80 percent of Republicans are just Democrats who don’t know what’s going on.

Robert F. Jennedy Jr, in an extraordinary speech, “We Must Take America Back” which is worth reading in full. Thanks to Ray Ison for the link.

Lest we get carried away by that Bush speech about reconstructing New Orleans, here’s an extract from Paul Krugman’s column.

It’s a given that the Bush administration, which tried to turn Iraq into a laboratory for conservative economic policies, will try the same thing on the Gulf Coast. The Heritage Foundation, which has surely been helping Karl Rove develop the administration’s recovery plan, has already published a manifesto on post-Katrina policy. It calls for waivers on environmental rules, the elimination of capital gains taxes and the private ownership of public school buildings in the disaster areas. And if any of the people killed by Katrina, most of them poor, had a net worth of more than $1.5 million, Heritage wants to exempt their heirs from the estate tax.

Still, even conservatives admit that deregulation, tax cuts and privatization won’t be enough. Recovery will require a lot of federal spending. And aside from the effect on the deficit – we’re about to see the spectacle of tax cuts in the face of both a war and a huge reconstruction effort – this raises another question: how can discretionary government spending take place on that scale without creating equally large-scale corruption?

Update: Dead Ringers on BBC Radio 4 tonight had a lovely spoof Bush speech. It began: “My fellow amphibians…”.

Lots of rumours on the Net today that Time-Warner is about to do a deal with Microsoft to merge AOL and MSN. And Google raised $4.18 billion in its second public offering. What will they do with it? My guess: something in the financial services area. Oh and Toshiba have released an updated version of the Libretto, the nicest sub-notebook computer ever made.

The great — and as yet unanswered — question about the Internet is whether it is really a revolutionary technology, in the sense of a force that overturns the established order. In the heady days of the late 1990s some of us thought it might be just such a thing. But I vividly remember a conversation I had about this at the time with an eminent academic colleague, a seasoned analyst of revolutions, and a genuinely wise man. We were both attending a seminar in the Whiteley Centre on San Juan Island in the Puget Sound — one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. We sat on the terrace overlooking the sea, smoking and talking. I outlined my reasons for thinking that the Net would sweep all before it. He listened, shook his head thoughtfully, puffed on his cigar, and said “We’ll see. We’ll see”.

His scepticism was justified. After an initial period of shock, the established order is getting to grips with the Net. And the Chinese are ahead of the game — shamefully aided and abetted by companies like Yahoo and Google and News Corporation, as this excellent piece by Isabel Hilton in Open Democracy shows. Sample:

The sentencing of the Chinese journalist Shi Tao to ten years in prison for “leaking state secrets” has two disturbing aspects. First, that Chinese citizens continue to be harassed and imprisoned for dealing in information that does not threaten state security and which, in any less authoritarian country, would be considered part of the normal currency of information exchange; second, that the Yahoo company assisted the Chinese government to track Shi Tao down, an identification that led to his arrest in November 2004 and conviction in April 2005.

Any government has the right to look after national security. But in China, national security is used as a catchall category that allows the authorities to imprison people whom they perceive as a threat less to the national interest but to the interests of the Chinese Communist Party. For the party, these are the same thing. By any reasonable measure, they are not.

More: Thanks to Kevin Cryan for pointing me to George Monbiot’s Guardian column, which makes the point even more forcefully.

One of the most irritating aspects of the Katrina disaster is the moralistic outrage that greets any attempt to point out that there may be a connection with global warming — a phenomenon about which the Bushites are in denial. How nice to see, then, a forthright New Yorker piece on the subject by Elizabeth Kolbert. Sample:

Though hurricanes are, in their details, extremely complicated, basically they all draw their energy from the same source: the warm surface waters of the ocean. This is why they form only in the tropics, and during the season when sea surface temperatures are highest. It follows that if sea surface temperatures increase — as they have been doing — then the amount of energy available to hurricanes will grow. In general, climate scientists predict that climbing CO2 levels will lead to an increase in the intensity of hurricanes, though not in hurricane frequency. (This increase will be superimposed on any natural cycles of hurricane activity.) Meanwhile, as sea levels rise—water expands as it warms — storm surges, like the one that breached the levees in New Orleans, will inevitably become more dangerous. In a paper published in Nature just a few weeks before Katrina struck, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported that wind-speed measurements made by planes flying through tropical storms showed that the “potential destructiveness” of such storms had “increased markedly” since the nineteen-seventies, right in line with rising sea surface temperatures.

It looks to me (and to some US journalists) that there’s now a concerted effort going on to control and limit the amount of free reporting being done in the disaster zone. See, for example, this report by NBC’s Justice Correspondent, Brian Williams:

An interesting dynamic is taking shape in this city, not altogether positive: after days of rampant lawlessness (making for what I think most would agree was an impossible job for the New Orleans Police Department during those first few crucial days of rising water, pitch-black nights and looting of stores) the city has now reached a near-saturation level of military and law enforcement.

