Give as much as you can, as quickly as you can, to organizations that can deploy help quickly.  I recommend the Salvation Army.  Click here to be directed to their donation server #5.  (I figure it's less busy than servers 1 through 4.)  If it's busy, keep clicking.  Or call 1-800-SAL-ARMY, and get ready to hit redial.

When you're done donating, if you feel like it, read the rest of this post.

This country and its government have no shortage of skills when it comes to the logistics of deploying personnel and matériel to take on adverse, emergent, violent situations.  We've done so recently in Afghanistan and Iraq; we even did so in Iran after the earthquake there.  That we can't, or won't, do so on our own shores is a poignant, staggering demonstration of our double standards and skewed priorities.

Rescue and recovery in the Gulf Coast states is concretely in our national interest.  The President should respond to the emergency there with at least as much resolve and passion as he has to situations where arguments of national security have been more abstract.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, in his interview with WWL radio last night, exhibited appropriate outrage and acrimony.  He and his city's most needy people have been so far treated by the Federal government as expendable.  We can all see news footage of babies without food and water, of dead bodies sitting curbside, of people appealing, desperately and in vain, for help.  Why the full force of this country's resources and generosity have not been brought to bear to help these people simply defies explanation.  If Nagin is politically targeted by anybody for speaking his mind, it will compound the already negligent, disgraceful response to this tragedy.

When this is all over, people need to hold their elected representatives (all of them) to task for this.  This can't happen again.  Not like this.

He’s tied together my Sunday morning and late night television viewing habits and now he’s invading my digital media world.  Fareed Zakaria, who is the Editor of the International Edition of Newsweek magazine (and who is a columnist in the US Edition) now has his own show.  I started watching and listening to Mr. Zakaria during his frequent appearances on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, and enjoy him even more during his guest appearances on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.  He’s incredibly bright and articulate, and as an Indian Muslim, his take on everything from Al Qaeda and the military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq to globalization and the Indian off-shore revolution have a lot of credibility.

Now, instead of being merely a guest and consultant, Mr. Zakaria has his own show, Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria.  The show airs on PBS, but at least in New York, the show airs only on a digital channel that is available to owners of digital televisions or subscribers to digital cable.  In New York, WNET’s digital companion service Thirteen World, which is carried on Time Warner Cable’s DTV digital service on channel 715, airs the show a few different times per week.  But the digital distribution of the show goes one step further, in that the most current episode and past broadcasts are available as streaming video, in either Windows Media or Real Video formats on the show’s Web site.

While the show is still finding its rhythm and voice, as is Fareed Zakaria as a host, I highly recommend the show.  Virtually all the guests so far have been extremely intelligent and well-spoken.  Given the virtual collapse of critical, vigilant insight in mainstream American news media, this show is a beacon of hope for fans of unfettered analysis and real debate.  Interestingly, the show is produced under something called the Creative Commons License, which apparently (forgive my ignorance) allows the show to be freely copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided proper attribution is made and the content is unaltered.  I find this concept intriguing, as I do its ironic parallels with Open Source software, of which I am not a terribly avid proponent.

A reunion of sorts took place today.  Along with my wife and 7-month old son, I joined two of my high school classmates, their kids and their husbands, at the playground in Peter Cooper Village.  The kids had fun (right now, my son thinks anything with people is fun) and the adults, who have stayed in contact over the years but are not super-close, caught up with each other.

The three of us grew up in Manhattan, and the three of us want to continue living here.  But the truth is that my two classmates cannot stay, nor could I but for my parents and landlords being one and the same.  I feel it reasonable to say that we are all successful, and were able to withstand the real estate inflation of the 80s and early 90s.  We recognize we need to spend more, even in inflation-adjusted dollars, to live in a city that is far cleaner and safer than it was when we grew up here.

