Magpie

Saturday, September 17, 2005

Hoax or cover-up?

On Friday, we posted about the appointment of a male veterinarian, Dr. Norris Alderson, as temporary head of the US FDA's Office of Women's Health. Since that post, the news item on the Feminist Daily Newswire has been withdrawn. In addition, the FDA's announcement of an appointment to head the Office of Women's Health has been revised to show the position going to Theresa Toigo, a 'patient advocate at FDA.' [The announcement carries this line at the top: This is a revision of this statement posted earlier on September 16.]

So what happened? Did a disgruntled employee at FDA issue a fraudulent press release? Or was Alderson's appointment withdrawn when a firestorm began to start? [See this Planned Parenthood press release as an example of the reaction.]

We think that the FDA did some quick backtracking, especially given that we found Alderson listed with his new position on this membership roster for the Dept. of Health and Human Services' Coordinating Committee on Women's Health [highlight added]:

Was he or wasn't he?

Either the 'hoax' proliferated very quickly inside the government, or Alderson was indeed the original appointee and the FDA acted quickly to turn his appointment into non-history.

More: Tim Grieve at Salon's War Room has more info here. Interestingly, the link to the original version of the announcement in Google's cache now points to an FDA page on insulin. Strange, yes?

| | Posted by Magpie at 7:27 PM | Get permalink

Ambulance-chasing of the worst sort.

Since Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, Republican backers of repealing the federal estate tax have had to back off. Given the costs of reconstruction, even the most rabid anti-tax members of Congress seemed to realize that public opinion wouldn't be in favor of a tax cut right now. [The tax added US$ 24.8 billion to federal coffers last year.]

But not everyone has given up on repealing the tax, as this report shows:

On Sept. 9, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions called his old law professor Harold Apolinsky, co-author of Sessions' legislation repealing the federal estate tax, which was encountering sudden resistance on the Hill. Sessions had an idea to revitalize their cause, which he left on Apolinsky's voice mail: "[Arizona Sen.] Jon Kyl and I were talking about the estate tax. If we knew anybody that owned a business that lost life in the storm, that would be something we could push back with."

Via Time.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:45 PM | Get permalink

'A nice, white city, for white, rich businessmen.'

Jeremy Scahill of the independent news program 'Democracy Now' has been in New Orleans for the last week, looking at how Hurricane Katrina has changed the city. On Friday, his report included these disturbing observations on the militarization of New Orleans, and on how race looks to be a big factor in the city's reconstruction:

One of the great concerns right now in New Orleans is businessmen talking openly of wanting to see New Orleans change, to change it completely in a demographic sense, geographically, politically, racially. You have this overt rhetoric. Well, as residents of New Orleans come back in and they try to go back to the apartments they were rent stabilized, the houses they were renting, they face a city that has repressive laws that do not protect tenants. You have an overt agenda to change the racial makeup of the city, the economic makeup of the city, and you have these very wealthy people hiring private mercenary types to guard their property and their interests. Then you also have the National Guard and the Army inside of the city now, and so the potential for conflict with residents coming back in is very great. A lot of people are very concerned now with this Martial Law still in effect with the military curfew in effect, that that is going to remain as people come back and live here. It's one thing to have Martial law when you have a depopulated city. It's another thing to have it when you have people who want to go about the business of rebuilding their lives, particularly when they are being told by very wealthy, powerful people backed up by men with guns that they are not welcome in the city that they have lived in their whole life. We have a potential, I think, for serious, overt conflict, hot conflict here in New Orleans as people start coming back in....

Look at the comments of James Rice, a local businessman, who is one of the leaders of the private Audubon Place, the gated community. The only privately owned in the city of New Orleans. He told The Wall Street Journal, "Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way, demographically, geographically and politically. I'm not just speaking for myself here. The way we have been living is not going to happen again or we?re out." James Rice has brought in Israeli para-militaries to guard his facility. It's Israeli company that brags about having former members of the Shin Beit, the GSS, the Israeli Defense Forces. He has brought them in. I was talking to them in front of his property. Some of them participated in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and these are guys now who are patrolling outside on St. Charles avenue in front of Audubon Place and will potentially come into conflict with residents of New Orleans. What on earth are Israeli paramilitaries doing on the streets of New Orleans? These are the questions that people need to ask right now, defending a man like James Rice who was called for the poor to not be allowed back into New Orleans.

There's much more to Scahill's report. You'll find the complete transcript here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:18 PM | Get permalink

The big melt.

Global warming may have pushed the melting of the arctic icepack past the point of no return. According to satellite data for this past August, the extent of sea ice has reached the lowest point ever recorded for that month — more than 18 percent below the long-term average.

While arctic sea ice is normally at a low point during the month of August, these new observations make it four years in a row that the sea ice coverage has been lower than expected. Scientists who study the arctic say that lossess of this magnitude haven't occurred in hundreds of years, and perhaps not in thousands of years. They believe that the downward trend since 2002 is a sign that the melting of the arctic icepack has accelerated.

In September 2002 the sea ice coverage of the Arctic reached its lowest level in recorded history. Such lows have normally been followed the next year by a rebound to more normal levels, but this did not occur in the summers of either 2003 or 2004. This summer has been even worse. The surface area covered by sea ice was at a record monthly minimum for each of the summer months - June, July and now August....

Scientists at the [Snow and Ice Data Centre] are bracing themselves for the 2005 annual minimum, which is expected to be reached in mid-September, when another record loss is forecast. A major announcement is scheduled for 20 September. "It looks like we're going to exceed it or be real close one way or the other. It is probably going to be at least as comparable to September 2002," Dr [Mark] Serreze said.

"This will be four Septembers in a row that we've seen a downward trend. The feeling is we are reaching a tipping point or threshold beyond which sea ice will not recover."

Via UK Independent and National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Graphic shows sea ice conditions for September 2002, 2003, and 2004, derived from NSIDC Sea Ice Index. Each image shows the concentration anomaly (key on right) and the 1978–200 median September ice edge (pink line) For each year, the ice edge is well north of its median position off the coasts of Alaska and Siberia. [Original here]

[Image: National Snow and Ice Data Center, Univ. of Colorado, Boulder]

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:36 AM | Get permalink

Want to know the future of New Orleans could look like?

You might want to take a look in Florida, at Punta Gorda and its satellite town of Hurricane Charley evacuees, FEMA City. Almost a year after the hurricane blew through, most of the low income working people dispossessed by the storm are still in the FEMA trailers. And back in Punta Gorda, the powers that be are rebuilding the town in a way that only leaves room for the well-to-do.

"You almost hate to say this because of the difficulties so many people have had, but Charley tore down some buildings that needed to come down and cleared areas for much higher kinds of uses," said City Manager Howard Kunik.

An old, damaged Holiday Inn on the town's waterfront, for instance, has been demolished and will be replaced with an $80 million condominium-hotel complex, and other upscale projects are moving forward. Many residents are excited by the changes, but others -- especially the poor and some in Punta's Gorda's long-standing African American neighborhood -- worry they will be permanently priced out of their old home town.

Those fears were stoked last month when the city made clear that it plans to tear down a public housing complex on the waterfront to make way for much higher-income people.

"That land was just too valuable to have poor people on it," said community leader Isaac Thomas. He said that the local government is trying to help him and other black leaders save some of the modest but historic homes in the African-American East End, but that "it's a really uphill fight."

As we noted the other day, the vultures are already starting to circle around New Orleans.

Via Washington Post.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:02 AM | Get permalink

Ooooooh, shiny!

Greetings from New Orleans! Thirty-three poscards from fictious people. New Orleans photographer Justin Lundgren's found-art project that turned into a memorial for a lost city.

On the second line

Second Line Reverie [Photo: Justin Lundgren]

A few weeks prior to Hurricane Katrina, I completed this photo project with the intent of displaying the images in a New Orleans gallery. Clearly that's not going to happen any time soon. When I evacuated my now-flooded house, these photos were among the few possessions that I saved. I look at the images now and realize with some despair what's been lost...

From June 20th to July 23rd, 2005, I developed a series of original images from my archive of New Orleans and Mardi Gras photos. I turned the 4x6 images into glossy, professional-grade postcards and provided each with a message from a fictitious sender to a fictitious recipient. Each card starts with the phrase "Greetings from New Orleans". The various messages were intended to be both personal and provocative, to elicit a range of emotion from sympathy to disgust. A newlywed writes home about her decadent honeymoon, a recently released Angola inmate writes to an old girlfriend for help, a visiting Army Corps Engineer exclaims that the city is doomed should a big storm hit it directly, a bigot complains to a friend about all the gays ruining the French Quarter, etc, etc, etc.

