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Good news from the Washington Post:The U.S. military pulled hundreds of troops out of the southern city of Najaf on Tuesday, transferring security duties to Iraqi forces and sticking to a schedule that the United States hopes will allow the...

9/12/05 Mitchell Daily Republic:America is succeeding in the fight against terrorism, and South Dakotans have played a strong role in that fight, said U.S. Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., while speaking during Sunday?s Sept. 11 Memorial Service in Mitchell. The memorial...

Power Line: Happy Anniversary, Guys...

Kaus has it about right: Sure, the Bushies are using the federalism issue, and Louisiana's potentially bruised feelings, as an excuse--especially when they talk about how "it would have been perceived" if Bush had seized control of the relief effort...

Here is some more truth that Chad Schudlt can?t handle: Kofi Annan is sitting there presiding over the absolute worst scandal in world history. The Volker Commission is pretty much establishing he was asleep at the wheel (story), and nobody,...

This is from The Hill: White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove is planning to travel to North Dakota later this month to rally GOP activists and, Republicans hope, persuade Gov. John Hoeven (R) to challenge Sen. Kent Conrad...

From Pat Buchanan: For the U.S. House minority leader to say the president of the United States is off his rocker and a danger is a rare insult. But it reveals that the Democrats no longer fear retaliation by this...

A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State

H/T to a former Navy shipmate for this article e-mailed to me. He offered it without comment, and if you check it out, you'll see that it speaks for itself. (by the way, he's in the Houston area, a lot closer to the action than the Chief is up in South Dakota.)

If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.

Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists?myself included?did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.

But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.

The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.

The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over four days last week. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.

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