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At the urging of Heritage Foundation blogger Mark Tapscott, Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters has added his influential voice to the blogosphere's fight against "pork" in the federal budget.

Morrissey's targets: the Democratic and Republican campaign committees for House lawmakers. He is urging people to withhold funds from the National Republican Congressional Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee until lawmakers quit funneling federal money to special-interest projects in their districts.

"For those representatives who refuse to pare the pork," Morrissey wrote, "we need to cut off their political oxygen until they turn blue and their campaign chests grow cold. Tell your congressperson that while they protect the pork we discover, while they continue to vote for budgets with these useless and wasteful projects when the funding could defray the hurricane relief efforts, we will send Not One Dime to their efforts to re-elect their incumbents. ... We mean to end the pork wagon now."

But Jesse Taylor at Pandagon said the PorkBusters effort is never going to work. "The only things that will get cut are the things that will either get the cutters political points or the ones that nobody cares about. Local money to your districts fit neither of those criteria. Fantasize about the power of the blogosphere all you want - when push comes to shove, they're not going to follow Truth Laid Bear's edicts on the shape of the federal budget."

Posted by at 07:47 PM | Comments (1)

The debate about how to cover the costs of rebuilding the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina prompted Rep. Marsha Blackburn to share her thoughts at RedState. Her post sought to draw attention to "Operation Offset," a Republican effort to fund post-hurricane reconstruction by cutting the money spent on other programs.

Blackburn, R-Tenn., used her foray into the blogosphere to highlight her call for changes to the earned-income tax credit, which aims to ease the tax burden on low-income Americans. The Internal Revenue Service contends that many taxpayers who claim the credit do not qualify, and Operation Offset assumes that a change to eliminate such claims could save $85 billion over 10 years.

Blackburn's blog entry mostly reiterated the information already available in the Operation Offset report. At least one reader was not impressed with her contribution: "I was surprised by the representative's lack of 'beef' in her posting."

UPDATE: Blackburn followed up with another post yesterday to tell RedState readers about her new call for across-the-board spending cuts of anywhere from 1 percent to 5 percent. She also responded to readers bothered by her proposal on the earned-income tax credit.

"Thanks for being here," RedState founder Mike Krempasky wrote in the comments section of her post. "You're far ahead of your Republican colleagues in your willingness to engage. Kudos to you."

Hat tip to The Hotline's Blogometer.

Posted by at 07:27 PM | Comments (0)

A Beltway Blogroll reader just alerted me to the fact that Sen. Barack Obama is blogging. In fact, the Illinois Democrat has had a blog on his Senate site since early April, so I'm a bit behind the curve on adding it to the blogroll.

The move is not surprising, considering how popular the freshman Obama is in the Democratic blogosphere. Along with now-Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, Obama spoke at a breakfast for credentialed bloggers at last year's Democratic National Convention.

One important change has occurred since then: Obama writes the entries for his congressional site. He took some heat from the bloggers at the convention when he praised blogging but confessed that aides were responsible for the content on his campaign blog.

Obama is not exactly a prolific blogger, having posted only 11 entries since April. But he has shown far more initiative in using technology to connect with his constituents than most of his colleagues. That initiative includes podcasting -- and he has been a bit more consistent in offering those digital audio downloads.

Obama's first podcast, about the response to Hurricane Katrina, went online Sept. 8, and he has offered three others since then. The topics have included the hurricane, energy policy, poverty, voting regulations and the nomination of Judge John Roberts to be the Supreme Court's chief justice. (Obama was one of 22 Democrats who voted against Roberts today, but the judge was confirmed on a 78-22 vote.)

Posted by at 11:58 AM | Comments (0)

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid unveiled a new Web site this week that is designed to rally Democrats as the party tries to regain Senate control in the 2006 election.

The new site, Give 'Em Hell Harry, was inspired by the 1948 campaign of President Harry Truman, but it has one campaign tool that Truman didn't have in his arsenal: a blog.

Not surprising considering Reid's status, the blog already has a significant following. The Nevada Democrat posted entries Tuesday and yesterday, and each has sparked about 50 comments.

Reid held a conference call with Democratic bloggers this week, and Seeing the Forest and Swing State Project already have spread the word about the new site.

Posted by at 07:15 AM | Comments (0)

Rep. Jane Harman headed to the Middle East yesterday for a tour of four countries in 96 hours, and the California Democrat will be blogging about the junket at TPMCafe this week.

Her first post, filed hours before her departure, set the stage for what she will be trying to accomplish, both on the trip and on the blog. She listed three goals for the trip: thank U.S. troops who are located in the region; engage U.S. allies there in some "tough talk" about what America expects of the nations it supports; and "search for 'ground truth' about whether our policies are working."

