The comments from Barbara Bush yesterday on how things are "working very well" for the "underprivileged" survivors of Hurricane Katrina are attracting a lot of interest on blogs today.
After touring a relief centre in Texas, the First Mother is reported to have told the Public Broadcasting Service:
What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.
The American Flyer blog also pulls up the remarks below from Mrs Bush - which have something of a congruent tone - on Good Morning America in March 2003 about speculation in the media before the US-led invasion of Iraq on the scale of US fatalities.
Why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many, what day it's gonna happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Oh, I mean, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?
The blogger comments: "So look out. If you weren't born with a silver spoon in your mouth, you may just get poked in the eye with Bush's compassion stick."
Barbara Bush is, at the time of writing, the top search on Technorati, which detects more than 4,000 mentions.
The Guardian's Julian Borger says that George Bush's mother's remarks did little to help the US president who is underfire for the response to the disaster. Borger also highlights a website called missingkids.com, where images of children missing since the storm have been uploaded with what details are available.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post today has a good round-up piece on hurricane blogs. It also reports that internet usage in New Orleans dropped by 80% the day of the storm and 90% the day after, citing research by ComScore Networks.
Another site the newspaper highlights is Slidell Hurricane Damage Blog, which in turn is very impressed by a testimony from a relief worker on another blog who writes that when he was meeting survivors:
Almost to a person they would tell us who needed a certain item more than they did. I was not prepared for this selflessness. I was prepared for gun battles, military checkpoints and defence of our truck - later I felt foolish for this.
We have been soliciting for people to post good links on the comment fields below on Newsblog and a couple of interesting ones that have been posted are Proteinwisdom.com and Balloon Juice, which have a questioning approach to some of the unconfirmed information which gets repeated about the disaster.
Balloon Juice today links to an interesting New York Times piece on the terrifying "toxic soup" of what is in the floodwaters in New Orleans.
I've also just come across a useful blog by CBS news journalists with updates on what is happening.
