Sherry Chandler

All week, Mr. Bush and the right have been trying to re-write history (again):

President Bush long ago accepted responsibility for the federal response to Hurricane Katrina. But now his administration and its allies are using the California disaster, with its affluent victims and reverse 911 telephone-warning system, to revisit Louisiana’s handling of the 2005 hurricane — and, in the process, to rewrite the story of one of the Bush administration’s biggest setbacks.

There is no doubt that state and local officials were partly to blame for the slow and inefficient response to Hurricane Katrina. And people on all sides of the hurricane vs. wildfires debate agree the storm, which put nearly an entire city under water, flooding evacuation routes and knocking out vital communications links, was a disaster of far greater magnitude, and thus California and New Orleans cannot be compared.

Yet the president drew the contrast on Thursday in California when, appearing with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, he said, “It makes a significant difference when you have somebody in the Statehouse willing to take the lead.” The remark was widely viewed as a veiled swipe at Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a Louisiana Democrat, who says she resents it.

See also this previous post and comments.

But it turns out that there is an ugly side to this Californian model of disaster relief:

Terri Trujillo, who helps the immigrants, checked on those in the canyons, urging them to leave, too, when she left her house in Rancho Peñasquitos ahead of the fires.

Ms. Trujillo and others who help the immigrants said they saw several out in the fields as the fires approached and ash fell on them. She said many were afraid to lose their jobs.

“There were Mercedeses and Jaguars pulling out, people evacuating, and the migrants were still working,” said Enrique Morones, who takes food and blankets to the immigrants’ camps. “It’s outrageous.”

…

Wayne A. Cornelius, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, who studies border questions, said that if the past was a guide there would be more friction over the fires and their effects on illegal immigrants.

“San Diego likes its illegal migrants as invisible as possible,” Mr. Cornelius said. “So whenever something happens that calls attention to their presence, it is fodder for the local anti-immigration forces.”

PZ Myers at Pharyngula started this meme as a means of demonstrating evolution in cyberspace. It’s sort of interesting to follow the string and watch the questions mutate. And this of course is only one string. (Hector’s pup, it’s a hoot just to see what people call their blogs.)

I stole the photo from The Primate Diaries.

As much as I hate to be accused of poopishness (especially of the old variety), I think I will not make a direct attempt to propagate myself. My genetic information is not that robust and so I will be content to be one of those occasional dead-ends that arise on the evolutionary tree.

However, if any of my readers is interested in a case of spontaneous generation, you may considered yourself tapped.

The rules:

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”. Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

• You can leave them exactly as is.
• You can delete any one question.
• You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change “The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…” to “The best time travel novel in Westerns is…”, or “The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is…”, or “The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is…”.
• You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”.
• You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

The lineage:

• My great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is Flying Trilobite.
• My great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock.
• My great-great-great-great-grandparent is Primate Diaries.
• My great-great-great-grandparent is Thus Spake Zuska.
• My great-great-grandparent is Kate.
• My great-grandparent is Finally Maturing.
• My grantparent is Parts-n-Pieces
• My parent is I See Invisible People.

The Questions and Answers:

• The best adult novel in SF/Fantasy is: The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle (you may think this is a children’s book but you’d be mistaken)
• The best scary movie in American classic cinema is: Night of the Hunter
• The best singer/songwriter song in classic rock music is: The Weight by Robbie Robertson as performed by The Band
• The best cult novel in post-Beat fiction is: Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me by Richard Fariña
• The best high-carb food in Southern cooking is: home-fried potatoes