A stupid public statement at the wrong time…..reported by stupid media !Clarence Ray Nagin is the Mayor of New Orleans, Louisiana. Before his election, Nagin was a member of the United States Republican Party and had little political experience. Days before filing for the New Orleans Mayoral race in February 2002, Nagin switched his party registration to the United States Democratic Party, presumably in order to improve his chances of winning the race in heavily Democratic New Orleans.

The AP is running yet another piece in which the White House is being blamed for the disaster that is New Orleans. It starts with the title of the piece (White House Backpedals on Flood Control) and takes off from there.

The White House scrambled Thursday to defend itself against criticism that it has consistently proposed cutting the budget for Army Corps of Engineers water and flood control projects — including several that could have mitigated the disaster in New Orleans. Just in February, President Bush proposed cutting the Corps' budget by 7 percent. The year before, Bush proposed a 13 percent cut.

Everybody got that, right? There were plans to protect New Orleans, and President Bush cut them. It's all his fault. Or, at least, that's the impression that will be taken away by anyone who reads the headline, or the headline and the first couple of paragraphs. But buried down toward the end, there are a couple of lines that put things into a slightly different context.

Other presidents also have taken aim at the Corps' budget. President Carters' [sic] first veto came against a big water projects bill passed by a Democratic-dominated Congress. And President Clinton squeezed the Corps budget as well.

Yes, that information is in the article. But a casual reader isn't going to get it. The headline and the first paragraph set the tone and agenda of the piece so completely that most people won't come away with the whole picture.

Lyflines - Lyford's other blog…

In the middle of a Thursday CBS Evening News story on the destruction in Slidell, Louisiana, across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, reporter Mark Strassmann showcased a distraught man “with a message for the President” who blasted Bush for how he responded in Iraq while not doing so for Louisiana. Anthony Nata charged: "You can go into Iraq and come in with big helicopters and set stuff up for people, but you can't do this for us? Come on, Bush. You can do better than that."

Over video of flattened houses, Strassmann set up that soundbite from Nata: “This community is a landscape of loss -- subdivision after subdivision flattened or flooded. Police whisper to you they suspect hundreds of bodies in those homes. Anthony and Edith Nata now live in a lean-to by the side of the road with a message for the President.”

Of course, going into Iraq took months of logistical and transport efforts.

Video: Real or Windows Media.

Two days after CNN's Jack Cafferty demanded to know, as detailed in a Tuesday NewsBusters item, “Where's President Bush? Is he still on vacation?”and snidely suggested that “based on his approval rating in the latest polls, my guess is getting back to work might not be a terrible idea,” on Thursday's Situation Room Cafferty took off after Bush again. At about 3:30pm EDT during his “Cafferty File” segment, he suddenly found the conservative New Hampshire Union Leader very wise and quoted approvingly from their Wednesday editorial: “'A better leader would have flown straight to the disaster zone and announced the immediate mobilization of every available resource....The cool, confident, intuitive leadership Bush exhibited in his first term, particularly in the months following 9/11, has vanished.'” He piled on with how a New York Times editorial excoriated Bush “for 'appearing casual to the point of carelessness.'”

Cafferty soon launched a rant: “I have never, ever seen anything as badly bungled and poorly handled as this situation in New Orleans. Where the hell is the water for these people? Why can't sandwiches be dropped to those people that are in that Superdome down there? I mean, what is, this is Thursday. This is Thursday. This storm happened five days ago. It's a disgrace.”

Cafferty ignored a Thursday Union Leader editorial which castigated Louisiana's Governor, Kathleen Blanco: “Louisiana Gov’t Fails Its People.”

Video: Real or Windows Media. Full transcript follows.

CBS News's Jim Axelrod has blogged about his now-ended Price Patrol cross-country assignment which concluded this week. The feature highlighted the cost of gasoline across the country from New York to San Francisco. Axelrod and his producers hopped a red-eye from San Francisco to cover alleged price gouging in Atlanta, which has seen high gas prices following Hurricane Katrina due to a pipeline which has gone offline.

Axelrod paints with suspicious a gas station owner who set gas prices for premium gasoline at $6 per gallon at one point yesterday:

We've talked to three men who own or operate gas stations. Two are
Exxon stations. A gallon of unleaded regular at one was $2.99. At the
other, $3.19. Both say they are at the mercy of their wholesalers,
although Michael Cleary, the guy who's got it at $2.99, says staying
under $3.00 is very important to him. The other gentleman operates a BP
station. At one point yesterday he had super unleaded over $6 a gallon!

I went to ask him why. He had an interesting explanation. Basically
— and follow me with the logic on this one — he said he raised the
prices because he was worried he'd run out of gas and didn't
want his customers to buy gas. I asked him why he didn't just shut off
the pump. The conversation ended quickly. We'll show it to you tonight
on the CBS Evening News.

During ABC's Wednesday night prime time special, In the Path of Katrina, reporter Chris Cuomo exploited the tragedy to push for a permanent expansion of the federal government, just as occurred under FDR, "the last time the country responded with unprecedented sweeping changes to help the least fortunate. Today may demand an equal effort." Interviewing Randy Cohen, ethics columnist for the New York Times Magazine, Cuomo asserted: "Hurricane Katrina is perhaps the most economically destructive event in American history since the Great Depression, the last time the country responded with unprecedented sweeping changes to help the least fortunate. Today may demand an equal effort. Couldn't this hurricane be something that is a historically relevant event that may change how we deal with each other in this society?"

