"If I invoked the Insurrection Act against her wishes, the world would see a male Republican president usurping the authority of a female Democratic governor by declaring an insurrection in a largely African American city."

"That left me in a tough position. That would arouse controversy anywhere. To do so in the Deep South, where there had been centuries of states' rights tensions, could unleash holy hell."

I was struck by that passage in Bush's memoir, "Decision Points." Bush, of course, ended up getting criticized for seemingly not "car[ing] about black people," so it's interesting to think that his delays — at least as he presents them now — had to do with the history of the South. But look closely as the 2 concerns that slowed Bush's imposition of federal authority in New Orleans:

1. Gender. Bush didn't like the image of the male pushing the female aside. He thought he'd be criticized for that.

2. "States' rights tensions." That's a strange way to evoke the history of racism in the south if you want to convey that you cared about the suffering of black people. "States' rights" was the cry of those who resisted federal efforts to advance integration. Bush was, in fact, being deferential to the Southern governor.

Bush, sensitive to potential criticism about sexism and states' rights, exercised restraint, which exposed him to criticism about race.

There was rapper Kanye West who told TV viewers: "George Bush doesn't care about black people." Jesse Jackson compared the plight of some survivors with being trapped in the "hull of a slave ship".

"Five years later, I can barely write these words without feeling disgusted. I am deeply insulted by the suggestion that we allowed American citizens to suffer because they were black... The more I thought about it, the angrier I felt. I was raised to believe that racism was one of the greatest evils in society," Bush writes. "I faced a lot of criticism as president. I didn't like hearing people claim I had lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or cut taxes to benefit the rich. But the suggestion that I was a racist, because of the response to Katrina, represented an all-time low. I told Laura at the time that it was the worst moment of my presidency. I feel the same way today."

He feels bad about this criticism and is contemptuous of those who expressed it, but: 1. His own words indicate that he put racism third on a list of 3 things he was worried he'd be criticized for, and 2. Jackson and West were speaking emotionally at the time when the suffering was going on.

Meanwhile, Kanye West cracked under pussycat questioning from Matt Lauer.

"We wanted to be part of a historic event... We knew Johnny White's would be the place to be...."

"We'll probably switch to water about 10 o'clock, sober up, and see if we can help out."

Life in New Orleans, spared by the hurricane.

ADDED: Does this mean God is for or against John McCain? I've lost track.

AND: "One doesn't anticipate that one's private conversation will be surreptitiously taped by some right-wing nutcase. But that's the nature of what we're dealing with."

Bush and Cheney will stay away from the GOP convention because of Hurricane Gustav.

Reports CNN. Other changes to the convention are needed:

"I wouldn't call it a nightmare, but it is a very perplexing challenge," said a GOP official planning the event.

A senior McCain source said Saturday that officials are considering turning the convention into a service event, a massive telethon to raise money for the Red Cross and other agencies to help with the hurricane.

Be careful. People will say you're just trying to claim viewers, and the viewers are going to want to see pictures of the big storm. They are going to want to see reporters dodging shards of metal.

Quite aside from the convention, Bush needs to handle the emergency brilliantly well. That is the best way to promote the Republican Party. Demonstrate competence.

IN THE COMMENTS: sammy990099 says:

I guess Michael Moore was right. There is a God in heaven. And he, in his wisdom, has provided a convenient excuse for W and C not to appear in St. Paul.

Good point! Here's the Michael Moore clip, in case you haven't seen it:



ADDED: And then there's this, former National Chairman of the Democratic National Committee Don Fowler laughing with Congressman John Spratt of South Carolina about the hurricane:



"It just demonstrates God's on our side." Then that must be the devil right behind you with a digital camcorder.

"This is the mother of all storms, and I’m not sure we’ve seen anything like it."

Says Mayor C. Ray Nagin, looking at Hurricane Gustav and ordering the evacuation of the City of New Orleans.

"Did the Corps fix the levees?, Is my house going to flood again?... Am I going to have to go through all this again?"

Anxiety in New Orleans.

ADDED: Storm preparation... for the GOP convention.

Super Tuesday is tomorrow.

What will you be looking for?

