JUDGES MAY BE LIKE UMPIRES, but Senators, well, not so much.

HOT DOGS FOR HEALTH? Well, sort of.

JIM HOFT NOTES lots of good news from Iraq, which has been buried under Katrina / Judge Roberts reporting.

TOM MAGUIRE HAS more on the Gretna bridge incident.

GO4TRUTH.COM is a new web initiative set up by the Tennessee Democratic Party. It’s still new, but I think it’s going to wind up being pretty bloggy.

Well, why not? WalMart has a blog now, after all.

GRAND ROUNDS is up!

IN THE MAIL: David Schoenbrod’s Saving Our Environment from Washington : How Congress Grabs Power, Shirks Responsibility, and Shortchanges the People. Lots of interesting stuff, and not much of the conventional wisdom.

CABLE NEWS AS GREEK TRAGEDY: Power Line and Austin Bay have thoughts.

MORE ROBERTS LIVEBLOGGING, by Tom Goldstein at SCOTUSBlog. So is Matt Margolis.

CHAOS IN GAZA: Gateway Pundit has the roundup.

OUCH. (Via Stephen Green).

WHEN ALTERMAN ATTACKS: Brendan Nyhan responds. In measured fashion.

RICK STUART:

So far incredible news from Katrina, the dead body count is really low compared to the numbers in the thousands we heard about.

So how did the media get the number and keep putting it out?

Good question. This should be a major media embarrassment:

The city braced for more grim discoveries as the receding waters allowed search parties to reach isolated buildings. But the death toll — 279 for Louisiana — was still far below the initial prediction of the city’s mayor that 10,000 perished.

“It’s hot. It smells. But most of the houses we are looking at are empty,” Oregon National Guard Staff Sgt. James Lindseth, 33, said as his platoon, inspecting for people dead or alive, worked its way through dank and broken homes that had been in the water a few days ago.

So they were off by 9700, so far. That’s good news, but it’s also reason to take other things they tell us with many grains of salt.

UPDATE: Reader Ryan Booth emails:

Mayor Nagin was the one to put forward the 10,000 number. It may have been irresponsible for him to do so, but surely it isn’t the MSM’s fault for repeating that number. If I were a reporter, I’d figure that the mayor would probably be in a better position to know than anyone else.

Well, that’s hardly been his record, but . . . .

Meanwhile, another reader emails: “Don’t you know why the body count in NO is so low? It is because of cannibalism my friend. Don’t you read the Huffington Post? ;-)”

I blame the Klingons.

But here’s the kind of critical assessment that we didn’t see enough of last week:

Officialdom abhors a numbers vacuum, and several elected officials have begun to speculate publicly about the death toll. Asked on NBC’s “Today” how many might have died, Mr. Nagin said Monday that “it wouldn’t be unreasonable to have 10,000.” (On Thursday, he had said in a radio interview that 1,000 had died and 1,000 more were dying every day.) That echoed a statement Friday by U.S. Senator David Vitter: “My guess is that it will start at 10,000, but that is only a guess.”

Educated guessing is an entirely understandable response, and it may help brace the public for the actual number. But that number could be very different.

“There’s plenty of speculation. There’s a thousand numbers out there, to say the least,” Trooper Johnnie Brown, a spokesman for the Louisiana state police, told me on Sunday. I asked if any of the death counts were official numbers. “An official may have said it, but there has been no count,” he said. He emphasized that more important work remained to be done: “We don’t have anyone who can sit there and be a counter.”

Read the whole thing. We don’t know, of course, but it’s interesting the way that a number — based on basically nothing — got set in concrete so fast.

IS INNOVATION IN DECLINE? Call it the reverse Singularity, I guess. . . .

But as my TCS column tomorrow will demonstrate, I don’t think so.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF HURRICANE RELIEF, in Memphis:

“Music is therapy for me now,” said Rasheed Akbar, 53, a saxophone player known as “Sheik Rasheed” to his French Quarter fans. “It’s as much therapy as livelihood.”

He’s finding some of both on Memphis’s version of Bourbon Street, thanks to hurricane-relief efforts by the Beale Street Merchants Association.

The merchants are offering paid gigs for musicians, jobs for restaurant workers, and free lunches that start at noon today in Handy Park. Vouchers for other meals also are available.

Displaced musicians and restaurant workers, who are asked to provide verification, can register at the merchants association office, 154 Beale, from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

“They’re our brothers and we need to take care of them,” said Preston Lamm, merchants association president.

There’s also this relief, from Musicares:

“We’re not the Red Cross, but I don’t know that the Red Cross understands how to get a musician who lost everything a guitar or trumpet or saxophone or drum kit,” said Jon Hornyak, executive director of the local chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, the Grammy organization.

New Orleans and Mississippi are part of the Memphis chapter.

The MusiCares Hurricane Relief Fund will provide funds for shelter, food, utilities, transportation, medical expenses and medication, clothing, instrument and recording equipment replacement, relocation costs, school supplies for students, insurance payments and more.

I belong to the Nashville chapter, but this is good work.

ARTHUR CHRENKOFF has put up his last post. He’s remembered fondly.

Thanks, Arthur, for everything!

100 WORDS OR LES NESSMAN is still underway!

SOMEWHAT LATE TO THE GAME, the NRA is denouncing gun confiscation in New Orleans. (Via TalkLeft).

WAS BUSINESS WEEK SNOOKERED? Wouldn’t be the first time.

ALT.MUSLIM IS CONDEMNING THE BURNING OF SYNAGOGUES in Gaza:

Imagine if Jewish settlers in the Gaza Strip destroyed two dozen mosques. There would be mass rallies in front of Israeli embassies around the world, and in America organizations like CAIR and MPAC would issue righteous condemnations calling on the American government to restrain Israel. However, as we’ve seen today, when Palestinians streaming into liberated Gaza set fire to synagogues there is deafening silence from most Muslims and certainly from the leadership of the American Muslim community. . . .

The wholesale destruction of the Jewish synagogues is yet another indication that Palestinians of all stripes, whether Fatah secularists or Islamic Hamas types, do not have the political maturity to construct a civil society. However, it is also a sign that Muslims in America lack the conviction of their religion to condemn sacrilege when it is committed by Muslims against others.

Read the whole thing. (Via Zombyboy).

UPDATE: TigerHawk isn’t sure if the Palestinian Authority was unable, or unwilling to stop the burning of synagogues, but says it’s bad news for the peace process either way. Roger Simon has related thoughts.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Here’s an article on environmental issues relating to Nanotechnology, and EPA hearings on the subject later this month.

Here’s a piece that I wrote on the topic for the Environmental Law Reporter a couple of years ago.

WHEN IS IT OK FOR MEN TO CRY?

Not at a Senate confirmation hearing:

“When I ponder our country and its greatness, its weaknesses, its potential, my heart aches for less divisiveness,” he says and pauses a long time, choking back tears. “He’s crying?!” I exclaim. We rewind the TiVo and play it again and, I’m sorry to say, laugh a lot. After the long pause, he goes on: “…less polarization, less fingerpointing, less bitterness, less mindless partisanship.” You know, I agree! I feel very strongly about all of those things. But crying in a Senate hearing speech, moving yourself to tears? I’m sorry. I laughed a lot.

Also not when you’re a police chief, according to the Insta-Wife, who earlier today saw Dr. Phil encouraging New Orleans’ police chief to cry on camera and was not amused.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

Favorite Jack Handey quote:

“It takes a big man to cry, but it takes an even bigger man to laugh at that man.”

Or a woman.

MICHAEL TOTTEN IS MOVING TO BEIRUT, where he’ll be a free-lance correspondent. Editors, take note!

JIM LINDGREN offers perspective on analogies between baseball umpires and judges.

OVER AT SLATE, A Katrina science test: “Hint: The answer isn’t global warming.”