MEGAN: Good morning! Was your Saturday night as "opulent" as McCain's? I mean, I know eating on the road sucks, but it doesn't seem like he had to come all the way back to D.C. after the debates to eat at a good hotel restaurant.

KAY: I know. This sort of puts Obama's claim about a Katrina-like response. I think what Obama meant was McCain's Katrina response. You know, when he and Bush were having a birthday party.

MEGAN: "Let them eat cake?" Oh, wait, that was Barbara Bush, never mind. I also love that he flew all the way back here after the debate to hang out in his Congressional office and call people, but that he couldn't be bothered to walk down to the Senate floor to vote on a spending bill that contained earmarks. I think he really has turned into a complete wuss. He didn't want to be seen voting for earmarks, nor voting against a spending bill that contained offshore drilling provisions, so he just went to dinner 5 minutes away.

KAY: Seems like a good use of time. Maybe he played some craps while he was at it —with the $700 billion bailout money.

MEGAN: I mean, who doesn't like a good Indian casino? Not McCain, that's for sure. Although, I'm just putting this out there, I haven't been in a casino yet, Indian or otherwise, that didn't make me grind my teeth. I don't think an alcoholic beverage should cost me $8 in the middle of nowhere in Connecticut.

KAY: Yeah, casinos tend to be filled with a lot of sad old people. I guess that includes McCain.

MEGAN: A lot of sad old people that aren't nearly drunk enough to be entertaining because they can't afford $6 beers and quarter slots at the same time. Sorry, I digress. I really, really hate casinos.

KAY: Don't worry, me too. In any case, we should probably say something about how McCain's debate performance on Friday was a big FAIL.

MEGAN: Oh, yeah, there's all kinds of evidence that he didn't play well with the crowds. I personally think it was because most Americans tuned out — figuratively or literally — once the discussion turned to foreign policy, so that most of them missed the preconditions/preparation debacle.

KAY: Well, it's easy to misspeak. McCain said we were at an "existential" crisis with Iran. I'm not even sure what that means. Did he just take freshman philosophy?

MEGAN: I know, I thought the same thing! But then I realized that he just meant that he thought Iran would be a threat to the existence of Israel, i.e., nuke it, and I wondered why the McCain camp is so obsessed with nuclear war and yet its Vice Presidential candidate can't correctly identify the purpose of the Bush Doctrine, which is to allow us to nuke people without provocation.

KAY: Well, if we're going to put nuclear war on the table we want to make sure we have at least one person "a heartbeat away" who has no clue about foreign policy

MEGAN: I mean, right? Palin's so bad even McCain's staffers are telling reporters that she's "clueless". And Jack Cafferty — no bastion of liberalism — had this to say:

"If John McCain wins this woman will be one 72-year-old's heartbeat away from being President of the United States. And if that doesn't scare the hell out of you, it should."

KAY: I know, even the right isn't so sure about her anymore. But at least we have Tina Fey to make us laugh. The thing is, those sketches are getting less funny the more true they are. I feel like this sketch was eerily similar to Palin's actual answer about the bailout.

MEGAN: I really thought some of what Tina Fey said early on was a direct quote, but I'd been drinking for 11 and a half hours at that point. I did find it uproariously funny.

KAY: It's always prudent to drink for 11 and a half hours.

MEGAN: It was a wedding! I was less amused at the part where she agreed with Obama on Pakistan and then McCain retracted it for her, though. Well, that and that she went to Geno's instead of Pat's. Geno's is the cheesesteak place with the signs requiring that you order in English.

KAY: Don't worry, I think the "October surprise" this year is going to be Bristol's wedding.

MEGAN: Well, it can't be that much of a surprise if we're already talking about it. Also, the thought of Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis dreamily talking about how marrying off Bristol Palin on her 18th birthday (it is a Saturday, after all!) is sort of incredibly creepy. Especially as a way to have the first-ever pre-election wedding in history. That's just, like, ewww.