The latter "is always the hardest part because the organized briefings are polished and well-rehearsed," Harman wrote, "but the ground truth often doesn't come out until the informal chat with the lieutenant colonel, the walk back to the car with the ambassador, or the whisper in your ear from the veteran intel officer."

She closed with a note about what her Internet audience can expect in terms of field reporting from the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee: "For security reasons, I won't always be able to tell you the real names of some of the folks we'll see or the details of where we're heading next. But I'll always try to share with you the ground truth as I learn it."

Posted by at 07:19 AM | Comments (0)

The push by President Bush for the federal government to spend $200 billion to recover from Hurricane Katrina has sparked a firestorm of criticism from bloggers on the left and right.

Liberals see the reconstruction plan as an opportunity both to blast Republicans as budgetary hypocrites and to revive their longstanding complaints about Bush's policies on taxes, war and domestic spending. Fiscal conservatives see the plan as further evidence that Bush is not one of their own. And the two bloggers who spearheaded a successful fundraiser for hurricane relief now have refocused on finding "pork" in the federal budget to help fund the reconstruction.

Liberal bloggers are gleefully noting the irony of a GOP president who preaches fiscal restraint now proposing, with little forethought, a massive spending plan to benefit one small region. Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of The Daily Kos called Bush "an LBJ-caliber spendthrift" in two separate posts.

Bush's liberal critics characterize his plan not as an anomaly but as part of a pattern of fiscal irresponsibility. "As Democrats know and Republicans try to forget," wrote Neil Sinhababu of The Ethical Werewolf, "this administration has turned the record budget surpluses of the late 1990s into unprecedented budget deficits. We've gone from a surplus of $236 billion in 2000 to a $412 billion deficit in 2004."

They also see a political element to the Katrina relief -- one that Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo said is sure to benefit the same types of Bush cronies as the equally misguided spending on the war in Iraq.

"What's driving this budgetary push is not a natural disaster but a political crisis, the president's political crisis," Marshall wrote. "The White House is trying to undo self-inflicted political damage on the national dime. ... This will be Iraq all over again, with the same fetid mix of graft, zeal and hubris. Cronyism like you wouldn't believe."

Liberal bloggers aren't opposed to spending federal money on post-hurricane reconstruction; they just want the government to pay for it by "ending tax cuts to the rich" and rebuilding America rather than Iraq.

They also are dead set against GOP proposals like "Operation Offset." Among other things, that plan targets the prescription drug benefit for Medicare recipients as a way to pay for the work in the Gulf Coast. "[T]o expect the Americans most at need to foot the bill while refusing to ask the wealthy to give up their tax cuts is absolutely unconscionable," Scott Shields wrote at MyDD.

Although driven by different motives, conservative bloggers, meanwhile, clearly are just as aggravated with Bush -- but for them the issue is that the president proposed a $200 billion hurricane reconstruction plan without first explaining why that amount is needed and how it would be spent. A GOP Bloggers post headlined "The Era Of Big Government Being Over Is Over" best epitomized their frustration.

Later entries at the same blog indicate that GOP loyalists still have hope for budgetary leadership by their party. But doubts about the costs of Bush's "compassionate conservatism" and the Republican Party's commitment to true conservatism are still apparent.

"As much as it pains me to admit it," Trevor Bothwell wrote at Democracy Project, "we're witnessing the consequences of virtual one-party government. Politicians left to their devices are dangerous, and at the end of the day they're still politicians. It hardly matters which party they belong to. Without a responsible check on spending authority, this is what we'll see."

Similar thinking led Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit and N.Z. Bear of The Truth Laid Bear to join forces again in a "PorkBusters" campaign. The mission: Mobilize the blogosphere to identify special-interest spending projects earmarked by politicians who can't help themselves, reverse that spending, and dedicate it instead to paying for hurricane reconstruction.

It's the kind of project that cynical Washington insiders -- and even some skeptical bloggers -- love to mock, and they already have good reason to doubt whether the campaign will work. A quick visit to the PorkBusters page at The Truth Laid Bear shows that "NO CUTS COMMITTED" to hurricane reconstruction and "No Response/Response Pending" or "Negative" response from contacted lawmakers are the dominant themes.

But there are also encouraging signs for Jokers to the Right, Punditeria, The Unalienable Right and the numerous other bloggers on pork patrol for "Glenn's army." A few lawmakers, for instance, have said they are open to the idea of forgoing transportation projects in their districts to cover post-hurricane work in the Gulf Coast -- and one of them is House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

An aide to Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., even sent an unsolicited e-mail to one of the PorkBusters bloggers. "I can only assume that the good senator from Oklahoma and his staff have been paying attention to the PorkBuster efforts in the blogosphere, and that's how my name ended up on an e-mail list," blogger Nicholas Schweitzer wrote. "I find this very encouraging."

