THE NEW YORK TIMES HAS PICKED UP ON the Gretna bridge-blocking story.

Tom Maguire, however, thinks that the Times is whitewashing the racial angle.

UPDATE: Two thoughts: Yes, this does sound like something out of Lucifer’s Hammer. And, yes, maybe the reason the NYT isn’t mentioning the race angle has something to do with this.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Related racial coverage here.

JOHN TIERNEY thinks a Katrina investigation might turn up some uncomfortable facts for the investigators:

Suppose, for instance, investigators try to find out who had the brilliant idea of putting the Federal Emergency Management Agency inside a new department with an organizational chart modeled on the Soviet Ministry of Agriculture and Food Economy. One Democrat, Hillary Clinton, did question whether FEMA would suffer, but the idea was originally championed by her colleagues, particularly Joe Lieberman.

Mr. Lieberman joined Mrs. Clinton this week in calling for a “re-examination” of FEMA’s status, but he was against independence before he was for it. After the Sept. 11 attacks, he helped lead the charge to create the Department of Homeland Security.

Republicans first resisted, as the Democratic National Committee pointed out during the presidential campaign last year. Its radio advertisement declared: “John Kerry fought to establish the Department of Homeland Security. George Bush opposed it for almost a year after 9/11.” . . .

A few outside skeptics may suggest letting this money be spent by mayors and governors in flood-prone areas who can lose their jobs if they earmark it for too many boondoggles and allow disasters to occur. But members of Congress would conclude that only they can be trusted to dispense the money. Of course, should there be another flood somewhere, they would be glad to investigate.

As I’ve said before, I don’t think Congress should be spared.

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.

I can only conclude that this time around, the press thinks it’s a good thing to inflame the public. What could the difference be?

UPDATE: Heh.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Ed Driscoll thinks that CNN is displaying the same situational ethics about body counts that it showed while shoring up Saddam’s position during the Eason Jordan days:

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.

Indeed.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Julian Sanchez is deliberately obtuse here, I think — as should be especially obvious after reading Ed Driscoll’s post.

Hey, CNN’s just lucky it’s not 100 years ago.

MORE: For the benefit of those who are — deliberately or involuntarily — still obtuse, reader Martin Shoemaker spells it out:

I think the difference lies in what they think an inflamed public might do.

In the case of 9/11, the elites in the media (who are so much more worldly than us folks in the masses, ya know) feared that an inflamed public might start burning Muslims at the stake. After all, all those Christian redneck hicks in the red states are just one step away from barbarians. And maybe they might even, I dunno, start a war or something, when what we need is to make apologies at the UN for our racist, imperialist past.

In the case of Hurricane Katrina, the elites in the media hope that an
inflamed public might start burning Republican leaders at the stake. After all, the elites all know how easily the masses are manipulated. (What was that Gallup figure again? Only 13% blamed the President? Don’t those masses understand that we’re trying to manipulate them? I guess we’ll just have to look for even MORE negative stories. Bodies! That’s it: we need BODIES! Somebody dig up some bodies for us, right away!)

I hear a lot of folks in the media ask how this disaster is different from 9/11. I feel the answer is: the folks in the media. 9/11 happened to THEM: to their home town, and to people they knew. They saw it happen, and it was something too momentous and awful for business as usual. The time was too solemn for their usual agenda promotion and self promotion. It hit home, and they were shaken. They saw people, not stories and angles and opportunities.

But Hurricane Katrina? That only hit a bunch of poor black folks (in their racially divisive view — it’s like they can’t even see the white victims) down in a rural southern reddish-purple state, far from their day-to-day lives. It’s not like it happened to anyone they knew, anyone who mattered to them. So that left them free to look for stories and angles and opportunities. And thus, they can pursue their ideological and professional agendas full bore.

The story coverage is different, because in their hearts, the media don’t care about black people.

And if anyone in the media think that’s an unfair, outrageous statement, I’ll apologize on a case by case basis: any of them who condemned Kanye West’s remarks can have an apology. The rest of them can go to hell.

