We have a family friend who, with many of her relatives, evacuated Covington (adjacent to New Orleans) before the storm hit. Please pray that her three remaining nieces and nephews are found alive.

Her home survived; the house of one niece was destroyed.

Covington is on its own, and the Red Cross is not operating there at all. Citizens are taking it upon themselves to try to get food to those who need it. Many of them are carrying firearms, since people undertaking rescue work have been carjacked (and boat-jacked).

Our friend asks that people not give money to the Red Cross, as it isn't present outside New Orleans at all. She has found that her Amex card actually works, so she is getting cash advances to people who need money.

Obviously, her friends here in Los Angeles are trying to figure out a way to get money to this woman and/or the local Baptist Church in Covington, which is the staging center for the local citizenry.

I'm a little concerned about how my friend is going to pay her Amex bill, since most of her income comes from tending bar (a bar in New Orleans that presumably doesn't exist any more).

If anyone wants to Paypal me, send me a note designating "barmaid" or "Baptists," and I'll hold it in my business account until we can figure out a way to get it to the church—or to my friend.

In the meantime, please don't forget those in the areas outside N.O. who are struggling with no power, no phone service, limited gasoline for rescue missions, and little food/water. People like my friend are hiking out to centers where MREs are being distributed, and taking them back to those with limited mobility.

They can use your prayers right now.

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. . . tell us it's time to re-think politics in Louisiana and in New Orleans. Too late, for sure—but perhaps not too little.

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After a mad drive back to Los Angeles from Scottsdale, AZ on Monday I spent a day preparing for a visit from my sister-in-law, and I've been playing hostess for 36 hours or whatever.

No, I haven't caught up on my Arizona posting, but I've got several more entries in draft that I'll polish up and post as time permits.

Tomorrow (okay, today—it is after midnight) I'll be catching up on some personal business and then frantically putting together another chapter for my murder mystery. It is, as my husband reminds me, the reconvening of our respective writer's groups tomorrow: how glorious and awful.

I had lunch today with a family friend I'll call "Ship Ahoy," a man I've known since 1988. In that time we've been colleagues at two different organizations. I was his editorial assistant at one local magazine, and he was my managing editor. I transferred to another department. I fell in love with someone else who worked in editorial, and ended up marrying this person, to my eternal good fortune. Eventually, Mr. Ship Ahoy worked for me at an outdoor magazine; I was his ME that time around.

This time, Mr. Ahoy had looked over the outline and sample chapters for my book, and was giving me his input in exchange for lunch. We talked about the problem of motivation, which is pivotal for anyone who's writing about mysteries that are not police procedurals. Ultimately, one has to "sell" the idea that Lord Peter preferred solving murders to seducing young heiresses—at least part of the time.

I sighed, because I hear this from my writer's group all the time. None of them are big mystery fans, and they'd all like to know why any normal person would try to figure this sort of puzzle out, instead of leaving it to the police and coroner, and knocking off early for a gin and tonic vs. looking at dead bodies.

Mr. Ahoy doesn't think the motivations for my characters are watertight.

"You do understand," I ask him, "that real fans of the genre might be willing to suspend their disbelief?"

"Yes," he tells me. "So you have a tactical decision to make. Do people have to enter the world you create, or are you going to bring it to them?"

"I do want it to be enjoyable by non-mystery fans," I tell him. I resist the temptation to add, "and fuck you." (Because he's doing me an enormous favor, and because I truly admire him.)

He hands me the pages as we part ways, and asks to be kept abreast as I produce more chapters. He explains that he found "a few little things," which scares me because I'm a copy editor/proofreader myself, and I know "a few little things" generally means a mass of pencil markings all over one's [previously] clean, white paper.

