Saturday, September 10, 2005
SAFE PREDICTION CAN’T BE DISPROVED
The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland:
It’s safe to say that if George Bush was in his first term, he would now be heading for defeat.
The Guardian felt it safe to say almost as much in May 2004:
Do not put the champagne on ice yet - there are, after all, five months to go before the election - but it is beginning to look as if Senator John Kerry may have the beating of President George Bush in November.
Maybe The Guardian is better at predicting results for elections that will never happen. Mark Steyn has more on the Bush-obsessed, in a conversation with Hugh Hewitt:
If somebody in a Belgian newspaper says why isn’t Bush doing more, that’s fair enough. You know, they think of this as a problem, why aren’t the politicians doing more. And the only American politician that they’ve heard of in foreign countries is the president, George Bush. But what excuse do the networks and the big newspapers have? They don’t have that same excuse. And they’re colluding, essentially, as you say, in a fraud that is going to further damage their reputation. It’s not really having any effect in the polls. It’ll just be another one of these dead horses they flog for a while, until they finally give up on it, because another dead horse has come along.
No dead horses, but lots of money for Katrina relief, reports Chuck Simmins:
Americans have now donated to Americans over $632,783,990.
The major story of this relief campaign is the incredible amount being raised on-line. The Red Cross reports $265 million.
It’s been so short a time since the disaster began, it’s difficult to measure all the “hometown” responses. We did not reach this level of giving until late January / early February on the Stingy List tsunami relief effort, 4-6 weeks post tsunami. Yet it’s only been 11 days since this disaster began.
I wish I could recognize all the people making an individual difference. The Southern Baptists turned out their disaster kitchens as they always do, and the Methodists are there with them. School children are collecting funds, selling lemonade, and being the generous and apolitical little people they always are.
In other (potentially) good news, the number of fatalities may be lower than expected:
Mayor Ray Nagin suggested last weekend that “it wouldn’t be unreasonable to have 10,000” dead, and authorities ordered 25,000 body bags. But soldiers who had been brought in over the past few days to help in the search were not seeing that kind of toll.
“There’s nothing at all in the magnitude we anticipated,” said Maj. Gen. Bill Caldwell, commander of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division.