Sunday, August 28th

Monday, August 29th

On CNN :

COOPER: This just in to CNN. Hurricane Katrina has been downgraded now to a tropical storm. It was a Category 1 storm when we arrived here about an hour or so ago in Mississippi, just outside Meridian, but it has now been downgraded to a tropical storm. So we will continue to follow that. And we’ll have a lot more on this Special Edition of 360 coming up next. But first let’s check in with Erica Hill for the day’s other headlines. Erica, good evening.

HILL: Hi again, Anderson. You still look pretty wet, by the way.

President Bush in Arizona and California today. And when he wasn’t focused on the damages of Hurricane Katrina, he was trying to drum up support for his Medicare Prescription Drug Program…

On Fox News :

SHEPARD SMITH: You’re live on FOX News Channel, what are you doing?

MAN IN NEW ORLEANS: Walking my dogs.

SMITH: Why are you still here? I’m just curious.

MAN: None of your fucking business.

From NPR’s levee breach timeline :

6 p.m.: A report from the Homeland Security Operation Center says: “Preliminary reports indicate the levees in New Orleans have not been breached.”

6:08 p.m. The American Red Cross e-mails officials at the White House and Department of Homeland Security about reports of levee breaches and “extensive flooding” in the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish.

9 p.m.: Appearing on CNN, then-FEMA Chief Michael Brown says: “We have some, I’m not going to call them breaches, but we have some areas where the lake and the rivers are continuing to spill over.”

9:29 p.m.: John Wood, chief of staff for Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, is sent an e-mail that reads in part: “the first (unconfirmed) reports they are getting from aerial surveys in New Orleans are far more serious than media reports are currently reflecting.”

10:30 p.m.: A Homeland Security situation report reads: “There is a quarter-mile [breach] in the levee near the 17th Street Canal… an estimated 2/3 to 75% of the city is under water… a few bodies were seen floating in the water.” This report reaches the White House around midnight, according to congressional investigators.

Tuesday, August 30th

Updates from New Orleans TV station WWL :

8:39 A.M. WWL-TV studios are being evacuated as rising water is coming into the station. The French Quarter is taking on water and water is expected to rise in the city for the next few days.

9:35 A.M. Marshal Law in effect in Jefferson Parish and Plaquemines Parish. 60 percent of homes in Plaquemines Parish under water.

10:15 A.M. A spokeswoman describes Jefferson Parish as a “very dangerous” place. Jackie Bauer says there’s gas leaks everywhere, water needs to be boiled, there’s no commercial power, no pumping stations and the water’s toxic.

And there’s still some deep water in some neighborhoods. Bauer says there are other dangers — snakes in the water, other vermin, loose dogs and cats everywhere. She says — quoting now — “We kind of have to fight for survival with them.” – Associated Press

10:35 A.M. Governor Blanco – “Worse than our worst fears.”

From the Associated Press (more photos here):

Before going on an helicopter tour of the New Orleans, Kenner, Metairie, Arabi, Slidell and Mandeville areas to assess the extent of Hurricane Katrina damage, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, center, expresses her concern for the victims Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005, in Baton Rouge, La. Blanco is surrounded by, from left, Louisiana National Guard Major General Bennett Landreneau, U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La, FEMA director Mike Brown and U.S. Sen. David Vitter, R-La. (AP Photo/Bill Feig, Pool)

President Bush plays a guitar presented to him by Country Singer Mark Wills, right, backstage following his visit to Naval Base Coronado, Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005. Bush visited the base to deliver remarks on V-J Commemoration Day. (AP Photo/ABC News, Martha Raddatz)

More from WWL :

2:00 P.M. – Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi says “this is going to be the most expensive natural disaster that’s hit the United States in history.”

2:01 P.M. – Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard says there is no plumbing and the sanitary situation is getting nasty. He told WAFB-TV that he is carrying around a bag for his own human waste.

3:07 P.M. – Governor Blanco: We are looking for ways to get people out of the Superdome and out of New Orleans said Governor Blanco as she tried to keep from crying.

Wednesday, August 31st

Thursday, September 1st

From the BBC :

US President George Bush has admitted there is “frustration” at the speed of the relief effort following Hurricane Katrina’s hit on the Gulf Coast.

“I fully understand people wanting things to have happened yesterday. I mean I understand the anxiety of people on the ground… So there is frustration but I want people to know there’s a lot of help coming,” he said in an interview with ABC television.

He said the operation being mounted was one of the biggest in US history, and inevitably took time to get under way.

“I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees. They did appreciate a serious storm but these levees got breached and as a result much of New Orleans is flooded and now we’re having to deal with it and will,” he said.