The bloggers also are not fighting the battle alone. Washington's conservative Heritage Foundation is a key contributor to PorkBusters. Though Instapundit gets the credit for starting the PorkBusters blog swarm, the idea actually originated months ago with Heritage blogger Mark Tapscott, who was inspired by a similar proposal from Heritage President Ed Feulner. Tapscott revisited the issue again in August, just before Katrina hit. Heritage also launched a separate blog called Pork Reports.

Longtime pork foes like Citizens Against Government Waste and Taxpayers for Common Sense also are engaged in the fight, with CAGW urging lawmakers to sign a "Hurricane Katrina No Pork Pledge". And the mainstream media are publicizing, and even participating in, the PorkBusters campaign.

"To me, the point is to take a step --- a small one, granted --- toward a culture of greater fiscal responsibility in Washington," PorkBusters co-general Bear wrote in defense of the project. "If we can hold our representatives on Capitol Hill accountable for the small bits of pork, then perhaps that example will also make them think twice about the larger boondoggles that plague our government."

Posted by at 07:23 AM | Comments (1)

Word that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a heart surgeon, is being investigated for the sale of hospital stocks has his conservative critics in the blogosphere looking for political blood.

RedState's Leon H called for the Tennessee Republican's resignation Friday, and Sean McConeghy at Republican Senate endorsed the idea the next day. "Conservatives will stick by leaders who stick by us, including with regard to ethical conduct," McConeghy wrote. "That is why we have rallied for House Majority Leader [Tom] DeLay. That is why there will be no such rallying around Bill Frist."

Noting that the case against Frist seems strong at first glance, Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarters also said Frist's resignation from the Senate leadership is necessary to keep the GOP agenda from going adrift. He said George Allen, R-Va., would be a good choice to replace Frist.

The End Zone added: "I have instinctively sensed Senator Frist was just a bit too clever, and too unprincipled, for his own good. This is evidence that my instincts were not off base."

Posted by at 08:22 PM | Comments (2)

Here's something I bet you never thought you'd hear Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of the liberal Daily Kos say about that right-wing rag on Wall Street: "The Wall Street Journal is not stupid. They're smart."

Or how about this take on that other venerable New York-based newspaper, one whose worldview is arguably much closer to Moulitsas' liking: "The New York Times, on the other hand, is the textbook definition of stupid."

The reason for his rant: The Times has just started charging a premium for readers to access its opinion columnists online, while the Journal has a separate, and free, site designed to give its opinion makers the widest possible influence in the public arena. "Heck, they have a guy e-mailing their content to bloggers," Kos added of the Journal's approach to shaping opinion.

"So the Wall Street Journal works hard to be a top influencer in the national debate," he said. "And The New York Times works hard to become a provincial paper. Wish granted."

Something tells me that Moulitsas is not going to be paying the $49.95 to access Times columns -- or even using his popular forum to give the paper's columnists much attention in the blogosphere.

Posted by at 09:17 AM | Comments (0)

Democrats in Congress have directed an unrelenting stream of criticism at President Bush ever since Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. Now The Huffington Post has become a favorite forum for the soldiers of that Bush-bashing brigade.

Several lawmakers have posted entries at the site since the storm, and the activity increased last week. Even House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California authored what apparently is her first-ever blog item. She posted the entry Thursday, about a week after visiting Katrina evacuees in Houston and just hours before Bush addressed the nation about the hurricane response. (Houston now is being evacuated because Hurricane Rita is on the way.)

Pelosi used the blog to outline the "Marshall Plan for the Gulf states" that she unveiled earlier in the day. It calls for "a partnership with the people of the region" aimed at rebuilding homes, reviving farms, repairing infrastructure and constructing schools. She also touted legislation to punish energy companies that "gouge consumers on gasoline and home heating fuel." And she contrasted those ideas with one of the steps taken by Republicans so far.

"Democrats have a clear message to the people of the Gulf Coast," Pelosi wrote. "We stand with you and we are prepared to do whatever it takes to help to rebuild your communities. ... House Republicans voted against bringing up the House Democratic proposal to create an independent commission" to investigate the failures of the hurricane response.

That House Democrats are determined to make the policy response to Katrina a political issue is obvious from a link at the end of Pelosi's entry. It directs people to a page focused on the response -- a page that includes criticisms of GOP actions and even a section titled "House Democrats Hold the President Accountable."

Here is what Democrats in Congress have been saying in their hurricane-related blog postings:

-- Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts decried the Bush administration's plan to cover the multibillion-dollar cost of hurricane reconstruction via spending cuts in other federal programs. "Katrina recovery efforts should not be funded out of spending cuts in Medicaid, education, and veteran's programs," he wrote, "but by repealing tax cuts for the wealthiest individuals and corporations in the country."

