"The real question - putting it baldly - is whether there is going to be a revolution."

A BBC opinionwriter muses about the American response to Hurricane Katrina:

Will the American social and economic system - which creates the wealth that pays for billionaires' private jets, and the poverty which does not allow for a bus fare out of New Orleans - be addressed?

It has been tinkered with before of course, sometimes as a result of natural disasters. There were for instance plenty of buses on hand for this week's Rita evacuation.

But the system's fundamentals - no limit on how far you can fly and little limit on how low you can fall - remain as intact as they were in the San Francisco gold rush.

The headline for this unbelievably smug piece is "Katrina prompts charity not change."

UPDATE: This post got a strange link from Andrew Sullivan:

ALTHOUSE ON THE BEEB: Picked up by Instapundit and the Corner as more evidence of wretched BBC anti-American bias, I read the piece assailed by Ann Althouse. It's an opinion piece, not news reporting, so obviously a little more lee-way for bias should be allowed. And yes, there's a bizarre assumption that there is no welfare net in America - or that we haven't just expanded it to cover millions of wealthy seniors, or that welfare rolls haven't been reduced by almost a half in a few years, and so on.

Was my post about the BBC being biased? Did I somehow not perceive that the writer I called a "BBC opinionwriter" was "writing an an opinion piece, not news reporting"? You'd think my use of the term "opinionwriter" would have nailed that down rather hard! But thanks for the ridiculously inappropriate patronizing, Andrew! Check out the title of my post! It's awfully damned obvious that I'm writing about the stupidity of this one writer's notion that the United States may be headed for a revolution, which Sullivan completely agrees with in his post, even though for some reason he writes as if he's taking issue with me. It's quite apparent that Sullivan is mainly concerned with things that Glenn Reynolds and Jonah Goldberg said at their sites when they linked to me, but he didn't bother to write accurately about me. I think if Sullivan is going to use my name in his post title, he ought to take care about acting as if he's got a problem with me, when, in fact, he doesn't. But Sullivan doesn't read my blog, I'm almost sure. He just reads Instapundit and the Corner. To him, I'm just an empty link found there.