Centerfield

Open thread

For all the meaningless stuff that is fit to blog.

So what didn't YOU like about the Katrina coverage?

Jonah Goldberg is usually a bit to right of center for me. But he is a clever guy and he's written a decent editorial to start a conversation.

All of the major newspapers contributed to the hysterical environment, passing on one unconfirmed rumor after another. And, to be fair, almost everyone else in one way or another contributed to the climate as well. The blogosphere bought the hyperventilation hook, line, and sinker.

and

Social scientists might call this an "overpredicted" event, meaning that there are too many causes to single out just one. Clearly, the breakdown in communications is a major factor. Word of mouth is never reliable. Word of mouth during a chaotic, horrifying disaster is worse than useless. Journalists stuck in isolated areas felt they had no choice but to buy the scuttlebutt coming out of the Superdome. And pundits, like yours truly, simply bought what they were selling — to our discredit.

So what are your thoughts on how this crisis coverage, and crisis coverage in general is lacking. My off the cuff comments/suggestions:

1)Showing the same pictures over and over fills the air, creates an impression but does little to enlighten

2) Multiple limited views of a crisis (i.e. our reporter at the Convention Center and our reporter in the helicopter) don't provide a "big picture".

3) While understandable that reporters in the midst of a tragedy will react emotionally they unfortunately become a part of the story.

4)In the midst of a seemingly inept governmental response its helpful to get facts (not pundit opinions) about what a "typical response" has been. (Something I still don't know)

5) Soliciting blame from an official about another official, while "newsworthy" will inevitably divert from the news at hand .

6) As unpleasant as it may be ( and as bad as it probably would look on air) you have to ask hard questions of everyone, even the "victims"; questions like "Did you actually see..."

Well, there are a few random thoughts. Any others?

The road ahead

Fred Barnes at the Weekly Standard frets about GOP prospects in 2008 in an interesting article looking forward to the next three years.

Judith Miller Released, Will Testify

Judith Miller Out of Jail, Will Testify Friday

The Inquirer had reported that an unnamed jail official had revealed that Miller left an Alexandria, Va. jail late this afternoon, at 3:55 pm., adding, "She was released after she had a telephone conversation with the Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, sources said. In that conversation, Libby reaffirmed that he had released Miller from a promise of confidentiality more than a year ago, sources said."

According to the Times, Libby "had made clear that he genuinely wanted her to testify."

But the Times account, published tonight, revealed that Libby and his lawyers asserted that they had given his waiver a year ago--and then again two weeks ago--but Miller did not accept it.

Scooter Libby? Let the wild speculation begin!

Oil

Evidently Rita did more damage to gulf oil production than Katrina. The Mineral Management Service (MMS) is reporting 98.59 percent shut down of gulf oil production and 79.97 percent of natural gas production..

Here is a DOE site with some more graphs and data.

A lot of rigs were Beached, Sunk, or Adrift in the gulf . These are very expensive pieces of equipment that are not easily replaced. Repairing and repositioning this equipment is no small task. Kind of reminds me of Kuwait after Saddam withdrew. Thus far the market seems to be holding it breath about what this means. At the very least expect a short term spike in prices. Interestingly enough some French refineries and shipping concerns that supply the US with refined petrol have gone on strike. (Freedom fries indeed?)

I've been thinking about what possible consumption reducing solutions might be acceptable to the republican lead congress.

What does everyone think of a revenue neutral gas tax? Adjust the price of gas with taxes to discourage consumption, but offset it with income tax cuts. That way “Taxes” will not be increased but consumption should decrease.

At the same times it provides a more stable market environment for the development of alternatives like ethanol, bio-diesel, and coal to gas conversion.

Roberts confirmed 78-22

And the seventh angel poured his bowl into the air, and a voice cried out from heaven, saying: "It is done."

John Roberts confirmed 78-22, Roll Call Vote 245.

Ann Althouse has a list of the dissenting 22.

EDIT: I goofed on the numbers slightly, those in the title and body are now correct.

Tom DeLay thread

DeLay indicted, will step aside as majority leader

Katrina, Rita, and climate change: Is there a connection?

(Cross-posted at The Reaction.)

With Katrina and Rita dominating the news recently, there's a good deal of talk out there about the relationship between hurricanes and climate change (or global warming). And it comes down to this: Are these larger, more powerful hurricanes related to climate change, or not? In other words, has climate changed caused these larger, more powerful hurricanes? (Of course, there's also the lingering question of whether climate change is myth or reality, but, to me, this is a no-brainer akin to evolution -- yes, it's a reality, however much head-in-the-sand naysayers insist on living in denial and avoiding one of the major problems of our time (or any time).

According to USA Today, Admiral James Watkins, chairman of the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy, finds two major culprits, the natural cycle of hurricane frequency, which is currently on the upswing, and climate change, which is raising sea levels and ocean temperatures, thereby intensifying hurricanes. In other words: "The recipe for a hurricane is simple. Conditions are ripe whenever large thunderstorms occur over tropical seawater heated to at least 80 degrees. Essentially, hurricanes are circling weather machines, sucking the heat out of the ocean and turning that energy into high waves and heavy rains."

Reuters: "Scientists say it's not easy to tell if global warming caused hurricanes Katrina and Rita but on Monday they forecast more unpredictable weather as Earth gets hotter. Even skeptics agree that global warming is under way and that human activity is at least in part responsible. Climate experts also agree that this warming is likely to make the weather more extreme -- colder in some places, hotter in others, with droughts and severe rainstorms both more common. 'Global warming, I think, is playing a role in the hurricanes,' said Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. 'But a lot of what is going on is natural. What global warming may be doing is making them somewhat more intense,' said Trenberth, a member of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.'"

And there are calls for something to be done. The Boston Globe's Derrick Jackson:

As the media screams about the one-two punch of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the question becomes how many more times does America need to be knocked to the canvas before we answer the bell on global warming...

In this tragic season of hurricanes, research continues to increasingly tie global warming to an increase in the intensity of tropical storms.

One was published last month in the journal Nature by Kerry Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Another was published last week in the journal Science by atmospheric researchers at Georgia Tech and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

While there has been no increase in the actual number of storms worldwide, the Georgia Tech/NCAR study found the number of hurricanes that reached categories 4 and 5, with winds of at least 131 miles per hour, have gone from comprising 20 percent of hurricanes in the 1970s to 35 percent today. This is with only a half-degree centigrade rise in tropical surface water temperatures.

The percentage of big storms in the North Atlantic has increased from 20 percent to 25 percent...

In the 1970s, no ocean basin saw more than 25 percent of hurricanes become a 4 or 5. Today, that percentage is 34, 35, and 41 percent, respectively, in the South Indian, East Pacific, and West Pacific oceans. The biggest jump was in the Southwestern Pacific, from 8 percent to 25 percent.

Emanuel, who formerly doubted that hurricane intensity was tied to global warming, said that he was stunned when his research showed that just that half-degree rise in tropical ocean temperatures has also seen a 50 percent rise in average storm peak winds in the North Atlantic and East and West Pacific in the last half century.

Meanwhile, the right-wing (head-in-the-sand, denial-inhabiting) Washington Times has unsurprisingly come out against any link between climate change and larger, more powerful hurricanes like Katrina and Rita. Admittedly, it bases its case largely on the testimony of the director of the National Hurricane Center, Max Mayfield, who blames the natural cycle of hurricane frequency, but its presentation is decidedly (and characteristically) one-sided -- the case for climate-change (and for its impact on hurricane frequency and strength) is reduced to John Lawton, chairman of Britain's Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, who is quoted to look like an idiot.

**********

Regardless (why dwell on the hopelessness of the anti-environmental right?), my friend Grace Miao recently sent me a link to RealClimate, "a commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists for the interested public and journalists". A recent post -- "Hurricanes and Global Warming -- Is There a Connection?" -- is a must-read. Here's an excerpt:

Katrina was the most feared of all meteorological events, a major hurricane making landfall in a highly-populated low-lying region. In the wake of this devastation, many have questioned whether global warming may have contributed to this disaster. Could New Orleans be the first major U.S. city ravaged by human-caused climate change?

The correct answer -- the one we have indeed provided in previous posts (Storms & Global Warming II, Some recent updates and Storms and Climate Change) -- is that there is no way to prove that Katrina either was, or was not, affected by global warming. For a single event, regardless of how extreme, such attribution is fundamentally impossible. We only have one Earth, and it will follow only one of an infinite number of possible weather sequences. It is impossible to know whether or not this event would have taken place if we had not increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as much as we have. Weather events will always result from a combination of deterministic factors (including greenhouse gas forcing or slow natural climate cycles) and stochastic factors (pure chance).