-- Rep. George Miller of California blasted Bush for an executive order that will allow lower wages for laborers involved in hurricane-related reconstruction. "Hundreds of thousands of people have just lost everything they had. America has to put Gulf Coast workers back to work -- and at wages that can help them and their families get back on their feet. ... If the president wants to help storm victims, he should rescind his executive order immediately."

Miller criticized Bush over the issue again in a separate post at TPMCafe: "The president has proven once again that he's more interested in governing for the few than in governing for all of us. ... What the president has done is immoral.

-- Rep. Major Owens of New York tried to tie the racial aspects of the hurricane tragedy to Bush administration policies toward nations like Niger and Haiti. "For the New Orleans blacks, the misery has just begun," he wrote. "As dislocated evacuees of color, they will be forced to suffer through years of wandering in a hostile bureaucratic wilderness. Today's host organizations and governments will viciously evict the pitiful interlopers tomorrow."

-- Rep. Diane Watson of California critiqued Bush's speech to the nation, arguing that he offered little substance in the address. "The president's actions speak louder than his soaring rhetoric," she wrote. "That's why we see in the immediate aftermath of Katrina that it's really business as usual. Old cronies ... are queuing up along the levee banks ready to line their pockets even before the flood waters recede."

-- Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana did not directly criticize Bush or the Republicans who now run the government, but he lamented that government had failed its people. "Many of us never thought we would live to see the day when tens of thousands of our fellow citizens would be left for nearly a week to fend for themselves without food, without water, and stranded on rooftops," he wrote. "This is a moment where we have to step back and revisit the idea of what America is really all about."

On the Republican side, Rep. Mark Kirk of Illinois has posted two entries at the blog on his House site since the hurricane hit, but both were about relief efforts, not policy. The blog of Indiana Rep. Mike Pence repeatedly has noted the need for fiscal discipline in the wake of the hurricane, but Pence's press shop has done most of the writing. Pence's only post on the subject consists solely of links.

There have been no other sightings of GOP lawmakers in the blogosphere since the hurricane hit.

Posted by at 12:38 PM | Comments (0)

You would think that after the infamous Holocaust reference by Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., back in June, liberals might wait a few more months before airing another such analogy. But Air America Radio host Randi Rhodes apparently missed the memo.

GOP Bloggers, Michelle Malkin and NewsBusters note that Rhodes compared the ongoing evacuation for Hurricane Rita to the scenes of "cattle cars" from the Holocaust.

"Think about it this way," she said. "People were taken one place; their children were taken another place. This is so much like the Holocaust. ... And here you have people being loaded onto transportation vehicles, not being told where they're going, and their children are being taken someplace else."

Liberals clearly are not alone when it comes to off-the-wall Nazi comparisons. But NewsBusters doubts, probably accurately, that the mainstream media will notice Rhodes' comments or express the kind of outrage they would if, say, conservative radio talker Sean Hannity said something similar.

Posted by at 12:25 PM | Comments (2)

If you want to know what conservative blogger Mike Krempasky is going to tell the House Administration Committee about regulating bloggers, you need not wait until tomorrow's hearing. Krempasky stole a bit of the panel's thunder by posting his written testimony at RedState a day before the main event.

The subject of the hearing is a bill that would pre-empt the Federal Election Commission from applying campaign-finance law to bloggers. Krempasky, who testified before the FEC in June and helped found The Online Coalition to lobby against such FEC regulation, is all for the legislation.

He has no tolerance for blog regulation, as evident in the testimony. "Make no mistake: There can be no effective political regulation of the blogosphere without destroying the freedom that makes this medium great. In fact, the only reason we're here today is that while ordered by a federal court to create rules to govern political activity on the Internet, the regulators at the Federal Election Commission have been unable to do so."

Krempasky revived his argument that bloggers are part of the new media and thus should be exempt from campaign law under the rules that apply to other media. He cited the blogosphere's response to Hurricane Katrina to bolster that view.

"Minutes after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, bloggers were collecting, sharing and distributing firsthand reports of the devastation, hosting documentary video footage, and lending help to the relief efforts," he wrote. "Lousiana bloggers who could maintain connections continued to post updates on the areas around them in greatest need -- some direct from the heart of New Orleans. In a news cycle measured in tiny increments, bloggers were hours ahead of their mainstream counterparts. And in reaction to tragic devastation and humanitarian need, they were willing and ready to lend their voices, time and effort to help."

Click on the link above to read the complete testimony.

