HOG WILD: MICHELLE MALKIN launches a salvo at Alaska Republican porkmeister Don Young.

Meanwhile, John Tabin observes:

For the first time in a long time, fiscal restraint is both good policy and good politics. To turn his approval rating numbers around, Bush needs to shore up restless conservatives, and get behind — or better yet, in front of — calls for spending cuts to offset hurricane reconstruction. . . .

Bush has made some rhetorical glances toward spending cuts; last Friday, when he ruled out a tax increase to pay for post-hurricane reconstruction, he spoke of “cutting unnecessary spending.” But if he and his party are going to get credit for turning toward fiscal discipline, he needs to be more visible on this issue.

Yes, he does. Jonah Goldberg is less optimistic, though: “The porkbusters fight is fun now, but not since early cave men tried to train grizzly bears to give them tongue-baths has a project seemed more obviously doomed to end in disappointment. Expecting Congress — of either party — to give back pork which has already been approved and passed into law is like expecting crack whores to give refunds days after services have been rendered.”

UPDATE: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jim Wooten signs on to PorkBusters: “Folks are invited to identify pork projects in our own backyards that could be delayed or scrapped altogether to help fund Katrina costs. The Web site is: truthlaidbear.com/porkbusters.php. It’s a sacrifice to a handful of Georgians, I know, but I’m offering up the commuter rail line to Lovejoy. That’ll free up $106 million for the Gulf Coast.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Daniel Drezner starts out pessimistic, but ends on a more optimistic note. I’m certainly OK on pushing back (or abolishing) the Medicare prescription drug benefit, and while I’d normally favor moon colonies I’m not at all convinced that NASA’s plan will give us what we need.

THE MUDVILLE GAZETTE casts a critical eye on press coverage of this weekend’s protests. And here are some well-thought-out dos and don’ts for protesters from the Daily Kos. Best one: “Don’t use the slogan ‘No Blood For Oil!’: Face it. The bromide is tired, used.”

Heh. Indeed.

UPDATE: Read this, too.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Reader David Nadle emails:

I’m watching CNBC “Squawk Box” this morning, and they are doing segments called “Pork Busters” with accompanying graphics. They’re showing video & stills of particular instances of pork, naming the state and it’s representatives, and inviting them on the show to “defend their pork.” The latest spot was about a vintage Packard museum in Ohio.

I think this is the briefest interval yet for good ideas from the blogosphere to hit the MSM.

Cool. Let’s hope for more of that. I mentioned the Packard museum in an NPR interview yesterday; it seems particularly hard to defend.

SPINNING THE PROTESTS: I recommend that readers google the names of people mentioned in the press accounts of this weekend’s antiwar protests. I looked up Brian Becker, who’s mentioned in this Washington Post story by Petula Dvorak. To be fair, Dvorak at least mentions the ANSWER connection, but a quick Google search of Becker’s name finds that he’s been praising the “Iraqi resistance” and denigrating U.S. troops since the beginning. It would appear that he’s not so much “antiwar” as just on the other side.

It would be nice if Dvorak’s article, and others, made that clearer, instead of offering the sanitized treatment of ANSWER that it does. The Post, however, has a history of whitewashing these folks.

For those who have forgotten, here’s some background on A.N.S.W.E.R. and its related groups by David Corn. Here’s some more, and here’s Michael Lerner’s piece on antisemitism in the antiwar movement, written after he was banned from an antiwar rally at A.N.S.W.E.R.’s behest.

If there were an authentic antiwar movement in this country, it wouldn’t have to rely on the services of fringe groups like A.N.S.W.E.R. to provide organization and cadre.

UPDATE: Here’s more on Becker from INDCJournal, including a photo from an earlier protest.

Meanwhile PostWatch asks:

Is the Washington Post simply incapable of accurately describing ANSWER, one of the chief organizers of this Saturday’s protest? . . .

Dvorak writes of “many causes” that antiwar protesters have marched for, but leaves out the really interesting ones.

Why can’t Dvorak do a little digging on the connection between ANSWER and the Stalinist Workers World Party (WWP)? . . .

If some bloggers can find this in an old Michael Kelly column, why can’t the combined staff of the Washington Post?

Why, indeed? Read the whole thing. And read this related post, too.

And there’s more criticism of the Dvorak article over at Newsbusters.

LOTS MORE HURRICANE NEWS at the WSJ’s Stormtracker page, which is free to nonsubscribers.