33 unique postcards were generated. Each was addressed to a single locale in Ohio, stamped, and copied three times for a total of 99 cards. I then proceeded to intentionally "lose" them all over the city of New Orleans. As discreetly as possible, I littered the cards on park benches, cafe tables, bookstore aisles, sidewalks, restaurant entrances, park tracks, and a variety of other high traffic areas. My hope was that a few of the postcards would be found, puzzled over, perhaps giggled at, and then conscientiously deposited in the nearest mailbox....

Via Boing Boing.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:01 AM | Get permalink

Friday, September 16, 2005

Well, duh.

This headline one went out on an AP story today:

Dusk-to-dawn curfew could cramp New Orleans' partying style

Via Minneapolis Star Tribune.

| | Posted by Magpie at 6:49 PM | Get permalink

How many members of Dubya's administration ...

... does it take to screw in a light bulb?

We dunno. But they do over here.

Via TalkLeft.

| | Posted by Magpie at 5:10 PM | Get permalink

We're speechless.

At the end of August, we posted about the resignation of Susan Wood from her post as head of the Office of Women's Health in the US Food & Drug Adminstration. Wood quit because of the FDA's continued refusal to make emergency contraception more easily available.

It's obvious that FDA head Lester Crawford didn't take the reasons for Wood's resignation very seriously. Yesterday, he appointed a male veterinarian as temporary head of the Office of Women's Health.

We bet the new guy is a real expert. Just like Michael Brown was at FEMA.

Via Feminist Daily Newswire.

| | Posted by Magpie at 4:16 PM | Get permalink

We don't often have a lot of good things to say about National Public Radio.

We've never been overly fond of the US public broadcaster's style of covering the news. And, especially since Dubya took office, we've been disappointed by the degree to which NPR's news programs have come to resemble propaganda outlets for the US government more than outlets for serious journalism.

But sometimes NPR News real good, as they did this morning with this story on how the bosses of FEMA and Homeland Security ignored warnings about Hurricane Katrina that came from their own staffs [RealPlayer or Windows Media Player req'd]. Kudos to reporter Laura Sullivan for a job sufficiently well done that Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff declined comment on her story.

Besides listening to the story, you should follow the links to the national situation updates that the honchos in FEMA and Homeland Security should have been reading in the days before Katrina plowed into the Gulf Coast. They're very interesting reading.

| | Posted by Magpie at 3:18 PM | Get permalink

Dubya takes a crack at the questions.

In the previous post, we saw how Dubya's press secretary and one of his top economic advisors couldn't answer press questions on how much the Katrina recovery effort will cost and how that effort will be paid for.

Dubya got the same questions today, when he and Russian president Vladimir Putin met the press. Here's how the prez answered:

Q Mr. President, with billions of dollars flowing out of Washington for hurricane relief, some Republicans are worried that you're writing a blank check that will have to be paid by future generations. Who is going to have to pay for this recovery, and what's it going to do to the national debt?

PRESIDENT BUSH: [...] And so, you bet, it's going to cost money. But I'm confident we can handle it and I'm confident we can handle our other priorities. It's going to mean that we're going to have to make sure we cut unnecessary spending. It's going to mean we don't do -- we've got to maintain economic growth, and therefore we should not raise taxes. Working people have had to pay a tax, in essence, by higher gasoline prices. And we don't need to be taking more money out of their pocket. And as we spend the money, we got to make sure we spend it wisely. And so we're going to have inspectors general overseeing the expenditure of the money.

Our OMB will work with Congress to figure out where we need to offset when we need to offset, so that we can manage not only to maintain economic growth and vitality, but to be able to spend that which is necessary to help this region get back on its feet. So it's a big role for the federal government.

There's a big role for private sector. And that's why I call for economic growth zones, an economic enterprise zone. Look, there's not going to be any revenues coming out of that area for a while anyway, so we might as well give them good tax relief in order to get jobs there and investment there. It makes sense. The entrepreneurial spirit is what's going to help lift this part of the world up. So we've got a -- I started laying out the outlines of a plan, and it's one that we want to work with Congress on.

Q What will it cost?

PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, it's going to cost whatever it costs. We're going to be wise about the money we spend. I mean, you're -- we haven't totaled up all the bridges and highways, but I said we'll make a commitment to rebuild the infrastructure, and to help rebuild the infrastructure. We're also spending money on -- $2,000 a family to help these people get back on their feet. There's a variety of programs. The key question is to make sure the costs are wisely spent, and that we work with Congress to make sure that we are able to manage our budget in a wise way. And that is going to mean cutting other programs. [Emphasis added]

So, combining what Dubya said with what we learned from today's White House press briefing, here's what we know:

The White House doesn't know how much the Katrina recover will cost, but
The feds will spend whatever it takes.
The money will come from taxpayers, but
Dubya won't raise taxes. In fact, he's going to cut taxes on businsses involved in the recovery.
The costs of the recovery will raise the federal deficit by an undisclosed amount, but
Nobody in the White House will own even the US $200 billion figure that's been floated for the past few days.
The feds are going to cut federal programs to help pay for the recovery, but
They either don't know which programs will be on the chopping block or [more likely] they won't say until they've carefully weighed the political consequences of the cuts they want.

We ask you: Is this all nonsense or what?

The full transcript of Dubya's remarks today is here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:34 PM | Get permalink

Who's going to pay for the Katrina recovery effort?

And what's it going to cost? If you want straight answers on either of these questions, don't ask anyone at the White House.

From today's White House press briefing with Scott McClellan and Al Hubbard [Dubya's assistant for economic policy and director of the National Economic Council]:

Q Al, where's the money coming from for this?

DIRECTOR HUBBARD: Where's the money coming from? It's coming from the American taxpayer.

Q Right, but you're already spending more than you take in, so how much more is there to --

DIRECTOR HUBBARD: Well, if you want to know the --

Q Are we going to have to borrow it, or are you going to raise taxes? I mean, if it's coming from the taxpayer that suggests maybe you're going to have to raise taxes.

DIRECTOR HUBBARD: The most important thing that we need to do is make sure that this economy remains very, very strong. A strong economy is what will provide the resources for the rebuilding for the disaster as a result of the Katrina storm. We're fortunate that the economy is very, very strong now; it will continue to be strong. But the last thing in the world we need to do is raise taxes and retard economic growth.

Q So where does the money come from? Obviously, you've got to borrow it or offsets in the budget, what?

DIRECTOR HUBBARD: Well, again, the money is going to come from the federal government, it's going to come from the federal taxpayer. This President is committed to, as you know, cutting the deficit in half. This in no way will adversely impact his commitment to cut the deficit in half by 2009. At the same time, unfortunately, because of the biggest national disaster I think we've ever faced, we're going to have to spend significant amounts of money on a one-time basis. And that's what's important: it's one time, it's not recurring. But the President is committed, and I know the American people are committed to doing everything that's necessary, but no more than is necessary, and doing it in a very prudent way.

Q -- significant amount? How much?

DIRECTOR HUBBARD: Pardon me?

Q How much? Do you have a ballpark figure for how much this is all going to cost the American taxpayer?

MR. McCLELLAN: Are you talking about the overall costs?

Q Yes.

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, one, I think -- and we talked about it the last couple of days, in terms of the longer-term recovery and reconstruction efforts, and the President made very clear last night that we're going to do what it takes to meet the needs of the people who have been affected by this and to meet the needs of the region. But as we do, we need to work with state and local officials to make sure it's done in a well thought out, well planned way. And that's why he emphasized we're going to make sure that the money is spent wisely and it's going to what it's supposed to go for.

But in terms of the longer-term reconstruction needs, I think that we're still assessing what those needs are. It's not clear exactly what those longer-term needs are going to be. And so it would be speculating at this point and we're not going to get into speculating about it.

Q Is the $200 billion figure --

MR. McCLELLAN: I mean, it's speculating about it, and we're not going to get into speculating about it. What we are going to do is make sure that the needs of the people are met.

Q So there were no internal initial investments for how much this will cost? None?

MR. McCLELLAN: For the longer-term? I think that's something that's still being assessed --

DIRECTOR HUBBARD: Right. I mean, you know, you've got --

MR. McCLELLAN: -- as our OMB Director has said over the last couple weeks, too.

Q Allan, can I just clear this up? So the money will be borrowed, so it will add to the deficit, right?

DIRECTOR HUBBARD: Well, there's no question that this -- the recovery will be paid for by the federal taxpayer and it will add to the deficit. That's right.

Gee, that sure clears everything up, doesn't it?

