Right Wing Nut House

Today has been set aside by bloggers (HT and Kudos to Glenn Reynolds) to raise funds for the relief of areas hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina.

And the more you read about the devastation, the more you realize how badly they need it.

If you didn’t know, Wizbang’s Paul is from New Orleans and has lost absolutely everything; no job, no home, and very little hope. So when looking at the macro relief effort, do you think you could see your way clear to going here and dropping a few bucks in the tipjar for Paul?

That said, the charity I’ve chosen is one located here in Chicago and has been around for 100 years. It’s called Catholic Extension and has been working with the poorest of the poor in this country through individual parishes.

Since I believe that the poorest have been hit hardest by this tragedy, there is no better organization to contribute to than Catholic Extension. They’ve started a fund to be used exclusively for relief efforts. And since they have offices in all the affected areas, your donation will be certain to get to the people who most need it.

If you’d rather send a check, here’s the address:

Catholic Extension
Hurricane Emergency Relief
150 South Wacker Drive
20th Floor
Chicago, IL 60606

This post will remain at the top all day to day. And I hope to have updates about how to give to local charities in the affected areas so check back after noon.

UPDATE

I tried contacting several local relief organizations in LA, MS, and AL hoping that they could give me a link for direct donations. Alas, my emails were returned because the internet is obviously down. I was hoping that they had alternate sites but it was not to be.

Anyway, here’s my blog bud Romeocat who will make a $5 donation for each comment (be nice please) left on this post. So go over there and let ‘Cat know that you appreciate it.

Sadly, as I predicted here, New Orleans is being ripped to shreds. Looters, armed gangs, snipers, all on the loose while authorities are still trying to rescue trapped people!

Hospitals containing thousands of patients are being evacuated. I hate to break the news to that lickspittle Jack Cafferty at CNN as well as other idiots in the MSM, but THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH HELICOPTERS IN THE ENTIRE UNITED STATES ARMY THAT COULD AIRLIFT 10,000 SICK PEOPLE TO THE AIRPORT AND DO IT ALL AT ONCE! Such an evacuation would take days under the best of circumstances. And this is far from that.

Get real people!

There are 90,000 square miles of disaster area. That’s a larger area than some countries. To believe that government can do anything meaningful in such circumstances demonstrates a towering ignorance and childish immaturity.

Part of the problem is that most in the MSM are basing their opinions on past disasters. There is no precedent in the history of industrialized civilization for this type of disaster. None. The only comparable event would be the detonation of a nuclear bomb in the middle of a major American city. And anyone who knows anything about that scenario knows full well that government actions wouldn’t be nearly adequate to deal with the disaster. Government has had more than 50 years to plan for such an eventuality and every mock disaster exercise they’ve ever carried out has ended up very much like what we’re seeing in New Orleans.

The food and water problem is incredible. I just heard Cafferty wondering in his towering ignorance why couldn’t they drop food from airplanes and helicopters.

Drop it where? In the water? It’s idiotic to think that some massive airlift a la Berlin in 1949 would be helpful when the people who need the supplies most are almost underwater themselves!

Think, people!

I believe that in fact the MSM is panicking while government remains calm. It’s not anti-Bush as much as it’s pro-people. They see the videos and want to do something but all they’re capable of doing is yelling at politicians who are doing the best they can under unprecedented circumstances. The media is going off the deep end.

The National Guard and the Army are doing the best they can. They’re coming as fast as they can. Does anyone have any idea what it takes to move 50,000 troops? Their equipment? Their infrastructure?

That would be like moving twice the number of people who live in my town. Every man. Every woman. Every child. All the food they would need. All the shelter they require. Every car and truck they own.

Everything.

The hysteria being shown by the MSM may prove that their hearts are in the right place. But it’s not helping.

First, before we get all fired up and take up hammer, saw, and paintbrush in order to rebuild the Crescent City, let’s try and get a handle on exactly what we’re up against. And the picture drawn in this Washington Post article is daunting indeed:

First they have to pump the flooded city dry, and that will take a minimum of 30 days. Then they will have to flush the drinking water system, making sure they don’t recycle the contaminants. Figure another month for that.

The electricians will have to watch out for snakes in the water, wild animals and feral dogs. It will be a good idea to wear hip boots and take care of cuts and scrapes before the toxic slush turns them into festering sores. The power grid might be up in a few weeks, but many months will elapse before everybody’s lights come back on.

By that time, a lot of people won’t care because they will have taken the insurance money and moved away — forever. Home rebuilding, as opposed to repairs, won’t start for a year and will last for years after that.

Even then, there may be nothing normal about New Orleans, because the floodwater, spiked with tons of contaminants ranging from heavy metals and hydrocarbons to industrial waste, human feces and the decayed remains of humans and animals, will linger nearby in the Gulf of Mexico for a decade.

Read the whole thing because there’s many more obstacles to rebuilding New Orleans than one can imagine.

There’s been a lot of “Buzz” on the blogs about not even bothering to rebuild New Orleans. To my mind, this is silly. Say what you want to about levees and dikes and such, but there’s a very good reason why New Orleans is one of the oldest cities in North America.

Location. Location. Location.

Located as it is at the mouth of the Mississippi, the importance of the city as a port cannot be overstated. Currently, the Port of New Orleans is the 9th largest in the country handling more than 130,000 freight containers and almost 700,000 passengers in the cruise industry every year. And despite the advent of trucks and railroads, more than 280 million metric tons of freight are carried down the Mississippi every year. Much of that freight - grain and other agricultural products mostly - ends up in those 130,000 containers to be shipped abroad.

Still want to abandon New Orleans?

Then there’s human sentiment to consider. While it’s probably true that most of historic New Orleans has been submerged (the French Quarter apparently is relatively undamaged) there’s a reason we have historic preservation societies; to protect and maintain historic sites and buildings.

Rebuilding all the historic buildings that were destroyed is not possible. But I’ll bet if given half a chance (and generous donations), the New Orleans societies would jump at the chance to rebuild many of those beautiful old buildings exactly as they were - down to the studs used in the flooring.

Finally, the Captain asks exactly the right question; what will it say about us as a nation if we fail to rebuild one of our major cities?

Americans don’t do pessimism, not as policy and not as part of our national character. We grew into the nation we know through an unbridled optimism about the kind of people we are and the kind of people we could become. Jimmy Carter found that out when he decided to tell Americans that we had come as far as we could go in his infamous “malaise” speech, and that we needed to know our limits. Rarely has an elected leader so misunderstood the people he led. We put men on the moon less than a decade after the notion occurred to us as a real possibility. We don’t do limits.

And so New Orleans must be rebuilt, in some manner, right where it is now. No leader will get up and say, We give up. Katrina beat us. Let’s move on. That message will not resonate with the vast majority of Americans on either side of the political divide, which will bring a political consensus to ensure that we produce some kind of recovery for New Orleans. We can and will debate the how and the what, but not the whether. We’re Americans, and we don’t run from a fight.

Spot on. And if a partnership between government and private businesses can be formed for the rebuilding efforts, I predict that people will return in droves to take advantage of relatively cheap housing as well as business opportunities galore.

“It’s good to be shifty in a new country” could be the motto of the new New Orleans. All it takes, as the Captain points out, is the national will to rebuild it.

See ya in the French Quarter at Mardi Gras in five years…

I had absolutely no idea that both desperately needy and dead people were political. Given the recent history of massive Democratic voter fraud in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and especially Washington state, it should come as no suprise the liberals only raise money from sources who agree with their politics.

It should go without saying that the Katrina blogburst referenced above is non-partisan.

AND ATRIOS STILL DOESN’T EVEN HAVE A LINK TO THE RED CROSS ON HIS SITE!

It’s much, much too important to make idiotic, unprovable charges against the President than raise money to help people survive. That would require two working brain cells. I can understand why Atrios can’t spare one.

The first buses filled with refugees from New Orleans have arrived at the Houston Astrodome where it looks like someone has finally taken the time and trouble to prepare in advance for the influx of the desperate.

Unlike the authorities in New Orleans who apparently dumped 20,000 tired, hungry, sick, and hopeless people into the Superdome and forgot about them for a day or two, relief organizers at the Astrodome appear to have anticipated the basic needs of the refugees:

Officials said they hoped to resume their work on Thursday, using hundreds of school buses and municipal buses to take the rest of the refugees to the Astrodome in Houston, on a ride lasting more than six hours. Rest stops were planned at Baton Rouge, Lake Charles and Beaumont, Tex.

If there was little comfort in the prospect of trading one sports arena for another, there was hope waiting in Houston, where Texas officials promised showers, food, medical care and perhaps most important, the freedom to come and go through a system of passes. At a news conference, Judge Robert Eckels, chief executive of Harris County, which owns the Astrodome, offered assurances that it was “not a jail.”

There will certainly be time enough after the living are rescued and the dead are buried to assess the performance of New Orleans officials in the immediate aftermath of the storm. But something must be said about the incredible stupidity that allowed conditions like this to exist at the Superdome:

They had flocked to the arena seeking sanctuary from the winds and waters of Hurricane Katrina. But understaffed, undersupplied and without air-conditioning or even much lighting, the domed stadium quickly became a sweltering and surreal vault, a place of overflowing toilets and no showers. Food and water, blankets and sheets, were in short supply. And the dome’s reluctant residents exchanged horror stories, including reports, which could not be confirmed by the authorities, of a suicide and of rapes.

By Wednesday the stink was staggering. Heaps of rotting garbage in bulging white plastic bags baked under a blazing Louisiana sun on the main entry plaza, choking new arrivals as they made their way into the stadium after being plucked off rooftops and balconies.

The odor billowing from toilets was even fouler. Trash spilled across corridors and aisles, slippery with smelly mud and scraps of food.

“They’re housing us like animals,” said Iiesha Rousell, 31, unemployed after four years in the Army in Germany, dripping with perspiration in the heat, unable to contain her fury and disappointment at being left with only National Guardsmen as overseers and no information about what might lie ahead.

Individual stories of the neglect are maddening:

Desperation was in the air. Danielle Shelby tugged at a reporter’s arm. “I have a handicapped daughter,” she said. “She’s over there with her wheelchair. She’s hot. We don’t have any water. I’m afraid she’s going to have a seizure.”

Others crowded around. “I’ve been in the food line twice, and every time I get to the front they tell me they don’t have any left,” said Juanita McFerrin, 80.

“My husband has cancer,” another woman said. “He’s not getting his regular treatment.”

Not enough food? Absolutely unforgivable. No plan for getting rid of the garbage? No allowances made for 20,000 people who have to go to the bathroom? No clearinghouse for information so that people could find out what was going on?

Unbelievable.

Couple this with the problems associated with closing the breach in the 17th street levee, the apparent unpreparedness of the police and fire departments, and the complaints by the mayor of “too many cooks” in the kitchen and you have a recipe for making a bad situation into a catastrophe.

And then there was this:

It got worse. Ms. Rousell recalled hearing a loud bang Tuesday afternoon as the body of a man slapped the concrete at the edge of the football field in a fatal suicidal plunge, after he apparently learned that his home had been destroyed. Others told of fights that broke out in food lines, and of a husband and wife who slugged each other in a wild argument.

Several residents said they had heard of children being raped, though it was not clear whether anyone reported such incidents to the authorities, and no officials could be found who could confirm the accounts.

Darcel Monroe, 21, a bakery cashier, stammered hysterically as she recounted seeing two young girls being raped in one of the women’s bathrooms. “A lot of people saw it but they were afraid to do anything,” she said. “He ran out past all of us.”

Dozens of National Guardsmen standing around with guns and they can’t guard places where women are most vulnerable? And if they didn’t have enough soldiers, why didn’t they ask for more?

Yesterday, I inadvertently spread a rumor that there had been shootings in the Superdome. The rumor proved false…we think. Given the dearth of information that came out of the Superdome while 20,000 human beings were being treated worse than cattle, I wouldn’t be surprised at anything that occurred in that black hole of Calcutta.

UPDATE

In the interest of balance, Aaron at Free Will has some sobering thoughts on the reality of what can actually be done by government in a crisis like this:

Years ago, when I was in school, I was invited to participate in a think-tank type of workshop at SIU on a similar scenario for Southern Illinois if the New Madrid were to blow and turn this joint into a sandbox. You know what we found? That we were screwed. There was no way to plan ourselves out of the worst-case-scenario. That, as it turned out, was the point of the exercise: To impress upon us that there was no Batman, there was no Superman, and that if the earthquake hit, with hundreds of thousands of people spread out across dozens of devastated towns, it would take days, at a bare minimum, before anyone could reach us, and that we had to take this threat seriously and convey to others the importance of preparing for the disaster, having a bugout kit, being at least moderately prepared for a survival situation. Same rule applies here:

New Orleans is not going to be “saved”. It’s not possible. It’s Atlantis. This is a disaster on an unprecedented scale, the kind of comic-book catastrophe like a major shift in the New Madrid, the La Palma tsunami, the Yellowstone caldera, or a significant meteor shattering over a major city and creating a firestorm that no society has the resources to really “shield” a city from and that no society has the technology to magically “fix” in the aftermath. For all intents and purposes, this may as well have been a nuclear meltdown. Nature is history’s greatest monster, and when it decides to go on a killing spree, even the most powerful superpower in human history is simply incapable of fighting back. Nothing within the scope of our imagination can make New Orleans a habitable place right now.

And some additional thoughts that relate to a post I did yesterday on the Compact of Civil Societies:

It’s a city. It’s huge, and there aren’t enough dig crews, dive teams, and SAR-capable helicopters in all of the Southland (especially after Katrina obliterated a significant portion of them), maybe in all the United States to attempt to excavate or search each of hundreds of thousands (millions?) of flooded, crushed structures across the city and, worse yet, across the wider devastated area along the Gulf Coast, much of which has been smashed into toothpicks.

There are 125,000 National Guardsmen activated and ready to go, 30,000 being mobilized, but they can’t secure the city. What are they going to do? Guard abandoned grocery stores in a deadzone from the hungry? Shoot looters and create more dead? End up in a street battle with people desperate to take their supplies? For what? For that matter, what about the logistics of a major deployment into the city? Anyone sent into that hellhole is just as likely to end up needing to be rescued themselves.

Okay, I’ll concede a little and cut the authorities some slack. But not enough food? Or medical supplies? That just smacks of piss-poor planning.

(HT: Instapundit)

Let’s play a game called “supposin’.”

Supposin’ there was a natural disaster where thousands of your fellow citizens were killed and many hundreds of thousands more in dire need of assistance.

Supposin’ you were a blogger who just recently helped raise more than $400,000 in less than 3 weeks for a political candidate who called his former Commander in Chief a chickenhawk.

Supposin’ you had a choice between writing about ways to help the victims of this horrendous natural disaster or writing about how much you hate the President.

Supposin’ you had a choice between getting behind an heroic internet wide campaign to raise money in a completely bi-partisan manner for the people of Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi or being a complete twit and nincompoop by trying to blame the President for An Act of God.

Of course, all of this is completely hypothetical, right? I mean, liberal bloggers are FAMOUS for their compassion, yes? They are RENOWNED for the oceans of tears they’ve shed for the poor, the oppressed, society’s “little people.”

Well…looks like compassion has taken a vacation on the left side of the sphere this week.

The mobilization of righty blogs to aid in disaster relief has been breathtaking in its speed and generosity. In fact, visiting sites like Instapundit and Michelle Malkin, one is in danger of being overloaded with information about various charities, websites for specific needs, and links, links links that connect to news about the disaster.

On the left, it’s bash Bush and let the devil take the people of the Gulf coast.

Let’s examine the top several blogs of both the left and right and see what people are talking about today, shall we?

CALLOUS CONSERVATIVE SITES (By Rank)

1. Instapundit has links to dozens of charities, information on corporate sponsorship, what other bloggers are doing as well as being the originator of the idea for the Hurricane Blog Burst set for tomorrow.

2. Michelle Malkin has worked tirelessly, posting hourly updates with valuable links to agencies and individuals to help find missing relatives, ways to help now, ways to help in the future, as well as posting some extraordinarily dramatic news reports that got everybody off their butt in the first place.

4. Powerline offers a link to Instapundit (why duplicate what’s been done already?) as well as giving some immediate historical perspective to the damaging storm by referencing the story of the 1927 Mississippi River flood - an event that some think was the greatest natural disaster in American history prior to Katrina.

5. The Captain also links to Instapundit was well as urging his 25,000 daily readers (many of them bloggers) to participate in the Blog Burst tomorrow.

6. Little Green Footballs reprints Instapundit’s links and has had several open threads where commenters have supplied untold number of helpful links.

10. Hugh Hewitt has been a traffic cop, directing readers and other bloggers to sites like NZ Bear who has set up a “Community of Katrina Relief Bloggers” with the blog name and the name of the charity they’ll be blogging for tomorrow.

Pretty impressive for less than 48 hours, eh? Let’s saunter over to the compassionate left and see what they’ve been up to, OK?

