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From Rush Limbaugh: Now, as inspired as I am about the heroic efforts of the rescuers and as awed as I am by the monumental cleanup task, I am disgusted by the looters, not just the looters of food and...

John Roberts made an analogy between Judges and Umpires that I have frequently used in my constitutional law class to explain the difference between judicial activism and judicial restraint. Jim Lindgren at the Volokh Conspiracy has this shrewd comment:Roberts' comparison...

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.

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...

Methinks that Instapundit is right on the money: THE PRESS WANTS TO SHOW BODIES from Katrina. It didn't want to show bodies, or jumpers, on 9/11, for fear that doing so would inflame the public. I can only conclude that...

Garrison Keillor is suing the blog MNspeak:A couple weeks ago, this website received, via the appropriately old-fashioned U.S. Postal Service, a cease and desist letter from Garrison Keillor's attorney. Click inside to read the letter and the unfinished saga of...

Great Britain considers getting rid of National Holocaust Day because it might offend Muslims. Meanwhile, Palestinians are gleefully burning synagogues in Gaza. What an amazing world we live in....

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...

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