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:08 PM | Get permalink

Too bad we're stuck with Dubya ...

... when 'loser' Al Gore has shown compassion and initiative in dealing with the Katrina disaster.

While Washington was fumbling around for its response to the hurricane, Gore organized the evacuation of 270 patients from Charity Hospital to Tennessee, where they were able to get the medical care they needed. Before Dubya had even made his first flyover of the disaster area — let along gone there himself — Gore had accompanied two evacuation flights into New Orleans.

Gore, incidentally, has refused to be interviewed about his role in the evacuations.

Via Looka!.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:08 PM | Get permalink

Another big photo-op.

Dubya's administration continues to see the Katrina disaster as a backdrop for making the prez look, well, presidential.

Here's part of an item from the blog of 'NBC Nightly News' anchor Brian Williams:

I am duty-bound to report the talk of the New Orleans warehouse district last night: there was rejoicing (well, there would have been without the curfew, but the few people I saw on the streets were excited) when the power came back on for blocks on end. Kevin Tibbles was positively jubilant on the live update edition of Nightly News that we fed to the West Coast. The mini-mart, long ago cleaned out by looters, was nonetheless bathed in light, including the empty, roped-off gas pumps. The motorcade route through the district was partially lit no more than 30 minutes before POTUS drove through. And yet last night, no more than an hour after the President departed, the lights went out. The entire area was plunged into total darkness again, to audible groans. It's enough to make some of the folks here who witnessed it... jump to certain conclusions.

This fits right in with something pointed out in this post at MetaFilter. Here are two pictures showing St Louis Cathedral at Jackson Square in New Orleans:

Normal lighting

Lighting for Dubya's speech

The one on the left was taken sometime before the disaster and shows the cathedral's normal white lighting. The one on the right was obviously taken during Dubya's Katrina speech last night. Notice how nicely the blue lighting of the cathedral matches his shirt?

[And lest someone think that the light isn't all that different, take a look at this photo of the normal lighting that we decided not to use. We were worried that the yellowness of the light might have been an artifact of the photography.]

So the White House not only had the area's lights turned on and off for Dubya's convenience, but a at least some of the lights were brought in specifically to make the prez look good for the cameras. We wonder how much it all cost. And what relief-related activities didn't happen as a result.

For more examples of Dubya photo-ops on the Gulf Coast, see earlier Magpie posts here and here, and this summary post at Blah3.

Via Talking Points Memo and MetaFilter.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:18 AM | Get permalink

Don't they ever think things through?

We'd really like to know how Dubya's brain trust explains how this makes any sort of sense:

President George W. Bush's advisers said on Friday billions of dollars needed to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast will be borrowed and will raise the deficit but Bush still wants to extend tax cuts.

Via Reuters.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:02 AM | Get permalink

Who caused the disaster in New Orleans?

The US Justice Department thinks they know:

Federal officials appear to be seeking proof to blame the flood of New Orleans on environmental groups, documents show.

The Clarion-Ledger has obtained a copy of an internal e-mail the U.S. Department of Justice sent out this week to various U.S. attorneys' offices: "Has your district defended any cases on behalf of the (U.S.) Army Corps of Engineers against claims brought by environmental groups seeking to block or otherwise impede the Corps work on the levees protecting New Orleans? If so, please describe the case and the outcome of the litigation."

The memo echoes charges that started coming from the US right wing as soon as Dubya's administration began getting hit with the political fallout from its failure to respond to the Katrina disaster. The charges are summed up well in this National Review article by John Berlau that appeared on September 8. In the article, Berlau blamed the poor state of the Mississippi River levees on a 1996 lawsuit against the Corps by the Sierra Club and other environmental groups rather than on budget cuts by Dubya's administration. Because of that lawsuit, the Corps was forced to back off from its plan to use fill scraped from sensitive wetlands for use in repairing and improving more than 300 miles of Mississippi River levees. [Of course, the fact that the levees holding back Lake Ponchartrain were the ones that broke, not the levees along the Mississippi, seems to have been irrelevant to the political point the magazine was trying to score.]

Do you think there's any link between a National Review article blaming environmentalists for the flooding of New Orleans and the DoJ memo looking for info about lawsuits filed against the Corps of Engineers? Does such a connection remind you of the handiwork of anyone in Dubya's administration? Does the name Karl Rove ring a bell?

Via Jackson (Mississippi) Clarion-Ledger.

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:47 AM | Get permalink

Uh-oh.

Take a look at a paragraph buried in a report on Dubya's Katrina speech:

Republicans said Karl Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff and Mr. Bush's chief political adviser, was in charge of the reconstruction effort, which reaches across many agencies of government and includes the direct involvement of Alphonso R. Jackson, secretary of housing and urban development. [Emphasis added]

Tnat takes care of any doubts we had that the Katrina reconstruction effort will be anything but an incredibly big-budget PR project for Dubya and the GOP.

Via NY Times.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:09 AM | Get permalink

Dubya's big speech on Katrina.

We didn't catch it on TV or the radio, but we did just go over to the White House website and read the transcript.

At the center of Dubya's speech was a promise of several hundred billion dollars in federal disaster relief programs for the people of the Gulf Coast — programs that could almost all have been designed by one of those 'tax and spend' liberal Democratic presidents that Dubya's conservative base hates so much. Our bet is that these "big government"-style programs are going to piss off the prez's right-wing political base — except for those of Dubya's corporate cronies who stand to make big bucks at the government trough, that is. But the fact that Dubya promised all that spending without indicating how he plans to pay for it is likely to piss off almost everyone else in the country, given that the federal finances are already on shaky ground due to the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the effects of the various GOP tax cuts.

Given all of this, we have some advice for Dubya: Don't hold your breath waiting for immediate improvements in your sagging poll numbers.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:00 AM | Get permalink

That photo of Dubya at the UN.

You know — this one:

Dubya's note

[Photo: Rick Wilking/Reuters]
When we first saw the photo, we wondered how it happened to be taken, and whether there was any ulterior motive on the part of the photographer. We weren't the only person to wonder, and those questions are answered here. We were amused [but definitely not surprised] to read how there's been worldwide interest in the photo from Reuters subscribers, especially in Europe:

The Times of London, for example, ran no less than three separate articles about it on its Web site, one at the top of its front page. (It's a Murdoch paper.) One headline reads: "Excuse me Condi, can I go to the bathroom?" Another story, believe it or not, opens: "The need to relieve oneself diplomatically has on occasion determined the fate of nations." The third discusses the sordid history of the particulatar lavatory in question, and contains this passage: "Medical experts said that the 59-year-old President was wise not to wait any longer."

The headline at the BBC news site suggested that Bush had been "caught short" at the U.N. summit. The Irish Examiner headline? "To Pee or Not to Pee, That is the Question." Der Spiegel in Germany translated a bathroom break" as "eine Toiletten-Pause."

However, here's the really important thing we learned:

The fact is, according to Reuters — and this has not been widely reported — President Bush did indeed take a bathroom break after passing the note to Rice.

Via Editor & Publisher.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:00 AM | Get permalink

Thursday, September 15, 2005

Shorter Paul Krugman.

From his column on Dubya's Katrina speech:

There's every reason to believe the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast, like the failed reconstruction of Iraq, will be deeply marred by cronyism and corruption.

Via NY Times.

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:54 PM | Get permalink

US economy: Get ready for bad times.

Why are we so nervous? Because of this:

"In the shorter term, the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina will have a palpable effect on the national economy," White House economic adviser Ben Bernanke said in prepared remarks for delivery at the National Press Club. But he said private-sector forecasts were for healthy long-run growth."

You know that really bad news is being hidden when the White House (1) actually admits that Katrina will have some effect on the economy but also says that (2) those effects won't be long-term.

Via Reuters.

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:49 AM | Get permalink

Oh my.

We'll never see espresso in quite the same way ever again.

More espresso photos here.

Via Update or Die.

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:42 AM | Get permalink

Circling for the kill.

The LA Times reports on how real estate speculators are already moving in on New Orleans:

Brandy Farris is house hunting in New Orleans.

The real estate agent has $10 million in the bank, wired by an investor who has instructed her to scoop up houses ? any houses. "Flooding no problem," Farris' newspaper ads advise.

Her backer is a Miami businessman who specializes in buying storm-ravaged property at a deep discount, something that has paid dividends in hurricane-prone Florida. But he may have a harder time finding bargains this time around.

In some ways, Hurricane Katrina seems to have taken a vibrant real estate market and made it hotter. Large sections of the city are underwater, but that's only increasing the demand for dry houses. And in flooded areas, speculators are trying to buy properties on the cheap, hoping that the redevelopment of New Orleans will start a boom.

This land rush has long-term implications in a city where many of the poorest residents were flooded out. It raises the question of what sort of housing ? if any ? will be available to those without a six-figure salary. If New Orleans ends up a high-priced enclave, without a mix of cultures, races and incomes, something vital may be lost.

"There's a public interest question here," said Ann Oliveri, a senior vice president with the Urban Land Institute, a Washington think tank. "You don't have to abdicate the city to whoever shows up."

Unfortunately, the current land rush wouldn't be the first time poor people have been moved out of desirable areas in New Orleans.

Some black New Orleans residents say dourly that they know what's coming. Melvin Gilbert, a maintenance crew chief in his 60s, stood outside an elegant hotel in the French Quarter this week and recalled how the neighborhood had been gentrified.

He remembered half a century ago when the French Quarter had a substantial number of black residents.

"Then the Caucasians started offering them $10,000 for their homes," he said. "Well, they only bought the places for $2,000, so they took it and ran."

The white residents restored the homes, which rose quickly in value. Gilbert said he expected the same dynamic when the floodwaters receded in the heavily black neighborhoods east of downtown.

Via Melanie at Just a Bump in the Beltway.

| | Posted by Magpie at 8:42 AM | Get permalink

What an opportunity!

Hurricane Katrina isn't just a disaster — it's an opportunity for right-wingers to try to push their usual neoconsservative economic solutions onto the country under the guise of helping out the Gulf Coast.

Being one of the oldest and easily the most prominent right-wing think tank of them all, the Heritage Foundation has put some of its deepest neo-con thinkers [including that old Reagan administration stalwart, Ed Meese] onto the task of fixing everything that's now wrong in the disaster area. They've produced a report called 'From Tragedy to Triumph: Principled Solutions for Rebuilding Lives and Communities,' in which they re-heat a whole bunch of tired old 'solutions' for application on the Gulf Coast.

Media Transparency took a close look at the report's recommendations and here's some of what they found:

The report suggests that, "New Orleans and other affected areas" be declared "Opportunity Zones." In these areas, "the President should direct an Emergency Board, drawn from federal, state, and local agencies and the private sector, to identify regulations at all levels that impede recovery and should propose temporary suspension or modification of these rules."

Suspending Davis-Bacon "would significantly reduce the cost of reconstruction and provide more opportunities for displaced Americans who are without jobs to work on federal projects to restore their neighborhoods." They do not detail the putting in place of any mechanisms aimed at preventing the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast from turning into an Iraq-like rip off. In addition, they do not explain how workers, many of whom have lost everything, can possibly afford to rebuild their homes and their lives by working for wages at, or close to, the minimum wage.

They recommend "repeal[ing] or waiv[ing] restrictive environmental regulations that hamper rebuilding a broad array of infrastructure from refineries to roads and stadiums." They also advocate "substantial changes in environmental laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the Clean Water Act" which they charge "have contributed to Katrina's damage,"

They believe the best way to get the energy infrastructure up and running is to "waive or repeal Clean Air Act (CAA) regulations that hamper refinery rebuilding and expansion," "waive or repeal gasoline formulation requirements under the Clean Air Act so as to allow gasoline markets to work more flexibly and efficiently and reduce costs to the American consumer," and "increase the production of oil in the United States" by drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

As an indication of how out of touch the Heritage Foundation is with the vast majority of the victims of Hurricane Katrina, they are offering a so-called tax relief package that will have little to no effect on most of the victims' lives. Front and center are recommendations to: "streamline or suspend" parts of the federal tax code in the so-called Opportunity Zones; repeal the estate tax in order to prevent the victims of the disaster from being "hounded by the IRS"; "postpone payment of 2004 and 2005 individual and business income taxes for Katrina's victims," and "waive penalties for withdrawals from tax-advantaged savings such as IRAs and 401(k) plans."

You can read the full Heritage Foundation recommendations for rebuilding after Katrina if you go here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 7:58 AM | Get permalink

The brighter side of Hurricane Katrina.

Cartoonist Mikhaela Reid has found silver linings galore:

That ol' silver lining

Check out the rest of the cartoon here.

There's a whole lot more of Mikhaela's political cartoons here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 7:55 AM | Get permalink

Houston, we have a problem.

And it's a really big one.

First, heres's some of what's known about Dubya's reconstruction plan for the Gulf Coast:

President Bush will call tonight for an unprecedented federal commitment to rebuild New Orleans and other areas obliterated by Hurricane Katrina, putting the United States on pace to spend more in the next year on the storm's aftermath than it has over three years on the Iraq war, according to White House and congressional officials....

Administration officials concede that the hurricane and its aftermath could push the budget deficit back above $400 billion next year, or about 3 percent of the country's gross domestic product, just as the tide of federal red ink that rolled over Washington during Bush's first term had begun to recede.

And then we have tax cut plans from House Republicans:

U.S. House Republicans said on Wednesday they were still committed to extending tax cuts signed by President Bush two years ago, saying they had not abandoned the effort, despite Hurricane Katrina....

[House Speaker Dennis Hastert] suggested Hurricane Katrina's devastation actually posed a new reason for pursuing tax relief -- as an economic stimulus.

And finally, here's a big vote of confidence for those tax cuts:

U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow said on Wednesday extending tax cuts for dividends and capital gains is key for U.S. economic growth and expressed confidence Congress will pass those measures.

"The administration supports those measures strongly and remains confident that either through (budget) reconciliation or otherwise, we're going to see those measures extended," he said.

"It's awfully important we do it because the strong economy we enjoy today is a direct result of the president's action on lowering taxes," he said on CNBC television's "Kudlow and Co."

Now maybe we'd see things differently if we had one of those brilliant financial minds so common in Dubya's administration, but a nagging little voice keeps telling us that even Dubya's administration will have a hard time hiding the problems caused when the feds have to pay for a huge reconstruction program on the Gulf Coast at the same time they are cutting federal taxes.

And we don't even want to think about how much worse everything will get if the GOP also continues on with its plans to permanently eliminate the estate tax.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:03 AM | Get permalink

Since the inquisition was so much fun the first time ....

Why not do it again?

Investigators appointed by the Vatican have been instructed to review each of the 229 Roman Catholic seminaries in the United States for "evidence of homosexuality" and for faculty members who dissent from church teaching, according to a document prepared to guide the process.

We are resisting the temptation to ask whether the investigators' chief methods will be surprise, fear, ruthless efficiency, and a fanatical devotion to the Pope.

Via NY Times.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:01 AM | Get permalink

You must whip it.

Whip it good! [.mov file]

Yes, these are fifth graders. From Minnesota, even.
This video is a slow download, but it's really worth your patience!

If the original site is down [or you just want a faster download], try this mirror site.

Via Naive Melodies.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:00 AM | Get permalink

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Can I go now, please?

When you're the president of the United States and you're attending a session of the United Nations, you sometimes need to send important notes to your secretary of state. Check out these two screen captures from the Reuters website, with two versions of a photo showing what Dubya was writing earlier today.

First, this one from 4:18 pm ET:

What's on that note?

The first version
Then, this one from 4:38 pm ET:

Now, please?

The second version
If this a hoax, it's a good one. If not, it's going to be fun watching the White House respond.

Via Editor & Publisher.

| | Posted by Magpie at 6:23 PM | Get permalink

Who could have predicted 9/11?

Indeed.

From Condoleezza Rice on May 16, 2002

"I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile."

From the 9/11 Commission report, August 2004 [after the Dubya administration's edits were restored]:

9/11 report excerpt with restored edit

[Source: National Archives; Graphic: NY Times]
It's absolutely amazing what nobody could have known, isn't it?

| | Posted by Magpie at 3:28 PM | Get permalink

Adding injury to injury.

Reuters reports that New Orleans schoolteachers won't be getting any more paychecks. The cash-strapped school district says that unless emergency federal funding comes through, there's simply no money left.

| | Posted by Magpie at 3:04 PM | Get permalink

Same-sex marriage ban nixed in Massachusetts.

The Massachusetts legislature has overwhelmingly voted against a constitutional amendment that would have banned same-sex marriages and replaced them with civil unions. In a joint session, legislators from both houses rejected the measure by a 157-39 vote.

Today's vote kills the proposed amendment, which had to be approved by two successive sessions of the legislature. It was also a turnaround from the vote in the last session, which approved the amendment on a 105-92 vote.

Efforts to end same-sex marriages in the state are far from over, however. Opponents are attempting to launch another amendment that would not only bar same-sex marriages, but civil unions as well. The earliest that can come to a vote is November 2008.

Via AP.

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:53 PM | Get permalink

US slammed for human rights violations in Iraq.

By the Iraqi government, surprisingly.

Iraqi justice minister Justice Minister Abdul Hussein Shandal has condemned the US military for holding thousands of Iraqis for long periods without charges.

"No citizen should be arrested without a court order," he said this week, complaining that U.S. suggestions that his ministry has an equal say on detentions were misleading.

"There is abuse (of human rights) due to detentions, which are overseen by the Multinational Force (MNF) and are not in the control of the justice ministry," said Shandal, a Shi'ite judge respected for standing up to Saddam Hussein on the rule of law.

The minister also wants changes made to the US Security Council resolution that gives sweeping powers to the 'multinational force' led by the US, including immunity from Iraqi law.

"The resolution ... gives immunity to the MNF and means taking no action against the MNF no matter what happens or whatever they do against the people of Iraq," Shandal said.

"We're hoping to make more efforts with the Security Council and the whole United Nations to end this resolution or amend it so that anyone who violates Iraqi law or assaults any citizen is held accountable," he said. "This is a matter of sovereignty."

Via Reuters.

| | Posted by Magpie at 8:44 AM | Get permalink

Google Blog Search.

It's materialized.

We haven't played with it enough to know how useful it's going to be. It appears that the database currently goes back only to this past March; we hope that changes soon.

The FAQ is here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:25 AM | Get permalink

Another casualty of Katrina.

From UK political cartoonist Steve Bell:

Another casualty

[© 2005 Steve Bell]
The full-size version of the cartoon is here.

Via UK Guardian. [Thanks to ChrisW for the tip!]

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:02 AM | Get permalink

It wasn't the former FEMA head who first bungled the response to Katrina.

It was his boss, Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff.

According to a report from the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau, federal documents show that Chertoff was the sole official with the power to make the federal wheels start turning. And those same documents show that Chertoff didn't act for 36 hours after Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast.

Even before the storm struck the Gulf Coast, Chertoff could have ordered federal agencies into action without any request from state or local officials. Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown had only limited authority to do so until about 36 hours after the storm hit, when Chertoff designated him as the "principal federal official" in charge of the storm.

As thousands of hurricane victims went without food, water and shelter in the days after Katrina's early morning Aug. 29 landfall, critics assailed Brown for being responsible for delays that might have cost hundreds of lives.

But Chertoff - not Brown - was in charge of managing the national response to a catastrophic disaster, according to the National Response Plan, the federal government's blueprint for how agencies will handle major natural disasters or terrorist incidents. An order issued by President Bush in 2003 also assigned that responsibility to the homeland security director.

But according to a memo obtained by Knight Ridder, Chertoff didn't shift that power to Brown until late afternoon or evening on Aug. 30, about 36 hours after Katrina hit Louisiana and Mississippi. That same memo suggests that Chertoff may have been confused about his lead role in disaster response and that of his department.

So while the press and the White House concentrated their energies on blaming FEMA head Michael Brown for the feds' inept response to Katrina — much of which blame was richly deserved — Chertoff until now has managed to come out looking relatively good. If the Knight Ridder article gets the attention it should, we expect that another 'resignation' is in the offing.

From the reaction that Knight Ridder reporters got when asking Dubya administration officials to comment on what they'd found, it's clear that officials at the White House and Homeland Security department know how the political problems that they're facing:

White House and homeland security officials wouldn't explain why Chertoff waited some 36 hours to declare Katrina an incident of national significance and why he didn't immediately begin to direct the federal response from the moment on Aug. 27 when the National Hurricane Center predicted that Katrina would strike the Gulf Coast with catastrophic force in 48 hours.

You can bet that the lack of comment will only last until the White House figures out who the next patsy is going to be. Despite his so-called acceptance of responsibility today, we've seen no signs that Dubya is willing to accept responsibility if any political consequences are attached.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:01 AM | Get permalink

I spy with my little eye.

Or, rather, Google Earth spies.

And it can see everything, including military installations all over the planet.

Oh look! An AWACS!

AWACS parked on the runway at Korat Air Force Base, Thailand
Via The Register.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:00 AM | Get permalink

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

The buck stops at Dubya.

A report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service says that Louisiana governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco took all the required steps needed to secure federal disaster aid for her state, and she completed those steps in a timely manner. The report totally shuts down the right-wing argument that the federal response to Hurricane Katrina was slowed by foot-dragging on Blanco's part.

The report was requested by Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. In a statement accompanying the release of the CRS report, Conyers said: "This report closes the book on the Bush Administration's attempts to evade accountability. The Bush Administration was caught napping at a critical time."

Among the findings of the report:

All necessary conditions for federal relief were met on August 28. Pursuant to Section 502 of the Stafford Act, "[t]he declaration of an emergency by the President makes Federal emergency assistance available," and the President made such a declaration on August 28. The public record indicates that several additional days passed before such assistance was actually made available to the State;
The Governor must make a timely request for such assistance, which meets the requirements of federal law. The report states that "[e]xcept to the extent that an emergency involves primarily Federal interests, both declarations of major disaster and declarations of emergency must be triggered by a request to the President from the Governor of the affected state";
The Governor did indeed make such a request, which was both timely and in compliance with federal law. The report finds that "Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco requested by letter dated August 27, 2005...that the President declare an emergency for the State of Louisiana due to Hurricane Katrina for the time period from August 26, 2005 and continuing pursuant to [applicable Federal statute]" and "Governor Blanco's August 27,2005 request for an emergency declaration also included her determination...that 'the incident is of such severity and magnitude that effective response is beyond the capabilities of the State and affected local governments and that supplementary Federal assistance is necessary to save lives, protect property, public health, and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of disaster." [Emphasis added]

You can read the full CRS report here [PDF file].

Via Raw Story.

| | Posted by Magpie at 6:18 PM | Get permalink

'Three of the dullest hours of my life.'

On Sunday, we posted about the 'Freedom Walk' — the Pentagon-sponsored commemoration of 9/11 in Washington, DC. We'd noticed an imprecision in the coverage: how the media said only that 'thousands' marched or that there were 'throngs' of people. This seemed especially odd given the media's propensity for tossing out supposedly precise numbers about the turnout for demonstrations in the nation's capital.

As we suspected, there was a reason for this imprecision — almost nobody showed up. According to reporter Christopher Hayes, who attended the 'Freedom Walk,' only one-third of the 15,000 registered participants actually made the walk. That's just one-third of an already pathetically small turnout.

Perhaps most striking about the march was that it awkwardly called attention to the diminishing returns of 9/11, the original fount of the White House's political capital. What was once The Day That Changed Everything has become so sentimentalized that it is now, simply, A Sad Thing That Happened. When Rumsfield addressed the crowd, in between Clint Black ballads, he told them the last time he?d walked across Memorial Bridge was for the funeral of JFK Jr. The point, I guess, was that too was sad.

Four years later, 9/11 has come to occupy a strange position in our cultural imagination. Like the day Kennedy was assassinated, everyone has their story of where they were, tales they tell eagerly, unprompted. But whereas once these memories had a raw and terrifying immediacy, you now get the sense they are indulged and lingered over like the bittersweet remembrance of an adolescent heartbreak. That 9/11 has lost the edge of rage it inspired in many is a good thing for the republic and a bad thing for the Republicans.

Via In These Times.

| | Posted by Magpie at 6:04 PM | Get permalink

Debunking the right.

Think Progress has posted an extensive and well-documented list of right-wing lies about Katrina and the facts you can use to set the record straight.

You'll find lots of really good fodder for letters to the editor.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:59 PM | Get permalink

How nice.

The US press is reporting that Dubya has accepted responsibility for the fed's blunders in responding to Hurricane Katrina:

"Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government," Bush said at a joint White House news conference with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.

"And to the extent that the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility. I want to know what went right and what went wrong," said Bush.

But we think that the headline writers have jumped the gun. Dubya didn't accept responsibility period — he accepted some responsibility in the context that there were 'serious problems' at 'all levels of government.'

What this looks like from here is a shift in the administration's strategy for recouping its political losses, not a true acceptance of responsibility for having made mistakes that cost lives. We lay odds that the next move is for the feds to shift as much of the responsiblity for Katrina-related problems to state and local governments as they can. That way, Dubya can have the benefits of saying that he accepted responsibility without actually having to get his hands dirty.

Via AP.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:21 PM | Get permalink

Old times there are not forgotten.

Like whites-only restrooms, for example.

Giant chicken processor Tyson Foods is being accused of maintaining a segregated restroom and break room at its plant in Ashland, Alabama. According to the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a 'Whites Only' sign was put outside the restroom and the door was padlocked. Black employees did not have keys to the lock, but keys were provided to 'numerous white employees.'

The African-American employees' complaint also alleges that, after they complained about the segregated bathroom, the plant manager told them that the bathroom had been locked because they were "dirty" and announced the closing of the break room. According to the complaint, the same white employees who had keys to the "Whites Only" bathroom formed their own, private break room, using Tyson materials to construct the furniture. Initially, a locked door segregated the private break room. To the present day, locked cabinets and a locked refrigerator maintain a private break room.

"When I was young, my mother used to tell me stories about segregated bathrooms," said Henry Adams, a plaintiff in this case. "I never thought that her reality of seventy-one years ago would become my reality today."

The employees' lawsuit claims that Tyson's actions violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and part of the US Code by 'maintaining a racially hostile work environment and by retaliating against employees who complained.' Employees also claim that they have been subjected to racial slurs and intimidation.

Via TalkLeft.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:37 PM | Get permalink

Not all countries are like the US.

Take Norway, for example, which just voted out the conservative government that had run the country for the past four years. But what's really telling is why the Norwegian left has come back to power:

The opposition bloc won the vote on its promises to spend more of the oil-rich country's money on its already generous welfare system. Offshore oil platforms have made it the world's third-largest oil exporter, after Saudi Arabia and Russia.

Much of the election debate focused on how to use the oil income, and [center-right Prime Minister Kjell Magne] Bondevik's campaign was hurt by claims that his tax cuts had only helped the rich. [Emphasis added]

Via UK Guardian.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:05 PM | Get permalink

You know Dubya must really be sweating the Katrina disaster.

The evidence: Not only has the prez made three visits to the disaster area in the last week, but he's going to be addressing the country from Louisiana tonight. According to the White House, Dubya will be speaking about 'the recovery and the way forward on the longer-term rebuilding.'

But, as Dubya keeps telling us, this president doesn't govern according to the polls. So we're sure that there's no connection between these low poll numbers and the untypical atattention that the prez is paying to the Gulf Coast.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:26 AM | Get permalink

Not like this is obvious or anything.

From Scott Bateman's sketchbook:

Dubya investigates?

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:15 AM | Get permalink

Covering the hometown disaster.

The second day of Paul McLeary's report on how the New Orleans Times-Picayune has been faring since Katrina smashed into the Big Easy deals with the reporters' daily grind of collecting news in a shattered city.

We head back to Harrah's, where Jeff and Steve interview various local cops and public officials until we break off to head over to the press briefing. It's there that I meet another Picayune staffer, Trymaine Lee, a police beat reporter who was stuck at City Hall when the storm hit. He stands on the steps next to a downed tree, with about 20 other reporters, waiting for the briefing to begin. The hardest story he has had to report, he says, was an interview with a woman whose family escaped their flooded home by punching a hole in the roof. Once they achieved that perch, they could hear their next-door neighbors making a failed attempt to do the same. The neighbors didn't made it, and the woman told Lee that when her own family was rescued they had to use sticks to push bodies away from the boat.

After the press conference, we weave our way through the broken streets back to Harrah's yet again, past more trash and fallen walls and looted stores. Once there, the reporters set about another round of interviews. Jeff and Steve herd a couple of newly-rotated Picayune reporters into a car to show them the "hot spots," while I stay behind and survey the scene.

Later in the afternoon, Anderson and a few others come back to the staging area, reporting that nothing happened while out on patrol. The weary staffers all nod in agreement to the notion that people really aren't being pulled out alive anymore, and that the patrols are a disorganized mess.

The guys work angles on a couple more stories and continue to tirelessly work contacts before finally heading back to the house. The schedule seems to be this: Gather information all day before heading back to the house about 5 p.m. to write, and then try to file by 7. They share one land line to email their stories to Baton Rouge.

At the house, I rejoin them a little after 7, tempted by the promise of beer, and fans powered by their gasoline generator. Once there, I find the staff in the throes of finishing their dispatches, along with writers Gordon Russell and Gwen Filosa who have joined the group. Eight staffers sit on chairs and couches, tapping on their laptops in the thick air of the crowded room, the exhaustion of unrelieved days of work visible on their faces. The street they're on, like every street, has some debris scattered here and there, but it is quiet; more important, it is passable. The only noise you can hear is the humming of the generator, and the thwack-thwack-thwack of Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters passing overhead. But a few houses down, there's a blanketed body lying on a porch, its legs bent upward in rigor mortis, with a handwritten prayer tacked to the wall above it. It has been there since the staff had moved in on Sunday, and in a subsequent email with Duncan on Monday (the 12th) he told me it was still there.

The first day of McLeary's report is here.

Via CJR Daily.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:00 AM | Get permalink

Something else that might change in Katrina's wake.

The hurricane has forced hundreds of thousands of people from New Orleans and other Gulf Coast communities devastated by Hurricane Katrina, and huge numbers of them have relocated [at least temporarily] to places like Baton Rouge and Houston. Now that the metaphorical dust has settled a bit, we're starting to hear talk of whether — and when — the boundaries of Gulf Coast legislative districts need to be re-drawn to reflect the geographic shift in population.

With Katrina having emptied out New Orleans and much of the surrounding parishes, hundreds of thousands of people who once voted in Louisiana's 1st, 2nd and 3rd Districts are no longer there. And many who never heard of Reps. Jim McCrery, Rodney Alexander and Richard Baker — Louisiana Republicans who represent the 4th, 5th and 6th Districts, respectively — are now camped out in those districts.

House members, their staffers and government officials in Baton Rouge and Washington say they're loathe to talk about politics when there are still bodies to be recovered, children to be reunited with their parents and schools and hospitals to be reopened.

But the reality is that less than 14 months before voters are scheduled to head to the polls, it's unclear which polls they'll be heading to — and how this will affect Louisiana's congressional balance of power as well as that of neighboring Alabama or Texas....

For now, no one wants to speculate about what a reconfigured congressional map in Louisiana might look like for fear of sounding crass or because most simply don't know who will be living where come 2006 or 2008, let alone 2010 or 2012.

But strong emotions are swirling around the interrelated questions of future congressional districts, the fate of New Orleans and who, exactly, will represent those former city residents if and when they come back.

We wouldn't be at all displeased if those largely Democratic New Orleans evacuees in Houston decided to vent their dissastisfaction with Dubya's administration on Texas Republicans.

Via The Hill.

| | Posted by Magpie at 4:33 AM | Get permalink

Let's play Wheel of Dubya!

The cartoon came out on Friday, but Dubya's definitely still playing the game.

Spinning the blame game

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:59 AM | Get permalink

To the victor go the spoils.

In his recap of the first day of the US Senate hearings on the nomination of John Roberts to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Lyle Denniston points out the political reality that underlies all of the senatorial rhetoric: The Democrats lost the elections of 2000 and 2004, and the GOP sees putting a conservative in charge of the country's highest court as part of the spoils of victory.

But no matter how lofty the exploration of issues may become on Tuesday and Wednesday, as the senators directly question Roberts, Sen. [Lindsey] Graham made it seem that this really is all about politics — about the spoils of the 2000 and 2004 victory. "To me," he said, "the central issue before the Senate is whether or not the Senate will allow President Bush to fulfill his campaign promise to appoint a well-qualified, strict constructionist to the Supreme Court and, in this case, to appoint a chief justice to the Supreme Court in the mold of Justice Rehnquist." Bush, said the South Carolinian, has been elected twice, and "has not hidden from the public what his view of a Supreme Court justice should be and the philosophy that they should embrace." Bush, "by picking you, has lived up to the end of the bargain with the American people," said Graham.

"We're not here," the senator went on, "to talk about liberal philosophy versus conservative philosophy and what's best for the country." That, he declared, is what the elections decided. Instead, he suggested, the sole issue before the committee and the Senate was one of judicial qualifications — "whether or not you and all you've done in your life makes you a fitting candidate to be on the Supreme Court." [Emphasis added]

Via SCOTUSblog.

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:14 AM | Get permalink

Bad news from New Orleans.

The system of levees protecting New Orleans has been damaged more severely than initially believed. According to the Army Corps of Engineers, miles of levees on the city's eastern lank were washed away by Hurricane Katrina's storm surge. The main task of those eastern levees was to — you guessed it — hold back storm surges.

The loss of the levees has left portions of New Orleans with little or no protection midway through the hurricane season, senior Army officials said. And rebuilding the levees will be a massive undertaking that could take years, meaning the city could be vulnerable for a long time.

