As ever, I am jealous of Lileks' talent to just dash off sensible screedy goodness. The best part is his two central lessons of the Katrina affair.

Lesson One:

If we learned anything we can take away, it’s this: you’re on your own. At least keep an emergency kit on hand, the sort of thing Tom Ridge proposed, and which made the smart set hardy har har because it contained duct tape. Don’t rely on the government. Four years after 9/11, it’s apparent that some local governments are not well-oiled machines when it comes to disasters – more like a box of sand and busted gears. Blame for that can be promiscuously distributed.

Lesson Two:

the next terrorist attack will not unite us for a warm hug-filled fortnight. The hard left won’t wait 24 hours before blaming President Bush, and the country will enjoy the sight of prominent pundits angrier at the President than the men who nuked Des Moines. If an attack should happen during the term of President Hillary Clinton, they’ll still blame Bush – and if she wishes to retain her moderate credentials, she’ll be canny enough to repudiate the lot. They’ll be stunned. They’ll be hurt. After all the free-lancing hating they did out of the goodness of their hearts! Where can they turn now?

I think he's being incredibly generous. At the next terrorist attack (or natural disaster), the moonbat left will start blaming Bush just as soon as they can draw breath, regardless of whether he's still president or it's twenty years later. He will always be blamed for problems from now until doomsday.

We'd better get used to it.

Posted by: Harry Callahan at 07:33 PM | Comments (29)
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Just read the first paragraph.

It is everywhere.
Resistance is futile.

(Just an aside: Who were the Borg supposed to be, anyway? The Soviets, or Microsoft Corp.?)

UPDATE: Pixy Misa corrects;

Sorry to derail everyone's rant, but if you read the whole thing rather than just the first paragraph, you find that the writer is using "middle class" to describe mid-range-earning movies - grossing between $100 and $150 million. The point being that there have been no movies in that bracket this year, just blockbusters (over $150 million) and flops (less than $100 million).

Nothing to do with leftism, classism, racism, stupidism, or anything-else-ism. Just box-office receipts.

Two things:

1. What part of "Just read the first paragraph" don't you understand??
and
2. Thanks. Guess I'm going to have to not be a hack. That kind of hurts.

Remember, its the MSM that has the layers of fact checking. Blogs don't, so they're dangerous.

Posted by: LauraW. at 06:56 PM | Comments (35)
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Actually, I can't see this video, as Quicktime isn't working on my computer.

Sure sounds funny though.

I hope it's not porno.

Thanks to Steven.

Posted by: Ace at 06:17 PM | Comments (15)
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That's what a young whipper-snapper of a hard-news-man on the Q (for Queer) Channel wants to be known as someday.

Until now, "the gay Dan Rather" was just known as, well, "Dan Rather."

Okay, that didn't even really make any sense.

Time for a break.

Posted by: Ace at 03:38 PM | Comments (5)
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It's all true. Well, not really, but what the hell.

It'll most likely be the top story on Keith ("Who?") Olbermann tonight.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again:

A buddy will help you move.

A best buddy will help you move a dead body.

But a Republican buddy will deliberately withhold aid to a major American city in a time of chaos and death in order to put a few shekels in your pocket for collecting and storing the thousands of dead.

We're thick as thieves, I tells ya.

We just "do shit" for each other all the time. And of course for money.

And killing thousands of people is no sweat to us. We kinda get off on mass-murder. As young whelps we get the taste for man-hunting by tracking and skinning railyard hobos.

By the time we're older and in positions of power, we can't maintain erections unless we've gotten our "murder on" within the past week or so. I start to feel a little "antsy," if you know what I mean, if I've gone ten days without strangling a sleeping homeless man.

Eh. What am I telling you guys for? You know. You know.

We're kind of like the vampire Lestat, only with wing-tips and power-ties.

Posted by: Ace at 03:11 PM | Comments (37)
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Good stuff... he even tries to keep it (slightly) fair and balanced:

Federal Emergency Management Adminstration Director Michael Brown today issued a warning to Gulf Coast residents to be on the lookout for Hurricane Katrina, a tropical storm that he said may reach landfall as early as last Sunday.

Also, Sean Penn is planning to construct a 900-foot-tall giant space robot to bail out the city with a freakin' enormous red kegger cup.

Thanks to Craig, or as I call him, Creig.

Posted by: Ace at 02:59 PM | Comments (1)
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Remember: multiple-layers of painstaking editorial fact-checking.

But all our liberal bozos in the media had to hear was "Department of Homeland Security" before they went to town on the claim Bush's DHS, and its sub-agency FEMA, was responsible for keeping the Red Cross out.

Could have taken a three-second clarification. Or a two minute phone call.

But of course they didn't bother.

Why fact-check a story you want to be true? Fact-checking can only hurt your story.

Your Professionally Fact-Checked Media

We're better than bloggers because... well, we certainly get paid a lot more. And that's something!

Anyone Want To Bet... that the decision to keep the Red Cross out -- previously vilified as a major error when it was believed by the LLMSM as having been made by the Bush Administration -- will suddenly seem like a prudent measure to keep Red Cross personnel out of harm's way, now that a Democratic governor is known to be responsible?

Oh, wait, that presumes they'll report on this at all and correct their initial errors. Which of course they won't.

Forget the bet. The point is moot.

Posted by: Ace at 02:07 PM | Comments (13)
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It's still one of the few shows on TV worth watching. But it comes at a price.

For example, there has been an increasing use of plastic gloves by burglars...