UPDATE: Bloglines waited until yesterday, the day of the hearing to post its testimony on the subject. "Linking to campaign Web sites, quoting from or republishing campaign materials, and even providing a link for donations to a candidate, if done without compensation, should not result in a blog being deemed to have made a contribution to a campaign or trigger reporting requirements," Bloglines founder Mark Fletcher wrote.

Duncan Black, meanwhile, has not yet posted his testimony at Eschaton, but he described his "Day in DC" and later shared his thinking on disclosure rules in response to AP coverage of the hearing.

His thinking on the topic as of yesterday: "Judging from the testimony of the FEC commisioners who were there, I'm much more optimistic than I was back during the summer when I testified [to the FEC]. They seem to 'get it' much more than they did before, and even a worst-case scenario from the FEC would probably be nothing to get upset about. ... Overall, I'm not too worried about this issue at the moment. One way or another I predict a decent outcome for the whole process."

Whether that same outcome would have been achieved without the involvement of bloggers over the past few months is another issue.

On a lighther note, Black mentioned the presence of conservative blog nemesis Krempasky at the congressional hearing. "They put some space between us so we didn't kill each other," Black joked. Or maybe he wasn't joking.

UPDATE II: Paul Mirengoff of Power Line raised the issue of blog regulation with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., at a dinner yesterday. Mirengoff said McCain "reaffirmed that there should be absolutely no regulation of the Internet in the name of McCain-Feingold or campaign finance reform."

That response prompted Patterico's Pontifications to wonder aloud either whether Mirengoff misunderstood McCain or McCain even knows "what his own law is doing." Mirengoff responded to Patterico, and the two now have a strange debate going about whether McCain is a "space cadet."

You have to love Fridays in the blogosphere.

On a more serious note, the House Administration Committee already has a transcript of the hearing, and there is a link to a webcast of it on the panel's home page.

Posted by at 12:12 PM | Comments (0)

I have added three blogs to the roll on the left but wanted to call attention to them here as well:

-- Broadband Blog. The motto is, "Give me high speed, or give me death," and the blog covers telecommunications policy issues from the states to the Supreme Court. Georgia-based attorney Erick Erickson, a blogger at RedState, is the brains behind the blog.

-- Christian Coalition. The religious right is blogging now. Just to give you a sense of what to expect, a post from yesterday praised former Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., as "the greatest conservative leader during the past half-century besides President Ronald Reagan."

-- Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. The blog reflects the priorities of the group with the same name: fighting terrorism, and promoting freedom and human rights. The bloggers include: Richard Carlson, a former U.S. ambassador and director of the Voice of America; Women for a Free Iraq co-founder Eleana Gordon; and Cliff May, a former journalist and communications director for the Republican National Committee.

Posted by at 12:19 PM | Comments (0)

Since Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, I have wanted to do something to help the victims of the storm but something more personal than just donating to charity. After several days of contemplation, it hit me: I write, therefore I am. So write I will.

With the help of Devin Hedge, a friend of mine and Webmaster extraordinaire, I have launched a site called Hurricane Job Hunter as a forum for volunteering my writing and editing services. I also have recruited some of my journalistic colleagues to help. The site will enable people left jobless by the hurricane to contact us so we can write cover letters, resumes or other materials they need as they try to recover from the storm.

That is the easy part. The hard part is finding the people who need the help, especially when we are nowhere near the hurricane's path or the key evacuee areas, and when many of the storm's victims are homeless, computer-less or never had computers or Internet access before the hurricane hit.

But as the managing editor of National Journal's Technology Daily and the author of Beltway Blogroll, I believe in the power of the Web to connect people and make things happen. After the hurricane hit, I watched with amazement as hundreds of bloggers marshaled their resources to raise more than $1 million in just a few days. The same kind of energy was apparent after the tsunami of last December.

This post is my attempt to start the same kind of charitable blog swarm. I am not asking for your money; I am asking for your help. If you have connections to people left jobless by Hurricane Katrina, either direct or indirect, please tell them about Hurricane Job Hunter. If they do not have computer access, act as their mediators and contact us through the site so we can try to open employment doors to them.

You can volunteer, too. If this appeal works as I hope it will, the few folks currently working for Hurricane Job Hunter will be overwhelmed with requests for help. Go to the site now and let us know what you can do to ease the burden. Whether you are a whiz at creating catchy cover letters and resumes, or a technology expert who has better ideas about using the Web to accomplish the goals of the site, we could use your help.

Posted by at 04:39 PM | Comments (1)

President Bush has had a rough few days since Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, and with his poll numbers steadily sinking, Bush's foes see an opportunity to inflict a mortal political wound. He is not the first president to face such a hurricane-induced outcry, though.

Seventy years ago, the strongest recorded hurricane in U.S. history hit the Florida Keys and killed numerous World War I veterans who were there to work on a federal highway construction project. President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent the veterans there, and when the leaders of the federal work camps failed to order an evacuation until it was too late, FDR's political foes tried to pin the blame on his administration.

