We haven’t had a chance to review all the numbers, but we noticed right away that some of the figures were contrived to include Katrina in the AP’s list of the Top Ten US disasters. The list includes the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 as number seven on the ghoulish Hit Parade with 700 deaths. Here’s what the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory says about that:

The frequently quoted value of 700 deaths caused by the earthquake and fire is now believed to underestimate the total loss of life by a factor of 3 or 4. Most of the fatalities occurred in San Francisco, and 189 were reported elsewhere.

The US Geological Survey estimates the number of deaths at 3000. If it took us about three seconds to spot this error, do you think there might be an agenda at work to make a bigger deal of Katrina than, sadly enough, it is? Or is it just incompetence at the AP? Based on their past history, documented extensively here and by John Hinderaker, we’ll go with bias.

Like you, in the aftermath of Katrina, we are dismayed by the depressing number of African Americans — 72% — who think that President Bush does not care about black people. But, in fairness, what do we have a right to expect after the rhetoric of the Jesse Jacksons, Al Sharptons, Louis Farrakhans, Cynthia McKinneys, Maxine Waters, Julian Bonds, and Randall Robinsons of this world? What can anyone reasonably expect when there are TV ads implying that George Bush did not care about the horrible murder of James Byrd or that black churches will burn if the GOP wins elections? It would be interesting to chart the time the leaders spend lambasting George Bush and the GOP versus their time addressing the problem that 70% of births are illegitimate among African Americans. This is of interest because, statistically in America, all you have to do to stay out of poverty is: (1) graduate from high school; (2) get a job; and (3) have no children out of wedlock.

We are here to point out that these black leaders have chosen in their rhetoric and actions a foolish poitical strategy. Here are the statistics as calculated by James Taranto:

The chart is a little hard to read, but the upshot is this: 59.8% of the American people believe that Bush cares about the fate of African Americans in New Orleans, and did not slow or hamper relief efforts because the recipients were black. Therefore: even if the black leaders convinced 100% of African Americans that Bush and the GOP were racist, it would not change majority opinion. Taranto’s point is that for playing the race card to work politically, it not only has to convince blacks, it has to influence white voters — and this is not happening.

Our point is somewhat different: the extreme and surreal rhetoric chosen by the African American / Democratic leadership is increasingly failing to influence its target audience in the black community. As the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies pointed out in October 2004, the number of African Americans who said they were willing to vote for George Bush soared to 18% in the most recent election cycle:

In a surprising contradiction, more African Americans say they are willing to vote for President George W. Bush on November 2, even though his favorable rating is lower now than it was four years ago, according to a new poll released today by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. In the Joint Center’s 2004 National Opinion Poll – Politics, 18 percent of African Americans say they would vote for President Bush, doubling the nine percent that said they would support him in the Joint Center’s pre-election 2000 poll. However, Senator John Kerry still beats President Bush among African American voters (69 to 18 percent).

Rich Lowry in NRO says that, according to exit polling, Bush’s numbers only inched up in 2004 over 2000. Whether the difference between in-person polling and telephone polling influenced the results is impossible to tell, but in any event the direction was clear and it was positive for the GOP:

The numbers fell off on Election Day. According to the exit polls, Bush’s support among blacks nationally inched up only slightly from 9 percent in 2000 to 11 percent in 2004. But the kind of dramatic movement in the pre-election Joint Center survey showed up in the battleground states where the GOP invested the most resources to woo black voters. Bush went from 7 percent of the black vote in Florida in 2000 to 13 percent in 2004. In all-important Ohio, Bush’s support among blacks rose from 10 percent to 16 percent.

In the near term, the Republican Party has no chance with the 72% of the African American population who say that he does not care about black people. But the GOP has clearly been making inroads in the other 28%. As Thomas Lifson has pointed out in the American Thinker, Bush’s performance in 2004 marked a 37.5% increase in black votes for him, very important in a voting bloc that accounts for roughly a quarter of national Democratic vote totals.

We prefer to see the glass as not mostly empty. If the glass goes from 8% full to 11% full, as it has, and holds the prospect of reaching 18% or 28% full, that would be incredible progress.

An author’s description in Business Week in a hit piece on Bush and Katrina:

Leo Hindery Jr. is managing partner of InterMedia Partners, a private investment firm. He is former CEO of the YES Network and CEO of TCI and its successor, AT&T Broadband.