Ouch. I’m getting a lot of email like this, and I think the press — despite its orgy of mutual congratulation — will see its reputation and influence shrink again before this is over.

I’VE GOT A PIECE ON DIGITAL FILMMAKING in the October issue of Popular Mechanics. The web version has a lot of extras, including interviews with John Farrell and J.D. Johannes.

UPDATE: Roger Simon comments: “I have to admit to some ambivalence about the implied possible demise of the studio system.”

NEW ORLEANS GUN CONFISCATION ILLEGAL: Dave Kopel has done some legal research and concludes:

I’ll have an article on the New Orleans gun confiscation on Reason.com. But there’s one part of the story that’s too important to wait: the confiscation is plainly illegal. . . .

The particular Louisiana statute which allows emergency controls on firearms also clearly disallows the complete prohibition being imposed by the New Orleans chief of police.

I hope that some civil rights organization — the NRA, say — will help the injured parties bring suit.

NOT SO EASY ON THE BIG EASY:

WASHINGTON (AP) — More than half the people in this country say the flooded areas of New Orleans lying below sea level should be abandoned and rebuilt on higher ground.

An AP-Ipsos poll found that 54 percent of Americans want the vast sections of New Orleans that were flooded by Hurricane Katrina moved to a safer location. About 80 percent of the city was flooded at the height of the disaster. The city, home to about 484,000 people, sits six feet below sea level on average.

The fate of the flood-prone areas of the city is an open question. The aid pricetag already runs tens of billions of dollars. In the days since the hurricane, House Speaker Dennis Hastert has questioned whether the worst-flooded areas should be rebuilt.

“But the fourth one stayed up!”

A REPORT from the 82d Airborne.

KANYE WEST BOOED.

LIKE ME, Les Jones is guestblogging over at Michael Silence’s place. He’s got a post on two-way radios for emergencies.

His choices are good ones, though fancier than anything I’ve got (I have one of these for the car, which I guess counts).

GRETNA BRIDGE UPDATE: Johnny Dollar has video.

CRONYISM AT FEMA:

Five of eight top Federal Emergency Management Agency officials came to their posts with virtually no experience in handling disasters and now lead an agency whose ranks of seasoned crisis managers have thinned dramatically since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

FEMA’s top three leaders — Director Michael D. Brown, Chief of Staff Patrick J. Rhode and Deputy Chief of Staff Brooks D. Altshuler — arrived with ties to President Bush’s 2000 campaign or to the White House advance operation, according to the agency. Two other senior operational jobs are filled by a former Republican lieutenant governor of Nebraska and a U.S. Chamber of Commerce official who was once a political operative.

I have to say I agree with Rod Dreher, who writes:

This is a scandal, a real scandal. How is it possible that four years after 9/11, the president treats a federal agency vital to homeland security as a patronage prize? The main reason I’ve been a Bush supporter all along is I trusted him (note past tense) on national security — which, in the age of mass terrorism, means homeland security too. Call me naive, but it’s a real blow to learn that political hacks have been running FEMA, of all agencies of the federal government!

Yes. It’s not that these guys have campaign ties — it’s that they don’t seem to have anything else. What’s sad is that if Bush were packing the NEH or NEA with people like that, there’d probably have been an outcry. It’s true, of course, that FEMA’s record has never been that great, and that the response time here is no worse than it was for Hurricane Andrew. But as Dreher notes, this is post-September 11 so that “no worse than before” is no accomplishment.

UPDATE: Going beyond FEMA, read this post on systemic problems with disaster preparedness:

1. The keystone cops response in New Orleans stems, in part, from a flawed model of how to train for disaster.

Training drills almost never prepare officials for the worst. New Orleans conducted disaster exercises in 2000 and 2004 for hurricanes, but these drills did not include the possibility of a levee failure. In Los Angeles, a major port security exercise, Determined Promise 2004, tested a new mobile radio patch unit that enables different emergency response agencies to talk to each other. Surprise surprise: the system worked well. Of course it did. When everyone knows disaster will begin at noon on Monday, they miraculously remember to bring the right radios and brush up on instructions about how to use them properly. Even worse, not only do many exercises avoid facing truly disastrous scenarios, they define success by how smoothly everything goes. This gives a false sense of comfort, or to use a technical term, it’s STUPID. Instead, we need to drill into officials that the right measure of success is how much they learn. If things do not go wrong in a drill, then the exercise was not useful.

