I understand that a TV station can only do one thing at a time, and that CNN isn't going to go split-screen and have two voices competing with each other for attention. Still, it seems somewhat jarring that in one instant, we have every news station on wall-to-wall hurricane coverage, and then, suddenly, the graphics all change, the titles all switch, and there's not a single channel where you can find any evidence that there's even anything still going on in New Orleans, and it's all about Justice Rehnquist. Understandably also a huge story. And I don't know that there's a better solution, barring a decision between the news networks that some will take one story and some will take the other. But I just found it jarring, that's all.

Some part of me imagines that weeks from now we will learn that in a nightmare scenario, President Bush, faced with all of the criticism he's facing on the news networks, trying every imaginable way to stop the negative coverage, to get this hurricane story off the screen, arranged for surrogates to kill Justice Rehnquist, knowing it would be one of the few stories that could, at least for a little while, bump the hurricane off. Because, really, there's no evidence of a hurricane right now. And not that President Bush is happy about Rehnquist, happy about the hurricane, or happy about anything, but someone in the White House has got to be feeling perhaps a small bit of relief that there's a break in the action. It's cynical to think that, and of course I don't really believe that the President killed the Chief Justice to change the news cycle, but it seems like it might be a good movie plot (Was "Wag the Dog" about this? I never saw it, but I think it is, with a war substituting for a murder. I like this murder scenario better from a budgetary standpoint though. Wars are expensive to film.)