KAY: So ewww. Well, we all know that you're not a real woman until you're married, right?

MEGAN: Well, you become a woman when you start bleeding out your cooch but only a real woman when you lock a man down to it for life or until the inevitable, painful and public divorce. I'm so glad that I'm not a girl and not yet a woman. And yes, I did just make a Britney reference. Seemed appropriate.

KAY: So appropriate.

Entertainment Weekly:

What divine inspiration moved Kimberly Rivers Roberts, an aspiring rap artist and toweringly self-possessed woman from New Orleans' Ninth Ward, to grab her Hi8 camcorder and document the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina as it smashed up her neighborhood? And what grace brought Roberts to the attention of Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, filmmakers who, like so many others, went to Louisiana after the levees broke? Whatever the cosmic luck, the result, Trouble the Water, is essential, unique viewing: a stunning experience of the hurricane and its aftermath, rooted in immediate personal response and emotions that encapsulate the full national catastrophe.

Newsday:

Shot predominantly from the attic of their rapidly submerging house during the worst of the storm, Roberts' visual record gives us a palpable sense of impending doom. But it's only after the Robertses - in the company of filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal - return to their battered city their crime-ridden neighborhood that the true, sustained and still-unresolved damage of Katrina becomes so terribly clear.

Salon:

If possible, Roberts' movie-within-a-movie is even more amazing than it sounds. She captures a tale of courage, heroism and tragedy more thrilling than any Hollywood spectacle; one neighbor, a man Roberts and her husband, Scott, hadn't even liked before the hurricane, risks his life to save them, swimming back and forth across the street using a punching bag as a flotation device. Roberts barely knew how to turn the camera on when the storm started, and her footage is highly uneven. But you can feel her taking ownership of the situation as the catastrophe worsens, doing her own TV-news-style voice- over and alternating between establishing shots and close-ups.

The Los Angeles Times:

Kim Roberts' footage, shot with a video camera she'd bought on the street for $20 only the week before, gives a rare from-the-ground-up look at what it's like to be flooded out of your house. We watch in hypnotized horror as the waters rise so high they almost obliterate the corner stop sign, forcing the Roberts and their extended family to take precarious refuge in their attic.

Startling as that footage is, however, it takes up only about 15 minutes of "Trouble the Water." The documentary's best asset is not what Kim shot, but the woman herself.

With her buoyant, naturally dramatic personality (she ended up giving birth to a daughter in Utah just days before the Sundance award ceremony), bold, nervy Kim has the kind of intensely charismatic spirit documentary directors dream about. With her as our guide, "Trouble the Water" looks at the reality of New Orleans from the inside.

New York Daily News:

Using mostly amateur video shot by an aspiring rap artist and her husband in the lead-up to Hurricane Katrina and in the weeks after, this gripping, sometimes unstructured doc shows the devastation New Orleans residents suffered in the swirl of the storm.

Filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal utilize the footage Kim and Scott Roberts had taken throughout the disaster, showing how residents suffered, survived and came together to help when official assistance let them down. Kim especially emerges as a real voice of America, one that refuses to keep quiet about the horrors she saw.

New York Post:

As "Trouble the Water" points out, most of New Orleans' black residents have yet to return to a city that turned its back on them. When Kimberly sings, she gives voice to their pain.

The A.V. Club:

Trouble The Water is infuriating in its depiction of helpless Americans getting left behind, and uplifting in the way it shows the Roberts putting their lives together, but it's also frustrating, because it lacks some focus. It starts off being about the footage Kim shot, but she didn't shoot a lot, and anyone coming to Trouble The Water looking for an insider's take on the storm and its immediate aftermath will be disappointed to find that the bulk of the film takes place post-emergency. Even more bothersome is how Lessin and Deal keep steering away from the most persistently unsettling part of the Hurricane Katrina story, having to do with the multiple ways the rights of American citizens were taken away, by the suspicious and the well-meaning alike. Given that the filmmakers' original idea for their project stalled out due to lack of access, it's disappointing that they didn't explore that angle more. Even the generally upbeat Roberts and their friends note the promises and lies that have been exposed by their predicament. "Freedom exists," one of their neighbors says. "There's just… limitations on the freedom."

