NOT JUST BORING, BORING FROM WITHIN! “I used to hate seeing Frank Rich’s byline on NYT op-ed columns, but no longer. Like Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman, Rich has become an active embarassment, an unwitting ally in the ongoing destruction of the Times as a respectable news organ.”

I’m guessing that goes for Bob Herbert, too. . . .

UPDATE: Read this Fisking, if you’re interested.

LIKE BOB HOPE IN WORLD WAR II, Sean Penn is able to take a devastated nation and make it laugh:

Movie star and political activist Penn, 45, was in the collapsing city to aid stranded victims of flooding sparked by Hurricane Katrina, but the small boat he was piloting to launch a rescue attempt sprang a leak.

The outspoken actor had planned to rescue children waylaid by the deadly waters, but apparently forgot to plug a hole in the bottom of the vessel, which began taking water within seconds of its launch. . . .

Asked what he had hoped to achieve in the waterlogged city, the actor replied: “Whatever I can do to help.”

But with the boat loaded with members of the Oscar-winner’s entourage, including his personal photographer, one bystander taunted: “How are you going to get any people in that thing?”

Thanks, Sean! (Via Kobayashi Maru). I’m pretty sure I know which one of Bill Whittle’s tribes Penn belongs to. The personal photographer is the giveaway . . . .

UPDATE: Picture (presumably not by the personal photographer) here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Also with a personal photographer — but at least she didn’t leave the plug out.

JASON DEPARLE thinks that New Orleans is all about race. So — in a not entirely different way that DeParle should find troubling — does Steve Sailer.

But I think Bill Whittle is closer to the truth when he says it’s not about race, but about tribes. His colors aren’t black and white, or red and blue, but — well, read the whole thing and see what you think.

UPDATE: Some people who have come late to the party seem to think I’m endorsing Sailer’s analysis. Nope. I think that — like DeParle’s — it takes a racial line that I’m uncomfortable with. Which was the point.

Meanwhile, here are some people who are members of Bill’s tribe, whether they know it or not:

In the absence of information and outside assistance, groups of rich and poor banded together in the French Quarter, forming “tribes” and dividing up the labor.

As some went down to the river to do the wash, others remained behind to protect property. In a bar, a bartender put near-perfect stitches into the torn ear of a robbery victim.

While mold and contagion grew in the muck that engulfed most of the city, something else sprouted in this most decadent of American neighborhoods – humanity.

“Some people became animals,” Vasilioas Tryphonas said Sunday morning as he sipped a hot beer in Johnny White’s Sports Bar on Bourbon Street. “We became more civilized.”

It happens that way, sometimes. (Via Kobayashi Maru).

THE DEA IS DEFENDING ALCOHOL PROHIBITION: More evidence that they’re totally out of touch with reality.

MATOKO KUSANAGI thinks the Singularity is a lot nearer than Ray Kurzweil does.

A HURRICANE KATRINA “I’M O.K.” REGISTRY: It’s a good idea. (Via Virginia Postrel).

CASS SUNSTEIN ON JOHN ROBERTS: “He’s conservative, but he’s no fundamentalist.”

JASON VAN STEENWYK has a number of interesting posts.

BUSH HAS NAMED JOHN ROBERTS to succeed William Rehnquist as Chief Justice.

UPDATE: Heh.

THE NEW YORK TIMES NOTES that the blogosphere was way ahead of the authorities on Hurricane Katrina. Particularly Brendan Loy. Excerpt:

Mr. Loy’s posting that Friday afternoon came three days before the hurricane struck and two days before the mayor of New Orleans, Ray C. Nagin, issued an evacuation order. Posts over the next several days, in aggregate, seem now like an eerie rewriting of the tale of Chicken Little, in which the sky does in fact fall.

In the cooperative and competitive world of blogs, Mr. Loy’s has gotten some serious praise. Mickey Kaus, whose kausfiles blog is featured on Slate.com, wrote on Friday that “Loy’s blog for the past week is a pretty extraordinary document,” adding that “it should maybe be in the Smithsonian, if you can put a blog in the Smithsonian.”

