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Wanda was commenting at Steve’s place and referring the Shrubbery’s “Fantasyland” speech providing the basis for a great country song: “Thing is, I can’t bear looking at his lying eyes and hearing his tired old alibis.”

Let’s see: Brown-drown, shoes-blues, guitar-Qatar, later-‘gator…

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Some good news heard on this week’s This American Life, a lady survived in her flooded house by resting atop her Stearns & Foster queen-sized mattress for most of week. I’ve never considered use as a floatation device when buying a mattress before.

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The South Florida Sun Sentinel was irritated when they discovered that people who weren’t within 100 miles of a hurricane had gotten FEMA checks before the election last year. So they have looked the agency’s record and today is the first of a two-part series: FEMA: A Legacy of Waste.

People who need help can’t get it, but other people are making out like bandits.

[Update 9/19: Part II now available.]

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Steve over at No More Mr. Nice Blog looks at a Richard Brookhiser column in the New York Observer and generally agrees that no one would have complained about the Marines or Army being sent in immediately to maintain order until help arrived.

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In an oil dependent world Australia hosts a great event: World Solar Challenge, a race from Darwin to Adelaide in solar-powered cars. With a straight-line distance of over 1600 miles, or about the same distance as from New Orleans to San Diego, it is a major test of solar technology.
The race starts next weekend.

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On Friday’s show · Sept. 16, 2005, Fresh Air from WHYY presented an interview with historian and author Douglas Brinkley who teaches at Tulane University and was displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

He has since returned to New Orleans begun gathering oral histories — he hopes to collect as many as 20,000 — for a book, tentatively titled The Great Deluge.

He doesn’t want the truth of what happened forgotten. He is concerned that if the situation isn’t immediately documented there will be an effort to “forget” what really happened.

He stayed in New Orleans during the hurricane, then evacuated his family and returned, so he knew the conditions regarding access to the city and some of the efforts to block assistance reaching those who couldn’t leave.

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