This American Life had a couple of the people from the EMS convention talking about being turned away from that one bridge by cops with guns. Finally they (white couple with rolly luggage and a few other people) got let in, but the rest of the people with them were still turned away. It just doesn't seem like stuff that would happen in 2005 in the US.

I'm watching Tommy Lee in college instead of doing my own homework. It's way more fun, I tell you what.

Timelies

Is it me, or is it that the zoo people are hiring the wrong directors to film Panda porn?

How much money goes into finding out what Panda's find hot? i mean, are these video boring? Its there something the scientists missed? Is the porn really bad? How do you tell if you made bad Panda porn? And my final question, is there someone out there who makes GOOD Panda porn?

Kara says thank you for the birthday wishes. She was very pleased to have them read to her.

Um... feels like I should segue into a joke about "What's black and white and humps all over?" but I can't quite make it work. I'm blaming it on the cold medicine.

Did you see where an Appeals Court upheld the right to detain an American citizen indefinitely, without charges and without legal representation on suspicion of being a terrorist? (Mind you, I think it's already obscene if done to a non-citizen.) Detention camps for the displaced is rather in line with that sort of thinking, right?

Happy Birthday, Trudy!!! Hope yiour day is fabulous!

Did you see where an Appeals Court upheld the right to detain an American citizen indefinitely, without charges and without legal representation on suspicion of being a terrorist? (Mind you, I think it's already obscene if done to a non-citizen.) Detention camps for the displaced is rather in line with that sort of thinking, right?

No. I need to start watching CNN then because I am OUTRAGED! It's not right to do that sto a non-US citizen, and definitely equally (not more or less) wrong to do that to a citizen. This is placing too much powerin the hands of government officials. The idea of such an atrocity occuring because of SUSPICION?! Outragous! The bar for evidence that would warrent uspicion will lower intself to the point of, like, Marshall Law. Which is NOT cool.

To be clear, I have seen a lot of racism in the analysis.

I suspect it's at least as much a class issue as a race issue. Not that the two issues are all that separate in much of the country.

Did you see where an Appeals Court upheld the right to detain an American citizen indefinitely, without charges and without legal representation on suspicion of being a terrorist? (Mind you, I think it's already obscene if done to a non-citizen.)

I've heard about that. Fourth Circuit, which seems to take great pride in being right-winger-than-thou.

OK, seriously, why didn't I know how adorable Tommy Lee Goes To College is? Damn, I love VH1 on the weekends.

From a Newsweek article about federal response to Katrina:

Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a motherly but steely figure known by the nickname Queen Bee, knew that she needed help. But she wasn't quite sure what. At about 8 p.m., she spoke to Bush. "Mr. President," she said, "we need your help. We need everything you've got."

Bush, the governor later recalled, was reassuring. But the conversation was all a little vague. Blanco did not specifically ask for a massive intervention by the active-duty military. "She wouldn't know the 82nd Airborne from the Harlem Boys' Choir," said an official in the governor's office, who did not wish to be identified talking about his boss's conversations with the president. There are a number of steps Bush could have taken, short of a full-scale federal takeover, like ordering the military to take over the pitiful and (by now) largely broken emergency communications system throughout the region. But the president, who was in San Diego preparing to give a speech the next day on the war in Iraq, went to bed.

The movie "The Siege", about martial law in Brooklyn after a string of Al Qaeda type bombings, was on History Channel last night. It went straight to the denial of citizen rights, a scene of the torture and murder by the military of a suspected terrorist (who turned out to be innocent), and such like that. Holy cow, someone at History Channel's got some balls.