You know it’s bad when even the muckrakers start feeling a little sorry for Katherine Harris.

More bigotry from our enlightened Republican friends. This time it is Steve Laffey, candidate for U.S. Senator from Rhode Island, whose white sheet is showing, in columns he penned while in college in the early 1980s:

In one column, Laffey said he has never seen a happy homosexual.

“This is not to say there aren’t any; I simply haven’t seen one in my lifetime. Maybe they are all in the closet,” he wrote. “All the homosexuals I’ve seen are sickly and decrepit, their eyes devoid of life.”

In another column he wrote that pop music was turning the children of America into sissies, and criticized the singer Boy George, referring to him as “it.”

“It wears girl’s clothes and puts on makeup,” he wrote. “When I hear it sing, ‘Do you really want to hurt me, do you really want to make me cry,’ I say to myself, YES, I want to punch your lights out, pal, and break your ribs.”

Laffey called the writings “sophomoric political satire” and said they do not represent his views.

“Not now, nor then, or ever,” he said. “Do I regret some of these things? Sure. But at the time, we were just having fun. We thought it was funny.”

Funny as in “Ha, ha”?

Rumsfeld: “I think the real threat that North Korea poses in the immediate future is more one of proliferation than a danger to South Korea. . . . I don’t see them, frankly, as an immediate military threat to South Korea.”

A miscalculation? Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah: “We did not think, even 1 percent, that the capture would lead to a war at this time and of this magnitude. You ask me, if I had known on July 11 … that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not.”

Update: From TPM Reader JG: “I read his statement more like a PR maneuver: all the destruction is a result of Israel’s unreasonable reaction. He would never, ever have dreamt that the kidnapping might have brought that kind of harm to his poor, beloved Lebanon.”

We’ve spent a lot of time on Katrina this weekend. I appreciate your indulgence. Usually, the media hype associated with one of these kinds of anniversaries is more than I can stomach. But in this instance, unfortunately, the attention is deserved, not merely because of the initial severity of the disaster but because each day the disaster along the Gulf Coast continues to unfold.

Two additional points:

(1) The people of the Mississippi Gulf Coast have suffered greatly, too. I will always remember the chill that ran down my spine late in the day the storm hit when I heard a local describe the storm surge as “worse than Camille.” For those who had lived for a generation with Camille as the benchmark against which all hurricanes would forever be measured, the notion of a hurricane worse than Camille was as surreal as watching the Twin Towers collapse.

(2) Had Hurricane Rita hit a more densely populated region, we would speak her name with the same reverence as Katrina’s. She was an awesome storm and wiped the landscape clean in Southwest Louisiana at least as thoroughly as Katrina did in the southeast part of the state. The impact on individual lives was no less disastrous for those in Rita’s path; the only difference is that there were fewer lives affected.

People often ask why New Orleans has benefitted from so much of the attention given to the Gulf Coast. The cavalier answer is, what benefit exactly? Whether the complaint is New Orleans getting more network TV anchor visits than Mississippi or the Ninth Ward getting more coverage than Lakeview, I have not seen any evidence that this allegedly undue media coverage has made a real difference on the ground. New Orleans has half of its pre-storm population. The Ninth Ward is merely uninhabitable. I wish the problem was as simple as an inequitable allocation of resources.

The real answer to why New Orleans is the focus is twofold.

First and most obvious, significantly more people lived in and around New Orleans than anywhere else affected by the hurricanes of the past two seasons. Naturally that makes New Orleans more newsworthy.

Second, nothing could have been done to prevent the impact of Katrina on Mississippi or of Rita on the Louisiana/Texas border region. But were it not for the failure of the levee system, New Orleans would have survived with a few bumps and bruises. Hundreds of lives, a culture, and a way of life would have been spared. It was preventable. Not only that, decades of toil and treasure had been expended specifically to prevent this precise disaster. American taxpayers were sold on the Cadillac of flood control systems but were delivered a Yugo.

Disasters happen. But what happened to New Orleans is different.

A reminder that TPM continues to provide first-hand accounts from New Orleans at its Katrina blog, After the Levees.

WSJ Battleground States Poll has Webb edging ahead of Allen in Virginia Senate race . . .

American troops have killed thousands of civilians in the protracted U.S. occupation of Iraq. So why, ask experts, have only a dozen soldiers ever served time for killing a non-combatant? That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.

Greetings! Josh is still away and I’ll be back as your guest blogger this week.

This story about fighting between the US military and Muqtada al-Sadr’s forces is interesting. Such episodes seem to have been increasing in frequency and intensity over the past few weeks. But why? Over a year ago we made our peace with Sadr, he joined the political process, his party did well in the election, and its members are represented in the Maliki cabinet. Recently, however, words seems to have gone out that our troops should start targeting him again. But why?

And what kind of sense does it make to fight Mahdi Army militiamen on the one hand, and on the other hand have the leaders of the Sadr Movement sitting in parliament and in the cabinet?

I feel like I should say something about the Katrina anniversary, but I honestly don’t know what to say about it. Fortunately, DK had a bunch of good Katrina-related content over the weekend. Sheryl Gay Stolberg’s article on the contrasting images of 9/11 Bush and Katrina Bush offers some food for thought.

In particular, the centrality of 9/11 to Bush’s political persona has always struck me as under-analyzed. It’s a strange thing primarily because Bush didn’t really do anything on 9/11 or its immediate aftermath. Terrorists hijacked four planes and sought to crash them into buildings. They succeeded in doing so with three of the planes. Thousands died. The physical destruction was enormous. It was terrible. But it wasn’t quite as bad as it could have been. The passengers on one plane downed it before it could reach its target. Many people were evacuated from the World Trade Center and their lives were saved. But none of the good work that was done on that day — and there was some good, heroic work done — was done by the president or had anything in particular to do with him.

Rather, the good vibes about 9/11 Bush all, in essence, relate to a series of speeches he gave in the days following the event (his immediate evening-of speech was poorly receieved). And I think they were good speeches. The rubble/bullhorn event was a good event. The address to a joint session of congress was great, too. But what does that all really amount to?

Not nothing. Providing inspirational rhetorical leadership in a time of panic is legitimately part of the president’s job. But it still doesn’t add up to very much. A speech is just a speech. It’s not, moreover, like this was a DeGaulle or Churchill type situation where the disaster struck and then a new leader stepped forward to take the reigns of authority from those who had failed and gave a speech to mark a new beginning. His popularity skyrocketed because, having failed to foil a serious terrorist plot, he made a series of pleasing remarks about the plot. And ever since that day, I think this dynamic has been infecting our national strategy. The main goal, in essence, is to do things that signify the adoption of an appropriate attitude toward hostile elements in the world rather than to evaluate possible courses of action in terms of their effects.

The debate on Iraq is just awash in this. The war gets discussed as if it’s a metaphor of some kind. A good opportunity to demonstrate resolve or commitment, or else the lack thereof. A place where our stick-to-it-iveness will show how strongly we feel that democracy is good. A shadow theater wherein we send messages to al-Qaeda or Iran or what have you have. But, of course, Iraq is a real place. The soldiers and civilians in that country are real people. They shoot real bullets and detonate real explosives. And so the question has to be, what, actually, is being achieved? What more might realistically be achieved? What are the consequences — not intentions, not desires, not hopes, but consequences — of our policies?

Not the most profound observation in the world, but somehow the news out of Pakistan is rarely reassuring.