One Man with a Boat

I like this.

Strong men in sports. Huh. That's odd.

Do you find this ad to be offensive? How do you define "scantily clad", taking into account camera angle and such?

Why do these stories dance around the obvious anyway? Having watched the ad, I find it hard to believe that Burk could care about the amount of female skin shown in it. I'm sure that the problem is simply that it seems to celebrate a certain masculine warrior spirit, and portrays a woman who seems to appreciate it. Martha Burk should muster a little courage and find a better way to articulate what it is that really ticks her off.

And if you like hockey, just watch the ad for the hell of it.

This just in from the Ministry of Truth

Big Brother says: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength, but you knew that already.

In other news,

Quote:

RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today.

So....if we change all the "shalt nots" into "thou SHALLs", I suppose all those things would stop. Statistics can be made to say anything, and newspapers will always be able to convince at least some people of anything, no matter how counter-intuitive.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1798944,00.html

h/t Ace

Wasn't that a scene in Animal House?

"How big is the pony? Get the (*#$ing pony and put it in the hotel room. What? No, just get a pony, put 'em in there, yeah, yeah. It needs to have a bridle on, just tie it to the *#&@ing bed."

Scene from a promotional clip for the Kerry/Edwards campaign documentary "Inside the Bubble"

http://www.xchangestudios.com/Video/Promo4Beeped.wmv

Thanks to the blogometer
http://blogometer.nationaljournal.com/archives/2005/09/926_timesshare.html

Update:

I have found the extended dance version of the pony saga during the Kerry campaign. Fascinating stuff. Not just interesting, it is funny as hell. You can watch it here:

(Rated R for language and disturbing goat apparel reference)

http://www.xchangestudios.com/Video/PONYTIME.wmv

And always remember, kids, if you get a goat, you'll have to stay with it, because it will eat the lingerie.

We are still at war

Flash movie:

I love these men and women with all my heart and support what they are doing.


And for those who like to cry "chickenhawk", yes I have served in uniform.

PiratePundit
USMA '89

The American Leader's Ignorance of American History

From today's WND:

Quote:

Five years after the controversial 2000 presidential election, ex-President Jimmy Carter now says he's certain Al Gore defeated George W. Bush. "Well I would say that in the year 2000, the country failed abysmally in the presidential election process," Carter told a panel Monday at American University in Washington, D.C. "There's no doubt in my mind that Al Gore was elected president." Those in attendance broke out in applause for that statement. "[Gore] received the most votes nationwide, and in my opinion, he also received the most votes in Florida," Carter continued. "And the decision was made as you know on a 5-4 vote on a highly partisan basis by the U.S. Supreme Court, so I would say in 2000, there was a failure."

I hate that the myth of a 5-4 decision is so easily accepted by so many people, but by an ex-President? That just astonishes me. And even if he forgot for a moment, it is another thing to insert it into speeches. Hell, maybe he does know that it is not true, and figures it doesn't really matter.

For those who don't remember, Bush v. Gore was decided by SCOTUS on a 7-2 vote.

Ginsburg and Stevens were the only dissenters.

A new twist in the Able Danger story

Either the Department of Defense has a fundamental misunderstanding of the regulations regarding intelligence gathering, or else the official story regarding why Able Danger information was not acted upon and is now missing is a smokescreen. Why? Because Mohammed Atta should never been classified as a "US person". Allow me to explain.

I've been asked to record audio commentary tomorrow for Free Market News Network, about the fact that the Department of Defense has forbidden certain witnesses to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Able Danger project. I've been following the story, but upon being asked to comment had to do a lot of quick research; I was startled by what I found.

For those who do not know, Able Danger was a DoD project in the '90s (disbanded in 2002), run primarily by SOCOM, that engaged in what is known as data mining. Those two words, "data mining", are of great concern to many privacy advocates, but I don't want to get into that aspect of it right now. As a matter of fact, everything I've read confirms that the data mined by Able Danger was mixed between "open source" and classified information, but was primarily "open source". What that means is that the Able Danger team was searching for information available to anyone with knowledge of how to use an internet search engine. Using presumably sophisticated software, diverse information available on the web was used to discern patterns of associations and behaviors among known terrorists, and extrapolate from that a picture of terrorist networks.