IN THE COMMENTS: Beth answers my question from New Orleans: "Zulu coconuts. Marching bands. Hip hop brass bands. My friends in outlandish costumes. A clean public bathroom."

"It said my house is pink. I would not have a pink house, I assure you."

Says Mitt Romney. Context:

MR. RUSSERT: This was The Boston Globe back in December of '06. "As Governor Mitt Romney explores a presidential bid, he has grown outspoken in his criticism of illegal immigration. But, for a decade, the governor has used a landscaping company that relies heavily on workers like these, illegal Guatemalan immigrants, to maintain the ground surrounding his pink Colonial house." That was a year ago. A year later, The Boston Globe came back and the same company and illegal immigrants doing the same work. Did you report that company to authorities saying--a year ago--saying they're using illegal immigrants?

GOV. ROMNEY: Oh, it was, it was on the front page of The Boston Globe; a reporting was not necessary. But I have to clear up the most egregious error in that article. It said my house is pink. I would not have a pink house, I assure you. In an effort to--let me, let me describe the circumstance. And that is the very issue I just mentioned, which is we need an employment verification system in this country. I hire a landscaper to take care of my leaves and, and mow the lawn, and, and the landscaping company hires people to work for them. We're certainly not going to have an America where a homeowner is expected or even thought of going out and saying, "Gosh, I see some workers here who have an accent. I want them to bring papers so I can inspect them." As a matter of fact, I think that's against the law in this country. And so, in this case, the, the landscaper, or the contractor has a responsibility to ensure that their workers are legal.

Watch him say it here (at 5:17). He laughs. It's a joke. (Planned?) But why is it funny?

The last time we talked about the meaning of pink, it was that locker room at the University of Iowa which was painted pink to taunt or weaken the visiting team. It was subject to feminist critique:

After protesting the pink locker room at a Hawkeye home game in November, Jill Gaulding plans to file a complaint under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972...

"This [is] understood as a funny version of the slur that goes on in athletics about playing like a girl, playing like a sissy"...

"It’s based on a concept of gender hierarchy that says not only are boys and girls different, but more important it’s better to be a boy than a girl; it’s shameful to be a girl," said Gaulding, who is researching a book on cognitive bias and gender discrimination. "Anyone who’s not deeply in denial understands and acknowledges that the pink locker room taps into this very long tradition of using gender as a put-down."

So what does it mean to say I would not have a pink house, I assure you? It was a joke that he planned and inserted into the interview. He laughed to make sure you understood that it was a joke. But how are we to understand it as a joke? What is he trying to say?



IN THE COMMENTS: Palladian offers up the perfect film clip:



Glorious. I was picturing Mitt singing that song. Or maybe some Mitt impersonator on "Saturday Night Live." (I bet Giuliani would do it.)

TerriW said...

I guess he's not afraid of alienating the John Cougar Mellencamp fanbase.

Not to mention The Band.



AND: Commenter and New Orleans resident Beth thinks Mitt doesn't know that he's losing New Orleans.

Orin Kerr devastates Frank Rich...

... with facts that Rich should be quite embarrassed not to have checked.

ADDED: Rich also asserts that Thomas never turns a critical eye on Republicans. Rich stresses Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy" and writes:

One former Nixon White House colleague, Pat Buchanan, said on "Meet the Press" last weekend that it was no big deal for Republican candidates to skip a debate before an African-American audience because blacks make up only about 10 percent of the voting public and Republicans only get about a tenth of that anyway....

Mr. Thomas seems ignorant of this changing America. He can never see past his enemies' list, which in his book expands beyond his political foes, Yale and the press to "elite white women" and "paternalistic big-city whites" and "light-skinned blacks."

But as I wrote back here:

At page 178, of "My Grandfather's Son," Justice Thomas, who was chairman of the EEOC, states that his "main quarrel with the Reagan administration... was that it needed a positive civil-rights agenda, instead of merely railing against quotas and affirmative action."

