Now I'm devastated.

Seeing the pictures out of New Orleans, Biloxi and Gulfport is simply devastating. Those poor blighters. While I stand by my comments re: the attitudes toward looting and all, I can't help but feel so badly for the people who have lost everything.

Look at this satellite photo of New Orleans (three cheers, lads, to Pundit Guy who had the photo first).

The big blue spot is Lake Pontchartrain. The blue areas (underneath the clouds) is New Orleans. (Click on it and then blow it up to full size and you can see better.)
I mean, Holy Pete!

That being said, I'm exceedingly annoyed by the liberals who are trying to make political hay from these people's tragedy. Surely everyone by now has read or heard of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s outrageous post over at HuffPo where he insinuated that Misssissippi suffered the enormous destruction because its now-governor Haley Barbour implored in 2001, back when he was still a Washington player, President Bush to forget the Kyoto Accords. Drudge has had it up for two days now.

The sheer sophistry of his post is absolutely astounding. His post is essentially saying that Barbour's Mississippi got its just desserts because of his actions. But it doesn't just stretch but completely snaps credulity to believe that even if Kyoto had been adopted in 2001 that any benefits that would accrue from such adoption a mere four years ago would have done thing one to stop Katrina's effects. And even if we had fully complied with Kyoto since 2001, Eurpoe hasn't done a damn thing, and let's not even get into China or India. So what good would our having adopted Kyoto have done to the thousands now suffering?

And then there's this enviro-wackaloon who essentially blames every weather pattern on global warming. This yutz states:

The hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming.

When the year began with a two-foot snowfall in Los Angeles, the cause was global warming.

When 124-mile-an-hour winds shut down nuclear plants in Scandinavia and cut power to hundreds of thousands of people in Ireland and the United Kingdom, the driver was global warming.

When a severe drought in the Midwest dropped water levels in the Missouri River to their lowest on record earlier this summer, the reason was global warming.

In July, when the worst drought on record triggered wildfires in Spain and Portugal and left water levels in France at their lowest in 30 years, the explanation was global warming.

When a lethal heat wave in Arizona kept temperatures above 110 degrees and killed more than 20 people in one week, the culprit was global warming.

Well, isn't that special?

Then he states:

Although Katrina began as a relatively small hurricane that glanced off south Florida, it was supercharged with extraordinary intensity by the relatively blistering sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico.

Except that he doesn't anymore know that than a bag of dead rats.

I saw this guy, an environment professor at UVa, who has studied this stuff (OK, no shouts of, "Ah ha! Logical fallacy! Appeal to authority!" He's a professsor, so I 'spect he knows more about the subject than I) on one of the myriad cable talking head shows. He said that water surface temperature only explains about 10% of a given hurricane's severity. That leaves some other factors to explain that remaining 90%.

The leftists are absolutely giddy regarding Katrina and their hope that they can bully anyone who is not a similarly inclined leftist into swallowing their bugle oil. I find their putting partisanship over simple decorum galling.

You too?

I got rights to other people's stuff, I've been oppressed

Man, I am totally appalled.

Maybe I shouldn't be so harsh. What the people of New Orleans and Gulfport and Biloxi is beyond my realm of experience. I mean, I've survived a tornado, but that didn't take out an entire city, leaving virtually nothing.

And our flawed, broken nature leads usto do bad things, like taking advantage of a crisis to do some looting.

But what I read in the story linked above saddened and appalled me. Read:

NEW ORLEANS - With much of the city flooded by Hurricane Katrina, looters floated garbage cans filled with clothing and jewelry down the street in a dash to grab what they could.

In some cases, looting on Tuesday took place in full view of police and National Guard troops.

At a Walgreen’s drug store in the French Quarter, people were running out with grocery baskets and coolers full of soft drinks, chips and diapers.

When police finally showed up, a young boy stood in the door screaming, “86! 86!” — the radio code for police — and the crowd scattered.

Denise Bollinger, a tourist from Philadelphia, stood outside and snapped pictures in amazement.

“It’s downtown Baghdad,” the housewife said. “It’s insane. I’ve wanted to come here for 10 years. I thought this was a sophisticated city. I guess not.”

And more:

Around the corner on Canal Street, the main thoroughfare in the central business district, people sloshed headlong through hip-deep water as looters ripped open the steel gates on the front of several clothing and jewelry stores.

One man, who had about 10 pairs of jeans draped over his left arm, was asked if he was salvaging things from his store.


“No,” the man shouted, “that’s everybody’s store.”

Here's the worst part:

Mike Franklin stood on the trolley tracks and watched the spectacle unfold.

“To be honest with you, people who are oppressed all their lives, man, it’s an opportunity to get back at society,” he said.

It's this last quote that gets me. See what he's saying? If you've been "oppressed," then you have some sort of blank check to get back at "the Man" (even if the Man's store you're looting is owned by someone who is far from wealthy and is just as likely to be living month-to-month, too).