"It is gone," said Col. Richard Wagenaar, the Army Corps' head engineer for the New Orleans district. "It is literally leveled in places. The power of the surge in this storm was greatly underestimated."

Via LA Times.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:58 AM | Get permalink

Ooooooh, shiny!

Unusual cards by Seattle artist Francesca Berrini!

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:00 AM | Get permalink

Monday, September 12, 2005

Meet the new boss.

Dumb as the old boss.

The newly designated head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, David Paulison, is the same guy who suggested that people stock up on duct tape as protection against a biological attack.

Dubya's supply of these clowns seems endless.

| | Posted by Magpie at 7:01 PM | Get permalink

Four years on.

Riverbend has some thoughts about the anniversary of 9/11:

Al-Qaeda was just a vague name back then [on Sept 11, 2001]. Iraqis were concerned with their own problems and fears. We were coping with the sanctions and the fact that life seemed to stand still every few years for an American air raid. We didn't have the problem of Muslim fundamentalists — that was a concern for neighbors like Saudi Arabia and Iran.

I remember almost immediately, Western media began conjecturing on which Islamic group it could have been. I remember hoping it wasn?t Muslims or Arabs. I remember feeling that way not just because of the thousands of victims, but because I sensed that we'd suffer in Iraq. We'd be made to suffer for something we weren't responsible for.

E. looked at me wide-eyed that day and asked the inevitable question, "How long do you think before they bomb us?"

"But it wasn't us. It can't be us..." I rationalized.

"It doesn't matter. It's all they need."

And it was true. It began with Afghanistan and then it was Iraq. We began preparing for it almost immediately. The price of the dollar rose as people began stocking up on flour, rice, sugar and other commodities.

For several weeks it was all anyone could talk about. We discussed it in schools and universities. We talked about it in work places and restaurants. The attitudes differed. There was never joy or happiness, but in several cases there was a sort of grim satisfaction. Some Iraqis believed that America had brought this upon itself. This is what you get when you meddle in world affairs. This is what you get when starve populations. This is what you get when you give unabashed support to occupying countries like Israel, and corrupt tyrants like the Saudi royals.

Most Iraqis, though, felt pity. The images for the next weeks of Americans running in terror, of the frantic searches under the rubble for relatives and friends left us shaking our heads in empathy. The destruction was all too familiar. The reports of Americans fearing the sound of airplanes had us nodding our heads with understanding and a sort of familiarity — you'd want to reach out to one of them and say, "It's ok — the fear eventually subsides. We know how it is — your government does this every few years."

Via Baghdad Burning.

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:00 PM | Get permalink

Duckin' and weavin'.

That's what Dubya was doing as he took questions from the press today in New Orleans. When asked about his administration's inept response to the Katrina disaster, Dubya first accused the press of playing the 'blame game,' then pulled out the 'New Orleans dodged the bullet' lie to defend his remark about how no one anticipated the levees breaking, and finally lied about whether the feds had prepared properly for a storm of Katrina's savagery.

Read it all for yourself. We've emphasized a few particulary egregious remarks.

Q Mr. President, there is a belief that we've been hearing for two weeks now on the ground that FEMA let the people here on the ground down. And perhaps, in turn, if you look at the evidence of what it's done to your popularity, FEMA let you down. Do you think that your management style of sort of relying on the advice that you got in this particular scenario let you down? And do you think that plays at all --

THE PRESIDENT: Look, there will be plenty of time to play the blame game. That's what you're trying to do.

Q No, I'm trying to --

THE PRESIDENT: You're trying to say somebody is at fault. Look -- and I want to know. I want to know exactly what went on and how it went on. And we'll continually assess inside my administration. I sent Mike Chertoff down here to make an assessment of how best to do the job. He made a decision; I accepted his decision. But we're moving on. We're going to solve these problems. And there will be ample time for people to look back and see the facts.

Now, as far as my own personal popularity goes, I don't make decisions based upon polls. I hope the American people appreciate that. You can't make difficult decisions if you have to take a poll. That's been my style ever since I've been the President. And, of course, I rely upon good people. Of course, you got to as the President of the United States. You set the space, you set the strategy, you hold people to account. But yeah, I'm relying upon good people. That's why Admiral Allen is here. He's good man. He can do the job. That's why General Honore is here. And so when I come into a briefing, I don't tell them what to do. They tell me the facts on the ground, and my question to them is, do you have what you need.

Q Did they misinform you when you said that no one anticipated the breach of the levees?

THE PRESIDENT: No, what I was referring to is this. When that storm came by, a lot of people said we dodged a bullet. When that storm came through at first, people said, whew. There was a sense of relaxation, and that's what I was referring to. And I, myself, thought we had dodged a bullet. You know why? Because I was listening to people, probably over the airways, say, the bullet has been dodged. And that was what I was referring to.

Of course, there were plans in case the levee had been breached. There was a sense of relaxation in the moment, a critical moment. And thank you for giving me a chance to clarify that.

Q Mr. President, where were you when you realized the severity of the storm?

THE PRESIDENT: I was -- I knew that a big storm was coming on Monday, so I spoke to the country on Monday* morning about it. I said, there's a big storm coming. I had pre-signed emergency declarations in anticipation of a big storm coming.

Q Mr. President --

THE PRESIDENT: -- which is, by the way, extraordinary. Most emergencies the President signs after the storm has hit. It's a rare occasion for the President to anticipate the severity of a storm and sign the documentation prior to the storm hitting. So, in other words, we anticipated a serious storm coming. But as the man's question said, basically implied, wasn't there a moment where everybody said, well, gosh, we dodged the bullet, and yet the bullet hadn't been dodged.

Oh, we forgot to mention Dubya's assertion that he doesn't govern according to the polls. Aren't his bad poll numbers the reason why he's visiting the Gulf Coast for the third time in a week, hmmm?

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:43 PM | Get permalink

Keeping on keeping on.

That would be an appropriate motto for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, which has kept publishing through the Katrina disaster, without missing a single day. Paul McLeary has an excellent piece [to be followed by a second one tomorrow] about about how the paper has stayed in business despite the odds.:

Weigh the complexities: How does a hometown newspaper write about a city that in effect, no longer exists? How long can a newspaper staff, effectively homeless and running on fumes, continue to hold up? Where does a newspaper turn for advertising revenue when the city it caters to all of a sudden has neither businesses nor subscribers? Can a 168-year old paper, whose initial cover price was a 6 1/4 cent Spanish coin, long survive after being reduced to what amounts to the country's most tragic metro section?

Answers will be a while coming. Managing editor for news operations Peter Kovacs says that at the moment his only concern is getting the paper out each day, in the face of every obstacle. Contrary to some reports last week that the paper's owner, Advance Publications, an arm of the Newhouse empire, was going to shut down the paper and just walk away from an untenable investment, the company says it is going to see the Times Picayune through this upheaveal and out the other side. Indeed, Kovacs says, everyone who was on the payroll before Katrina continues on it, at full pay.

Despite all this, to see the newsroom at LSU is to see the basic elements of journalism -- go, see, come back, tell -- being practiced at a high level of professionalism and dedication. While the staff looks weary and ragged, they're doing what reporters do -- digging out the facts, one by one by one, and painting a vivid daily picture of the ever-shifting scene. Sitting in the foyer of the journalism building, I watched them walk out of the hot, stuffy little newsroom to gobble a bag of chips, drink some water or conduct a cell phone interview a few feet away from a group of freshly-scrubbed returning students. Many of the staffers are staying with LSU professors or other local residents, and make it into the office when they can. When I left about 9 p.m. last Wednesday night, staffers who had been there all day were still making phone calls, taking dictation from reporters in New Orleans, flipping furiously through their scribbled notes and tapping away at their laptops. They may have a place to sleep, but they appeared in no hurry to get there.

Via CJR Daily.

More: Editor & Publisher has a story on how the Gulfport, Mississippi Sun-Herald has kept publishing since Katrina.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:26 PM | Get permalink

Did he jump or was he pushed?

FEMA head Micheal Brown has resigned.

"I'm turning in my resignation today," Brown said. "I think it's in the best interest of the agency and the best interest of the president to do that and get the media focused on the good things that are going on, instead of me."

Given that Brown says the resignation was his idea, and that it was not requested by the White House, we vote for 'pushed.'

Via AP.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:13 PM | Get permalink

The effort to repeal the US estate tax has gone away for the moment.

But you can be that as soon as the public's attention starts to drift away from the cost of the Hurricane Katrina clean-up, Republicans in the US Congress will make another try at repealing the federal estate tax permanently.