From the Los Angeles Times :

A 2-year-old girl slept in a pool of urine. Crack vials littered a restroom. Blood stained the walls next to vending machines smashed by teenagers.

The Louisiana Superdome, once a mighty testament to architecture and ingenuity, became the biggest storm shelter in New Orleans the day before Katrina’s arrival Monday. About 16,000 people eventually settled in.

By Wednesday, it had degenerated into horror. A few hundred people were evacuated from the arena Wednesday, and buses will take away the vast majority of refugees today.

“We pee on the floor. We are like animals,” said Taffany Smith, 25, as she cradled her 3-week-old son, Terry. In her right hand she carried a half-full bottle of formula provided by rescuers. Baby supplies are running low; one mother said she was given two diapers and told to scrape them off when they got dirty and use them again.

At least two people, including a child, have been raped. At least three people have died, including one man who jumped 50 feet to his death, saying he had nothing left to live for.

The hurricane left most of southern Louisiana without power, and the arena, which is in the central business district of New Orleans, was not spared. The air conditioning failed immediately and a swampy heat filled the dome.

An emergency generator kept some lights on, but quickly failed. Engineers have worked feverishly to keep a backup generator running, at one point swimming under the floodwater to knock a hole in the wall to install a new diesel fuel line. But the backup generator is now faltering and almost entirely submerged.

There is no sanitation. The stench is overwhelming. The city’s water supply, which had held up since Sunday, gave out early Wednesday, and toilets in the Superdome became inoperable and began to overflow.

“There is feces on the walls,” said Bryan Hebert, 43, who arrived at the Superdome on Monday. “There is feces all over the place.”

From Newsweek :

The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it might displease the president, did not really sink in until Thursday night. Some White House staffers were watching the evening news and thought the president needed to see the horrific reports coming out of New Orleans. Counselor Bartlett made up a DVD of the newscasts so Bush could see them in their entirety as he flew down to the Gulf Coast the next morning on Air Force One.

How this could be—how the president of the United States could have even less “situational awareness,” as they say in the military, than the average American about the worst natural disaster in a century—is one of the more perplexing and troubling chapters in a story that, despite moments of heroism and acts of great generosity, ranks as a national disgrace.

Friday, September 2nd

From CNN :

CHRIS LAWRENCE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It’s hard to describe. It’s something I never could conceive of ever seeing in a major city like New Orleans. It is hard to believe, you know, this is New Orleans, Louisiana, we’re talking about.

We spent the last few hours at the convention center, where there are thousands of people just laying in the street. They have nowhere to go. These are mothers. We saw mothers. We talked to mothers holding babies. I mean, some of these babies, 3, 4, 5 months old, living in these horrible conditions. Putrid food on the ground, sewage, their feet sitting in sewage. We saw feces on the ground. It is — these people are being forced to live like animals.

And you know, when you look at some of these mothers, your heart just breaks. We’re not talking about a few families or a few hundred families, thousands and thousands of people gathered around the convention center.

I want to warn you, I mean, some of these images that you will see, they’re very, very graphic. But people need to see this. The people down there have been down there for days, and people need to see what it is really like down here.

We saw dead bodies. People are dying at the convention center, and there’s no one to come get them. We saw an older woman, someone’s mother, someone’s grandmother in a wheelchair, her dead body pushed up against the side of the convention center, with a blanket over it. Right on the ground next to her, another dead body, wrapped in a white sheet. People are literally dying. Right in front of us as we were watching this, a man went into a seizure on the ground. It looked like he was dying. People tried to prop his head up. No one has medical training. No ambulance can come. There’s nowhere to evacuate him to.

It is just heart breaking that these people have been sitting there, without food, without water, waiting for these buses to take them away. And they keep asking us, “When are the buses coming? When are the buses coming?”

And you just have to say, “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

Here’s a study that won’t be popular with the nationalistic right :