The author’s description after an evisceration of Business Week by John Hinderaker:

Leo Hindery Jr. is a former CEO of telecom carrier Global Crossing, has been active as a Democratic fund-raiser and organizer, and worked on Dick Gephardt’s Presidential campaign in 2004. He’s currently managing partner of InterMedia Partners, a private investment firm. He’s also a former CEO of the YES Network and CEO of TCI and its successor, AT&T Broadband.

You’d think that when a guy is a Democratic Party activist and fundraiser, who gave $160,000 to Democrats in 2004, and was a candidate for Chairman of the Democratic National Committee last year, there would be some mention the first time around. You’d think. Kudos to John Hinderaker and shame on Business Week. (HT: Larwyn)

Get Oliphant his snuff box and the handkerchief he keeps in his sleeve. Here is his snooty self on Roberts:

I have no doubt that his encyclopedic knowledge of constitutional history includes a detailed understanding of Plessy v. Ferguson, the landmark abomination that enshrined segregation in 1896 for another 58 years under the delusional mantra of ”separate but equal.” It wouldn’t surprise me if Judge Roberts could quote sentences from Justice Henry Brown’s majority opinion on behalf of eight brethren and even from John Harlan’s passionate dissent.

But I doubt very much that Roberts knows beans about Homer Plessy, and I can imagine him being tripped up even if asked Plessy’s first name. It is that human face of justice, or injustice, that concerns me, and, from the available record anyway, has never interested Roberts.

What interests us is Oliphant’s assumption that Roberts would be more familiar with the majority opinion in Plessy than in John Marshall Harlan’s famous dissent, from which this:

[I]n view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is colorblind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.

In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved. It is therefore to be regretted that this high tribunal, the final expositor of the fundamental law of the land, has reached the conclusion that it is competent for a state to regulate the enjoyment by citizens of their civil rights solely upon the basis of race.

In my opinion, the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case.

Harlan’s lone and amazingly prescient dissent is what is memorable about Plessy today, not the majority opinion. Harlan, who was a former slave owner, is credited with coining the phrase: our constitution is colorblind. He served as an inspiration for generations to follow. This from an article by Charles Thompson, available at the University of Louisville, where his papers reside):

Even a full century after its delivery in 1896, Harlan’s eloquent defense of civil rights for black Americans retains its power. Indeed, it was a fount of inspiration for one of the great lawyers of the century, the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. At a 1993 ceremony in memory of Marshall, a colleague, Constance Baker Motley, recalled that when Marshall was the lead attorney in the NAACP’s fight to end segregation, he picked himself up in low moments by reading aloud from Harlan’s dissent. And he cited it in Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 case that finally overturned Plessy v. Ferguson. As quoted in Judicial Enigma, a new biography of Harlan, Judge Motley said: “Marshall admired the courage of Harlan more than any justice who has ever sat on the Supreme Court. Even Chief Justice Earl Warren’s forthright and moving decision for the court in Brown did not affect Marshall in the same way. Earl Warren was writing for a unanimous Supreme Court. Harlan was a solitary and lonely figure writing for posterity.”

Oliphant’s is the very worst kind of liberal condescension. It appears to us that, because Roberts is a conservative — and Republican, as was Justice Harlan — he is characterized by Oliphant as somehow implicitly racist. Roberts, summa at Harvard College and subsequently editor of the Law Review, is not credited with the level of knowledge that can be found among average, well-educated Americans in the matter of Plessy v. Ferguson. Frankly we thought that even someone like Oliphant would grant Roberts better.

A lot less of this and this:

And a lot more of this:

UPDATE from Mark Steyn:

As UPI’s Jim Bennett wrote, “The Era of Osama lasted about an hour and a half or so, from the time the first plane hit the tower to the moment the General Militia of Flight 93 reported for duty.”

Exactly right. Six decades earlier, the American people had to wait four months between Pearl Harbor and the Doolittle Raid. But September 11th was Pearl Harbor and the Doolittle Raid wrapped up in 90 minutes. Flight 93 was supposed to be the fourth of Osama’s flying bombs, its destination either the White House or the Capitol. Had it reached its target, the following morning’s headlines would have included “The Vice-President is still among the missing, presumed dead”. Had Flight 93 sheared the top off the White House, that would have been the day’s “money shot”, as it was in the alien-invasion flick Independence Day – the shattered façade, smoke billowing, the seat of American power reduced to rubble.