RITA’S LITTLEST VICTIM: Soon to be a very special episode of Oprah, no doubt.

NOT ENOUGH GAS: Evacuees are running out, though National Guard fuel trucks are on their way. Some people left without enough fuel in their tanks, but mostly it just seems that people burned it up while stuck in traffic. Notes for the future: Obviously, the “contraflow” needs to start earlier, and prepositioning gas trucks along the route is probably a good idea.

The amount of traffic seems worse than expected, with more than twice as many people on the road as were anticipated. Houston blogger Bill Dyer blames local media: “Katrina + news media hysteria = lots of folks in non-flood-prone areas of Houston, who otherwise would have hunkered down altogether or at least waited until tomorrow to evac, instead hitting the road yesterday afternoon, last night, and today = avoidable degree of gridlock. IMHO, local media have done a very bad job of distinguishing between ‘mandatory evacuation’ areas (truly coastal counties, storm-surge areas) and elsewhere. . . . And ordinary folks are hyper-receptive to the hype because of Katrina. . . . And thus, when amplified by the media megaphones and imprecision in the media’s reporting, Mayor White saying anything at all about evacuation by anyone comes across to most people like ‘RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!'”

Nobody wants to be accused of downplaying this one, of course.

Meanwhile, delays at the Houston airport resulted from TSA employees abandoning their posts. (“White, a Democrat, blamed the ‘failure to show up at work by (110) essential personnel of the federal TSA.'”) So much for the notion that federalizing airport security would professionalize it, I guess.

UPDATE: Reader Melissa Dorman emails:

As someone who recently evacuated from Houston, I can tell you the hysteria and overwhelming rush to get out was too much for the transportation infrastructure. My family lives in Clear Lake, which is southeast of the city of Houston, just North of NASA’s Johnson Space Center. We’re considered a high flood risk, being East of I-45 and South of the Sam Houston Beltway (we’re 5-10 minutes from Galveston Bay). As such, we faced a mandatory evacuation for a Cat 4 or 5. Having filled up the wife’s Suburban with gas days before, and gotten the house ready as can be, we headed off with 2 kids, 2 dogs and 3 fish that the 2 kids would not leave behind. When we left at 4:20 a.m. yesterday morning we knew things would be bad as far as traffic. Rather than joining the parking lot on I-45, which took 8 hours to drive from our location to before the North beltway on 45 (still in Houston!), we decided to use my new Microsoft GPS software and hardware and hit the back roads. Almost exactly 12 hours later, we arrived at my sister’s house in Dallas, where I’m e-mailing you from.

A few points of observation:

1. The evacuation routes and highways are incapable of moving the number of people necessary from the Texas coast, and in particular a large storm. Yes, it was stupid not to order the contra-flow to open for one day, but my guess is it took a while to make sure the southbound lanes were clear and all entrance ramps closed. Coordinating this many gov’t workers isn’t easy on a good day. As far as roads, we simply need more. To hell with the environmentalists that say concrete doesn’t solve anything, simple physics will show that more roads allows more cars to move. There is insufficient road capability on a good traffic day in Houston (an oxymoron, I know), and I’ll be willing to pay for new places to drive. Most of the roads currently in place were built during the 80s for traffic from the 70s, and can’t keep up with the population growth of the region.

2. I’m sure the Republican governor will quickly be blamed, while the Democratic Mayor of Houston will be seen as a hero fighting against the state. Now I must be the first to give Mayor White his kudos in handling the Katrina refugees–he and County Judge Eckels did a fantastic job in opening the city and Astrodome (the County’s baby). Then Mayor White’s liberal tendencies took over and he proposed paying private Houstonians a per diem to keep New Orleans refugees. This asinine proposal met a quick death at city council, given that our city purportedly can’t pay its bills now. Even though we housed a couple we’d never met from New Orleans right after Katrina hit (they were friends of our neighbors who had too many people), I wouldn’t have thought to ask for money–it was the right (dare I say Christian) thing to do. Oh, and their race didn’t matter to this evil Republican.

