Have a good weekend

I'll be back tomorrow night after the concert for another blog entry.

The Scotsman gives Chaos and Creation in the Backyard two stores.

How to process in the aftermath of Katrina. This is too good to not reprint in full here.

How to process the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina:

Read every copy of The New York Times you can get your hands on, passing it on to your news-junkie friends and reading theirs in return.

Digest every bit of news -- even those forwarded e-mails you usually dread. If you can't stay up late enough to see what sage Jon Stewart has to say on The Daily Show, tape it.

Write a check to the American Red Cross.

Package your 7-year-old's excess clothes for the little boy of a friend of a friend who fled New Orleans to Roanoke with only the clothes on his back. Talk your son into filling up a sand pail with toys and writing a note that says: Call me if you want to play.

Express guilt to another guilt-ridden friend for the seeming triviality of your riches and, face it, your sheer dumb luck: your blue skies and clean water, the food you're about to eat, the asters you just planted in the front yard.

Take comfort when my friend sends you this quote, something she clipped from a magazine years ago: "As long as you are alive, be alive. Taste deeply. Trust the senses. Forget advice. Drink something. Cook. Eat."

Is Senator Russ Feingold's stance on Iraq his plan for 2008? I knwo 2008 should be on the backburner right now but I can only digest so much news right now from the gulf coast.

Since he proposed the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2006, U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold has met with two reactions within his own party.

One is acclaim from activists, liberals and war critics.

The other is a polite but cold shoulder from the Democratic establishment.

Feingold is almost alone among the party's senators, foreign policy mavens and unofficial 2008 presidential hopefuls in pushing a target date for troop withdrawal.

"He could be either ahead of the curve or a total outlier," one Democratic strategist said last week.

In either case, his stand has obvious implications for his possible dark horse run for the Democratic nomination in 2008.

"Feingold represents the largest share of the Democratic base and how they feel about this issue," Matthew Dowd, strategist for President Bush's 2004 re-election, said in an interview last week.

"It reminds me of what (Howard) Dean did...knowing the intensity of the Democratic base on Bush, that whoever took on Bush directly in a vociferous way was going to get a big bump," Dowd said of Dean's unexpected emergence in the Democratic field in 2003.

With rising discontent over the war, Feingold's position may test the public's receptiveness for talk of a troop withdrawal. It also underscores divisions among out-of-power Democrats over Iraq. Those disagreements involve both politics (the party's fear of looking weak or defeatist) and policy: whether stabilizing Iraq and avoiding a quagmire or a failed Iraqi state requires more troops or fewer troops, patience or deadlines.

In an interview Tuesday, Feingold - a longtime critic of the war - said he thinks Democrats have been fearful of discussing withdrawal "because they do not want to take the flak of people saying they are not patriotic, or not interested in the war against terrorism."

How Feingold votes on Roberts could affect his stance with the large liberal base in the party.

Note to political appointees at FEMA: Grow a spine and start working like crisis managers and not positions you used to own since you all are very unqualified for your positions.

FEMA's top three leaders -- Director Michael D. Brown, Chief of Staff Patrick J. Rhode and Deputy Chief of Staff Brooks D. Altshuler -- arrived with ties to President Bush's 2000 campaign or to the White House advance operation, according to the agency. Two other senior operational jobs are filled by a former Republican lieutenant governor of Nebraska and a U.S. Chamber of Commerce official who was once a political operative.

Meanwhile, veterans such as U.S. hurricane specialist Eric Tolbert and World Trade Center disaster managers Laurence W. Zensinger and Bruce P. Baughman -- who led FEMA's offices of response, recovery and preparedness, respectively -- have left since 2003, taking jobs as consultants or state emergency managers, according to current and former officials.

Because of the turnover, three of the five FEMA chiefs for natural-disaster-related operations and nine of 10 regional directors are working in an acting capacity, agency officials said.

Patronage appointments to the crisis-response agency are nothing new to Washington administrations. But inexperience in FEMA's top ranks is emerging as a key concern of local, state and federal leaders as investigators begin to sift through what the government has admitted was a bungled response to Hurricane Katrina.

"FEMA requires strong leadership and experience because state and local governments rely on them," said Trina Sheets, executive director of the National Emergency Management Association. "When you don't have trained, qualified people in those positions, the program suffers as a whole."

The Rolling Stones have announced that they have donated $1 million to the relief efforts. At their Soldier Field stop, the night will get started by Jim Belushi and Dan Akyroyd as the Blues Brothers & Friends open up.

Bill Nighy is afraid he'll be starstruck when he meets Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards.

He says, "I would absolutely love to work with him.

"He's really clever, a very witty man, but I imagine I'll get incredibly tongue-tied and won't be able to speak."

Sorry, Ringo. However, I feel that his birthplace is a historical site and should be spared and turned into a museum.

The British birthplace of former Beatles drummer Ringo Starr is to be destroyed, as local officials have decided it has "no historical significance".

The house in the Dingle district of Liverpool, England, was initially saved from the bulldozers when outraged residents protested against the move, which was part of a massive regeneration scheme.

But now Liverpool City Council has reconsidered their decision, and the iconic rock 'n' roll dwelling is one of 460 houses to be obliterated - even though the houses of his fellow bandmates are being kept intact.

Housing executive Flo Clucas says, "Ringo Starr lived in the Madryn Street house for about three months before he moved to Admiral Grove, where he lived for about 20 years.

"John Lennon and Paul McCartney's childhood homes were preserved because they spent a significant part of their lives in them.

"The house on Madryn Street has no historical significance."

Ringo Starr previously argued, "Why are they knocking them down? If it is economically viable, they should do them up.

"Are they going to knock out the centre of Liverpool again? That's what they did before. They moved everybody to high-rise apartments outside the city and forgot to rebuild.

"I believe it's now very nice. They even have bathrooms, which we never had."

Save the house at all costs. I don't care how long he lived there. It is a historical site.