I promise myself that I'll look them over later, because I have errands to do before I go home. I make two stops, and then I can't stand it. Getting back into the car, I sit in the back seat and read his remarks. One has to do with a man's non-jealous reaction to the news that someone's been putting the moves on his fiancee. In retrospect, I realize that it serves my plot for this character not to care too much. Mr. Ahoy simply writes, "not a 'guy' reaction. He would either be pissed or extremely pissed." Fair enough. So he would.

A woman honks at me as she tries to maneuver out of the space adjacent to me, so I close the passenger door and realize after I've finished going through Ahoy's notes that—once again—I've locked myself into the back seat of my own car, because it has some sort of childproof feature that keeps it from being opened from the inside. So I climb over the front seat and free myself from the tyranny of my own scatterbrained nature.

And I exit the parking structure smiling. With something that looks almost like a plan to fix the plot holes. Or at least a renewed commitment to a project that's as maddening as it is fun.

Bear with me, okay? (Actually, there aren't any bears here at all. I don't know why I said that.)

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. . . the most novel fundraising idea I've ever seen. Give money for Katrina relief and he'll write an essay on any topic you like. Including "How to Understand Women," or "Why Cancer is Good and We Should Have More of It."

Go.

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Behold the Nagin "Black Magic" Water Park. Isn't it spooky?

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Authorities were . . . castigated by British bus driver Ged Scott, from Wallasey, Merseyside, who was on holiday in the New Orleans area.

He stayed in the Ramada Hotel during and after the devastation with his wife, Sandra, and seven-year-old son Ronan. At one stage, Mr Scott, 36, had to wade through filthy water to barricade the hotel doors against looters.

He told the Liverpool Daily Post: "I couldn't describe how bad the authorities were. Just little things like taking photographs of us, as we are standing on the roof waving for help, for their own little snapshot albums.

"At one point, there were a load of girls on the roof of the hotel saying 'Can you help us?' and the policemen said 'Show us what you've got' and made signs for them to lift their T-shirts. When the girls refused, they said 'Fine' and motored off down the road in their boat."

Via Lair.

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. . . is Goldstein a little tense?

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Bob Denver of Gilligan's Island just died.

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I still have a lot of entries from my stay in Scottsdale to bring up out of "draft" format and get onto the main page.

In the meantime, I've been listening to a lot of criticism of New Orleans officials—and some in Louisiana—who just did not appear to take this impending crisis seriously until it was too late. Some people chalk this up to the corruption that's rampant in the Big Easy, but I'm not so sure.

I called my husband yesterday morning from the desert to ask if this kind of negligent response would have occurred in Chicago under the first Mayor Daley.

"No, no," he tells me. "They were crooks, but they were competent crooks. That's why the people of Chicago went back to the Daley dynasty: ultimately, the matter of honesty mattered less than having a well-run city."

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—who seems a little defensive.

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With It Takes a Family, Rick Santorum has served notice. The bold new challenge to the Goldwater-Reagan tradition in American politics comes not from the Left, but from the Right.

Terms like "left" and "right" become meaningless after a point, but Rauch's take is that replacing the individual with the family as the basic unit of society is an invitation to governmental growth, and that Santorum is drastically revising—perhaps even reversing—the Goldwater-Reagan formula.

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. . . seems a mite irritated about all those unused buses owned by the City of New Orleans. Instead of carrying thousands of people to safety, they are now ruined by flooding, rusting away with massive oil slicks caused by their engines.

There's even a satellite photo showing how close the buses were to a freeway that led right to the Superdome.

Via Insty.

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. . . the difference between "looting" and "emergency commandeering of supplies."

Or they should.

Of course, they should also know the difference between "rioting" and "rebellion."

As the Los Angeles riots of 1992 commenced, no one was under any illusions about what it meant: color was irrelevant, and the only distinction to be made was between those who had some kind of values and those who were using the situation as an excuse to loot stores—and worse, much worse. I drove around town then in order to get across it—avoiding the center of the city—and spent the night in my boyfriend's more quiet neighborhood.

