I watched the clip of Kanye's comments on ifilm.com. He comes off not so much as polemical as simply and utterly shellshocked and overwhelkmed by the enormity and horror of the past week's events, the murderous rhetoric of the Louisiana governor, and the federal government's complete indifference to a city in which rotting corpses were drifting down streets flooded with toxins in a disaster which may well have been preventable. I am finding it very difficult to feel Trent Lott's pain. The things West was saying seemed pretty spontaneous, like, with the cameras on him, he had to say something other than the empty and self congratulatory platitudes Bush and Chertoff have been spewing over the last twenty-four hours.

When you walk over the Manhattan Bridge you can see into the windows of the massive Jehova's Witness complex that sits between the two bridges. It's basically hallway after hallway of numbered closet-size cells, like Manhattan Mini-Storage, only Jehova's Witnessy. It looked pretty claustrophobia-inducing for a massive complex the size of several city blocks...