At page 179, he writes: "Too many of the president's political appointees seemed more interested in playing to the conservative bleachers..." He suspected this was because "blacks didn't vote for Republicans," so there was little to be gained by helping them. As proof that his suspicion was right, he notes that he offered to help the Reagan reelection campaign "only to be met with near-total indifference." A "political consultant" told him "straight out that since the president's reelection strategy didn't include the black vote, there was no role for" him.

So Clarence Thomas wrote explicitly about the exact issue that he "seems ignorant of" to Rich. Yes, of course, he seems ignorant to you, Frank Rich, because you knew the attitude you intended to take and you had your assumptions all lined up when you wrote this idiotic tirade.

Take another look at the column, and you'll see that Rich got most of the material for his column by watching television. I've added some boldface to point this up:

Since kicking off his book tour on "60 Minutes" last Sunday, he has been whining all the way to the bank...

It's useful to watch Mr. Thomas at this moment, 16 years after his riveting confirmation circus....

This could be seen most vividly on "60 Minutes,"...

Bill O'Reilly may have deemed the "60 Minutes" piece "excellent," but others spotted the holes. Marc Morial, the former New Orleans mayor who now directs the National Urban League, told Tavis Smiley on PBS that it was "as though Justice Thomas's public relations firm edited the piece." On CNN, Jeffrey Toobin, the author of the new best-seller about the court, "The Nine," said that it was "real unfair"...

[Thomas] asserted to a compliant Jan Crawford Greenburg of ABC News last week...

Did Rich even read the book?

"Whatever right the Second Amendment guarantees, it does not require the District to stand by while its citizens die."

The District of Columbia's petitions the Supreme Court to review the case that struck down the city's ban on handguns.

"No other provision of the Bill of Rights even arguably requires a government to tolerate serious physical harm on anything like the scale of the devastation worked by handguns," the petition states....

The court ruled that the Second Amendment "protects an individual right to keep and bear arms" and that "once it is determined -- as we have done -- that handguns are 'Arms' referred to in the Second Amendment, it is not open to the District to ban them."

The court acknowledged that its decision was groundbreaking; only one other federal appeals court -- that of the 5th Circuit, based in New Orleans -- has recognized an individual's right to gun ownership, and it nevertheless upheld the federal gun-control law at issue. Nine other circuits around the country have endorsed the collective right.

Given that split, it's likely the Court will take the case.

"The more power Drudge has attained, the more reclusive he has become. Drudge seems to despise his own fame with a Kurt Cobain–like intensity."

Did you see this huge article in New York Magazine about Matt Drudge?

On radio he speaks of himself as a nobody and has referred to his fans as “psychic vampires.” He has utterly compartmentalized his life, separating the personal and the public. Acquaintances describe very brief, formal encounters, and even friends of Drudge’s, if there is such a category, generally communicate with him by IM....

Drudge enjoys the changing fashions in news, the plot shifts that he has a hand in engineering. As he’s entered middle age, something noir and futuristic has entered his sensibility, more Philip K. Dick (on his show, he often invokes Blade Runner) than Walter Winchell. The site is obsessed with global warming, with the dangers of cell phones and cloning, with all manner of tabloid horrors. He’s a storyteller, and the stories are dark....

The left hates Drudge for good reason; he has helped kill one Democratic presidential aspirant after another and has started in on John Edwards this season....

Republicans can’t count on Drudge. He praises Rosie O’Donnell and Michael Moore for their independence and fight, and seems to despise Giuliani and McCain....

Drudge has a sneaker for the woman he calls “the Senatress.” When Clinton started wheezing and coughing in a speech in New Orleans in May, Drudge expressed genuine concern for her. “Hillary, dear, take care of yourself. We need you. I need you personally … Take a few days off, what’s this frenetic pace?” He added admiringly, “She was professional. She kept going. She finished the speech.” After a left-wing listener IM’d Drudge to say he wanted Hillary to drop dead onstage, Drudge said, “I need Hillary Clinton. You don’t get it. I need to be part of her world. That’s my bank. Like Leo DiCaprio has the environment and Al Gore has the environment and Jimmy Carter has anti-Americanism … I have Hillary.”

Much more at the link -- including plenty of speculation about Drudge's sexuality.

Finishing the debate in transcript form, I give the win to Richardson.

