Bobby Jindal, in command

My dad got through on the phone line this morning. Their phone service is still hit or miss in their part of south Louisiana. We talked for a while, and he catalogued the devastation they're dealing with. Five days later, and he's still audibly shocked -- especially by all the downed trees. "We're looking at an old tree in the fencerow that was uprooted; it's got a 17-foot root ball. The storm just picked it up, right out of the ground." It's much, much worse all around them. And they're still weeks away from getting power back.

"Never in all my life have I seen anything like this around here," he said. "We're living like back in the old times now." (Video report here).

Dad seemed startled that little of this is making its way into the national news media. I guess that's what happens when the storm doesn't hit New Orleans, and provide good pictures of imperiled masses of poor people. The poor people, and everybody else, are in serious distress, but the press outside of Louisiana doesn't seem to be all that interested (read Favog on why they're missing a really important story; he continues the theme here).

I asked him how Gov. Jindal was performing.

"He's been terrific," my dad said. "He sees a problem, and he jumps on it. He's been giving updates a couple of times a day. This isn't anything like it was last time, with Blanco."

Listening to my dad talk about how Jindal has been performing, I was reminded of how Rudy Giuliani performed on 9/11. Obviously Giuliani faced a far more acute situation in terms of public fear, but what distinguished his leadership was that he gave people facing a terrible situation a sense that somebody was in charge, and that the government was making every effort to hold things together and help those in trouble. That's so important in a moment of crisis. It sounds like Jindal is doing that now. I'd like to hear from Louisiana readers (who have [electrical!] power) as to how Jindal's performng from your point of view.

By the way, Dad said that he and my mom were sitting on their front porch "watching the trees blow down" during the hurricane when they spotted a buzzard staggering across the front yard. "He looked like he'd been drinking George Dickel," my dad said. "He was so weak he couldn't fly, and could barely walk. We watched him stagger across the road, and I don't know what happened to him after that. We'd never seen a bird like that before. He had a white ring around his neck. It looked like he'd been riding those winds from a long, long way away, and he'd finally gotten worn out. Who knows where he came from... ."