Village Voice:

The first and most gripping half of Trouble the Water, directed by Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, is essentially a first-person disaster movie—history captured in the visual grammar of Cloverfield. Driven just to get it down ("I'll be able to tell the story"), Kimberly aims her palm-sized camera at her backyard, at the neighbor passed out on his porch, at the kids laughing off the storm warnings in the street. A dog whimpers, an Army truck creeps by, the sky fades to gray, a drizzle begins. Those cunning directors who've turned shaky-cam mock-vérité into a horror-movie cliché waste a lot of effort planting such "stray" details; they don't have the thing that gives Kimberly's footage its eerie force—genuine uncertainty about what's going to happen.

New York Magazine:

As someone of bounteous hope but little (formal) faith, I found Kimberly’s religious ejaculations a bit trying. She and her husband trek north to a relative’s house in which there’s no water, and when a man shows up to turn it on, she exclaims, “When you trust in God, he sends miracles your way!” Five minutes later, the man returns, now ordered to shut the water off, and this time God goes pointedly unmentioned. But I admit that my perspective is that of a privileged New Yorker who has never had to summon comparable spiritual resources. Whatever sparked and has sustained Kimberly’s resolve is indeed a kind of miracle. The rap that she performs for the camera, “Amazing,” is just that, an explicit (and profane) account of her sordid past capped with an irresistibly upbeat refrain—a potential smash. That faith brings her and her husband back to New Orleans despite continued government neglect—even as New Orleans pours its resources into luring tourists back to the French Quarter. In one scene, Kimberly and fellow refugees line up for FEMA assistance at some kind of ranch, where a sign overhead points to Gate B—CATTLE ENTRANCE. You can’t make this stuff up. You can, however, capture it on film for all time. Trouble the Water is ineradicably moving.

Rolling Stone:

Kimberly's star power comes from the music she writes and sings, music that was almost lost in the storm. The moment in the aftermath when she finds it and raps about her feelings will knock you off your feet. At the Sundance Film Festival in January, when the film premiered, that moment got audiences standing and cheering. Never mind Katrina, Kimberly Roberts is the real force of nature. Despite the political incompetence that continues to devastate New Orleans, Kimberly and Scott went home with only positive vibes. The repair needed in their city has gotten Scott a job in construction. And Kimberly's music has attracted producers. No wonder, a glory abides in this woman's voice. "Inspiring" is an overused word in the movie business. But it fits here. Lessin and Deal have made Trouble the Water a spellbinder you do not want to miss.

'Trouble The Water' opened on August 22nd in selected theaters in Los Angeles and New York.

Earlier: Hurrican Katrina, Three Years Later: A New Memoir And An Approaching Storm [Jezebel]

I encourage you all to read the entire interview with Phyllis Montana-LeBlanc, but here are some excerpts:

On her "rescue" experience:

…A helicopter came by and we were like, "We can go now, we're saved." They came right in front of our faces, and the [pilot] looked at me, but they left. I couldn't believe they were leaving us and they were that close. But my thinking afterward, after reason hit, was that there was only 5 feet of water [where we were] and they had to go and get other people who were in more dire need. I understand that now.

On elected officials:

I don't know why George Bush keeps coming down here. He should have paid us a real visit three years ago. I guess I'd just ask him if he's seen the documentary. Everything I wanted to say to him is in there. And as for John McCain? My mom always told me if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all.

What she thinks New Orleans needs:

We need someone who's going to come in here and immediately take advantage of that energy to help people to rebuild. We're taxpayers. Not everybody in [New Orleans] is poor. A lot of people work and pay taxes. If the government supports us and works with us, we'll come back.

