...who could find anything bad to say about Houston? Apparently the New York Times could, which on Tuesday printed an article about Houston's response to Katrina in two different newspapers. In one, the article seems relatively even handed. But in the other, some say it is overly critical, ill-timed, and in poor taste.

In the Times, there's an above-the-fold article by Houston-based reporter Simon Romero. And apparently what's in the Times is not all the news that's fit to print.

In The International Herald Tribune published by the Times in Paris, Romero's article is on page 15 and it begins with a line not in the Times, which reads "No one would accuse this city of being timid in the scramble to profit from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina."

...Both papers compared a Houston real estate company to ambulance chasers for offering special financing to hurricane victims. "Houston isn't profiteering," contends Houston Mayor Bill White. "I found it remarkable that you'd have a publication that has two different versions of an article about Houston. Looks to me like some editor wanted an angle to put on a piece."

J.& W. Seligman & Company, a New York investment firm, sued the state's attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, yesterday, asserting that he had overstepped his authority in his investigation of improper trading in Seligman's mutual funds.

The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, seeks to suspend Mr. Spitzer's ability to investigate "allegedly excessive advisory fees paid to Seligman."

Seligman, founded in 1864 and one of the nation's oldest investment firms, is one of the few mutual fund managers that have yet to reach a settlement with Mr. Spitzer regarding market timing in its funds.

The Industrial Canal has been the area's defining presence since it was built in the 1920s. Time and heavy use have taken a toll on the canal, now operated and maintained mostly by the federal government. Barges and ships were routinely delayed because of growing traffic levels and the lock was "literally falling apart at the hinges" in 1998, according to a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers report, which called it an "antique" and recommended replacing it.

A $600 million lock-replacement project didn't get very far. Lower Ninth Ward residents complained about noise and launched a legal fight that bogged down the work.

Update... Our prediction market guru Chris Masse isn't impressed:

Play-money prediction exchanges don't have human market makers, and it's those who have predictive power.

Mr. Bush made a lot of mistakes last week, but most of his critics are making an even bigger one now by obsessing about what he said and did. We can learn more by listening to men like Jim Judkins, particularly when he explains the Magic Marker method of disaster preparedness.

Mr. Judkins is one of the officials in charge of evacuating the Hampton Roads region around Newport News, Va. These coastal communities, unlike New Orleans, are not below sea level, but they're much better prepared for a hurricane. Officials have plans to run school buses and borrow other buses to evacuate those without cars, and they keep registries of the people who need special help.

Instead of relying on a "Good Samaritan" policy - the fantasy in New Orleans that everyone would take care of the neighbors - the Virginia rescue workers go door to door. If people resist the plea to leave, Mr. Judkins told The Daily Press in Newport News, rescue workers give them Magic Markers and ask them to write their Social Security numbers on their body parts so they can be identified.

"It's cold, but it's effective," Mr. Judkins explained.

Barney,

I’ve sent you a "Krugman Truth Squad" t-shirt to congratulate you on what you’ve accomplished over the last couple weeks. But major loose ends still exist.

1) On the Times web archive, the August 19 column still carries the original correction, which states the 2-out-of-3 error resolved on Friday. The correction itself should be corrected, with an acknowledgement that the original correction was in error.

2) On the Times web archive, the August 22 column in which the 2-out-of-3 error first appeared now carries no correction whatsoever. After the original August 26 correction, the August 22 column did at first carry the correction. The correction should be reinstated, but this time not repeating the 2-out-of-3 error as its first version did, with an acknowledgement that the original correction was in error.

3) On the Times web archive, the August 26 column which, in print, had the first correction appended to it now carries no correction at all. It should be reinstated there to document that that’s how the correction was first made. Additionally. the correction itself should be corrected, with an acknowledgement that the original correction was in error.

4) On the Times web archive, the new correction appears with the claim that it was “published September 2, 2005”. It was not, in fact. To the best of my knowledge it did not appear in the print edition on that date. It appeared on the web edition late in the afternoon on that date. The archive version should reveal where and when the correction saw print.

5) Did the second correction ever see print at all? I have no idea, since I don’t regularly see the paper version of the Times. I know it wasn’t in the Friday edition, because I happened to check. Did it ever appear at all?

6) The second correction should have been appended to Krugman’s column today (Monday, September 5). Under the columnist correction policy propounded by Gail Collins on March 27, 2003,

If one of them makes an error, he or she is expected to promptly correct it in the column. After some experimentation at different ways of making corrections, we now encourage a uniform approach, with the correction made at the bottom of the piece.

The question of why columnists are permitted to do their own correcting comes up frequently. There are several reasons, some of them practical. The columnists are widely syndicated and it is important that their corrections run within the columns to maximize the chance that they will be seen by all their readers, everywhere. Readers also tend to communicate directly with the columnists rather than through the editorial page editors, and the columnists are often aware of errors that the editors never hear about until they read the correction in the paper.

Collins re-emphasized that element of the policy in Dan Okrent’s column of March 28, 2003:

Gail Collins's determination that corrections will appear on their own at the end of a succeeding column, and not disappear into an unrelated digression, is on its own a significant piece of progress. But it's her assertion of responsibility that matters most. Critics might say her statement of policy is very gently phrased, but when I asked her if there was wiggle room, she was unequivocal: "It is my obligation to make sure no misstatements of fact on the editorial pages go uncorrected."

So there’s a lot of work to be done. From what I can see, Krugman still hasn’t complied. He made a correction that may or may not have run in print, and certainly didn’t run at the end of his column as the policy clearly dictates. Worst of all, the original columns that bore the error have gone uncorrected and/or corrected wrongly.

After 9/11, all the country really needed from him [Bush] was a speech.

I predict that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society.

When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).

So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?

...What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. And they don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

The welfare state—and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages—is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.

Update... Contrast this uncompromising view with the shallow psycho-babble of David Brooks:

It's already clear this will be known as the grueling decade, the Hobbesian decade. Americans have had to acknowledge dark realities that it is not in our nature to readily acknowledge: the thin veneer of civilization, the elemental violence in human nature, the lurking ferocity of the environment, the limitations on what we can plan and know, the cumbersome reactions of bureaucracies, the uncertain progress good makes over evil.

Tracinki's commnets sound off the mark by a mile. Many of the poorer citizens who chose to stay behind probably did so to protect the little of property they do have. When down, people tend to value the little they own more than the rest of us who have insurance and the luxury of calling it 'stuff,' and the means to replace it over time. Time and again, well-meaning souls in Europe and elsewhere have tried to subsidize entire families in housing projects to go on summer vacations together, only to discover that there is no way they are going to lock the door and leave their place empty, even for a couple of days.

And what would Tracinski do, stranded on a roof with his family, surrounded by water and currents? What does moral virtue have to do with it? What does 'spontaneous organization' have to do with that?

The events of 9/11 in NY cannot be compared; not only was the damage infliced in a matter of hours but help was present within minutes.

I'm afraid the one individual sitting around and complaining in this instance is Tracinski himself.

The nation's taxpayers will now be asked to rebuild New Orleans. The rationale for doing so is that it is a great city of national significance. Fine. But, if it's of national significance...why did the porkmeisters of the national legislature and national executive branch slash a request by the Army Corps of Engineers for $105 million for additional flood protection measures there down to just over $40 million, at the same time they approved a $230 million bridge to an uninhabited Alaskan island? Given that the transport infrastructure's already in place, maybe it makes more sense to rebuild New Orleans in Alaska.

...huge swathes of the political culture in America remain committed to a bargain that stiffs the people at every level, a system of lavish funding of pseudo-action. You could have done as the anti-war left wanted and re-allocated every dollar spent in Iraq to Louisiana. Or you could have done as some of the rest of us want and re-allocated every buck spent on, say, subsidizing Ted Turner's and Sam Donaldson's play-farming activities. But, in either case, I'll bet Louisiana's kleptocrat public service would have pocketed the dough and carried on as usual -- and, come the big day, the state would still have flopped out, and New Orleans' foul-mouthed mayor would still be ranting about why it was all everybody's else fault.

Capital Animal Care, a Washington DC-based non-profit animal welfare organization is taking their state-of-the art vet mobile clinic to Best Friends Animal Society's animal rescue operation base in Tylertown, Mississippi.

Best Friends and its sister sanctuary, St. Francis Animal Sanctuary, are setting up emergency housing for the animals rescued from metro New Orleans.

Capital Animal Care will be deployed under Best Friends Animal Society's disaster team leader Paul Berry to provide critical care and emergency vet needs. They have stainless steel cages for up to 50 animals, hot and cold running water, heat/ac, onboard generator and three fully equipped operating room stations.

Right now, the critical care animals rescued in New Orleans are being shuttled to LSU vet school so and the mobile vet clinic will provide urgently needed care.

Thanks to Skip Oliva for pointing this out (Skip has more, here). Skip tells me, "Incidentally, the FTC says that gas is the only commodity it monitors prices for on a daily basis. This is because of constant congressional whining to the FTC every time there's a price increase. The FTC has all but admitted that this 'monitoring' is for political show."

Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 3:08 PM | link