But the dopey hijackers assigned to Flight 93 were halfway across the continent before they made their move and started meandering back east. And, by the time the passengers began calling home on their cellphones, their families knew what had happened in New York. Todd Beamer couldn’t get through to his wife, so the last conversation of his life was with the GTE telephone operator, who stayed on the line with him and overheard his final words: “Are you ready, guys? Let’s roll!” And then a brave group of passengers jumped their hijackers and, at the cost of their own lives, prevented that day’s grim toll rising even higher.

Precisely our thinking — let’s honor the General Militia of Flight 93.

Salman Rushdie has a proposal for, as he calls it an Enlightenment in Islam or a Reformation, an accommodation of the religion to the modern world. It is an ambitious project (via Times of London), and would take place first in the non-Islamic world:

Reformed Islam would reject conservative dogmatism and accept that, among other things, women are fully equal to men; that people of other religions, and of no religion, are not inferior to Muslims; that differences in sexual orientation are not to be condemned, but accepted as aspects of human nature; that anti-Semitism is not OK; and that the repression of free speech by the thin-skinned ideology of easily-taken “offence” must be replaced by genuine, robust, anything-goes debate in which there are no forbidden ideas or no-go areas.

Reformed Islam would encourage diaspora Muslims to emerge from their self-imposed ghettoes and stop worrying so much about locking up their daughters. It would emerge from the intellectual ghetto of literalism and subservience to mullahs and ulema, allowing open, historically based scholarship to emerge from the shadows to which the madrassas and seminaries have condemned it.

We wish him well, and hope this is the beginning of something. We long for the day when terms like Dar al-Harb disappear from common currency.

From the AP:

Authorities raised Louisiana’s death toll to 197 on Sunday, and recovery of corpses continued.

Yes, it was bad, we all know that. But the hype — 10,000 — has been out of control.

We’re shorting XOM, the chart of which is pictured above — its out-of-line overperformance easy to see. Stocks do not overperform, as a rule, over a very long period of time.

Steve Forbes says oil prices will drop in mere months to $30-40 per barrel, and we are paying attention, despite the naysayers. He may be wrong, but many fundamentals support him:

(1) the Saudis don’t want oil at this price for their long term interests; (2) China, the massive marginal consumer of oil, has an export-led economy which has grown by 9% per annum over the last 20 years, but it is hard to see where double-digit growth is coming from now; (3) (key item) China has, in our view, not reached Walt Rostow’s take-off point of self-sustaining internal growth — the collapse of China’s steel industry, the low 15% value added in Chinese manufacturing, the corruption of its banking system, and the massive unproductivity of capital investment in China (eg, $5 to get $1 in sales) are evidence of this — therefore, any significant slowdown of external demand will have substantial reprecussions in domestic Chinese consumption patterns; (4) China’s 40% increase in oil imports over the last few years is therefore unsustainable; (5) Americans are rich, but $65 oil is killing the swing consumers of oil in many countries around the world; and (6) our old colleague, Barton Biggs, predicted a China hiccup three years ago the same way he predicted Japan’s market meltdown three years before it happened — and Barton is almost never wrong about big picture appraisals like this.

Two items are key in our analysis. The first is incontrovertible, that every poorer country in the world is getting slaughtered by high oil prices. Could this result in a 2-3% reduction in world oil demand? We think so. The second factor is China, the pivotal source of most of the increased demand for oil over the last two years, and where we posit that export-led growth may slow considerably, at least for a little while. Of course China, with its commitment to a minimum 7% growth to maintain internal stability, its $600+ billion in forex reserves and an economy which may be more internally self-sustaining than we give it credit for, can do much to enhance domestic demand, but it has no incentive to influence that demand so that it fattens the coffers of Arab sheikhs, unless it is critical to the growth strategy for China.

We may be right or we may be wrong about the factors influencing changes in price for oil. But this remains a constant: commodities, particularly those with inelastic supply curves, suffer wild increases — and decreases — in price, when market conditions change swiftly.

Wall Street is great at many things. One thing it is not good at is forecasting discontinuities. In August 1987, some traders bought puts on elements in the roaring bull market of the time. In October, the market plunged 508 points in a single day, making them wildly rich, and proving, as the Great Crash did, that the market often fails to predict major, discontinuous, changes of direction. Wall Street currently is not forecasting anything other than up, up, up in the price of oil (which, incidentally, we last experienced in stocks on CNBC in early 2000 when the NASDAQ was 5000 — as oppsed to 40% of that today). We may be wrong, but this oil market smells fishy to us, and we’re going to put our money where our mouth is.