Due to this semi-random nature of weather, it is wrong to blame any one event such as Katrina specifically on global warming -- and of course it is just as indefensible to blame Katrina on a long-term natural cycle in the climate.

Yet this is not the right way to frame the question. As we have also pointed out in previous posts, we can indeed draw some important conclusions about the links between hurricane activity and global warming in a statistical sense. The situation is analogous to rolling loaded dice: one could, if one was so inclined, construct a set of dice where sixes occur twice as often as normal. But if you were to roll a six using these dice, you could not blame it specifically on the fact that the dice had been loaded. Half of the sixes would have occurred anyway, even with normal dice. Loading the dice simply doubled the odds. In the same manner, while we cannot draw firm conclusions about one single hurricane, we can draw some conclusions about hurricanes more generally. In particular, the available scientific evidence indicates that it is likely that global warming will make -- and possibly already is making -- those hurricanes that form more destructive than they otherwise would have been.

The key connection is that between sea surface temperatures (we abbreviate this as SST) and the power of hurricanes. Without going into technical details about the dynamics and thermodynamics involved in tropical storms and hurricanes (an excellent discussion of this can be found here), the basic connection between the two is actually fairly simple: warm water, and the instability in the lower atmosphere that is created by it, is the energy source of hurricanes. This is why they only arise in the tropics and during the season when SSTs are highest (June to November in the tropical North Atlantic).

SST is not the only influence on hurricane formation. Strong shear in atmospheric winds (that is, changes in wind strength and direction with height in the atmosphere above the surface), for example, inhibits development of the highly organized structure that is required for a hurricane to form. In the case of Atlantic hurricanes, the El Nino/Southern Oscillation tends to influence the vertical wind shear, and thus, in turn, the number of hurricanes that tend to form in a given year. Many other features of the process of hurricane development and strengthening, however, are closely linked to SST.

Hurricane forecast models (the same ones that were used to predict Katrina's path) indicate a tendency for more intense (but not overall more frequent) hurricanes when they are run for climate change scenarios.

Fascinating stuff, and a balanced assessment of the relationship between climate change and hurricane frequency and strength. There may be more to the story than climate change, and it may be true that we are witness the upswing of a natural cycle, but it would be wrong to claim that climate change has had nothing to do with what's been going on. Indeed, such claims are nothing if not grossly ignorant grotesquely irresponsible.

Which is yet one more reason why the problem of climate change must be tackled. Now.

**********

Previous posts on climate change at The Reaction:

On climate change, they know the truth in Tuktoyaktuk

Meet the polar bear, a victim of climate change

Baby Steps....

GOP seeks restraint in stopgap bill

Labour To Dominate The Center

Unlike the Democratic Party, the formerly socialist British Labour Party has clearly staked out the center

While Blair's address on Tuesday is officially the central event of the party's annual meeting, Brown's speech was perhaps as eagerly awaited. After eight years in office and a narrow victory in elections in May, Blair has announced that this, his third term, will be his last. Political analysts here endlessly debate exactly when Blair might step down, but there is near-unanimous agreement that Brown, who serves as his chancellor of the exchequer, or finance minister, will succeed him.

Clearly addressing critics who have said he would steer Britain to the political left, Brown praised Blair and echoed many of his centrist themes. "We will not just inhabit the center ground but dominate it," he said, in a speech that ranged from pensions to alternative energy but barely mentioned the Iraq war, which has severely damaged the popularity of Blair and Labor.

Labour's centrist strategy has been political gold in Britain. Why are Democrats seemingly rejecting the center and diminishing Bill Clinton's legacy? It seems to me that the strength of the reaction against President Bush is dominating the direction of the Democratic Party, and threatens to leave moderate voters with few palatable choices.

ID Goes To Court

'Intelligent Design' Court Battle Begins

"They did everything you would do if you wanted to incorporate a religious point of view in science class and cared nothing about its scientific validity," said Eric Rothschild, an attorney representing eight families who are challenging the decision of the Dover Area School District.

UPDATE: Witness Says Pa. Board Was Anti-Evolution

Um, duh?

Good News From New Orleans

Rumors of deaths greatly exaggerated: Widely reported attacks false or unsubstantiated

Following days of internationally reported killings, rapes and gang violence inside the Dome, the doctor from FEMA - Beron doesn't remember his name - came prepared for a grisly scene: He brought a refrigerated 18-wheeler and three doctors to process bodies.

"I've got a report of 200 bodies in the Dome," Beron recalls the doctor saying.

The real total was six, Beron said.

Of those, four died of natural causes, one overdosed and another jumped to his death in an apparent suicide....

In other Katrina news, the state of Louisiana opens the bidding....

Louisiana Goes After Federal Billions

Louisiana's congressional delegation has requested $40 billion for Army Corps of Engineers projects in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, about 10 times the annual Corps budget for the entire nation, or 16 times the amount the Corps has said it would need to protect New Orleans from a Category 5 hurricane.

Louisiana Sens. David Vitter (R) and Mary Landrieu (D) tucked the request into their $250 billion Hurricane Katrina Disaster Relief and Economic Recovery Act, the state's opening salvo in the scramble for federal dollars.

The bill, unveiled last week, would create a powerful "Pelican Commission" controlled by Louisiana residents that would decide which Corps projects to fund, and ordered the commission to consider several controversial navigation projects that have nothing to do with flood protection. The Corps section of the Louisiana bill, which was supported by the entire state delegation, was based on recommendations from a "working group" dominated by lobbyists for ports, shipping firms, energy companies and other corporate interests.

Sounds like a larger version of the New Orleans Levee Board.

UPDATE: LSU poli-sci prof Jeffrey D. Sadow weighs in with some perspective.

MORE UPDATES:

Katrina Takes a Toll on Truth, News Accuracy

Some Reports of N.O. Violence Exaggerated

Splashing Water on Kinky

A couple of Sunday ago, I splashed some water on Kinky Friedman, local author, salsa magnate, and prospective Texas gubernatorial candidate, as he was in a conversation over dim sum with a couple of political advisers.

I somehow doubt he reads the Centerfield blog, but the others might, so if you're reading this, and you're the other one I splashed, sorry.

The Profesora is thinking of staying out of the primary so as to be eligible for signing Kinky's petition of eligibility to run for governor. I think she feels guilty over having been ineligible to sign Nader's petition last year after voting in the Democratic primary. Meanwhile, I'm thinking of going the other way primary-wise, breaking a long chain of voting as a Democrat specifically to have the opportunity of voting against Perry an additional time.

I've decided I need another blog-break. Like the last one, it's already de facto - I haven't posted anything but comments in a couple of weeks. Several posts are stacked up pending the intellectual energy to finish them. So I'll relieve you of putting up with my pontifications for at least another month. I have the horrors of ending up like bloggers who started as thoughtful centrists and ended paranoid and ... well, less thoughful. Plus, I blog because it's fun, and if I don't take it easy every once in awhile, then it won't be fun any more.

Another political typology test

My results (in extended entry) on this typology test provide further self-affirmation that I am, in fact, a "centrist" on domestic issues.

I encourage people to report their results and commentary in the comments.

You are a Social Moderate (56% permissive) and an... Economic Moderate (55% permissive) You are best described as a: Centrist Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid

Whither Public Sentiment On Iraq?

Polls Show Public Doubt Over Iraq War

Only 21 percent said the United States definitely would win the war in Iraq, which began when a U.S.-led coalition invaded in 2003 to topple Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Another 22 percent said they thought the United States probably would win.

Twenty percent of respondents said the United States was capable of winning in Iraq -- but probably would not. And 34 percent said they considered the war unwinnable.

...

With a large anti-war demonstration planned outside the White House this weekend, Bush said Thursday the United States can lose in Iraq only "if we lose our nerve and abandon the mission."

"Some Americans want us to withdraw our troops so that we can escape the violence," Bush said. "I recognize their good intentions, but their position is wrong. Withdrawing our troops would make the world more dangerous and make America less safe."

I don't know if these questions have been repeatedly asked over time. It would be nice to have a comparison that might indicate what movement in sentiment there is. But it's clear that this shows substantial doubt in some quarters. My take is that I'd add 21 and 22 to get 43 that are in favor of and think we'll win, and guess that the 34% who think we'll fail are primarily composed of those who don't support the war, although certainly there are bound to be some war supporters who have just gone pessimistic. That is just a guess though, so hold your fire.

I find that category of the 20% who think we can win but won't the most interesting. My best guess (there's that word again) is that these people are also mostly war supporters, but that they have gone pessimistic, having lost confidence in leadership. I am not in the group of people who thinks we'll lose, but we might. And my confidence in leadership is low. I'm disappointed that Bush saw fit to invade and commit troops to what he deemed a crucial enterprise, but has not seen fit to utterly wear out his bully pulpit in order to maximize our chances of winning. My tak is that the public sentiment of Americans and of Iraqis is crucial to victory.

So I for one am waiting with interest to see what the outcome of this weekend's protests are. It's the first I've heard of 'em, and they seem poised to try to ride a wave of a sentiment of general doubt and pessimism, driven as much by gas prices and Katrina as by anything else.

I know Bush is not much of a bully pulpit kind of guy. However, my sense is that he has to find a way to be an omnipresent cheerleader by any means necessary, both for general American can-do-it-ness, and for the importance and feasibility of spreading democracy to Iraq. And, yes, I know that the quote above shows he's trying. My point is that trying hasn't been enough so far. He has to stop worrying about fanning the resentment of those who reflexively oppose him, and get up in the entire nation's grill and freakin lead. And he needs to do it with re-assuring conviction, not weirdo deer-in-the-headlights grins.

I am not holding my breath, BTW.

Friday Open Thread

...because Tully's getting out of control with these wildcat monday and wednesday open threads. Where's the discipline?

Warning: protest be be smaller than appears in pictures

This story about Cindy Sheehan's "protest march" in Washington particularly caught my eye. As another blog points out:

The story of Cindy Sheehan’s march on Washington DC was all over the wires today, with the usual worshiping tone, accompanied by carefully cropped photos...So this march must have been gigantic for the mainstream media to devote so much time and energy and money to covering it, right? Wrong.

The reality is that Sheehan's protest - a protest about an issue which appears to have gripped the nation, about a stupendously important question of national resources and international policy, involving potentially hundreds of thousands of lives and billons of dollars, and armed with the full influence of a sympathetic U.S. mass news media and a vast network of anti-war people - scrounged up THIRTY PEOPLE.

Getty images has a series of photographs of the march. Look at them carefully. At first glance, they appear to be action shots of a big crowd. But the more you look at them, the more they start to look as if something's amiss - as if they've been carefully edited. Here is a reuters photo of the ACTUAL size of the march.

As Confederate Yankee put it:

That's all, folks. I count 29 people. This is her entire protest party. Including Cindy.

After a carefully stage-managed vigil by liberal PR firm Fenton Communications, and a pair of 3-week long national bus tours to drum up support for her cause, "Mother Sheehan" managed to bring with her just this tiny gaggle with her to the gates of the White House.

THIRTY. A few years ago, a college friend of mine scrounged up ten more people than that for a protest march against a university policy. If anyone has a fork handy, I can point to a turkey that's done.

Hat tips: Miss Mabrouk, Little Green Footballs and Confederate Yankee.

Open thread

What is on your mind?

Rita is a Cat5 (170 mph winds) and still strengthening.

Consider this an open thread for any comments/cries for help.
(Its not really politics but I don't think Rick would disapprove.)

Most of the computer models have the storm hitting Houston/Galveston dead on.
Here is a couple of good web sites that mirror most of the pertinent information (the NHC site seems a little slow this morning):.

crownweather.com
wunderground.com

Julie Myers

Is Julie Myers the best person, or even the best Republican, to head the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency? Michelle Malkin doesn't think so.

Roberts Confirmation Prediction Thread

By request. Hat Tip, Susan. Also, by my request, predictions only about what you think will happen, not recommendations about what you think should happen.

My prediction: Roberts yes, 59-41, with 4 GOP crossers and 8 democratic crossers.

If you want to chime in, please help us keep a running tally of our predictions using the following categories:

Not confirmed:
Confirmed with 51-55 yes votes:
Confirmed with 56-60 yes votes:1
Confirmed with 61-65 yes votes:
Confirmed with 66+ yes votes:

Dead bodies in an abandoned hospital? More details

I previously posted on the bodies found in Memorial Hospital in New Orleans. Now the NYT has filled in many of the details of the abandoment by resuce authorities and the subsequent slow agonizing deaths of many hospital and nursing patients. This is required reading to understand how a major catastrophe and poorly excuted relief leads to the death "of the most vulnerable". Please read this gripping story. Here are a few choice tidbits:

Of the dead collected so far in the New Orleans area, more than a quarter of them, or at least 154, are those of patients, mostly elderly, who died in hospitals or nursing homes, according to interviews with officials from 8 area hospitals and 26 nursing homes.

and

State officials acknowledged that hospitals were correct in assuming rescuers would come to their aid. "You have to have enough supplies so that once the storm passes, you can last until we can get to you," said Dr. Jimmy Guidry, Louisiana's state health officer. But he added that officials never anticipated the magnitude of the storm, and were overwhelmed rescuing people in the floodwaters. "We were competing for resources," he said, stressing that the state did the best it could under the circumstances.

and

Ten for-profit nursing homes evacuated early, hiring buses, ambulances, and in one case a helicopter, to safely move more than 1,000 patients. One private, for-profit hospital leased planes to safely evacuate all 200 of its patients.

The state pulled off some evacuations successfully as well. A state mental hospital was emptied before the storm. After the hurricane passed, a fleet of buses and hundreds of heavily armed guards safely evacuated New Orleans' prisons and jails. All of the city's 7,600 prisoners made it out safely. (But) Most of the city's hospitals decided to take a calculated gamble. The hospitals had plans: They assumed that they could hold out for two or three days, that they had backup electricity, that help would arrive.

and again

At the far end of the financial spectrum, serving the city's poorest patients, were Charity and University Hospitals. As public hospitals, they had no money for private helicopters and had to rely on government officials.

finally

On paper, the state required nursing homes to have signed agreements with bus companies to evacuate patients, and have identified inland nursing homes to accept them. But no one had noticed that many homes had contracted with the same companies. "They were never ever going to be able to meet the need," Ms. Sadden said. In the end, only 40 percent of the 53 nursing homes that evacuated did so before the storm, according to the State Department of Health.

I'm not surprised the patients who suffered the most were those at the "bottom of the ladder" most dependant on governmental help for rescue. As a doctor who's spent a lot of time working in hospitals I have to admit I've always assumed the most needy for rescue "the sick and the frail patients" would get highest priority. It's clear from this story that at one point in this disaster the "law of the jungle" took over.

For those of you living in a cave

Rita expected to reach Cat 4 in 24 hours. Projected path is for a landfall in Texas. If Rita reaches cat 4 it will be a Katrina strength killer storm.

GET OUT OF THE WAY OR YOU WILL DIE!!

Now, on a much calmer note:

Anyone here from Houston?
It seems that Houston isn't in any better shape than New Orleans when it comes to weathering a hurricane. I would love to hear from someone who can give this some ground truth. Didn't a tiny little Cat 1 storm called Allison kick the cities butt?

PS: On a more political note, the current path is for Rita to pass over Crawford Texas. Karma?

Fixing Government after Katrina

Fixing government after Katrina

The more resilient organizations were better prepared and had designed their supply chains with greater flexibility in mind. Close examination, however, also showed that such companies have something in their DNA that makes them more resilient, a certain corporate culture that helped them survive and even strive:

• Empowerment of front-line employees. While it is well-known that production line employees in Toyota factories have the authority and responsibility to stop the line when they see a quality problem, it is less known that any sailor on the deck of a US carrier has the right and responsibility to stop flight operations when they detect a developing problem. Front-line employees are close to the action and can assess what is needed; as a disruption develops there is usually not enough time to go through the usual chain of command.

• Constant communications. Resilient enterprises communicate obsessively and ensure that they can communicate in a disaster. Constant communication allows employees to know the state of the system when disaster strikes and emergency communications allow for the recovery efforts. Thus, Intel keeps an emergency center in each region of the world where it is doing business and each center is equipped with landline telephones, cell phones, SSB communications, satellite phones, Internet connections, and even globe-spanning ham radios. But resilient organizations not only have the gear; they create the environment in which communications are important and bad news travels fast.

• The big picture. Employees in resilient enterprises are passionate about their mission and care deeply about what they do. Don Schneider, chairman of the largest truckload company in the US, Schneider National, explains to his 20,000 associates that they are not really in the trucking business. As transportation enters the cost of every item sold, efficient, low-cost trucking reduces the price and increases availability of products. Thus, Schneider is really in the business of raising the living standards of US consumers. At UPS, employees are keenly aware of how dependent their customers are on timely deliveries and thus ''nobody goes home until all the packages are delivered" regardless of disruptions.

