From View from the Right by Lawrence Auster:

L.A. Times hires Mexican immigrant as editorial page editor

An e-mail from Dan Sheehy:

American Patriots -

The Los Angeles Times today announced that leftist Michael Kinsley is being replaced by leftist and Mexican Andres Martinez to head the paper's editorial page. Martinez is a native of Mexico. He has a bachelor's degree from Yale, a master's in Russian history, and a law degree from Columbia. Martinez said his appointment means the newspaper would continue to support "free trade in Central America." He said he plans to partner with the Downtown Public Library in a series of public forums called Zocalo. I've visited the Zocalo in Mexico City. It's a giant square filled with impoverished people, just like the millions flooding into our country. I remember watching pitiful-looking women sitting on the sidewalk in front of the cathedral, openly breast-feeding their babies and begging for money.

Interestingly, the L.A. Times, which is owned by the Tribune Company in Chicago, no longer publishes its number of subscribers, probably because tens of thousands of Americans have dropped their subscription, many of whom have left Mexifornia. With a Mexican in charge of the editorial page and Americans continuing to escape Mexifornia, how much longer before the paper becomes a Spanish-language paper, I wonder? Los Angeles already has a Mexican mayor, and millions of Mexicans live in the Los Angeles region, so why shouldn't the L.A. Times become a Spanish paper sometime down the road? And isn't it also interesting that this paper, just like all the rest of the corporate media in America, still haven't reported that on March 23 of this year President Bush met with Mexico's Fox and Canada's Martin in Texas, where they quietly agreed to the merger of the three countries and agreed to let the Council on Foreign Relations work out the details. That's when Bush publicly called the Minutemen "vigilantes." Bush agreed to the merger two weeks after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met in Mexico City with Foreign Secretary Ernesto Derbez to discuss the "integration" of the U.S. with other nations in the Western Hemisphere. I write about those meetings in my new book, Fighting Immigration Anarchy: American Patriots Battle to Save the Nation. Can anyone spell T-R-E-A-S-O-N.?

From washingtonpost.com:

Whose Victory, Exactly?
By Anne Applebaum
Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Last week my son's elementary school raised several thousand dollars for hurricane victims by washing cars. My other son's preschool announced without fuss that a boy from New Orleans would be joining the class. My employer is organizing help for the company's Gulf Coast employees, my local bookstore is collecting money for the Red Cross and my favorite radio station raised $54,000 last weekend. Every church or synagogue attended by anyone I know is, of course, raising money, housing evacuees or delivering clothes to victims.

To put it differently, nearly every institution with which I come into daily contact -- my library, my grocery store, my search engine -- has already donated time or money to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, and I don't think this makes me or my community unique. A Zogby poll conducted last week found that 68 percent of Americans had donated money to hurricane relief. An ABC News/Washington Post poll published yesterday found that 60 percent had already donated, and a further 28 percent intend to. Those percentages mean that donors must represent a huge range of political views, economic classes, even aesthetic preferences. Indeed, among the fundraisers listed in last weekend's Post were a jazz concert, a tea dance, a "Christian music" concert and a rehearsal of Verdi's "The Sicilian Vespers." No wonder the Red Cross has already collected more than half a billion dollars; no wonder it was impossible to get on to the Salvation Army's Web site at peak times last week.

But those percentages also mean that it is important not to draw hasty conclusions about the ultimate political impact of this tragedy. More specifically, it's important to ignore the hasty conclusions that have already been drawn, both here and abroad, about the victory of "big government" and the death of a certain kind of American individualism. The German chancellor -- once again using American politics in his election campaign -- has already called the disaster an argument for "strong government." Polly Toynbee, a columnist for Britain's Guardian, declared that Katrina revealed "a hollowed superpower . . . a country that is not a country at all, but atomised, segmented individuals living parallel lives as far apart as possible." A Los Angeles Times article, headlined "A Comeback for Big Government," more objectively quoted lots of experts agreeing that in the wake of the hurricane, the administration will "put aside its interest in small government."

But while it is true that the government's relief effort looks set to dwarf anything it has tried before, consider what the actual experience of the disaster has already been -- not theoretically, not on paper, but in practice. Listen, for example, to volunteers who prepared 92 boats to help evacuate people from the rooftops of New Orleans. They were ultimately kept out by Federal Emergency Management Agency bureaucrats because, among other things, they didn't have life preservers. Or listen to the volunteers who organized 100 doctors to treat 400 sick people at a converted Baton Rouge warehouse -- until they, too, were told by the government to shut down, reopen and then shut down again. Or to the hundreds of firefighters who, according to the New York Times, responded to a nationwide call for help and were then "held by the federal agency in Atlanta for days of training on community relations and sexual harassment," while women were raped and lives were lost in New Orleans. Compare their frustration to the joy experienced by 8-year-olds across the country, washing cars for the Red Cross.

By the same token, consider the effectiveness of the relief strategies so far. With great fanfare, the federal government announced it would distribute debit cards to Katrina victims. The result was chaos, anger and expectations of fraud. Quietly, the Red Cross has been paying evacuees' hotel bills. The result is that 57,000 people have time to plan what to do next. Massive government efforts to get people into massive shelters have led to dissatisfaction, delays, long lines and frustration. But private initiatives -- ranging across the political spectrum from MoveOn.org's Hurricanehousing.org, which is advertising space in thousands of private homes, to First Baptist Church in Athens, Tex., which has just installed six new showers -- are helping people find better housing faster. Over the longer term, it's also pretty safe to bet that people who relocate thanks to a church, find a job thanks to a charitable Web site, and get by thanks to their extended families are going to do a lot better, economically and psychologically, than the people who hang around waiting to be helped by a government jobs program and a government trauma counselor.

I'm not saying anything radical here: I'm not calling for the abolition of FEMA, and I certainly think there's a role for government in disaster and evacuation planning. But it is true that the worst failures of the past two weeks have been big government failures. The biggest successes, by contrast, have come out of this country's incredibly vibrant, amazingly diverse and fantastically generous civil society. Sooner or later, it will be impossible not to draw political lessons from that paradox.

applebaumanne@yahoo.com

From Real Clear Politics:

Katrina, What Went Right
By Lou Dolinar

With body recovery teams in New Orleans finding far fewer than the expected 10,000 to 25,000 dead, despite the flooding of 80 percent of the city, it is time to ask: What went right?

Largely invisible to the media's radar, a broad-based rescue effort by federal, state and local first responders pulled 25,000 to 50,000 people from harm's way in floodwaters in the city. Ironically, FEMA's role, for good or ill, was essentially non-existent, as was the Governor's and the Mayor's. An ad-hoc distributed network responded on its own. Big Government didn't work. Odds and ends of little government did.

The critical period was the immediate aftermath of the levy breaks on Monday, August 29 until the flooding crested on Sept. 2. If people were going to be trapped in attics, drowned in their cars, or washed off roofs, this is when it would have happened. Once the flooding crested, while thousands still needed to be removed from their homes, fed, and relocated, at least the immediate threat of drowning was over.

During the critical period beginning Monday, rescue helicopters were already reeling in at least 2000 people a day. These independent units comprised dozens of Coast Guard, Air Force, Air National Guard and Army choppers. Various boat-rescue operations by New Orleans first responders saved thousands more-even as the media's attention was focused on the Superdome, snipers and scenes of looting. The response to the real threat of Katrina, other words, was immediate and massive -it just wasn't the response the media wanted, expected or was spoon-fed at a press conference.