You will be pleased to see that trains were offered to New Orleans to help people evacuate, but the city declined them. Further, in the course of her meltdown, soon to be former Senator Landrieu says that the evacuation of New Orleans did not proceed because the mayor of a 67% African American community has “a hard time getting….people to work on a sunny day.” Since she repeated the comment three times, it was obviously meant as a talking point. Perhaps it is, for her future opponent or Ray Nagin’s. (HT: Political Teen, Brendan Loy, Powerline)

Steyn puts our war in context:

It wasn’t a “tragic event” or even one of a series of unfortunate events. It was an “attack,” an “act of war.” I sat at the lunch counter with a guy who’d tuned out the same station on the grounds that “I never heard my grampa talk about ‘the tragedy of Pearl Harbor.’ ” But, consciously or otherwise, a serious effort was under way to transform the nature of the event, to soften it into a touchy-feely, huggy-weepy one-off. As I wrote last year: “The president believes there’s a war on. The Dems think 9/11 is like the 1998 ice storm or a Florida hurricane — just one of those things.”

I didn’t know the half of it. If an act of war is like a hurricane — freak of nature, get over it — it’s evidently no great leap to believe that a hurricane is an act of war. Katrina was thus “allowed” to happen because Bush “hates black people.” The Army Corps of Engineers was instructed to blow up New Orleans’ 17th Street levee so that the flood would kill the poor people rather than destroy the valuable tourist real estate.

Whatever. As part of their ongoing post-9/11 convergence, the left now talks about Bush the way the wackier Islamists talk about Jews. I thought the Australian imam who warned Muslims the other week to lay off the bananas because the Zionists are putting poison in them was pretty loopy. But is he really any more bananas than folks who think Bush is behind the hurricane? Bush is apparently no longer the citizen-president of a functioning republic, but a 21st century King Canute expected to go sit by the shore and repel the waters as they attempt to make landfall. Instead, he and Cheney hatched up the whole hurricane thing in the Halliburton research labs to distract attention from their right-wing Supreme Court nominee . . .

On this fourth anniversary we are in a bizarre situation: The war is being won — in Afghanistan, Iraq, the broader Middle East and many other places where America has changed the conditions on the ground in its favor. But at home the war about the war is being lost. When the media look at those Bush approval ratings — currently hovering around 40 percent — they carelessly assume the 60 percent is some unified Kerry-Hillary-Cindy bloc. It’s not.

On the fourth anniversary of 9-11, we face an insurgency in our war that is resilient and innovative, constantly adapting to changing battlefield conditions. Last year on this day, we looked forward to an imminent defeat of our enemy. We hoped it would be less than two months away. Alas, the Mainstream Media survived the loss of John Kerry and keeps up its relentless insurgency against the hearts and minds and will of the American people.

In battle after battle we have fought them — from Rathergate to Abu Ghraib, from al Qa Qaa to Camp Gitmo, from Katrina to Camp Cindy. And still they attack. Yet we shall not weaken, we shall not falter, we shall not rest, until war be called by its true name, battles be celebrated — and the only “tragic event” is the utter marginalization of the so-called Mainstream Media. (HT: Michelle Malkin)

UPDATE

200 of our neighbors. HT: Ace.

Phil Pearlman, the son of a successful urologist in Southern California, was a sixties rock musician who did not believe in the “unnatural augmentation of smell.” He did not believe in raising children properly either, as appears evident from this interview with a former band member on his life a decade ago:

It seems he had married a wonderful woman who was totally supportive and involved in his choice of lifestyle. They had several children who were being raised on a farm/ranch east of San Diego, California. The Ranch had NO electricity, they also used a well for water. He was raising goats, which according to him he slaughtered personally and humanely whenever preparing them for market. He described to me what he thought was the most inhumane conditions in the local slaughter-house techniques. He had devised a quicker, bilateral knife to the carotids on a goat that was painless and “humane”. For some reason I had a hard time in visioning Phil killing anything.

One of the funnier situations he described about his family situation was his utter disgust with his in-laws for giving his kids a battery-operated television. He said he was having to act as the TV police, trying to limit the ways in which television might damage his children permanently! Another funny thing was that the very old 4-cylinder, white, rusty, small pickup truck he came to my office in was stripped inside of anything that resembled comfort. It was a stick-shift, headlight-switch-only-affair, with gaping holes where radio, air-conditioner, or glove-box might reside. Even the window behind the driver between the bed and the cab was missing. I vaguely recall that the side driver and passenger windows were absent.

