NEW ORLEANS IS SINKING

Here is an interesting map, below, of the home towns of Iraqi War fatalities.

http://icasualties.org/oif/images/US_City.jpg

The war is not being fought by those usually lumped in together when thinking of American soldiers. Not by farm boys from Kansas or Iowa.  Nor by poor boys from the Mississippi delta or from the hillbilly sections of the South.  Or if it is, these types of soldiers tend to die less often than those soldiers from America's major urban regions.

Note the clusters.  Boston to Northern VA (urban Mass, BTW; not western Mass); Pittsburgh to Detroit; Chicago to Milwaukee; urban centers in the Midwest & Rockies; LA-SF-Seattle.  A few Interstate highway corridors.   Interesting how the ‘South’ in general has a very dispersed arrangements of home towns.  So it is not the Confederate Army, any more.  And these are not just the Blue States, but also the Blue Counties in the Blue States
http://www.dailyreckoning.com/Featured/BK95.html

New Mexico's state treasurer and his predecessor were charged Friday with racketeering, accused of steering state business to investment advisers in return for hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050917/ap_on_re_us/new_mexico_treasurer_2

The mini-mart, long ago cleaned out by looters, was nonetheless bathed in light, including the empty, roped-off gas pumps. The motorcade route through the district was partially lit no more than 30 minutes before POTUS drove through. And yet last night, no more than an hour after the President departed, the lights went out. The entire area was plunged into total darkness again, to audible groans. It's enough to make some of the folks here who witnessed it... jump to certain conclusions.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/Pages/Sept05/170905power.htm

That's inventive, anyway. But then, there's long been an aura of self-invention about Severin.

The young man known at Vassar as Jimmy Severino is now Jay Severin III. The former B-grade political consultant would have his listeners believe he was once a top-level national strategist.

So what can we conclude from this intriguing episode? Well, journalistic standards aren't the only thing in decline.

These days, Pulitzer Prize winners just aren't what they used to be, either.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/09/16/severins_phony_pulitzer/

FEMA bureaucrats yesterday infuriated exhausted Hurricane Katrina responders and lawmakers with yet another blunder.

Federal Emergency Management Agency leaders ordered officials in the agency's Preparedness Division to stop all Katrina relief efforts and begin a long-planned move from agency headquarters to new offices in Virginia by Monday.

"They're no longer focused on the gigantic Katrina job and are putting their files into boxes instead," said one outraged FEMA insider. "This is simply incredible considering that the entire staff has been an integral part of the response effort."

Taking staff off hurricane duty is "disruptive when we need every single soul here to work on Katrina," the source said.
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/347200p-296252c.html


[I wonder what Mr. Israel’s religious background is.]
Mr. Marino's narrative starts on the last trading day of December 1998, more than three years after Bayou was founded by Samuel Israel III, a scion of a commodity-trading family that is well known to Wall Street. On that final day of a tumultuous year in the markets - three months earlier, another hedge fund known as Long-Term Capital Management had nearly collapsed, causing widespread disruption in the financial world - Mr. Israel called two of his colleagues into a conference room.

All three men knew the situation was dire at Bayou - the funds' losses had vastly overwhelmed their gains for more than two years. Something had to be done, and fast.

The solution, devised by Mr. Israel and a lieutenant, James Marquez, was simple: produce a fake audit of the funds' performance and try to make up the losses next year.
...
And while Mr. Israel came off as a spirited, affable prankster to outsiders, to close associates he could be demeaning and threatening, even to the point of wielding a gun at Mr. Marino in 2002 when he refused to follow Mr. Israel's orders, according to Mr. Marino's letter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/17/business/17bayou.html?hp&ex=1127016000&en=6433c6fde82413a1&ei=5094&partner=AOL

Some people say that racial profiling will make terrorism a self-fulfilling prophecy, or that it’s somehow unfair to designate certain individuals as being more likely to commit an act of terror than another.

They’re wrong.

If 19 blond-haired, blue-eyed, Caucasian Jews had plowed into the World Trade Center with two jumbo jets, I would demand to be interrogated every time I browsed Cheapflights.com.
http://www.dailytarheel.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2005/09/13/4326450119685?in_archive=1

The Phony (Mossad)
Al Qaeda Cell in Palestine
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/fakealqaeda.html

NEW ORLEANS IS SINKING
BY JIM WILSON
Published on: September 11, 2001
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/research/1282151.html