On Jon Stewart tonight, former first lady Barbara Bush -- who, as virtually everyone has noted, taught Dubya what he knows about compassionate conservatism -- got an almost totally free ride.

And why did she deserve a proper satiric whupping?

For telling PBS's Marketplace this on Sept. 5 about New Orleans evacuees:

"What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality."

"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them."

I just got an e-mail bulletin that says Dubya will personally lead an investigation into what went wrong with the hurricane Katrina relief effort.

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The Beeb's Matt Wells thinks the Katrina rescue debacle has helped the U.S. media find its spine.

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New Orleans' dominant newspaper is not happy with El Presidente:

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Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine has a post up called Recovery 2.0: A call to convene, that discusses ways to make the Internet a much better tool to help communities recover from disasters like hurricane Katrina.

It is unquestionably worth a read.

My one criticism, and it's a mild one, is that in Katrina's case, many of those most adversely affected don't appear to be that wired or computer-literate.

That doesn't argue against the initiative; it just means you might need trained volunteers without strong computer/Internet skills to help those in need make use of the Internet's capabilities.

The Register, via Ananova, reports the following karoake freakout in Bulgaria:

An enraged Brit spent 24 hours in jail and was fined 60 quid for terminating a Bulgarian karaoke with his fists - a small price to pay for bringing to an end a tuneless rendition of Queen's We are the Champions belted out by a couple of melodicidal locals.

Having assaulted the two men responsible for the outrage, 40-year-old Kevin Tester of Eastbourne proceeded to trash the Techhouse karaoke restaurant in the Black Sea holiday resort of Sunny Beach. He later told police he had been provoked by the "bad singing" and "bad English", Ananova reports.

As well as the fine, Tester faces compensation claims from the victims and the bar owner. We doubt if the summons will be delivered by singing telegram.

If you were going to be violently provoked into trashing a karaoke machine, would it be the singing or the choice of song that does it?

If it's the song, what tune would be most likely to send you on a karoake-machine-destroying rampage?

Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz on how the U.S. media seems to have found its capacity for outrage with the hurricane Katrina story.

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This NYT story on how CNN and NPR turned out to be the right outlets for the hurricane Katrina story.

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There's some varied offerings on that subject:

NYT: After failures, officials play the blame game

W-P: 'How could this be happening in the United States?'

W-P: Storm exposed disarray at the top

W-P: Officials deal with political fallout by pointing fingers

Newsweek: The Lost City

LAT: Why FEMA was missing in action

Gail Porretto is middle-class and white. Tracy Jackson is poor and black.

Their stories play out predictably in this NYT piece.

To see Celine Dion's freakout over Hurricane Katrina, go to this CTV.ca story and under video on the right-hand side, look for her name and click.

CopyGuard, a new software tool by LexisNexis, detects both plagiarism and copyright violation.

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This NYT story tells how the Times-Picayune of New Orleans and other Gulf Coast newspapers kept going after Hurricane Katrina tried her best to put them out of business.

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The NYT's David Brooks picks up a thread from a blogger (in addition to building on an earlier column) an asks whether the Hurricane Katrina disaster will trigger a major political shift in the U.S.

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In Killed by Contempt, NYT columnist Paul Krugman, writing about the Bush administration's general opposition for government as a force for public good, included the following paragraph:

Each day since Katrina brings more evidence of the lethal ineptitude of federal officials. I'm not letting state and local officials off the hook, but federal officials had access to resources that could have made all the difference, but were never mobilized.

Here's one of many examples: The Chicago Tribune reports that the U.S.S. Bataan, equipped with six operating rooms, hundreds of hospital beds and the ability to produce 100,000 gallons of fresh water a day, has been sitting off the Gulf Coast since last Monday - without patients.

Here's one from the NYT's Maureen Dowd, in United States of Shame, published Saturday:

Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA - a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association - admitted he didn't know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.

Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala., yesterday: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

The famous novelist talks to America about the flooding of New Orleans in an NYT commentary.

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Novelist Mark Childress, a part-time resident of the Big Easy, names off some of the great things about New Orleans. Here's a few:

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After a night that saw 12 more people die in a Paris-area apartment fire, here's some excerpts from a BBC Online story about Paris's dilapidated housing stock.

The writer, Caroline Wyatt, is talking about Fofanna Satou and her husband, immigrants from the Ivory Coast and living in a ostensibly desirable district in Paris:

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Rex Murphy, who I believe is a CBC contract employee, talks about the lockout. He's not on side with management.

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Hip-hop star Kanye West tore a new one for Dubya on Friday night during a televised hurricane benefit concert, saying the prez doesn't care about black people.

It's amusing to read how that statement made it past the censors!

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On Thursday, we learned that Mohammed Siddique Khan made a video explaining why he bombed the London subway system on July 7 -- and including some nice words about al Qaeda's leadership.

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People in Ratanakkiri province in Cambodia (where the final scenes of Apocalypse Now would have happened if there wasa real life version), are slowly losing the land that is central to their way of life.

