primitive
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.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.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. Nuking Hurricanes
By Ed Driscoll · September 21, 2005 02:13 PM · The Perfect Storm
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. Purity Of Essence
By Ed Driscoll · September 20, 2005 11:02 AM · Oh, That Liberal Media! · The Gulag Archipelago · The Perfect Storm
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.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: Read More » Newsweek: A National Shame
By Ed Driscoll · September 19, 2005 04:42 PM · Bobos In Paradise · Oh, That Liberal Media! · The Perfect Storm
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.Don't hold your breath. Indian Summer Silly Season, Part II
By Ed Driscoll · September 16, 2005 09:23 PM · Muggeridge's Law · Oh, That Liberal Media! · Radical Chic · The Perfect Storm · The Return of the Primitive · War And Anti-War
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:Hinderaker concludes: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. 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. Indian Summer Silly Season
By Ed Driscoll · September 15, 2005 12:19 PM · Muggeridge's Law · The Perfect Storm · The Return of the Primitive
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. The Role Of Cassandra Will Be Played By Time Magazine
By Ed Driscoll · September 15, 2005 12:25 AM · The Perfect Storm
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. Our Absolutely Fabulist Media, Revisited
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:So let's look at how Webster's definition of the word applies to the mainstream media's coverage of Hurricane Katrina.resembling or suggesting a fable: of an incredible, astonishing, or exaggerated nature [fabulous wealth] 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."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 » The 20 Most Obnoxious Hurricane Katrina Quotes
By Ed Driscoll · September 13, 2005 03:04 PM · Muggeridge's Law · Oh, That Liberal Media! · The Perfect Storm
"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. "Go Ahead, Punk, Make My Earl Grey."
By Ed Driscoll · September 12, 2005 05:50 PM · The Perfect Storm
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.Do I even have to say, read the rest? Life Imitates Oliver Stone
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".) Off The Tracks
By Ed Driscoll · September 11, 2005 06:05 PM · The Perfect Storm
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.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. "Does Anybody...Know Anything About Buses?!"
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. As Sung To The Tune Of Junior Walker's "Shotgun"
By Ed Driscoll · September 10, 2005 08:06 PM · Hollywood, Interrupted · Muggeridge's Law · The Perfect Storm
Armed and dangerously narcissistic, Sean Penn swings into double-barreled action. No sign of the horrible red cup of doom, though. Katrina Snuff Films: This Is CNN
By Ed Driscoll · September 10, 2005 09:35 AM · Oh, That Liberal Media! · The Perfect Storm · War And Anti-War
![]() 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.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.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. "FEMA Is Never Going To Operate With The Agility Of FedEx"
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.Last week, Professor Bainbridge had a post on outsourcing disaster relief; certainly sounds worth trying. Exit To Idiocy
By Ed Driscoll · September 9, 2005 12:52 AM · Bobos In Paradise · The Perfect Storm · The Return of the Primitive
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. New Category: The Perfect Storm
By Ed Driscoll · September 8, 2005 11:43 PM · The Perfect Storm
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. When The Moral Levee Breaks
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. This Will Be Inevitable
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. The Food Chain of Suffering Doesn’t End 'Til The Last Lawsuit
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.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". When The Next One Hits
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.And there's always Olbermann. Katrina: 1999
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... TCS On Katrina Updated
Tech Central Station has new items online in their section devoted to Katrina and its aftermath. ![]() Redneck Hurricane
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.No? Well, read the rest. Update: Related, if less satirical, thoughts from Jonah Goldberg. Life Under The Anti-Giuliani
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."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?"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. The End Of The End Of History
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.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. Life Imitates Dire Straits
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. "I'm OK" Registry
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.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. Giuliani Time
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.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
By Ed Driscoll · September 5, 2005 09:49 PM · Democracy In America · The Perfect Storm · The Return of the Primitive
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.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". Sean Penn Swings Into Action!
By Ed Driscoll · September 5, 2005 04:58 PM · Hollywood, Interrupted · Muggeridge's Law · The Perfect Storm
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. Saints Home Opener Becomes Monday Night Doubleheader
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 Cowboys/'Skins game is scheduled to include the induction of the Cowboys' famed "triplets" at halftime. Bringing New Meaning To "NO PD"
By Ed Driscoll · September 4, 2005 10:11 AM · The Perfect Storm
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. The Pressure Cooker Theory Revisited
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). The Timetable
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. "The Infamous Ray Nagin Memorial Motor Pool"
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.Read the whole thing. More TCS On Katrina
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. ![]() Sung To The Tune Of The Who's "Substitute"--Updated
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.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 To New Orleans
By Ed Driscoll · September 3, 2005 02:10 PM · The Perfect Storm
"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.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. DirecTV Launches Katrina Information Channel
By Ed Driscoll · September 3, 2005 01:51 AM · The Perfect Storm
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.Meanwhile, the Pajamas Media beta-site has suspended its member profiles for the weekend, and is providing information on Katrina as well. Good To See
By Ed Driscoll · September 2, 2005 05:17 PM · The Perfect Storm
"More Than 3 Dozen Countries Pledge Assistance" Saints To Play Opener At Giants Stadium
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. Coloring Katrina
By Ed Driscoll · September 2, 2005 03:12 PM · The Perfect Storm
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... NOLA View
By Ed Driscoll · September 2, 2005 12:19 PM · The Perfect Storm
Charles Johnson writes, "Messages from people in New Orleans who desperately need help are being posted at the NOLA View weblog". Flood Aid
![]() 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. Disaster Planning--Or Lack Thereof
By Ed Driscoll · September 2, 2005 11:50 AM · The Perfect Storm
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. Astrodome Blogging
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. Life (As Usual) Imitates Airplane
"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. "State Of Anarchy"
Cities Living On Borrowed Time
By Ed Driscoll · September 2, 2005 10:16 AM · The Perfect Storm
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.Read the rest. TCS On Katrina
Pictures of Devastation
By Ed Driscoll · September 1, 2005 09:43 PM · The Perfect Storm
Some incredible photos of the aftermath of Katrina, over at the Digital Irony blog. Fats Found
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. NFL Commissioner: Saints Unlikely To Play In New Orleans
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.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. God's Eye View
By Ed Driscoll · September 1, 2005 05:33 PM · The Perfect Storm
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. Alabama Also Hard-Hit By Katrina
By Ed Driscoll · September 1, 2005 03:07 PM · The Perfect Storm
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.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. "The Angry Left And The Looters"
By Ed Driscoll · September 1, 2005 01:41 PM · Bobos In Paradise · The Perfect Storm · The Return of the Primitive
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.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. "Will New Orleans Recover?"
