Arguments Yard

New Orleans is under water. It's a disaster. As a friend points out, it'll be virtually impossible to get that water out of there. Who can possibly help?

According to former N.O. Mayor Sydney Barthelemy, only one man.

"We really need the president of the United States to make this a priority. We have to stop the breaches in the levee. We have to, or we're going to lose New Orleans and lose thousands of people there," he said on CNN this morning.

In case you missed his point, Barthelemy said it five times. "The president of the United States is the only person who has the resources to coordinate, to bring in the troops, to make this city a safe place, and solve the problems, particularly the breach in the levee," he said.

In other words, "we've got a problem, and President Bush needs to come in and solve it."

My golly, who does Barthelemy think Bush is, anyway? Those of us who grew up watching Superfriends cartoons on Saturday mornings wonder why he doesn't fly down in a supersonic jet, using its sonic boom to suck the water out of the streets. That's what Batman might do.

Or maybe he could make the earth reverse rotation, causing time to reverse so he could evacuate New Orleans and move it to a location above sea level. That's what Superman would do.

But Bush is only one man and, sadly, lacks super powers (except, according to liberals, his super power to deceive). The entire federal government is dealing with this disaster as best it can; there's nothing more the president or anyone can do to make things better.

Blaming the president is easy, and comforting for some, I suppose. Yesterday the Center for American Progress sent an e-mail in which it blamed Bush for the scale of the disaster. According to CAP, the president SLASH[ed] SPENDING ON HURRICANE PREPAREDNESS IN NEW ORLEANS, DESTROY[ed] NATURAL HURRICANE PROTECTIONS, GUT[ed] THE AGENCY TASKED WITH DEVELOPING HURRICANE RESPONSES and HELP[ed] FUEL GLOBAL WARMING, among other sins.

Folks, we'll all do whatever we can. But bashing Bush won't make things better.

It is worth wondering why the city of New Orleans, which is below sea level and is positioned on the hurricane-prone Gulf coast, wasn't better prepared. Everyone knows you can get the powerful rum drink "the Hurricane" in New Orleans -- why wasn't the city ready for a hurricane?

"I think, Soledad, everyone thought there was a plan," Barthelemy, mayor from 1986 until 1994, told CNN. "Everyone thought that we could handle most of the problems that would come due to a hurricane. No one ever dreamed that it would take -- be such devastation."

But it is.

Luckily, we're Americans. We'll attack the problem and fix it. We'll rebuild the city with better protections.

That's just what we do.

More than 20,000 people who rode out the storm in the New Orleans Superdome will be moved to the Houston Astrodome.

Too bad they blew up the Seattle Kingdome, or they could go there.

is that you can't provide all the information someone needs to make a good choice.

The WashPost asked, "Do you think President Bush should or should not meet with Cindy Sheehan or not?" 52 percent said yes.

However, I suspect their answers might change if they were told that Sheehan, as George Will reported recently, "has called him a "lying bastard," "filth spewer," "evil maniac," "fuehrer" and the world's "biggest terrorist" who is committing "blatant genocide" and "waging a nuclear war" in Iraq."

It's not clear what they might "talk" about if they did meet. It would probably be more like "Crossfire," or whatever CNN is calling it now. Any meeting would be pointless, much like the Post's poll.

CNN's running a commercial for the drug Avodart, which apparently shrinks a man's prostrate (not that you wanted to know that).

Anyway, the actor with the prostrate problem looks like Michael Tucker -- not the baseball player, but the dude from LA Law.

So, help: Is this the same guy? And if so, what an amazing career comedown...

There's no doubt we need to race supplies there. Where will we get these supplies?

How about Sri Lanka.

Eight months after the devastating tsunami, some 167 aid containers are still sitting on docks in Colombo. As long as they're not going to use the stuff, why not send it on to New Orleans?

Of course, some of the supplies have already rotted. "Some baby milk that I bought with my own money for £600 expired in July," Ben Panesar, a shipping executive, told the Times of London.