It seems that it worked. Think of it in terms of "connecting the dots." That is literally what Able Danger was designed to do, and even to use computing power to identify "dots" that no one even knew existed. A year and a half before September 11, 2001, Able Danger had identified 60 terrorists inside the United States. Four of those 60 eventually ended up on the aircraft used in the September 11 attacks. Able Danger even specifically identified Mohammed Atta, who was the leader of the attacks. The problem is that the information processed by Able Danger was neither acted upon, nor was it apparently seriously considered by the so-called 911 Commission. The question is, why?

What I've found is puzzling. In a Department of Defense news conference held September 3, 2005, the DoD presenters conceded that at least five people associated with Able Danger today recall seeing a chart or graphic that identified Atta as a threat, long before the terrorist attacks. Two of the five are described as being members of a core of ten people who worked on Able Danger, and the other three described as being more peripherally involved with Able Danger. It was five witnesses called by the Senate to testify who were blocked by doing so by the DoD. I am not completely sure that it is the same five, but can only assume so.

The interesting part is that, in response to questions about the alleged chart identifying Atta, a policy analyst said (this excerpt is edited by me for length; the transcript is available here):

Down: There are regulations. At the time how they were interpreted, very strictly pre-9/11, for destruction of information which is embedded, I guess is the way I would say it, that would contain any information on U.S. persons. In a major data mining effort like this you're reaching out to a lot of open sources and within that there could be a lot of information on U.S. persons. We're not allowed to collect that type of information. So there are strict regulations about collection, dissemination, destruction procedures for this type of information. And we know that that did happen in the case of Able Danger documentation.

Media: What is the definition for U.S. person?

Down: I wish we had our lawyer here.

Chope: A U.S. citizen or someone who is in the country legally.

Media: So a tourist is a U.S. person.

Chope: Can be.

Gandy: But there are strict definitions.

Media: Maybe you can direct me to --

Gandy: Executive Order 12333. You can go on the web tonight and do it. DoD Directive 5240-1R.

"You can go to the web tonight" and look up Executive Order 12333. So I did. Thank you for reading this far; you've reached the punchline. Executive Order 12333 (and DoD Directive 5240-1R, which I have also read) says (in part):

(i) United States person means a United States citizen, [or] an alien known by the intelligence agency concerned to be a permanent resident alien...

Mohammed Atta did not meet the definition of "US person".

Yet, according to the information put out in that press conference, that is the reason given for the destruction of the Able Danger data on Atta. Move ahead to the Senate hearing yesterday, September 21, 2005 (the one at which the DoD forbid the five to testify), at which the "US person" restriction on gathering data was again suggested for the reason that the Able Danger data had been destroyed (if it was):

WILLIAM DUGAN: I guess I wish to convey to the committee that US person information is something that we are skittish about in the Defense Department. We follow the rules strictly on it. And we want to do the right thing and follow the attorney general guidelines.

SEN. ARLEN SPECTER: Mr. Dugan, Mohammed Atta was not a US person was he?

WILLIAM DUGAN: Based on what I've read in the press since Sept. 11, 2001, I don't believe he was.

SEN. ARLEN SPECTER: Mr. Dugan, you're the acting assistant secretary of defense for intelligence oversight. Can't you give us a more definitive answer to a very direct and fundamental and simple question like was Mohammed Atta a US person?

WILLIAM DUGAN: No, he was not.

So there you have it. As an attorney analyzing the testimony, it seems to me that one of two things must be true: (1) either the intelligence operatives within the DoD (and their lawyers) have completely misunderstood the Executive Order and Army Directive regarding what constitutes a "US person", with tragic results, for many years, or (2) the "US person" defense as to why the Able Danger data is now missing is simply untrue, i.e., a smokescreen.

I think that option 2 is more likely than option 1, but that is only my opinion (as a supporter of the Pentagon, by the way). Whichever it is, it isn't a good thing, and needs to be explored.

If you link to this, please credit this blog (PiratePundit) or CourtZero.