The precise records of who saved how many, when, are incomplete. However, the bottom line here is the count of the dead. That it is far lower than projections indicates that many of the people who faced imminent doom were rescued as waters rose. By Friday of the first week of operations, chopper crews had literally run out of victims to save and had mostly switched to transporting supplies, dropping sandbags, and rearranging people who were already safe.

The Connecticut Post, of all places, gives the best overview of the operation in a column by Peter Urban. He points out that a single chopper of the Louisiana National Guard, on Monday after the storm hit, pulled some 250 people to safety; there were 16 other 30- passenger Black Hawks in the unit that had been stripped of seating to fly similar rescue missions. If the other choppers only saved half as many people, that one unit alone pulled out 2000 people a day.

But the Louisiana Blackhawks weren't the only rescuers. The Coast Guard was flying as soon as the hurricane passed on Monday as well and had already accounted for several thousand victims by Wednesday.

The Air Force reported 1,300 rescues and some 14,000 "transported" by Sept. 4.

By Tuesday night, the Navy's USS Bataan amphibious assault ship -cited for its inaction by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman--in fact had five choppers flying rescue missions and had pulled out several hundred people.

But those weren't the only helicopters flying. Overall, 113 choppers were in operation around New Orleans by Sept. 1, according to The Armed Forces Press Service.

Urban also notes one explanation why the rescue operation flew below the radar of the media: Individual federal and state units were not coordinating their efforts overall. There was no central clearing house for information on rescue efforts. What looked like a hurricane relief breakdown was in fact a press release breakdown.

Local rescue efforts by boat were surprisingly robust, contrary to conventional wisdom. The much maligned New Orleans police and fire departments, which began operations Monday afternoon, were able to field 100 to 200 boats in the first 24 hours after the breach, according to local officials quoted in the Times Picayune. However, with the City's communications system broken down, the 500 to 1000 rescue workers had to organize themselves and so were operating without central command and control, thus also below the media radar. How many these police and firefighters saved is unknown, but with so many boats in the water so quickly, the number would have easily been in the thousands.

Meanwhile the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, claimed 20,000 rescues by Sept. 8 at which point it suspended calls for more volunteers and boats. While it is unclear how many of these rescues took place in the critical time frame, the only mention of this staggering achievement came in the Sept. 8 press release. How many national reporters thought to call the Wildlife department, or even thought it was a go-to agency?

This list is by no means exhaustive. State police and deputies from various Sheriff's departments were operating rescue boats, as was the Coast Guard. Individual National Guard units responded on their own initially, as did civilian rescue teams from out of state. Dates and numbers saved simply haven't been added up, or served to a skeptical media.

Besides the large number of rescuers, there was another key reason for the success of rescue efforts. The nature of the flooding differed from the scenarios that would have resulted in 10 to 25 thousand dead. Worst case models projected a storm surge that overtopped the levies by 10 feet, destroying them and creating an instant flood at or near the time a Cat 5 hurricane leveled 80 percent of the structures in the city and environs.

That only happened in parts of the city, eastern New Orleans. It is clear from video footage that even there much of the housing survived, at least insofar as it provided a few days of refuge from flood waters. The flooding elsewhere was extensive, but not always rapid--in many areas the rise was six inches to a foot per hour, easily evaded by a moderately fit adult or child.

Flooding didn't crest until Sept. 2, giving rescuers a five-day window in which to prioritize operations for the most desperate. Even then, few homes were overtopped and submerged.

The death toll from Katrina in New Orleans will inevitably rise, but it will likely be in the hundreds rather than the thousands, contrary to the ghoulish projections. That doesn't absolve authorities from responsibility for some of those deaths. As is the case in any disaster, the old, the sick and the handicapped will disproportionately be victims, bringing into tight focus the City of New Orleans' failure to take the modest steps needed for early evacuation for a few thousand of its most vulnerable. More died at the Superdome after the Governor decided on a Pol Pot solution for evacuation of the city, e.g. Starve the city dwellers to force them into the countryside. And of course FEMA's political appointees, and by extension the Administration, failed to step in to address these and other problems, particularly the lack of coordination between the many agencies that were flying blind for the first 48 hours. Indeed, if it turns out that there are large numbers of dead remaining, they won't have died for lack of resources, but rather, because there was no one to tell the vast and otherwise successful rescue flotilla where to go.

Lou Dolinar is a former volunteer firefighter and a retired reporter for Newsday.

From CNN.com:

'You're going to make a good album'
McCartney's hard work shows: New CD earning good reviews

NEW YORK (AP) -- It sounds cruel, but let's face it: Except for the occasional highlight like "Vanilla Sky" or "My Brave Face," for the past 20 years, Paul McCartney's catalogue has been pretty barren.

So the former Beatle wanted to make his new solo album, "Chaos and Creation in the Backyard," stand out.

"I decided to lay it on the line for myself and challenge myself and say, 'You're going to make a good album here.' It was a good motivator," he told The Associated Press.

Time magazine breathlessly declared "Chaos" to be McCartney's first album that matters since the Beatles broke up 35 years ago. But it's simply unlike anything he's done before, a quiet disc with complicated emotional shadings -- the album that generations of critics who derided his sunny, silly love songs have been asking him to make.

He'll never be mistaken for Nine Inch Nails. But the heartache of "Too Much Rain" and smoldering anger of "Riding to Vanity Fair" are unusual for McCartney. When the 63-year-old struggles for the notes in the "Blackbird" successor "Jenny Wren," he even sounds fragile.

"Even though I'm essentially an optimist, an enthusiast, like anyone else I have down moments in my life," he said. "You just can't help it. Life throws them at you.

"In the past I may have written tongue-in-cheek, like 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer,' and dealt with matters of fate in a kind of comical, parody manner. It just so happens in this batch of songs I would look at these subjects and thought it was good for writing. If it's good enough to take to your psychiatrist, it's good enough to make a song of."

McCartney also was pushed by the blunt Nigel Godrich, a producer known for his work with Radiohead and Beck.

His method was to force the music legend out of his comfort zone. McCartney brought his touring band in to record; after two weeks Godrich dispatched them. Much like he did with his very first solo album, McCartney played virtually every instrument himself -- on "Friends to Go" alone, he's credited on the grand piano, acoustic/bass/electric guitars, harpsichord, drums, tambourine, flugelhorn, melodica and shakers.

'I could just fire this guy'

Producer and artist particularly clashed on "Riding to Vanity Fair," which McCartney brought in as a fast song and Godrich kept trying to slow down.

"There were one or two moments on the album when I had to think to myself, 'You know, I could just fire this guy,' " McCartney said.

Widening his emotional palette doesn't necessarily belittle his optimism, McCartney said. He's not disowning anything. He spoke of talking with Bruce Springsteen a few years ago at a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction where the Boss admitted he didn't really get "Silly Love Songs" at the time it came out in 1976. He feels differently now that he's a family man.

"It took a little nerve to hold on, knowing that people were going to take a cheap shot," McCartney said.

Obviously he never set out to log many years of lackluster recordings.

"You're not really aware of that," he said. "You can maybe get a little complacent, or you're not hitting a good patch, or you can think it's great and it isn't. There are a multitude of reasons why."

For a man who seemingly tumbled out of bed every morning of his youth with a brilliant melody, the struggles were painful to listen to. Think "Freedom." What was once effortless seemed forced.

Working with John

Writing songs isn't necessarily harder for him as he gets older, McCartney said. And for whatever reasons -- time, a happy remarriage and new fatherhood -- he feels he's writing better than he has in a long time.

"I still have this deep love for melody in particular and writing songs," he said. "It isn't any more difficult. Obviously what made it easier then was writing with John (Lennon). He was such a great collaborator. The two of us were on fire every time we sat down to write.

"If he was stuck, I knew that I could help him out and vice versa. We normally sat down for three hours and bingo, a pretty good song came out. We never had a dry session. Every time we sat down, we came out with a song."

That happened up to the end; Lennon even asked for advice on "The Ballad of John and Yoko," he said. "We're not stupid," McCartney said. "We knew a good thing."

Yet it put in place the essential dilemma of his solo years. McCartney seems to intrinsically understand the value of a strong collaborator, but what can compare when you've had a partnership for the ages?

He enjoyed, for example, a brief songwriting collaboration with Elvis Costello that produced some good music ("My Brave Face"). But "you do something like that and it makes it even more obvious that there's no replacing John for me and no replacing me for him."

McCartney spoke by telephone from a car driving to band rehearsals in Miami for his American tour. He's long past the period where he felt he had to prove himself post-Beatles so, twistedly, he avoided the band's work in concert.

Now the whole catalogue is up for grabs, and it's easy to find songs he's never played live before -- like the voice-shredding "Helter Skelter," which he brought out for the Live 8 concert.

One last query as the car pulled up: Has he ever thought over the years, I've put a pretty good songbook together, maybe it's just time to let it be?

"Pardon the pun," he said. "The trouble is, I like it too much. If I was asked to retire tomorrow, if I was forcibly removed from my contract, I'd just do it for fun."

From VDARE.COM:

9/11 Monumental Surrender
By Michelle Malkin

I am not an architect, but here is my 9/11 architectural philosophy: War memorials should memorialize war. If you want peace and understanding and healing and good will toward all, go build Kabbalah centers.

Please, for the sake of those who have sacrificed, let's put the design of war memorials in the hands of creative people committed to erecting monuments of courage over capitulation.

This past weekend, to mark the fourth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Discovery Channel aired a searing documentary on Flight 93. It was the "Flight That Fought Back" against al Qaeda hijackers who crashed the United Airlines plane into a field outside of Shanksville, Pa.—15 minutes' flying time from the nation's capital and the killers' likely target, the White House.

The movie fleshed out many of the heroes of Flight 93 through actual cell phone recordings and interviews with relatives. One was Alice Hoglan, mother of Mark Bingham, who encouraged her son not to sit back and surrender. These are excerpts from a voice mail message Mrs. Hoglan left for Bingham during the hijacking:

 "Mark, this is your mom. It's 10:54 a.m. [Eastern time]. The news is that it's been hijacked by terrorists. They are planning to probably use the plane as a target to hit some site on the ground. So if you possibly can, try to overpower these guys if you can—'cause they will probably use the plane as a target. I would say go ahead and do everything you can to overpower them, because they're hell-bent. You know the number here. OK, I love you sweetie. Bye."

Throughout the documentary, family members recounted the take-charge, can-do attitudes of their loved ones. These were Americans who refused to sit down and be quiet and allow Islamic terrorists unfettered control over the flight stick of history. These were doers, not hand-wringers, who engaged in a violent and valiant struggle against evil.

I remind you of all this because the official Flight 93 memorial unveiled last week is now embroiled in overdue public controversy. Funded with a mix of public money and private cash (including a $500,000 grant from Teresa Heinz's far-left Heinz Endowments), the winning design, titled the "Crescent of Embrace," features a grove of maple trees ringing the crash site in the shape of an unmistakable red crescent. The crescent, New York University Middle East Studies professor Bernard Haykel told the Johnstown, Pa., Tribune-Democrat, "is the symbol of ritual and religious life for Muslims." 

Some design contest jury members reportedly raised concerns about the jarring symbol of the hijackers' faith implanted on the hallowed ground where the passengers of Flight 93 were murdered. But their recommendations to change the name of the memorial (to "Arc of Embrace," or some such whitewashing) were ignored. Memorial architect Paul Murdoch, whose firm emphasizes "environmental responsibility and sustainability," did not return calls and e-mails seeking comment, but he did emphasize to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that his creation was about "healing" and "contemplation." He is also proud of his idea to hang a bunch of wind chimes in a tall tower at the site as a "gesture of healing and bonding."

Wind chimes? Hey, why not add pinwheels and smiley face stickers and Care Bears while we're at it, too?

Let's set aside the utter boneheaded-ness of using a symbol that, inadvertently or not, commemorates the killers' faith instead of the victims' revolt. The soft-and-fuzzy memorial design of "Crescent of Embrace" still does injustice to the steely courage of Flight 93's passengers and crew. It evokes the defeatism embodied by those behind a similar move to turn the 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero in New York City into a pacifist guilt complex.

This is no way to fight a war. Or to remember those who have died fighting it.

A proper war memorial stirs to anger and action. We all remember passenger Todd Beamer's last heard words as he and his fellow Americans prepared to take back the plane from al Qaeda's killers, don't we?

No, the phrase wasn't "Let's meditate." It was "Let's roll."

(View the memorial design at http://www.flight93memorialproject.org/. Voice your concerns by e-mailing FLNI_Superintendent@nps.gov )

Michelle Malkin [email her] is author of Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s review. Click here for Michelle Malkin's website.

From The Guardian:

Faith does breed charity
We atheists have to accept that most believers are better human beings
By Roy Hattersley

Monday September 12, 2005

Hurricane Katrina did not stay on the front pages for long. Yesterday's Red Cross appeal for an extra 40,000 volunteer workers was virtually ignored.

The disaster will return to the headlines when one sort of newspaper reports a particularly gruesome discovery or another finds additional evidence of President Bush's negligence. But month after month of unremitting suffering is not news. Nor is the monotonous performance of the unpleasant tasks that relieve the pain and anguish of the old, the sick and the homeless - the tasks in which the Salvation Army specialise.

The Salvation Army has been given a special status as provider-in-chief of American disaster relief. But its work is being augmented by all sorts of other groups. Almost all of them have a religious origin and character.

Notable by their absence are teams from rationalist societies, free thinkers' clubs and atheists' associations - the sort of people who not only scoff at religion's intellectual absurdity but also regard it as a positive force for evil.

The arguments against religion are well known and persuasive. Faith schools, as they are now called, have left sectarian scars on Northern Ireland. Stem-cell research is forbidden because an imaginary God - who is not enough of a philosopher to realise that the ingenuity of a scientist is just as natural as the instinct of Rousseau's noble savage - condemns what he does not understand and the churches that follow his teaching forbid their members to pursue cures for lethal diseases.

Yet men and women who believe that the Pope is the devil incarnate, or (conversely) regard his ex cathedra pronouncements as holy writ, are the people most likely to take the risks and make the sacrifices involved in helping others. Last week a middle-ranking officer of the Salvation Army, who gave up a well-paid job to devote his life to the poor, attempted to convince me that homosexuality is a mortal sin.

Late at night, on the streets of one of our great cities, that man offers friendship as well as help to the most degraded and (to those of a censorious turn of mind) degenerate human beings who exist just outside the boundaries of our society. And he does what he believes to be his Christian duty without the slightest suggestion of disapproval. Yet, for much of his time, he is meeting needs that result from conduct he regards as intrinsically wicked.

