I don't think I have to point out to anyone just how horrendous the situation down in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama is today. Hurricane Katrina has proved to be the worst natural disaster to strike the United States since the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, and the effects of this unprecedented catastrophe will surely be felt in this country for many months, and perhaps years to come.

As rescue workers from all over the country converge on the gulf coast states, millions of other Americans are donating much needed aid dollars to the relief effort, and community leaders from Birmingham to Baton Rouge are working day and night to save the lives of untold numbers of flood victims.

Average citizens around our nation are doing their best to stay focussed on the task at hand, and avoid complaining about the comparatively minor inconvenience of having to pay higher gas prices in the near future.

In early August, the Democrats responded to the news reports of the President's physical results with an incredibly petty statement about non-existent "cuts to education funding." As one internet observer remarked, "if George Bush walked on water tomorrow, the DNC would issue a press release entitled Bush Can't Swim." And the AP's Ron Fournier would carry it. Fournier's "newsview" this evening is pre-emptively criticizing the President for whatever it is that he's about to do in regards to the disaster on America's gulf coast.

If you'd like to see a typical example of how a major metropolitan newspaper completely skews a "gay marriage" story in favor of the gay left, see Mary Otto's piece in the WashPost today. Almost the entire story is devoted to the ACLU and gay activists and their arguments. (There were no liberal labels.) In the seventh paragraph, we get two state officials briefly defending the status quo. The conservative activist from Defend Maryland Marriage debuts in paragraph 20. The rest is saved for the "right" side of the debate. Typically, both pictures in the print edition featured the gay activists and their signs.

At about 4:40pm EDT this afternoon on MSNBC, Andrea Mitchell marveled at how Venezuela, “perhaps with a bit of a sense of irony,” has offered assistance despite the call by Pat Robertson, whom she identified as a “colleague” of the Bush administration, for the assassination of Venezuela's President. Chris Matthews soon piped up about how “we often argue about states' rights and the need to reduce the size of the federal government, yet in a crisis, it's the federal government which has the resources, the money, the manpower, the personpower I should say, to do the job.”

Mitchell contended FEMA was ineffective until Bill Clinton became President and was going well until a second Bush took over the White House. She contended that “since the Clinton days,” FEMA has shown “that it can move very effectively,” but “we've seen also, post-9/11, that federal disaster assistance and coordination was sorely lacking.” She also wanted to know “how much the National Guard deployments from around the region to Iraq and Afghanistan and other parts of the world has depleted the resources that were available?”

Full transcript of the exchange follows.

Chicago Tribune's Clarence Page capped off the PBS NewsHour yesterday with a commentary on wedge issues in politics, particularly the supposed use of the race card by Republicans in President Nixon's "Southern Strategy.". Page congratulated Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman for publicly renouncing the "Southern Strategy" earlier this year in an apology given to the NAACP, but he closed his commentary hinting that the GOP is all too ready to make gays the next wedge issue:

Mehlman's outreach to black or Latino audiences is aimed just as much at the wider and whiter audience of moderate suburban swing voters that both parties covet. Just as Bill Clinton had to show he was not in the hip pocket of civil rights leaders, Mehlman wants to show that his party is not hostile to them. The suburban swing voters that both parties desire want to see a kinder, gentler and less-polarizing Republican Party. In that sense, the old southern strategy was replaced in 2004 by a new red-state strategy that divided the country against even smaller minorities, like homosexuals who want to get married.

Apologies can't change the past. Apologies are about the future. In today's racial and ethnic demographics, neither party can build a true majority on wedge issues alone -- or at least not with the same old wedge issues. I'm Clarence Page.

PBS, spending your tax dollars on insulting the American voter for approving marriage protection initiatives by large margins in 11 different states, including Kerry states like Michigan and Oregon.

Some in the media have blamed the ferocity of Hurricane Katrina on global warming. NBC's Robert Bazell warned on Monday's NBC Nightly News, in a story carried repeatedly on MSNBC, that "many scientists say we can expect such storms more often as global warming increases sea temperatures around the world." In a Monday posting on Time.com Jeffrey Kluger forwarded that "to hear a lot of people tell it, we have only ourselves -- and our global-warming ways -- to blame." Kluger conceded that "hurricanes were around a long, long time before human beings began chopping down rainforests and fouling the atmosphere," but he concluded that in the future global warming "could make even Katrina look mild." Former Washington Post and Boston Globe reporter Ross Gelbspan, in a Tuesday Boston Globe op-ed, charged: "The hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming." In contrast, the New York Times remarkably reported Tuesday: "Because hurricanes form over warm ocean water, it is easy to assume that the recent rise in their number and ferocity is because of global warming. But that is not the case, scientists say."

Full CyberAlert item follows. For all of today's MRC CyberAlert.

It took the force of Hurricane Katrina to wake up the media to a big story: U.S. oil refining.

Following a summer of relentless gas price coverage, the storm’s threat to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico added urgency to reports about the oil industry. But only one network news story in three months of summer coverage has attempted to explain the role of U.S. oil refining in the nation’s gasoline supply. Instead, networks have made passing references to the causes behind pricing and have criticized the free market.

One way the networks addressed refining was to hype the profits oil companies were gaining from higher prices. As NBC’s Katie Couric said on the August 17 “Today,” “As we pay through the nose, someone has to be smelling some pretty big profits.”

