ANN ALTHOUSE: “You know one Supreme Court case the Senators aren’t grilling Roberts about?”

Meanwhile, there’s continued liveblogging by Tom Goldstein and Matt Margolis.

TOM DELAY UPDATE: I have to agree with Ramesh Ponnuru that DeLay’s comments don’t seem to have been taken out of context, and I still don’t find the “sarcasm” defense persuasive. As I said before, if it was sarcasm, it misfired.

RELIEFCONNECTIONS.ORG is a cool new portal set up by N.Z. Bear to connect relief-providers and those who need relief services. Check it out if you’re in either category.

J.D. JOHANNES offers a look at the Iraqi court system.

REPEAL THE SEVENTEENTH AMENDMENT? I have thoughts on reforming the Senate, over at GlennReynolds.com.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL’S BOOK, Presidential Leadership : Rating the Best and the Worst in the White House, in which I have a chapter, is now available in paperback.

SOME THOUGHTS ON WHAT THE KATRINA RESPONSE says about the likely response to avian flu:

You think Katrina was bad, imagine a bird flu pandemic which will spread from country to country. The UN and WHO will be in the position of the federal government!

You think the Katrina situation was confused, imagine what an avian flu pandemic would be like: poor countries trying to cover-up cases while the outbreak becomes increasingly widespread while the UN/WHO stands by impotently. . . .

I’d be a lot happier if Congress and the media would focus on what to do about the next predictable crises, not on what went wrong in Katrina. 1,000 dead seems to be the upper limit on the number who died in Katrina. The number who’d die in an epidemic could be 4 or 5 orders of magnitude larger.

Uh oh.

MISSISSIPPI READER HAROLD BRASHEARS WRITES ON KATRINA RESPONSE:

Regular reader who just got internet access in South Mississippi tonight! I hope it does not go out before I finish this email. I live in Gautier, just north of I 10 on the gulf coast. Unlike many, I can plead personal knowledge.

I must disagree with those who appear to have made some kind of holy writ that the response was slow or inadequate. Of course, I cannot speak for New Orleans, which has had such a dysfunctional government
my wife and I have hesitated to visit for almost a year now. We stayed at home during Katrina (at my wife’s insistence, we won’t do that again!), and I must report that I think the emergency response was very fast, considering the size of the storm and the barriers to the response.

This was the biggest storm to hit the US in memory; it stretched from west of New Orleans to east of Mobile in its damage. The storm was a category 2 or 3 as far inland as Hattiesburg and Laurel. This means
prepositioning of supplies would not work, since they would have been destroyed in most cases. As I understand it, there were emergency supplies in the Gulfport/Biloxi area, but they were destroyed by the
strength of the storm.

The barriers to the emergency response are mind boggling. In many cases, emergency personnel and other first responders in the affected area could not be found. In Gulfport, for example, the police station was under water, and was relocated to a school, wading through water to get there. I don’t think anyone has found the Waveland PD, since Waveland is not there any longer. From New Orleans to Mobile there was no phone, no cell phones, no Internet, no
TV, no cable, no electrical power, no gas, no water and no communications of any kind except messenger. This is hard for people in communities far from the disaster to understand, the complete isolation of this communication lack.

North of the gulf coast is an area called the “Pine Belt”. As you may suspect, there are a lot of pine trees there, many of which ended up on the roads after the storm. Just clearing US 49 (a major artery to the coast from the north), took nearly a day. Hattiesburg is the major transportation hub in South Mississippi, and it was actually closed to all traffic for almost a day, due to fallen trees on the city roads. This is incredible, and unprecedented on this scale.

There was literally no way into the area for convoys that did not involve clearing hundreds of miles of roads. The bridge between Mobile and Pascagoula was closed, due to fear that it would collapse. It is still only one lane each way. I 10 was, in places,
under water until Tuesday.

So where did this idea of a slow response originate? I believe it came from fearful local politicians, mostly in Louisiana, eager to deflect blame to anyone else. It was picked up enthusiastically by the media. The Cindy Sheehan story was rapidly fading, so this was simply another attack by the media, beleieving they have finally got Bush. The Plame story, the Rumsfield story, Cindy Sheehan, Abu Graib, etc… etc…

I saw emergency personnel on Tuesday evening, and I was quite happy with the response.

I’m glad the power’s on. Here are some photos of damage on the Gulf Coast. And check out these aerial photos showing damage to bridges and roads.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: “Every House member and every senator, as a show of support for the hurricane’s victims, should publicly give up a pork project in their district or in their state.” (Via Newsbeat 1).

ANN ALTHOUSE ON DIANNE FEINSTEIN: “Or is one of Congress’s enumerated powers the power to show it cares?”

Read the whole thing, which illustrates that listening to Senators bloviate about things they don’t understand isn’t like having a tooth pulled — it’s worse!

THE PLOT THICKENS: More blog investigative journalism regarding the Air America scandal.

THIS POST ON TRAFALGAR brings to mind this column by James Lileks: “Now our memorials are muted things whose passive beauty often seems at odds with the events they describe.” At best.

UPDATE: Some progress, here.

MERYL YOURISH: “Someone needs to explain to me how what happened in Iraq today can in any way be labeled the actions of ‘insurgents’ who are fighting to rid the country of the ‘occupiers.’ . . . Shouldn’t an insurgent to be a native of the land he’s fighting for? Wouldn’t you otherwise call these men mercenaries, or perhaps even—dare I say it—terrorists?”

UPDATE: Gateway Pundit rounds up some interesting news from Iraq, too, including a translation of an Iraqi newspaper article.

BLOGS scoop NBC.

MARK TAPSCOTT WONDERS WHY collusion between the New York Times and the Washington Post isn’t just as bad as collusion between Ford and GM.

“FATUOUS only in retrospect.” Heh.

CRUSHING OF DISSENT BLOCKED IN BROOKLYN:

In a swift and crucial victory for freedom of speech and academic freedom, Brooklyn College has affirmed that prominent professor KC Johnson will not be subjected to an unconstitutional inquisition into his views. The college surrendered mere days after the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) came to Johnson’s public defense.

As it should have, though it would have been better not to have needed FIRE at all.

DONALD SENSING: “Yesterday my eldest son, Lance Cpl. Stephen Sensing, deployed with his unit to Iraq. . . . My son and his fellows are producers of freedom, not mere consumers of it.” Read the whole thing.

JEFF GOLDSTEIN = KARL ROVE: It all makes sense now.

HUGH HEWITT WONDERS why Arthur Jones, chief of disaster recovery for Louisiana’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, is speaking at a conference in New York instead of, you know, doing his job in Louisiana. Maybe that explains the confusion over the bodies.

CONFUSION CONTINUES TO REIGN:

Gov. Kathleen Blanco lashed out at the federal government, accusing it of moving too slowly in recovering the bodies. The dead “deserve more respect than they have received,” she said.

However, Federal Emergency Management Agency spokesman David Passey said the state asked to take over body recovery last week. “The collection of bodies is not normally a FEMA responsibility,” he said.

Perhaps if people spent less time talking to the press, and more time talking to each other . . .

KINDS OF SINGULARITIES: Phil Bowermaster has worrisome thoughts.

MICHAEL BARONE WRITES on Adam Smith’s political punditry.

THE NATIONAL CONVERSATION: “It’s new, and about you.” What’s not to like?

THIS WEEK’S Carnival of Education is up!