Bush's vacation and New Orleans' poor

...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. All the focus now must be on rescuing the survivors. Beyond that lies a long and painful recovery, which must begin with a national vow to help all the storm victims and to save and repair New Orleans.

People who think of that graceful city and the rest of the Mississippi Delta as tourist destinations must have been reminded, watching the rescue operations, that the real residents of this area are in the main poor and black. The only resources most of them will have to fall back on will need to come from the federal government. (NYT)

In a society hooked on access to instant and overwhelming quantities of information, it was remarkable how much was unknown about the scope of the disaster wreaked by Katrina; the storm had simply destroyed much of the information network. More often than not, calls to southern Louisiana were answered by a polite recording saying that hurricane damage had rendered telephone service impossible. In most of the storm-socked area, there was no power to run computers, much less pumps to remove the water. The Times-Picayune, New Orleans's main newspaper, was doing a heroic job of covering the crisis until suddenly, at 9:40 yesterday morning, its entire staff had to evacuate the building to flee the rising waters coming through breached levees. On CNN, harried reporters told their anchors on camera that they didn't know much more than what they could see from the hotel rooftops on which they had taken refuge. (WaPo)

Roberts and civil rights

Today's Washington Post:

In the early 1980s, a young intellectual lawyer named John G. Roberts Jr. was part of the vanguard of a conservative political revolution in civil rights, advocating new legal theories and helping enforce the Reagan administration's effort to curtail the use of courts to remedy racial and sexual discrimination....

He wrote vigorous defenses, for example, of the administration's version of a voting rights bill, opposed by Congress, that would have narrowed the reach of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. He challenged arguments by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in favor of busing and affirmative action. He described a Supreme Court decision broadening the rights of individuals to sue states for civil rights violations as causing "damage" to administration policies, and he urged that legislation be drafted to reverse it. And he wrote a memo arguing that it was constitutionally acceptable for Congress to strip the Supreme Court of its ability to hear broad classes of civil rights cases.