Here are some thoughts on Katrina...
On the local leadership...
So I'm asking Congress, please investigate this now. Take whatever idiot they have at the top of whatever agency and give me a better idiot. Give me a caring idiot. Give me a sensitive idiot. Just don't give me the same idiot.-Aaron Broussard, President of Jefferson Parish, La. (hat tip to Vincent Carroll)
On what Charity to pick...
Charity Navigator lists relief agencies that get three or four star ratings-the highest the group gives out.
The Better Business Bureau Wise Giving Alliance offers various info about the charities.
The IRS provides tips on giving.
And on what is the most American game of all; the blame game...
The urge to blame is an innate human impulse dating back a million years or more. It's an impulse that travels through our bodies to our fingertips, as we all saw in the frenzied finger-pointing over Hurricane Katrina.
Just as meteorologists and coastal engineers predicted the hurricane and flooding, there are "blame researchers" who foresaw the storm of words and pointed fingers that followed. They weren't surprised when politicians, victims and the media angrily affixed blame for the inadequate levee system and deadly slow rescue efforts. In fact, they see the tragedy through the prism of an academic question: can our blame impulses weed out ineptitude, improve conditions and save lives?
Modern America is beset by blame-mongering. At ShiftTheBlame.com you can buy a "calibrated blame-shifting device" for $2.95. It's a giant foam had with the words "It's Your Fault!" on the pointer finger. Run by East Bank Communications, an ad agency in Portland, Ore. the Web site offers tongue-in-cheek mantras: "You have everyone but yourself to blame." "It's not you, it's the printer." The jokes ring true because finding blame is an American Preoccupation...
Hat tip to the Wall Street Journal.
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