Ignorance of European history is rampant

Well, it is rampant at least among French foreign ministers.

Quote:

during the visit of French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy to the new Holocaust museum in Jerusalem's Yad Vashem on September 8, he asked - while perusing maps of European sites where Jewish communities had been destroyed - whether British Jews were not also murdered. Needless to say, Douste-Blazy's question was met by his hosts with amazement. "But Monsieur le minister," Le Canard quoted the ensuing conversation, "England was never conquered by the Nazis during World War II." The minister apparently was not content with this answer, which, according to the magazine, was given by the museum curator, and persisted, asking: "Yes, but were there no Jews who were deported from England?"

http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/626303.html

Oh. Kay.

Quote:

Raising Boys Without Men : How Maverick Moms Are Creating the Next Generation of Exceptional Men (Hardcover) "Truly a cutting-edge book . . . important for everyone who cares about the future of the American family." --Carol Gilligan, author of The Birth of Pleasure. "We urgently need this book."--Anthony Lewis, author of Gideon's Trumpet

After seeing this book and its description, I can think of several other books we need, such as:

"Firing a loaded nailgun into your eyeball will give you a fresh perspective"

"The 5-minute Drano diet"

"Better living through meth and crack abuse"

Liveblogging Hitchens v. Galloway

I've never tried liveblogging before. Results, therefore, are predictable. I started by being alerted by a member of the CourtZero message board that the debate had started. My posts (all times are US Eastern time, in 24 hour format):

1902: Thanks for the reminder!! [duh]
1910: I've got in on and the debaters aren't up yet. Who the blazes are these people talking? Oh...StopTheWarProductions, whatever that is. I'm learning a lot...
1920: I am kicking myself for not firing up the recorder on the behind the scenes stuff I heard a few minutes ago.
1922: Huzzah!!!

Just move the progress bar back to the beginning, and begin recording!

HAHAHAHAHAHA

I'm going to have to pass on the audio of this to y'all later. Good stuff.

1934: eek, it's a leftorama. I'm sure Hitchens can hold his own, but..wow...the intros aren't looking real friendly to him. The co-ed who introduced the segment did smile and giggle in kind of a cute way when she declared America to be evil, though.

1938: Galloway must be trashing the dressing room over brown M&Ms or something. They still haven't started.

In case you haven't noticed, I intend to bring you a play by play. PiratePundit should be doing that, really, but Eric started this.

1942: Woe, big applause for Hitchens. I'm surprised.

OK, that clinches it. I'm heading over to PiratePundit to liveblog this thing.

1951: Hitchens, starts, and asked for a moment of silence for those murdered in Iraq today (there was a huge bombing of civilians by terrorists). He made the moment short, perhaps five ten seconds at most, but there were hecklers shouting things. I'll have to go back to the audio capture later and figure out what was shouted.

1953: Catching up on what has happened before, now to the substance of Hitchens opening. Essentially that Saddam was responsbile for aggression and genoicide, and is "in jail now" and notes that he will follow, historically, the path of Milosevic and Pinochet. He says it's a long overdue act of justice and mercy . Good applause.

1955: Hitchen's litany of good effects of Iraq War. Good for Kurds, women, those who were tortured, Libya disarming, and so on

1959: H gets personal with Galloway, calls him a disgrace. Just prior, more lists of good consequences of the War in the greater Arab world. The remark about Galloway as an Member of Parliament gets angry heckling. H: "If you knew how you looked and sounded when you do that, comrades..."

2002: Loud, and mixed response to H's end. G begins "Slobbering was Mr. Hitchen's (opening)" Notes that (25 years ago), "Mr. Hitchens 'praised me'" Good for you, G. We all look in your direction five times a day for precisely that purpose.

2004: Good amount of applause from the crowd when G mentiones the Munich killers and hijackers in the 70s. Calls Charelton Heston a fulminating gun nut, for some reason. Making point that 1991 war to liberate Kuwait (among other reasons) was wrong. Says that by supporting 2003 war marks H's metamorphosis from butterfly to slug...talks of trails of slime. What? "You, Mister Hitchens, are no chimney sweep." I'm glad that's put to rest.

2008: G invokes Cindy Sheehan. Notes that her soldier son didn't give his life, but that Mrs. Sheehan gave his life. (as an ex-soldier, that grates on me)

2010: G: We are going to be ruled by crazed fundamentalists, like Pat Robertson, Dick Cheney, and Ashcroft. The American people are not free; we are instead occupied by...America, it seems. G plays Irish card. Disses the UK. (yes, I'm Irish too). Somehow this has something to do with Iraq in the year 2005, but I'm having a hard time following his point.

2012: "Are you with the foreign occupiers of Iraq, or are you with the people who (paraphrase: keep them from being free, meaning the US). Says that the US has "massacred" thousands in Iraq just this week.

2014: G plays chickenhawk card on H. Nothing new so far.

2018: G wraps up his rant. That is a fair characterization, he was yelling. Missed much because of a trip for refreshments; I did catch his declaration that anyone who thinks Operation Iraqi Freedom is not a sentient being.

2024: H takes over for 10 minutes, points out that G is no pacifist, lists wars and despots supported by G. H makes good point that desire to re-establish Caliphate, "an ancient empire", is not anti-empirialism. H says that Michael Moore on jihadists as minutemen is "self-discrediting" and funny. Other good examples of leftist lack of seriousness (Galloway touring with the Vagina Monolouges and Jane Fonday, for instance). Puts the actions and sacrifice of Specialist Casey Sheehan in context; says its wrong to praise the people who killed him, then come to America and appeal to the emotions of his mother. Wow.

2025: "the scars of your long underground struggle against Dick Cheney" I missed the line just before, but I'll review it later. LOL. H is talking to vocal members of the crowd. Notes that preventing things like turning Falujah into a Taliban type city is something that does not come without casualties and cost.

2028: G: "How far has this neocon rot seeped into your souls?" Weird question about whether or not they really believe something called the Lancet Medical Journal to be fanatical or something. Loud "NO" from parts of the crowd. What?

Cites some Algerian revolutionary from the past...."when asked why he is putting bombs in baby carriages.." oh hell, the point is that the West should not have superior weapons to terrorists. Not even the French, if you take his comments at face value. "Every islamist in the world is on his way or dreaming of being on his way, descending like spores upon Iraq"...and at the exact same time "spreading around the world"..all Bush's fault (and Blair's) that the terrorists at the same time are concentrating in Iraq and "spreading around the world". Neat trick.

2033: G: "I believe, I believe, I believe" (and several more times) that the US and the UK caused 9/11 and deserved it because of supporting those dirty Jews. Same story. I'm getting tired of that one. I didn't know that anti-semitism was an Irish thing, though, so I'll have to think about that. "we must drain the swamp of support for Israel". Rock on, Galloway. Keep talking.

More logic from G: it seems that invading and occupying muslim nations caused 9/11. No examples given. Repeats that we need to get behind the destruction of Israel.

2037: Hitchens is up again. H: "it makes perfect sense to hijack a planeload of civilians and fly it into a building full of civilians, why hadn't I thought of that before." Notes that "some of us are still mourning" 9/11. Loud boos from audience at the college (it's in NY, isn't it?)...I must have missed something. H is refuting G's assertion that the US supports the Syrian dictator. Yeah, I must have missed something. "masochism is being offered to you by sadists" Good line, referring to the logical conclusion to G's seeming point that if one is angry that jihadists have flowed from Afghanistan to Iraq, then the only thing to do is to keep them in power in Afhanistan, don't bother them, don't anger them.

2043: G takes over again. Says that H supports dictators. Disses the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon. Says they weren't wanting democracy (doesn't say what they did want). Disses Christians and the US Marines (we seem to have imposed a Constitution on Lebanon in the 50s that requires a Christian President)--if so, what happened to that? G to H: "You're working for the devil! Damn you and all your works!!" OK, I really am laughing out loud as I type that. Yes, he said it.