In the areas we visited, the red berets of the 82nd Airborne are visible on just about every block. National Guard soldiers are ubiquitous. At one fire scene, I counted law enforcement personnel (who I presume were on hand to guarantee the safety of the firefighters) from four separate jurisdictions, as far away as Connecticut and Illinois.

And tempers are getting hot. While we were attempting to take pictures of the National Guard (a unit from Oklahoma) taking up positions outside a Brooks Brothers on the edge of the Quarter, the sergeant ordered us to the other side of the boulevard. The short version is: there won’t be any pictures of this particular group of Guard soldiers on our newscast tonight. Rules (or I suspect in this case an order on a whim) like those do not HELP the palpable feeling that this area is somehow separate from the United States.

At that same fire scene, a police officer from out of town raised the muzzle of her weapon and aimed it at members of the media… obvious members of the media… armed only with notepads. Her actions (apparently because she thought reporters were encroaching on the scene) were over the top and she was told.

There are automatic weapons and shotguns everywhere you look. It’s a stance that perhaps would have been appropriate during the open lawlessness that has long since ended on most of these streets.

Someone else points out on television as I post this: the fact that the National Guard now bars entry (by journalists) to the very places where people last week were barred from LEAVING (The Convention Center and Superdome) is a kind of perverse and perfectly backward postscript to this awful chapter in American history.

According to CNN,

WASHINGTON — Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen will replace FEMA director Michael Brown as the on-site head of hurricane relief operations in the Gulf Coast, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced Friday afternoon. Brown will head back to Washington from Louisiana to oversee the big picture, the official said.

I have this image of Brown painting the ‘big picture’ by numbers.

Interesting NYT column by David Brooks. Excerpt:

It has created as close to a blank slate as we get in human affairs, and given us a chance to rebuild a city that wasn’t working. We need to be realistic about how much we can actually change human behavior, but it would be a double tragedy if we didn’t take advantage of these unique circumstances to do something that could serve as a spur to antipoverty programs nationwide.

The first rule of the rebuilding effort should be: Nothing Like Before. Most of the ambitious and organized people abandoned the inner-city areas of New Orleans long ago, leaving neighborhoods where roughly three-quarters of the people were poor.

In those cultural zones, many people dropped out of high school, so it seemed normal to drop out of high school. Many teenage girls had babies, so it seemed normal to become a teenage mother. It was hard for men to get stable jobs, so it was not abnormal for them to commit crimes and hop from one relationship to another. Many people lacked marketable social skills, so it was hard for young people to learn these skills from parents, neighbors and peers.

If we just put up new buildings and allow the same people to move back into their old neighborhoods, then urban New Orleans will become just as rundown and dysfunctional as before.

Thoughtful — and sobering — Guardian column by Timothy Garton-Ash.

You think the looting, rape and armed terror that emerged within hours in New Orleans would never happen in nice, civilised Europe? Think again. It happened here, all over our continent only 60 years ago. Read the memoirs of Holocaust and gulag survivors, Norman Lewis’s account of Naples in 1944, or the recently republished anonymous diary of a German woman in Berlin in 1945. It happened again in Bosnia just 10 years ago. And that wasn’t even the force majeure of a natural disaster. Europe’s were man-made hurricanes.

The basic point is the same: remove the elementary staples of organised, civilised life – food, shelter, drinkable water, minimal personal security – and we go back within hours to a Hobbesian state of nature, a war of all against all. Some people, some of the time, behave with heroic solidarity; most people, most of the time, engage in a ruthless fight for individual and genetic survival. A few become temporary angels, most revert to being apes.

And, while we’re on the subject, how about this from today’s New York Times?

Florida’s attorney general has already filed a fraud lawsuit against a man who started one of the earliest networks of Web sites – katrinahelp.com, katrinadonations.com and others – that stated they were collecting donations for storm victims.

In Missouri, a much wider constellation of Internet sites – with names like parishdonations.com and katrinafamilies.com – displayed pictures of the flood-ravaged South and drove traffic to a single site, InternetDonations.org, a nonprofit entity with apparent links to white separatist groups.

The registrant of those Web sites was sued by the state of Missouri yesterday for violating state fund-raising law and for “omitting the material fact that the ultimate company behind the defendants’ Web sites supports white supremacy.”

Late yesterday afternoon, the Federal Bureau of Investigation put the number of Web sites claiming to deal in Katrina information and relief – some legitimate, others not – at “2,300 and rising.” Dozens of suspicious sites claiming links to legitimate charities are being investigated by state and federal authorities.