Shortish Friday Around the Internets

September 2

Couple of highlights: Calpundit nails it.

"Actions have consequences. No one could predict that a hurricane the size of Katrina would hit this year, but the slow federal response when it did happen was no accident. It was the result of four years of deliberate Republican policy and budget choices that favor ideology and partisan loyalty at the expense of operational competence. It's the Bush administration in a nutshell."

And before that quote he gives you a timeline of how competent people were turned out and no nothing cronies were put in. A nutshell. Indeed. Both Atrios and Calpundit have been must reading concerning the crisis.

Guest commentator Amy Sullivan also has an interesting post:

LEFT BEHIND....Don't miss Joan Walsh on Salon today, putting into words the frustration so many of us have struggled to articulate.

These are desperately poor people who've been deliberately left behind, in so many senses of the word — left behind by society, shut up in housing projects and hideous poverty, and now truly left behind by local and federal officials who failed to come up with an evacuation plan for people too poor and isolated to leave on their own....

....Why didn't we send a caravan of buses into the city's poorest neighborhoods on Saturday or Sunday, when the dimensions of the disaster were already predictable?....Sure, Houston's got electricity and running water, but tens of thousands of scared, angry people packed into an abandoned sports stadium — we couldn't come up with a better symbol of how little we care about the poor, how little we've thought about what to do with them, for them, if we tried.

We've heard the warning "this isn't about politics" over and over in the last few days. The hell it isn't. And I don't mean kicking Bush while he's down, just for the fun of it, although there are surely liberals eager to do that. For the rest of us, however, we're seeing the awful real world consequences of conservatism play out on our television screens. This is why we're liberals. We don't yell about poverty and racial disparities for kicks. An evacuation plan that consists of telling people to get out on their own is not an evacuation plan.

More later, after I've digested all of this...