Perhaps Gonzalez should check out Godfather II and learn the obscure tale of Italian-American involvement in organized crime.

Hmmmm...being an Italian-American this comes as a complete and utter shock to me.  When did this all start?

So what was Gonzalez' plan?  Label the Hispanic gang members as "enemy combatants", send all of them to Gitmo, and torture them until they turn over the names of their Al-Qaeda contacts?

Was Gonzales wearing red or blue when he made that comment? Did he make any unusual hand signals?

Ok, maybe this is tongue in cheek and I'm missing it, but the indignation over the NYT article seems awfully misplaced. I don't get the sense that Sanneh is trying to prop up Good Charlotte's obviously dubious punk credibility: He's just pointing out that they've adopted the trappings/iconography/etc. of punk, which seems like a fair enough point (and not one that's worth expending the energy to be vitriolic about). I think it's safe to assume that mostpeople who read the article are pretty well aware that Hillary Duff ain't no Public Image Ltd., so I'd much rather read something along the lines of Sanneh's story (which isn't exactly stop-the-presses stuff) than have to slog through you-aren't-a-real-punk gatekeeping, which ain't very intellectually interesting.

Anyway, the poster who said that Sanneh (he's a guy) is a critic, not a reporter, is right. Claiming that the guy's made an ass out of himself because he hasn't shown enough respect for an arbitrary genre distinction seems to be pretty much arguing against the enterprise of rock criticism in general.

Beating out the president's claim that no one anticipated a levee failure

Well, given that the Bush's statement wasn't stupidity, but a calculated lie, you might be right. But I find the juxtaposition a little jarring. Who the heck is Hillary Duff and why should I care?

The only question for Bush is whether variations on the identical lie can continue to work forever: we are always adequately prepared; we've just had the misfortune to be hit by a series of troubles beyond human imagining. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Surely no one anticipated that Bush would have the chutzpah to turn out this lame excuse yet again.

i admire matthew on politics tremendously, but if it comes to choosing between Mr. (not miz) keleefa sanneh or matthew on music and its social meaning, matthew isn't close to the same league. Sanneh is a superb music critic, one of the best in the business....

Give it up, Al. If you and the NYT want to defend the indefensible, that's fine, but expect to be pretty lonely.

Maybe FEMA had some "assume a spherical cow" simplifications in their model to make the exercise tractable. That's a far cry from saying no one anticipated levee failure. The condition of the levees and need for repair was an on-going topic in the Times Picayune. Anyone with any stake in the situation was concern about what a levee break would mean. Here's an interesting quote about a "worst case scenario" envisioned in 1998"

Homes are without electricity or water service. Shelters are stuffed. And everyone is trapped, whether alone or in clusters, waiting for the National Guard to bring emergency food rations and supplies of drinking water.  Assuming no levee breaks, it will be three to five days before city pumps have made much headway sluicing the inundation back into the lake, marshes and river that encircle the metro region

Does this fail to anticipate a levee break? Well, actually it rules it out explicitly from the exercise without giving a good justification for why it won't happen. It's self-contradictory, since it would obviously worsen the worst-case scenario. I would read this more as saying if the levees do breach, then all bets are off, rather than a failure to imagine this happening.

But however you want to read it, the most you can conclude is that these particular modellers weren't anticipating a breach. The fact that they mention it at all suggests that others might reasonably wonder what would happen in that event.

The most charitable assessment of Bush's comment is that it was an irrelevant aside. The federal response was inadequate and would have been inadequate even without a levee breach. Local emergency coordinator Walter Maestri had predicted that the city would look like a massive shipwreck though it sounds like he was more concerned about levees trapping water inside. There is certainly nothing in Bush's statement that excuses his administration's response, and plenty that fits into his pattern of blaming the latest failure on events allegedly beyond human anticipation.

Matt is correct that Bush's comment was "dumb" (except in the political sense that it might have been an effective lie--only time will tell on that one).

I can think of two clear reasons. Most importantly, it's a dumb comment because it does nothing to excuse the federal government's response, which was late in coming and clearly inadequate. Levee breach or not, FEMA has a lot to answer for, so it was "dumb" for Bush to even bring up the topic about a levee breach.

Thought experiment: Suppose you ask an ambulance driver why he spent an extra 5 minutes in a fast food drive thru causing the death of a patient. He responds "I did not anticipate that the patient was a hemophiliac and would bleed that fast." Now suppose all evidence supports his claim that the patent was a hemophiliac and he really never thought about it. Was his response "dumb"? Just wondering how Al and the NYT would classify such a comment. I know how I would. 

Of slightly less significance, it was a dumb comment for being obviously and transparently false:
"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." is what Bush said, not that the Army Corps of Engineers had ruled it out. In fact, lots of people anticipated a levee breach and realized what a disaster it would be. If Bush really thinks otherwise, that's astonishing. Once you get this mental image of a city below sea level with only walls holding back disaster, you think "Hey, how are those levees holding up?" Remember the little Dutch boy? If the Army Corps of Engineers had a more sophisticated argument showing why a levee breach would not happen, defying conventional wisdom about a category 5 storm, then I guess they ought to go back to the drawing board on that one.