THE LONG WEEKEND STARTS HERE…
…WITH FATS DOMINO, who was among the thousands of New Orleans residents plucked from rising floodwaters. He had been missing after telling his manager he would “ride out the storm” in New Orleans. New Orleans’s “Queen of Soul” Irma Thomas escaped to the home of her aunt in Baton Rouge. Allen Toussaint, who — among many achievements — wrote “Lady Marmalade” and the all-too-appropos “Right Place, Wrong Time,” was one of the 25,000 people holed up at the New Orleans Superdome hoping to get on a bus for Houston’s Astrodome. The Neville family is safe, but most of their homes are destroyed. Soul Asylum frontman Dave Pirner is anxiously watching television, hoping to see if his house in New Orleans escaped the destruction. Dave should get on the Internet and check the satellite photo.
IT'S NOT ALL ABOUT N.O. and musicians, of course. The L.A. Times has a photo gallery from Mississippi that has some mind-boggling stuff.
GIVE! Multiple telethons are scheduled for tonight and (probably) Tuesday, with Jerry Lewis pledging $1 million from this weekend's MDA telethon to disaster relief. Corporations are contributing millions of dollars. FEMA has links to major relief groups; Instapundit has a slew of links to bloggers and their adopted charity groups. Some, such as the McCormick Tribune Foundation Hurricane Katrina Relief Campaign, are matching or partially matching donations. My fave may be the hard rock radio station in Houston that was playing any request — including Don Ho — for every hundred dollar donation.
FRIDAY TIMEWASTER: Connexions.
R.L. BURNSIDE, the late bloomer of the Delta Blues, has passed away at 78. Though Mississippi Fred McDowell taught him to play in Chicago in the 1940s, and he performed in local bars for decades, he didn't really turn pro until he was 65. Burnside was popular with a number of younger acts, including the Beastie Boys and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. He had been in declining health since heart surgery in 1999, and died in a Memphis hospital.
TED LEO's cover of “I'm Looking Through You” from the forthcoming Rubber Soul tribute album has leaked onto the 'net. YANP is killing music.
TALKING HEADS: A fan site is killing music with a remix of “Take Me To The River.” But how could it top Pate's cover version?
TREY ANASTASIO seemingly drinks like a Phish.
PETE DOHERTY UPDATE: The troubled singer's website is named after bala chadha — a slang term for crack cocaine.
THE KAISER CHIEFS are good boys.
CBGB has been asked to leave the building, but will not go without a fight. Well over 1,000 photos from the benefit concerts — including pics of Blondie, Flipper, Steve Van Zandt, Peter and the Test Tube Babies, the Chesterfield Kings and more — are tagged at Flickr.
TEENAGE FANCLUB: The band's appearance on KEXP last month is now available for streaming.
GREG DULLI, formerly of Afghan Whigs, has a podcast promoting his newest effort with the Twilight Singers.
BRITNEY SPEARS: When not busy dreaming up names for her baby sure to provoke abuse from his peers, she's praying for the hurricane victims in her home state. That's nice, but a prayer and a check would be better, wouldn't it?
TERRORIST SITCOM supposedly hilarious, but no one wants to produce it. Who'da thunkit?
LONDON BOMBING: The suspected ringleader of the July 7th attack warned of more strikes in a pre-death video that included praise for the bombings from al Qaeda's second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahri. London's Times reports that the bomber blamed Britain’s role in the invasion of Iraq for homegrown terror, but Zawahiri is quoted by Reuters as saying, “We have repeated again and again, and here we are warning one more time — all those who took part in the aggression on Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine, we will respond in kind.”
KEIRA KNIGHTLEY: Constant styling for a quick succession of roles was causing her hair to fall out.
THE MOHAWK: Now that Natalie Portman and four-year-old Maddox Jolie are sporting it, the punk haircut has gone mainstream.
STACY'S MOM thinks she's too tall to be a leading lady, given the height of most leading men.
MICHAEL YON, the Ernie Pyle of the Iraq war, is interviewed by the Boston Herald.
LOST: I suppose it's tough to suspend disbelief on ABC's island drama when naked female fans swim into the scene.
SoCAL TERROR PLOT: A federal grand jury Wednesday indicted four men — including the alleged leader of a radical Islamist prison gang — accusing them of plotting a string of terrorist attacks on U.S. military facilities and synagogues in Southern California.
MADONNA was back to work after her horse accident, shooting a commercial in London for the Motorola iPod phone; Iggy Pop and other musicians will be doing ads also. Raconteur Camille Pagilia saw Madge's horse accident coming, just by looking at the cover of Vogue.
TOM-KAT UPDATE: Some think that the woman who made Cruise appear sane for many years, Pat Kingsley, has taken Brooke Shields as a client as a dig at Cruise, who criticized Shields' advocacy of anti-depressants to treat post-partum depression. Kingsley's people deny this, which is what any good PR person would do.
BRADGELINA UPDATE: Jolie plans to sue the Sun over reports her adopted daughter Zahara is not an orphan. No mention of the suit on Zahara's blog yet.
SIENNA MILLER is again rumored to be pregnant by Jude Law.
THE ACME PRODUCTS CATALOG is online. From Bat-Man Outfits to Rocket Powered Roller Skates, Acme really has it all.
HURRICANE POLITICS: There are a few people, such as Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News, who couldn't wait until those killed by Katrina are buried to claim that Bush budget cuts caused the catastrophe. However, The New York Times — hardly a tool of the Bush Administration — reports (try bugmenot or tuan12, 123456): (1) the current levees were designed to hold back a hurricane at Category 3 on the five-step intensity scale, but Katrina was at the high end of Category 4; (2) the primary breech happened at a spot “that, if anything, had received more attention and shoring up than many other spots in the region;” and (3) a new system that would withstand a Category 5 hurricane was just entering the planning stages. The actual completion of such a system would take at least a decade. Not to mention that the cost of Iraq is off-budget. This is probably why I heard Sen. Democratic Whip Dick Durbin say on the radio Thursday night that he hoped we would not get into this sort of argument. UPDATE: As some people cannot resist playing the blame game in the middle of a disaster, I’m going to vent a little more on this at the “Read More” link at the bottom of this entry.
TARA REID really wants to play a role like Pretty Woman or the Patricia Arquette role in True Romance. Which is to say she wants to play someone who has sex for money. Has she forgotten that she played Bunny Lebowski?
BIANCA JAGGER is not a big fan of America, according to Jack Baxter, a New York filmmaker who was partially paralyzed in a suicide bombing in an Israeli café. I don't think that's news, though someone actually challenging her on it may be.
SCARLETT JOHANNSON finds Woody Allen sexier than boyfriend Josh Hartnett. She's doing her second movie with Allen and given the history of women who do more than one movie with him, Soon-Yi ought to be thinking.
IRANIAN PRESIDENT has terrorist ties, but will be given a visa to come to the U.N. The linked ABC News story, after noting that an investigation uncovered no evidence to prove he had any role in the 1979 hostage crisis, writes: “Evidence or no evidence, the legal finding says the Iranian president has terrorist ties.” The folks at ABC apparently don't know or don't care that he has been implicated in the 1989 execution-style slayings of an Iranian Kurdish leader and two associates in Vienna, among other things.
CULT OF THE iPod: Folks with iPods tend to be creators and influencers of consumer-generated media.
DROWNING GIRL saved by a computer.
NANOTECH: Nanospheres could help dentists fill the tiny holes in our teeth that make them incredibly sensitive, and that cause severe pain for millions of adults and children worldwide.
A QUICK ONE: Amber Taylor is thinking of calling her new kitten Ivor, the Dirty Old Sooty Engine Driver, but now seems to be leaning toward “Snape.”
OTHER CATS are surviving a 15-story fall and burning down a house.
DOGS are getting rescued from Hurricane Katrina.
SILENCE OF THE GOATS: Plucky girl saves a goat from being eaten. When she grows up, she will become an FBI agent, in hopes of stopping that awful screaming of the goats…
THE GOAT SUCKER: Is a Texas television station desperate for ratings or is there something behind the legend of the Chupacabra?
PYTHON ATTACKS SLEEPING CHILD: A 12-year-old boy awoke to an unpleasant surprise this week when a python bit him in his bed. The Rodriguez family recently moved into their northwest Fresno, CA home and doesn't own a snake.
WOLVES are being kept as pets by an Italian minister who told authorities to feel free to come and investigate as he always needed “fresh meat.” The minister used to keep a tiger, but had to get rid of it because it ate a dog.
MORE HURRICANE POLITICS: Above, I noted that some people could not wait for the corpses to be recovered to play politics with the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina, particularly with the issue of funding flood-control in New Orleans. Yesterday’s Washington Post reported: “Even with full funding in recent years, none of the flood-control projects would have been completed in time to prevent the swamping of the city, as Democrats yesterday acknowledged.”
But that didn’t stop a few from trying to blame the President. “It is hard to say, but it is true: There was a failure by [Bush] to meet the responsibility here,” said Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.). “Somebody needs to say it.”
Well, not really. In addition to the WaPo story quoted above, the Chicago Tribune reports that U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officials said that a lack of funding for hurricane-protection projects around New Orleans did not contribute to the disastrous flooding. Indeed, portions of the flood-protection levees remain incomplete, but (as I noted yesterday from another source) the levees near Lake Pontchartrain that gave way were completed and in good condition before the hurricane. Lest we suspect that these officials are biased, Al Naomi, project manager for the east bank Lake Pontchartrain hurricane levee system, said the high water that the strong Category 4 storm pushed into the lake overwhelmed the levee’s design: “They were designed to withstand a surge for a Category 3 or less storm.” In the Trib story, Naomi said that if a project to provide Category 5 protection were fully funded and started immediately, it could be completed in three to five years. But the project to provide Category 3 protection was not even complete after a decade.
Back to the WaPo: “Is the National Guard ‘depleted because so many Guard are in Iraq that we don’t have the opportunity to activate civil control?’ asked Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.). ‘That question has to be asked.'” The WaPo then reports that “Almost one in three National Guardsmen in Louisiana is serving in Iraq or war-related efforts, according to the National Guard.” Put another way, more than two-thirds of Louisiana Guardsmen are not in Iraq. Or, as the National Guard Bureau put it:
“Even though National Guard forces have been heavily engaged in the Global War on Terrorism, nearly 124,000 troops were available for duty in the 17 states along the storm’s projected path, the National Guard Bureau reported. That averages to 78 percent of those states’ total Guard strength. Another 6,000 were available in Texas, and a Guard spokesman pointed out that tens of thousands more could be drawn from the rest of the nation.”
Similarly, in The New York Times, columnist Paul Krugman writes, “Yesterday Mr. Bush made an utterly fantastic claim: that nobody expected the breach of the levees. In fact, there had been repeated warnings about exactly that risk.”
Mr. Krugman ought to read his own newspaper, which reported (as syndicated so you don’t have to register): “disaster experts and frustrated officials said a crucial shortcoming may have been the failure to predict that the levees keeping Lake Pontchartrain out of the city would be breached, not just overflow.”
Again, if we suspect bias should lead us to believe Krugman over the disaster experts, we could listen to former President Clinton, who told off a finger-pointer on CNN:
“I’m telling you, nobody thought this was going to happen like this. But what happened here is they escaped — New Orleans escaped Katrina. But it brought all the water up the Mississippi River and all into Pontchartrain, and then when it started running and that levee broke, they had problems they never could have foreseen.”
Ironically, these sorts of partisan attacks only cause others to note that the Clinton Administration put no priority on funding flood control in New Orleans, either.
Some bloggers on the Left, like Ezra Klein and the Right, like VariFrank, have had the common sense to recognize the overwhelming magnitude of the disaster. According to Reuters, the disaster area is roughly the size of Britain. As the above-mentioned syndicated NYT story notes: Katrina could have made landfall anywhere from Texas to Florida; National Guards and heavy machinery could not quickly move into New Orleans because of the storm itself and the damage and flooding caused by it; in Mississippi, the zone of destruction was so widespread, it was difficult to cover it all quickly; a 1878 law generally restricts active-duty military forces from performing domestic law enforcement duties; and so on. Under the circumstances, the government response “has been nothing short of heroic,” according to Joe Becker, the top disaster response official at the American Red Cross.
As military folk like to say, “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” While I’m sure that hindsight will turn up various blunders — particularly regarding the seeming lack of planning for evacuating the poor, elderly and disabled — government planning cannot turn one of this country’s greatest natural disasters into a nuisance to be solved like a problem on a television sitcom. If it could, the Soviet Union probably would have won the Cold War; government planning was their specialty. Obviously, we will need to review what happened to see what can be learned to improve our response in the future. But the blame game only distracts from addressing the urgent problems we have now; it ought to be able to wait for more than a week.