"I blame no one person, but a number" of people, said Republican Rep. Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts, "and I hold this government directly responsible for the death and injury of those veterans." Rep. Harry Sauthoff, a Wisconsin Progressive, added: "It must be remembered that the government put them there. The government had a responsibility and a duty."

That is just one tidbit from "Policy Storms of the Century," an essay I wrote last week for National Journal magazine about the policy impact of hurricanes and other natural disasters. You can read the rest below the fold.

Meteorologically speaking, the hurricane that slammed into the Gulf Coast on August 29 died days later in the northern part of the continent. Politically speaking, Katrina is very much alive, and its eye has settled over Washington for the foreseeable future.

Shortly after the storm, Congress cleared two emergency spending bills totaling more than $60 billion. And lawmakers, as is typical, are also trying to make sure that their pet policy ideas ride the hurricane-induced legislative wave moving through the capital. But the real test of Katrina's staying power will be whether the storm spawns substantive changes in federal disaster mitigation, just as its most infamous atmospheric siblings have done in the past.

Throughout history, hurricanes have captured the attention of government leaders, and President William McKinley was chief among them. Raymond Arsenault, a historian at the University of South Florida, recently noted on the History News Network that the near-annihilation of Cedar Key, Fla., and the deaths of more than 100 people in an 1896 hurricane made a lasting impression on McKinley -- one that eventually influenced his military strategy."

I am more afraid of West Indian hurricanes than I am of the entire Spanish navy," McKinley said at the start of the Spanish-American War some two years later. That fear inspired the president to order the creation of a hurricane warning system designed to protect vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

Congress, for its part, has long been responding to hurricanes and other disasters by providing monetary relief. In a 1950 document printed in the Congressional Record, Rep. Harold Hagen, R-Minn., charted such federal aid back to 1803. Lawmakers have provided aid in the wake of everything from "Indian depredations" in the mid-1800s, to "grasshopper ravages" in the 1870s, to the kinds of disasters more familiar today: tornadoes, droughts, earthquakes, floods, volcanoes, and hurricanes.

The earliest hurricane-related federal spending that Hagen recorded came in 1928, after a September storm hit Puerto Rico. Congress provided $8.1 million to rehabilitate agriculture and schoolhouses and to purchase seeds. Two years later, lawmakers allocated $1 million to cover repair work by the Puerto Rican Hurricane Relief Commission, and they gave the commission loan breaks in 1935. Another $5 million went toward forest rehabilitation in New England after a hurricane struck there in September 1938.

Not every disaster has been what Claire Rubin, a disaster research consultant and the co-author of the Disaster Time Line on the Internet, calls a "defining event." In fact, no defining events occurred until well into the 20th century.

Even the Category 4 hurricane that swamped Galveston Island off Texas in 1900, killing at least 6,000 people, failed to push the federal government into the disaster-mitigation business. Although Congress did react to that tragedy, according to Casey Greene, the head of special collections at Galveston's Rosenberg Library, lawmakers merely funded extensions of the seawall, in part to protect federal military reservations. Funding for the extensions was authorized in installments from 1904 through 1950, Greene said in an e-mail exchange with National Journal.

Other major hurricanes, including Category 4 storms in 1909, 1915, and 1928, made landfall in the early decades of the century. Yet not until the massive flooding of the Mississippi River in 1927 did lawmakers start thinking they could do more to protect Americans from "acts of God." They passed the 1928 Flood Control Act, which gave the federal government authority over flood control on the Mississippi and moved from a levee-only system to one based on dams and reservoirs.

The New Deal changed the public's attitudes about a social safety net, amplifying the move toward more federal involvement. "The public's willingness to bear a portion of disaster losses dates back to the early 1930s," the General Accounting Office wrote in a 1980 report on the history of flood control, crop insurance, and federal reimbursement for property losses.

But the Labor Day hurricane of 1935 showed that even President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the father of the New Deal, could dodge responsibility for natural disasters. The Category 5 storm was the strongest ever to hit the United States, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and it hit a politically significant population: veterans of World War I whom FDR had sent to the Florida Keys to work on a New Deal highway project.

More than 400 people died in the hurricane. The supervisors of the veterans' camps failed to heed hurricane warnings or send for a train to evacuate the area until it was too late. The hurricane's 18-foot storm surge overturned the train before the veterans and other residents could board.

Republican lawmakers, led by Rep. Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts, tried to pin the blame on FDR during congressional hearings. But Rep. John Rankin, D-Miss., a Roosevelt ally, chaired the hearings and managed them in a way that largely shielded the president from criticism. Rankin dismissed Rogers's attacks as "silly efforts ... to play politics."