But the last four years or so have put Manhattan, and indeed many parts of Brooklyn and Queens, out of reach financially for most people with families.  Between rent or mortgage and maintenance, not to mention schooling, New York has become the increasingly exclusive domain of the ultra-wealthy.  The alarmist rhetoric of ten years ago and more has proven uncannily accurate.

Even Peter Cooper Village, where my erstwhile classmates live (and one grew up) and Stuyvesant Town have become expensive.  Originally established as affordable housing for veterans of World War II and forever places known for their long waiting lists (up to 15 years) and low rents, Cooper and Stuy Town have effectively converted into luxury rental developments.  I didn’t even see one of the famously friendly squirrels.

In general, I support free market economics and am not a fan of protectionist policies.  But I know full well that this city’s historical strength has been its sometimes almost overwhelming diversity, both of ethnic and economic strata.  And if New York becomes the exclusive domain of the moneyed class, its very fabric, its core, will disintegrate.

Indulge my perhaps Utopian analysis, but I believe New York has bred an ambitious, high-functioning, successful citizenry precisely because many of its members started with little and lived side-by-side with those who had more.    Many, though certainly not all, of the wealthy in this city have traditionally encouraged and admired those with high ambition and achievement and little monetary means.  That symbiosis has been the story of this city and is what has made it invincible.

Invincible.  Through gang wars, through unimaginable political corruption, through a fiscal crisis in the 1970s that made everyone want to leave and almost destroyed a now century-old subway system.  Invincible.  Through every horrible facet of what happened here when the planes hit the buildings and attacked all of us.  Invincible even through the political dissonance that has followed those attacks.

But perhaps New York will not be invincible in the face of its own success.  A success that makes people want to live here who might once have been afraid even to visit.  A success that brings the city, in fact, to evict its champions, its advocates, its lifeblood.  Surely we are smart enough to reconcile our success with our strength, our attractiveness with its contributors and architects.

Surely we can do better than outright self-betrayal.

The headlines tonight make it look almost certain that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s board will vote to approve the New York Jets’ bid to build a stadium over the LIRR rail yards in Manhattan’s West 30s.  I am extremely pleased with this probable outcome and I think the Bloomberg administration was right to push hard for it.  Many people I know, and with whom I often agree on matters of city politics and policy, do not share my view on this issue and have been (and will be) very surprised by it.  What follows is a first attempt at explaining why I think the stadium initiative is good for New York and for New Yorkers.

Most importantly, New York City needs a convention center that equals or exceeds in size that of other major cities.  From attending industry conferences around the U.S., many of which are very far from New York, I can tell you that Javits is a laughing stock in comparison to its counterparts in other cities.  Besides gnawing at my innate New York snobbery and assumption that New York should have the biggest and best everything, this disparity infuriates me in terms of the economic misfortune it brings to this city.  Javits’ inadequate size kills our prospects for most serious convention business.  Has Microsoft ever had a major conference in New York?  Even VSLive, for the first time in 10 years, won’t be coming here.  We’re too small at the high end and too expensive at the low end.  Something needs to change.

I want New York hotels to have the room nights, I want New York cab drivers to have the fares, I want New York restaurants to have the revenues, and I want New Yorkers to have the jobs that a constant flow of convention and conference business can bring.  I want people who wouldn’t ordinarily come to New York to come here because a conference is in town, and I want them to discover how much fun it is here, and then I want them to come back on vacation.

The Jets stadium gets us a bigger Javits Center.  It also gets the Jets back to New York.  I have never been a big sports fan, but I grew up here and I went with my dad to see the Jets play at Shea.  And when the Jets left Queens to play in New Jersey, it really kind of broke my heart.  In the 70s, New York had all the “ets” teams…The Mets for baseball, the Jets for football, and the Nets for basketball.  With two out of three going to NJ, it’s just felt unnatural.

And another thing.  The campaign by Cablevision to scuttle this deal is one of the most cynical, dishonest, and corrupt political ploys I’ve seen in a long time.  Anyone who thinks a company based in Bethpage, Long Island gives a damn about the quality of life of residents of Manhattan’s West Side is dreaming.  Although the TV spots they ran were meant to look like they were paid for by a consortium of Chelsea block associations, they were in fact a desperate attempt by a failing media and entertainment company that is not based in New York City to protect its Radio City Music Hall and Madison Square Garden franchise.  Period.

I’m as troubled as anyone by the hyper-gentrification of Manhattan, and I do acknowledge that the stadium project has the potential to make it worse.  But I also know that protectionist policy to keep the West 30s a relative wasteland is wrong-headed.  And I feel strongly that many people who oppose the stadium truly do not realize how much economic activity we are losing without such a project.  Further, I have a feeling that the number of home games played and nighttime events held at the stadium will make for traffic congestion that is far less than what many people fear.  When I was a kid, I marched against Westway.  That would have caused traffic nightmares all throughout the West Side.  I can’t imagine a Jets stadium doing any such thing.

And a final word with regard to New York’s bid for the 2012 Olympics (another underpinning of the case for the stadium).  I think the campaign is improbable, and maybe even Quixotic.  I think having the Olympics here will ultimately make no sense economically.  I also think chances are very good that the games will go to Paris.  But maybe we should still try.  It would be a royal pain to be the host city, but I have to admit it would be fun.  And with our stadium plan in place, and the specter of labor unrest in Paris during the games, you just never know…the IOC may just decide to give us a chance.

But a bigger Javits is my mantra, and this project looks to me, on balance, like the best way to build it.

If you travel (or live) outside North America much you’ll be familiar with the ubiquity of BBC World and CNN International.  The latter, in James Earl Jones’ voice identifies itself simply as CNN, just as its North American counterpart, but is in fact a very different channel.  Just to the right of the omnipresent CNN logo is a small, slowly spinning globe.  And that globe means a lot: the anchor desk is based in London and the programming is much more news-heavy, infotainment-eschewing, and editorially pure than CNN in North America.  Much like BBC World, the channel follows a format of 30 minutes of pure international news at the top of the hour followed by a variety of shows on the half hour.  Many of these shows like “Diplomatic License,” “Inside Africa,” “World News Asia” and “International Correspondents” are also chock-full of interesting world news content.  Anyone who remembers and liked CNN in the 80s will feel right at home watching CNN International.

Whether you’re conservative, liberal or somewhere in between, if you crave a news channel that isn’t sensationalistic and ratings-hungry and focuses on serious analysis of the news, BBC World and CNN International are terrific news programming sources.  The problem is that until recently, neither of these channels was widely available in the United States (I believe BBC World is available 24-hours a day on some Canadian cable systems, however).  CNN International was available all weekend and from midnight until around 8am each weekday morning by watching CNN fn, which was off the air at that time, but not on a full-time basis.

But now there’s a better option.  Recently, CNN fn went dark (which is too bad, I actually liked watching it) and on many cable systems, including Time Warner Cable’s DTV digital cable service in New York, CNN International has replaced CNN fn and is now on 24 hours a day.  On Time Warner in New York, you can tune to channel 133 and watch CNN International whenever you want.  If you think of it, at the top of the hour, tune in and see what you think.  If you’re serious about your news, this could become habit forming for you.

If you can’t get CNN International, or even if you can, you have another option for hard world news.  Many of the news half-hours from BBC World are carried on BBC America (a digital cable/satellite channel) and many PBS stations.  If you’re a news junkie and you have a DVR, you can do what I do: tell your machine to record all airings of BBC World News on all channels, saving only the one most recent recording (you may want to give the recording a relatively low priority so that it doesn’t pre-empt other recordings you’ve programmed in).  This way, you’ll always have a recent half hour of world news near the top of your recorded shows menu, and you won’t use more than a half-hour’s worth of hard drive space on your DVR. This approach works quite well, especially in markets like New York, with a number of PBS stations (including new digital-only PBS channels).  Here in NY, if you have digital cable, BBC World News airs on a total of five different channels.

By the way, both channels have their own Web sites.  BBC World’s is www.bbcnews.com, which redirects to http://news.bbc.co.uk/.  Unless you’re in the U.K., you’ll probably want to select the World Edition.  And speaking of selecting the World Edition, you can configure CNN’s main home page, www.cnn.com, to display CNN International’s content by clicking the International Edition link on the upper-right of the home page or by pointing your browser directly to http://edition.cnn.com.  Oh, and check out BBC World's front page RSS feed here.  News junkies of the world, unite!

I try very hard each Sunday morning to watch ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos."  This is due to a combination of the time that it's on (9 am in New York), their Sunday Funnies segment that usually features outtakes from my all-time favorite television show "The Daily Show With John Stewart," and the fact that when David Brinkley hosted the show, it was actually pretty good.  Don't get me wrong...I think George Stephanopoulos is bright and astute, but he lobs mostly softballs at his guests, and, to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, he's no David Brinkley.  There's one other reason I still stay tuned...I actually like George Will.  George is a bit pompous of course, but he's a reasonable, honest and intelligent man, and he argues earnestly and skillfully.  I find it pretty tough to find another conservative on television I can describe as such. 

My nostalgia for the old crew and format was indulged today as Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts were brought back to sit on the round-table panel with the two Georges.  They discussed a number of recent news events and developments, one of which brings me genuine optimism, and one of which has rather the opposite effect.

On the positive side is what seems to be an improving situation in Israel and the occupied territories.  I honestly think the current initiative for peace is much more likely to fail than succeed, but it could just work out, and it would in any case be a mistake not acknowledge some genuine bravery and risk taking by both Abbas and, dare I say it, Sharon.  My gut feeling is that Abbas genuinely believes violent struggle to be pragmatically ineffective, not to mention immoral.  But beyond having his heart and brain in the right place, he seems pretty resourceful in his approach to influencing Hamas and Islamic Jihad to see likewise.  The danger there is that truly winning their confidence may require that he unreasonably compromise his current stance.  Time will tell.  For Sharon's part, it does seem that age and opportunity have swayed him toward a general desire to be seen as the one to deliver a secure peace to Israelis.  Time tends to moderate politicians, and Sharon's moderation was ironically pointed out by James Baker III, as he was interviewed by Stephanopoulos.  I say "ironically" because Baker himself seems to have moderated quite a bit since his Reagan-Bush days, as he provides genuine insight without much vitriolic Republican rhetoric.  Mind you, Baker is Senior Counselor with The Carlyle Group, so his conservative credentials are still well intact.

The negative development was Saturday's naming of Howard Dean as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee.  Words cannot convey my anguish and utter disappointment in the choice of Dean to be the face of the party I affiliate myself with.  With this choice in place, it's unclear to me whether the Democrats can ever transcend their role as the party of (seemingly perpetual) opposition.  What frustrates me is that the Democrats seem to have fabricated a false dichotomy between choosing leaders that are too conservative and those like Dean who lay rhetorical claim to espousing the party's core liberal values.  Certainly, Dems who fashion themselves essentially as imitation Republicans don't strike me as good choices (especially since people will prefer real Republicans every time).  But candidates making passionate arguments for progressive causes, who do so pragmatically, and who sensibly and promptly respond to FUD and slander hurled at them by their opponents are the ones who ought to be in leadership positions in the party.  The last guy the Democrats had in the White House was a pretty good example of that, and we need more like him (don't all flame me at once).  They're definitely out there. Martin O'Malley, the Mayor of Baltimore, who I heard speak at my niece's graduation at Goucher College, strikes me as one such Democrat; he was a genuinely moving speaker who exhibited maturity, charisma, and passion. The FUD on O'Malley has already started, so the Republicans must think he's a rising star too!  Hopefully, he'll respond appropritely and quickly, and provide a positive example for discouraged Democrats.