Even worse, the newspaper reports, "when goods have finally been released, the port authorities have charged customs duty. In June Oxfam paid £550,000 duty to import 25 four-wheel-drive vehicles." Imagine that: Thanks for help, here's your bill for a MILLION DOLLARS!

In nearby Indonesia they're having similar problems. Haru Prasetyo, the transport attache at the Indonesian High Commission in London, told the Times, "It must be the bureaucracy, particularly from the customs and also from the port procedure. It is a very slow process: they have many documents to be arranged and many thousands of containers come into the same port."

Ah, right. So sorry, no food or water for you, refugee family. We bureaucrats are too busy filling out paperwork.

Here's a prediction: New Orleans will receive a fraction of the $4.5 billion in private aid sent to south Asia, yet will recover more quickly and be back to leading the nation in debauchery within a month.

At which time, hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankans will remain homeless, and hundreds of containers of aid, sent to help them, will sit unopened on docks in Colombo.

so I'll say it again:

Hurricanes give reporters a chance to prove they don't have the sense to come in out of the rain.

"Let's stand here and watch this hotel be torn apart!"

Not if you're smart...

Front page headline in today Wash Post: "Greenspan Cites Economic Risks for Consumers."

Cue scary music. (Bum bum bum).

Read the four paragraphs on the page and flip to page 7, where the story continues under the subheadline "Greenspan Lauds Economy's Flexibility."

Now, imagine the editors flipping those headlines, so the positive one would be on the front page and the frightening one on A7. Never happen.

A newspaper reports that, of the 490 female students at an Ohio high school, 65 are with child.

"Timken High School officials were not sure why the pregnancy rate soared," the story says.

Well, that's pretty simple, isn't it? Somebody's been inserting slot (A) into tab (B).

P.M. John Howard takes this whole "War on Islamic terrorism" thing seriously.

As far as Pat Robertson goes, I'm not sure what I can add. He doesn't speak for me, and he doesn't speak for most Conservatives and most Christians.

It's tiring, and eventually meaningless, to have to refute Robertson and Falwell every time they say something silly. To me they're not "Christian leaders" any more than Jesse Jackson is a "black leader." Who ever elected them, anyway?

I'd tell them to shut up and get off the air, but then I'd be doing the same thing CAIR does.

As to violence by Muslims, what we've seen since 2001 is not a handful of leaders talking about something -- we've seen hundreds of believers doing something: Killing in the name of Islam.

900 years ago we had Christians, following the orders of their leaders, killing people of other faiths. That's not happening today. It stopped because Christians stopped it.

In the same way, today's violence will stop when Muslims stop it.

Can't see how anyone could object to this ad...

Americans have it rough.

CNN is running an Alan Chernoff package explaining the difficulties of Beth Cioffi, who "spent $64 to fill up her SUV this week."

Yes, gas prices are higher. But Cioffi's "sacrifices" don't strike me as all that bad. She's not buying as much stuff for her 6-year-old twins.

"No more toys," she told CNN. "You know, thank God my kids don't need toys so much. But, you know, when they used to get things that they didn't need, they're not -- you know, they used to get it, but now they'll have to do without it."

Boy, times are tough. And may get tougher.

"If gas prices keep rising, American economizing may have only just begun," Chernoff notes. "While Beth Cioffi is still buying less at the store, she's still spending plenty at the gas pump to keep driving her 2005 GMC Denali."

Yea, hate to see her be forced to give up that $45,000 SUV, which gets less than 20 MPG highway. Now THAT would be a sacrifice.

He doesn't speak for me; never has.

Personally, I think Chavez should be removed from power through peaceful, constitutional means. Assuming that's still possible after all the constitutional changes Chavez has engineered to make himself a virtual dictator for life.

It's odd, though, that every time Robertson or Falwell says something foolish, other Christians are painted with the same brush: "You all must hate gays because Jerry Falwell doesn't like the TeleTubbies."

The lead paragraph of the BBC story linked above sums up the mainstream approach to Christians: "The innocent world of the Teletubbies is under attack from America's religious right." Not from me; I let my children watch Teletubbies, until they outgrew it (at about 8 months of age...).

At the same time, we're supposed to ignore the fact that all the major recent terrorist attacks around the globe have been carried out by Muslims. September 11, Bali, Madrid, Turkey, July 7, all the bombings and beheadings in Iraq. Carried out by Muslims.

Still, we're told "Islam is a religion of peace." Apparently not to all Islamists it isn't.

I'm not saying all Muslims are bad, and I'm not saying that Islam is bad. I am saying that many people are using Islam for bad means. And it's up to Islamists to take back their faith from the terrorists.

Getting Michael Graham to shut up won't accomplish that.

Conservatives have been rightly asking for condemnation of Muslim clerics who bastardize their religion in order to preach hatred and advocate murder as driven by their politics. I am curious now to see whether they ask for the same condemnation of a prominent, politically-connected Christian who's doing the same thing.

Ignore it.

The backstory: WMAL radio here in D.C. has fired talk show host Michael Graham. Back in July he said, on the air, that "Islam has, sadly, become a terrorist organization."

Now, that's controversial, of course. But you'd have to be a fool to ignore that the terrorists who've attacked us in recent years have all been Muslims. Occasionally, people argue against racial profiling by noting that Richard Reid, Jose Padilla and John Walker Lindh weren't Arabs. But they are, however, Muslims.

Graham's comments brought the predictable response from the Muslim pressure group CAIR. It demanded "disciplinary action."

But if Graham's statements are so outrageous, they ought to be easy to counter. Why didn't CAIR simply do so? Instead, CAIR engaged in the tactic of all those who can't launch a logical debate: They demand that those who disagree with them shut up. Instead of having an exchange in the arena of ideas, the group wants anyone who would express those ideas pulled off the air.

A lot of us don't like the idea that a radio station would discipline someone for saying something controversial. So I went to the WMAL Web site and filled out a comment form, simply asking why Graham was fired. A moment later I got this reply:

"I am out of the office without access to email until the end of August. If your message is urgently related to the operations of 630 WMAL, please contact General Manager Chris Berry. Otherwise, I suggest you re-send it to me after Labor Day. Enjoy the rest of your summer!"

I will enjoy the rest of my summer. I won't be listening to WMAL. I can hear Paul Harvey on the Web.

To his credit, Bob Costas doesn't want to talk about it.

There's no front page story today about John Roberts today.

Seems there's been one every day since he was nominated.

Stunning revelations have included that he's Conservative "Roberts's memos show he not only embraced the ideals of the conservative administration, but advocated even more conservative solutions than his colleagues," and thought courts were over-reaching: "repeatedly arguing that the high court was interfering in issues best left to Congress."

Oh, and he told lawyer jokes. "Some might question whether encouraging homemakers to become lawyers contributes to the common good, but I suppose that is for the judges to decide." Heh heh heh.

Of course, the president of the National Organization for Women, Kim Gandy, showed the humorlessness the Left is becoming known for. She called Roberts' comment "Neanderthal." Maybe she would have preferred this one: "What do you call a busload of lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? A good start!"

Oh, now I've gone and done it: Blown any chance of ever getting nominated to the Supreme Court. Oh, well.

Meanwhile, what will Pat Leahy, Ted Kennedy and the boys at People for the American Way do without their daily dose of anti-Roberts propaganda?

Rap "star" Eminem admits he's addicted to sleeping pills.

Now, what would he need those for?

He ought to just curl up at night, pull down the "slim Shady," throw on one of his records. He'll be asleep in no time.

I really don't.

It's not as meaningless as preseason hockey. But it's close.

Anyway, I happened to see about 5 minutes of tonight's Redskins game while changing out my DVD (Office Space. Watch it if you haven't. It's Dilbert, except an hour and a half long).

The announcers calling this game (Mike Patrick, Joe Theisman and some other former player -- ESPN's lead broadcast team) said "it's the Cardinal sin of football" three times. In the five minutes I happened to watch! Who knows how many Cardinal sins I missed?

Speaking of the 'skins, they apparently have a QB controversy. The controversy is that, since both men are so bad, they're considering hiring me to Q...

On another topic, I don't think anyone should be allowed to use a cliche unless he can identify where it came from. Don't say "push the envelope" unless you know it came from test pilots pushing their planes past the supposed safe speed, for example.

I don't know where Cardinal sin came from. Any help out there? Or must I excise it from my vocab (as certain football announcers ought to do).

I'm willing to admit it. I've never found the "skinny woman" thing attractive.

When Friends went on the air in 1994, I'll admit I had a real thing for Corteney Cox. In later years, she went on some sort of starvation diet and, well, disappeared. Today she's a stick. She looks awful.

Same thing with Lindsay Lohan. Here she is last year. And this year. This is the same woman? Where did she go?

Anyway, Dove decided to play to people like me. It launched an ad featuring real women. Today, the irreplaceable Robin Givhan of the Washington Post (you might remember that she critiqued John Roberts and his wife for dressing up their children for a visit to the White House) takes on the ad.

Givhan writes in defense of skinny models. "In some ways, these women are like professional athletes, paid to maintain a fighting weight and a breathtaking physique," she writes.

"Yet no one complains that championship marathoners, tennis stars and volleyball players, with their impossibly taut bodies, dominate the covers of sports magazines, posing a threat to the delicate psyche of weekend athletes everywhere."

I'm actually going to turn the rest of this post over to Colin, because he said it better than I could:

"Well, let's see. Representations of impossibly thin models in media encourage teenage girls to try to achieve an unachievable figure, often leading to eating disorders. Representations of athletes typically encourage people to get out and exercise. One of these things is a good thing, the other is a bad thing.

"Now it is true that many athletes have bodies that are simply unattainable by the rest of the population. But the responses to that are twofold:
(1) they are being marketed primarily on their abilities, not their looks, whereas skinny models are marketed solely on their unnatural looks; as such, we don't attack their 99.99 percentile looks because it is their performance that motivates people to act positively more than their look that motivates people to do unhealthy things.
(2) people in fact _are_ complaining that athletes are achieving these body styles via unnatural means, i.e. performance enhancing drugs. Givhan brings up the example of Marion Jones, but has the author been in a cave while Jones has been suspected of achieving her look through unnatural means?

"Athletes do not get a free pass; there has been widespread criticism of the byproducts of athletics when it focuses, say, strictly on weight (e.g. leading to eating disorders among gymnasts and high school wrestlers)."

while watching Israeli soldiers evicting settlers from Gaza, I have to wonder if it will accomplish anything.

TV commentators keep insisting this is the "best chance for peace," (Miles O'Brien said so on CNN this morning, and I've heard it a dozen other places as well.)

But what are we basing that on? There's no evidence I'm aware of that an Israeli retreat will bring "peace." In fact, just the opposite seems to have happened.

As former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu told CNN's Wolf Blitzer (in the Situation Room, no less) on Tuesday, "we had the same debate before the Oslo peace process began. It said it would bring an end to 100 years of terror. It gave us terror the likes of which we didn't see for 100 years and that no nation is safe. We lost over a thousand people in 250 suicide bombs just as I predicted would happen"

This is a time when I hope I'm wrong. I hope the Israeli pullout starts a new era, convincing Palestinians to make peace.

However, I suspect that Netanyahu and Natan Sharansky have it right: Handing over land without demanding something in return will only empower the worst elements among the Palestinians, eventually leading to more violence.

Yesterday, CNN had an interesting interview with Ingrid Sanden of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Sanden's 1-year-old daughter was apparently on a no-fly list last year, causing the Sanden family a headache at the airline gate.

"It took the airline employee kind of a long time to figure it out, actually. There was a lot of typing on the computer," Sanden told CNN. "[She was] rushing around back and forth, and going in the back, and calling people. I don't know exactly what happened, but then she did come out and say that our daughter was on the no-fly list. And she sort of chuckled, but she just had to do her job."

And that's the problem with no-fly lists, and with airport security in general. We've created a series of bureaucratic rules and laws everyone has to follow (just doing their job) and stifled the creativity that might make us safer.

