All the way to the depths of your psyche?

In the wake of Highest Gas Prices Ever, the trusty Strib has published a list online this evening of the lowest prices in the Twin Cities metro.

(LIfted from TwinCitiesGasPrices.com)

Perhaps not surprisingly, some of the now-exurban stations are relatively cheap, with the three cheapest locations--at $2.50 to $2.55 a gallon--being in Prior Lake. (Interesting to note that two of those are by Mystic Lake Casino.)

But the two surprises on the list are in what folks in Prior Lake or other outlying areas of the metro would call the "Inner City."

Two Marathon stations on the north side and near north are coming in at $2.62 and $2.63, respectively. The station on Fremont Avenue North and West Broadway is close enough to what's is generally considered to be "the bad part of town"--sometimes translated as "where black people live." Will any suburban commuters swallow perceptions and stereotypes and venture in for cheap fuel?

Even money says they're more likely to drive out to the casino.

It's less than two weeks before the September 13 political primaries. While Minneapolis isn't quite a one-party town, the DFL is dominant enough for the primaries to be more important than the general election in determining the eventual winner in some races.

Minnesota Public Radio ran an informative, succinct story on how a proposed highrise development in Uptown is affecting the primary race in Ward 10. And the bi-weekly Southwest Journal and its sister publication the Skyway News have put together a strong package of stories for their respective voter's guides. The SWJ features previews of the primaries in Wards 10, 7, 13, and 8. There is only one contested primary race in Skyway's circulation area--Ward 3. But in addition to a preview of that contest, Skyway includes rewarding features that are also in SWJ, regarding cops and public safety, the smoking ban, and the pension mess in Minneapolis. The city's best parks board reporter, Scott Russell, chimes in on relevant park board races. Even the taxing and library board candidates are covered.

Next month The New Press will publish James W. Loewen's book Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism. It's an eye-opening account of how hundreds of towns across the country systematically removed blacks and other minorities--often through violent means--during the first half of the 20th century.

What's particularly striking is that the overwhelming majority of these cleansed municipalities were not in the Jim Crow South, but rather spread across the northern half of the country. "While African Americans never lost the right to vote in the North (although there were gestures in that direction), they did lose the right to live in town after town, county after county," Loewen writes in the introduction.

One of the municipalities singled out for particular attention by Loewen is Edina, Minnesota. He points out that prior to the establishment of Edina just after World War I there were quite a few blacks living in what was then known as Richfield Township. This was largely owing to the fact that there was a Quaker village in the area that openly embraced minorities.

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1:20 P.M. - (AP) Mayor Ray Nagin says at least hundreds of people are dead -- maybe thousands -- in New Orleans. "We know there is a significant number of dead bodies in the water," and others dead in attics, Mayor Ray Nagin said. Asked how many, he said: "Minimum, hundreds. Most likely, thousands."

Read the WDSU-TV dispatch here.

Read updates at WWL's blog here.

At this hour, there are 1254 missing persons posts at nola.com.

"To repair damage to one of the levees holding back Lake Pontchartrain, t he Army Corps of Engineers said it planned to use heavy-duty Chinook helicopters to drop 3,000-pound sandbags Wednesday into the 500-foot gap in the failed floodwall. But the agency was having trouble getting the sandbags and dozens of 15-foot highway barriers to the site because the city's waterways were blocked by loose barges, boats and large debris. Officials said they were also looking at a more audacious plan: finding a barge to plug the 500-foot hole."

Yesterday it was reported to be 200-300 feet. Story here.

Go here to see a very good slideshow posted at WWL-TV's website, including photos of the 17th Street canal levee break such as the one linked above.

Around noon today, the Army Corps of Engineers claimed that water levels between the canal and the city had equalized and that no more water was flowing into the city for the time being.

One of the more ridiculous aspects of natural disaster media coverage is the property damage estimates that inevitably emerge within hours of the pertinent event. In the present circumstances the absurdity of such projections has been magnified as the situation has rapidly devolved from a fairly routine hurricane to an emerging national disaster.

A quick search of the Nexis database shows that the figures have fluctuated wildly in the last 72 hours, providing absolutely no useful information to the public. CNNMoney reported on Monday that "risk modeling firm" Eqecat initially estimated that insurance companies would be hit with between $15 billion and $30 billion in damages. But the company then twice downgraded that figure within hours of Katrina hitting land, eventually settling on $9 billion to $16 billion.

By Tuesday morning the media seemed to have collectively agreed-- through some unknown process probably not unlike picking numbers on a roulette wheel--on the figures of $10 billion to $25 billion. Of course this is such an engulfing range that it renders the information completely useless.

Over the last 24 hours, as the situation has dramatically worsened, media outlets have hastened to ratchet up their damage projections. By 6 p.m. yesterday CNN was announcing that damages were expected to top $25 billion, while other outlets reported that the insurance costs could now reach $34 billion. This morning the Philadelphia Inquirer declared Katrina the "most expensive hurricane in the nation's history," with the property damage tally upped to $40 billion.

Perhaps they're taking bets on the final figure in Vegas. For the record, risk modeling expert Paul Demko projects that Katrina will ultimately cost insurance companies $118,434,327,612.43.

