by Last Night in Little Rock

For no apparent reason, the Federal Emergency Mismanagement Agency refused to permit Wal-Mart and Sam's Club stores in Jefferson Parish, LA to reopen. Getting no explanation and taking matters into his own hands, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff ordered them to reopen for the people as noted here.

by TChris

Some Democrats remember that they’re supposed to stand up for the poor and powerless, not for the wealthy and their lobbyists. Here’s John Kerry:

The reality of what millions of Americans face every day was brought home this week. Americans saw on television the grave economic disparity that exists in this country. They were forced to confront the struggles that many African American families have faced for years due to lack of jobs and critical services to help open the doors of opportunity. They saw the people left behind literally and figuratively by the politicians who control Washington these days.

Some displaced children who have never been vaccinated will receive that basic service now that they’ve made it to a shelter. Kerry reminds us that 11 million other children aren’t receiving adequate health care. Must their homes be destroyed before they receive help?

by TChris

A proposed amendment to the Massachusetts Constitution, banning gay marriage while permitting civil unions, appears unlikely to survive a second legislative session. A majority of the state’s 200 legislators must approve the proposed amendment in each of two consecutive years before it goes to voters. Last year, the proposal squeaked by on a vote of 105-92. This year, according to an AP survey, the steam has gone out of the state's anti-gay marriage movement.

The survey, conducted between Sept. 6-9, found at least 104 lawmakers who plan to vote against the proposed constitutional amendment, which would ban gay marriage but create civil unions.

Law Prof Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, has five questions for Judge John Roberts in an op-ed in today's New York Times.

On a lighter note, I'm kind of partial to TChris's questions:

Did anyone in the White House ask you about Roe v. Wade? If the word abortion came up during any conversation with a member of the White House, please repeat that conversation for us. Was Guantanamo mentioned during your job interview? If given the chance, would you go duck hunting with Dick Cheney? Who should decide elections: voters or the Supreme Court?

More questions from TChris here. On a most serious note, I recommend Elaine Cassell's article on how death penalty jurisprudence will change under Roberts.

Here are some of the criminal law decisions authored by Judge Roberts.

Confirmation hearings begin at 11:30 ET for Judge John Roberts. You can watch them here. If confirmed, he will be the youngest Chief Justice in the past 200 years. That's important, because it means he will be shaping our jurisprudence for decades to come.

Roberts is expected to be confirmed, although his questioning may become testy at times. According to Yale Law School Professor Jack Balkin, there are good reasons for the Democrats to stand up to the President and ask Roberts the tough questions.

Poverty, Race and a National Shame. No, that's not from Move-On or Daily Kos. It's from Newsweek, and it's the cover story.

Like many of us, Nora Ephron at Huffington Post has been puzzled by Dick Cheney's absence during Katrina and doesn't buy that it's because he was on vacation. She wonders whether the President and Cheney have had a falling out.

Could Cheney – and not just his aides -- possibly be involved in the Valerie Plame episode? Is Cheney not speaking to Karl Rove? Does the airplane/bicycle incident figure into this in any way? And how is it possible that the President is off on vacation and the Vice President is too? Not that it matters particularly if the President is on vacation; on some level, the President is always on vacation. But where was Cheney?

A few months ago, I heard of a lunch conversation that Cheney had with a political type in Wyoming. I have no idea if it's true or not, but it makes some sense. Here's the tale:

As President Bush begins his third tour of the Gulf Coast, here's what the rescue workers around him are seeing in New Orleans - a view of which he undoubtedly will be spared:

Police, troops and rescue crews in New Orleans pursued their round-the-clock mission of fishing out rotting corpses and pressing lingering survivors to leave their homes....A National Guard unit patrolled one neighbourhood, trying to persuade the old and infirm to abandon their homes, as nearly half a million others have done, and were inevitably stumbling across decomposing bodies in the streets.

"It ain't a pretty sight," said Sergeant James Terrel as his men went house to house. "I don't recommend walking down there. Even a lot of my guys don't want to see this kind of thing... and some of them have been in Iraq."

Mark Fiore outdoes himself. This is his best ever, please watch the whole thing.

The Sunday Mail has an agonizing report, quoting a rescue doctor in New Orleans:

Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leaving them to die in agony as they evacuated hospitals, The Mail on Sunday can reveal. With gangs of rapists and looters rampaging through wards in the flooded city, senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive.

In an extraordinary interview with The Mail on Sunday, one New Orleans doctor told how she 'prayed for God to have mercy on her soul' after she ignored every tenet of medical ethics and ended the lives of patients she had earlier fought to save.

If TalkLeft's blog traffic the past ten days is typical of other left-leaning blogs, there can be no doubt that the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe is the blogger story of the year - and that the Bush Administration is in big trouble.

by Last Night in Little Rock

Time.com posted this evening has several articles about Katrina, as a disaster for the victims, the people of the United States, and for the Bush Administration, with one aide virtually admitting that they really blew it: