Texas gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman commented on the large number of Katrina evacuees in Houston by calling them "crackheads and thugs". African-American state representative Senfronia Thompson, D-Houston tells Kinky not to be racist.

A Houston-area lawmaker said Tuesday that she is "vehemently insulted" by independent gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman's derogatory comments about Hurricane Katrina evacuees.

Friedman last week attributed a spike in Houston's crime rate to the "crackheads and thugs" who evacuated New Orleans.

"He has demonstrated a total lack of human sensitivity," said state Rep. Senfronia Thompson, D-Houston. "The people of Katrina have lost everything and are suffering not only from the loss of loved ones, but the trauma of the event itself. What has precipitated from this tragedy is behavior that results from a disastrous event."

Sounds like the suicide bomber defense to me. The humiliation! The lack of hope!

Houston police have reported that 59 of the 262 Houston murders between Jan. 1 and Aug. 26 involved Katrina evacuees, either as victims or suspects.

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Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert doesn't know the words to our national anthem. And he can't sing either. I'm not sure which is the most painful part of watching this video.

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Elie Wiesel, Alan Dershowitz and others have an easy solution to dealing with Iran in the United Nations. Threatening a member state? Secretly fomenting wars against other countries while denying responsibility? Kick 'em out!

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A lot of conservative pundits have fun taking comments from NY Times editorials and contrasting them to opposite stands that the paper has taken in the past. I have found myself that it isn't all that hard to do.

Today's lead editorial sharply criticizes President Bush's speech last night. "Last night, President Bush once again urged Americans to take terrorism seriously — a warning that hardly seems necessary. One aspect of that terrible day five years ago that seems immune to politicization or trivialization is the dread of another attack."

Now read what the Times printed in it's Week in Review section just two days ago. (If you think I'm taking this out of context, feel free to read the whole thing.)

The Age of Terror, at least inside the United States, has morphed into the Age of the Foiled Plot. But this very success has led to a new debate. The government says the record vindicates its prevention strategy — to intervene long before an attack is imminent. Its critics assert that officials have exaggerated the threat posed by some accused plotters, painting hapless misfits as Qaeda operatives.

None of this means that a serious plot isn’t being hatched now, invisible even to a counterterrorist bureaucracy hugely expanded since 2001. But five years of evidence suggests that the terrorist threat within the United States is much more modest than was feared after 9/11, when it seemed quite possible that there were terrorist sleeper cells in American cities, armed with “weapons of mass destruction” and awaiting orders to attack.

“The idea that we are surrounded by terrorists who could strike anywhere, anytime, is a complete misconception,” said Karen J. Greenberg, director of the Center on Law and Security at New York University.....

As time has passed without a new attack, the voices of skeptics who believe that 9/11 was more a fluke than a harbinger are beginning to be heard.

“A perfectly plausible explanation is that there are no terrorists here,” said John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State Univeristy...

As I've discussed with my loved ones in NY, there is also a huge difference between how New Yorkers are experiencing the post 9/11 world compared to the rest of the country. The Times forgets that the President is not speaking for their benefit, but for the vast majority of Americans who don't live there. Typical myopic thinking.

I also like their comments in their editorial yesterday entitled "9/11/06". Without ever having asked to be exempt from the demands of this new post-9/11 war, we were cut out. Everything would be paid for with the blood of other people’s children, and with money earned by the next generation. Our role appeared to be confined to waiting in longer lines at the airport.

Over one million Americans have already served in Afghanistan or Iraq (not to mention the millions more that affected as close family or friends), to say that we have not sacrificed goes to show how self-involved they are. Maybe they haven't enough, and maybe I haven't enough, but we?!? Perhaps some veterans from New York should disabuse the Times editorial board of the notion that it's readership should not include them. If anything, given the Times disgust over the war in Iraq, they should be grateful that the administration hasn't gotten more people involved to be killed for an unjust, lost war.