The best thing we've done is ordered that airplane cockpit doors be sealed and locked. Since terrorists won't have access to the cockpit, it's much more difficult for them to seize or crash the plane.

Still, we need security at the airport. But that security ought to focus on potential terrorists, not on strip-searching members of Congress or no-fly listing 1-year-olds.

The anchor asks, "So does the no-fly list -- does the no-fly list make you feel safe?" Sanden replies, "That's an interesting question. I'm not sure if it makes me feel safe or if it's just kind of like -- looks like they're trying to do something and maybe it's working, but I'm not sure if it actually does work."

We need to stop looking like we're doing something, and instead focus on actually doing something.

as Cindy Sheehan insists, we're doing a poor job of it.

Sheehan, of course, is camping out near the president's ranch in Texas. He's on vacation, she insists -- stealing a page from Maureen Dowd. Raise your hand if you believe a president is EVER on vacation, regardless of where he is.

In any event, Sheehan's son Casey died in Iraq, which is indeed a tragedy. She's turned tragedy into comedy, though, by insisting President Bush come out and speak with her. “You get that maniac out here to talk with me in person,” is how she put it.

"I want him to tell me is ‘just what was the noble cause Casey died for?’ Was it freedom and democracy? Bullshit! He died for oil. He died to make your friends richer." Eek. As all drivers know, gas prices are jumping up. The other day I filled my tank for $50, a personal record.

Again, if we're at war for oil, let's get it flowing, because it sure ain't right now.

The fact is, we're at war to spread democracy and freedom. Going to war was, ironically, the best way to do that. Our option was to attempt to talk Saddam out of power.

So here's a thought experiment: We went to war in Iraq, and turned Iran policy over to the European Union. We invaded, they kept the alleys of communication open. Which country is likely to be in a better position in, say, five years?

Iraq will have a constitution and democracy. Iran will have a mullah-cracy and nuclear weapons.

but I didn't realize how out-of-touch I was, until Esquire magazine released its best-dressed list.

Not only am I not on the list, I don't recognize 7 of the top 10 men on the list.

Andre 3000? Is that a man or a new computer game?

but it'll happen soon.

There's a break coming between the governing Republican party and the people who put it in power: Conservatives.

Today's Washington Post lays out the problem. "Having skirted budget restraints and approved nearly $300 billion in new spending and tax breaks before leaving town, Republican lawmakers are now determined to claim full credit for the congressional spending," it notes.

Conservatives know that all spending must be paid for someday by somebody. We're pleased with the tax cuts, which allow all of us to keep more of our money.

But today's Republicans are spending like old time Democrats -- there's no problem they won't throw money at. And, since we've got such a large deficit, it's not our money, it's our children's and grandchildren's. That's why the 30 year T note is coming back.

We need to stop this massive wave of spending, before it sweeps us all away in an ocean of debt.

...that even the defeats must be spun as victories.

After Republican Jean Schmidt defeated Paul Hackett in Ohio's Second Congressional District, Democrats celebrated the fact the race was even close.

"There's no safe Republican district. You can run, but you cannot hide," said U.S. Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Uh, OK.

As Syracuse fans used to chant during S.U.-Cornell basketball games, "Check that score."

No need to run or hide. The Republican won.

"John Bolton has been rejected twice by the Senate to serve as our Ambassador to the United Nations..." Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.

Um, no he hasn't. There hasn't been a vote on his nomination. A filibuster is not a rejection. On the contrary, it's an admission by the minority that, if they allow a vote, the nominee will be approved. So they go to the mat to prevent one.

"It's sad that even while the president preaches democracy around the world, he bends the rules and circumvents the will of Congress in appointing our representative to the United Nations." Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg, D-N.J.

So vote, Senator. Come back from your month-long break and vote. We'll all live with the result.

"Bolton arrives at the United Nations with a cloud hanging over his head." Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

To the extent, that is true, it's a cloud you helped generate, Senator. It hardly makes sense to trash a man's reputation and then complain that he's got a tarnished reputation.