COMPASSIONATE LIBERAL SITES (By Rank)

3. Daily Kos. Bush bashing, Bush bashing, war bashing, an open thread for Bush bashing on the Hurricane, Roberts, and Bush bashing. While its true that Kos is bashing Bush in the context of the Hurricane, I wonder if, you know, it would have been better to wait until after the bodies cooled off a bit and people stranded in totally dark attics with water up to their necks were like, you know, rescued.

But hey! That’s just me…

13. Eschaton. Gleeful reporting of gas lines in Atlanta. Bash conservatives. Bash really stupid conservatives. Bash Jonah Goldberg. Bash Bush. Bash Andrew Sullivan (well…you got me there.) Bash Bush. Bash Bush.

Atrios didn’t even bother with Hurricane relief. I mean, why let a silly natural disaster that’s taken the lives of thousands of your fellow citizens stand in the way of a good opportunity to score political points at the expense of dead bodies floating in raw sewage?

16. Kevin Drum. Bash the American people (for good reason). Bash Bush. Bash Bush. Bash Bush. I-Pod. Bash Bush. Drum didn’t even bother to bash the President using the Hurricane as context.

Just business as usual. Drum yawns and scratches his scrotum while people in Biloxi, Mississippi sit on the ground and weep about losing everything.

17. Huffington Post. The first five posters in order: An actual link to the Red Cross! Bash Bush. Bash Bush. Bash Bush. Bash Republicans.

You’d think Ariana would plaster her dog-ugly blog with links to relief organizations and the like. I guess it’s just easier to sit on the sidelines and kibbutz while people in Slidell, Louisiana walk through waist deep water choked with debris and dead bodies.

18. Talking Points Memo. The inevitable “didn’t want to but can’t resist” Bush bashing. Iraqi dead. Bush Bash. Bush Bash. Plug for his other blog.

Marshall should go back to sleep. Either that or at least express some emotion other than hate and disgust for the President. Come to think of it, I’m sure ole Josh doesn’t lose a minute of shut eye over the fact that tens of thousands of his fellow citizens (even if they are goober chewing yahoos from Red America) are without jobs and now live in areas where the likelihood of finding gainful employment so that they can feed their families over the next several months is just about zero.

The bile that’s been rising in my throat all day long has spilled out onto this post. I’ve watched over the last few years as the left has given aid and comfort to our enemies in Iraq, at times openly cheering for an American defeat on the field of battle just so that the President’s standing with the American people would be lowered and they could gain political advantage.

I can’t even speak to their rationalizing the looting going on in New Orleans. The kind of twisted logic it takes to encourage people to steal another’s property - not food mind you, but other people’s possessions - is I believe the most egregious example of cynicism and outright evil thinking that I have seen on the political landscape in 30 years.

And now the treasonous louts have been exposed for the hypocrites they truly are. When Bush bashing trumps the absolute vital necessity of pulling together as Americans so that we can save lives as well as property not to mention saving one of the most beautiful cities on the planet, then it’s time for those on the rational left to make a decision. Will you continue to support Kos and his midget-brained minions in their blindly striking out at anything Bush, or will you put your foot down and say “no more.?” I’m not saying join the Republican party. Hell, given some of the crap they’ve pulled recently I wouldn’t recommend anyone join them. But if you’re not willing to try and make a difference in your own party to cure this nauseating sickness of mind and soul, then you are just as guilty as any of the paranoid, dirty necked galoots who are running the Democratic party.

UPDATE

More on the compassionate left from Newsweek’s Howard Fineman who writes an entire article on how Katrina coming so close to 9/11 will be Bush’s “tipping point.” The Academic Elephants have a clue:

It had not occurred to me to cast the Katrina-9/11 pairing in political, rather than historical, terms until Fineman bravely blazed the trail. I can understand why he sees a link, but I think his conclusion is dead wrong. Fineman suggests that Bush needs to take a page from his brother’s playbook, and imitate Jeb’s response to the hurricanes that buffeted Florida last year. I maintain that Jeb was himself imitating his older brother–that same older brother who almost four years ago stood in the rubble of the World Trade Center and gave the famous “I Can Hear You…” speech. That is the Bush we will see over the next weeks–that we are already seeing, for that matter.

Absolutely spot on. You want to get political Howard? You should know by now that in times of national crisis people will rally to the President if he asks them to.