Video: Real or Windows Media. Some more context and description follows.

Harry Smith, interviewing Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour on the Early Show today, started off by asking him where all the relief aid was, where the workers were. Smith said he was relaying this as the frequent complaint of Gulf Coast survivors of Hurricane Katrina that he'd been talking to. After Barbour replied that things were being tirelessly coordinated and set in order to get relief to needy residents as soon as possible, Smith prompted Barbour to give the viewers at home a glimmer of hope about the efforts underway:

Yeah, you know, I hear that loud and clear. I guess, you know, as we're out here with the people that have been directly affected by it, it's hard not to have an emotional response to the pain that they're experiencing on an ongoing basis. And I'm just feeling like maybe we're just going to be a little bit of a conduit back to you so you know what's going on down here. Is it, usually in a hurricane, after a day or two, there's a little light on the horizon, there's a little hope on the horizon, what, can you give us any good news today?

It's good and wholly appropriate for Smith to seek to present a balanced picture of the setbacks and progress of the Hurricane Katrina recovery effort, if only indirectly at Barbour's prompting. Now if only Smith and his colleagues at CBS would apply that template to coverage of Iraq, and balance out their consistently bleak picture with concurrent good news.

As the pressure mounts on the media to figure out more and more creative ways to blame the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on the Bush administration, a front-page New York Times article by David Sanger appears to lay the post-hurricane looting right at the White House doorstep:

Even before Hurricane Katrina, governors were beginning to question whether National Guard units stretched to the breaking point by service in Iraq would be available for domestic emergencies. Those concerns have now been amplified by scenes of looting and disorder.

With all the "Blame Bush" stories from the different media, where are the stories about his foresight to not previously release the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPRO) for non-emergencies?

Back in March and again in July the media had multiple stories with Democrats calling for the release of oil from the SPRO for purely political reasons;

Published by CNN on
March 9th 2005, excerpt;

The rising prices have prompted new calls by several
senators for Bush to release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and put
off new purchases for the stockpile.

In a column for the Los Angeles Times, former NYT Executive Editor (and eternal blowhard) Howell Raines joins the left wing in using the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina to bash Bush:

"The dilatory performance of George Bush during the past week has been outrageous. Almost as unbelievable as Katrina itself is the fact that the leader of the free world has been outshone by the elected leaders of a region renowned for governmental ineptitude.

"Louisiana's anguished governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, climbed into a helicopter at the first possible moment to survey what may become the worst weather-related disaster in American history. Even Gov. Haley R. Barbour of Mississippi, a tiresome blowhard as chairman of the Republican National Committee, has shown a throat-catching public sorrow and sleepless diligence that put Bush to shame.

Live from the White House in the 7am EDT half hour of Thursday’s Good Morning America, Diane Sawyer pressed President George W. Bush to respond to a series of liberal talking points, starting with how “people have worried that the National Guard is stretched too thin” with “so many overseas” in Iraq. Later, she demanded: “Do we have to make a choice, at some point, between what we're doing in Iraq and what is needed, right now, to funnel massive amounts of money” to the hurricane victims? She also wanted Bush to “guard against price gouging” and wondered: “Is this a time to call on Americans to simply pull back, not use the gas? Pull back and stay at home and save the gas for those who are in dire need." Sawyer forwarded how “some people have said that the oil companies, themselves, should simply forfeit some of their profits in this time of national crisis.” She suggested the federal government owes everyone a job as she asked “how far the federal government is going to go to get their lives back? Do you promise jobs? Do you promise that they will be moved back into housing, and how soon?"

Full CyberAlert item follows. For all the articles in today's MRC CyberAlert.

The Media Post reports:

"The Washington Post has entered into a deal with blog search engine Technorati that will make it easy for readers to find blog entries about Post stories. Technorati already has similar deals with Salon.com and Newsweek.com, but WashingtonPost.com marks the search engine's first major newspaper partnership.

"The Technorati partnerships allow the news sites to direct their readers to blogs that link directly to stories. "In the 20th century it was about letters to the editor; in the 21st century we're seeing people adding their commentary by blogging about the stories and articles," Technorati Founder David Sifry told OnlineMediaDaily in July, after news of the Newsweek.com partnership began circulating. "There's definitely a symbiosis between bloggers and the mainstream media."

On NPR's Morning Edition today, co-anchor Renee Montagne was interviewing David Wessel of the Wall Street Journal on the hurricane's effects on the national economy. But she was a little over the top in her tone with her first question: "Is the hurricane the last straw for the economy?" (Hear it here.)

Last straw? Economic growth is strong, unemployment is low, and the liberal media is still pretending that Bush is presiding over the Great Depression. Unbelievable. Listening to NPR can really ruin a commute.

The big three broadcast networks have been mostly silent during the run-up to the Senate's hearings on Supreme Court nominee John Roberts, with just a handful of evening news stories over the last five weeks. But big papers such as the Washington Post have been busily poring over Roberts' writings, hunting for the legal brief or memo that might put his seemingly-assured confirmation in doubt. No "smoking gun" has emerged, but that hasn't stopped some journalists from trying to tar Roberts as a kooky far right-wing extremist. Recall: