The boys:

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Your son just hasn’t read Atlas Shrugged!

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Scary!!!

Here’s Jon Stewart’s take.

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Nothing like a last-minute comeback!

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They’re calling it the largest natural disaster on record, destroying homes, land, crops and water supplies, and yet the coverage in the U.S. media has been relatively low-key. Sadly, now it looks like things will be getting even worse:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan issued new flood warnings on Thursday that could last into the weekend as government and relief agencies strained to confront the toll from a growing humanitarian disaster.

The new warnings to several cities in Punjab and Sindh Provinces added to the desperation of many across the country facing a daily struggle for survival as Muslims around the world began to observe the holy month of Ramadan.

[...] The United States Embassy in Islamabad announced that two Marine helicopters had arrived in the country, the first of a contingent of 19 American military helicopters that has been ordered to assist the Pakistani government in relief efforts. The United States has pledged $71 million for flood relief, and American officials have called for more.

“Americans have been very focused on other, equally heart-wrenching issues, like Haiti,” Richard C. Holbrooke, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said Wednesday at the Council on Foreign Relations. “I hope they will turn their attention as well to this extraordinary crisis that Pakistan is facing.”

The aid deliveries could help the United States improve its image here and blunt a growing anti-American sentiment. The Taliban have already urged Pakistanis to shun American aid and have used the crisis to expand their influence and outreach in the flood-affected areas of the northwest.

The United Nations has estimated that at least one-fifth of the country is flooded, but the scope of the damage seems far greater. About 14 million people have been affected by the floods, and 6 million of them are children, according to Unicef. Estimates of the dead have ranged from 1,200 to 1,600.

You can donate to Oxfam here.

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You would think that someone who’s nominally a psychiatrist would understand the notion that because someone was harmed by someone wearing yellow, the fact that they’re now frightened by the color yellow is a displacement of the original trauma.

But that would be assuming he isn’t as shitty a psychiatrist as he is a human being.

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I guess the thing I found most interesting about this controversy is that Dr. Laura believed she was the final arbiter of defining racism — that the listener was too “sensitive.” Well, yes, the person with the bruises would tend to be a little more sensitive.

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The Post has an extensive profile of Elizabeth Warren today, which I suppose indicates they expect her to get the consumer agency job. I still believe that even if she gets the appointment, the agency will be stacked with people who will be working against her:

The administration has floated several candidates for the job, including Assistant Treasury Secretary Michael S. Barr and Eugene Kimmelman, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. But Warren has drawn the most public support — and the most ire.

She has received fervent backing from consumer advocates, labor unions, academics and scores of Democratic lawmakers. Tens of thousands of people have signed online petitions urging Obama to choose her. Her endorsements have ranged from the New York Times to MoveOn.org to Dr. Phil.

Others have made no secret about their distaste for Warren, questioning her qualifications and describing her as an ideologue.

“I get disgusted every time I hear her speak. It’s like she’s sitting in some ivory tower, not understanding the ramifications of anything she says,” Anton Schutz, president of Mendon Capital Advisors, recently told Reuters — a sentiment shared by others in the financial industry, though rarely so candidly. “Any person you put in that role really ought to have some industry experience.”

For her part, Warren has spent much of the summer outside of the public spotlight, declining interview requests and visiting family in California and Oklahoma.

“I asked her point-blank, ‘Do you want this grubby job or not? Why do you want this thing?’ ” her brother David Herring said. He said it was clear that if she were to end up leading the consumer bureau, it would be out of a sense of duty.

Warren’s daughter and co-author on two books, Amelia Warren Tyagi, agreed that her mother has little appetite for politics or public life, and only her passion for consumer issues and the urgency of the crisis have kept her from returning to her quiet, tenured life at Harvard.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime moment to do the thing she cares about most,” Tyagi said. “If she didn’t think she could make a difference in Washington right now, she wouldn’t be there.”

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Interesting:

SYDNEY (AP) — An Aboriginal elder in Australia who said she had a psychic vision of where to find a missing 6-year-old went to the wooded location outside Sydney and instead found the dismembered torso of an older woman.

The Aboriginal woman had been trying to find Kiesha Abrahams, who disappeared from her suburban Sydney home almost two weeks ago, when she came across the headless, limbless body Wednesday along a creek in a nature preserve west of the city, said New South Wales state Detective Chief Inspector Pamela Young.

”I’ve had a feeling to go there,” Cheryl Carroll-Lagerwey told Australia’s Nine News. ”So I went with my gut feeling.”

Officials were still working Friday to identify the remains but said they may be those of 31-year-old Kristi McDougall, who disappeared two months ago after telling friends she was heading to the western Sydney suburb of Ermington, about 16 miles (26 kilometers) east of the nature preserve.

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Richie Hayward, 64. Drummer for Little Feat.

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