Two centuries ago there was relatively little dispute over the existence of God, or the societally beneficial effect of popular belief in a creator. In the twentieth century extensive secularization occurred in western nations, the United States being the only significant exception (Bishop; Bruce; Gill et al.; Sommerville). If religion has receded in some western nations, what is the impact of this unprecedented transformation upon their populations? Theists often assert that popular belief in a creator is instrumental towards providing the moral, ethical and other foundations necessary for a healthy, cohesive society. Many also contend that widespread acceptance of evolution, and/or denial of a creator, is contrary to these goals. But a cross-national study verifying these claims has yet to be published. That radically differing worldviews can have measurable impact upon societal conditions is plausible according to a number of mainstream researchers (Bainbridge; Barro; Barro and McCleary; Beeghley; Groeneman and Tobin; Huntington; Inglehart and Baker; Putman; Stark and Bainbridge). Agreement with the hypothesis that belief in a creator is beneficial to societies is largely based on assumption, anecdotal accounts, and on studies of limited scope and quality restricted to one population (Benson et al.; Hummer et al.; Idler and Kasl; Stark and Bainbridge). A partial exception is given by Barro and McCleary, who correlated economic growth with rates of belief in the afterlife and church attendance in numerous nations (while Kasman and Reid [2004] commented that Europe does not appear to be suffering unduly from its secularization). It is surprising that a more systematic examination of the question has not been previously executed since the factors required to do so are in place. The twentieth century acted, for the first time in human history, as a vast Darwinian global societal experiment in which a wide variety of dramatically differing social-religious-political-economic systems competed with one another, with varying degrees of success. A quantitative cross-national analysis is feasible because a large body of survey and census data on rates of religiosity, secularization, and societal indicators has become available in the prosperous developed democracies including the United States.
. . .
[18] In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the prosperous democracies (Figures 1-9). The most theistic prosperous democracy, the U.S., is exceptional, but not in the manner Franklin predicted. The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developed democracies, sometimes spectacularly so, and almost always scores poorly. The view of the U.S. as a “shining city on the hill” to the rest of the world is falsified when it comes to basic measures of societal health. Youth suicide is an exception to the general trend because there is not a significant relationship between it and religious or secular factors. No democracy is known to have combined strong religiosity and popular denial of evolution with high rates of societal health. Higher rates of non-theism and acceptance of human evolution usually correlate with lower rates of dysfunction, and the least theistic nations are usually the least dysfunctional. None of the strongly secularized, pro-evolution democracies is experiencing high levels of measurable dysfunction. In some cases the highly religious U.S. is an outlier in terms of societal dysfunction from less theistic but otherwise socially comparable secular developed democracies. In other cases, the correlations are strongly graded, sometimes outstandingly so.

[19] If the data showed that the U.S. enjoyed higher rates of societal health than the more secular, pro-evolution democracies, then the opinion that popular belief in a creator is strongly beneficial to national cultures would be supported. Although they are by no means utopias, the populations of secular democracies are clearly able to govern themselves and maintain societal cohesion. Indeed, the data examined in this study demonstrates that only the more secular, pro-evolution democracies have, for the first time in history, come closest to achieving practical “cultures of life” that feature low rates of lethal crime, juvenile-adult mortality, sex related dysfunction, and even abortion. The least theistic secular developed democracies such as Japan, France, and Scandinavia have been most successful in these regards. The non-religious, pro-evolution democracies contradict the dictum that a society cannot enjoy good conditions unless most citizens ardently believe in a moral creator. The widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster is therefore refuted. Contradicting these conclusions requires demonstrating a positive link between theism and societal conditions in the first world with a similarly large body of data – a doubtful possibility in view of the observable trends.

Gosh. People who arrogantly think their beliefs have been blessed by god seem to be incapable of making progressive changes that would positively affect their society? I’m shocked. Maybe if our country could put a stake in the heart of the false contention that faith and liberalism are mutually exclusive we could get some damn work done. I’m completely jaded by politics, religion, and the shallowness of our culture now, so I won’t be holding my breath.

There’s only one Democrat running for Senate in Connecticut and his name isn’t Joe.

Also, the race’s importance goes far beyond some liberal blog pissing match, but I’m sure you already knew that.

Go check out this clip from Crooks & Liars of Chris Matthews interviewing Howard Dean. Now is it just me or is Matthews going out of his way to bait Dean into saying something controversial? First Matthews tries to put words in his mouth :

DEAN: I served with George Allen when he was governor. I don‘t think he belongs in public service, to be honest with you. There are Republicans who are capable and smart, thoughtful people, and he‘s not one of them. So you know, the people in Virginia are going to do what they want to do, but I…

MATTHEWS: You make him sound like a knucklehead. Is that what you think?

DEAN: I‘m not going to use those kinds of words.

MATTHEWS: Well what words are you saying, he doesn‘t belong in public service, because of why?

Immediately after that, it seemed like Matthews was trying to get Dean to slip-up and say something racially insensitive :

DEAN: Because he‘s always shooting from the hip. He never thinks through what he means, and he caters to the wrong instincts in people. And I think using derogatory terms to people of color is certainly something that a public servant might not do.

MATTHEWS: Do you know what Macaca means?

DEAN: Yes, I do.

MATTHEWS: What does it mean?

DEAN: You know what it means as well as I do. It refers to a monkey, and it‘s also a racial epithet used in some parts of the world.