I think I got about two thirds of the way through the debate last night. Here's what I managed to write. I was just about to watch the end of the debate this morning to finish up, but I found this handy transcript. I like a nice transcript. It's quicker to read than to watch, you don't have to type out the quotes, and evading the question is so obvious that what's irritating seen on TV becomes almost amusing.

Let me start reading where I left off last night and pick out what interests me.

Obama is asked "what are America's three most important allies around the world?" He throws in so much extra material that he gets around to naming two: the European Union and Japan. A follow-up question is asked: "I didn't hear you mention Israel, and I ask because there is a quote attributed to your name. You said recently, 'No one is suffering more than the Palestinian people.' Do you stand by that remark?" Answer:

Well, keep in mind what the remark actually, if you had the whole thing, said.

What the remark said. There's that remark, talking away, and I'm over here, so I guess you can say I'm standing by it. Standing by, watching with amazement, wondering what that darned remark will come out with next.

But in his next sentence, he takes ownership of the remark:

And what I said is nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people from the failure of the Palestinian leadership to recognize Israel, to renounce violence, and to get serious about negotiating peace and security for the region.

And:

Israel has been one of our most important allies around the world. It's the only established democracy in the Middle East. It's the linchpin of much of our efforts in the Middle East.

Has been? So it "has been" an important ally, but it "is" a "linchpin" of our "efforts."

Hillary Clinton is asked about Giuliani's statement that "the Democrats do not understand the full nature and scope of the terrorist war against us," and "America will be safer with a Republican president." She responds with what looks like her favorite debate move: say the current President is a failure.

We haven't secured our borders, our ports, our mass transit systems. You can go across this country and see so much that has not been done. The resources haven't gotten to the front lines where decisions are made in local government the way that they need to. And I think that this administration has consistently tried to hype the fear without delivering on the promise of making America safer. And its foreign policy around the world, as you've heard from all of my colleagues here, has also made the world less stable, which, of course, has a ripple effect with respect to what we're going to face in the future. So I hope that we can put that myth to rest. It is certainly something I will try to do during the campaign.

There is absolutely nothing there about why she would do a better job as the next President, and we were just reminded of Giuliani. Who do you want to trust, Clinton or Giuliani? That's the question. She gives not one shred of a reason here to go with her. Is there some way she would secure our borders and ports better than he would? Picture her standing at a debate next to Giuliani a year and a half from now. That's what you ought to do if you're trying to pick the best Democratic candidate. Is she the one you Democrats want standing there?

There's a "show of hands" question: "Do you believe there is such a thing as a global war on terror?" Kucinich doesn't raise his. I don't bother to read his explanation.

Let's read something important. Obama is asked "how would you change the U.S. military stance overseas" if there were another attack on two American cities and we knew "beyond a shadow of a doubt" that al Qaida did it:

Well, the first thing we'd have to do is make sure that we've got an effective emergency response, something that this administration failed to do when we had a hurricane in New Orleans.

The first thing he thinks of is Katrina. Bush failed there, don't you know. Think fast, Senator. It's another 9/11! What is the military response? Show us you can think like a Commander in Chief:

And I think that we have to review how we operate in the event of not only a natural disaster, but also a terrorist attack.

The second thing is to make sure that we've got good intelligence, a., to find out that we don't have other threats and attacks potentially out there, and b., to find out, do we have any intelligence on who might have carried it out so that we can take potentially some action to dismantle that network.

But what we can't do is then alienate the world community based on faulty intelligence, based on bluster and bombast. Instead, the next thing we would have to do, in addition to talking to the American people, is making sure that we are talking to the international community.

Because as already been stated, we're not going to defeat terrorists on our own. We've got to strengthen our intelligence relationships with them, and they've got to feel a stake in our security by recognizing that we have mutual security interests at stake.

So the military response is: think and talk.

Edwards is supremely fortunate to get a shot right now at the same question:

Well, the first thing I would do is be certain I knew who was responsible, and I would act swiftly and strongly to hold them responsible for that.

The second thing I would do -- and, of course, some of these have been mentioned already -- is find out how did this happen without our intelligence operations finding out that it was in a planning stage; how did they get through what we all recognize is a fairly porous homeland security system that we have in this country that has not been built the way it needed to be built?

You know, did the weapons that created these two simultaneous strikes come through our ports? Were they in one of the containers that have not been checked? How did these weapons get here, and how do we stop it from happening again?

I believe -- and this goes to the question you asked earlier, just a few minutes ago -- global war on terror. I think there are dangerous people and dangerous leaders in the world that America must deal with and deal with strongly.

But we have more tools available to us than bombs.

And America needs to use the tools that are available to them, so that these people who are sitting on the fence, the terrorists are trying to recruit the next generation get pushed to our side, not to the other side. We've had no long-term strategy. We need one and I will provide one as president.

So, be strong. But mainly just try very hard to figure out how they did it and how we can defend against the next attack. His idea seems to be about winning the hearts of the next generation. How do you fight the terrorists? Why not make them love us so they won't want to be terrorists anymore? Surely, if they see the Democrats have brought their new tools into the White House, they'll feel the love.

Now, Clinton gets her shot. Come on, Hillary, show you can do it! Your two biggest opponents have set this up perfectly.

Well, again, having been a senator during 9/11, I understand very well the extraordinary horror of that kind of an attack and the impact that it has, far beyond those that are directly affected.

Boring. Non-responsive.

I think a president must move as swiftly as is prudent to retaliate.

Yes! Retaliate!

If we are attacked, and we can determine who is behind that attack, and if there are nations that supported or gave material aid to those who attacked us, I believe we should quickly respond.

Now, that doesn't mean we go looking for other fights. You know, I supported President Bush when he went after Al Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

And then when he decided to divert attention to Iraq, it was not a decision that I would have made, had I been president, because we still haven't found bin Laden. So let's focus on those who have attacked us and do everything we can to destroy them.

Attack! Destroy! Thank God, one of them is willing to say it. Hillary wins.

No one else is given a turn at this, the key question of the night. But the next time Richardson is called on -- with the special Hispanic question "How do you feel about normalizing relations with Castro's Cuba?" -- he insists on going back to the "two cities" question. Good for him! And he must have been pissed to have been excluded from the A group.

I would respond militarily, aggressively. I'll build international support for our goals. I'd improve our intelligence, but that would be a direct threat on the United States, and I would make it clear that that would be an important, decisive, military response, surgical strike, whatever it takes.

That beats Hillary. Richardson is my favorite of the Democrats. And Obama and Edwards are unacceptable.

But wait.

Taking a cue from Richardson, when Obama is asked a question about lightbulbs -- yeah, really, what kind of lightbulbs! -- he goes back to the terrorism question. Now, that he's heard the others answer, he knows he's screwed it up.

But one thing that I do have to go back on, on this issue of terrorism: We have genuine enemies out there that have to be hunted down, networks have to be dismantled.

There is no contradiction between us intelligently using our military and, in some cases, lethal force to take out terrorists and, at the same time, building the sort of alliances and trust around the world that has been so lacking over the last six years.

And that, I think, is going to be one of the most important issues that the next president is going to have to do, is to repair the kinds of challenges that we face.

Am I going to let him off the hook for this? "In some cases, lethal force"?

Kucinich is spurred to challenge Obama.

My good friend, Senator Obama, that's a very provocative statement. You previously said that all options are on the table with respect to Iran. And I think that it's important for people to reflect on the real meaning of that, that you're setting the stage for another war.

Oh, no. Kucinich is pushing him back into the peace corner.

I think it's important that we move away from global warming and global warring. And the connection is oil. We're in Iraq for oil. We're looking at attacking Iran for oil.

Oh, no.

And until we change our international policies, which quit using war as an instrument of policy ... and change our energy policies ... we will continue to repeat this sorry cycle.

Obama responds (with Kuchinich interrupting him throughout):

I think it would be a profound mistake for us to initiate a war with Iran. But, have no doubt, Iran possessing nuclear weapons will be a major threat to us and to the region.... And I don't think that's disputed by any expert. They are the largest state sponsor of terrorism... Hezbollah and Hamas.... There is no contradiction between us taking seriously the need, as you do, to want to strengthen our alliances around the world -- but I think it is important for us to also recognize that if we have nuclear proliferators around the world that potentially can place a nuclear weapon into the hands of terrorists, that is a profound security threat for America and one that we have to take seriously.

