Stop squabbling, we're all on the same team.

Everyone can agree: building below sea level in a region prone to hurricanes was a bad idea. The people who made that decision have been dust for centuries.

The point is that the Government screwed it up.

Lots of blame to go around before the storm and decades of it. Afterward, it was the responsibility of the Federal Government to say: "There are millions of people there and hundreds of billions in property. Since we have this problem, we should fix it up so well it'll never break again to protect our citizens and our country's investment in this area."

This isn't some socialist thing - if a "Federal" government has any purpose at all, it's to deal with issues that individual regions cannot. It makes good economic sense to do this.

Indonesia is a third-world country, very conservative. Look how they handled the aftermath of the tsunami - and they didn't have the five days' notice the US had for Katrina. Look how they've continued to systematically clean up afterward. Look how they've poured money into Bali after the bombings, rightfully seeing that its tourist trade is a huge asset that they must preserve.

The fact is that the US government hasn't done anything like this. The reconstruction has been largely muffed. In particular, these levees will not hold against the next Katrina, and there will be one, perhaps even this year, but certainly in the next 20.

If we had rational, competent government they'd pull out all the stops to fix New Orleans, because it's not just the only humane and compassionate thing to do but because it makes huge financial sense - you have a greatly valuable asset that you're in danger of losing but could preserve for a small fraction of its value.

But of course instead the money is going to destroy a country thousands of miles away.

You wonder if protests actually achieve anything. But if "The Man" is eager to shut 'em down, perhaps they know something I don't.

Keep up the good work, I'll send you some $$$.

The Times says this is supposed to lay the rumour about Palin's last child to rest - but how does this do so?

We now know that 1) the daughter is sloppy with birth control 2) she's fertile - in my mind this increases the chance that the original rumour is true.

Regardless, I just can't see any positive way that the Repigs can spin this one - perhaps the media will just let them off the hook, wouldn't we be surprised?

D'oh! Hadn't looked at the timings. Thanks!

There's *almost* enough time for it to be hers but I strongly doubt she'd get knocked up again immediately after having an illegitimate baby.

This is the Republican VP candidate.

The Republican party believe that they have every right to legislate morality. They think pre-marital sex is morally wrong and have for decades introduced bills to punish this behaviour. They believe that many of us are criminals for our personal consensual lifestyle choices.

The Republicans are big on "family values" so it's perfectly reasonable to ask them questions about this, particularly when this is exactly the behaviour that they themselves condemn.

Reading the thread, most people are pretty polite, and you know, after almost eight years of Republican mismanagement, hundreds of thousands of deaths, the plundering of the Treasury and the establishment of the endless Security State for the War Against Terror... let us say that I'm very understanding of people who are a mite hostile towards the architects of all this destruction.

"No matter how many times I look at something on a computer screen, it still takes printing it out to find the most basic errors."

I wouldn't allow production work to go out without being printed and proofed at least once - but that should be the last step.

If you can't find "the most basic errors" without printing, you should work on your proofreading skills, because you're going to go through literally dozens of printings and waste reams of paper.

Though I simply couldn't finish the Baroque Cycle. What was the editor thinking? Too chatty, and after finishing the first book, I realized that nothing much had happened...

handcuffs, an orange suit, a perp walk and a long, enforced vacation.

CREW rocks. Some of these "public servants" are gratuitously dishonest.

Aviatrix is just such a nice word, much better than sculptress, for example. Can't we just keep the ix gendered words? Since this is a family website, I shan't list them, but we do love them so.

(Very good news about your Sikh pilot. Running into people different to you in the real world is what really educates you about strangers. My experience of Muslims is largely due to thousands of New York City taxi rides in a fleet that's mostly Muslim - and it's almost unanimously of a well-educated, polite, educated and concerned group of people...)

"Vince. He's a penguin." Hysterical. But please, Berkeley - don't go.

The real question is, "Is it legal for them to be conducting government business with a personal account."

No, the real question is whether it's ethical for our employees, these politicians, to hide what they are doing while working for us.

If I started using an external address at my job, I'd be immediately told to stop, and fired if I did not.