Rogers nevertheless made a final stand on the House floor when the chamber considered a bill to compensate the families of hurricane victims. "I blame no one person, but a number" of people, she said, "and I hold this government directly responsible for the death and injury of those veterans." Rep. Harry Sauthoff, a Wisconsin Progressive, added: "It must be remembered that the government put them there. The government had a responsibility and a duty." But after the aid to the families became law, the hurricane was eventually forgotten.

Congress pushed the government further into the disaster arena in 1950 with passage of the first Federal Disaster Relief Act, the measure that Hagen advocated when he outlined his 147-year history of aid. "It simply establishes a fund to enable the government to give direct relief to these disaster areas when disasters arise, rather than having to come to Congress in each instance," Rep. Edward Cox, D-Ga., said during floor debate.

A year earlier, Congress had created the Farmers Home Administration, and in 1953, it created the Small Business Administration. Loans from these two programs, and from the Federal Crop Insurance Corp., became the foundation of federal disaster assistance. Neither the 1950 law nor the three agencies were created in direct response to hurricanes, but all were in place in time for three major hurricanes in 1954: Carol, Edna, and Hazel.

Like Katrina, the next two hurricanes to demand lawmakers' attention hit the Gulf Coast. Hurricane Betsy came first, in 1965, followed by Hurricane Camille four years later. Both triggered significant changes in disaster law.

After Betsy, Congress quickly enacted the 1965 Southeast Hurricane Disaster Relief Act. The statute provided aid to flood victims and ordered a study on flood insurance. President Lyndon B. Johnson noted upon signing the bill that disaster aid had been broadened six times during "the unusually severe succession of disasters" over the previous 18 months, but he added that all of those steps had occurred "on an emergency basis." Johnson advocated a permanent system of flood insurance, and the study ordered under the law eventually led to just that: the 1968 National Flood Insurance Act.

A year later, Camille battered the Gulf Coast again, and then caused flash floods in Virginia after moving inland. More than 100 people died not far from the seat of the federal government. President Richard Nixon responded in 1970 with an appeal for a new law to address the "gaps and overlaps" in the existing "complex program" of disaster relief.

"The last presidential message on the subject of disaster assistance was written 18 years ago," Nixon said. "Since that time, this program has grown in a piecemeal and often haphazard manner, involving 50 separate congressional enactments and executive actions."

Among other things, Nixon proposed a law that offered two extra years of unemployment benefits to hurricane victims, low-interest loans to local governments that lost property-tax revenue because of disasters, and the repair or replacement of public facilities. He also favored steps to simplify and speed debris removal from private property. Congress largely endorsed his proposal in passing the 1970 Federal Disaster Relief Act. Rubin said it is "the basic enabling act for the kinds of things [that the Federal Emergency Management Agency] does" today.

Hurricane Agnes hit next, in 1972, prompting Nixon to say this in a national radio address: "Confronted with so massive a disaster emergency, our response as a nation must also be massive. Conscience commands it; humanity impels it." Then, two years later, spurred in part by a tornado in Xenia, Ohio, Congress amended the 1970 law. Nixon said the action "truly brings the New Federalism to our disaster preparedness and assistance activities."

Policy makers have continued to follow that pattern ever since, with the intensity of each disaster dictating the intensity of the response. "There has been a tendency ... in response to large disasters to reshape and often expand the federal role," said Rutherford Platt, a professor at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst). He said that the trend has grown stronger during the past 25 years and suggested that "the era of hazard mitigation" really hit its stride in the Clinton administration.

"Every few years," added Rubin, "something comes along that causes them to change the system." Despite what she calls an unprecedented attempt to politicize Hurricane Katrina, she said that the latest disaster will be a defining event. "The partisan fury is temporary, I think, although I expect it to continue for the recovery planning phase," Rubin said. "Ultimately, even congressmen will come to grips with the need for a new approach to dealing with catastrophic events."

Posted by at 07:10 AM | Comments (0)

In less than two months' time, Democrat Ginny Schrader has managed to lift and sink the spirits of the Democratic "netroots."

A hero of the blogosphere in 2004, Schrader caused a buzz in late July when she announced a rematch against Republican Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick in Pennsylvania's 8th District. But in a vague announcement last week, she withdrew from the race to follow "new roads [that] hold more of an allure to me than another year spent on the campaign trail."

Leading netroots blogs like Daily Kos and Swing State Project took note of the announcement. "We are sorry to see Ginny leave the race," blogger DavidNYC wrote at the latter site, "but I am sure it will still be an interesting one -- and regardless of who wins the primary, freshman Republican incumbent Mike Fitzpatrick is highly vulnerable."