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Thinking about New Orleans and the social breakdown there in the past few days, I recalled this quote:

"[People constantly requesting government intervention] are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours."

- Margaret Thatcher, Conservative prime minister of Great Britain, in 1987

Accuracy In Media is angry at U.S. cable network MSNBC for running an on-screen clock counting the time since Katrina hit  (seen first at Zerby's blog).

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Some pro-labour types argue against the type of employment model the CBC is trying to impose.

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According to a report by CTV News Toronto, this is what a New Orleans police officer told a tourist from Michigan when she asked for help: "Go to hell. It's every man for himself."

Two of Canada's most prominent lefties have offerings on rabble.ca.

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"We have long heard claims of compassionate conservatism among our nation's leaders. We now want the compassion. This is the time for those with wealth and resources to step up to the plate."

- Rep. Elijah Cummings, D., Maryland, member of the Congressional Black Caucus

I would also note that U.S. Republicans also savagely mocked John Edwards' talk of "two Americas." Let's see them do that now.

And for something a bit lighter, the NYT's Stephen Holden has released his list of the best movies from this summer (yes, folks, it's almost over!).

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According to the U.S. papers the BBC surveyed, the consenus is the anarchy in New Orleans has sprung from the wholly inadequate disaster response.

One TV vignette early this week showed a man in the hurricane zone cooking a can of beans over a fire. On the garage door behind him, he spray-painted "Stay Out or Die."

As he saw things, he was in a battle zone, "and you do what you got to do to survive," he said.

A Globe and Mail article explores those sentiments:

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Just as I was waking up, I  heard a radio clip by New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin saying a lot of the craziness there was due to drug addicts who hadn't had a fix since Hurricane Katrina hit.

"We're tryin' to form a perimeter, but we might not be able to hold them," he said (or words to that effect).

This is starting to sound like something out of a George Romero movie.

Update:

I found a transcript on Salon of the interview Nagin did with WWL-AM Radio in New Orleans that has the exact quote:

And one of the things people -- nobody's talked about this. Drugs flowed in and out of New Orleans and the surrounding metropolitan area so freely it was scary to me, and that's why we were having the escalation in murders. People don't want to talk about this, but I'm going to talk about it. You have drug addicts that are now walking around this city looking for a fix, and that's the reason why they were breaking in hospitals and drugstores. They're looking for something to take the edge off of their jones, if you will. And right now, they don't have anything to take the edge off. And they've probably found guns. So what you're seeing is drug-starving crazy addicts, drug addicts, that are wrecking havoc. And we don't have the manpower to adequately deal with it. We can only target certain sections of the city and form a perimeter around them and hope to God that we're not overrun.

Excerpts from some NYT stories and a Salon column about the disaster unfolding in New Orleans and how it's disproportionately affected poor blacks.

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In 2004, despite 3.8 per cent economic growth, incomes largely stagnated in the United States while poverty rose for the fourth straight year.

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The head of the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency said protecting New Orleans from a major hurricane event was his number-one priority.

City officials in New Orleans, however, are blasting the feds and the state for an inadequate response now that the feared has become the actual.

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A team of volunteer drug addicts in Vancouver is helping shoot up addicts who are too ill or incapacitated to shoot up themselves.

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CBC's Shelagh Rogers, host of Sounds Like Canada (heard in happier times on CBC Radio One) kicked off her one-woman (and two producers) outreach program yesterday called Caravan Unlocked.

She plans to travel across Canada during the lockout, visiting CMG picket lines and talking to people.

Besides doing the blog, she also did her first podcast from Victoria (which you can link to from the blog, along with a slide show).

Democracy Now! talked with two journalists who have written about the hurricane hazard facing New Orleans: Mark Fischetti, contributing editor of Scientific American, and John McQuaid of the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

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Former Chatelaine editor Kim Pittaway quit after 11 months in the job (and years as a contributing editor), citing editorial independence issues.

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Zerby quotes from a CMG newsletter issued Thursday that three of the top executives at the CBC have no real hands-on experience in the creative, journalistic or technical ends of the public broadcaster.

That seems to be the message of CFL fans after the broadcast of a few announcer-less CFL games.

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The Globe and Mail's Margaret Wente stands up for the public broadcaster she loves to complain about.

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The NYT's David Brooks looks at the political repercussions of major disasters like Hurricane Katrina.

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From the Salon blurb: In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war.

I added an excerpt from an NYT editorial too.

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Saw this first at Canadian Journalist (thanks Deb!): Slate's Jack Shafer on two issuses related to the tragedy unfolding in in New Orleans that are going unspoken by U.S. networks: race and class.

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The Times-Picayune newspaper did a series in 2002 called Washing Away on the dangers to New Orleans of a catastrophic hurricane striking. Some of it is looking disturbingly prophetic now.

Take this blurb:

THE BIG ONE A major hurricane could decimate the region, but flooding from even a moderate storm could kill thousands. It's just a matter of time.

Some parts of the U.S. blogosphere are apoplectic over two photo captions from different agencies of apparent "looting" by blacks in New Orleans -- but "finding" by whites. However, did they over-react?

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