Likewise, the August 11 “World News Tonight” pounded the oil market for making a profit. ABC’s David Muir asked, “But are any of those increasing profits, both overseas and at home, being spent to fix those refineries or to help solve the shrinking U.S. gas supply?” Mike Rothman, an oil industry analyst, replied: “There has in fact been an increase in investment, both for production of oil as well as refining. But the impact of those is not immediate.” Muir responded as if he had not heard what Rothman said, continuing his attack: “But analysts say they’ve yet to see any improvement. And oil companies are busy spending billions in their profits reinvesting in themselves.” Muir didn’t look into how much of that “reinvesting” went to compliance costs for regulations on the industry.

Dan Froomkin in the Washington Post stretches for a ways to blame Bush for Hurricane Katrina.

"Did any of his previous budget decisions allow the hurricane to cause more damage than it might have otherwise?"

Those darn tax cuts.

"Could Bush and the federal government have done more to prepare for hurricane recovery? Unlike the Asian tsunami, this hurricane was forecast days ahead of time."

If he hadn't been vacationing, maybe this whole thing could've been avoided.

Froomkin had other questions as well:

"If the reason Bush returned to Washington is that he is more effective here, then why didn't he come back two days ago?"

Reporter Carl Hulse flips through former conservative Sen. Jesse Helms' memoir, "Here's Where I Stand." The headline accurately captures the loaded nature of the review: "In Memoir, Jesse Helms Says He Was No Racist."

Hulse begins: "Former Senator Jesse Helms defends his record on race relations and explores his role in the rise of the modern conservative movement in a new memoir that reserves some of its harshest words for the news media."

Hulse brings up some of Helms' most controversial moments: "In his book, he disputes the idea that he injected racial politics into one of those re-election bids -- his 1990 contest against Harvey Gantt, a former mayor of Charlotte and a black man who supported a civil rights measure that Mr. Helms and other conservatives said could lead to job quotas. Late in the close fight, the Helms campaign broadcast a commercial that showed the hands of a white person crumpling an employment rejection letter while the announcer said the position had to go to a minority applicant. Mr. Helms's book does not discuss the imagery in that commercial but said the advertisement was created by his advisers 'to help voters understand the practical reality of the law Gantt favored.'"

By contrast, the Times ignored the recent memoir of an even more racially controversial senator still serving: Ex-Klansman (and fiercely anti-Bush Democrat) Sen. Robert Byrd.

As I reported here yesterday, a Washington Post/ABC News poll suggesting that all of the attention on antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan has had absolutely no effect on America’s views on Iraq appeared to be buried by the Post’s editors.  Well, this observation not only panned out, but became even more curious when the story hit this morning’s print edition with a completely different headline, and a thoroughly different focus.  And, it appears that the Post has eliminated the story originally posted at its website yesterday at 7 AM eastern time.

WashPost reporters Dana Milbank and Alan Cooperman crack wise today on a Heritage Foundation event, mocking the idea that the "anti-war" movement's leading groups are anti-capitalist and anti-American, and in some cases (like International ANSWER) clearly affiliated with the communist Workers World Party.  This is easier to mock when you've left out all of Cindy Sheehan's wildest anti-American statements.  You can play the game of seeing how twisted the Post account is. The Heritage Foundation has video of the event here.

Gaggle is a daily comic strip about the Washington press corps and Larry the press secretary. Larry deals with the shenanigans of reporters who couldn't imagine anyone voting for a Republican.

There will be a new Gaggle strip, fully colored, every weekday.

Click here for previous strips.

CNN's Jack Cafferty isn't the only one taking cheap shots at President Bush for taking a vacation in August, before Hurricane Katrina hit Mississippi and Louisiana. The New York Times and Washington Post are doing it, too. From an August 31 New York Times editorial about Katrina:

As the levees of Lake Pontchartrain gave way, flooding New Orleans, it seemed pretty clear that in this case, government did not live up to the job. But this seems like the wrong moment to dwell on fault-finding, or even to point out that it took what may become the worst natural disaster in American history to pry President Bush out of his vacation. [Emphasis added] All the focus now must be on rescuing the survivors...

From a Washington Post editorial, also dated August 31:

For years New Orleans has issued dire warnings about the unique threat a powerful hurricane posed to the city; with floods inundating 80 percent of the Crescent City yesterday, it is clear that those warnings were not hyperbole.

The latest direct-mail fundraising letter from Walter Cronkite for the liberal Interfaith Alliance begins with the ludicrous sentence: "When I anchored the evening news, I kept my opinions to myself." (SURE you did.) It continues: "But now, more than ever, I feel I must speak out. That's because I am deeply disturbed by the dangerous and growing influence of people like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell on our nation's political leaders."

What? Robertson and Falwell, "growing influence"? They may have seemed like the top dogs in the religious right when Cronkite retired from newscasting in 1981, but the growing-influence train has passed them by. (Do they believe Robertson calling for the head of Hugo Chavez is an act destined to cause "growing influence"?) Cronkite's little note has another Robertson and Falwell mentions and two mentions of the Christian Coalition, which is a mere shell of its former self after being picked apart by the Federal Election Commission in the 1990s.

Harlingen, Texas, August 30, 2005: The Miami Herald had another Abu Ghraib story this past Saturday. In an Associated Press article by Charles J. Hanley, the headline announced, “Abu Ghraib general describes her Iraq tour”

The article’s opening paragraph reads, “Iraqi prisoners could lift their doors right off their hinges. One senior sergeant whiled away his evenings blasting grazing sheep with a guard tower machine gun. U. S. commanders didn’t bother telling their troops they’d be stuck in Iraq for months more than advertised.”

It next goes on to explain that the only woman commanding general in the war zone, prison chief Janis Karpinski, has written a candid portrait of an often dysfunctional Army.

This was printed in one of those major daily newspapers that so proudly proclaim they support the men and women in uniform. If they are so supportive, why are stories on the degradation of prisoners in Abu Ghraib featured in print over and over again,