While I don't entirely agree with Sheffi's description of Katrina as a "largely avoidable tragedy," I think he makes good points about what we'd like our government's emergency response functions to look like: constantly communicating and assessing, responding flexibly, always aware of what the most important goals are, with policy and behavior driven by those.

Open Monday Thread

Why? Because no one started one on Friday!

Clinton: Bush should raise taxes to pay for recovery

Clinton: Bush should raise taxes to pay for recovery

I mean, sooner or later, just think what would happen if the Chinese -- we're pressing the Chinese now, a country not nearly as rich as America per capita, to keep loaning us money with low interest to cover my tax cut, Iran -- I mean Iraq, Afghanistan, and Katrina. And at the same time to raise the value of their currency so their imports into our country will become more expensive, and our exports to them will become less expensive.

He said the United States depends on Japan, China, Britain, Saudi Arabia and Korea "to basically loan us money every day of the year to cover my tax cut and these conflicts and Katrina."

So what's the deal? Is this view wrong because the last anti-christ said it? I don't have any strong feeling about whether paying for Katrina should be done moreso via taxes or via cuts, but I sure don't like the idea of more borrowing.

Here's the other thing that's interesting about such statements. Is Bill playing "who's your daddy" with Hillary on policy issues? If she goes the other way, then she has to answer questions that go "your husband the former President said that America should pursue policy X, so why are you supporting policy Y instead?

Is the end of the age of DeLay approaching?

Tom DeLay has weathered many storms (no pun intended) and survived many calls from the Democrats for his departure. But in the wake of his absurd comments about the absence of budget fat, even the GOP press is starting to buckle. The otherwise loyalist Washington Times offers:

If Mr. DeLay actually believes what he said -- that "after 11 years of Republican majority we've pared it [the federal budget] down pretty good" -- then he has clearly lost touch with reality and Republicans must ask whether he is really the best person to continue leading their party. After all, total federal spending, aside from interest, has increased 79 percent since 1995 -- much greater than the inflationary increase in prices of 28 percent.

I should disclose that I have never much cared for Tom DeLay; I do not like his style of leadership, I do not - for the most part - share his causes, his concerns, or his vision of what the Republican party does or should stand for. On the other hand, nor do I expect his ouster, given that I think the majority of the Republican party today do not share my disapproval of the Majority Leader.

However, I think that many inside the GOP tent have for some time been quietly voicing discomfit with the "big government conservatism" that has driven deficit spending to astonishing levels and federal intrusion into those areas "reserved to the States respectively, or to the people". Those concerns have grown ever louder this year, between the unconstitutional intervention in the Schaivo case, the unconstitutional attempt to change the Senate rules, and most especially, with the passage of the bloated porcine monstrosity that bore the entirely fictional label of a "highways bill". The President's endorsement of FDR-style reconstruction in the south, and the Majority Leader's seeming disconnect with fiscal reality, provide further rallying points for those who are concerned with just where the party is going, and just what is being done in its name. A palace coup - unlikely, but highly desirable, especially now that the calls for his resignation have died down will avoid any sense of the left having claimed a scalp - to remove the Majority Leader would be the first tangible sign that the tide is turning back in the direction of a more genuinely inclusive party. As no lesser a personage than Newt Gingrich once remarked, "It's impossible to create a right-only majority in America. The key to electing Republicans to more offices and have a bigger majority is to be more inclusive"; to the extent that DeLay stands for precisely the opposite proposition, I hope against expectation that his time is up.

Reactions to previous SCOTUS nominations

National Review is compares the reactions of the groups now bitterly opposing John Roberts to their reactions to previous nominees, presumably to show just how well-founded the criticism is:

1975: According to Nan Aron, then the president of the Women's Legal Defense Fund, John Paul Stevens should be opposed because had shown "blatant insensitivity to discrimination against women."

1990: With the nomination of David Souter, Molly Yard, then the president of NOW, declared that confirming Souter would mean "ending freedom for women in this country." NOW howled that his confirmation meant "Women will die."

2005: From NOW following the Roberts nomination: "Women's Lives on the Line." Feminists' credibility should be on the line.

Given the source, we might want to be carefull before taking this at face value, but it seems entirely credible, given how dubious their current objections to Judge Roberts seem to be.

On Roberts And The Next One

The Moderate Voice has a roundup on Roberts, and on the Democrats dilemmas.

Having seen a bit of the hearings, I like the guy personally, and would be happy to take a class or a meal with him. He's more conservative than I am, but on some of the things he's been attacked for, like opposition to "comparable worth," I'm on his side. So my personal preference is to confirm him.

With regard to the strategy for Democrats:

1. If you want to run for President in 2008, vote to oppose him, says Elenor Clift. Play to the activists.

2. If you're not seeking personal advancement, but hoping to save Roe v. Wade, I recommend voting for Roberts. He will be confirmed, so a protest vote will accomplish nothing. On the other hand, if you support Roberts, that gives you all the more ammunition to oppose Bush's next nominee.(.e.g. "I supported the well-qualified Judge Roberts, but this time, Bush has sent us a radical ...)

One More Centrist

I love the caricature that accompanies this one:

Kevblog

New Centrist Blogs

Some new blogs have come to my attention. Check them out, and let them know what you think!

WeThePeople

The Journal of a Future President

ModerateVoters.Org

Blair abandons Kyoto (sort of)

Onstage with former president Bill Clinton at a midtown Manhattan hotel ballroom, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said he was going to speak with "brutal honesty" about Kyoto and global warming, and he did. And Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had some blunt talk, too.

Blair, a longtime supporter of the Kyoto treaty, further prefaced his remarks by noting, "My thinking has changed in the past three or four years." So what does he think now? "No country, he declared, "is going to cut its growth." That is, no country is going to allow the Kyoto treaty, or any other such global-warming treaty, to crimp -- some say cripple -- its economy.

Read more

More from Andrew Sullivan

After his excellent New Republic article earlier this year, Andrew Sullivan continues to speaks for many in the GOP:

I don't hate this president and never have. I'm just sick of him. Sick of the naked politicization of everything (Karl Rove over-seeing reconstruction?); sick of the utter refusal to acknowledge that there is a limit to what the federal government can borrow from this and the next generation; sick of the hijacking of the conservative tradition for a vast increase in the power and size of government, with only a feigned attempt at making it more effective; sick of the glib arrogance and excuses...

Maybe I'm over-reacting. But please don't ignore the facts: the biggest increase in federal government spending, debt and power since LBJ. Here's one tiny example of what we're seeing: hugely expensive trailer parks to create new federal ghettoes for evacuees...Harry Reid's call for a Marshall Plan for the South was a healthy reminder that many Democrats are still even worse than this profligate crew. But please don't ask me to be enthusiastic about this. Buying popularity by spending billions was not why I originally became a conservative. Increasing the welfare state, burdening the future generations with mountainous debt, confusing politics with faith, failing to impose basic law and order as a primary reponsibility for government: these things I thought were characteristics of the left. They now define the Bush administration. I became a conservative because I saw in my native country what a terrible, incompetent, soul-destroying thing big government socialism is. It breaks my heart to see much of it now being implemented in America - by Republicans.

I'm minded to agree with Sullivan, although I am also still aggrieved over the Roberts nomination, which may be coloring my view. This comes just days after a quote from Tom DeLay in which the House Majority Leader appeared to be living in a parallel world: DeLay said:

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said yesterday that Republicans have done so well in cutting spending that he declared an "ongoing victory," and said there is simply no fat left to cut in the federal budget.

Mr. DeLay was defending Republicans' choice to borrow money and add to this year's expected $331 billion deficit to pay for Hurricane Katrina relief. Some Republicans have said Congress should make cuts in other areas, but Mr. DeLay said that doesn't seem possible

"My answer to those that want to offset the spending is sure, bring me the offsets, I'll be glad to do it. But nobody has been able to come up with any yet," the Texas Republican told reporters at his weekly briefing.

Asked if that meant the government was running at peak efficiency, Mr. DeLay said, "Yes, after 11 years of Republican majority we've pared it down pretty good."

Congress has passed two hurricane relief bills totaling $62.3 billion, all of which will be added to the deficit.

Welcome to bizarro-land.

Katrina/hot water/world hurricane activity/global warming/New Orleans

When Katrina had finished her run through the gulf I went and looked at the sea surface temperature (SST) graphs. I was kind of stunned by what they showed. No significant cooling had occurred in the gulf! That meant there was a lot of hot water left to power the next round of hurricanes. I would have thought that a storm of Katrina's size and power would have significantly cooled the gulf.

However over the next couple of weeks an interesting thing happened, blooms of cold water started appearing at the mouths of the major rivers in Katrina struck areas. Duh! Although Katrina caused some evaporative cooling of the Gulf waters, the real cooling occurred when water was sucked high into the atmosphere, dropped out as cold rain and ran back into the gulf.

I don't think the gulf coast is going to see any more cat 5's this year. A couple of 3's maybe, a 4 or 5, probably not. (Just spit balling here, using years of obsessive SST's watching.)

However, an interesting article was published in Science magazine today, “Changes in Tropical Cyclone Number, Duration, and Intensity in a Warming Environment”

It's an interesting article for what it shows and for what it doesn't show.

First off, it doesn't look at effects prior to the widespread use of weather satellites. So it lacks historical context. That is very important when trying to pick out a trend line in a graph.

Second it looks at world wide hurricane events, not just the gulf and the North Atlantic. Conditions in the gulf are unique since the water is shallower and kind of bottled up by the Yucatan, Florida and Cuba. If the oceans are heating up, the effect would be more dramatic in the gulf. But the author doesn't break out his data down that far, he includes the Gulf with the North Atlantic. Regardless the graph shows the North Atlantic heating up.

The Bottom line is that the author shows that GLOBALLY the NUMBER of storms and “storm days” peaked in the 90's then DECLINED. (This is in contrast to the dramatic increase in the number of storms in the North Atlantic)

While at the same time the INTENSITY of the storms has dramatically INCREASED.

New Orleans is a vital port. I don't think the country can survive without it, but it would be foolish to pour Billions into the gulf region just to have it destroyed again next year. As many as will go, should be offered the chance to relocate. Those that remain should be forced to sign a notice that no more federal assistance will be forthcoming after this round of rebuilding.

One Person's Eyewitness testimony on Iraq

I'm a little surprised that the Boston Globe chose to publish this Brian Golden editorial on positive news from Iraq

In April, I flew over Baghdad in a Blackhawk helicopter for the first time, and hope was not something I thought much about. A mere hundred feet above the city, I watched women cloaked in black scurry through the streets with their children. The narrow neighborhood routes to their homes were dingy with trash, crumbling buildings, and the carcasses of exploded vehicles.

My trips through Baghdad, by ground and air, became frequent, but hope became a word of concrete relevance. Two weeks ago, the National Assembly forwarded a draft constitution to the ballot for an October referendum. The Sunni Arabs, roughly 20 percent of the overall population, thrived under Saddam Hussein's protection and are unhappy with it. That's the focus of the Western media, but it's a focus that is lost on Iraqis.

On the night of the draft's approval, it was interesting that the Iraqi Army generals who work near my office watched local television coverage of spontaneous celebrations throughout Iraq.

...

January's election turnout was astounding; it will certainly be surpassed this fall. A recent poll in the Arabic newspaper Al Hayat reports that 88 percent of Iraqis plan to vote in the October referendum. The Kurds and Shi'ites, comprising 80 percent of the population, embrace the draft constitution. Even disgruntled Sunni Arab leaders are redoubling their efforts to register voters. Many Sunnis will vote in opposition, but opposition in a democracy isn't a bad thing; it's a victory.

All worth reading. To be taken only as one person's testimony. Gives me hope. YMMV of course, dismiss if you want.

Broken Record

I was going to post this but then Katrina hit...Anyway, by now y'all know its my obligation to berate this tiny corner of America with the problem of health care costs. Well here I go again. This article from USA Today sums up a survey of Americans and the cost of Health Care done this spring. As usual a few highlights:

More than one in four Americans are faltering under the burden of health costs

Sixty-two percent of those struggling to pay medical bills have health insurance, underscoring how increasing premiums, deductibles and gaps in coverage are affecting families.

28% of adults were unable to pay for some form of medical care in the past year. That's nearly double the 15% who reported such a problem in 1976.

“The cost of health care is going up much faster than people's wages,” says Drew Altman of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a non-partisan research group not affiliated with the Kaiser medical group. “Families are paying about (on average) $1,000 more now just for health care premiums than they were five years ago.” Surprisingly, costs are less of a problem for the elderly, most of whom are covered by Medicare, even though it has seen a 71% increase in monthly premiums since 2000.

“Whenever you say there's a health care crisis, most Americans say, ‘Gee, it must be my neighbor, not me,' ” says Uwe Reinhardt, an economics professor at Princeton. “That's because most Americans are not very sick. But when they really do need several different drugs, it can very quickly be very expensive.”

Oh yeah, as an aside, rising healthcare costs isn't just an American content. A recent article in the Economist (sorry "Premium" content requires an actual subscription. You'll have to trust me on this one) reviews the increasing difficulties several European countries are having with the revenue side keeping up with the expense side.

Solutions anyone?

Bush's Plan to Rebuild Bigger and Better

This was the response to the President's speech tonight from MSNBC:

Lt. Governor Mitch Landrieu, Democrat: The President was "dead on."

Howard Fineman: He "missed an opportunity.

Joe Scarborough, Republican: The other 48 states aren't going to like the cost.

Tucker Carlson, Republican: Too much money, gonna hurt him with the base.

Congressman Elijah Cummings, Democrat: The President is on "the right track."

No joke. I thought Chris Matthews said it best when he said that this is a speech we would expect from Lyndon Johnson or Franklin Roosevelt, not George W. Bush.

I think this President has seen poverty at its worse over the last few weeks and has been touched by it, enough to do something he hasn't been capable of up until now: admit failure and take responsibility for it. Of course, John Kerry was also right when he said there was really no other option for him.

Read the President's speech here.

His proposals include:

1. The creation of opportunity zones throughout the Gulf region.

2. The "creation of worker recovery accounts to help those evacuees who need extra help finding work. Under this plan, the federal government would provide accounts of up to $5,000, which these evacuees could draw upon for job training and education to help them get a good job and for child-care expenses during their job search."

3. Congressional approval of an "Urban Homestead Act," aimed at identifying "property in the region owned by the federal government," and providing "building sites to low-income citizens free of charge, through a lottery. In return, they would pledge to build on the lot, with either a mortgage or help from a charitable organization like Habitat for Humanity."

There are many relief workers and citizens who are skeptical tonight, and rightfully so, but I thought the President at least took the right step forward. I fully agree with Congressman Cummings who pointed out that follow-through is everything, but this isn't the time to think small. Those extremists in my party who will take this opportunity to sound off about local control should think twice. As Joe Scarborough pointed out, if this storm has done anything for Conservatives, it should at least make them rethink their absolute opposition to Federal authority.

The prisoners of New Orleans

An unusual angle courtesy of ACSblog:

"When the levee broke in New Orleans, about 7000 men, women, and children were locked up in Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) and other area jails. After 2 days of chaos and rising water, people who were locked up were shoved onto buses and scattered to 35 facilities throughout the state. They were sent without papers, and the OPP computer system is underwater. Many of the folks now sitting in DOC custody were in OPP waiting for bond, serving 5 day sentences for public drunkenness, waiting to be processed in/out, etc. They are now locked down in Louisiana's DOC, a notoriously mean-spirited bureaucracy that has very little capacity to reconnect families or even verify information that would allow these folks to be released & reunited with their families.

A call has been made for volunteer criminal defense attorneys and paralegals by the Southern Center for Human Rights to assist in Louisiana this weekend.

Federal cout declares pledge unconstitutional

After the Supreme Court ejected the issue last year in Elk Grove v. Newdow on grounds of a lack of standing - Rehnquist and O'Connor voted with the majority - Michael Newdow, the california atheist militant, has scored a minor victory in having a California Federal Judge declare the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional.

Having been rebuffed for lack of standing in his Madalyn Murray O'Hair-like effort to use his own child as a proxy (see Abington v. Schempp), Newdow this time brought suit on behalf of three other sets of parents. An appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will likely follow.

TNR article on New Orleans, pre-storm

The New Republic is carrying an interesting article discussing what went wrong at the level of city government in New Orleans. A free registration is required, but selected highlights below the break.

Hat tip: Althouse.

if Katrina has laid bare the shortcomings of Bush-style conservatism, it has also exposed problems with contemporary urban liberalism...Katrina exposed the failures of not one, but two, political philosophies: a national conservatism unconcerned about urban centers; and an urban liberalism unconcerned about the daily realities of the majority of urban dwellers. The media has largely focused on the former failure. But the latter failure is no less real.

