I'll be on the road today and tomorrow. Last Night in Little Rock and TChris will fill in some during my absence, and I'll try to get a post or two in, but there also will be an open thread each day, like this one, for readers to take over.

Say hello to the new blog Fema Failures, by a doctor in Washington, DC who writes:

I am outraged at the response of FEMA to Hurricane Katrina. Consequently, I have created a site expressly designed to list these failures. Users are welcome to use this site to: 1) Better inform themselves regarding the remarkable negligence and dissimulations of FEMA and the Bush Administration 2) Add information of their own.

New information will be added as it comes to light.

For those of you who have more to say....

(Note to new commenters, please read the comments policy. Name-calling, profanity and personal attacks on other commenters isn't allowed. Nor is reprinting the full text of news articles. Links must be in html format or they skew the site. Instructions are in the comment box.)

I've been dominating the conversation. It's your turn now, I'll be back tonight.

Update: One more on FEMA's ineptitude: When they finally sent supplies, they sent those intended for a chemical attack:

" After the authorities in Baton Rouge had prepared a field hospital for victims of the storm, Fema sent its first batch of supplies, all of which were designed for use against chemical attack, including drugs such as Cipro, which is designed for use against anthrax. "We called them up and asked them: 'Why did you send that, and they said that's what it says in the book'," said a Baton Rouge official. "

[hat tip Patriot Daily.]

Update: Commercial airlines are beginning evacuations from New Orleans. And Carnival Cruise ships will house thousands.

Blogads is having trouble with one of their image servers that spilled onto other servers. While they are fixing it, I stripped the links to ads on TalkLeft because the site was loading so slowly, if at all.

Hopefully, this will make it faster for those of you reading and commenting.

Update: Ads are back.

I'm turning comment registration back on. There have been too many annonymous comments from people not taking the time to include their user name. Also, there have been too many comments with urls not in html format.

If you have a problem with the registration or get a validation error message, send me an email and I'll re-evaluate.

TalkLeft went down for a few hours apparently while I was out today....the hosting service is having trouble ..thanks for your patience. Here's what their site says:

We are currently seeing issues at both AT&T and TWTelecom in traces from various locations. If your routes travel along those networks, you may experience high latency and/or complete failure to reach your site or other services. We’ve sent a note to the main NOC at P10, asking them for a status, since no doubt they are already aware of the issue, and we’ll post whatever we get back from them.

Due to the problems with Typekey, comment registration is turned off. Anyone can comment. I'm rebuilding all the individual entries now so it works on older entries. I have to leave for court soon, so here's an open thread for you.

Great reads: Digby on "judy in da skies" and Actor Tim Russert . Arianna's latest on The Judy Tsunami.

Several people e-mailed today to let me know they are having problems logging in to post comments. If you are also having problems, please let me know here or by e-mail. We're trying to fix it.

Update: I have no idea what is wrong with the TypeKey - everyone is getting "validation" errors - I just turned off the registration requirement. Hopefully, we won't get a flood of trolls and it will be fixed soon.

Last week, TalkLeft contributer Last Night in Little Rock, aka John Wesley Hall, wrote a moving post about his wife's trip to Crawford. Arianna really liked it and asked me if I'd like to post it at Huffington Post. Of course, my answer was yes. Here it is. Thanks, Arianna!

Update: John Amato of Crooks and Liars has a post at HuffPo too - on the she-pundit with long blonde hair.

First, a major thanks to TChris for posting great stuff today. I headed off for court this morning, and one thing followed another, and I just got back. I haven't seen any news, so here's a place for you to discuss whatever you want while I take a few hours to unravel and get caught up.

We haven't had one of these in a while, and since I've got a lot of work to do today, the time is right.

Also, if you've had trouble posting comments the past few days, let me know in the comments. One poster has, and we're having a hard time getting him and his new computer past the typekey screen. It would help to know if it's happening to anyone else.