2008 Woodie Awards
Maybe if enough people choose not to subscribe to TimesSelect, it’ll just go away.
Or else: ahem, ahem.
It is just unbelievable what is happening down in New Orleans: looting, lawlessness, disease, death, and destruction. The fact that, according to experts, the levees broke came as no surprise. Again poor funding and ignored reports on the need for repair work are partially to blame. The failures to plug the broken walls surrounding the city demonstrate the lack of an adequete emergency plan, all exacerbated by the inability to provide food and water and the delays in busing people out of that hellacious place.
I was watching Larry King earlier and during the broadcast there was a particularly poignant moment when King asked Anderson Cooper, who was in the devastated area, why he was “mad.” Cooper responded that he was not mad, nor were the people around him. He said the people were not mad because they were dying. It’s just that simple. People were not frustrated, they were dead or dying, being laid out in the stairwell of hospitals because there was no energy for their ventilators or just simply left on the sidewalk. Help was needed (Cooper sounded like he was going to do just that after filming), and while people worked hard, there just was not enough to go around.
I don’t understand why in this day and age something like this had to happen. A lot of the problems now were utterly preventable. The night before Katrina (already a Category 5 storm by then) hit I think everyone knew this was going to be very close to a worse case scenario where New Orleans would come out heavily flooded. The politicians and people in charge should have had a security plan drawn up that fit the worst-case, which means among other things, having enough buses and helicopters ready to lift people to safety, enough to drop food and medical supplies, and enough to drop sand into the broken levees (found out not to work). It took nearly two days (and counting) for engineers to realize how to fix the broken walls and levees, walls that are 350 miles in total length. You’d think something as fundamental as that would be fixed fast.
The lack of a rapid response in this domestic disaster, given the predictability of the situation and the high stakes, is horrific.
In George Will’s most recent column “Tone-Deafness among Democrats,” he excoriates Democrats for too much shrieking and for embracing their more radical elements. Will goes on to predict that, because of this, certain doom awaits for Dems during the 2008 elections. He explains that the Republican Party, however, is immune to such attacks because its more radical elements have been marginalized.
Hm . . . I often enjoy reading George Will’s columns. He is certainly better than that idiotic hate-pandering Cal Thomas. However, this column is nothing short of ridiculous.
After setting up the over-the-hill John Birch Society as a straw-man, Will fails to even mention the power that loonies like James Dobson, Rick Santorum, and Pat Robertson (among others) hold in the Republican Party. If the Democrats are tone-deaf, then George Will must be blind, deaf, and dumb not to notice these guys. George, when was the last time you heard Democrats calling for the assassination of democratically elected world leaders? What about the last time you heard them blame the clergy abuse scandals on an entire city? How about the last time Democrats said that a father should prevent his son from becoming homosexual by showing the son that he possesses a larger penis size?
That’s what I thought . . .
It is extremely heartening when famous people back you up.
CampusProgress.org has pictures from Todd.
Todd Hill, my Texas-based colleague on the CampusProgress.org blog, met with Cindy Sheehan in Crawford earlier today.
Novak clarifies things to the Daily Dish:
A calmer Novak told us later: “He said I was trying to please the editorial writers of The Wall Street Journal. I thought that was an unacceptable questioning of my integrity. I overreacted.
Well Bob, you sort of make it easy for us, don’t cha?
I’m not the only one who think Posner is off his rocker in his discussion of alleged bias in the media.
When a factually fradulent article by a hack partisan who doesn’t know the first thing about being a journalist gets reprinted on the website of a major news organization, you know that there’s no “liberal media”- only one devoid of even the most basic editorial standards.
Read all about it.
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