That’s Bush’s next speech. And you Howard, will look like you are engaging in wishful thinking instead of hardnosed political analysis which is what we assume Newsweek pays you for.

UPDATE

The Commissar has gone me more than one better as he compares side by side many of the same lefty blogs with righty blogs on hurricane relief coverage. This proves not only that great minds think alike but that they are also attached to extraordinarily good looking and successful people - at least from my end.

This concentration on Bush bashing instead of raising money for your fellow human beings who are in dire need has shown up in the starkest possible way.

Here are the total amount raised as of 6:30 PM central time today by the liberal blogad site and the NZ Bear mostly conservative sites:

Liberal: $124,700
Conservative: $488,000

Gee…do ya think that if Kos and Atrios had paused for a few hours to raise some money for desparate people rather than trying to score political points they wouldn’t leave themselves wide open to this kind of criticism?

Nuf said…

This article originally appears in The American Thinker

Hour by torturous hour, the news grows ever grimmer. An event unlike any other in modern industrialized history is taking place right before our eyes. The stories of individual heroism and mob cowardice are obscuring the real story - a story that simply cannot be told because the modern human mind is incapable of processing the images, the words, and the stories they’re telling and make any kind of a coherent narrative or sense out of it.

It is quite simply beyond belief, beyond understanding, and beyond anything in our experience. No modern industrialized city has ever experienced anything like New Orleans is going through in the aftermath of Katrina.

Don’t talk to me about London, Berlin, or Tokyo and the trials that those cities endured during World War II. There is nothing remotely to compare with what’s happening to New Orleans. Those cities were destroyed relatively slowly over a period of years (Berlin and London) or months (Tokyo). But the Noahic flood that now engulfs more than 80% the Crescent City has subsumed not just buildings and people, it has washed away the thin veneer of civilization and brought to the surface behaviors and emotions more suited to the African savannas where modern Homo Sapiens first began to dominate the planet rather than the city streets where until just a few days ago, people were laughing, walking, singing, playing music - living.

What, after all, is civilization? At it’s core, human civilization represents an agreement between people not to kill each other. The only way millions of strangers can live together in relative peace in big cities is by recognizing the unspoken agreement that when walking down the street and approaching someone you don’t know, one refrains from the natural human impulse of fighting for your life. Usually, both parties are in agreement on this singular principal and the hundreds of encounters with strangers we have every day pass unnoticed amid the hustle and bustle of city life.

This is the compact of civilization. I won’t kill you if you won’t kill me. It’s maintained by something even more tenuous; faith. Faith in the strictures an organized society places on people who break the compact as well as faith in the people and institutions who are charged with the task of enforcing those strictures. This shared community of faith works pretty well for all except the social misfits and anti-social galoots who prey upon the weak like predators in a jungle. For the rest of us, we form little islands of support in this larger community - neighbors, our church, our sports teams - which allows us the luxury of feeling less vulnerable to the predators, less alone amidst the millions of strangers.

But something has happened in New Orleans that is unprecedented. We’ve seen it happen on a smaller scale during other natural disasters. The looting, the anger, the despair was evident in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew in Florida. However, while the area damaged by Andrew may have been just as large as the swath of total destruction left by Katrina, Andrew never quite destroyed the spirit of community and shared faith which allowed Floridians to maintain a patina of civilization that kept them from lunging at each other’s throats and descending to the level of animals whose only thought was of obeying the primal instinct present in all of us for self preservation.

Make no mistake. Unless something truly dramatic happens in the next 48 hours, the situation in New Orleans will degenerate into something heretofore seen only in refugee camps and places like Somalia. People will start forming themselves into mobs for protection. And those mobs will start fighting both the authorities and each other for scarce resources as people get hungrier and thirstier by the hour. We already have seen property owners setting up their own security patrols in sections of downtown. This is from a New Orleans blogger:

Since it’s war out there, I figure it’s time to go back to my military ways.

Camp Crystal is locked down for the night. Team SOTI (that’s the crew up here) has broken up into 3 squads. Squad 1 is on diesel detail. Squad 2 is on patrol. Squad 3 is on service and support.

The Final Protective Line is Poydras Avenue. All avenues of approach are secure. Stand to is at 0600.

The cops were out in force on Poydras until just a few moments ago. Not sure what they were upto.

