—Can’t help you, I’m afraid. Woke up yesterday to a note from the little guy stuck to my monitor letting me know he’d lit out early for Port Arthur with a couple of militia dudes we met at the local shooting range.  From what I can gather, all he took with him—besides his modified Romanian PSL sniper rifle—is a pocket GPS system, some Gortex socks, a couple of Power Bars,

Me: “Well, it could be worse.  I mean, at least Shepard Smith is in Texas this time…” Long:  “I hear you. Which, that reminds me.  Any truth to the rumor he had flippers grafted to his feet in preparation for this one?  Because even though I ain’t one to root for wholesale flooding, I think it’d be kinda cool to see ol’ Shep reporting from deep inside the storm surge

Don’t know about all of you, but I, for one, am completely at ease knowing that George Bush has put away the guitar and the cowboy hat, and that this time he really really cares. Although, judging from this latest round of flooding, the streets of New Orleans don’t seem to appreciate the effort.  Ungrateful, hard-hearted streets.

In a typically defeatist AP article on Iraq (suicide bombers, US deaths, factional strife, etc.), the 12th paragraph finally yields this bit of good news, buried about midway through the piece: Less than a month before a national referendum on Iraq’s new constitution, the government’s campaign to win support for the charter has won the critical backing of the most influential Shiite religious leader. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, meeting with

From CBS5: The presence of the supernatural and the influence of voodoo long have been synonymous with New Orleans. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, members of the U.S. military are saying that there’s something spooky going on and it’s not just images of death and destruction that’s haunting them. By all accounts, the Sophie B. Wright Middle School in New Orleans sits empty and evacuated except for military personnel

protein wisdom is BlogPulse’s Blog of the Week—which, so far as I can tell, is an honor that brings with it no attendant prize money, and is quite unlikely to attract the kind of hot teenaged blog groupies that, say, Hewitt or “Hindrocket” routinely reel in. The sexists.

A FEMA spokesman talking to FOXNews’ Jeff Goldblatt from New Orleans’ 9th Ward reports that there have been no confirmed breaches or seepages to the levee system, though the area continues to fill up with water.  The current thinking is that storm surging is overtopping the levee walls at the Industrial Street Canal. FEMA is pulling back—there’s not much they can do while water is coming in, the spokesman says—but

“Goodness!  Guess I don’t handle the spicy foods like I used to!  Sorry about that, underpants.”

For those of you interested in war coverage that goes beyond coalition casualty reports and long, ideologically-framed narratives put out by the news weeklies, check out this presentation of operations that took place Aug 27-Sep 17th in the West of Iraq around the Syrian border.  The piece was developed by Steve Schippert, Marvin Hutchens and Bill Roggio, and posted at The Fourth Rail with the following introduction: The pace and