For two days now Fox News' Major Garrett has reported on first the Red Cross, and then the Salvation Army, being denied entrance to New Orleans by Louisiana State authorities. According to Garrett and the Red Cross website, officials didn't want the food, water and sanitary supplies to get to the Superdome and Convention Center because it might encourage others to come to those sites rather than evacuate the city. The result of the decision to withhold aid was thousands of New Orleans citizens trying to survive in horrific conditions without much needed supplies. The Louisiana National Guard, which was not tasked with providing survival supplies to evacuees, had to divert their attention from law enforcement and rescue operations to providing aid to the desperate families looking for the basics of life.

On this evening’s The Situation Room, CNN’s Jack Cafferty ran a poll asking the following question concerning ongoing rescue efforts in New Orleans:  What should be done with the people who refuse to leave? 

 “Officials want everybody out of town because the health risks of the contaminated water are  simply too great.  But not everybody wants to leave.”

This raises an interesting question that seems to be eluding media representatives like Mr. Cafferty:  If a large percentage of people don’t want to leave now as the health risks in the water that is surrounding them are mounting and obvious, why should we be surprised that a similarly large percentage of the New Orleans population didn’t leave prior to the hurricane making landfall?

Refuse To Evacuate Video

You guys pretend that the US media is too much on the left ?

For everybody with half a brain in the rest of the world your media is totally controlled by Bush and the military establishment along with the petrolum companies.

And here is a web site where they pretend the journalist are in the left wing ? lollll boy the USA will always suprise me :)

Sounds like if the vast majority here have guns, drive a big american gaz guzler and think they live in a democracy !

I often think that the USA was born in war, is always in war and will end in war within itself again. You guys always support the wrong side, the injustice, the tyrans just for the f,,,n $. Pinochet is one example of killing poor people just for corporate profit.

The glamour is going down, look whos helping you, countries like Mexico are faster to help then your own president. By the way did he cheat the last election in a similar way as the first one ?

In a new low, the Associated Press has dealt another race card from the bottom of the deck. In a slanted piece called, “Katrina, Aftermath Galvanize Black America,” author Jesse Washington includes quotes from the inane:

"I've seen black folk come together around any number of issues. It's usually either a head or a heart issue," [PBS host] Tavis Smiley said. "For example, we came together after the election of 2000, when Bush essentially stole the election. That was a head issue. People were mad. Other issues hit our hearts; O.J. Simpson comes to mind."

To the insane:

"You'd have to go back to slavery, or the burning of black towns, to find a comparable event that has affected black people this way," said Darnell M. Hunt, a sociologist and head of the African American studies department at UCLA.

Under video shown on ABC's Good Morning America, during Charlie Gibson's Wednesday interview with Senator Hillary Clinton on Capitol Hill, viewers saw a graphic which asked: “WHAT WENT WORONG?” ABC's spelling, for one thing. The misspelled graphic ran under video of Senator Clinton talking to people inside the Washington, DC armory, one of the shelters for those evacuated from New Orleans.

The MRC's Rich Noyes caught ABC's miscue, which they quickly corrected when they switched to a two-shot of Gibson and Clinton.

Tax cuts have been the latest craze in gas price management, but CNN’s Miles O’Brien suggested on the September 8 “American Morning” that raising taxes might be the way to go.

“I think there’s a lot of people who’d tell you long-term, raising the gas tax would be a good idea,” O’Brien said. Andy Serwer replied, “Oh yeah. That’s right. But it’s politically suicidal to suggest that, as we’ve seen.”

Serwer was reporting the amount of federal and state taxes factored into consumers’ gasoline costs, noting that Georgia had temporarily cut its gas taxes. His report on “stubbornly high” gas prices was filled with economic malfeasance:

• It’s their money anyway: Serwer said other states were considering gas tax cuts. “But there’s some downside,” he said. “Number one, the states lose hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue, and number two, it may discourage conservation. On the other hand, maybe we all need a break.” The idea that tax relief is a loss to the government is the standard media approach – ignoring the fact that consumers get to keep more of their hard-earned money.
  