Gravel goes wild here and says, among other things: "Who the hell are we going to nuke? Tell me, Barack. Barack, who do you want to nuke?"

Obama's all: "I'm not planning to nuke anybody right now, Mike, I promise."

Well, now I do want to watch the video. It seems as though Obama comes to life at the end, that he does best when he's reacting to the other candidates, rather than answering the question cold. This is a good sign that he may be an engaging candidate. I'll say more when I've seen the video.

From the transcript, I like Richardson best. Hillary didn't do anything wrong. Obama worries me. Edwards did not impress me. The others... I don't have to have an opinion on them. But what a nut that Gravel is.

UPDATE: Mere Rhetoric notes a discrepancy in some transcripts and questions whether Obama said "Israel has been one of our most important allies" as I have it quoted or "Israel is one of our most important allies" as the quote appears elsewhere. Since I have the debate TiVo'd, I checked. My quote is correct. I am certain.

Edwards.

He said he would say he was running that then he did. Do I need to post about stuff like this? A news thing happened. Ah, what the hell.

Though Mr. Edwards’s central theme in the 2004 campaign was poverty, that was not the case on Thursday, as he made only a passing reference to the “two Americas,” his slogan two years ago. Instead of choosing to announce from the Lower Ninth Ward, the impoverished neighborhood that has become a symbol for the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Edwards, a former North Carolina senator, opted for middle-class East New Orleans, and an area of solid, single-story tan-brick homes that are salvageable, unlike the flimsy frame buildings in the Lower Ninth Ward....

He said the next president would “need to re-establish America’s leadership role in the world,” called for quick withdrawal of 40,000 to 50,000 troops from Iraq, and said it “would be a mistake for America to escalate its role in Iraq.”

Roundly denouncing the administration’s approach, he said, “You can’t lead through raw power.”

He expressed regret for his Senate vote to authorize force in Iraq. “My vote was a mistake,” he said. “I should never have voted for the war.”

Why am I so bored with the idea of Edwards running for President? I voted for him in the primary in 2004. Why did I do that? Because I thought he was the remaining candidate with the best shot at winning. I thought he was smart, charming, and articulate enough to make people want to vote for him. As opposed to what we were about to get. And got.

ADDED: Ooh, I'm so bored with Edwards that I forgot to write the ending of the post saying why I'm so bored! I just don't like a guy who serves one term in the Senate and then reveals to the whole world -- by not running for reelection -- that he doesn't want to bother with any other public service than the one biggest plum job on the face of the planet.

Theme? America.

No, I'm not doing a theme day here on the blog, although as I set out this morning, I felt I'd left behind three posts that look like a theme: blogging/vlogging... blahhh! I'm not doing that. I keep telling myself not to blog about blogging too much.

But I had to make fun of those bloggers who gravitated to Clinton's lunch. It made me think of this video clip a reader sent me yesterday, with President Bush standing intimidatingly close to Matt Lauer and repeatedly making stabbing finger-pointing gestures at him. I like the way Lauer wasn't the slightest bit cowed. I want nervy bloggers who stand up to powerful politicos, not folks who gush about their charm and hospitality and how good they made their ideas sound.

But I lit out before I could dispel the impression that I had a theme day going, because I wanted to take the long way driving into work and listen to "Theme Time Radio With Bob Dylan." What was the theme? For the first time, there wasn't a precisely articulated theme like flowers or the devil or baseball. It was something about traveling all over the map. The first song was the city-naming song "I've Been Everywhere" -- which made me assume, incorrectly, that the most obvious city-naming song, "Route 66," would come up later. Sometimes Bob acted as if the theme was cities. There were songs about Chicago and Tulsa and Jackson and Knoxville. But not every song had a city name. There was "Jersey Girl" and "Hawaiian Cowboy" and "Stars Fell on Alabama." So what exactly was the theme? As the show was ending, under Dylan's closing remarks, we heard a mellow, evocative guitar rendering of "America, the Beautiful."