Or am I just being paranoid here? I know Howard Dean has a reputation for inserting his foot in his mouth, but the way Matthews seems to be egging him on is frustrating to watch.

Wanna see something pathetic and hilarious? Go to YouTube and search for “im sorry“. Apparently YouTube is full of people who are really sorry for what they did, whatever that may be. And what better way to apologize than through a montage of cutesy photos and emotionally-wrought dedications backed up by “their” song.? Here’s a perfect example :

How long has this trend been going? I’ve already found one parody.

Since I’ve spent the last 3 1/2 years criticizing the President, here’s a special post that you’ll appreciate, Bushie :

This video is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen….when I was twelve. Now my sense of humor is more along the lines of schadenfreude.

When it was on the air, Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction was one of my favorite shows. Not because it was particularly well-made, but because it was one of the most ridiculous shows on television. Each episode contained five short vignettes that were your standard supernatural crap that’s a staple of half of those mentally challenged “documentaries” on the History, Travel, and Learning Channels. Junk like “Guy goes to Vegas and hears the voice of his dead grandfather tell him to put all his money on hard eight” or “Family moves cross country, but forgets the dog. One month later, the dog shows up.”

The amateurish production was fun in an MST3K way, but the real treat was the show’s premise. On Beyond Belief, half of the stories were “fact” and the other were “fiction”. At the end of each episode, the host revealed which stories were fake and which where based on unreliable legends or news reports (and were most likely also fake). Not only did this make for the most perfect televised drinking game ever (aside from the spelling bee and presidential debates), but the host segments were hilarious.

Y’see, the brilliance of Beyond Belief was that the host’s only job was to reiterate the show’s already simple premise 6-7 times during each episode. For people too dim to realize the point of the show based on its title or opening, the host ended each segment by rephrasing the show’s concept. “Did this really happen….or is it something from the imagination of our writers?” the host would tease with a well-worn smirk. “Was this just another tall tale or did these events unfold as you saw them?” “Could this possibly be true? Or are we just pulling you leg?” “Can this story really be the figment of an overactive imagination…or did you just see something that actually happened?”

I don’t know whatever happened to the people behind that show, but here’s hoping they all became liberal bloggers. There are only so many ways you can point out that Joe Lieberman totally sucks.

After seeing this post by Kevin Drum I decided to go through the Quote Randomizer and find some quotes that I like. Of the two or three million quotes that I read, these are the ones that appealed to me the most :

The cost of living is going up and the chance of living is going down.
Flip Wilson (1933 – 1998)

A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward.
Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882 – 1945), radio address, Oct. 26, 1939

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly American criminal class except Congress.
Mark Twain (1835 – 1910)

I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.
Bill Cosby (1937 – )

The great thing about democracy is that it gives every voter a chance to do something stupid.
Art Spander

It’s kinda lame that I never found a religious one that appealed to me, so here’s a few from the quote site’s religion category that I liked :

A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes.
James Feibleman

The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.
Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821 – 1890)

A cult is a religion with no political power.
Tom Wolfe (1931 – )

Like I mentioned, I read a lot of quotes before I found the ones I like because 99% of the sayings that are considered “quotable” are complete crap. The vast majority of the quotes are either by-the-numbers cleverness like “Life sucks, but it’s better than the alternative” or saccharine, religious, and/or inspirational drivel like “God’s greatest gift is imagination”. Blech!

My latest apolitical obsession is molecular gastronomy or as I like to call it, food geekiness. I’ve enjoyed cooking for a while, but it wasn’t until a week and a half ago that I found out (via NPR) that I hadn’t even heard of the bible of food science, Harold McGee’s “On Food and Cooking : The Science and Lore of the Kitchen”. Since I picked up the book, I haven’t been able to put it down. One of my favorite bits so far has been this little sidebar in the section on soy products :

The Delightful Physics of Miso Soup

Miso soup is one of the most common Japanese dishes. It typically includes a dashi broth (p. 238) and small cubes of tofu. As is true of many Japanese preparations, miso soup is a delight to the eye as well as the palate. When the soup is made and poured into the bowl, the miso particles disperse throughout in an even haze. But left undisturbed for a few minutes, the particles gather around the center of the bowl in discrete little clouds that slowly change shape. The clouds mark convection cells, columns in the broth where hot liquid from the bowl bottom rises, is made cooler and so more dense by evaporation at the surface, falls again; is reheated and becomes less dense, rises, and so on. Miso soup enacts at the table the same process that produces towering thinderhead clouds in the summer sky.

So far, the rest of the book isn’t nearly as precious as the section above, but it’s a damn good read. Highly recommended.