3. For people who were ordered to get out of Galveston and Southeast Houston, we had no choice, and the media-whipped scarefest (helps those ratings!) only exacerbated the traffic nightmares. That said, you noted that nobody wants to be at the end of the media’s pointed finger (“you should have warned people…you didn’t do enough”), from a practical point of view, it makes things worse for everyone. Back to my Microsoft program, this allowed me to route a plan on back roads, thus relieving pressure on I-10 and I-45. We headed Northeast on the Beltway, hit I-10 toward Beaumont. By 10:30 a.m., we had not even gotten 1/2 way there (an hour drive on a regular day), so I decided to take the first open exit and head North. EVERY gas station on I-10 was out yesterday morning by 9:00 a.m., but miraculously, the stations 15 miles off the freeway had gas–must be something about supply and demand. We headed North & East–away from the mass of Houston/Galveston evacuees–for some time, until we hit a Texas Dept. of Public Safety roadblock on a Northbound road. The DPS officer simply said the “road is closed” without explanation, and told us to head BACK to Beaumont and join the parking lot/freeway. I asked him why the road was closed (locals could still use it) and that it made no sense to head back and add to the problem (I was 30 miles North of I-10) at this point, but he said he was just “told” the clear road due north was closed. I explained that he was in essence risking my family’s life, since stuck on the road with a 20+ foot flood surge, would be suicide. He didn’t care and when I said it was idiotic to shut down good roads to force people onto a jammed evacuation routes, he said what was idiotic was to have to talk with people like me. I can count the number of people I’ve hated in my life on 1 hand and he’s one–stupid, inflexible and unwilling to do SOMETHING (call, just move aside to let people go, etc.) to help take people to safety. My wife tried to keep me calm, and I decided to use the GPS to find an alternate route. We went east 1.5 miles, headed northwest on a dirt road (luckily on the GPS program!) and then hit the “closed” road with no problems about 1 mile north of the idiot DPS officer. No breaking the law, no roadblock at that point, and I was on my way North again.

The sad thing is that the back roads North were almost entirely deserted. Only when we hit the “official” evacuation route would we hit miles-long gridlock, which we quickly used the GPS program to get off and go through the small towns of East Texas. We found gas, food and incredibly nice people in all these small towns, and made it to Dallas (eventually coming in I-20 from the East) yesterday afternoon. When we arrived my wife said the program paid for itself and then some. I am no Bill Gates fan but I must say it was a life saver and stress reliever.

Sorry for the disjointed e-mail since from Sun-Weds. I only got 5 hours sleep.

It’s very hard to move that many people at once, and our infrastructure isn’t designed for it. I think, though, that we should take these considerations more into account in the future.

MICKEY KAUS:

Q.: Does the NYT have the subscriber totals for the triumphant first days of TimesSelect, its new pay-for-columnists feature?

A: Of course it does.

Q.: If those numbers were any good, wouldn’t the NYT be telling us about them?

A: Of course it would!

Q: Have you seen them telling us about any numbers?

A.: Not yet.

Heh.

PORK PROGRESS:

A former candidate for the U.S. House is asking Bozeman to give up $4 million in federal funding for a parking garage so it can instead be used to help victims of Hurricane Katrina.

In an e-mail sent to the Bozeman City Commission, Tracy Velázquez of Bozeman said that given the scale of the disaster, she doesn’t think the city can in good conscious keep the money when it is desperately needed elsewhere. “I think every city in America should look at what they can postpone or do without for now,” she said in an interview Friday.

Good for her.

UPDATE: The Washington Times editorializes:

If fiscal business-as-usual was dangerous before Katrina, then in a post-Katrina world it is undeniably disastrous. Yet, no less than House Majority Leader Tom DeLay was initially in denial. In the wake of the $62.3 billion in emergency appropriations for Katrina, Mr. DeLay said that the Republican-controlled Congress had already removed the fat from the federal budget. “My answer to those who want to offset [Katrina] spending is, ‘Sure, bring me the offsets,’ ” he said. “I will be glad to do it, but no one is able come up with any yet.”

To its credit, the conservative Republican Study Committee (RSC) accepted Mr. DeLay’s challenge. This week the RSC released a detailed 23-page report identifying and explaining a menu of more than 100 specific budget offsets that total nearly $1 trillion over 10 years, including $102 billion for 2006 and nearly $400 billion over the first five years. . . . Back to you, Mr. Delay.

Indeed. And, of course, we’ll soon be seeing Rita relief, too. The evacuation seems to be better-handled this time around, but the property damage will nonethless be enormous.

MICHAEL YON has posted another dispatch from Mosul.

N.Z. BEAR is looking for a volunteer to help clean up the porkbusters pages. If you’re interested, let me know.