I think the theme was "America," but a decision was made to be subtle about it. Was anything said about 9/11? No, no, nothing at all. But I thought it was very interesting that Bob chose to play a song about the great Baltimore fire of 1904 and then took the time to quote what the mayor, Robert McLane, said at the time, when offers of help poured in: "As head of this municipality, I cannot help but feel gratified by the sympathy and the offers of practical assistance which have been tendered to us. To them I have in general terms replied, 'Baltimore will take care of its own, thank you.'" And: "To suppose that the spirit of our people will not rise to the occasion is to suppose that our people are not genuine Americans. We shall make the fire of 1904 a landmark not of decline but of progress."

Did he mean to imply something about New Orleans and New York City today? Was there a subtle political message to extract?

Impossible to restore the complex culture of New Orleans?

Consider this:

Before Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans was a majority-black city. It also was a poor one, and most of the people hardest hit by the storm were both....

It is also a place where French, Spanish, American Indians and West Africans intermarried as far back as the 18th Century. This resulted in a rich cultural heritage and a multiracial, sometimes inequitable society organized along color and class lines.

Now the city's native sons and daughters are speculating on how that complex culture will change in the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Some even question whether it will survive at all.

"I don't know that you're going to be able to capture the past," said Arnold Hirsch, a historian at the University of New Orleans. "You may come up with something new. You might be able to help the poverty and the problems that became so manifest during the hurricane, and that might be to the good. But it wouldn't be the historical New Orleans."

Read the whole thing.

"My biggest mistake was not recognizing by Saturday that Louisiana was dysfunctional."

Ousted FEMA director Michael D. Brown testifies before a House panel today and lays the blame on the governor and the mayor:

Brown told the committee, FEMA's approach worked in Mississippi and Alabama, whose governors are both Republicans.

Of the disastrous flooding that stranded thousands for days in New Orleans, he said, "The only variable was the state government officials involved."

The way FEMA works with state officials in disasters is "well established and works well," Brown said in emphatic tones in his opening statement, pointing his finger and shaking a clenched hand at lawmakers. "Unfortunately, this is the approach that FEMA had great difficulty in getting established in Louisiana."

... "I very strongly, personally regret that I was unable to persuade Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin to sit down, get over their differences and work together. . . . I just couldn't pull that off."

Looking for "Creeole Ladde."

A couple weeks ago, we were talking about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, here, and a reader who called himself herself "Creeole Ladde" wrote:

Let's not be blind to the continued stratification of people of Louisiana. Why was I not swimming with the masses...because my European ancestry allowed my father to move to California and get a job that payed enough to send me to private school, which allowed me to become well educated. However, I do not disregard my African ancestry. People of mixed backgrounds such as Louisiana Creoles of color, but that is not to say it may not be available to all. It's a Creole thing. You have to be one to perhaps understand.

Now, I've received an inquiry from a reporter for a large news organization who is "writing about this stratification – trying to get a handle on how this will change or not change as New Orleans is rebuilt." If you are "Creeole Ladde" and would be willing to correspond with the reporter, please email me. (My email address is the name of this blog followed by @wisc.edu.)

"The real question - putting it baldly - is whether there is going to be a revolution."

A BBC opinionwriter muses about the American response to Hurricane Katrina:

Will the American social and economic system - which creates the wealth that pays for billionaires' private jets, and the poverty which does not allow for a bus fare out of New Orleans - be addressed?

It has been tinkered with before of course, sometimes as a result of natural disasters. There were for instance plenty of buses on hand for this week's Rita evacuation.

But the system's fundamentals - no limit on how far you can fly and little limit on how low you can fall - remain as intact as they were in the San Francisco gold rush.

The headline for this unbelievably smug piece is "Katrina prompts charity not change."

UPDATE: This post got a strange link from Andrew Sullivan:

ALTHOUSE ON THE BEEB: Picked up by Instapundit and the Corner as more evidence of wretched BBC anti-American bias, I read the piece assailed by Ann Althouse. It's an opinion piece, not news reporting, so obviously a little more lee-way for bias should be allowed. And yes, there's a bizarre assumption that there is no welfare net in America - or that we haven't just expanded it to cover millions of wealthy seniors, or that welfare rolls haven't been reduced by almost a half in a few years, and so on.