That the governments of New Orleans and Louisiana, long dominated by Democrats, are corrupt and ineffective is of course widely recognized. But the problems in New Orleans went beyond mere corruption...Even as crime rates have fallen throughout the country, the number of violent crimes in New Orleans was rising well before the storm...a New Orleans resident was nearly ten times more likely than the average American to be murdered. So it was no surprise that many members of a police force long considered among the least effective in the United States would desert their city in a time of crisis, or, worse still, reportedly participate in the looting.

[A] similar rot had set in throughout the public sector. The fact that 27 percent of the city's residents had no access to any form of private transportation--almost 3 times the national rate--was widely recognized. Yet apparently no one had devised a plan to move these citizens out of town in the event of an emergency.

While these and other basic needs went unmet, New Orleans politicians, like so many liberal leaders in cities nationwide, focused on an elite-driven agenda designed to create an ephemeral economy rather than a broad-based one...Yet for decades New Orleans leaders sought to attract conventions and the arts while failing [develope] a high-wage economy around trade activities and related services.

And so on.

Wednesday Open Thread

Why? Because I'm headed out of town today so it's just like Friday to me!

Iraqi Civil War? Probably Not

Here's why I'm always suspicious of these suggestions that Iraq is about to fly to pieces. Yeah, they sell papers well.

Put yourselves in the position of an Iraqi for a second. You hear from and read about all sorts of people. Some of them want you to be subservient to a version of Islam that would enslave you like your neighbors the Iranians, and whose devotees keep trying to kill you, your friends, and your relatives. Some of them want you to help put down the Shia and Kurds, following the Ba'ath or other would-be fascist tyrants back to power. You remember Saddam too well to be comfortable with this idea, unless you personally identify with the Ba'ath for some reason.

On the other hand, if this democracy works, your children will see an Iraq like Germany and Japan today. You have heard these places mentioned, and know they are part of the amazing western democracies; you are hoping similar magic can be worked here.

You trust George Bush about as far as you can throw him, and hate the facts of defeat and occupation, and how the occupation was conducted, but you are impressed with American seriousness about this, and have started to hope that Bush' view of his interest continues to coincide with yours.

Thus, the only pro-civil-war blocs are the terrorists and the Ba'athists. Only the Ba'athists are sizeable, because Saddam had to have enough supporters to run the country. And I'd guess that only those worried about later prosecution are actively working toward civil war. The call of future generations is powerful if your own existence isn't threatened.

Like Pat Robertson and Tom DeLay here, the media like to report on the extremists because they sell more newspapers. It would be utterly trivial to construct an article that made it sound like civil war here might break out again at any moment. The only reason we don't see many is because the topic has been largely exhausted for a century or so. Despite that, I remember a breakout of them when I was a kid.

Ethics in Dealing With Tyrannies

Tnis controversy reminds me of a potential ethical problem I was beginning to confront in a company I started, just as it fell over. Mind you, I tend to think that Yahoo was wrong, but they were in a tough spot since they have a presence there, and I think it was a decision made there. They should have looked ahead and prepared for this, though.

Pushcache.com was selling products and services based on Squid web proxy servers modded to do push (called peer-to-peer now). Our first big customer was a Canadian project using them to push web content to schools via a government-funded satellite broadcast.

Now, it so happens that proxy servers are a popular spot to put web filters. Squid has good support for filtering. A Singaporean researcher helped speed one aspect of filtering up, for example. At that time, they used Squid for a lot of their filtering because it's price is right - free.

Just as the business plan failed, they told me that the Chinese government was interested in my software for a similar project. It would've been even more beneficial than Canada, because it would've reached a lot more children, and done more for their web services because their other links are worse. It would've had real impact. Doubtless, they would've installed filters in it, though (Canada did too, but of course for porn filtering rather than to limit access to anti-governmental sites).

Business failure spared me this choice. Should I have chosen to support the children or freedom?

Are We Looking at Civil War in Iraq?

Spencer Ackerman, in The New Republic, argues that the Bush Administration is helping to empower the Shiia in Iraq at the expense of the Sunni and creating a recipe for civil war. He believes that the conflict over the constitution is a foreshadowing of sectarian bloodshed that is being fomented by he considers the Administration's siding with the Shiia against the Sunni.

Apparently, the leader of the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), Amar Al Hakim, came to Washington to seek a "strategic alliance" with the US, in essence, according to Ackerman, hoping for Administration backing in a coming civil war with the Sunnis.

It's true that the U.S.-backed political process has already empowered the Shia majority. But to actively back a faction in a prospective civil war would push the disastrous Iraq occupation into the abyss. Not only would the United States effectively be licensing sectarian killings, but we would essentially be guaranteeing the mobilization of Iraq's five million Sunnis into a massively augmented insurgency. Even worse, a decision to explicitly support the Shia in Iraq would force the United States into a central cleavage of Islam and might prove intolerably provocative to Sunnis beyond Iraq, who make up 85 percent of the world's billion-plus Muslims--a blueprint for turning the broader war on terrorism into an unwinnable clash of civilizations. As one State Department insider delicately cautions, "Those with experience of the region know that giving more power to the Shia elbow is not very smart, but others might not understand the dangers."

While Sunnis rally against the proposed constitution and the country seems to be splintering into factions, Bush continues to compare the situation in Iraq to that of the United States post-Revolutionary War, ie, that these conflicts are just minor "disagreements" that we have to expect in a democracy. In the meantime, you have a Sunni insurgency that is targeting Shiia civilians and, according to the article, Shiia militias that are increasing targeting Sunnis for revenge. Doesn't exactly sound like Philadelphia in 1787, does it?

Moreover, Ackerman believes that empowering the Shiia in this context has meant effectively acquiescing to illiberal Islamic rule that resembles Iran. So much for liberal democracy, although it is certainly true that the US is between a rock and a hard place here--if we insist on a liberal constitution that is opposed by a majority of the populace, how can we call it democracy? Yet, if we allow an Iranian-style Islamic state, what was the point of all this?

But Bush might well remember that his supposed rationale for invading Iraq is to advance the war on terrorism, which is, in no small part, about convincing millions of Sunnis worldwide that the United States is not opposed to their religion. Directly supporting the Shia against the Sunnis in Iraq is about as counterproductive to the broader war as invading Iraq itself has proved.

Hmm, this is harder than it looked in March, 2003, isn't it?

Good News From Iraq, Part 35

Being the final installment in Chrenkoff's series bringing you the news you don't see at six o'clock, as he gives up blogging to move up his own professional ladder.

Good news from Iraq, part 35

Others are taking up the load, but this is Chrenkoff's last.

Can't we all just get along?

I told you this Katrina thing has got me thinking. And one big issue is race. (Disclaimer/clarification: I'm and upper class Caucasion who grew up in a small eastern city in a middle class family. There, I feel better now.) Here's one of several polls that demonstrate the gulf between the perceptions between blacks and whites in America. Just reading that reminds me of the sick feeling I had after the OJ trial and a similar disparity in poll results.

I was on a cruise ship when the Hurricane happened; the only news on our television was CNN (i.e. lots of pictures over and over with little in-depth analysis). Within the first 48 hours the pictures lead me to fear of such a racial divide. The pictures of the victims were all black; the pictures of the "looters" were all black. Now intellectually I said, we'll N.O. has a high Black population and (I bet) a disproprtionate share of the poor folks (who had to use the shelters) were black. I saw race as a manifestation of socio-economic status. Is that racism?

But according the poll broken down by race, blacks were more likely to blame Bush for problems in New Orleans, with 37 percent holding him most to blame for the fact that many residents were trapped inside the city after it flooded.

Twenty percent of blacks primarily blamed New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, 11 percent blamed the residents themselves and 27 percent blamed no one at all.

Among whites, 29 percent blamed Nagin, 27 percent blamed the residents, 15 percent blamed Bush and 24 percent held no one responsible.

Is this racism and if so is it the respondents (black vs. white) or the objects of the response (President Bush vs Mayor Nagin) or both.

I can't tell you deeply disturbing this divide is to me.

Dead bodies in an abandoned hospital?

from Modern Healthcare:

Forty-five bodies were found at Memorial Medical Center, a New Orleans hospital owned by Tenet Healthcare Corp., the Associated Press reported. The bodies reportedly were those of patients, according to a spokesman for the Department of Health and Hospitals who did not provide other information. Harry Anderson, a Tenet spokesman, said they were patients who had died and were tagged after Katrina hit but before the hospital was evacuated. They were awaiting removal by the coroner and were guarded by a security detail, he said. A significant number of the patients were those of a long-term rehabilitation company that managed an LTAC in the facility, Anderson also noted. "No living patient was left behind," he said. "We evacuated every living patient before the staff left on Friday... . The coroner simply didn't show up until yesterday." Anderson said one of the great tragedies of the disaster was that fragile patients awaiting evacuation in high temperatures with no power or water no doubt died in all New Orleans hospitals.