Indeed. There’s another Smithsonian-worthy record here, too.

UPDATE: Loy has a follow-up post that’s worth reading in its entirety, but here’s an excerpt:

It is true, as some have pointed out in comments, that Katrina was not “likely” to hit New Orleans as of Saturday morning, or even Sunday morning for that matter. New Orleans was the hurricane’s most likely target — it remained in the crosshairs of the official forecast track all weekend — but in terms of statistical strike probabilities, even the most likely target at 24-48 hours out still has a less-than-50% chance of getting hit, thanks to the uncertainties inherent in hurricane forecasting. However, given the technology that we currently have, you simply could not have a greater threat to a specific location, 48 hours before landfall, than the threat that New Orleans faced on Saturday morning. It was, as I said, a “high-confidence forecast,” and one with enormously catastrophic potential. Thus, if an evacuation was not appropriate then, then it follows that an evacuation must never be appropriate at 48 hours. And that can’t be, because really, 48 hours is already too late; studies have long shown that it would take 72 hours to completely empty the city of New Orleans. So unless the city’s hurricane strategy was to throw up its hands and say, “there’s nothing we can do,” a mandatory evacuation — school buses and all — was most certainly called for on Saturday morning. As I wrote on Saturday afternoon, “If you knew there was a 10 percent chance terrorists were going to set off a nuclear bomb in your city on Monday, would you stick around, or would you evacuate? That’s essentially equivalent to what you’re dealing with here. I sure as hell would leave.”

Finally, one last point. As horrible as the catastrophe has been, please realize that it actually could have been far worse. What occurred was not the long-feared “worst-case scenario,” which involved not a levee breach equalizing the water level in Lake Ponchartrain and “Lake New Orleans,” but rather a storm surge over-topping the levees and causing the water level in “Lake New Orleans,” hemmed in by the still-intact levees, to rise substantially higher than the water level in the lake. If the storm had wobbled a meteorologically insignificant 20 or 30 miles to the west, and/or had not weakened from a Category 5 to a Category 4 at the last minute, that scenario would have occurred, and instead of a slowly developing 10-20 foot flood, New Orleans would have suffered a rapidly developing 30-40 foot flood. (Jackson Square would have been underwater, whereas in the real-world scenario it remained high and dry.) The whole thing would have happened Monday morning, and at the same time as the city was rapidly and massively flooding, the devastating winds that demolished the Mississippi coastline would have been tearing New Orleans apart instead. All of those attics where people took shelter would have been either submerged or shattered to bits. The French Quarter would have been swamped, instead of mostly surviving the flood. Second-floor generators in hospitals might well have drowned. Bottom line, there would be a lot fewer refugees and a lot more corpses.

Yes. Read the whole thing.

MORE KATRINA RED TAPE: “Volunteer physicians are pouring in to care for the sick, but red tape is keeping hundreds of others from caring for Hurricane Katrina survivors while health problems rise.”

UPDATE: More on this at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

After nearly a week spent waiting or driving from city to city chasing victims of Hurricane Katrina, the 31 doctors, nurses and paramedics arrived Sunday at Reunion Arena here expecting to find a shelter full of patients clamoring for care.

What they found instead were medical facilities already in place that were better than anything they could provide.

“They don’t need us here,” said Cari Spradlin, deputy commander the Georgia-3 Disaster Medical Assistance Team, activated after the storm hit.

Other volunteer physicians from across the country have poured into the South in week since Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, but many are finding roadblocks keeping them from caring for survivors.

If they’re just not needed, that’s good. When there’s red tape keeping them from getting where they’re needed (which is true elsewhere) that’s bad. (Thanks to reader Joseph Britt for the link).

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Jeff Cook emails:

Some of the red tape is about credentialing. Trust me. Nuts come out of the woodwork pretending to be physicians in situations like this and whatever organization is responsible for health care is also in charge of making sure doctors and nurses are credentialed, even if they’re not licensed in Louisiana. Hugely important.

Makes sense. But there should be a way to do this quickly in emergencies.