Read the whole thing. And note that both of these problems are far more unforgivable than miscues made in the teeth of a disaster like Katrina, because they’re mistakes made when there’s plenty of time to get things right.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jeff Goldstein thinks Dreher and I are making mountains out of molehills: “I just want SOMEBODY to point out FEMA’s actual failures instead of using a disputed resume blemishes and a lot of showy handwringing to suggest Brown’s failures.” And reader C.J. Burch emails: “Isn’t the real question here whether FEMA as it is desgined could do any more than it has done? I’m not defending cronyism, but I’m still not convinced that FEMA could accomplish more given the monumental problems it faced at the state and local level. And for that matter, how different are these men’s bona fides from previous FEMA heads? Shouldn’t we know that as well?”

I’d be interested to hear that.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Merv Benson emails:

People forget that Katrina is not the first hurricane FEMA has worked under Brown. He handled all four of the hurricanes that hit Florida last year. Since Florida has a competent governor, there was no indication that he was inadequate to the task.

People are overblowing the response to terrorism fear. Al Qaeda can only fantasize about causing the damage Katrina did. What few comments they have made suggest they are somewhat envious of the power of nature. At this point al Qaeda has been reduced to back pack bombs outside of Iraq and in Iraq they are incapable of making a militarily significant attack. Perhaps they wish they had thought of blowing the New Orleans levee, but they are clearly having difficulty getting their troops into the US despite our border problems.

I hope he’s right.

MORE: Coyote Blog: “After watching the relief effort over the last couple of days, I am more convinced than ever that part of the problem (but certainly not all of it) with the relief effort is the technocratic top-down ‘stay-in-control’ focus of its leadership. . . . Unfortunately, I fear that the lessons from this hurricane and its aftermath will be that we need more top-down rules and authority rather than less. It is the technocrats on the sidelines who are most appalled by the screw-ups, and will demand more of whatever next time.”

NO WIGS IN THE SUNSPHERE: Dipti Vaidya takes you on a video tour of Knoxville’s World’s Fair landmark and discovers that Bart Simpson misrepresented some things.

OKAY, THE KATRINA RELIEF BLOGBURST is over, but — given the wide array of bitching and fingerpointing that’s going on — I think I’ll strike a constructive note and point to it one more time. Here’s a list of places where you can help. And here’s N.Z. Bear’s roundup of participating blogs.

Also, this Katrina fundraising effort seems to have stalled a bit, so if you’d rather give through a lefty outfit, please consider donating there. As Skippy said: “this is not about red states v. blue states…this is not about left v. right…this is not about liberal v. conservative… the people in louisiana, mississippi and alabama are americans.”

THE MICHAEL BROWN DEBACLE has inspired some thoughts by Joseph Britt.

UPDATE: Wrong link before. Fixed now. Sorry.

IRAQI SOLDIERS donate to Katrina victims.

GIVING UP on The Daily Show.

It never did much for me — I always saw it as a pale shadow of Weekend Update.

SOME REPORTS AND PREDICTIONS from a reservist who’s been in New Orleans.

THIS MAY BE GOOD NEWS:

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AP) — Authorities said their systematic sweep of New Orleans to get voluntary evacuees out was nearly complete, and far fewer bodies than expected or feared were found during the operation.

Estimates of the death toll have ranged up to 10,000.

“I think there’s some encouragement in what we’ve found in the initial sweeps that some of the catastrophic deaths that some people predicted may not have occurred,” said Terry Ebbert, New Orleans homeland security chief.

Let’s hope it turns out that way.

UPDATE: An I told you so. And another.

