Wednesday, September 07, 2005

One of the all-time intellectual beat-downs in blog history was administered to Michelle Malkin by Eric Muller, on the subject of Malkin's book "In Defense of Internment." Today, fresh evidence (as if it was needed) that Malkin was wrong. 8:19:33 PM   permalink   comment []

Here's a poser: if the News & Record aims to be the paper of record for local news...and business is a big part of local life and the general culture...why doesn't the News & Record put more effort into covering local business? 7:53:48 PM   permalink   comment []

Best of luck to Matt Williams, a true pioneer of blog journalism who is taking a two-year leave from the News & Record to train as a pilot in the Air Force Reserve. Hope you'll blog the experience, Matt. 7:50:04 PM   permalink   comment []

Must read: documented Katrina timeline. It contradicts some of the falsehoods floating around out there, like the governor not declaring a state of emergency and FEMA lacking the authority to act... UPDATE: A less tendentious timeline (eg, it lacks the smug shots at Condi Rice) from Josh Marshall, who is seeking reader input in filling it out. 2:45:02 PM   permalink   comment []

Max Boot is just horrified that pundits are playing the blame game with Katrina. He is shocked, shocked that anyone dared to pass judgment on rescue efforts even as "Ordinary people are sitting at home, transfixed by the spectacle unfolding on their television screens. Their hearts are breaking as they watch the horrifying spectacle of an entire city drowned." Right, Max, ordinary people were watching it happen...and they were yelling at their TV sets, "Where the hell is the cavalry? Why can't anyone get some food and water choppered in? IS ANYONE IN CHARGE DOWN THERE?" A lot ordinary people are angry precisely because they have been paying attention. They know that "the horrifying spectacle of an entire city drowned" was followed closely by the horrifying specatacle of people trapped and waiting for help that seemed to take forever to arrive. We all saw it happen. Very few of us, I'm guessing, actually thought to ourselves what Boot suggests that whiny, soft Americans* think, that "all disasters are unnatural." Nobody blames FEMA (or the Governor or the Mayor) for the storm, just for the incompetent response to it. There's no avoiding questions about who was responsible, and who may be responsible for the next disaster. That's not a blame game, that's the kind of stuff ordinary people say to each other as they watch the news. *Boot writes wistfully of the "stoicism with which Bangladesh faces the regular loss of tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of its citizens from natural disasters." Americans are such crybabies when they are starving! 1:11:58 PM   permalink   comment []

Mickey Kaus: "The U.S. should take Fidel Castro up on his post-Katrina offer to send over 1,586 doctors from Cuba. It could be a PR victory--how many do you think will go back?" 10:36:07 AM   permalink   comment []

Clarity from Monkey Media: "New Orleans should have done more to plan for its poor and disabled - it's a city in a bowl below sea level, for crying out loud. But the federal response was utter horseshit, and conservatives need to wake up to that fact, too. Can we please stop defending indefensible partisan positions and just try to figure out what's gone wrong? And make sure this kind of preventable destruction doesn't ever happen again?...smart lefties simply have to acknowledge that some of the failures also occured at local and state levels. Anything less is pure partisan hackery." 7:18:21 AM   permalink   comment []

Friedman is furious. His studiously even tone breaks in today's column. "If the Bush-Cheney team seemed to be the right guys to deal with Osama, they seem exactly the wrong guys to deal with Katrina - and all the rot and misplaced priorities it's exposed here at home. "These are people so much better at inflicting pain than feeling it, so much better at taking things apart than putting them together, so much better at defending 'intelligent design' as a theology than practicing it as a policy." The kicker: "If Mr. Bush learns the lessons of Katrina, he has a chance to replace his 9/11 mandate with something new and relevant. If that happens, Katrina will have destroyed New Orleans, but helped to restore America. If Mr. Bush goes back to his politics as usual, he'll be thwarted at every turn. Katrina will have destroyed a city and a presidency." News & Record readers won't see this tomorrow, of course...but I'm sure the Thomas Sowell column they'll run instead will be very useful in its own way. 7:05:25 AM   permalink   comment []