I blame people like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, and the various socialists for this kind of attitude. These types have making a great living feeding people with the notion that they are "oppressed" and laying the ground work for these kinds of beliefs of "the entitlement of the oppressed" to take root.

If you've been told every day that you're oppressed and your misfortune is all the fault of someone else, society, of course it's going to lead to such acts of "getting back at society."

Major League Moonbats

It's a thoroughly sick and twisted thing on my part, but I love lurking over at the Democratic Underground boards. I know that a lot of my posts are dealing with the some of the absolute wackaloon things they say. This blog isn't intended as a kind of DU Watch (see this), but sometimes the things the DU denizens post are just so completely outrageous or otherwise moonbatty that sunshine (or at least my little spectrum of it) must be shone upon it.

For your consideration:

Apparently New Orleans police had made some arrests for looting or the Louisiana National Guard were on alert to prevent any possible looting. Now, I learned as a small child that stealing is wrong. But to the anarcho-socialists at DU, it is not only OK but even desirous that the poor in The Crescent City steal food from local markets.

Don't believe me? Read here and here.

A few of my more favourite quotes:

[A]fter a disaster like Katrina I think the rich mans rules can stand to be relaxed a bit.

quote

And A few hot plasma TV's sold at a pawn shop,could make for a couple months of prepaid existance..like food and rent an security deposit while you move out and look for work in a new place swarming with other refugees also looking for work while out of town.And in this shitty republican economy getting work is not so easy now..
Didya ever consider THAT might be a reason for stealing plasma TV's?

quote

Apparently, the form of killing whereby property owners withhold life-saving property from those in need of it is A-OK with you, by your own admission.

quote

Now, this is not to say that all of the DUers are permissivist when it comes to crime.

This is a case of some [a--holes], who are probably well fed and who can afford to buy food, using the cover of the storm to go on a crime wave.

But I mean, seriously....

None dare call them liberal

I've been avoiding posting on this Cindy Sheehan nonsense, in part because I've been so busy and in part because the target is just too easy.

But I had to chime in today, after reading this post in Wednesday's PowerLine blog.

John Hinderaker takes the AP's Angela Brown to task for her not-so-subtle cheerleading for Sheehan. The post dealt with this story, dated August 24, by Ms. Brown. Hinderaker made this observation:

The article concludes with an outright whopper:

Sheehan and other grieving families met with Bush about two months after her son died last year, before reports of faulty prewar intelligence surfaced and caused her to become a vocal opponent of the war.

Hinderaker goes on to explain how this graf (paragraph in the newspaper biz) is patent nonsense.

So what does Ms. Brown do in today's installment of her Sheehan rooting, a story concerning Sheehan taking her Merry Pranksters show on the road? See for yourself (scroll down to the last graf):

Sheehan and other grieving families met with Bush about two months after her son died last year, before reports of faulty prewar intelligence surfaced and caused her to become a vocal opponent of the war.

Expect to see this graf at the end of each of Ms. Brown's stories about Sheehan until her editors finally wake up.

Also, Ms. Brown adds this graf:

Conservative activists and military families also were en route to Crawford from California on a tour called "You don't speak for me, Cindy!" The caravan coordinated by Move America Forward plans to hold a pro-Bush rally in town Saturday.

I could not find anywhere in the story where Ms. Brown labels Sheehan and her cadre "liberals." No, she and her comrades are described as "A fallen soldier's mother" and the benign "anti-war activists." Nowhere is the reader told who is helping coordinate Sheehan's month-long protest (one reference is made to a Quaker-created exhibit now on display in Crawford).

The clear implication is inescapable: Ms. Sheehan is just your run-of-the-mill mom protesting the war; those who are now countering Sheehan are the dreaded "conservative activists" who are "coordinated."

Oh, hide the children and animals!

Update: It wasn't a charley horse

It was some torn fibers or ligaments below the calf muscle, causing bleeding into the muscle, which the muscle didn't like at all.

I'm still hobbling a bit, but not as bad as before.

I got a charley horse yesterday.

Still hurts today. Is that normal?

The Wife and I have been watching the Thin Man series lately. My folks used to love those movies when I was a kid. I never understood them -- then. I probably was too young to understand that Myrna Loy was a total honey.

Hate is not a family value

but it apparently is a Democratic Underground one -- against President Bush and any one who doesn't hate Bush as much as they.

Seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong bicyled with President Bush yesterday in Crawford. It doesn't appear that Lance beat Bush to a pulp while screaming anti-war slogans; ergo, the DUers have decided that Lance is not fit to live and his efforts at cancer research are to be boycotted.

See the totally sick, twisted, often vulgar, hate-filled results here, here, and here.

N.B.: There are few DUers who find the visceral reaction shameful, but they are the definite and distinct minority.

Y'know, this kind of blind hatred driven by something as trivial as partisan politics can't be commented upon and have it done justice. It is something that merely has to be experienced first-hand.

Sad, truly sad. What miserable lives those folks must lead when their partisanship trumps every other human value.