On her life now:

We spent nearly three years in a FEMA trailer set up on my sister Catherine's property, but five months ago we finally got our own place. The old apartment we were living in had been fixed up — it looks like nothing ever happened to it — but [instead of going back there] my husband and I bought a new home. It's wonderful. I still haven't gotten used to the space yet, after so long in that trailer. But we're back in eastern New Orleans, where we always were. Personally, I feel like I'm finally moving forward.

This is a clip of Ms. Montana-LeBlanc in When The Levees Broke, nearly shedding tears as she recalls trying to call 911, only to find that they were "not taking any calls."

Also from When The Levees Broke: Newscaster Soledad O'Brien found FEMA director Michael Brown's lack of intelligence "baffling." In this clip, she interviews him and seems not only frustrated but confused and shocked as to why he is calm and collected in the midst of a major crisis.

Again, from When The Levees Broke: Dr. Ben Marble, a resident of Gulfport, Mississippi, famously told Dick Cheney: "Go fuck yourself."

Hope Floats [Salon]
Related: Hurricane Gustav Tracker [Weather.com]
Gustav Nears Jamaica As New Orleans Keeps Watch [AP]
When The Levees Broke: A Requiem In Four Acts [HBO]
When The Levees Broke: A Requiem In Four Acts [Amazon]
Not Just the Levees Broke: My Story During and After Hurricane Katrina By Phyllis Montana-Leblanc [Atria Books]

MOE: Did you know Obama was a skilled card player? Surprise of the day! Anything else you can think to talk about? Anything at all? I was going to try and get us to read up on whether oil prices are a bubble. I think sorta! Unrelated: has Maureen Dowd gotten even more insane?
MEGAN: Let me read Maureen and make that determination while you read about how a certain lapdog mauled its owner when he found out he was being fed Facon instead of Bacon.

MEGAN: Completely insane. That's, like, practically insulting to everyone involved. Also, who'd'a thunk that she could try so little and still piss off an entire region of the country by making fun of their accents? She's right about Bill Clinton being ruddy. That's about the only thing.
MOE: Hahaha imagery! And who is the so-called "liberal media" in McClellan's case? Like when people tell their dogs to attack swarthy complected strangers who approached the house? But the people are about to set a 9 alarm fire to the house for insurance so the strangers are actually their friends? Anyway I have to say, I'd hate Bush if I were Scott McClellan too but I'm surprised by the intensity/sincerity?

MEGAN: Yeah, I mean, I guess he just got sick of looking stupid and incompetent or something? For my part, what I'm reading it's like a missive from an ex who still loves you but recognizes and even excuses some of your flaws (I know when you stood me up that time it was all your best friend's fault!) but in the end just wants you to know that s/he's just so tired of feeling stupid for loving you. I'm apparently all about metaphors today.

MOE: You know what I like? How Karl Rove comes off with all the evil and none of the genius. McClellan was obviously so far outside the loop he wasn't even in the same time zone as these crooks. And back to your stupid argument:

“There is only one moment during the leak episode that I am reluctant to discuss,” he writes. “It was in 2005, during a time when attention was focusing on Rove and Libby, and it sticks vividly in my mind. … Following [a meeting in Chief of Staff Andy Card’s office], … Scooter Libby was walking to the entryway as he prepared to depart when Karl turned to get his attention. ‘You have time to visit?’ Karl asked. ‘Yeah,’ replied Libby. “I have no idea what they discussed, but it seemed suspicious for these two, whom I had never noticed spending any one-on-one time together, to go behind closed doors and visit privately. …

MOE: At least one of them, Rove, it was publicly known at the time, had at best misled me by not sharing relevant information, and credible rumors were spreading that the other, Libby, had done at least as much. …
McClellan repeatedly embraces the rhetoric of Bush's liberal critics and even charges: “If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq. “The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. … In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”

