This is the End, beautiful friend, the End

It's hard to believe that Armageddon's not just around the corner. The Big Easy is underwater, grown men are breaking down into sobs on national television (watch the clip here), rescuers have yet to begin to count the bodies, soliders just home from Iraq are being immediately redeployed to what is left of New Orleans, the SCOTUS Chief Justice died in his sleep, leaving us with a 8 member court heading into one of the most significant sessions in years in terms of civil liberties, and giving one of the worst presidents ever the opportunity to nominate another justice, AND Jon Stewart is still on vacation.

Fortunately for the moment, Justice John Paul Stevens, the senior member of the court, is in charge. He is, by all appearances, in vigorous good health at 85.
UPDATE: Bush has now nominated Roberts to be CJ and asked Sandra Day O'Connor to stick around until her successor can be appointed. While an inarguably savvy move on Bush's part, it is now also likely that Roberts will still be CJ when I retire. Which is farther away than I like to think about. Now I'm just crankier, and I didn't think that was possible.

Michael Moore's giving it his all. And why was DHS Chief Michael Chertoff getting his information on the hurricane from the newspaper as late as last Tuesday, as he stated on Meet the Press this morning? Fortunately Tim Russert is kicking the #@*% out of him at the moment. Eleanor Clift used the word apartheid this morning when describing the scenes of New Orleans, and I'd have to agree with her. Perhaps NOW we'll have that long overdue discussion on race and class in America. Let's start with Bob Herbert's column, "A Failure of Leadership".