The blogger has a fairly clear picture as to what’s happening on the ground:

I guess what I’m saying is there’s no need to focus on us here, because we’re gonna make do. We need to worry about preventing the city from consuming itself, because the looting is getting nuts, the waters are rising in many heretofor unflooded sections, and there’s no timeline available for power, food, water, medicine and the like for the masses.

If you have any survival tips, feel free to toss in your input. I’ve got a lot of survival training, but we’ve never trained for the total collapse of civilization (or I should say, my only training in that regard was from a military perspective).

The “total collapse of civilization” is right around the corner and there’s nothing really to stop it. The authorities first priority is to save the living. Since so many are stranded, trapped, injured, or lost - numbers that may be in the tens of thousands - this is a process that will take days. In the meantime, the flood waters keep rising, the dead go unattended, the looting is getting out of control, people in shelters are getting close to open revolt, and the chances for complete and utter chaos that would cost the lives of thousands of people grows hourly.

Something or someone must intervene to restore the one commodity that could head the chaos off at the pass and put the evil genie of anarchy back in the bottle. That one commodity is hope. Unless people have hope that things are eventually going to get better and get better quickly, they will succumb to the siren song of mobocracy and tear New Orleans to shreds. As it stands now, we’re a hairsbreadth from open warfare in the streets. And if no one can step forward - the Mayor, the Governor, or even President Bush - and give the residents of New Orleans confidence in the future, people will look to their present circumstances and act accordingly.

That way lies madness.

UPDATE: STREAMING COVERAGE

I’ve been glued to this feed from WDSU in New Orleans. It’s getting worse people. Water is still rising due to some confusion yesterday involving the Army Corps of Engineers and some Blackhawk helicopters that were supposed to drop huge, 3000 pound sandbags into the levee breach at 17th street in New Orleans. In fact, all day yesterday CNN and Fox were reporting that this was being done.

In fact, it was never done. Mayor Nagin reports that the copters were diverted to rescue up to 1000 people who were trapped by flood waters and had taken refuge in a church. They’re going to try again today, but the Mayor is obviously frustrated. He has complained that “there are too many cooks” in the kitchen, obviously alluding to FEMA and other federal and state entities who are involved.

Two major situations need to be taken care of in the next 48 hours if New Orleans is to avoid the fate I write about above; the Superdome must be evacuated and the 17th Street levee must be plugged. The mayor reports that if that levee keeps emptying water into the city the entire city will be under at least 9 feet of water.

That’s the entire city.

The problem with the Superdome is unbelievable. Evidently, guns and knives have been smuggled in and there have been 3 shootings in the last 12 hours. Unless those people are dispersed, the situation could get completely out of control and we’d have a war on our hands. That’s why the Governor has ordered the evacuation. The problem is how do you get 20,000 people out of a flooded city?

We’ll know more in the next 12 hours. As always, keep checking with Michelle Malkin for round-ups and breaking news.

UPDATE II: RUMOR ALERT

The report from WDSU of shootings in the Superdome have not been confirmed by any other news organ. In fact, the station’s own site doesn’t mention any shooting incidents at the Dome either. The report came from an on-air interview with a reporter. He was obviously repeating a rumor he had heard.

I apologize for helping to spread that rumor and it points up the need for all of us to be careful about what is published.

The torrent of invective pouring from the mouths of the left directed toward President Bush in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is startling in its ferocity. The speed and eagerness that they have jumped down the President’s throat makes one question whether any spark of human decency exists among people who see political gain to be had from a disaster where thousands of dead bodies lie floating amidst the flotsam and jetsam of Katrina’s wake.

They are cheering on the looters. They are pushing pet leftist agenda items like global warming. They are railing against the war by blaming the President for taking National Guard units away from states affected by the disaster. Any and all political openings they either sense or imagine are being shamelessly exploited.

It’s enough to make decent people vomit.

I frankly don’t have the words to describe the utter contempt I hold for these leftist lickspittles. There is nothing they can say or do at this point that will convince me that their criticisms directed toward Republicans, the right, and the President is in the best interests of the people affected or of the United States. It is nothing more than pure, unadulterated politics. They seek to gain a political advantage on the the backs of the dead bodies of their fellow citizens. They are using the suffering of the living to tear down the President in time of crisis.