Civilised people do not believe that drug addiction and male prostitution offend against divine ordinance. But those who do are the men and women most willing to change the fetid bandages, replace the sodden sleeping bags and - probably most difficult of all - argue, without a trace of impatience, that the time has come for some serious medical treatment. Good works, John Wesley insisted, are no guarantee of a place in heaven. But they are most likely to be performed by people who believe that heaven exists.

The correlation is so clear that it is impossible to doubt that faith and charity go hand in hand. The close relationship may have something to do with the belief that we are all God's children, or it may be the result of a primitive conviction that, although helping others is no guarantee of salvation, it is prudent to be recorded in a book of gold, like James Leigh Hunt's Abu Ben Adam, as "one who loves his fellow men". Whatever the reason, believers answer the call, and not just the Salvation Army. When I was a local councillor, the Little Sisters of the Poor - right at the other end of the theological spectrum - did the weekly washing for women in back-to-back houses who were too ill to scrub for themselves.

It ought to be possible to live a Christian life without being a Christian or, better still, to take Christianity à la carte. The Bible is so full of contradictions that we can accept or reject its moral advice according to taste. Yet men and women who, like me, cannot accept the mysteries and the miracles do not go out with the Salvation Army at night.

The only possible conclusion is that faith comes with a packet of moral imperatives that, while they do not condition the attitude of all believers, influence enough of them to make them morally superior to atheists like me. The truth may make us free. But it has not made us as admirable as the average captain in the Salvation Army.

From washingtonpost.com:

A Poverty of Thought
By George F. Will

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

It took exactly one month -- until the president's prime-time news conference of Oct. 11, 2001 -- to refute the notion that Sept. 11 "changed everything." When a reporter said, "You haven't called for any sacrifices from the American people," he replied, "Well, you know, I think the American people are sacrificing now. I think they're waiting in airport lines longer than they've ever had before." And that was before the sacrificing became really hellacious with the requirement that passengers remove their shoes at security checkpoints.

The idea that Hurricane Katrina would change the only thing that matters -- thinking -- perished even more quickly, at about the time Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, a suitable symbol of congressional narcissism, dramatized the severity of the tragedy by taking a television interviewer on a helicopter flight over her destroyed beach house. "Washington rolled the dice and Louisiana lost," she said in a speech on the Senate floor that moved some senators to tears. You can no more embarrass a senator than you can a sofa, so the tears were not accompanied by blushing about having just passed a transportation bill whose 6,371 pork projects cost $24 billion, about 10 times more than the price of the levee New Orleans needed. Louisiana's congressional delegation larded the bill with $540,580,200 worth of earmarks, one-fifth the price of a capable levee.

America's always fast-flowing river of race-obsessing has overflowed its banks, and last Sunday on ABC's "This Week," Sen. Barack Obama, Illinois's freshman Democrat, applied to the expression of old banalities a fluency that would be beguiling were it without content. Unfortunately, it included the requisite lament about the president's inadequate "empathy" and an amazing criticism of the government's "historic indifference" and its "passive indifference" that "is as bad as active malice." The senator, 44, is just 30 months older than the "war on poverty" that President Johnson declared in January 1964. Since then the indifference that is as bad as active malice has been expressed in more than $6.6 trillion of anti-poverty spending, strictly defined.

The senator is called a "new kind of Democrat," which often means one with new ways of ignoring evidence discordant with old liberal orthodoxies about using cash -- much of it spent through liberalism's "caring professions" -- to cope with cultural collapse. He might, however, care to note three not-at-all recondite rules for avoiding poverty: Graduate from high school, don't have a baby until you are married, don't marry while you are a teenager. Among people who obey those rules, poverty is minimal.

In 1960 John Kennedy of Choate, Harvard and Palm Beach campaigned in West Virginia's primary and American liberalism experienced one of its regularly recurring rediscoveries of poor people, an epiphany abetted three years later by Michael Harrington's book "The Other America" receiving a 50-page review where liberals would notice it, amid the New Yorker magazine's advertisements for luxury goods. Between such rediscoveries, the poor are work for liberalism's constituencies among the "caregiving" professions.

Liberalism's post-Katrina fearlessness in discovering the obvious -- if an inner city is inundated, the victims will be disproportionately minorities -- stopped short of indelicately noting how many of the victims were women with children but not husbands. Because it was released during the post-Katrina debacle, scant attention was paid to the National Center for Health Statistics' report that in 2003, 34.6 percent of all American births were to unmarried women. The percentage among African American women was 68.2.

Given that most African Americans are middle class and almost half live outside central cities, and that 76 percent of all births to Louisiana African Americans were to unmarried women, it is a safe surmise that more than 80 percent of African American births in inner-city New Orleans -- as in some other inner cities -- were to women without husbands. That translates into a large and constantly renewed cohort of lightly parented adolescent males, and that translates into chaos in neighborhoods and schools, come rain or come shine.

This will become of intense interest to the "czar" or "czarina" -- this republic has a fascinating reflex for cloaking improvised offices with the dignity, such as it was, of defunct Russian royalty -- who is charged with "overseeing" the "rebuilding" of New Orleans. He or she can exchange notes with our "nation-builders" in Iraq, now learning conservatism's core truths about the limits of government's abilities to know and control things. Or he or she can glance at Ground Zero in Manhattan where, four years later, the "rebuilding" of a few square blocks is not going well.

Saving America's Soul Kitchen
How to bring this country together? Listen to the message of New Orleans
By WYNTON MARSALIS

Now the levee breach has been fixed. The people have been evacuated. Army Corps of Engineers magicians will pump the city dry, and the slow (but quicker than we think) job of rebuilding will begin. Then there will be no 24-hour news coverage. The spin doctors' narrative will create a wall of illusion thicker than the new levees. The job of turning our national disaster into sound-bite-size commercials with somber string music will be left to TV. The story will be sanitized as our nation's politicians congratulate themselves on a job well done. Americans of all stripes will demonstrate saintly concern for one another. It's what we do in a crisis.

This tragedy, however, should make us take an account of ourselves. We should not allow the mythic significance of this moment to pass without proper consideration. Let us assess the size of this cataclysm in cultural terms, not in dollars and cents or politics. Americans are far less successful at doing that because we have never understood how our core beliefs are manifest in culture--and how culture should guide political and economic realities. That's what the city of New Orleans can now teach the nation again as we are all forced by circumstance to literally come closer to one another. I say teach us again, because New Orleans is a true American melting pot: the soul of America. A place freer than the rest of the country, where elegance met an indefinable wildness to encourage the flowering of creative intelligence. Whites, Creoles and Negroes were strained, steamed and stewed in a thick, sticky, below-sea-level bowl of musky gumbo. These people produced an original cuisine, an original architecture, vibrant communal ceremonies and an original art form: jazz.

Their music exploded irrepressibly from the forced integration of these castes to sweep the world as the definitive American art form. New Orleans, the Crescent City, the Big Easy--home of Mardi Gras, the second-line parade, the po' boy sandwich, the shotgun house--is so many people's favorite city. But not favorite enough to embrace the integrated superiority of its culture as a national objective. Not favorite enough to digest the gift of supersized soul internationally embodied by the great Louis Armstrong. Over time, New Orleans became known as the national center for frat-party-type decadence and (yeah, boy) great food. The genuine greatness of Armstrong is reduced to his good nature; his artistic triumphs are unknown to all but a handful. So it's time to consider, as we rebuild this great American city, exactly what this bayou metropolis symbolizes for the U.S.

