Edwin Feulner’s commentary at the Heritage Foundation goes through the litany of government failures in the response to Hurricane Katrina, and then names a hero that would probably surprise those who believe everything reported by the WORMs (Worn-Out Reactionary Media, known to most as The Mainstream Media) and their allies (bolds are mine):

….. But let’s remember, not all answers can be found in Washington.

It would be better to look toward an institution that didn’t fail during Katrina: Wal-Mart.

The world’s largest retailer had 171 facilities in the path of the storm. But as Jason Jackson, the company’s director of business continuity, told a Senate committee, “We were able to recover and reopen 83 percent of our facilities in the Gulf area within six days.”

One key reason for Wal-Mart’s success, Jackson said, is “associates who are dedicated to their communities.” That local connection helped it deliver goods when government failed. As Investor’s Business Daily reported in September, “While local and federal groups suffered communications problems and bickered over who was in charge, Wal-Mart sprang into action.”

And while Chertoff admits Katrina caught the government flat-footed, Wal-Mart is always ready. In his book The World is Flat, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote, “The minute Wal-Mart’s meteorologists tell headquarters a hurricane is bearing down on Florida, its supply chain automatically adjusts to a hurricane mix in the Florida stores.” That means plenty of non-perishable food and critical items such as generators appear in stores even before disaster strikes.

Wal-Mart has plenty to teach the government. “When FEMA or another agency places a blanket order of 100 trailers of water, we often question if the person placing the order really knows what 100 trailers of merchandise looks like,” Jackson testified. “Usually the answer to this is that the person making the order was given a dollar amount to spend, and they do not comprehend the size of this order or what it means.”

….. After Katrina, even Wal-Mart’s critics sang its praises. “It’s hard to imagine any government program matching the efficiency of a Wal-Mart,” wrote consulting firm Lynch Ryan on its Weblog, adding, “Government has a lot to learn from Wal-Mart.”

Unless we change our approach — bringing in more private, local expertise and less federal bureaucracy — we’ll be reminded of that the next time disaster strikes.

Feulner’s last paragraph echoes Daniel Henninger’s suggestion in early September that many aspects of diaster relief should be privatized (from last three paragraphs at link), and I agree:

But we ought to at least recognize that our increasingly tough First World problems–terrorism, viruses, the rising incidence of powerful natural disasters–are being addressed by a public sector that too often is coming to resemble a Third World that can’t execute.

I’ll go further. We should consider outsourcing some of these functions, for profit, to the private sector. In recent days, offers of help have come from such companies as Anheuser-Busch and Culligan (water), Lilly, Merck and Wyeth (pharmaceuticals), Nissan and GM (cars and trucks), Sprint, Nextel and Qwest (communications gear and phone cards), Johnson & Johnson (toiletries and first aid), Home Depot and Lowe’s (manpower). Give contract authority to organize these resources to a project-management firm like Bechtel. Use the bureaucracies as infantry.

A public role is unavoidable and political leadership is necessary. But if we’re going to live with First World threats, such as the destruction of a major port city, let’s deploy the most imaginative First World brains–in the private sector and academia–to mitigate those threats. Laughably implausible? Look at your TV screen. The status quo isn’t funny.

From H&R Block’s announcement of its 3rd quarter results (HT TaxProf Blog):

As part of its ongoing work to remediate control weaknesses in its corporate tax function, the company said that it will restate its results for fiscal years 2005 and 2004, as well as previously reported quarterly results for fiscal 2006. The restatement pertains principally to errors in determining the company’s state effective income tax rate, resulting in a cumulative understatement of its state income tax liability of approximately $32 million as of April 30, 2005. The company estimates that the restatement will result in a 7-cent decrease in earnings per share in fiscal 2005 and a 2-cent decrease in earnings per share in fiscal 2004. The company has not completed its analysis of the restatement adjustments, and, accordingly, the effects of the restatement on all prior periods are preliminary and subject to change. These adjustments are also being reviewed with the company’s registered public accounting firm. The company will report in amended filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission the further restatement of results for fiscal years 2005 and 2004, and restatements for the first two quarters of fiscal 2006 for the income tax adjustments.

