Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit is organizing a Katrina relief “blogburst” effort today. The idea is for each blog to link to its favorite hurricane-relief charity, and then link back to Glenn, who is in turn linking to all the participating blogs. The overarching point, of course, is for everyone to give as much money as possible to the relief effort.

I don’t really have a “favorite” charity, but I’ll go with the Salvation Army, as they get CharityWatch.org’s top rating for Katrina-relief giving, and generally have a good reputation besides. I just gave $100. I hope y’all can contribute something, too.

The link for online donations to the Salvation Army is here. If you work for a company that will provide “matching funds” for charitable donations, you should consider giving through them instead. You can also donate by phone or postal mail; see the Salvation Army homepage.

If you have a different charity you’d like to recommend, please do so in comments. Please use the comments on this post ONLY to talk about charities. Put unrelated comments on other posts, please. Thanks!

A shorter post with a link to the Salvation Army donation page will sit at the top of my homepage throughout the day today.

Also… all of my Google AdSense revenues today, and for at least the rest of this week, will go to the relief effort. (But please don’t click my ads over and over — I’m pretty sure Google can detect that.)

Technorati tags: Flood Aid, Hurricane Katrina.

“Anderson Cooper is so gay. He’s practically wearing a rainbow thong.” –Becky

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. :)

I apologize for not posting this earlier; I was consumed with Katrina news, but this too is an utterly tragic, horrific, and very newsworthy event: nearly 1,000 Iraqis died in a stampede today, triggered by rumors of a suicide bomber. Awful, just awful. My heart goes out to the victims and their families.

AP: “It’s an engineering problem that hasn’t been solved: How do you plug a broken floodwall and drain a city that is submerged in water in many areas? Officials acknowledge plans to ‘unwater New Orleans’ have failed, have been redrawn and are continuing to evolve.”

Agree or disagree, there is a pet rescue operation being organized.

According to WWL-TV, citing the AP:

More than 7,600 prisoners had to be moved from jails in the New Orleans area because of flooding and unsanitary conditions caused by Hurricane Katrina — prompting such widespread rumors of riots and jail breaks that Corrections Secretary Richard Stalder focused Wednesday on setting the story straight during a briefing with reporters.

“We cannot find any credible intelligence that the kinds of things that had been reported have happened,” he said.