2047: moderator starts to ask questions: "since removing Saddam was not the MAIN justification...blah blah...rather WMD...blah blah [much applause]" Lots of historical revision there, but let's press on. H answers: "it's a single issue for me; the previous administration (Clinton's) promised to achieve a post-Saddam Iraq" and essentially, stands now still in favor of just that. Second question "response to Colin Powell"..answer "I don't give a damn about what Colin Powell thinks about anything. He's currently running for most overrated man in the world."

2056: Question to G: what do you think about Saddam being in jail. G's answer (paraphrase) "It's good because it's for the crimes of the US and the UK because they ordered him to invade Iran." I did not know that.

I'm distracted for a minute. It is Hitchens' turn again, and then Galloway is calling him Pinochio. I didn't catch why. G takes over and is pulling out H's opinion on the war in 1991 again. Question for G: who, exactly, are the political and judicial authorities "of the world"? You had to hear it to know why I want to know the answer to that at this point in the debate. G thinks that H making money is a bad thing. Implies he's a drunk.
G: "Were you lying in 1991, or are you lying now". What an idiot. Before an audience of students of higher learning, 1991 and 2003 are identical, and no one is permitted to change one's mind in any event. H responds well. "I changed my mind."

2100: H changed his mind because of talking to Kuwaitis and Iraqis who said that the 1991 war had saved their lives. Notes that Syria supported 1991 war "If Assad can change his mind, and I can too, then I suppose you should be complimented for your consistency in absolute support for dicatators and thugs."

2102: G says that Iraqi government is puppet regime, a "lipstick on the ugly face of their occupation." I suppose that means that Saddam, and Zarqawi are "pretty". G declares that America intends to occupy and own Iraq forever (for Halliburton and agriculture companies), but that the Iraqis have rejected (such things as food and electricity). G equates international commerce with occupation. (John Deere, you bastards, get out of Canada immediately. And take CBS television with you).

At this point is seems to me that the left simply assumes that, prior to the Iraqi government even getting a chance to assemble itself, that whatever it emerges will be illegitimate because they can only be puppets to the US and the UK. Same old racist bigotry, in my book. Speaking of racist, G just said that getting all of the foreign fighters out of Iraq wouldn't be a good thing and that the vast majority of the Iraqi people want the US and UK out, and that it's racist to think otherwise. (?).

H on when US forces should be out of Iraq: Is surprised that G won't just be consistent and voice loud support for the beheadings, etc. Loud boos, G says, "are there no depths" repeatedly. H remind audience that the talk is televised, and do they want their mothers to see them cheer (paraphrasing..the terrorists).

2113: strange slip from moderator, repeating the line that the National Guard was not available in Lousiana because the "weapons, I mean vehicles, are in Iraq". Interesting. The question was, "Is the United States any better than Iraq?" H tries to go US constitutional scholar, much booing, G walks away from podium in disgust over mention of the US Constitution. H: "to say that what happened (Hurricane Katrina) wouldn't have happened to American Blacks if we weren't involved with Arabs is the most provincial statement possible." G: gets applause, as an Irish MP of the UK government, plays the race card. Calls Barbara Bush a racist, and misquotes her. What a jerk. Calls Hitchens a court jester.

That did it for me. That changed my mind. I'm against the liberation of Iraq now. After all, Galloway called Hitchens a court jester, and Marie Antoinette as well. How can you argue against that? To hell with Iraq, then. Tea, Mr. Galloway?

2121: H talks about the abilties of the US military, that they have learned much about civil engineering in the last few years. The jeers grow quite loud and impassioned. H says that "it takes more than that, tough guys and gals, to shut me up." Rather astonishingly, the jeering students all shut up just at the point. Asks the students to consider carefully what they are requiring when they boo the US military and cheer "warlords".

H calls G a "courtier of sadists". No response from audience or G. H follows with "I'm not a member of Bush's staff (or something like that)", which does get a negative reaction from G and the audience.

2125: Moderator asks Hitchens if his opinions have hurt him as a member of the press. He thinks it's a waste of a question, that his views haven't helped him any professionally. G says "that was a waste of an answer".