Was my post about the BBC being biased? Did I somehow not perceive that the writer I called a "BBC opinionwriter" was "writing an an opinion piece, not news reporting"? You'd think my use of the term "opinionwriter" would have nailed that down rather hard! But thanks for the ridiculously inappropriate patronizing, Andrew! Check out the title of my post! It's awfully damned obvious that I'm writing about the stupidity of this one writer's notion that the United States may be headed for a revolution, which Sullivan completely agrees with in his post, even though for some reason he writes as if he's taking issue with me. It's quite apparent that Sullivan is mainly concerned with things that Glenn Reynolds and Jonah Goldberg said at their sites when they linked to me, but he didn't bother to write accurately about me. I think if Sullivan is going to use my name in his post title, he ought to take care about acting as if he's got a problem with me, when, in fact, he doesn't. But Sullivan doesn't read my blog, I'm almost sure. He just reads Instapundit and the Corner. To him, I'm just an empty link found there.

"It's like looking at a murder... The first time is bad. After that, you numb up."

Watching the re-flooding of New Orleans. "[A] waterfall at least 30 feet wide poured over and through a dike that had been used to patch breaks in the Industrial Canal levee," and Rita has not yet arrived.

"The English teacher used to talk about his papers after he had written them because they were outrageous but very well crafted."

Another interesting basis for insight into John Roberts from the NYT piece:

"The English teacher used to talk about his papers after he had written them because they were outrageous but very well crafted," remembered John Langley, an emergency room doctor in New Orleans who was a class below Judge Roberts at [the prive high school] La Lumiere. "He could take an argument that was borderline absurd and argue for it so well that you were almost at the point of having to accept his stance even though it was intuitively obvious that it was absurd."

Let me try to constrain my wild enthusiasm as a lawprof for beautifully constructed opinions that require hard work to discover the flaws. Most of the awful stuff I'm forced to assign to students is drudgery to read just for the most basic understanding of what this judicial character is trying to say.

How much more fun law school would be if the prose were crystalline! We could enjoy reading it, and get, right away, what the judge was saying. Then we could spend all our class time critiquing and questioning and devising arguments to the contrary. Heaven!

Ah, but I know the Supreme Court is not really about providing law school classroom pleasures. Still...

If Justice O'Connor retires, must her successor be a woman?

"Sources report Rehnquist is not ready to resign and that O'Connor is readying the way for a return to Arizona with her invalid husband." So reports Robert Novak today.

No woman has ever vacated a seat on the Supreme Court. Every woman who has ever served on the Supreme Court is currently on the Supreme Court. We have yet to discover the extent of the political feeling that a woman must be replaced by a woman.

Novak writes:

While Bush would consider replacing one of the court's two women with its first Hispanic justice, neither Roberts nor Luttig for O'Connor would be politically correct.

Accordingly, White House judge-hunters are looking for a woman. They have interviewed Appellate Judge Edith Brown Clement (5th Circuit, New Orleans), a conservative who flies under the radar. She was confirmed as a Louisiana district judge in 1991, seven weeks after her nomination by the first President Bush, and was confirmed as an appellate judge in 2001, two and a half months after George W. Bush named her.

Clement would be subject to far more scrutiny as a Supreme Court nominee. So would any other conservative named by Bush, though Democrats may have exhausted scrutinizing Gonzales.

It's funny that members of minority groups should be thought to be exchangeable with women. I suppose there's an idea that it isn't right for the Court to consist almost entirely of white men, and the one thing you cannot do is move any closer to that extreme. But if we're concerned about representation, women are more than fifty percent of the population, and there are some important legal issues that have a special impact on women. For only one ninth of the Court to be female, after so many years of two ninths, should disturb us, unless we cast the notion of representation aside altogether. Equating a Hispanic man with a woman should be regarded as kooky. But it is really a smokescreen. Look, I'm doing a first! Sorry, that irks me.

Either replace a woman with a woman or don't talk about representing groups on the Court.