New Orleans has a habit of tweaking the national consciousness at pivotal times. The last foreign invasion on U.S. soil was repelled in the Crescent City in 1815. The Union had an important early victory over the South with the capture of the Big Easy in 1862. Homer Plessy, a black New Orleanian, fought for racial equality in 1896, although it took our Supreme Court 58 years to agree with him and, with Brown v. Board of Education, to declare segregation unequal. Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference was formally organized in New Orleans in 1957. The problem is that we, all us Americans, have a tendency to rise in that moment of need, but when that moment passes, we fall back again.

The images of a ruined city make it clear that we need to rebuild New Orleans. The images of people stranded, in shock, indicate that we need to rebuild a community. The images of all sorts of Americans aiding these victims speak of the size of our hearts. But this time we need to look a little deeper. Let's use the resurrection of the city to reacquaint the country with the gift of New Orleans: a multicultural community invigorated by the arts. Forget about tolerance. What about embracing? This tragedy implores us to re-examine the soul of America. Our democracy from its very beginnings has been challenged by the shackles of slavery. The parade of black folks across our TV screens asking, as if ghosts, "Have you seen my father, mother, sister, brother?" reconnects us all to the still unfulfilled goals of the Reconstruction era. We always back away from fixing our nation's racial problems. Not fixing the city's levees before Katrina struck will now cost us untold billions. Not resolving the nation's issues of race and class has and will cost us so much more.

Marsalis, the jazz trumpeter and artistic director of New York City's Jazz at Lincoln Center, was born and raised in New Orleans

The Names
By Billy Collins, Poet Laureate of the United States

Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night.
A soft rain stole in, unhelped by any breeze,
And when I saw the silver glaze on the windows,
I started with A, with Ackerman, as it happened,
Then Baxter and Calabro,
Davis and Eberling, names falling into place
As droplets fell through the dark.
Names printed on the ceiling of the night.
Names slipping around a watery bend.
Twenty-six willows on the banks of a stream.
In the morning, I walked out barefoot
Among thousands of flowers
Heavy with dew like the eyes of tears,
And each had a name --
Fiori inscribed on a yellow petal
Then Gonzalez and Han, Ishikawa and Jenkins.
Names written in the air
And stitched into the cloth of the day.
A name under a photograph taped to a mailbox.
Monogram on a torn shirt,
I see you spelled out on storefront windows
And on the bright unfurled awnings of this city.
I say the syllables as I turn a corner --
Kelly and Lee,
Medina, Nardella, and O'Connor.
When I peer into the woods,
I see a thick tangle where letters are hidden
As in a puzzle concocted for children.
Parker and Quigley in the twigs of an ash,
Rizzo, Schubert, Torres, and Upton,
Secrets in the boughs of an ancient maple.
Names written in the pale sky.
Names rising in the updraft amid buildings.
Names silent in stone
Or cried out behind a door.
Names blown over the earth and out to sea.
In the evening -- weakening light, the last swallows.
A boy on a lake lifts his oars.
A woman by a window puts a match to a candle,
And the names are outlined on the rose clouds --
Vanacore and Wallace,
(let X stand, if it can, for the ones unfound)
Then Young and Ziminsky, the final jolt of Z.
Names etched on the head of a pin.
One name spanning a bridge, another undergoing a tunnel.
A blue name needled into the skin.
Names of citizens, workers, mothers and fathers,
The bright-eyed daughter, the quick son.
Alphabet of names in a green field.
Names in the small tracks of birds.
Names lifted from a hat
Or balanced on the tip of the tongue.
Names wheeled into the dim warehouse of memory.
So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.

Ethics 01A.1: Gay Marriage, Democracy
By Thomas Fleming

Gov. Schwarzenegger has promised to veto the California Legislature’s recent bill legalizing “Gay Marriage.” For Schwarzenegger the issue is democracy, not morality. Five years ago Californians approved a ballot initiative that forbids the state to recognize “Gay Marriages” performed in other states, and the legislature has no right to resist the people’s will.

In principle, the California governor appears to be saying that he has no principles. If California voters were to approve an initiative outlawing heterosexual marriage or authorizing human sacrifice, he would presumably take the same position. As governor, he is simply the people’ tribune, standing outside the senate house saying “No” to unpopular legislation.

Let us look a little deeper. Democracy, as it is commonly understood, is a system by which the people, expressing their general will by means of election, get what they want. Is that any way to conduct a government? While any sane person would deplore most of the legislation passed by the US Congress and the California legislature, that same sane person should acknowledge some standard independent of the will of a supposed majority. (Let’s set aside the obvious fact that successful ballot initiatives and elections very rarely receive the support of a majority of eligible voters.)

The basic question is whether or not there are moral standards independent of the whim of the majority? If there are not, then let the bad times roll. We do not need Socrates or Plato or even Alexander Hamilton to tell us that “the people” can be misled by demagogues or that democracies are capable of atrocities as savage as those committed by Attilla the Hun.

Try a simple thought experiment. Suppose we have a hundred people—or a thousand or a hundred thousand or even three hundred million—and suppose we ask them to decide some basic principle: Can two men marry each other? Are 12 year old boys free to have consensual sex with a 30 year old man? Is a 16 year old girl free to have an abortion without her parents’ consent? Does a someone in New Orleans who has not eaten in 12 hours have the right to loot a store? It really does not matter what the question is. Now suppose we really could get 51% of the people (or even 99% of the people) to endorse either side of the issue. What are we saying? Does that majority, whatever it is, represent some mystic intuition or is it merely the sum total of the individual opinions of 51 or 510 thousand or 150 million plus one voters.

Then what we really mean by the principle of majority rule, when applied to moral questions, is that we adhere to two principles: 1) individuals are free to decide basic moral questions, and 2) the greater number of expressed opinions, on one side or the other, is to prevail.

Principle number 2 is obviously foolish both for reasons I have already indicated and from common sense. While the majority in some societies is often wiser than educated opinion, it cannot always be wiser—even in America, where the intellectual class, as judged by what one sees of the professors, is the biggest collection of fools and scoundrels the world has ever seen. Ordinarily people are superior to the elite only when they follow the rules of conscience imposed by tradition, but where ordinary people watch TV, play video games, and listen to pop music they are often as wicked and even more obtuse than the pointy headed intellectuals they say they hate but to whom they are willing to trust their children’s minds and morals. Don’t tell me about the basically good American people, when so many of them put their kids in government internment centers and do next to nothing to combat the propaganda that is drummed into the little heads every day.

The more interesting principle is number one: that individuals are free to decide basic moral questions. This by far the more dangerous assumption. The reason the mass cannot be trusted is because the mass is made up of individuals who cannot be trusted. Few people, by the end of their lives, have ever thought through a single moral question on their own. If they are good, it is because their character and moral understanding have been formed by their family, their Church, and their friends, all of whom represent a long-standing moral tradition. This is true even of virtuous moral philosophers, whose basic distinctions between right and wrong are not arrived at by an exercise of reason. As Aristotle showed long ago, philosophy serves to confirm the character and principles that have been formed by our families and friends. If we are virtuous, philosophy helps to teach us why and how we can and should be virtuous, but if we are vicious, philosophy will only confirm our vice.

This leads me to a basic principle of Ethics 01A. The individual, his will and appetites and above all his opinions, are not to be regarded in moral questions. No moral or political philosophy that emphasizes the acquisitive self can be taken seriously either by Christians or by morally serious pagans. If we accept a tradition and live within it, then those of us who are not philosophers are to trust the broad tradition (though not necessarily any one exponent of it) and not put much credit in our private opinions. And, if we fancy ourselves philosophers, we shall, nonetheless, put our minds and pens to work honestly in the service of the tradition. Even Christian philosophers are far too fond of their own opinions, their own speculations, their own little “systems.” Christians who wish to study theology should, therefore, begin with the early Fathers rather than with the latest book of fashionable theology.

The need for humility and patient study is becoming steadily more acute as Christians of every type are being seduced by alien ideologies that are essentially incompatible with their religion: Straussianism, neoconservatism, democratism, libertarianism, sentimental humanitarianism, vegetarianism, and every Rightsism—from women’s to animals. Even good men and women try to compromise the long and deep Christian ethical tradition with Christianity’s cheap and Johnny-Come-Lately Rivals, whose language they adopt. Metternich once said, “Speak of the Social Contract, and the Revolution is made.” In other words, use the language of the revolution—individual rights, majority rule, market efficiency—and you are furthering the cause of Anti-Christianity, whatever you may think you intend.

Governor Schwarzenegger things he is a conservative. I may think I’m Napoleon, and if thinking could make it so, Arnold would be a right-winger and I would be conquering Europe. The California strongman may be an excellent executive, for all I know, but the moral anarchism of his early years is no better for being put into the service of amoral democratism

Cheering On Racial Division
by L. Brent Bozell III

September 7, 2005

A major news event follows a very routine pattern. First, we get the hard news phase, where reporters relate the unfolding dramatic facts. In the second phase, those same reporters become analysts, commentators passing moral and political judgment on the story. By its nature, the first phase tends to be devoid of bias. But the second phase often comes loaded with politicized gotchas and predictable liberal editorializing.

Hurricane Katrina and its flooding aftermath in New Orleans is a good example. No one can fault reporters’ emotional statements as they eyewitness the tragedy. Nor is it inappropriate for them to ask the tough questions about the government’s – local, state and federal – wholly inadequate preparation and response. But viewers should be tiring of the Monday morning grandstanding, particularly the rush to judgment when so many facts are still as murky as the standing water in New Orleans.

But a truly deplorable aftermath of Katrina is the far left’s attempts to stir up racial divisions and the news media’s fanning of those flames. Both should be roundly condemned.

Friday's Washington Post had a front-page headline quoting a woman saying "To Me, It Just Seems Like Black People Are Marked," as if even weather systems are members of the Klan. (Do tornadoes in Kansas have a "racial dimension," a racial animus? Would the Washington Post ever dream up a headline for that?) Apparently, America is so stacked with racism in the air that it’s in the gale-force winds.

Stirring up racial anger was a common theme by week’s end. On NBC, anchor Brian Williams lectured that the hurricane would "necessitate a national discussion on race, on oil, politics, class, infrastructure, the environment, and more." On ABC, Ted Koppel began by orating that New Orleans is 67 percent black, and "The slow response to the victims of Hurricane Katrina has led to questions about race, poverty, and a seemingly indifferent government." On CNN, Wolf Blitzer, who raised eyebrows by calling the hurricane victims "so poor and so black," prodded Rep. Elijah Cummings not once, but twice, to find racism in the slow response.

But perhaps the strongest news pitchman for the Vast Racist Conspiracy -- you know the one, like the skit on "Saturday Night Live" where Eddie Murphy paints himself white and they hand him free money at the bank -- was CNN anchor Aaron Brown. Brown baited Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones: "Do you think black America's sitting there thinking, if these were middle class white people, there would be cruise ships in New Orleans, not the Superdome?"

Jones tried to put race aside, focusing her outrage on charging "the government has not allocated the resources." But Brown went back to his Love Boat for Whites theme: "Now, look, here's the question, okay? And then we'll end this. Do you think the reason that they're not there or the food is not there or the cruise ships aren't there or all this stuff that you believe should be there, isn't this a matter of race and/or class?"

But given that Louisiana is one of the least affluent states in the nation, and two-thirds of the residents of New Orleans are black, is it any surprise that most of the people left behind were poor and black? There’s a difference between citing racial and class realities and goosing black politicians to endorse the poisonous idea of a conscious conspiracy of neglect against poor minorities.

The media attitude was quickly mirrored with fervor by black celebrities and commentators. During NBC’s concert for hurricane relief, rapper Kanye West abused that network’s generosity by going on an unscripted verbal rampage ending with the sentence "President Bush doesn’t care about black people." That, sadly, is what one expects from some elements of the entertainment community.

What was unconscionable, however, was watching CBS "Sunday Morning" commentator Nancy Giles carry the same vicious message, saying President Bush failed to come to the Superdome to show poor, black victims "that he gave a damn." Giles declared if the majority of Katrina’s victims were white, "they would not have gone for days without food and water, forcing many to steal for mere survival. Their bodies would not have been left to float in putrid water. They would have been rescued and relocated a hell of a lot faster than this. Period."

Conservatives who have followed politics for a while remember have seen this before, with the race card used against its leaders personally, and in attempts to undermine its policy prescriptions. (Remember Willie Horton?) But what liberals have done in the last few days is worse. They have taken a human tragedy for Gulf Coast residents of all colors, and turned it into a Caucasian-kicking sideshow.

The networks have not taught the world to sing in perfect harmony. They are Pied Piper-ing for the likes of Al Sharpton, matching stride for stride his disregard for dignity and truth.

From The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

No shame
The federal response to Katrina was not as portrayed
By Jack Kelly

Sunday, September 11, 2005

It is settled wisdom among journalists that the federal response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina was unconscionably slow.

  "Mr. Bush's performance last week will rank as one of the worst ever during a dire national emergency," wrote New York Times columnist Bob Herbert in a somewhat more strident expression of the conventional wisdom.

But the conventional wisdom is the opposite of the truth.

Jason van Steenwyk is a Florida Army National Guardsman who has been mobilized six times for hurricane relief. He notes that:

"The federal government pretty much met its standard time lines, but the volume of support provided during the 72-96 hour was unprecedented. The federal response here was faster than Hugo, faster than Andrew, faster than Iniki, faster than Francine and Jeanne."

For instance, it took five days for National Guard troops to arrive in strength on the scene in Homestead, Fla. after Hurricane Andrew hit in 2002. But after Katrina, there was a significant National Guard presence in the afflicted region in three.

Journalists who are long on opinions and short on knowledge have no idea what is involved in moving hundreds of tons of relief supplies into an area the size of England in which power lines are down, telecommunications are out, no gasoline is available, bridges are damaged, roads and airports are covered with debris, and apparently have little interest in finding out.

So they libel as a "national disgrace" the most monumental and successful disaster relief operation in world history.

I write this column a week and a day after the main levee protecting New Orleans breached. In the course of that week:

-More than 32,000 people have been rescued, many plucked from rooftops by Coast Guard helicopters.

-The Army Corps of Engineers has all but repaired the breaches and begun pumping water out of New Orleans.

-Shelter, food and medical care have been provided to more than 180,000 refugees.

Journalists complain that it took a whole week to do this. A former Air Force logistics officer had some words of advice for us in the Fourth Estate on his blog, Moltenthought:

"We do not yet have teleporter or replicator technology like you saw on 'Star Trek' in college between hookah hits and waiting to pick up your worthless communications degree while the grown-ups actually engaged in the recovery effort were studying engineering.

"The United States military can wipe out the Taliban and the Iraqi Republican Guard far more swiftly than they can bring 3 million Swanson dinners to an underwater city through an area the size of Great Britain which has no power, no working ports or airports, and a devastated and impassable road network.

"You cannot speed recovery and relief efforts up by prepositioning assets (in the affected areas) since the assets are endangered by the very storm which destroyed the region.

"No amount of yelling, crying and mustering of moral indignation will change any of the facts above."

"You cannot just snap your fingers and make the military appear somewhere," van Steenwyk said.

Guardsmen need to receive mobilization orders; report to their armories; draw equipment; receive orders and convoy to the disaster area. Guardsmen driving down from Pennsylvania or Navy ships sailing from Norfolk can't be on the scene immediately.

Relief efforts must be planned. Other than prepositioning supplies near the area likely to be afflicted (which was done quite efficiently), this cannot be done until the hurricane has struck and a damage assessment can be made. There must be a route reconnaissance to determine if roads are open, and bridges along the way can bear the weight of heavily laden trucks.

And federal troops and Guardsmen from other states cannot be sent to a disaster area until their presence has been requested by the governors of the afflicted states.

Exhibit A on the bill of indictment of federal sluggishness is that it took four days before most people were evacuated from the Louisiana Superdome.

The levee broke Tuesday morning. Buses had to be rounded up and driven from Houston to New Orleans across debris-strewn roads. The first ones arrived Wednesday evening. That seems pretty fast to me.

A better question -- which few journalists ask -- is why weren't the roughly 2,000 municipal and school buses in New Orleans utilized to take people out of the city before Katrina struck?

From The Chicago Sun-times:

Terror war all but forgotten on home front
By Mark Steyn

Sept. 11, 2005 -- the fourth anniversary of the start of the war. That is, if you believe it's a ''war'' A lot of people didn't want to, even in those first days.

About a week after, one of my local radio stations held a fund-raiser and this is how their trailer for it opened. Cue the terminal-illness-movie-of-the-week soupy piano. Then:

''After the tragic events of Sept. 11 . . .''

And, by the time I'd heard it half-a-dozen times, I retuned the dial and never listened to the station again.

It wasn't a "tragic event" or even one of a series of unfortunate events. It was an "attack," an "act of war." I sat at the lunch counter with a guy who'd tuned out the same station on the grounds that "I never heard my grampa talk about 'the tragedy of Pearl Harbor.' " But, consciously or otherwise, a serious effort was under way to transform the nature of the event, to soften it into a touchy-feely, huggy-weepy one-off. As I wrote last year: "The president believes there's a war on. The Dems think 9/11 is like the 1998 ice storm or a Florida hurricane -- just one of those things."

I didn't know the half of it. If an act of war is like a hurricane -- freak of nature, get over it -- it's evidently no great leap to believe that a hurricane is an act of war. Katrina was thus "allowed" to happen because Bush "hates black people." The Army Corps of Engineers was instructed to blow up New Orleans' 17th Street levee so that the flood would kill the poor people rather than destroy the valuable tourist real estate.

Whatever. As part of their ongoing post-9/11 convergence, the left now talks about Bush the way the wackier Islamists talk about Jews. I thought the Australian imam who warned Muslims the other week to lay off the bananas because the Zionists are putting poison in them was pretty loopy. But is he really any more bananas than folks who think Bush is behind the hurricane? Bush is apparently no longer the citizen-president of a functioning republic, but a 21st century King Canute expected to go sit by the shore and repel the waters as they attempt to make landfall. Instead, he and Cheney hatched up the whole hurricane thing in the Halliburton research labs to distract attention from their right-wing Supreme Court nominee . . .

On this fourth anniversary we are in a bizarre situation: The war is being won -- in Afghanistan, Iraq, the broader Middle East and many other places where America has changed the conditions on the ground in its favor. But at home the war about the war is being lost. When the media look at those Bush approval ratings -- currently hovering around 40 percent -- they carelessly assume the 60 percent is some unified Kerry-Hillary-Cindy bloc. It's not. It undoubtedly includes people who are enthusiastic for whacking America's enemies, but who don't quite get the point of this somewhat desultory listless phase. If the "war" is now a push for democratization and liberalization in Middle East dictatorships, that's a worthy cause but not one sufficiently primal to keep the attention of the American people. You'd have had the same problem in the Second World War if four years after Pearl Harbor we were postponing D-Day in order to nation-build in the Solomon Islands.

Four years ago, I thought the "war on terror" was a viable concept. To those on the right who scoffed that you can't declare war on a technique, I pointed out that Britain's Royal Navy fought wars against slavery and piracy and were largely successful. Of course, since then we've had the shabby habit of presidents declaring a "war on drugs" and a "war on poverty" and, with hindsight, that corruption of language has allowed Americans to slip the war on terror into the same category -- not a war in the sense that a war on Fiji or Belgium is a war, but just one of those vaguely ineffectual aspirational things that don't really impinge on you that much except for the odd pointless gesture -- like the shoe-removing ritual before you board a flight at Poughkeepsie. The "war on terror" label has outlived whatever usefulness it had.

And, as the years go by, it becomes clearer that the war aspects -- the attacks in New York, Washington, Bali, Madrid, Istanbul, London -- are really spasmodic flashes of a much more elusive enemy. Although Islamism is the first truly global terrorist insurgency, it shares more similarities with conventional terror movements -- the IRA or the Basque separatists -- than many of us thought four years ago. Terror groups persist because of a lack of confidence on the part of their targets: the IRA, for example, calculated correctly that the British had the capability to smash them totally but not the will. So they knew that while they could never win militarily, they also could never be defeated. That's what the Islamists have bet.

Only a tiny minority of Muslims want to be suicide bombers, and only a slightly larger minority want actively to provide support networks for suicide bombers, but big majorities of Muslims support almost all the terrorists' strategic goals: For example, according to a recent poll, over 60 percent of British Muslims want to live under sharia in the United Kingdom. That's a "moderate" Westernized Muslim: He wants stoning for adultery to be introduced in Liverpool, but he's a "moderate" because it's not such a priority that he's prepared to fly a plane into a skyscraper.

As with IRA killers and the broader Irish nationalist population, these shared aims provide a large comfort zone in which terror networks can operate. And it enables the non-violent lobby groups to use the terrorists -- or the threat of terrorists -- as part of a good cop/bad cop routine. Thus, the Islamic lobby groups pressure governments to make concessions to them rather than to the terrorists -- even though both elements share the same aims. You can pluck out news items at random: In London, a religious "hate crimes" law that makes honest discussion of Islam even more difficult; in Ontario, the moves toward sharia courts for Muslim community disputes; in Seattle, the introduction of gender-separate, Muslim-only swimming sessions in municipal pools. The 9/11 terrorists were in favor of all these things.

So four years on we're winning in the Middle East and Central Asia, floundering in Europe and North America. War is hell, but a war that half the country refuses to recognize as such staggers on as a very contemporary kind of purgatory.

From The Washington Post:

Hindsight: A User's Guide
By Michael Kinsley

Sunday, September 11, 2005

As a good American, you no doubt have been worried sick for years about the levees around New Orleans. Or you've been worried at least since you read that official report back in August 2001 -- the one that ranked a biblical flood of the Big Easy as one of our top three potential national emergencies. No? You didn't read that report back in 2001? You just read about it in the newspapers this past week?

Well, how about that prescient New Orleans Times-Picayune series back in 2002 that laid out the whole likely catastrophe? Everybody read that one. Or at least it sure seems that way now. I was not aware that the Times-Picayune had such a large readership in places like Washington, D.C., and California. And surely you have been badgering public officials at every level of government to spend whatever it takes to reinforce those levees -- and to raise your taxes if necessary to pay for it.