As late as yesterday afternoon, officials were still saying that non-critically ill refugees at New Orleans' Superdome would likely be there for up to a week. This morning Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco announced they would be moved by bus to Houston, where many will be sheltered in Houston's Astrodome. "Time is of the essence," she said at a press conference that just concluded on WWL-TV. "It's critical that we move quickly."

Regarding the levee breach that has necessitated the immediate evacuations, Blanco said this in an earlier TV interview: "The challenge is an engineering nightmare," Blanco said on morning TV. "The National Guard has been dropping sandbags into it, but it's like dropping it into a black hole." [Read the WWL-TV post.]

The sense of urgency is heightened by fears that New Orleans may be hit this morning by a major southbound surge of water from the north side of Lake Pontchartrain, where hurricane winds pushed a great deal of water on Monday.

Lately, CNN has felt like the Democrats of the major news outlets, and that's not because they're supposedly the "liberal" alternative to Fox News. (They're not.) Like the dems, the first 24-hour news channel is struggling with its identity: Who are we? What does "news" mean in the new millennium? How can we compete with the internet and citizen journalists? The answer: Pander to the lowest common denominator and rely on the human element, the "tragedy," if you will, to exploit, err, tell, the real story.

Never has this been more apparent than in the last three days, as the currently self-titled "Hurricane Headquarters" posts videos on cnn.com with slugs like, "Watch the video account of unanswered screams," "See knee-deep and rising water in the French Quarter," and perhaps the most egregious, "Watch the video report of a husband whose wife slipped from his grip." With titles like that, they might as well have exclamation points and be packaged as the first in a series of the World's Most Extreme Videos. That is, after all, what CNN is selling.

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News outlets have carried almost nothing but Katrina dispatches and video footage since the hurricane came aground Monday morning, but in the past 24 hours they've been surreally slow to elucidate what's going on in New Orleans following the break of a critical levee on Lake Pontchartrain either late Monday or early Tuesday.

That levee break was said to be from 200-300 feet wide at Tuesday midday--as far as I know, no one has broadcast aerial pictures of it, though there have been repeated images of the less consequential Industrial Canal breach, some of them passed off as pictures of the Pontchartrain canal break--and elementary hydraulics dictate that the breach will only widen as long as it's open. The lake will continue emptying into the New Orleans basin below it at an increasing rate until either a) the levee break is closed, or b) the water level inside the basin is equal to the water level in the lake. In that event, the city is a total loss. Forget water damage per se; the toxicity of the former site of New Orleans would be staggering both in terms of chemical pollutants and organic ones--the most virulent and dangerous body of water in the world, sitting in a natural bowl below sea level that cannot drain itself.

So how are efforts to close the levee going? Late last night the cable networks reported that an initial effort to dam the breach with sandbags had failed, and that heavy military equipment was supposed to arrive on-site late in the night and begin work today. A regional Homeland Security official, Mark Smith, told the Shreveport Times on Tuesday, "That breach is not going to be fixed today, tomorrow, or the next day." (See this MSNBC dispatch.)

There is no overstating the magnitude of this disaster. Those $25 billion damage estimates still being circulated are ludicrous--a Mississippi congressman told Fox News there is that much damage in his state alone. Fifty billion won't begin to fix New Orleans. Much of the city is already destroyed, many of its buildings structurally undermined and the rest so profoundly contaminated they will have to be razed in any event. And if the basin keeps taking on water, the same will eventually be true of all but the tiny portion of the city that is above sea level, mostly at the southern edge along the Mississippi River levee.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has stood head and shoulders above practically every other official in the clarity and candor of his public comments. Last night on CNN, he said simply, "This is the bowl effect that you hear people talk about... and now the bowl is filling up."

We will post more notes and links about storm damage, and particularly the levee breach in New Orleans, through the day today. Here's a note from New Orleans TV station WDSU on the levee-plugging effort this morning.

And here are the NYT and WashPost's pretty-good levee break stories from this morning.

Watch the WWL-TV live feed here.

CITY PAGES BLOGS

Former New Orleans resident Peter S. Scholtes has Katrina updates, including an interview with Phil Frasier of the Rebirth Brass Band at Complicated Fun.

THESE DAYS

In 2004, the ratio of average CEO pay to the average pay of a production (i.e., non-management) worker was 431-to-1, up from 301-to-1 in 2003, according to "Executive Excess," an annual report released Tuesday by the liberal research groups United for a Fair Economy and the Institute for Policy Studies.

You can follow the New Orleans/Katrina tragedy at the WWL-TV blog.

Pope Benedict XVI faces his first controversy over the direction of the Catholic church after it was revealed that the Vatican has drawn up a religious instruction preventing gay men from being priests.

MINNESOTA BLOG OF THE DAY

If you're interested in conservation, birds, blowers, gardening, and bat houses, check in with St. Paulite Darlene at Nature Info.

TIME WASTERS

Minnesota State Fair photos at Flickr

Steve Gilliard at his News Blog hands out Kombat Keyboard Badges to those pundits who advocate the Iraq War, but refuse to serve or have family members serve, when eligible.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH

"None of your fucking business."

-- a patron at the Royal Sonesta Hotel on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter, to FOX News anchorman Shepard Smith, when asked on live television what he was still doing at the hotel as Hurricane Katrina was approaching

"What are these Bush Republicans afraid of? Dirty looks from the help at the country club?"

-- Pundit Pat Buchanan on Bush's stance on allowing Mexican immigrants to cross into the United States illegally