It seems that Phil’s son has moved from a family where the throats of goats were slit, to a family that likes slitting the throats of Danny Pearl, Eugene Armstrong, Nick Berg, and so many others, all the while chanting “Allahu Akhbar”. Phil’s son is now known as Adam Gadahn.

The left photo is from Gadahn/Pearlman’s FBI profile; the right is from this ABC story that characterizes him this way: “Only a few years ago, Adam Gadahn was a southern California teenager with interests in the environment and heavy metal music.” Sounds conventional, doesn’t it? ABC leaves out the parts about the no electricity, the goat slaughtering, and the truck mutiliation. ABC does tell us, however, what precious little Adam is up to today:

In an apparent Sept. 11 communiqué broadcast on ABC News, an al Qaeda operative threatens new attacks against cities in the US and Australia. “Yesterday, London and Madrid. Tomorrow, Los Angeles and Melbourne, God willing. At this time, don’t count on us demonstrating restraint or compassion,” the tape warns. “We are Muslims. We love peace, but peace on our terms, peace as laid down by Islam, not the so-called peace of occupiers and dictators.”

American intelligence officials believe the man who appears on the tape to be Adam Gadahn of Orange County, Calif. Last year, Gadahn delivered a similar taped communiqué for al Qaeda. That tape was later deemed authentic. On the new tape, delivered to ABC News, Gadahn’s message contains a very pointed al Qaeda threat against Los Angeles and Melbourne.

Given the upbringing of young Pearlman, does it seem inexplicable to you that he wants to aid in an attack of Southern California, the land of his demented father? As for our part, we will think of Adam Gadahn/Pearlman, “who should be considered armed and dangerous,” and his father Phil, every time we now drive into the parking garage at LAX. (HT: Michelle Malkin)

We have said that we thought there was a Democrat PR element to capitalize on Katrina. The appearance a week ago of FEMA head under Clinton, James Lee Witt, is suggestive that the boondoggle was not limited to a plan to make a little hay out of whatever hurricane hit the Democratic state of Louisiana, but to capitalize on the specific problems of Katrina for partisan PR purposes. Note the order of events. Here is a WaPo story from last Sunday, September 4, showing that while the deplorable Blanco was dithering about federal troops, she had no problem making the decision to hire the Clinton FEMA chief:

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

Blanco made two moves Saturday that protected her independence from the federal government: She created a philanthropic fund for the state’s victims and hired James Lee Witt, Federal Emergency Management Agency director in the Clinton administration, to advise her on the relief effort.

It is even worse than the Post makes it out to be. Blanco contacted Witt on Thursday, September 1, according to the Boston Globe. Then on Friday, September 2, Mayor Nagin made his famous direct appeal to President Bush aboard Air Force One — the one in which Blanco said she needed “24 hours” to decide if she would accept federal troops. Here, once again, is what Nagin said of that meeting:

The president looked at me….He said, “No, you guys stay here. We’re going to another section of the plane, and we’re going to make a decision.” He called me in that office after that. And he said, “Mr. Mayor, I offered two options to the governor.” I said – and I don’t remember exactly what. There were two options. I was ready to move today. The governor said she needed 24 hours to make a decision….She said that she needed 24 hours to make a decision. It would have been great if we could of left Air Force One, walked outside, and told the world that we had this all worked out. It didn’t happen, and more people died.

Clearly, Mayor Nagin was desperately reaching out for help, which the governor refused to decide upon. She had no problem deciding on other matters, however.

The deplorable Blanco had no problem deciding to contact and hire a Democrat crisis management firm, but somehow had great problems making simple and obvious decisions to actually manage the crisis, like letting Federal troops in — if those decisions let in the Bush administration for action and, we suppose, credit. We really want to know who Blanco needed to talk to in the 24 hours after Mayor Nagin’s desperate plea: the result of Blanco’s 24 hours of deliberation was to hire a Democratic consulting firm and to shun real, tangible, large, and direct federal assistance. We would really like to see Blanco’s phone records for that period. (Big HT: Larwyn)

From the AP:

Less than two weeks after the storm hit the Gulf Coast, private gifts have soared to nearly $700 million, a pace exceeding the response to the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The American Red Cross alone had received $503 million in gifts and pledges as of Friday, nearly equaling the $534 million collected for its Liberty Fund over two months following the Sept. 11 attacks.

The naysayers should be ashamed of themselves — but they won’t be.

Once more, with feeling

The NYT waddles in in a pathetic parody of journalism to try a CYA for the deplorable Blanco:

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

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

They were an obvious linchpin for evacuating a city where nearly 100,000 people had no cars. Yet the federal, state and local officials who had failed to round up buses in advance were now in a frantic hunt. It would be two more days before they found enough to empty the shelters.

Let’s see. We wrote about these buses on September 2, and again on September 4, when we wrote that Mayor Nagin had not followed the detailed emergency plans for New Orleans. So now we are 7-9 days later, and the NYT apparently is still clueless as of September 11 about the buses. Oh the pain, the pain. HT’s: Captain Ed and Tom McGuire.

We believe that part of the deplorable Blanco’s response to Katrina was possibly dictated by this: Hurricane Katrina was intended to be a bit of political theater that got wildly out of control. The plan was designed for a normal hurricane, not one of Katrina’s magnitude; no one intended loss of life.

Think about it. Hurricane season comes around every year. President Bush’s strong suit since 9-11 has been his response to emergencies and national security matters. How to dent that armor? Are you so naive that you believe that Democratic Party strategists do no planning to make hay on the seasonal issues of the day?

What would be the elements of such a plan? First, you need a state governed by a Democrat. Second, you need talking points. Here are a few: (1) Bush is incompetent; (2) Bush doesn’t like poor people; (3) if the National Guard is needed, find a way to delay and shout that all the Guardsmen are unavailable because they are in Iraq. We suspect that point (3) was meant to be particularly important, in light of recent polls.

Here are the talking points in motion, from Howard Dean, via Radioblogger:

(1) Incompetent: “I don’t think the president is personally…did a horrible job. The president didn’t seem to be informed. I think he had incompetent people working for him. You know, Michael Brown [whose performance on four prior hurricanes was just fine, by the way] has become a national joke…..Not only did he…apparently according to Time Magazine now, this morning, he’s falsified his credentials to get the job. The president still won’t fire him. What is it about this president, who has people like Karl Rove, who gave away the identity of a CIA agent in a time of war, who has people like Michael Brown working for him that he won’t fire him. These people ought not to be working for anybody, never mind the government of the United States of America.”

(2) Doesn’t like poor people: “I do not think that this president cares about everybody in America. How…it’s one nice…I’m sure the president is a nice man on a personal level. His policies have been devastating to middle class and poor people in this country, white black and brown. The people who were affected in this disaster, the people who are holed up in the Astrodome, look at the kinds of things that have been said about them. Look at what the Republican representative from Louisiana said this morning in the Wall Street Journal, that finally God has gotten rid of, or has cleaned up the public housing in New Orleans. It’s not enough to be a nice guy. I’m not disputing the fact the president’s a nice man. And maybe even has compassion in his personal life. The truth is that Americans have suffered deeply under this presidency, 80% of Americans. And that black people, hispanic people, poor people, and old people have suffered disproportionately.”

(3) Iraq: “I was Governor for almost twelve years. I think we had seven or nine emergencies during that time, states of emergency, under three presidents. And I can tell you that what you need when there’s an emergency, is National Guard. The National Guard was in Iraq….And the equipment was in Iraq.”

Preposterous, you say, and outrageous too! How dare we suggest such a thing? Well, we didn’t come up with the idea on our own. It was, in fact, suggested to us by none other than Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans. His personal plea to the President aboard Air Force One was sufficiently powerful that Bush called a huddle with the deplorable Blanco so that they could decide on immediate action, as we have noted previously. Here, once again, is Nagin’s account of what happened:

The president looked at me….He said, “No, you guys stay here. We’re going to another section of the plane, and we’re going to make a decision.” He called me in that office after that. And he said, “Mr. Mayor, I offered two options to the governor.” I said – and I don’t remember exactly what. There were two options. I was ready to move today. The governor said she needed 24 hours to make a decision….She said that she needed 24 hours to make a decision. It would have been great if we could of left Air Force One, walked outside, and told the world that we had this all worked out. It didn’t happen, and more people died.

President Bush was offering soldiers immediately to save lives and allieviate suffering in response to the desperate pleadings of Mayor Nagin. The deplorable Blanco was governor of the state and in a position to make an easy decision. Yet she said she needed 24 hours. Here’s our question: who did the governor need to consult with? Who was pulling the strings of the depolable Blanco? We hope a board of inquiry provides the answer to this very interesting question.

