MORE ON KATRINA: The report is out, and Popular Mechanics has a summary. Excerpt:

Government or contractor negligence was not discovered. The practices and design criteria did vary however since 1965. The piecemeal construction of levees, floodwalls and gates over the decades led to “inconsistent levels of protection.” Protection erected around the 17th Street Canal for example was not as strong as those at the Orleans Canal, which incorporated more conservative designs and practices. Materials also ranged in strength and fortitude.

IPET also determined Katrina’s surge levels were as much as six feet higher than design levels in the eastern and southern portions. And the waves were “long period ocean storm waves” allowing them to run over the levees. Some waves generated velocities of 10 to 15 feet-per-second over levees.

All but four breaches were due to overtopping and erosion. A key element leading to failures at the 17th Street Canal and London Avenue was the formation of gaps behind I-walls. The morning of the hurricane, water had already rose 1.7 feet above the tops of the levees and floodwalls to an elevation of 14.2 feet. As the water passed over the levees, it eroded the soil supporting the walls degrading their stability and resulting in catastrophic flooding.

It will be interesting to see how much media play this gets, since it, er, undercuts some earlier reporting on the story.

DALE CARPENTER WRITES on why a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage is a bad idea even if you oppose gay marriage. I support gay marriage (though I’d prefer to separate marriage and state, making marriage a matter of contract, not status), but it’s interesting reading.

MY MENTION OF THE HENRY REED BOOKS led to various requests for kids’ book recommendations. That’s really my mother’s turf — she’s a children’s librarian — but the InstaDaughter is a big fan of Cornelia Funke’s books Inkheart and Inkspell, though I haven’t read those. She liked The Thief Lord, too, though I read it and found it okay but not great.

For oldies-but-goodies of the Henry Reed variety, of course, there are also the recently reissued Mad Scientists’ Club books by Bertrand Brinley. The InstaDaughter read the first one but was lukewarm — unlike Henry Reed’s stuff, she saw it as a “boy book.” And it pretty much is, I guess.

A LOOK AT HUGO CHAVEZ AND OPEC, with an Iranian slant.

PEGGY NOONAN: “The Perot experience seemed to put an end to third-party fever. But I think it’s coming back, I think it’s going to grow, and I think the force behind it is unique in our history. . . . The problem is not that the two parties are polarized. In many ways they’re closer than ever. The problem is that the parties in Washington, and the people on the ground in America, are polarized. There is an increasing and profound distance between the rulers of both parties and the people–between the elites and the grunts, between those in power and those who put them there.”

(Via Texas Rainmaker). I’ve been saying that for a while. There’s more on the third-party angle here, too.

UPDATE: Mark Tapscott looks at the rapid ascendancy of the Republicans from third-party status before the Civil War and comments:

The GOP went from nowhere in 1854 to Lincoln in the White House and congressional majorities in a decade. Thanks to the Internet’s power to link like-minded people, I doubt it will take so long this time around for a new party to become ascendant.

I think the “Feiler Faster Principle” applies here, too. But Michelle Malkin, even though she favors Noonan’s idea in the abstract, thinks it won’t go anywhere: “When push comes to shove, Kos repulses me more than Bill Frist or Dennis Hastert does. So I won’t gamble on a Reform candidate, especially one who’s likely to draw votes from the GOP nominee, lest it tip the election to the nutroots.” John Podhoretz, less comfortable, warns against just such an outcome.

That’s what Republican (and Democratic) leaders are counting on, of course. But their best protection against a third-party breakout would be to do a better job themselves.

ANDREW MCCARTHY: “Given the last five years of strident complaints about the supposedly imperial presidency, I’m just wondering what, say, Senator Reid or Rep. Pelosi thinks about a branch of government that decides to define its own powers regardless of what the courts say.”

Read this, too, about Rep. Jefferson’s car and the speech-and-debate clause. And there’s some interesting institutional background here.

SOME COOL PORTRAITS FROM INDIA.

STRATEGYPAGE ON EAST TIMOR: It’s a case of “Melanesian malaise.”

Meanwhile, a comparison of East Timor and Iraq.

MOWERBLOGGING UPDATE: Yes, I still have the unpowered push mower that I wrote about last year. Still works fine. Doesn’t use any gas!

I’d rather have a robot mower, though. But then you’d miss photo-ops like this one.

DON SURBER has an update on the Harry Reid scandal, and seems to think it’s a bit more important than I do.

A SCOTT BURGESS / JOHANN HARI cage match. They’re vacuuming up what’s left of Hari.

GUN CONTROL IN BURLINGTON, even if it violates state law?

Maybe we need a federal “amnesty” for people who break state and local gun laws. . . .

GAY-BASHING IN MOSCOW: Peter Tatchell writes:

When Moscow’s mayor can abuse fundamental freedoms with impunity, it is doubtful that Russia is fit to hold the presidency of the Council of Europe – or even be a member.

President Putin’s silence is damning. He has said nothing in defence of the right to protest or of the human rights of Russia’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.

Nevertheless, Moscow Pride was a huge success, despite all the homophobia it revealed and the savage repression it unleashed. It is a major milestone in Russian queer history. A handful of courageous gay Russians got up off their knees and stood tall, proud and defiant. They dared to take on the authoritarian regime of Mayor Luzhkov.

By insisting on the right to protest, they were defending more than gay rights: they were defending the democratic freedoms of all Russians, gay and straight.

That’s certainly true. Moscow needs more people willing to stand up to the authorities. Veronica Khokhlova has a big roundup on this event, too, one that takes a somewhat more negative view of the precedent that was set.