MEGAN: They were too nice to him! Awww. It's like, why didn't you make me seeeeee how bad he was for me??
MOE: Do we have the next David Brock on our hand?
MOE: s
MOE: okay making coffee brb
MEGAN: Well, we will once the Administration rips off his neck and shits down his throat, in 5...4...3...
MEGAN: Oh, holy shit, Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao got himself a Facebook page.
MOE: Great Wall Of Facebook ... snicker
MOE: And we have the earthquake to thank!
MEGAN: And it connects to his Flickr!!
MOE: More than 500 people have written on his wall.
MOE:

The page appears to have been set up recently. It is not clear whether Wen, 65, did it himself. Perhaps another government official put it up, or, just as likely, someone with no ties to Wen.

MEGAN: More than 1,000 people have written on it as of right now, actually.

MOE: So far this is the most profound I've found in English

Evelyn Chang (China) wrote
at 9:06am
Please do take care of yourself!!!!
I know there are many tough problems in China,but don't push yourself too much.
You care about Chinese people,and Chinese people also care about you.

MOE:

Cindy Zhang wrote
at 9:04am
John Doededoe i read quite a few your posting and have to response. First i live in austrlain and have been in last 20 year and did not support chinese government until torch relay so i have nothing to gain in support chinese government, since they never pay anything for me.
You impression of china is distorted by biasd western media and if you only read repression of china after incident i would blame western media.
You mentioned Tiananmen square, but i tell you china has come a long way not just in economy but also in personal and political freedom and i hope your view of china can be updated as well, just like we should not use the histroy of black slave as a reason to again today's USA government. I hope i really want to know china go to china and talk to its ppl as some of view about china is breath taking

MEGAN: It sort of makes me wish I could read Mandarin (I'm assuming it's in Mandarin and not Cantonese).
MOE: The characters are the same no matter what dialect you use.
MEGAN: Ah, my former roommate never told me that. Of course, she hated
me, so she didn't tell me a lot of things.

MOE: But in China (and Singapore) they use simplified versions of them. And in Hong Kong and Taiwan (which speak separate dialects, Cantonese and Taiwanese or Hokkien) they use the old school versions.
MEGAN: Except that when she was young she was a liberal arts major, too, but then she wised up and went to business school and I would, too.
MOE: That's still my plan
MEGAN: She was from Hong Kong, but her parents moved before the transition so they wouldn't lose all their money.
MEGAN: Well, I don't know how great a plan it was for her, but I can tell you how staying a German Lit major ended up for me. Umm, well, I mean, I guess you already know.
MOE: Here's some sophisticated analysis:

Michael Kingston wrote
at 8:59am
I get tired of some people who always give examples of 1 particular person detained or jailed for speaking against the government. The truth is, millions of chinese protest against the gov. every year, and sometimes the gov. gives in. Its no different frm the west.

MEGAN: Can we friend that idiot?
MOE: I like the first 25 pages of Death In Venice btw! But reading it made me somehow woozy. I need a vacation too.
MEGAN: Yeah, it's kind of trippy, right? Luckily, you don't have that many more pages to go. I don't want to spoil it for you, but somebody dies!
MOE: Did you read TRex's post When Good Droids Go Bad?

Goddamn, can we PLEASE just send Karl Rove to Gitmo until we can arrange a suitable trial for him? You know, like, whenever we get around to it?

He'd also like to send Bush to Gruinard a.k.a. Scotland's Anthrax Island, which I didn't know about. (Thanks TRex!) It's always weird reading stories about weapons of mass destruction andsuch dated shortly before 9/11. Somewhere some guy was like, "DUUUDE, I totally did my thesis on this dammit!" Oh and speaking of — well not really, did you catch the interview with Frank Fukuyama?

