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14 September 2005 Roll Call:A few days before a federal commission was scheduled to decide the fate of Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota's two Senators preemptively released a lengthy statement pledging to work together on issues of importance to...

In her questioning of John Roberts to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Diane Feinstein used the phrase the hard-earned autonomy of women and approvingly cited Planned Parenthood vs. Casey in saying woman should have the ability to control...

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.

Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan on Katrina: I heard from a very reliable source who saw a 25 foot deep crater under the levee breach. It may have been blown up to destroy the black part of town and...

From NewsMax: MSNBC averaged 220,000 viewers in daytime in August, according to the Post, compared to 998,000 for Fox News and 432,000 for CNN....

From Rush Limbaugh: All right, people say, Rush, what do you mean media scandal? Let me put scandal in quotes. The simplest way, I think, to clue you in as to my thinking is to give you the -- well,...

I'm going to write a personal check for $55 tomorrow, the amount I've received via PayPal for the Sheriff's Relief Fund. I'm also thinking about just matching whatever all of you have donated for my own personal contribution. That should...

From the Times-Picayune: BATON ROUGE - Mayor Ray Nagin pledged Monday that he and other citizens of New Orleans rather than state and national officials would be the lead planners in rebuilding the Crescent City, even as the town copes...

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