SOMETHING ELSE TO WORRY ABOUT: What happened to New Orleans’ anthrax labs?

IT’S THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY of RatherGate.

MSNBC reports that Michael Brown is out. No link yet. [LATER: Here.]

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin: “While the president is getting rid of dead wood, can he do something about Norman Mineta now?”

POLICE TRAPPED THOUSANDS IN NEW ORLEANS: This report from UPI seems to confirm the item I linked earlier:

Police from surrounding jurisdictions shut down several access points to one of the only ways out of New Orleans last week, effectively trapping victims of Hurricane Katrina in the flooded and devastated city. . . .

“We shut down the bridge,” Arthur Lawson, chief of the City of Gretna Police Department, confirmed to United Press International, adding that his jurisdiction had been “a closed and secure location” since before the storm hit.

“All our people had evacuated and we locked the city down,” he said. The bridge in question — the Crescent City Connection — is the major artery heading west out of New Orleans across the Mississippi River.

Lawson said that once the storm itself had passed Monday, police from Gretna City, Jefferson Parrish and the Louisiana State Crescent City Connection Police Department closed to foot traffic the three access points to the bridge closest to the West Bank of the river.

He added that the small town, which he called “a bedroom community” for the city of New Orleans, would have been overwhelmed by the influx.

“There was no food, water or shelter” in Gretna City, Lawson said. “We did not have the wherewithal to deal with these people.”

“If we had opened the bridge, our city would have looked like New Orleans does now: looted, burned and pillaged.”

But — in an example of the chaos that continued to beset survivors of the storm long after it had passed — even as Lawson’s men were closing the bridge, authorities in New Orleans were telling people that it was only way out of the city.

An absolute disgrace. (Via Rogers Cadenhead). I renew my suggestion that the Civil Rights Division look into this, as there’s some reason to think it was racially motivated.

UPDATE: This satellite photo shows the Crescent City Connection bridge as a “dry route to safety.” (Compare with this map.) But it was a blocked dry route. So while the Red Cross was being kept out of New Orleans, refugees were being kept in.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s more on Chief Lawson. Meanwhile, reader Jim Chandler doubts there was racism involved: “Most of the police officers I’ve seen there are black, so where does the racial motivation come in?” The article suggests otherwise, but I don’t know. I think DoJ should look into it, though.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s more on Chief Lawson. And here’s an article that makes me wonder if he was worried about the fate of his video poker machines.

MORE: Bruce Rolston thinks that the New Orleans authorities are at fault.

A WIN FOR THE GOVERNMENT IN THE PADILLA CASE:

The exceedingly important question before us is whether the President of the United States possesses the authority to detain militarily a citizen of this country who is closely associated with al Qaeda, an entity with which the United States is at war; who took up arms on behalf of that enemy and against our country in a foreign combat zone of that war; and who thereafter traveled to the United States for the avowed purpose of further prosecuting that war on American soil, against American citizens and targets.

We conclude that the President does possess such authority pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force Joint Resolution enacted by Congress in the wake of the attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001.

Whole opinion at the link above.

IN THE MAIL: Annie Jacobsen’s book, Terror in the Skies: Why 9/11 Could Happen Again. It’s certainly not the week to argue that Homeland Security has everything under control . . . .

GOV. BLANCO: “Nobody told me that I had to request that.”

UPDATE: Mickey Kaus continues to blame federalism. “When things screw up, these days, we hold the president and the federal government responsible. It follows that the president and the federal government should have the power to stop things from screwing up.” He makes a fairly strong case — except that bureaucratic confusion and cross-purposes occur quite strongly even in unitary states with strong leaders at the top.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I’ve mentioned this in passing before, but The Daily Howler has a lengthy post (scroll down) about FEMA’s history of taking days to respond: “Perhaps most surprisingly, in the first three days after Andrew, there was little outside help coming into South Florida, no federal cavalry riding over the hill. Local governments and charities were scrambling to do what they could.”

MORE: Jeff Goldstein has a much lengthier look at the issue.

MORE STILL: So does Michael Young.