I’m not a great Anne Rice fan. But this piece, Do You Know What It Means to Lose New Orleans?, is heart-breaking.

But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us “Sin City,” and turned your backs.

George W. “Leadership Vacuum” Bush better watch out. Now the vampires are after him, too.

The Australian media hasn’t been very good at keeping government accountable, and it’s about to get worse with the new all-conservative, all-the-time Australian Senate. Cross-media ownership laws will doubtless be abolished and Murdoch will be rubbing his hands with glee at the prospect of buying up every last remaining independent traditional media outlet.

Which leads John Quiggin to speculate about the role of new media, and, specifically, blogs, in this brave new deregulated world

The other big question is technology. Would it be possible to put together something readable as an online newspaper, using blog software as the basis rather than the more elaborate content management software used by the Internet versions of mainstream papers? [...]

I would say yes. Blog-style CMSes are evolving rapidly, but already are substantially better than most of the horrendous websites developed for traditional newspapers.

Furthermore, I think it’s going to be a matter of extreme urgency that designers, journalists, and technologists begin to collaborate, to develop a more effective response to the shrinking and lessening of our media.

More on this soon.

Some people ask Hulk why Hulk not run for president.

Hulk have simple answer.

Hulk not smart enough to be president and Hulk knows it, unlike stupid puny human Bush in office now. Only saving grace of puny human Bush is his face looks like MONKEY.

HELLO MONKEY!!!!

Genius.

from The Hulk’s Diary

The big blogging buzz right now is a Livejournal from a female soldier in Iraq—so big, in fact that no one is willing to link to her for fear that she’ll be found out and forced to pull it down. Here’s a sample.

When they update the list of soldiers killed in this war, one of them from this week will be from my unit. He died on Sunday, the victim of a car crash. It was his first week. We had the service today, and what I remember distinctly is thinking that it was a great advertisement for the seperation of church and state.

while the government refuses to increase Medicare payments to GPs in any significant way, it has increased the Medicare levy to pay for the Gulf War and the East Timor expedition; thus the Australian government has been willing to raise the health care tax for military adventures, but not for health care.

From Frankenblog

Lots of good stuff.

Via Calpundit:

http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001483.html

(curtain opens on four men in suits in a well-lit conference room.)

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT: …so I know you’ve studied the tapes. I doubt that I’m telling you anything you don’t know. But it turns out that he was eating so much because he had to. He needed it in order to turn into a butterfly.

(pause)

That’s why the caterpillar was so hungry, you see.