MEGAN: TRex interviewed Fukuyama? Dude, I would pay actual money to see that.
MEGAN: Just like I'd sorta like to see the look on the Myanmar embassy staff's faces when they start opening up envelope after envelope of used granny panties.

MOE: I touched on it yesterday in News Roundup…There's some stuff about US-Australian relations toward the end which is kind of boring but basically he loves Obama, he is totally over "hard power"…This is the important part:
MOE:

There needs to be great downplaying of the whole war on terrorism. To call it a war I think has over-militarised our objectives and the means that we have used to prosecute it, and I think there has to be a greater shift to the use of soft power in projecting American influence and then there are large areas of the world where we have kind of neglected thinking about things like east Asia where you have obviously got some very big changes going off.

Not a lot of conservatives have gone out and said that. That said, Fukuyama was never a huge jihad guy. We mostly talked about the Latins and the Asians in the class I took. He was going through this phase where he was super into encouraging and galvanizing societal "trust" — which was why I never took him seriously as a neocon.
MEGAN: That must've been, like, his End of History period, right?

MOE: "The End of History" was 1989 I believe, and this was 1998. He had moved on to some Joseph Putnam shit, corporate culture, this book that sort of blamed The Pill for all the West's modern social problems…terror was less on the agenda. I mean, it sort of makes sense. Remember studying policsci in college? Remember all the dual degree engineers and weirdos who threw themselves into covering the "rogue states"? I remember thinking, "Dudes, you know China is going to be a much bigger deal, right?" Well. Not when it comes to getting in on the DoD budget!
MEGAN: I, um, never took a single PoliSci class in college. I was a German Lit and a Sociology major and I minored in History
MEGAN: Also, I finished college in 1999, I'm not sure if rogue states were quite in vogue yet. Maybe they were. I avoided both the PoliSci and IR departments like the plague. Those people were all really, really intense and kind of annoying knowitalls. Yes, I recognize the irony of me saying that.
MOE: Speaking of, what group of auditors and appropriations monitors is worse off than our financial regulatory system?

MOE: Rogue states were totes the rage in some of my classes. But I also went to Penn, where…a lot of kids went on birthright trips.
MEGAN: See, I think the real question is whether the continuing lack of political appointees hurts or actually fucking helps that.
MEGAN: I didn't get a birthright, let alone a birthright trip.
MOE: (And by the way haters I had a wonderful experience and wouldn't change it for …well maybe I would go back and study economics and Russian lit at a small liberal arts college with a slightly lower tool ratio but, anyway, i dropped out because I didn't have the money. That is all.) Finally though.
MOE: Firedoglake wants to know why all these people who leave always express their fondness for the president even as they admit his administration ushered in an era of unprecedented corruption and inhumanity etc. etc.
MOE: And I think about that a lot and I think the answer is simply that the president is retarded.

MEGAN: Washington has elevated CYA to an art form. It's the only place where you can have your cake and eat it, too, and get two birds in the hand and still leave one in a bush. It's where you can sell your boss and all your former colleagues downriver for the sake of your career and still claim that you like and respect them.
MOE: Ahem, I don't think that's really how it went down with Paul O'Neill.
MEGAN: You gotta practice talking out of both sides of your mouth before you come, and Scottie was the White House Press Secretary, he could probably talk out of both sides and the middle.
MOE: See I disagree? What good does it do to say you respect and admire that imbecile? And meanwhile vilify everyone involved in the administration who might have to hold a job later on? I think there's a class of Bush administration defectors — and he's in the camp with O'Neill and the Italian faith-based organization dude Suskind also wrote about —- who look at it like a cult sorta.
MEGAN: Well, but who is going to get him a job? Pay for his speaking engagements? Karl Rove, who thought that Scottie was an idiot? Or the people that think he should be loyal to Bush (his former boss) but don't give a shit about the other people? He's got to prove he's not a fool while still showing loyalty. I think, on that score, he's pretty successful.

[London, July 1. Image via Splash]