PETER ARCHER writes that we should be encouraging the resistance in Iran. That seems right to me.

I’VE GOTTEN A BUNCH OF EMAILS ON A JIMMY CARTER / OSAMA BIN LADEN CONNECTION, but as John Hinderaker notes, “The bin Laden Group is the biggest construction company in the Middle East and is, as far as I know, a perfectly respectable company. Jimmy Carter would say that the Camp David accords were the crowning achievement of his generally-unsuccessful Presidency. There is no reason why Middle Eastern Arabs like the bin Ladens should not show their appreciation of President Carter by making a donation to his library. And there is no reason why the entire bin Laden family should be guilty by reason of its black sheep, Osama–who had, as I recall, some 50 brothers and sisters.”

He concludes: “We’ve been highly critical of Jimmy Carter on a number of grounds, but this isn’t one of them.” Nor should it be.

This seems a bit like the bogus Kerry China scandal.

A LOOK AT MAYOR BLOOMBERG vs. guns.

Personally, I’d rather have a gun . . . .

WHAT IS SO RARE as a day in June?

I’M INTERVIEWED on the Internet and politics, in the D.C. Examiner.

WATCH OUT, GOOGLE: Ask.com now has a blog search feature. It gets a pretty good review over at TechCrunch. (Thanks to Gabe Rivera for the tip.)

MICKEY KAUS thinks that John McCain is setting himself up for a third-party run in 2008.

POPULAR MECHANICS: “Hurricane Season Begins with New Plans and Old Levees.”

It could be subtitled “It’s the soils, stupid.”

THE WASHINGTON POST has a story on Egypt’s imprisoned bloggers. And, in the Christian Science Monitor, Sandmonkey is calling for a boycott of Egypt:

If arresting peaceful protesters on the street, week after week (653 last month alone), weren’t enough, the Egyptian government is looking to end public dissent over the Internet. So far, six bloggers have been arrested. One of them is Alaa Abdel-Fatah, one of Egypt’s most prominent bloggers. Mr. Abdel-Fatah runs an aggregator service for Egyptian blogs, using the space to help organize protests. He has been a thorn in the side of the Egyptian government for some time, which finally decided to handpick Abdel-Fatah and fellow bloggers out of a recent street protest and detain them. They have been in jail for three weeks now in a place that makes Abu Ghraib look like the Four Seasons.

Another blogger, Mohamed el-Sharqawi, was released, then rearrested two days later, just last Thursday. He was beaten up and says he was raped by the police before being thrown in jail again. There is still no word on what he is charged with, or how long he will be detained, since the emergency laws allow his indefinite incarceration without charges. . . .

For all of the aforementioned reasons, I call upon you to boycott Egypt financially.

I am not just asking the US State Department to suspend the $3 billion in annual aid sent to the Egyptian government. I am asking every person who reads this to not visit Egypt, not buy Egyptian products, and not invest in companies that invest in Egypt. I am asking you to completely boycott Egypt and everything Egyptian until this government stops silencing dissent.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my country. But the current regime has to be stopped, and the only way that’s going to happen is if it is no longer supported.

Read the whole thing. Mubarak, apparently, is pissed at the pressure he’s been getting from the United States. Seems to me that means it’s time for more.

SINCE SOME PEOPLE DON’T REALIZE IT, I should note that Kim du Toit is blogging again.

BILL ROGGIO HAS POSTED A REPORT FROM KABUL that’s worth your time.

He also emails this photo of sunset in Kabul.

MERCENARIES FOR DARFUR: Max Boot floats an idea that’s been seen here at InstaPundit before:

If you listen to the bloviators at Turtle Bay, salvation will come from the deployment of a larger corps of blue helmets. If only. What is there in the history of United Nations peacekeepers that gives anyone any confidence that they can stop a determined adversary?

The odds are much greater that U.N. representatives will instead be taken as hostages by bloodthirsty thugs, as happened in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995 and in Sierra Leone five years later. Or that, rather than protecting the people, the peacekeepers will prey on them — as allegedly has happened in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea and Congo, all places where blue helmets have been accused of a horrifying litany of sexual abuses, including pedophilia, rape and prostitution.

Even if these worst-case scenarios don’t come to pass, the U.N. is likely to prove ineffectual in the face of determined opposition. Look at what is happening in East Timor, where, after seven years of U.N. stewardship, the capital has been paralyzed by fighting among armed gangs. The situation is even worse in Haiti, where a Brazilian-led U.N. force has done little to stem growing chaos. It is worse still in Somalia — the most lawless country on Earth — where a U.N. deployment failed in the early 1990s. . . .

But perhaps there is a way to stop the killing even without sending an American or European army. Send a private army. A number of commercial security firms such as Blackwater USA are willing, for the right price, to send their own forces, made up in large part of veterans of Western militaries, to stop the genocide.

We know from experience that such private units would be far more effective than any U.N. peacekeepers. In the 1990s, the South African firm Executive Outcomes and the British firm Sandline made quick work of rebel movements in Angola and Sierra Leone. Critics complain that these mercenaries offered only a temporary respite from the violence, but that was all they were hired to do. Presumably longer-term contracts could create longer-term security, and at a fraction of the cost of a U.N. mission.

Yet this solution is deemed unacceptable by the moral giants who run the United Nations. They claim that it is objectionable to employ — sniff — mercenaries. More objectionable, it seems, than passing empty resolutions, sending ineffectual peacekeeping forces and letting genocide continue.

More likely they fear that if it proves effective, they’ll lose out on a line of business that has proved profitable so far.