Political Wire has some early 2008 news from the state whose caucus-goers think they deserve to hand-pick the leader of the free world :

According to Hotline On Call, the unofficial “Corn Poll” at the Iowa State Fair is bringing good news to Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), former Sen. John Edwards (D-NC), and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). Clinton and Edwards were each supported by 33% of Iowa voters in a potential 2008 presidential match-up. Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack (D) came in third with 13%, while Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) came in fourth with 9%.

McCain was supported by 24% of Iowa voters, while Rudy Giuliani (R) and Condoleezza Rice (R) tied for second with 22%. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) came in fourth with 10%.

As far as I’m concerned, the people of Iowa are the reason Democrats lost the 2004 election. Going into their primary caucuses, Iowans had a huge slate of Democratic candidates to choose from, but at the end of the day their lack of vision and courage led them to give into their “anybody but Bush” impulses and pick the safest candidate, John Kerry. I can understand why they may have been turned off by Howard Dean and his hype machine, but John Edwards and Wesley Clark were much more engaging and inspiring candidates that actually offered people a reason to vote for them. Needless to say, Kerry’s dramatic upset in Iowa all but handed him the Democratic nomination.

Screw the argument that early primary states deserve their king-making role because it’s the only time they ever get any attention. Why should people in Iowa or New Hapshire get their asses kissed more than residents of Indiana, Oklahoma, Montana, or any other state? Having grown up in a bright red state and settled in a dark blue one, I’m sick of being part of a population that one party takes for granted and the other one barely tries to woo. We should all be lucky enough to have Presidential candidates pander to our local concerns.

What Atrios said. The firing squad in Connecticut stopped being “circular” the day Lieberman lost the primary and left the Democratic party. Lieberman’s loyalty to the Democratic party is slightly better than Zell Miller’s at this point, so why shouldn’t bloggers and activists committed to helping Democrats take over the Senate be concentrating on this race? Joe Lieberman isn’t a Democrat anymore. He’s just another spoiler candidate like Ralph Nader. Joe’s got more money, better name recognition, the not-so-secret support of the entire Republican noise machine, and the bully-pulpit of incumbency. As long as Joe Lieberman is campaigning against the Democratic candidate in the race, he’s a threat to to the Democratic party’s chances of taking the House or Senate in November.

Last year, Mary appeared to the faithful as a giant stain that looks like a vagina. This year, she’s back as a turd :

Okay, technically it’s a piece of chocolate, but we all know what it really looks like. To be fair, praying to a retarded candy bar is only slightly less embarassing than worshiping crap, but that’s not saying much.

On the same subject, next time you’re in Vegas, don’t fall asleep within 500 feet of any poop. It’s against the law now.

In case you hadn’t heard, a company is claiming they have discovered “a technology that produces free, clean and constant energy“. The only thing that’s standing in their way is the laws of physics. Once that little hurdle has been overcome, we’ll end our dependency on oil, the world will be at peace, and all that crap. Hey, at least they’ve got a good marketing department.

When it comes to free energy, I prefer Rube Goldberg’s method (apologizes for the low-quality image) :

Driver opens trapdoor (A) – Monkey (B) reaches for banana (C), upsetting basket of cotton (D) – Ducks (E), mistaking cotton for snow, think winter has arrived and fly south, pulling car forward.

P.S. These are vitamin-fed superducks.

We could use a few more superducks these days.

Okay commenters, here’s a challenge for you. In any artistic medium, name an underrated work by an overrated performer or vice versa. For example, John Lennon is criminally overrated (don’t argue with me on this, it’s true), but Gimme Some Truth doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it deserves. Or to switch things around, The Zombies are easily one of the greatest bands of the 60’s, but Time of the Season isn’t that great a song.

So, tell me what’s over/under for you.

Here’s a bizarre letter that appears in the latest issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly under the heading “Misplaced Priorities” :

On July 4th, North Korea shot five missiles toward Tokyo as a test launch. Thankfully, the test failed and the missiles landed harmlessly in the ocean. But what if the missiles had hit Tokyo? Games like The Legend of Zelda : Twilight Princess, Super Mario Galaxy, and Metal Gear Solid 4 would not see stateside release. Unfortunately, it is a fact that most of the gaming world originates in Tokyo, and a large-scale attack on that city could certainly spell problems from obsessed U.S. fans. North Korea is likely to attack again in the near future. If successful, do you think that it could spell the end of gaming (at least as we know it)? – Chris Day

In the event of a nuclear attack on Tokyo, we’re pretty sure you’ll have other things to worry about, like being drafted.

It’s amazing that this guy was able to put down his controller long enough to see the news.