Tuesday night, as water rose to 20 feet through most of New Orleans, CNN relayed an advisory that food in refrigerators would last only four hours and have to be thrown out. The next news item from CNN was an indignant bellow about "looters" of 7-Elevens and a Wal-mart. The reverence for property is now the underlying theme of many newscasts, with defense of The Gap being almost the first order of duty for the forces of law and order. But the citizens looking for clothes to wear and food to eat are made of tougher fiber and are more desperate than the polite demonstrators who guarded The Gap and kindred chains in Seattle in 1999. The police in New Orleans are only patrolling in large armed groups.

WAR MADE EASY
How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death
By Norman Solomon
John Wiley & Sons ISBN 0-471-69479
$24.95 314 pages

In "War Made Easy" Norman Solomon demolishes the myth of an independent American press zealously guarding sacred values of free expression. Although strictly focusing on the shameless history of media cheerleading for the principal post-World War II American wars, invasions and interventions, he calls into question the entire concept of the press as some kind of institutional counterforce to government and corporate power.

"Sarah,  if the people had ever known the truth about what we Bushes have done to this nation, we would be chased down in the streets  and lynched."
-- Bush 41 to reporter Sarah McClendon, Dec. 1992

It's an amazing thing. Doctors' offices in New York and Washington will likely be standing-room-only in a couple of months. I can see it now -- the look on a nurse's face when she asks the vacuous, target-eyed media twits when they are "due," and each one chirps happily, "May 25th!" As she comes to the end of the line, the nurse notices a slender, auburn-haired woman fast asleep, her lips slightly open in a half-smile. She is snoring gently.

Hesitating to awaken her, the nurse spies a blonde whom she recognizes as CNN's "White House" correspondent, Dana Bash, "What about her?" the nurse asks Bash, pointing to the woman. "Is she due on May 25th too?"

A spectrum of liberal responses to Cindy Sheehan has come into sharper focus.

The message is often anti-Bush... but not necessarily anti-war.

Frank Rich spun out his particular style of triangulation in the New York Times on Aug. 28. While deriding President Bush's stay-the-course stance, Rich also felt a need to disparage the most visible advocate for quick withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

Putting down Sheehan -- and, by implication, the one-third of the U.S. public that wants all American troops to exit Iraq without delay -- Rich's column mocked "her bumper-sticker politics" and "the slick left-wing political operatives who have turned her into a circus."

Rich criticized "the utter bankruptcy of the Democrats who had rubber-stamped this misadventure in the first place." Yet, in effect, he was willing to help rubber-stamp continuation of the "misadventure" in the present tense.

The president, Rich lamented, "pretends that the only alternative to his reckless conduct of the war is Ms. Sheehan's equally apocalyptic retreat."

Hurricane Katrina, one of the largest and strongest storms on record, roared onto shore this week, causing massive devastation in Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and other states. But another danger to the region is still brewing. With storm surges of up to 20 feet in some areas, huge petro-chemical plants, gas stations and waste pits have unleashed a toxic cocktail of chemicals ranging from vinyl chloride to gasoline.

Take Action! Natural disaster or terrorist attack - Tell Congress to act NOW to prevent more tragedy.

Already nicknamed "Cancer Alley," the polluted area now suffers from contaminated flood waters of up to 20 feet - which can affect homes, drinking water and surrounding waterways. In New Orleans, the city's levee system is now serving only to hold water in the city, creating a temporary lake of toxic chemicals, gas, oil and storm debris.