No? You never gave five seconds of thought to the risk of flood in New Orleans until it became impossible to think about anything else? Me neither. Nor have I given much thought to the risk of a big earthquake along the West Coast -- the only one of the top three catastrophes that hasn't happened yet -- even though I live and work in the earthquake zone.

Of course, my job isn't to predict and prepare for disasters. My job is to recriminate when they occur. It's not easy. These days the recrimination business is overrun like Baton Rouge with amateurs, who are squatting on all the high ground. The fetid aroma of hindsight is everywhere.

Sen. Mary Landrieu and other Louisiana politicians have been flashing their foresight all over the tube. They say they asked repeatedly for more money so that the Army Corps of Engineers could strengthen the levees, but repeatedly the Bush administration actually cut the Corps budget instead. The Corps itself is feeling pretty smug. It has long wanted money to build levees that would survive even a Category 5 hurricane, let alone a measly Category 4 such as Katrina.

Sure, and if there were a Category 6 or a Category 473, there would be a dusty Corps of Engineers report in a filing cabinet somewhere asking for money to protect against that one, too. The Corps has done many marvelous things. But it would cement over the Great Lakes or level Mount Rainier if we would let it.

Its warnings about natural disasters are like the warnings of that famous economist who has predicted 10 of the past five recessions.

Likewise, a senator may not be the best judge of the need for a vast federal construction project in her state. Landrieu's I-told-you-so's would be more impressive if the press release archive on her Web site didn't contain equally urgent calls to spend billions of dollars to build boats the Navy hasn't asked for in Louisiana shipyards, self-congratulations for having planted a billion dollars of "coastal impact assistance" for Louisiana in the energy bill (this is before the flood), and so on. Did she want flood control, or did she want $10 million to have "America's largest river swamp" declared a "National Heritage Area"?

Obviously -- obviously in hindsight, that is -- we should have spent the money to strengthen the New Orleans levees. President Bill Clinton should have done it. Presidents George Bush Senior and Ronald Reagan should have done it. As Tim Noah notes in Slate, warnings about the perilous New Orleans levees go back at least to Fanny Trollope in 1832. In fact, the one president who is pretty much in the clear on this is our current Bush -- not because he did anything about the levees but because even if he had started something, it probably wouldn't have been finished yet.

Everybody is having a fine fit about our politicians, our governments at every level, our "institutions" (current vogue word) for failing us in this crisis and others. The TV news networks, which only a few months ago were piously suppressing emotional fireworks by their pundits, are now piously encouraging their news anchors to break out of the emotional straitjackets and express outrage. A Los Angeles Times colleague of mine, appearing on CNN last week to talk about Katrina, was told by a producer to "get angry."

But just Google up a phrase like "commission warns," or "urgent steps," or "our children's future" -- or simply "crisis" -- and you may develop a bit of sympathy for the people who stand accused today of ignoring the warnings about anything in particular. Far from being complacent about potential perils, we suffer from peril gridlock.

Did all the attention and money devoted to protecting us from a terrorist attack after Sept. 11, 2001, leave us less prepared for a giant flood? Undoubtedly. And if the flood had come first, the opposite would be true. We, the citizens, would have demanded it and then blamed the politicians and the institutions when it turned out to be a bad bet. There is no foresight. We fight the last war because hindsight is all we have.

The writer is editorial and opinion editor of the Los Angeles Times.

From Independent Weekly:

"Where there's No Depression"
Magazine celebrates 10 years
By Rick Cornell

Early 1996 in the Triangle, and life is good at the center of the
universe. Granted, it's a minor universe--that of so-
called "alternative-country" music, a big tent destined for sprawl--
but the center is still the center. Every weekend, or so it seems,
you can hang in town to witness local heroes mixing Neil Young, Buck
Owens, Uncle Tupelo, The Band, R.E.M., George Jones, the
Replacements and/or Gram Parsons, dipping the resulting hunk of
sound in beer, and rolling it in whatever batter is called for by
the particular band's take on country-conscious rock. The
Backsliders can't decide whether they want to be Crazy Horse or
Sweetheart-era Byrds, so they split the difference. Jolene makes
country rock for fans of Stipe-ian cryptograms, while Six String
Drag brings soul music to the party, and occasionally horns.
Whiskeytown are punky upstarts with a Jones jones and a boy genuis.
And this is just The Big Four.

Know, though, that this center of the universe thing wasn't just the
pillow talk of a guy falling in love with his adopted hometown. In
other words, I wasn't the only one who thought this way. "(I)f
indeed the No Depression community has a home base at the moment--a
geographic region that seems unusually rich in alternative-country
acts, in terms of both quantity and quality--it's North Carolina,"
offered Peter Blackstock in a review of Jolene's debut full-length,
Hell's Half Acre. Those words appeared in issue No. 3 of a fledgling
magazine named No Depression, identified in this spring of '96 by
the cover phrase "The Alternative Country Quarterly" and
masterminded by co-editors Blackstock and Grant Alden.

Despite a recent Jolene show in Charlotte, it's fair to say that The
Big Four are no more. No Depression, however, rages on. It soon
turned into a bimonthly publication, with its Kinko-esque roots
gradually giving way to full color and its page count tripling. It
continues to draw some of the best music writers on the beat.
With the release of the September/October issue, No Depression is
celebrating its 10th anniversary, and across those 10 years, the
magazine has maintained a strong relationship with the Triangle.
Among many other ties, local writers such as David Menconi and Ross
Grady documented the unfolding scene in No Depression's pages, and
Blackstock's Whiskeytown cover story in the July/August '97 issue
remains one of the best reads in the publication's history. (Both a
Menconi story on the Backsliders and a Six String Drag profile by
Grady are featured in the No Depression anthology, published in
1998. A second volume is just out.)

"What really cemented the Triangle's reputation for alt-country,
though, was that it didn't end with that first wave," Blackstock
shares via e-mail from Seattle. "A whole new batch of talented acts
followed on the heels of Whiskeytown, et al. --not just Caitlin
Cary's solo career and the Tres Chicas offshoot, but also Tift
Merritt, Thad Cockrell, Kenny Roby's post-Six String Drag stuff,
Chatham County Line, and the resurgence of Chris Stamey as both a
producer and a performer."

Thus, it's appropriate that one of the shows being held to celebrate
No Depression's diamond year is taking place at Carrboro's Cat's
Cradle, featuring Stamey, Tres Chicas, the stalwart Two Dollar
Pistols and the bill's wildcard, veteran folk-rocker Sally Spring.

"Maybe the most telling thing about the strength of the Carolina
scene is that when we started planning our 10th-anniversary events
in various cities across the country, it was obvious that one of
them needed to be in the Triangle," Blackstock says. "And equally
obvious that we'd have no trouble creating a solid bill solely from
the local acts."

Time to party like it's 1996.

No Depression's 10-Year Anniversary Celebration is Saturday, Sept.
10 at the Cat's Cradle. Tickets are $12; and the music starts at
8:45 p.m. There are also two readings from the new The Best of No
Depression: Writing About American Music scheduled, with co-editor
Peter Blackstock and contributing editor David Menconi reading
Sunday, Sept. 11 at 6 p.m. at Quail Ridge Books & Music in Raleigh
(music by Kenny Roby) and Monday, Sept. 12 at 7 p.m. at the
Regulator Bookshop in Durham (music by Caitlin Cary and Lynn
Blakey). For more on No Depression, see
http://www.indyweekblogs.com/scan.