AIRBUS ISSUES? “The problems with JetBlue Flight 292 marked the seventh time that the front landing gear of an Airbus jet has locked at a 90-degree angle, forcing pilots to land commercial airliners under emergency conditions, according to FAA records. . . . The locking of the nose gear on Airbus jets is one of several recurring problems with the planes’ nose landing gear.”

TOM BEVAN: “There’s nothing quite like getting your enemy’s propaganda served up unfiltered in a major American daily newspaper.”

We’re used to it by now.

UPDATE: “The groups that will gather in Washington DC for a major anti-war protest this weekend have financial ties to major leftist fundraisers like George Soros and Theresa Heinz Kerry, and beyond them to communist organizations and radical left-wing groups, the Washington Times reports today. The conduits for the rallies appear to be the ubiquitous front groups International ANSWER and the UPJ.”

But the press reports will say that the marchers are ordinary Americans, not MoveOn and A.N.S.W.E.R. astroturf. But then, they said that about Cindy Sheehan, too.

UH OH: “As the death toll rises from an outbreak in Indonesia of avian flu, health officials and business executives are warning firms across Asia to start preparing for a possible pandemic of the disease.”

INDEED: “Can’t be fun being a spokesman for the New Orleans police department these days.” Especially in the face of the looting-and-robbing accusations.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Here’s a response from Congressman George Miller. His constituent is unsatisfied.

UPDATE: Investor’s Business Daily:

People worry: How do we repair hurricane damage, fund a war and expand domestic programs all at the same time? The answer: prioritize. Take a machete to the unnecessary stuff — which Congress should have done long ago.

We’ve come up with our own list (left), borrowing from various sources. All are programs or projects that could be deleted with little economic disruption but with maximum fiscal impact.

The typical family now spends $22,000 a year on federal government and has serious doubts about where it all goes. Seventy-one percent of Americans, according to budget analyst Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation, “are more bothered by how their taxes are spent than by the amount of taxes they pay.” . . .

Some in Congress are already starting to look more closely for savings in the $2.6 trillion budget for 2006. Other voices — including those of the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, Citizens Against Government Waste and a fast-growing blogger group called Porkbusters — have weighed in with many suggestions.

Don’t let Tom DeLay and other discombobulated politicians fool you. It can be done. If we can get out $200 billion without breaking a sweat, imagine what Congress can do if it rolls up its sleeves and really gets down to work.

Indeed.

ANOTHER UPDATE: “What happens here is important, not just for recovery efforts in the Gulf, but for the future of conservatism and the relationship of fiscal conservatives with the GOP. If the Republican majority can’t prioritize spending now, there is no reason to believe it ever will.”

BRENDAN LOY: “I don’t know if they can read blogs in heaven… but I’ll miss you, Sarah. We all will.”

Of course they can read blogs in heaven. And write them. Otherwise, how could it be heaven?

JEFF JARVIS: Do not build it. Not here.

BILL QUICK:

Yes. I’ll be on pins and needles waiting to watch a tv series about a woman President written by Eleanor Clift, Gwen Ifill, and Helen Freaking Thomas.

How about a series about a President who actually has brains and leadership qualities, written by Jonah Goldberg, Roger Simon and, well, me?

I’d watch that.

A TALE OF TWO CITIES: Rand Simberg thinks that Katrina and Rita offer an opportunity for a controlled social experiment.

PERSONNEL PROBLEMS for Al Qaeda.

POLITICAL BLOGGERS DEMAND SPEECH FREEDOMS: You’d think the First Amendment would take care of this, but, you know, “eternal vigilance” and all that.

My advice: Tar and feathers futures — buy!

SCHUMER’S COLSON? Well, some people are calling him “the new Nixon!”

PAVEMENT MARKINGS as an alternative to red-light cameras:

New research sponsored by Florida’s Department of Transportation suggests a number of effective engineering alternatives can reduce red light running. Using an advanced driving simulator to monitor the reactions of ordinary drivers, University of Central Florida researchers concluded that improving street markings near intersections reduced red light running by 74 percent without increasing the likelihood of rear end collisions.

“The pavement marking countermeasure is a low-technology and inexpensive solution to reduce the number of motorists that run red lights,” the study concluded.

On the other hand, it’s not a source of revenue.

UPDATE: By comparison, traffic cameras increase accidents according to this Virginia study. But they also increase revenue!

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: An email from Senator Coburn. “I can only assume that the good Senator from Oklahoma and his staff have been paying attention to the porkbuster efforts in the blogosphere, and that’s how my name ended up on an email list. I find this very encouraging. Keep it up!”

Yes, do!