There are times - this is one of them - where I almost wish we could accommodate the left’s fantasy by tearing up the constitution and putting them in concentration camps. They’ve been screaming so long that the day is coming when Bush will become a dictator and stifle their dissent that it becomes more and more tempting to make their ridiculous paranoia a reality. Along with the “imminent military draft,” stolen elections, and other idiotic fancies, there has never been a group so divorced from reality, so mired in hubris and contempt for the intelligence of their fellow citizens, in the history of the United States.

Their descent into hell is complete. Let’s all throw another log on the fire and participate in their total damnation.

The vote is in from this week’s Watchers Council and the winner going away in the Council category is Gates of Vienna for “An Open Letter to Cindy Sheehan.” Finishing second was Dr. Sanity’s “Shame, the Arab Psyche, and Islam.”

Finishing first in the non-Council category was Alpha Patriot’s “Israeli Pride, Israeli Angst.”

If you’d like to participate in this week’s Watcher’s Vote, go here and follow instructions.

WTOP is reporting that the Pentagon now says “there’s no reason to doubt the specific recollections” of Able Danger team members that the top-secret data mining operation had unearthed specific information about at least one of the 9/11 hijackers more than a year before the attack.

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon appears to have reversed its position on Able Danger, the Army intelligence collection team.

A Pentagon spokesman now says “there’s no reason to doubt the specific recollections” of the growing number of team members. The team members say the project had pre-Sept. 11 intelligence on al Qaida, which Defense Department lawyers prohibited them from sharing with the FBI.

(HT: Tom McGuire)

Well now, that’s a horse of a different color, wouldn’t you say?

We’ve gone from categorical denials on the part of the 9/11 Commission that no such information was given to the Commission, to admitting that the information was not considered “historically relevant, to to a belief by the Pentagon that the information about Able Danger is indeed somewhere…or at least it was.

And the Captain’s speculation about the civil liberties ramifications being the reason why the Pentagon has been so reluctant in coming forward on this appear to be spot on.

Smith says data was gathered from a variety of sources, including about 30 or 40 individuals, but one day it all came to a grinding halt. So why did that happen?

“The I.G. (inspector general) came in and shut down the operation because of a claim that we were collecting information on U.S citizens,” says Smith.

It turned out to be more than just a claim.

“On some of my charts I had links to U.S citizens,” he says.

Smith notes that it’s illegal for the military to collect intelligence on U.S. citizens.

Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., has alleged a Pentagon coverup regarding Able Danger and is seeking congressional hearings on the matter. Weldon has said coverup will “shake the country to its roots.”

Before we get out the rope to hang the boys at the Pentagon, let’s try and put this into a little context, shall we?

In pre-9/11 America (and to a large extent now) the Pentagon’s sensitivity toward violating civil liberties was a given. It must be said that this attitude was not due to any squeamishness on the part of Pentagon brass about snooping into the lives of private citizens but rather a culture terrified of scandal and blowback. Craig Henry pointed to the Tailhook scandal as a traumatic example of the culture at the Pentagon that wishes to avoid scandal at almost all costs. Couple this with the outright hostility from the executive branch during the Clinton years toward the military and intelligence communities - commented on by dozens of military aides who worked in both places - and you begin to see why Able Danger would have been seen as a lose-lose situation for the Pentagon. Not only were they spying on American citizens but any data gleaned from the operation would be useless in a court of law, the mindset of the time being to put terrorists in jail instead of the ground.

As I’ve asked before, could there have been a shredding party at the Pentagon in the days following 9/11? The fact that any documentation relating specifically to Able Danger and Mohamed Atta has failed to turn up would bolster such a case. And given the nature of the operation, it’s possible that they didn’t even wait for 9/11 to get rid of the incriminating evidence.

And someone put a sock in “Crazy Curt” Weldon’s yap and tell him to sit down and shut up. The revelations about Able Danger are revealing but will hardly “shake the country” when we get to the bottom of the mystery. That kind of hyperbole is why the Pentagon has been able to stonewall for so long. Any man who says that al Qaeda has 20 suitcase nukes already positioned throughout the United States waiting for the right moment to blow us all to kingdom come cannot be taken seriously. Better to let the grown ups on the Senate Judiciary Committee get the ball rolling with hearings. The sooner the better.

Thanks to AJ at Strata-Sphere for all the hard work and for the heads up. Also glad to see he’s given up on the Roman numerals for his updates - they were getting hard to read!