The Liberal Doomsayer, a blogger in Bucks County, Pa., added, "I think she would have made a good rep, but after a couple of tries, I think it's plain that the voters don't want her there." The blog also noted that "Patrick Murphy is trying to make his case to the blogger community, and that will definitely help him."

Posted by at 07:08 AM | Comments (0)

Testifying before the Federal Election Commission and Congress, and blogging at sites like Confirm Them, Personal Democracy Forum and RedState apparently is not enough to keep Mike Krempasky busy. He has taken a blog-related job at the Edelman public-relations firm.

Krempasky's first client, according to a post last week at RedState, is Wal-Mart. "I can't tell you what an experience it's been over the past two weeks -- watching this corporate giant lead the way in response to Hurricane Katrina and helping to tell that story," he wrote.

In an e-mail announcing the job last month, Krempasky described his new job like this: "I'll be joining Edelman as a vice president, working on corporate public affairs with a bit of an Internet twist. It's bound to be a tremendous challenge, but it's an exciting opportunity I couldn't pass up."

His work for Wal-Mart already has prompted reaction from other bloggers.

Krempasky's move is one of a few noteworthy developments in the blogosphere in recent weeks. Another one also occurred at RedState, and it was not nearly as exciting -- at least not for Josh Trevino, a RedState founder and board member who announced his departure as an editor over "differences of vision and purpose with the board and community."

Trevino announced his decision soon after he criticized President Bush for his response to Hurricane Katrina, and MyDD blogger Jerome Armstrong jumped to the conclusion that the two developments were related. "[T]hey can't even stand a bit for criticism of Bush, even when he's most obviously failed at leadership and execution in the face of a natural disaster," Armstrong wrote in describing what he sees as a key difference between liberal and conservative blogs.

But Trevino said that in Armstrong math, two plus two must equal five. "It's posts like this that leave me wondering why Armstrong garners the respect that he does," Trevino wrote in an e-mail to me. "I was not forced out for criticizing the president over his response to Katrina. I wasn't forced out at all. I chose to leave RedState for entirely different reasons."

Krempasky said this of Trevino's departure: "If Hollywood can cite 'creative differences,' I suppose that's about as close as it gets. Josh is extraordinarily talented, and he'll continue to do great things."

(A footnote to the story: Trevino inexplicably accused me of "left-wing ... fishing for a nonexistent scandal" simply because I asked him a question based on another blogger's comments. One of his readers kindly came to my defense.)

Armstrong is going places, too. Last month, he became the Internet director at Forward Together PAC. Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, a potential Democratic presidential candidate in 2008, is the honorary chairman.

"Where does Warner go next?" Armstrong wrote. "I dunno, stay tuned. Warner's said that he wants to be part of the national Democratic Party dialogue, with Forward Together, and I've been hired to facilitate that over the Internet."

Liberal blogger Ezra Klein also has a writing day job now. He starts work at The American Prospect on Monday. And Yahoo has hired blogger Kevin Sites to report from "hot zones" around the world.

Posted by at 05:11 PM | Comments (0)

Rep. John Conyers, a blogger in his own right who also has diaries at Daily Kos and The Huffington Post, today added AMERICAblog to the list of online forums he has visited. The reason: to celebrate House passage of language targeting hate crimes.

"This historic event marks the first criminal law-based civil rights measure to pass in decades," the Michigan Democrat said. The vote was 223-199, and it came on an amendment to a bill that would address the registration of convicted sex offenders.

"This legislation will make it easier for federal authorities to prosecute bias crimes by loosening the unduly rigid jurisdictional requirements under federal law," Conyers wrote, adding that the bill would authorize Justice Department assistance for hate-crime prosecutions in the states.

UPDATE: Conyers may love the bill, but not all lefties do. TalkLeft criticized both the provisions on hate crimes and sex offenders.

On the right, PoliPundit took note of the House vote.

UPDATE II: The Tom Tancredo for President blog said the linkage of bill language on hate crimes and sex offenders is the result of "a stroke of evil-genius" by Conyers, a "scheming leftist." Conyers considers the mention "a backhanded compliment."

Posted by at 10:10 PM | Comments (0)

Lawmakers regularly insert articles into the Congressional Record, and I have long had a wonky wish to write something so profound that some congressman will feel compelled to enshrine my words in the annals of American democracy. Alas, after 15 years of hard work in Washington's mainstream media, I am batting zero.

You might not think that blogging, the pastime of amateur, pajama-clad pundits, according to one infamous MSMer, would increase my odds. But, hey, it worked this week for Jim Lindgren of The Volokh Conspiracy.

His post about umpiring as a judicial philosophy didn't make it into the Record, but it did serve as the foundation of a question asked at the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of John Roberts.

Maybe there is hope for me yet.

Posted by at 09:24 PM | Comments (0)