It seems like one of the basic tenets of the American identity that’s been defined in the past few centuries is that we help people in need. It’s what we do. Sometimes it may completely backfire and sometimes we may have some ulterior motives, but that’s who we are and who we always have been. But what happens when we…can’t. With FEMA’s disaster-relief fund looking to be dangerously low, that appears to be the problem. Recently, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor took it upon himself to be the bad guy in this story, proposing that any additional funds (like those for Hurricane Irene) should be offset by set spending cuts. Unsurprisingly, this hasn’t been an entirely popular notion, however, there’s at least one guy who agrees with him; former FEMA administrator Mike Brown who discussed the proposal today on Fox News.

When we first learned that Hurricane Irene was headed for the United States, it was only a matter of time before comparisons and contrasts would be drawn between the response of federal and local governments during this storm to Hurricane Katrina, which Jake Tapper today described as “the hurricane that exposed mismanagement and weakness at the highest levels.”

Appearing on Fox News Sunday right after FEMA director Craig Fugate, who has been appearing on many of the Sunday talk shows to update people on relief efforts, Congressman Ron Paul criticized the federal agency for bureaucratic mismanagement and continued to argue his position in favor of abolishing it.

Andrew Breitbart takes his media blitzes seriously. While the newly-minted author was taking on Bill Maher‘s panel last night on HBO, he was also simultaneously on FBN’s Follow the Money, lambasting Democrats for “using [Hurricane] Katrina as a cudgel against President Bush” while not criticizing President Obama for his take on other disasters. Surprisingly, he took nearly as much heat on Fox Business as he did on HBO.

The first full business day of the year finally gave the cable news world proper time to address the madness in New York City after last week’s blizzard, and bad feelings about the clean-up still abounded. On tonight’s O’Reilly Factor, Bill O’Reilly took a strong stance for federal intervention in such situations, suggesting conservative columnist Mary Katharine Ham, by not supporting an intervention, was “ok with people dying.”

Almost exactly ten years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that George W. Bush would be the 43rd president of the United States. To commemorate that landmark decision, New York Magazine asked five writers to each compose a short piece detailing what might have happened if Al Gore had instead unequivocally won in 2000. Those authors include Kurt Andersen, Kevin Baker, Jane Smiley, Walter Kirn—and, most surprisingly of all, Glenn Beck.

Here is Brian Williams full interview with President Obama from last night. Williams spoke to the President in New Orleans on the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina about a number of things including Glenn Beck, the birthers, his vacation, and a second term.

President Obama and family flew from Martha’s Vineyard to day directly to New Orleans to mark the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. In a half hour speech made at Xavier University under gray skies (according to Twitter) and following a shrimp po boy for lunch (also according to Twitter), Obama touched on both Katrina, its aftermath, and the states current struggles due to the BP oil spill

Today marks the 5th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Meet the Press did a special broadcast this morning from New Orleans, hosted by Brian Williams to mark the occasion including a fascinating tour of Brad Pitt‘s Make It Right housing project in the Lower Ninth Ward, and hard panel discussion about NOLA five years later. Also, whatever happened to that national discussion we were supposed to have about poverty and race?

What would the coverage of Hurricane Katrina have been like in the age of Twitter? The question has been raised, as it often is when contemplating massive national events in the past – back in late August and early September 2005, we watched that story unfold, unbelievingly, on our TV screens and news reports and via the then-lighting-fast-seeming world of blogs, as the Times-Picayune brought their operation online from wherever they could get online.

Five years after Hurricane Katrina, the media is descending on New Orleans once again to follow the progress of the city’s rebuilding. Last night, Rachel Maddow reported from Louisiana on the closing of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (Mr. Go), a canal that was directly responsible for channeling water into New Orleans when Katrina hit. It was yet another sign that her point of the night was true: when man fights nature, nature always wins.

No matter how calm and collected President Obama appears to be, I bet the results of this poll really pissed him off. Even more so if he had a look at the fine print. A new ABC News/Washington Post released yesterday revealed that the country thinks the BP Oil spill is worse than Katrina. Sort of.

The BP Oil Spill is now a month old. Fairly early on the administration managed to shut down the initial storyline that this was President Obama’s Katrina by relentlessly pointing out that Katrina was primarily the result of government neglect and this time around the administration was fast-acting and in charge. It would appear Obama’s grace period on this comparison is about to come to an end.

On Tuesday, Robert Gibbs chastised Fox News’ Wendell Goler for an appearance by former FEMA Director Michael Brown in which Gibbs said he alleged sabotage by the administration in the Gulf Oil Spill. Your World host Neil Cavuto then challenged Gibbs to come on the show to correct the record, as Brown had merely said the administration deliberately let the spill worsen to advance policy goals.

Yesterday, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs had some advice for Neil Cavuto, channeled through Fox News’ Washington correspondent Wendell Goler: don’t let former Bush administration officials propagate conspiracy theories on your show. Except Gibbs didn’t quite get the theory right, which Cavuto took him to task for on today’s program, along with extending Gibbs an invitation to the show himself.

After yesterday’s intimate pre-recorded interview with Matt Lauer on Today, Karl Rove stopped by the studio to talk to the host live about three of the most controversial issues of the Bush administration: the invasion of Iraq, the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, and the Valerie Plame CIA leak scandal. Unlike yesterday, this Rove showed no signs of remorse or vulnerability, and stuck to his points against an increasingly combative Lauer.

Regardless of the outcomes of the two playoff games this weekend, the Super Bowl will have plenty of compelling story lines. Mediaite presents a four part series where we tell you who’s left in the NFL playoffs, why they matter, and what the media will not stop talking about if they earn a trip to the big game. Part two focuses on the New Orleans Saints.

The decade got off to such a nice start, didn’t it? At the stroke of midnight, as the nines turned into zeroes, our millennial fears were allayed by magnums of champagne and an army of Silicon Alley wizards. Cities around the globe twinkled with the light of an infinity of camera flashes. It was all [...]

Amidst this weekend’s wall-to-wall Ted Kennedy coverage, and the growing Sarah Palin anniversary retrospectives it was sometimes difficult to recall that Saturday marked the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans. Even Twitter seemed relatively quiet on the subject. Speaking of Twitter, it’s hard not to wonder how differently the aftermath of Katrina might have played out had Twitter been around just four years ago.

Has the NYT Magazine figured out a way to save newspapers? The Times Magazine has seen cuts on three dimensions this summer — the cover is both shorter and skinnier (and the whole thing seems thinner). Times invesitgative pieces are notoriously expensive and this weekend’s is no exception.

However, this time around the Times did not foot the bill. Pro Publica — the non-profit journalistic outfit supplied the $400,000 story. Is this the future of investigative journalism?

It’s been a rainy summer in New York, but so far there’s been a drought of news this August. Aside from the health care debate and the bad behavior it’s spawned, it’s slim pickins. According to The Guardian, even “silly stories” about sharks, dubious surveys, and animals with prosthetic limbs have been in short supply.