Cursor's Media Patrol - 09/21/05

Newsweek reports on the 'Daily Dance With Death' for U.S. Marines near Fallujah, who typically go out on "472 extremely dangerous missions in less than a year -- invariably carried out while sleep deprived and drenched in sweat."

'More Blood, Less Oil' Reviewing "the failed U.S. mission to capture Iraqi petroleum," Michael Klare predicts that "oil production in Iraq is likely to remain depressed for years, no matter how much more blood is shed in its pursuit."

If experts are correct in claiming that faulty levees, not extraordinary surges, are to blame, then the flooding of New Orleans was "no more a natural disaster than a surgeon killing a patient by failing to suture an artery would be a natural death," says the author of "Rising Tide."

"Do you realize that if those walls had held, we'd have just had a little cleaning job?" says a New Orleans councilwoman, a point of view mocked by Limbaugh on the levees, and by Fox News analyst James Pinkerton, who accused flood victims of "whining all the time on TV to get more federal money." Plus: 'The New Black'