Confirmation hearings begin at 11:30 ET for Judge John Roberts. You can watch them here. If confirmed, he will be the youngest Chief Justice in the past 200 years. That's important, because it means he will be shaping our jurisprudence for decades to come.

Roberts is expected to be confirmed, although his questioning may become testy at times. According to Yale Law School Professor Jack Balkin, there are good reasons for the Democrats to stand up to the President and ask Roberts the tough questions.

Poverty, Race and a National Shame. No, that's not from Move-On or Daily Kos. It's from Newsweek, and it's the cover story.

Like many of us, Nora Ephron at Huffington Post has been puzzled by Dick Cheney's absence during Katrina and doesn't buy that it's because he was on vacation. She wonders whether the President and Cheney have had a falling out.

Could Cheney – and not just his aides -- possibly be involved in the Valerie Plame episode? Is Cheney not speaking to Karl Rove? Does the airplane/bicycle incident figure into this in any way? And how is it possible that the President is off on vacation and the Vice President is too? Not that it matters particularly if the President is on vacation; on some level, the President is always on vacation. But where was Cheney?

A few months ago, I heard of a lunch conversation that Cheney had with a political type in Wyoming. I have no idea if it's true or not, but it makes some sense. Here's the tale:

As President Bush begins his third tour of the Gulf Coast, here's what the rescue workers around him are seeing in New Orleans - a view of which he undoubtedly will be spared:

Police, troops and rescue crews in New Orleans pursued their round-the-clock mission of fishing out rotting corpses and pressing lingering survivors to leave their homes....A National Guard unit patrolled one neighbourhood, trying to persuade the old and infirm to abandon their homes, as nearly half a million others have done, and were inevitably stumbling across decomposing bodies in the streets.

"It ain't a pretty sight," said Sergeant James Terrel as his men went house to house. "I don't recommend walking down there. Even a lot of my guys don't want to see this kind of thing... and some of them have been in Iraq."

Mark Fiore outdoes himself. This is his best ever, please watch the whole thing.

The Sunday Mail has an agonizing report, quoting a rescue doctor in New Orleans:

Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leaving them to die in agony as they evacuated hospitals, The Mail on Sunday can reveal. With gangs of rapists and looters rampaging through wards in the flooded city, senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive.

In an extraordinary interview with The Mail on Sunday, one New Orleans doctor told how she 'prayed for God to have mercy on her soul' after she ignored every tenet of medical ethics and ended the lives of patients she had earlier fought to save.

by Last Night in Little Rock

Time.com posted this evening has several articles about Katrina, as a disaster for the victims, the people of the United States, and for the Bush Administration, with one aide virtually admitting that they really blew it:

Don't miss the New Yorker's Top of the Town. Here's a snippet:

...to a frightening degree, Bush’s faults of leadership and character were brought into high relief by the crisis. Suntanned and relaxed after a vacation so long that it would have shamed a French playboy, Bush reacted with fogged delinquency, as if he had been so lulled by his summer sojourn that he was not quite ready to acknowledge reality, let alone attempt to master it. His first view of the floods came, pitifully, theatrically, from the window of a low-flying Air Force One, and all the President could muster was, according to his press secretary, “It’s devastating. It’s got to be doubly devastating on the ground.” The moment demanded clarity of mind and rigorous governance, and yet he could not summon them.

[hat tip Terry Kindlon.] On a much lighter note, check out Eyewitness Muse's Administration "Natural Terror" Color Charts. A sample:

by Last Night in Little Rock

The U.K. Independent Online has an article today Cover-up: toxic waters 'will make New Orleans unsafe for a decade' contending that U.S. government officials know it, and they just aren't saying it.

by Last Night in Little Rock

Grits for Breakfast, a criminal law blog, has this today: John Roberts & the Fourth Amendment: Judicial activism to allow police searches. As I have previous said on my own site after Roberts' name was released, things do not bode well for the Fourth Amendment, Among other cases, it talks about Roberts' penning the infamous Metro french fry arrest case, previously referred to here as the ridiculous case of the week.

This photolog of 197 photos from August 28 until September 6, all with diary type descriptions, is one of the best I've seen. Judging from the comments, many others feel the same way.

It's published in Der Spiegel, and composed by a man named Alvaro who worked at the Chateau Sonesta hotel. The photos give a better sense of the evolution of the damage and of what the streets really looked like before and after the flooding than most MSM photos. There's no dead bodies, close-ups of victims or politics - it's really about New Orleans. The personalized descriptions of the photos and their chronological order really made me feel like I was there. I highly recommend it.

Update: Digby also has high praise and thoughts on this photoblog, and puts some of the photos in context.

Dave Koppel, Second Amendment expert, explains why the confiscation of firearms in New Orleans is both illegal and foolish.

The power of "regulating and controlling" is not the same as the power of "prohibiting and controlling." The emergency statute actually draws this distinction in its language, which refers to "prohibiting" price-gouging, sale of alcohol, and curfew violations, but only to "regulating and controlling" firearms. Accordingly, the police superintendent's order "prohibiting" firearms possession is beyond his lawful authority. It is an illegal order.

Last week, we saw an awful truth in New Orleans: A disaster can bring out predators ready to loot, rampage, and pillage the moment that they have the opportunity. Now we are seeing another awful truth: There is no shortage of police officers and National Guardsmen who will obey illegal orders to threaten peaceful citizens at gunpoint and confiscate their firearms.