This past week, the Economic Policy Institute reminded us why repeal isn't just irrelevant to most people in the US, but it's just another give-away to the rich. Unless you expect to be leaving an estate worth over US$ 1 million, your heirs aren't going to be losing anything to the estate tax.

What estate tax?

In 2003, of 2.4 million deaths, only 30,627 taxable estate tax returns ? 1.3% ? were filed. This reflected a sharp decrease in filings from just a few years before, when the effective exemption from the tax was much lower. In 2000, for instance, 52,000 taxable estate tax returns were filed. (By comparison, there are about 130 million income tax returns filed annually.)

In the chart above, the blue bars reflect the percent of estates' value paid under the tax. The basic exemption allowed when filing this tax shielded estates under $1 million in value from any tax whatsoever. The highest average rates do not exceed 17% and apply to estates between $5 and $20 million, which comprised less than 8% of all estate tax returns.

Thanks to Working Life for reminding us that we hadn't made our weekly visit to EPI.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:24 AM | Get permalink

From the 'Another Amazing Coincidence' Department.

Five years ago, Florida adopted the 'One Florida' plan pushed by Gov. Jeb Bush, under which race could no longer be used as a factor in university admission decisions. So guess what happened?

New figures show that the number of black students has dropped at six of the state's 11 public universities, and the percentage of blacks in this year's freshman class is at its lowest since Dubya's brother arrived in the governor's mansion in 1999.

Another amazing coincidence!

Via AP.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:04 AM | Get permalink

Is the US economy finally at a 'tipping point'?

Has the Katrina disaster pushed it over the edge?

Over at Gordon.Coale, there's an excellent set of links to articles that try to answer those questions. There's this one:

Over the weekend Barron's ran an interview with two hedge fund managers and dedicated short sellers, Lee Mikles and Mark Miller, who argued that we were at a dangerous juncture vis a vis the economy and stock market. Since short sellers benefit from falling stock prices, they're prejudiced to the down side, but that doesn't mean they're wrong.

This one:

Never in modern history has the world's leading economic power tried to do so much with so little. A saving-short US economy has long pushed the envelope in drawing on foreign capital to subsidize excess consumption. But now Washington is upping the ante as it opens the fiscal spigot to cope with post-Katrina reconstruction at the same time it is funding the ongoing war in Iraq. Could this be a tipping point for America's shoestring economy?

And this one:

By any measure, Katrina is a shock to an economic ecosystem already seriously out of balance. It has reduced national wealth by several hundred billion dollars, displaced hundreds of thousands of citizens, aggravated bloated budget and trade deficits and reduced the political odds for permanent tax cuts on capital. And with so much still unknown, the risks, as they say at the Fed, are on the downside.

Don't read these first thing in the morning unless you want to be depressed all day.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:43 AM | Get permalink

The Forever War.

We finally got around to reading Mark Danner's excellent piece assessing Dubya's 'war on terror' four years on. In just a few pages of the NY Times Magazine, Danner says more of importance about terrorism as practiced by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda and the way that Dubya's administration has responded to that threat than most authors manage to say in entire books on the same subject.

As the Iraq war grows increasingly unpopular in the United States - scarcely a third of Americans now approve of the president's handling of the war, and 4 in 10 think it was worth fighting - and as more and more American leaders demand that the administration "start figuring out how we get out of there" (in the words of Senator Chuck Hagel, a Republican), Americans confront a stark choice: whether to go on indefinitely fighting a politically self-destructive counterinsurgency war that keeps the jihadists increasingly well supplied with volunteers or to withdraw from a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq that remains chaotic and unstable and beset with civil strife and thereby hand Al Qaeda and its allies a major victory in the war on terror's "central front...."

We cannot know what future Osama bin Laden imagined when he sent off his 19 suicide terrorists on their mission four years ago. He got much wrong; the U.S. military, light years ahead of the Red Army, would send no tank divisions to Afghanistan, and there has been no uprising in the Islamic world. One suspects, though, that if bin Laden had been told on that day that in a mere 48 months he would behold a world in which the United States, "the idol of the age," was bogged down in an endless guerrilla war fighting in a major Muslim country; a world in which its all-powerful army, with few allies and little sympathy, found itself overstretched and exhausted; in which its dispirited people were starting to demand from their increasingly unpopular leader a withdrawal without victory - one suspects that such a prophecy would have pleased him. He had struck at the American will, and his strategy, which relied in effect on the persistent reluctance of American leaders to speak frankly to their people about the costs and burdens of war and to expend the political capital that such frank talk would require, had proved largely correct....

Too bad the NY Times isn't always this good.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:28 AM | Get permalink

Sunday, September 11, 2005

Dubya's administration may be trying to blame the locals for the inept response to Hurricane Katrina.

But at least some officials from the affected states are fighting back hard. Here's part of an interview with US senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana [PDF file] that Bob Schieffer did earlier today on 'Face the Nation":

SCHIEFFER: Do you think the White House is trying to put the blame on local officials?

Sen. LANDRIEU: I am unfortunately aware that, yes, they are. While the president is saying he wants to work together as a team, I think the White House operatives have a full-court press on to blame state and local officials, whether they're Republicans or Democrats, whether it's Haley Barbour or Kathleen Blanco, whether it's Mayor Nagin or a Republican mayor from Mississippi. And it's very unfortunate. This federal government has an obligation to support our local and state officials particularly in times of tragedy and distress, not to pile on them, not to make their suffering worse, but to lighten their load, and I hope the federal government will do that. It's been years of neglect from not investing, and as Susan Collins will tell you, one of the big lack of investments is in a communications system that would allow locals to communicate with each other, and that's a lesson that we should have learned after 9/11 and we will learn again, unfortunately, this week.

SCHIEFFER: That's a very strong charge you've just leveled. What are some examples of that?

Sen. LANDRIEU: Well, I think that there are journalists throughout town that can give you those examples, and I'll be happy to provide more detail as the week unfolds. But it's been very unfortunate, I think, that there is an effort under way to blame the local and state officials, Republicans and Democrats, black and white, and it's not fair, and it shouldn't be done.... [Emphasis added]

Via CBS News.

| | Posted by Magpie at 6:09 PM | Get permalink

Has anyone else noticed?

We just went poking around the web to find out today's Pentagon-sponsored 'Freedom Walk' went in Washington. Especially, we were wondering how many people actually showed up for this tightly controlled and carefully choreographed demonstration.

But try as we would, we haven't been able to find numbers: All of the news reports we've seen [and we've looked at a lot of them] say that said 'thousands of people' or 'throngs' particpated in the march. And this was the closest to a long shot of the march we could find:

9/11 'Freedom Walk'

[Photo: Leo Shane III/Stars & Stripes]
It hardly allows one to do a head count of the whole thing.

So does anyone else find it interesting that neither the feds or the national media — who always seem to be so willing to give low-ball counts for anti-government demonstrations in DC — don't seem to be providing any numbers for the 'Freedom Walk'?

Has anyone seen numbers? or a better photo?

| | Posted by Magpie at 5:16 PM | Get permalink

What's worse than having to live through Hurricane Katrina and dealing with the aftermath?

Living through Hurricane Katrina and dealing with the aftermath when you're transsexual.

Via Roz Kaveney's Journal, we have the story of Arpollo Vicks, a 20 year old new Orleans university student and a substitute teacher in a middle school. Until this past week, Vicks had never been in any trouble with the law. Things changed, however, as a result of Hurricane Katrina.

Vicks was one of the thousands of people who were unable leave New Orleans before Katrina struck. She had to swim from her apartment to temporary 'safety' on an I-10 bridge, and later went to the New Orleans Convention Center. After five days homeless, Vicks was evacuated to a shelter in College Station, Texas. But instead finding a safe haven there, she instead was arrested for taking a shower in the 'wrong' bathroom. Vicks was held in the Brazos County jail for five days and was released without charges only after national lesbian/gay and transgendered organizations intervened on her behalf.

According to Vicks... she had never before encountered a problem when using women's bathrooms. She said she wanted to shower in the women's facility because she felt safer and more comfortable doing so.

Vicks said she did not request special accommodations, but that she did speak to a female volunteer and explained her situation.

Police and shelter officials said they were unaware of any such conversation.

Shelter officials say that, after a complaint from another shelter resident, they warned Vicks not to use the shower. Vicks was arrested and held in isolation on a US$ 6000 bail.

Ann Robison, executive director of a Houston organization that is providing support and housing for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered hurricane evacuees, said special accommodations for Vicks and her cousin should have been provided by the shelter.

"They should've made provisions for her upfront," Robison said. "She considers herself female."

Via Bryan-College Station Eagle.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:56 PM | Get permalink