Memorial Medical Center Chief Executive Officer Rene Goux wrote a firsthand account of his experience with Hurricane Katrina for this week’s issue of Modern Healthcare

I think I feel better now?

The GOP's GOP

Dare we offset the needed spending on recovery from Katrina with cuts elsewhere when time permits?

With almost no debate and with precious few provisions for oversight, Congress has passed President Bush's mammoth $62 billion request for emergency Katrina relief. House Speaker Denny Hastert says the final total will "probably [be] under the cost of the highway bill" that Congress passed last month with a pricetag of $286.4 billion.

Despite such sums, there are few calls for offsetting cuts in other programs, apart from antiwar opportunists who see in Katrina a chance to undermine the Iraq effort. Last week Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma asked White House Budget Director Josh Bolten if he planned to continue to pursue budget reductions the administration had already proposed in its January budget. Mr. Bolten said he "didn't have time" to worry about that.

All this leaves Mr. Coburn and other budget hawks wondering what has happened to what might be called "the Republican wing of the Republican Party."

9/11 + 4

We remember.

Jeff Flake and George Bailey

This whole Hurricane Katrina thing has really got me thinking. One thought came to the fore after I saw this story about Congressional action toward Hurricane relief. Rep. Jeff Flake from AZ (not my district) was one of only 11 to vote against the relief bill. Now what ideological idiot would vote against relief for such a devasting disaster. I doubt it helped him with voters in his district (east Phx metro and rural AZ) and it certainly didn't endear him to fellow congressmen. Hell, even a fellow Republican from AZ criticised him

"If this kind of a natural disaster or a disaster involving weapons of mass destruction happened in his (Flake's) district, he'd be singing a different tune," Rep. Rick Renzi said of his colleague.

And yet I have to admit I was taken by Flake's reasoning.

in a statement, Flake said, "Congress has the responsibility to cut spending elsewhere if we are going to commit this amount of money. Today, Congress appropriated another $50 billion in hurricane relief, and it's just a start. That's an average contribution of more than $600 from every household in America."

Asked about Renzi's comment later in the day, Flake spokesman Matthew Specht said he could not respond directly because Flake was on a flight to Arizona. However, Specht emphasized that Flake "doesn't have a problem with the spending and recognizes this is a federal responsibility that ought to take precedent over just about every other federal spending, at this point. But Congress has a responsibility to prioritize."

Specht also said Flake would prefer to do supplemental emergency relief bills in smaller, but perhaps more frequent, increments, such as the initial $10.5 billion emergency spending bill approved last Friday by Congress. Flake said he believes this would bring more accountability to the process, Specht said, but that "too much too soon is bound to lead to mismanagement and misappropriation."

We should remember this is the same Jeff Flake who regularly rails against pork even to the point of voting against pork that will benefit his district. I gotta admire someone who even in the midst of "compassionate spending" has the courage to ask "Where's the money going to come from?" and "Are we being fiscally responsible?"

As I weighed this question in my mind I was (strangely enough) reminded of scene from "Its A Wonderful Life". George Bailey (played by James Stewart) has just gotten married but before he can enjoy his honeymoon he finds there's a "run" on his bank. In efforts to save the bank he exhorts his customers, and fellow community members, to considerate how this mutually beneficial "Building and Loan" is supposed to work:

CHARLIE
I'll take mine now.

GEORGE
No, but you . . . you . . . you're thinking of this place all
wrong. As if I had the money back in a safe. The money's not
here. Your money's in Joe's
house . . .
(to one of the men)
. . . right next to yours. And in the Kennedy house, and Mrs.
Macklin's house, and a hundred others. Why, you're lending them
the money to build, and then, they're
going to pay it back to you as best they can. Now what are you
going to do? Foreclose on them?

TOM
I got two hundred and forty-two dollars in here, and two hundred
and forty-two dollars isn't going to break anybody.

We all know how this scene ends. George (through his wife Mary) sacrifices his honeymoon by adding the money to the bank's coffers to tide everyone over till the crisis abates.

So what's the relationship between the two? How do we reconcile the conflict between wanting to help our fellow citizens (and ourselves) out and still remain fiscally responsible with their/our money. (Let's be honest, as admirable as George's sacrifice was, he wasn't managing the coffers of the bank very well. And I know few politicians who would be so self-sacrificing as George was.) Even if we spent our money well (i.e. no pork) how do we decide whether a stronger levee in New Orleans is more important than my (Phoenix's) light rail project? And can we trust the government to manage and spend my/our money wisely? Several on this blog have suggested that the inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina is what you get when you buy the "Republican, less government is better" line.

And I wonder if we're at a critical turning point. Clearly the polls show that Americans are stunned by this crisis; that they're upset and without confidence in GW and that they wonder if we've done enough. At this point in time no one in Congress is interesting is discussing cutting programs (note the delay in discussing Medicaid reform and the estate tax issue.) Is the Reagan revolution coming to a close?

Hurricane Predictions

I have to go wait around for evacuees this weekend and won't be online at all, but thought I'd throw this one out for discussion and bold, fearless soothsaying.

What predictions do you have for New New Orleans in the months ahead?

It not being fair to start such a thread without leading with one's chin, here's a few of my own.

[1] The casualty count will be a full order of magnitude less than the 10 to 20 thousand numbers that have been bandied about.

[2] Mardi Gras will occur on schedule.

[3] The active-duty troops will begin pulling out next week. There's nothing for them to (legally) do.

[4] Yes, we'll rebuild the city. No, the ongoing legacy of corruption will not go away. It's N'Awlins.

[5] Much of the evacuated population will be returning by Thanksgiving. The process of demolition of the worst-flooded areas will begin before New Year's. Taxpayers will pick up the tab.

[6] MOST of the massive emergency shelter space that has been established (such as what I'm going to be watching this weekend) will go completely unused.

[7] The market price of MRE's will drop like a rock to half of last month's prices ($50/case), beginning in about two weeks.

Have fun.

Losing the fight for nonpartisan redistricting in California

The latest comprehensive poll from California shows that Proposition 77, Governor Schwarzenegger's initiative to shift legislative redistricting from the legislature to a nonpartisan panel of retired judges, is failing badly. 46% of voters polled oppose the initiative already, with 32% supporting and 22% undecided. But the potentially devastating numbers are buried within the poll report: 49% of independent voters oppose the initiative. (Granted, the report does indicate that independent voters were underrepresented in the poll.) Conventional wisdom suggests that independent voters and centrists--those who tend to lose, rather than benefit, from redistricting by the party establishment, regardless of which party is in control--should most support nonpartisan, nonlegislative redistricting. So are California's independent voters reacting to the details of this particular remedial measure, or is there some consideration weighing against nonpartisan, nonlegislative redistrict for independent voters that the conventional wisdom neglects?

Open thread

Speak up!

An EMS in NOLA

Here is a story that will set your teeth on edge.

Two EMS techs were attending an EMS conference in New Orleans. Their experiences trying to stay alive and get out post Katrina.

We decided we had to save ourselves. So we pooled our money and came up with $25,000 to have ten buses come and take us out of the City.

The buses never arrived. We later learned that the minute the arrived to the City limits, they were commandeered by the military.

The hotels turned us out and locked their doors, telling us that the "officials" told us to report to the convention center to wait for more buses. As we entered the center of the City, we finally encountered the National Guard. The Guards told us we would not be allowed into the Superdome as the City's primary shelter had descended into a humanitarian and health hellhole.

As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads.

As more people get out, more stories like this are going to appear. The Internet just won't allow for any secrets to be kept.

The Silliness Continues

I'm as critical as anyone of the Bush Administration's response to Katrina, but some of the criticism is becoming risible. According to this story in the NYT, Michael Chertoff is being ripped for being "insensitive" to the suffering from the hurricane. I guess these days being insensitive is the worst crime imaginable, far worse than being a genocidal maniac. Anyway, according to the story, Chertoff's sin occurred during a briefing of members of Congress, where he made remarks that struck the Democrats as being "insensitive about the conditions faced by sotrm survivors."

Apparently, the problem was that Chertoff actually had the gall to suggest that

news images showing horrendous conditions for evacuees in shelters did not reflect the totality of the federal government's response.

The fact that this might actually have been true did not seem to have any impact on our esteemed representatives.

Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the ranking Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee, said the message he took from Mr. Chertoff's comments regarding the relief effort was that "what you see is not really what is."

So, of course

"People just looked at him," Mr. Thompson said. "He was the first speaker, and it sort of went downhill after that. People felt we are not going to get the truth here." A few Democrats were so upset by the tone of Mr. Chertoff's remarks that they walked out of the briefing, said Representative Elijah Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, who said he stayed for all of the remarks but became increasingly frustrated by what he heard. "The picture was being painted that things were not as bad as they appeared to be" in news reports, Mr. Cummings said in an interview. "It reached the point where the answers didn't add up."

Does any of this make sense? Chertoff clearly wasn't trying to minimize the situation; he was simply arguing, as I read it, that people shouldn't judge the situation entirely by what is being presented on TV. I don't think that is too unreasonable, yet from the tone of the comments, you would think that Chertoff was proposing to go play golf.

This is the kind of crap that passes for representation today in this country on both the right and the left. It's one thing to make legitimate and responsible criticism of the Administration. It's another to just look for excuses to attack it. These clowns have no idea what the situation is like in New Orleans. What they want, of course, is a mea culpa by Chertoff and--I think--some butt kissing of self-important politicians. The fact is that all this does is encourage even more CYA behavior and less candor by government officials. But it makes the members look like they are standing up for the storm victims, which is, of course, more important than actually accomplishing anything.

A failure on all fronts, not just one

The Washington Post is noting that:

[O]ver the five years of President Bush's administration, Louisiana has received far more money for Corps civil works projects than any other state, about $1.9 billion; California was a distant second with less than $1.4 billion, even though its population is more than seven times as large.

Much of that Louisiana money was spent to try to keep low-lying New Orleans dry. But hundreds of millions of dollars have gone to unrelated water projects demanded by the state's congressional delegation and approved by the Corps, often after economic analyses that turned out to be inaccurate. Despite a series of independent investigations criticizing Army Corps construction projects as wasteful pork-barrel spending, Louisiana's representatives have kept bringing home the bacon.

...[O]verall, the Bush administration's funding requests for the key New Orleans flood-control projects for the past five years were slightly higher than the Clinton administration's for its past five years. Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, the chief of the Corps, has said that in any event, more money would not have prevented the drowning of the city, since its levees were designed to protect against a Category 3 storm, and the levees that failed were already completed projects. The Corps had been studying the possibility of upgrading the New Orleans levees for a higher level of protection before Katrina hit, but Woodley said that study would not have been finished for years.

Note that this is the WashPost, not the WashTimes. Enough blame to go around, it would seem; before, during and after.

General Mechanics Driving Crisis Management Patterns

Tyler Cowen has an interesting post on the mechanics that drive the patterns we see when uncommon crises occur:

The public choice economics of crisis management

1. The event is often small-probability in nature.

2. The event has very negative consequences, and we don't have optimal punishments for those who get it wrong.

3. Many crisis-related events and required decisions happen quickly in immediate sequence.  First, it is hard to get the decisions right, second it is even harder to look good, given some inevitable mistakes.

4. Media scrutiny is intense, and voters care about the issue.  This encourages ex post overreactions and overinvestments in symbolic fixes, especially when combined with #1.

5. A crisis is, by definition, large.  This puts federalism, whatever its other merits, at a disadvantage.  No one is sure who is responsible for what, or how a chain of command should operate.

Smart fella, that Tyler, making good points without pointing fingers at particular names. He does suggest a role for increased accountability, tho. Another cite he makes is to a Washington Post article. Say what you want about evil behemoth Walmart, the category killer. Just don't say that they don't know how to git 'er done.

Walmart chief executive H. Lee Scott Jr. called an emergency meeting of his top lieutenants and warned them he did not want a "measured response" to the hurricane.

"I want us to respond in a way appropriate to our size and the impact we can have," he said, according to an executive who attended the meeting. At the time, Wal-Mart had pledged $2 million to the relief efforts. "Should it be $10 million?" Scott asked.

Over the next few days, Wal-Mart's response to Katrina -- an unrivaled $20 million in cash donations, 1,500 truckloads of free merchandise, food for 100,000 meals and the promise of a job for every one of its displaced workers...

Here's the thing. To face such disasters, we could benefit from realistic and creative planning that fosters responses more focused on gittin 'er done than crossing T's and dotting I's. I'm hopeful that both the good and bad stories coming out of Katrina help us devise better ends-oriented planning that leads to quicker relief. Walmart is not the government. But let's face it, when such events are low-probability ones, who is better prepared to provide large volumes of food, clothing, water, and construction materials on short notice than, say, Walmart and Home Depot?

In such instances, does it really make sense for the government to stock, update and constantly re-supply huge regional stockpiles of emergency supplies? That's a much more expensive and inefficient way of doing it. It may be warranted to some extent and in some cases, But I'm not convinced we should come up with some huge new expensive program that spends huge piles of dough annually to be a little more ready when we have an uncommon disaster. Isn't it a least possible that we're better off relying on our ample private supply chains by planning to quickly re-direct them with private cooperation? All this would mean is that when we had a disaster, unaffected regions of the country would have to sacrifice by, say, drinking tap water, putting off clothes purchases, and waiting a few months to buy lumber and nails for that new construction project.

Centrist Conference Call Tonight

Just a reminder that we're holding our next centrist conference call tonight at 8:00 PM Eastern Time.

We use these as a connecting point for folks with an active interest in centrist politics -- just a chance to touch base and talk about what we're all doing.

If you'd like to participate, email volunteers@centristcoalition.com and we'll send you the dial-in number and access code.

Hope to talk to you then!

"A brave, intelligent man deeply committed to maintaining the rule of law and preserving an independent judiciary."

SCOTUSblog is carrying the reactions of the associate Justices to the Chief's death. The quote above is from Justice Breyer; Justice Ginsburg called him "the fairest, most efficient boss I have ever had", while Justice Scalia called Rehnquist's death "a loss to the Court, to all the federal judiciary that he headed for so long, and to the Nation. It is a double loss for me; he was my friend long before he was my Chief. May he rest in peace."

Former Rehnquist Clerk Richard Garnett writes a fond recollection of the Chief in Slate today.

New Email

You'll notice that Centerfield has a new email address. It's

cf at centristcoalition dot com

Please update your address books. The former email address, blog@.. has been overwhelmed by spam.

What are your local conditions like?

I curious what conditions are like around the country.

I live in Huntsville Alabama, about 35000 lost power locally but most got it back by Friday. No real damage to speak of. However Gas stations are starting to run out of gas. Whether it's due to hording or lack of supply I don't know. Costco is out and so is the PX on base. The attendant at the PX said he might get a truck load in a week. Costco has no idea. A co-worker said several station on the north side of town had also run out. On my ride home Friday rush hour traffic was at about 1/3 normal. Although several web sites like AAA have regular at about 2.704, most of the stations I passed on the way home were showing about 3.25. ( I beginning to wonder if should sleep in my office this week.)

I have some friends in a local baptist church. They are trying to set it and several houses up for refugees. In fact they were taking about allowing a New Orleans seminary to relocate here.

What is the situation like elsewhere?

PatHMV: Are you up to reporting on local condition?

BREAKING NEWS - Rehnquist, C.J., deceased

Chief Justice William Rehnquist has died, after 33 years on the Supreme Court bench. He was 80.

Having battled thyroid cancer last year, there had been "a precipitous decline in his health in the last couple of days," court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg said, and the man known as "The Chief" died in the evening surrounded by his three children.

Source

Blame Game II

There were protests yesterday on this blog about assessing political accountibility for hurricane preparations and relief. But last night, on the McLaughlin Group, even Bush loyalist Tony Blankley was doing it, and stating that the Administration will pay a heavy price for miscues. Perhaps the President's own statement that the relief efforts have been "unacceptable" has given his supporters license to criticize. Now, the Republican governor of Massachusetts, a possible presidential candidate is getting into it.

``I look at FEMA and I shake my head,'' said a furious Gov. Mitt Romney yesterday, calling the response ``an embarrassment.''

The Moderate Voice now reports that FEMA director Mike Brown was fired from his last private sector job. Several days ago, I said that it looked like somebody ought to be fired. Mike Brown now seems like an obvious candidate. But I don't think that would be enough.

I think many of you know that I don't approve of President Bush's performance. But it's not conservative principles I object to; rather, it's the poor way they have applied under this administration, and IMHO, the kneejerk way conservatives have defended the President from attacks, whether from kneejerk liberals or thoughtful critics.

Living in the Boston area, I feel fairly safe that in the event of a massive disaster, I can simply walk west. There are no physical bottlenecks in the landscape to prevent my egress should I ever become a "ref