What is happening in New Orleans is a national disgrace. I’m talking about the lack of prompt assistance to thousands and thousands of people who desperately need help.
This is a massive failure of emergency planning. The military and FEMA obviously didn’t plan or position themselves for the worst-case scenario, even though everyone knew days in advance that this was the Big One. And now the situation is sliding out of control. Remind anyone else of Iraq?
Thousands stranded at the Convention Center have absolutely no help, and people are dying and being left on the ground. No wonder some of them are looting nearby stores for food and drink.
One man said, "I don’t treat my dog like that," pointing to a dead woman in a wheelchair nearby. "I buried my dog." He added: "You can do everything for other countries but you can’t do nothing for your own people. You can go overseas with the military but you can’t get them down here."
President Bush has promised a rapid federal response to the disaster. For many, he’s already too late.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Goddard, and Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., both told The Eagle editorial board in separate meetings in the past week that the media isn’t reporting enough of the good news in Iraq. Tiahrt said there have been great successes, but that successes don’t make the headlines. Brownback said that the media favor conflict over good news and that, on an objective basis, things are actually going well in Iraq.
Some conservative columnists also have criticized media coverage. For example, Mary Katherine Ham of Townhall.com wrote about a dispute between a St. Paul Pioneer Press columnist and the Knight Ridder reporters stationed in Iraq.
On the other hand, as I noted in a recent column, here is how Andrew Marshall, Reuters’ bureau chief in Baghdad for two years, responded to such criticisms in the August issue of Editor & Publisher magazine:
“I regard the charge that journalists in Iraq are skewing their reporting and focusing ‘too much on bad news’ as ill-informed, and a great insult to the Iraqi people. Many of those who criticize Iraq coverage seem to be suggesting that the media should somehow play down or ignore the fact that so many Iraqi civilians are being killed. . . .
“Of course, some progress is being made in Iraq. Many people in Iraq, including U.S. soldiers, are doing their best to rebuild the country and improve security. But taken in isolation, the renovation of a power plant or the opening of a new school are not a story unless placed in the wider context, and the wider context is that reconstruction is proceeding much more slowly than had been expected.”
What do you think? Are the media too negative? Does the coverage seem fair? Are the complaints politically motivated? Or, rather than hyping bad news, are the media actually sanitizing how difficult daily life really is in Iraq?
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
George Will has an interesting column in Thursday’s Washington Post about how conservatives shouldn’t be quite so quick to condemn judicial activism and celebrate majority rule. Will writes: “The conservatives’ party, the Republican Party, was born in reaction against repeal of the Missouri Compromise — against, that is, the right, established by Congress in 1854, of Kansans to own slaves if a Kansas majority approved of that. . . . Lincoln’s greatness was inseparable from his belief that there are some things that majorities should not be permitted to do — things that violate natural rights, the protection of which is the Constitution’s principal purpose.”
Of course, what many of the conservatives and liberals who complain about the judiciary really want are judges who are activists for their causes.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
An Opinion Line contributor asked in Wednesday’s newspaper: “I wonder how long it will be before Hurricane Katrina is blamed on President Bush and the theory of global warming?”
Well, according to this Salon article, it isn’t crazy to think that there is a connection between global warming and hurricanes. A recent paper in the science journal Nature found that as sea temperatures rise, the duration and intensity of hurricanes are going up, too. (Read the Salon article for a straightforward explanation as to why.)
But the frequency of hurricanes has been holding steady — even though it may seem like there are more of them. There is a natural upswing or downswing in hurricanes that happens every 20 or 30 years, and we’re in an upswing now. The reason this one seems worse is because there are more people living in the path of hurricanes.
“A lot of people in my business had been, even in the 1980s, warning anybody who would listen — which was very few, it turned out — that there was going to be this upswing in hurricanes,” said Kerry Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s not rocket science. We’ve been building all this stuff in Florida during this lull that lasted 20 years. We built all this stuff, and it’s waiting to get creamed. There’s been a fantastic amount of construction. A lot of people have built homes on the water. And nobody really listened. And now all of those predictions are exactly coming true. But it doesn’t have much to do with global warming.”
Posted by Melissa Cooley
Americans only thought this presidential administration was unusually rich in biblical references. Turns out it’s not good enough for the Christian Exodus movement, a 2-year-old effort aimed at reinventing the government according to Christian principles. The short-term goal is to control South Carolina, by encouraging thousands of the group’s activists to move there from other parts of the country. The group plans to take over the state one office at a time, by running its candidates in local GOP primaries.
“All we have to do is put our guy on the ballot with an ‘R’ sign,” founder Cory Burnell told the Los Angeles Times. “It could be a corpse and they’ll vote for him.”
Hey — that part sounds like Kansas. Which raises a question: Is there an answer here to our state’s lagging population growth?
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Wichita got up close and personal with Bill Koch’s star-studded art collection in 1992 and 1996, in exhibitions at the Wichita Art Museum that drew boffo crowds and inspired fantasies that the native Wichitan and America’s Cup winner might turn the loan into a gift someday. Similar thinking has sparked debate in Boston, where two of Koch’s racing yachts are on display outside the Museum of Fine Arts as part of the just-opened exhibition “Things I Love: The Many Collections of William I. Koch.” One passer-by told The Boston Globe, “They’re beautiful, but I’m still trying to figure out why they’re at the museum.” That Koch is funding some of the show’s costs is fueling the controversy in the art world. But whether in Boston or Wichita, it’s getting harder all the time to argue that it’s a bad thing when art creates a buzz.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