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The misery and loss of life following Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans make it the worst calamity to hit the United States since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. But after 9/11, many journalists insisted that their correct stance was rigid neutrality, refusing to call terrorists "terrorists" and insisting objectivity would be compromised by wearing lapel pins with the American flag. In contrast, journalists showed no similar desire for neutrality in covering this disaster.

As television showed thousands of hurricane victims suffering in designated shelters without food or water, distressed reporters dropped any pretense of neutrality and began lambasting the Bush administration's response — even though it was not at all clear whether the failure was with the federal, state or local governments, or some combination of all three. That didn't matter to media critics, many of whom cheered the new "passion" of TV's journalist/activists:

A day after CNN reported poll numbers which show a small minority of Americans blame President Bush for a slow response to the disaster in New Orleans, CBS News today reported their new polling data, which were considerably more negative for the Bush administration. The poll, unlike CNN’s, doesn’t deal with “blame” for the New Orleans disaster but rather focused on the adequacy of the governmental response. Nevertheless, correspondent Thalia Assuras on today’s Early Show chose the most negative poll numbers, failing to give a broader context to her story than the "bitter political sniping" which she portrayed as almost a natural reaction to the Bush administration's response, rather than a calculated liberal Democratic strategy: "Well the government's response to the catastrophe has unleashed bitter political sniping here in Washington, with much of the criticism directed against the Bush administration. Americans are struck by the images they have seen, and now we know just how strong their feelings are."

Assuras relayed most of the polling data but failed to report two numbers I found striking. For example, the initial public reaction from the earliest days of Katrina’s aftermath was positive, with 54 percent favoring the government’s reaction and only 12 percent opposed, and presently 60 percent of poll respondents think the federal government is doing all it can do now to address the crisis. These polling numbers, I believe, show the evolving public reaction to the stark images from New Orleans as the liberally biased national media pushed the blame towards FEMA's Mike Brown and President Bush while downplaying or ignoring the misjudgments on the ground by Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco.

Below is a transcript of Assuras’s piece, including the set-up by host Harry Smith and the opening credits tease by Hannah Storm:

The Orlando Sentinel profiles Josh Fountain, who will be anchor of a new show on the Q Television Network. That's Q as in queer.

"Right now, QTN is a subscription channel that's available in only a few major markets, such as New York and San Francisco. But cable companies around the nation, including Central Florida's Bright House Networks, are looking at QTN to see whether they should add it to their lineup."

Says Fountatin, "I want to be the gay Dan Rather, except better-looking."

As he explains it, his new national news show will be "the first 30-minute news about queer news."

Of course, when he worked for a Fox affiliate, the Sentinel reports that "he mostly stayed in the closet when it came to his sexuality."

Tuesday's Times story by Simon Romero on the efforts of Houston businesses to assist in Katrina relief efforts was fairly unobjectionable -- but the version that appeared in the Times' international edition (the International Herald Tribune) contained some political raunch sure to delight European readers of a left-wing bent.

Blogger Austin Bay says, "note the sharpened rhetorical daggers" in the lead sentence of the IHT version: "No one would accuse this city of being timid in the scramble to profit from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina."

That bit didn't make it into the stateside edition of the Times.

For more on local reaction to the Times story, see the website of Houston's local ABC station, where some found the international version "overly critical, ill-timed, and in poor taste."

Today, lacking a voter and a congressional majority, the liberals have not the constitutional means to either create or support legislation. The previous administration made judicial appointments at will, objections being far and few between. Upon taking office, President Bush’s appointments were blocked.

For the past four years, Schumer has crusaded to give ideology — a nominee's personal or political views — a more open role in confirmation grilling. He has been "especially good" at articulating the stakes in the Supreme Court fight as an "extraordinary battle between competing and radically different judicial philosophies," said Ralph Neas, president of People for the American Way, one of the liberal groups opposed to Roberts. - The Journal News

A couple of weeks ago, I addressed a piece from the AP's Jennifer Loven. Loven, the wife of a former Clinton administration environmental official, found it necessary to write, as gasoline prices were rising, about how George W. Bush was probably the greatest consumer of gasoline. Well, after almost two weeks of absolutely relentless criticism of the President for not taking Katrina seriously, the AP has run a Loven article today (Many Chiefs in White House Recovery Effort) which criticizes the President for having his administration focused on the Hurricane relief effort.