- National Review magazine will celebrate next week the 50th anniversary of its founding by William F. Buckley Jr. Yet hard on NR's heels is the Weekly Standard, now 10. National Review was the manual of a conservatism fighting for power; the Weekly Standard is the guidebook for a conservatism in power - and now increasingly fractured. Notes the Washington Post's David Broder, "We don't know where conservatism will be on the Standard's 20th birthday, 10 years from now. But the rumbles of an important debate can be heard."

  - Anything good about Katrina? Newsweek's Eleanor Clift thinks so. While lamenting that "it may be too much to predict an upsurge of progressive government," she finds this "upside": "The Republican agenda of tax cuts, Social Security privatization, and slashing government programs is over."

- Joel Kotkin, among the nation's leading writers on urban affairs, finds in the past four weeks "two different governmental responses to disaster, one efficient, the other, frankly, disastrous." The New Orleans "establishment," he writes, was "lulled to sleep" in the face of a predictable, looming disaster - spending not on shoring up levees but on frivolities. In contrast Houston, with foresight, "has been industrious, building elaborate drainage, sewer, flood, and other systems to handle the delivery and control of water into the metropolis."

-  "Importantly," Kotkin adds, "this should not be seen as a partisan issue but one of civic patriotism. As New York's Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia once noted, 'There is no Republican or Democratic way to clean streets.'"

- Among the many displaced by Katrina were, according to University of North Carolina researchers, 6,000 - that's 6,000 - physicians. If some or all choose not to return, imagine the consequences for the delivery of health care along the Gulf Coast.

- Meanwhile Cindy Sheehan, having pulled up stakes from her summer campsite outside President Bush's ranch, appeared at a peacenik rally in Washington - and, seemingly smiling all the while, succeeded in getting herself arrested.

- The caring Jane Fonda had planned to cruise around the country in a bus fueled by vegetable oil, protesting the American presence in Iraq. But she has elected to cancel her tour so as not to distract attention from the Sheehan enterprise, and giving Cindy Sheehan all the space she needs. La Fonda terms "what the right wing" has done to Cindy Sheehan "despicable." Yet consider this query: What are Mesdames Fonda and Sheehan doing to the morale of America's fighting forces?