For the love of everything larcenous, a burglar who hasn't heard about fingerprints by now isn't going to be in business very long.

But this is the one I've always thought was pretty clever, and I'm sad to see that criminals are finally figuring this trick out:

...and a practice reported by police in northern England in which car thieves leave cigarette butts picked up from the street inside vehicles, hoping to lay a trail of false DNA evidence.

See, that's good. Real good. Even if they can place *you* at the scene of a crime, they have someone else's DNA there too which they can't explain (or, most likely, even identify, unless the DNA happens to come from someone in the system already).

Which, if the case against you is just circumstantial plus DNA, may very well constitute reasonable doubt.

Still, they're getting better at placing you at the scene, even if you touch nothing at all:

However, the magazine warned that outwitting the scientists was increasingly hard.

In a test of DNA contamination, Professor Rutty asked a volunteer to walk around a sterile room while speaking. He was able to retrieve the man's DNA even though he had been in the room only a few seconds.

Posted by: Ace at 12:30 PM | Comments (18)
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I just can't believe that a network news anchor expressed an opinion the unhinged left agrees with:

The hottest blogger of the last 24 hours is... NBC anchor Brian Williams? Apparenly so. As we'll show later in this edition, a post at his official Daily Nightly blog is finding praise among bloggers primarily -- but not exclusively -- on the left. Williams' blog post happens to fit in with a series of reports in the past day or so that FEMA and other gov't officials are refusing to admit media entry to disaster-ravaged areas, in effect censoring (the less-charged term is "blackout")independent news reports from the area.

Now, I'm not sure I disagree with Williams on his point about the military preventing journalists from entering flood-ravished areas (primarily, I guess, to keep them from snapping grisly pictures of bloated corpses).

But I'm super-duper surprised to read Williams writing in such a liberal-pleasing, morally-preening tone, not-so-subtly connecting up the Army in New Orleans with the supposed "assassinations" of reporters in Iraq:

At that same fire scene, a police officer from out of town raised the muzzle of her weapon and aimed it at members of the media... obvious members of the media... armed only with notepads. ... Someone else points out on television as I post this: the fact that the National Guard now bars entry (by journalists) to the very places where people last week were barred from LEAVING (The Convention Center and Superdome) is a kind of perverse and perfectly backward postscript to this awful chapter in American history.

Other things that may shock me in the coming hours: water falling to find its own level; dogs failing to settle their eternal conflict with squirrels and ratty tennis balls; how the magic of a baby's smile always leaves me feeling... absolutely nothing at all.

It's A Day Of Potent Psychic Shocks Update: Keith ("Who?") Olbermann doesn't even blog it, he just rips into Chertoff on his show.

His crime? The smoking gun proof that he let the floodwaters kill lots of black folk to help ensure a Republican presidential victory in 2008? Why, Chertoff, speaking contemporaneously, accidentally referred to "Louisiana" as a "city," thus proving he... um, mispoke.

Mispoke? Or signalled his hatred of blacks? You be the judge. Let Ketih ("Who?") Olbermann serve as the prosecuting attorney:

This is not typically a newscast of commentary. I can recall only twice previously offering such perspectives.

Uh-huh.

But something that Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff said at his news conference Saturday made this necessary.

[Playing video of] Michael Chertoff, Homeland Security Secretary: "Louisiana is a city that is largely underwater."

Olbermann: Well, there's your problem right there. If ever a slip of the tongue defined a government's response to a crisis. Forget the history of slashed federal budgets for projects that might have saved the levees. Drop the imagery of the government watching 'Monty Python's Flying Circus' while New Orleans drowned. Ignore the symbol of bureaucrats like Mr. Chertoff using only the future tense in terms of relief that they could have supplied last Monday and Tuesday. We no longer need the President sounding like he's on some sort of five-day tape delay to summarize this debacle. We now have Mr. Chertoff's indelible announcement that Louisiana is a city.

Oh my God. I can't wait until he sees my multiple errors in trying to spell "Giuliani." Those typos are, too, "indelible."

Is this childish or is it just me? Again I repeat: liberalism is only secondarily a political philosophy. It is primarily two things:

1) an alternate system of spirituality which avoids a belief in a specific, concrete God (although it has a host of Devils);

and more importantly:

2) a system of ego-pleasing reinforcements as to one's moral and intellectual superiority.

Keith ("Who?") Olbermann is higher than a kite because a politician mispoke on the air -- thus proving that Olbermann is smarter than he is, because Olbermann knows Louisiana is a state. He learned that in grade school-- in fact, he's pleased as punch he knows how much the whole of the Lousiana territory cost ($15 large), when it was purchased (1803), and who sold it (Napoleon).

He also can tell you what DeSoto and Dr. Charles Drew discovered, if you only bothered to ask him.

And then of course he gets in the moral-preening angle too -- he's a better person because he didn't make that mistatement.

Keith ("Who?") Olbermann-- how fucking old are you? I used to have these sorts of arguments over obvious slips-of-the-toungue ("Wait! You said the rent for Park Place was two dollars! Now you're saying it's two thousand! You said two dollars first!") with my younger brothers. When I was ten.

All right, up until when I was eighteen. So, I was immature.

But you're getting up there in age now, big fella.

You should have gotten wise before you got old.

Fool to King Lear.

See, I went to high school too. Let's be superior together.

Posted by: Ace at 12:09 PM | Comments (21)
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They stated they wanted to keep the area "wet and wild."

I guess they got their wish, eh?

Posted by: Ace at 12:01 PM | Comments (12)
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