By Ed Driscoll · September 1, 2005 01:29 PM · The Perfect Storm
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: Read More » Fats Domino Is Missing in New Orleans
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! Quote of the Day
By Ed Driscoll · September 1, 2005 12:49 PM · The Perfect Storm
"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. Shooting At Superdome Rescue Helicopters?!
By Ed Driscoll · September 1, 2005 12:37 PM · Radical Chic · The Perfect Storm · The Return of the Primitive
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.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. "Do Not Self-Dispatch"
By Ed Driscoll · September 1, 2005 12:34 PM · The Perfect Storm
Thinking of loading up the SUV with supplies and heading down to the Big Easy? Don't, says FEMA. Inventing Your Own Religion
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.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."Hey, that was Page's shtick, 30 years ago! Homeless Saints Could Face Vagabond Season
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: Read More » Talk About Taking Things "Day By Day"
By Ed Driscoll · August 31, 2005 09:26 PM · The Perfect Storm
![]() 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. Amazon Keeps Its Powder Dry While The Gulf Floods--UPDATED
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:Elsewhere, Michelle writes:[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.) Question on many readers' minds: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. Exploiting Katrina
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.Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt writes that Katrina shouldn't be exploited by ratings-worshipers either. Update: Geez, speaking of exploiting Katrina... Mississippi: Death Toll Rising
By Ed Driscoll · August 31, 2005 12:12 AM · The Perfect Storm
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...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. Friends In Need
By Ed Driscoll · August 30, 2005 09:59 PM · The Perfect Storm
Glenn Reynolds has a list of charities involved in Katrina-related relief efforts. Give whatever you can. CNN Lets The Snark Fly
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?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.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”.Exactly. Minimalist Photo Captioning
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. Fire Make Sea Gods Angry--Revisited
"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.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.Don Singleton has some related thoughts and links. Katrina's Aftermath
By Ed Driscoll · August 30, 2005 09:44 AM · The Perfect Storm
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!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. "Hurricane Porn"
By Ed Driscoll · August 29, 2005 09:17 PM · The Perfect Storm
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.That's a cautionary note for other media to remember as well, of course. Update: Welcome, Daou Report readers. Katrina Update
By Ed Driscoll · August 29, 2005 11:04 AM · The Perfect Storm
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. My God
By Ed Driscoll · August 28, 2005 10:06 PM · The Perfect Storm
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: Read More » Cat-5: It's Not Just For LAN Cables Anymore
By Ed Driscoll · August 28, 2005 12:48 PM · The Perfect Storm
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.Glenn Reynolds has more; and these guys are probably getting a workout today as well. The Vast Tsunami Tshakedown
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.Read the rest. Earthquake Off California Coast
By Ed Driscoll · June 14, 2005 09:08 PM · The Perfect Storm
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. Mo Better Blogs: Homemade News Hits The Road With "Moblogs"
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.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. Talk About Not Knowing What Hit You
By Ed Driscoll · February 25, 2005 12:53 AM · The Perfect Storm
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: Read More » Resilience Vs. Anticipation
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. Don't Mention The Navy
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! Before And After
By Ed Driscoll · January 7, 2005 01:01 PM · The Perfect Storm
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. Tsunami-nomics
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. The Dirty Dozen
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. Video Blogging Breaks Out With Tsunami Scenes
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. Not Exactly Like Batman When The Bat-Signal Flashes
By Ed Driscoll · December 31, 2004 05:26 PM · The Perfect Storm
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. Meanwhile, Over In Big Media
Here's a round-up of a few year-end stories on this, the last day 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.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. More Bias In Tsunami Reporting
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."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. The Beauty of Blogger
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.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. Top Scientists Warn: Fire Make Sea Gods Angry!
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." Read More » Christmas Day Earthquake
By Ed Driscoll · December 26, 2004 02:15 PM · The Perfect Storm
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.Update: The quake is now listed at 9.0 in magnitude by the US National Earthquake Information Center. BLOGGING TODAY'S EARTHQUAKE IN SAN DIEGO
By Ed Driscoll · June 15, 2004 04:51 PM · The Perfect Storm
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. EARTHQUAKE UPDATE
By Ed Driscoll · December 22, 2003 03:30 PM · The Perfect Storm
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. WHEN IRWIN ALLEN MEETS CITIZEN KANE
By Ed Driscoll · December 22, 2003 11:34 AM · The Perfect Storm
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. WELLLLLL...THAT WAS INTERESTING!
By Ed Driscoll · May 13, 2002 11:03 PM · The Perfect Storm
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. |
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