UPDATE: I received a “corrected” version of the e-mail at about 5:00 PM ET without the login/password problem described here, but learned that it WAS intended to be a legitimate e-mail from Domania/Lending Tree (contrary to what is documented below). I have contacted the company’s e-mail service provider, who has seen the screen shot below, and who has promised a follow-up after talking with the ad’s campaign manager at Domania.

From my perspective, the corrected e-mail is dumb, and is one I would never have responded to (go here to see a screen shot of the corrected e-mail). There is to my knowledge no foolproof way to verify its origin, and therefore no way to know that I will be forwarded to a legitimate vendor’s web site if I attempt a clickthrough. Better safe than sorry.
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ORIGINAL POST (before update above)

I received a very unusual e-mail that I have to assume (and have confirmed) is a phishing expedition.

Here’s a picture of what I encountered when I clicked on the message in the message list window (width compressed to fit into the blog):

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That’s right, you’re looking at a log-in pop-up built into an e-mail.

I put in several bogus user names and passwords and the log-in window returned with no error message. I also clicked “cancel” several times, and the log-in window continued to return. The only way to escape was to quit my Mail program entirely.

I notified LendingTree.com of the problem, and directed them to the screen shot above. They said (of course) it’s not theirs, and that they would investigate.

Since I use Apple’s Mail program, it’s more than a little likely that some of the bad things that might happen to users of other mail programs didn’t and can’t happen to me. I suspect that putting in a user name and a password in a Windows-based -email program will direct you to a site that pretends to be Domania or Lending Tree, but isn’t.

What to do:

• Ideally, don’t even click on the message in the message list window of your e-mail program. I’m concerned that even clicking on the message in the message list window may trigger a malware download in Windows-based e-mail programs. So, if you can remember this post and you see a message with “Compare REALTORS(R), Save on Commissions” as the subject line, don’t even click on it, and send it with a group of other messages you wish to delete to your trash can.
• If you get this message and are directed to a log-in pop-up similar to what you see here, immediately quit your e-mail program. Upon relaunch, trash the message with a group of others so you can avoid the log-in pop-up.
• Whatever you do, don’t put valid info into the User Name or Password areas of the log-in pop-up.

E-mail me if you have any news to report on what happens with this e-mail when a Windows user encounters it.

Previous Posts for those new to the controversy:

• Feb. 20 — Follow-up on TV Ads in Minnesota Supporting the War on Terror
• Feb. 18 — So Why Can’t Former Soldiers and the Families of Fallen Soldiers Speak Out?

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Powerline’s Latest Posts (here and here) on the TV ad controversy in Minnesota are primarily about one lone media voice in the intellectual wilderness that is the state’s Democratic-Farm-Labor Party (the DFL, which is the state’s version of the Democratic Party).

Katherine Kersten of the Minneapolis Star Tribune is the only person to go on record speaking out against the DFL’s documented characterization of the former Iraq War soldiers and the families of slain soldiers involved in producing the ads, which you can see here in various formats, as (I’m not kidding) “un-American”:

The DFL has branded the ad “un-American, untruthful and a lie.” The DFL isn’t bothering to present its version of the facts in an ad of its own. Instead, party chairman Brian Melendez launched a campaign to silence (OIF vet Bob) Stephenson and others who appeared in the ad. He demanded that the ad be pulled from the airwaves, so Minnesotans couldn’t hear its message and make up their minds themselves.

….. I suggest that the DFL itself deserves that label, for attempting to silence the speech of fellow citizens with whom it disagrees. If Republicans employed the same tactic, the media would be howling. But the silence here has been deafening.

I guess free speech doesn’t apply to un-American folks such as Bob Stephenson, and his supporters in Minnesota Families United.

Scroll down the DFL’s home page, and you’ll still see the full text of the party’s request that the first ad be taken off the air (the second hadn’t been released on February 16, the date of the DFL press release).

So let’s put 2 and 2 together here: You have conclude from all of this that the DFL and its non-objecting rank and file only believe in free speech that agrees with their worldview, and that the party would, if it held enough of the levers of power, move to repress dissent with the eager help of its faithful. What other interpretation is there? So exactly why would any DFL candidate for any public office in Minnesota deserve the vote of anyone who holds the First Amendment dear?

Free Links:

• Kevin “Dances with Wolves” Costner, call your office — Every couple of years I see an item similar to this one from The Washington Post, that the “noble savage” image of American Indians is a carefully constructed falsehood. (HT Will Durant in an e-mail). This current piece documents results of archaeological work showing that “Native Americans living in an area where the city of Emeryville (California) is now located hunted several species to local extinction from 600 B.C. to A.D. 1300.” Though it won’t immediately pierce the darkness of Political Correctness on the topic, enough different stories from different times and places documenting the truth eventually will.
• Apple’s iTunes service, which started in April 2003, sold its billionth downloaded song Wednesday evening. At his MacWorld keynote address in January, Apple CEO Steve Jobs told the audience that iTunes downloads were running at over 3 million a day. That’s over 1 billion songs, and dollars, per year. At that rate the second billionth iTunes song will probably be downloaded before the end of the year. Has there ever been a startup business or business segment that has gone from zero to $1 billion in annual sales in less than 4 years? Jobs also made a good point in his statement celebrating the achievement when he said, certainly aiming at record company executives who are getting greedy about the service, that “Over 1 billion songs have now been legally purchased and downloaded around the globe, representing a major force against music piracy and the future of music distribution as we move from CDs to the Internet.”
• Jobless claims fell more than “expected,”, bond prices fell Thursday based on inflation fears. The stock market pulled back a bit too. With the Consumer Price Index excluding food and energy only going up 0.2% as reported earliers this week, I think they’re overreacting.
• The “Nigerian” advance-fee scams just won’t go away (HT Techdirt), because the supply of dupes hasn’t dried up — Another gang that extracted at least $2.4 million, and probably a lot more, was arrested in Amsterdam:
  

  Under the “419″ scam - named after the Nigerian legal code for fraud - criminals send junk e-mail to thousands of unsuspecting people offering them a share in a large fortune if they can only provide a smaller amount of money up front. The criminal takes the money and then disappears.

  “Despite repeated publicity and generally distributed warnings, people still fall for these proposals,” the police statement said.

  So don’t pay the money up front, folks. There’s no free lunch.

• The European Union has decided to impose steep tariffs on most non-sports shoes imported from China and Vietnam (HT EU Rota) — This is a futile exercise in industry protection that will increase the cost of affected shoes roughly 15%-20%.
• A classic example of cherry-picking in business reporting, followed by misdirection — The big news as far as AP was concerned is that average family income fell 2.3% from 2001 to 2004. Ah, but AP downplayed the fact that median family income went up 1.6% in that same period. The logical conclusion from the average and median stats would be that people with above-median incomes saw their incomes go up less than people with below-median incomes. Of course AP didn’t mention that obvious point, because to do so they would have to acknowledge that income inequality actually decreased. Instead, AP did a “clever” misdirection by changing the subject to family net worth, a largely different topic. AP used the net worth stats to make the usual rich-got-richer claim — well of course, sillies, thanks to the boom in real-estate prices, people with more expensive homes saw their wealth go up by more than those in less expensive homes, or those who are renting. AP’s distortions had their desired effect, as the Federal Reserve reports involved were used for political cheap shots by Mr. Bush’s political opposition. Garbage-heap reporting like this explains the need for this blog’s existence.

When a mother couldn’t get the treatment her seriously handicapped daughter needed, she orchestrated the opening of a clinic to provide it:

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