First, of course, I had to spend an hour in line at a Glendale supermarket, rubbing elbows with black and white and Asian people who all understood the score: there is something broken in human nature, and when it's not practical to fight it, you need to get out of the way.

So we all loaded up our grocery carts and prepared to stay off the streets for however many days it took before the thugs lost their stranglehold on L.A.

It appears that it could have been a lot worse. God have mercy on those who took advantage of the situation in New Orleans in order to commit violent acts.

I'm sure there's a special place in Hell for them.

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. . . is going to go far.

This action is the only thing he needs on his resume; he'll be working for the rest of his life.

[h/t: Goldstein.]

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I'm at the Ronald Reagan Awards Banquet. In a separate entry I will list the winners of the various NFRA Awards. Soon, there will be a showing of In the Face of Evil, the documentary about Ronald Reagan's fight against communism, and how it bears on the current terrrorist threat. Of course, I've already seen it, at the Liberty Film Festival last fall, where as I recall it was the world premiere.

At the moment, Tom Tancredo is speaking, and giving an eloquent argument against illegal immigration—an issue that most of you know I've been vascillating on for some time. (Why? Because part of the whole issue has to do with how the economies in our border states are going to conduct their business without the labor normally provided by "illegals," so the "seal off the borders and everything will be lovely" people [those who oversimplify the practicalities of the process] bother me. But the security issues tied into this are sobering, and a good place to start.)

Tancredo discusses the fact that some misguided teachers in schools with a lot of immigrants teach a cartoonish version of multiculturalism, encouraging high school and junior high school students to identify with their native lands rather than this country.

"I don't care whaere you come from," he says. "All I ask is that once you get here, you do what most of our grandparents did, and become part of this nation."

He gets a standing ovation.

And I have a lot to think about.

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. . . has just died.

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has an interesting compilation of statements from those who saw this coming, along with a few well deserved digs at the media vultures who like to overhype any hard rain as a "storm"—making it less likely that people will heed the warning when there really is a threat.

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. . . remembers his Winnie-the-Pooh.

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Dr. Judith Reisman is speaking on the counter-assault against Alfred Kinsey and his research, for which she has led the charge.

Her thesis is that Kinsey's research is based on outrageous sampling errors, and that some of his claims about the sexuality of the "greatest generation" reflected some of the claims made by Nazis in propaganda distributed to British and American troops.

One of the most egregious aspects of Kinsey's research, of course, was his promotion of the notion that young children were sexual in a way that excused adult-child sex.

There's more. I'll definitely have to read Dr. Reisman's latest book, Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences and review it herein.

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The official slogan for this year's NFRA convention is "turning up the heat on the left." Get it? We're in Scottsdale, Arizona, toward the end of the hot days of summer. This is a glorious part of the country, though: the physical beauty here is astounding.

Mike Spence, introducing Bob Barr as the keynote speaker, modifies the slogan, making the point that what NFRA really needs to do is to "turn up the heat on the GOP."

Bob Barr is speaking on the inadequacy of passively depending on the two-party system to represent the people. He makes a number of truly excellent points, one of which hit me right over the head: Republicans continually preach to African-Americans about the need to objectively evaluate what the Democratic Party is (and, more usually, is not) doing for them. True conservatives need, he tells us, so "practice what they preach.

Rep Barr also analyzed Ronald Reagan's presidency, pointing out that he was an outsider at the beginning of his first term, and remained an outsider until he left office.

Rep Barrr is an amazing thinker, attempting to raise the level of debate about all issues, and explaining that the important thing is to talk about substance, rather than to go along with the prevailing wisdom. Make sure to talk reasonably with people whom you disagree with, he exhorts us: you may have an opportunity to carry an important message.

He defends his relationship with the ACLU, pointing out that despite the many areas of disagreement between his own positions and those of that group, there are important discussions to be had about some provisions of the Patriot Act, and we'd be derelict to gloss them over.

In conclusion, he reminds us that "expediency is for cowards. Principles are for winners."

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