Hugh Hewitt is asking the question we posed a few days ago on the power of what the media chooses to show on its cameras. If it is safe enough for a correspondent to stand at the water’s edge in a coming Category 5 hurricane, why on earth should people evacuate? Here’s Hugh chatting with NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen:

What about the semiotics of standing in the rain on the Gulf Coast, and then moving your car back a few yards as the waters get bigger. What’s the message that the mainstream media really sent to the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast ten days ago, Jay Rosen?…..

Again, I’ve got a proposition for you, because they did not do their homework, because they did not understand the levees were the threat, they ended up killing hundreds of Americans. I’m not going to say thousands, because I don’t know the number. But I know hundreds are dead, that they did not communicate the severity of this storm. Your reaction to that proposition?

People used to know how to get in out of the rain. Not anymore, apparently. For some years now, we have been treated to annoying and idiotic sights: a live report — which appears for all the world to be serious — at a newspaper stand in Queens surveying pedestrian reaction to the snow that has begun to fall, the wind testing the signs at the gas station, the now ubiquitous beach scene, etc. Who are these idiots, we used to ask. But there is a more serious question now. What is the news content that their presence on the beach actually communicates? Number one has to be that it is safe to be at the beach.

We now think that such displays have cost lives in Katrina, but that does not relieve every individual from the burden of minimal common sense.

Imagine the scene if Bush invaded Louisiana. Imagine the reactions of 49 other governors. Imagine the blue states all hopped up about states’ rights. Imagine the public learning the term Posse Comitatus. Imagine the deplorable Blanco on TV as Blanche DuBois, in tears over the cruelty of strangers. Now that’s some good TV. Anyhow, here’s why the President didn’t invade the state of Lousiana against the will of the governor, and have a showdown between the illegal Union army and the troops under the governor’s command — that that would have been really really great TV — via NYT:

As criticism of the response to Hurricane Katrina has mounted, one of the most pointed questions has been why more troops were not available more quickly to restore order and offer aid. Interviews with officials in Washington and Louisiana show that as the situation grew worse, they were wrangling with questions of federal/state authority, weighing the realities of military logistics and perhaps talking past each other in the crisis.

To seize control of the mission, Mr. Bush would have had to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows the president in times of unrest to command active-duty forces into the states to perform law enforcement duties. But decision makers in Washington felt certain that Ms. Blanco would have resisted surrendering control, as Bush administration officials believe would have been required to deploy active-duty combat forces before law and order had been re-established.

While combat troops can conduct relief missions without the legal authority of the Insurrection Act, Pentagon and military officials say that no active-duty forces could have been sent into the chaos of New Orleans on Wednesday or Thursday without confronting law-and-order challenges.

But just as important to the administration were worries about the message that would have been sent by a president ousting a Southern governor of another party from command of her National Guard, according to administration, Pentagon and Justice Department officials.

As Jeff Goldstein notes, Bush didn’t invoke the Insurrection Act because there wasn’t an insurrection; instead, federal govenment officials followed the Constitution. And that made for some really bad TV. Which would you prefer, good TV or the Constitution?

Thomas Lipscomb, whose family has lived in New Orleans for 150 years, tells us:

Having been prodded on Saturday into ordering an evacuation by President Bush and the head of the Hurricane Center and then delaying it for seventeen crucial hours until well into Sunday, Mayor Nagin is directly responsible for the AP picture of over 200 unused New Orleans buses marooned in four feet of water that might have evacuated more than 15,000 in one trip alone. Those were the buses that in the Mayor’s own plan were to be used to evacuate 100,000 poor the city has long understood had no other means of transportation.

Nagin is also responsible for failing to pre-position generators, food and water, a medical presence and portable toilets for the two sites at the Superdome and Convention Center that he had proclaimed “emergency centers” for tens of thousands of the more than 30% of New Orleanians that lived below the poverty line. And then the Mayor failed to police them.

The rapes, murders, and needless deaths that took place in those “black holes” of New Orleans are his responsibility as well. Eighty armed policemen were too cowardly to enter the Convention Center after reports of the savagery inside as late as Sunday. Troops finally searching the Convention Center on Monday found an elderly man and a young girl, battered to death, among the corpses. New Orleans’s would-be reformers thought they had elected a responsible leader in former cable executive Nagin and instead they got a classic “cable guy” with a million excuses and the same lousy service.

Of course behind all this is a dirty little secret well-known in New Orleans which is also the reason almost 30% of New Orleans police precinct members deserted during the Hurricane Katrina emergency. The police were afraid to try to enforce any kind of evacuations in the violent ghettos of a city that remains one of the most lawless in America. Anyone driving a school bus down a street in one of New Orleans’s “projects” trying to enforce the mayor’s evacuation order would be risking his life. Had the Mayor ordered police escorts, the desertion rate of the police would have been far higher than 30%. And that is the reason for the current argument between the Mayor and his own Police Commissioner, who still refuses to enforce his “mandatory evacuation” order.

Why do we think that there will not be meaningful hearings on all this?

WaPo:

This time, “we registered to defeat the constitution,” said Khalid Jubouri, a guard at a government ministry in Fallujah, a city in the volatile western province of Anbar. “This is considered fighting by word and thought. We are optimistic about the battle, and we will win it eventually.”

Registration in Anbar swelled from a tiny percentage of eligible adults in January to nearly 85 percent, said Muhammed Ibrahim, the director of voter registration centers in the province. Ibrahim said about 600,000 of the province’s 715,000 eligible adults registered, despite pledges from al Qaeda in Iraq, an insurgent group led by Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian, that anyone who took part in the voting would become a target for killing. “It is a big number we didn’t expect given the security situation in the province,” Ibrahim said. “It is a great number.”

One marvels at the audacity and oddity of Iraqi Sunnis registering in droves to oppose constitutional democracy. What is that? If democracy is a crime, is not registering to vote a crime? Is it not a sin to vote against the constitution, because voting itself is sinful? Or is it that this humanist impulse of democracy, more theologically acceptable to Shiites than Sunnis, is secretly alluring even to the Sunni population of Iraq? We shall see.

From a Reuters story about Colin Powell and the flood:

“There was more than enough warning over time about the dangers to New Orleans. Not enough was done. I don’t think advantage was taken of the time that was available to us, and I just don’t know why,” Powell said in excerpts on ABC’s Web site. He said he did not think that race was a factor in the slow response, but that many of those unable to leave New Orleans in time were trapped by poverty which disproportionately affects blacks.

Memo to Reuters: poverty is not heart disease, high cholesterol or sickle cell anemia. As James Q. Wilson and many others have noted, you only have to do a few things to avoid living in poverty: graduate from high school, have no children out of wedlock, get a job and get married. In this richest of all countries, statistically speaking, poverty “affects” almost no one able bodied and of working age. It is far and away the result of very bad and easily avoided choices.

UPDATE

Would Reuters say that illegitimacy is merely a condition that “affects” people rather than a choice? That choice is a particularly powerful predictor of poverty. Roger Clegg in National Review:

The percentage of out-of-wedlock births for non-Hispanic whites is 21.9 percent, but for non-Hispanic blacks it’s 69.3 percent….But it hasn’t always been this way. In 1940, the black illegitimacy rate was 19 percent, less than what it is for whites now. Does it matter? Of course it matters. It is only common sense that 1.3 million illegitimate children is a significant national problem…..

In a lecture at the American Enterprise Institute a couple of years ago, Professor James Q. Wilson said that the empirical data regarding the importance of family structure is “so strong that even some sociologists believe it.” For instance: Children in one-parent families are twice as likely to drop out of school as those in two-parent homes. Boys in one-parent families are much more likely to be both out of school and out of work. Girls in one-parent families are twice as likely to have an out-of-wedlock birth.

Professor Wilson cites a Department of Health and Human Services study of 30,000 American households, which found that for whites, blacks, and Hispanics at every income level except for the very highest, children raised in single-parent homes were more likely to be suspended from school, to have emotional problems, and to behave badly. He added that another study showed that white children of an unmarried woman were much more likely than those in a two-parent family to become delinquents, even after controlling for income.

Perhaps Mr. Kanye West has some thoughts about the influence of hip hop culture on all this.

UPDATE II

Kanye West wasn’t much of a hit at the Patriots game last night, via the Globe:

And we got remotes of rapper Kanye West and pop rockers Maroon 5 from a generic-looking, red-white-and-blue stage in Los Angeles. Maroon 5 came off vapidly (doing just one song, ”Harder to Breathe”), while West did one tune, ”Heard ‘Em Say.” Yet it was disconcerting to hear his name booed loudly by Patriots fans who evidently didn’t appreciate his nationally televised comment the other night on a Hurricane Katrina benefit that President Bush ”doesn’t care about black people.” The boos were thunderous and lasted for much of his number.

Right on!