In closing remarks, G suddenly gets more measured and quiet and argues that everyone in the entire world, other than Hitchens, knows that the war is bad, a mistake, and the world and Iraq are far worse off now. Absolutely everyone has "adjudicated" that fact. G brings up Israel again. He really has a thing about Israel. Closes with calling H a "popinjay" for continuing to support the Iraq effort.

Hitchens closes. His old friends lost "from the moveon.org world" in exchange for his new (liberated) Kurdish friends "is well worth it." And he won't abandon his new Kurdish friends "because Michael Moore said so, or Sheehan said so, or oil-for-food money made me." He asks the audience to point to "something you have done to uncover the mass graves, or help the new Iraqi media" etc. He is smart here, giving the undecided or confused something to actually do rather than just repeating slogans.

Bottom line: Galloway channeled Michael Moore and any Democratic Underground thread on any given day and shouted slogans, Hitchens spoke more quietly and more measuredly, and gave the student audience the opportunity to give more consideration to their opinions.

You're welcome, Sir.

Quote:

In the name of Iraqi people, I say to you, Mr. President, and to the glorious American people, thank you, thank you. Thank you, because you liberated us from the worst kind of dictatorship. Our people suffered too much from this worst kind of dictatorship. The -- (inaudible) -- was hundred thousand of Iraqi innocent children and women, young and old men. Thank you, and thanks to the United States, there are now 15 million Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq liberated by your courageous leadership and decision to liberate us, Mr. President. We agree with Mr. President Bush that democracy is the solution to the problems of the Middle East. Mr. President, you are a visionary, great statesman. We salute you. We are grateful to you. We will never forget whatyou have done for our people.

Iraqi President Talabani, September 13, 2005
For full transcript:
http://tinyurl.com/aovkh

To watch the remarks on RealPlayer:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/09/20050913-5.v.html

And for more good news from the Iraqis and our military:

http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2005/09/iraqis-protest-terrorism-as-us-routs.html

Supreme Court to rule poverty unconstitutional

You know, the whole idea of CourtZero seems silly sometimes. I admit that when I look at what our elected representatives think of the proper role of the courts, I wonder why I bother.

In their opening remarks, the two top Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee invoked the tragedy as a reminder of the gap between rich and poor and the need for a Supreme Court that wants to close that gap.

How the blazes do 9 lawyers close the gap between rich and poor in a Republic? Hell, how would they do in any other system of government, for that matter?

I did not know that

I just heard a clip of Mary Landreiu complaining that President Bush hadn't had levees built in Orlando, Florida (among other places she mentioned).

I find myself alarmed; I was unaware that we needed levees here. Maybe no one has told her that the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ride has been closed for years.

The New Orleans Hurricane Barrier that Almost Was

SOWL's legacy lives on and on within the heart and spirit of every man, woman, child, bird, red fish, speckle trout, croakers, etc.

What on earth could that quote be referring to? What legacy? Read on.

One question that we are bound to ask, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and in the coming debate over to what extent to rebuild New Orleans, is whether something can be done to make the city safer in the face of future storms. By "something", I mean an engineering solution, not a political or legal one. This is the story of how one engineering solution never happened once it got sucked into the legal system.

Before I get to the legal side of the story, let me give you some background on the engineering side. For context, one can look at the example of the Dutch. Much of the Netherlands is below sea level and protected from flooding by dikes. In 1953 the Netherlands suffered a disaster involving great loss of life and property after the dikes were breached during hurricane-force winds. To make a long story short, that country embarked on a series of enormous engineering projects to protect against further disasters of the scope of the 1953 flood. Various structures were built, and are believed to be both effective and environmentally friendly (that is, built in such a way so that neither tidal currents nor migration of marine life is altered), culminating in the mammoth storm barrier called the Maeslant Barrier, protecting the vital port of Rotterdam. It seems that public safety, Dutch national pride, environmental, fishing, and shipping concerns are all living in harmony with that project.

Nearly three decades ago, in 1977, the US Army Corps of Engineers began working on a similar solution to the danger of flooding and breached levees in and around New Orleans. The idea was to avoid the kind of disaster experienced by the Dutch in the event of a hurricane-delivered storm surge. Unfortunately, what would prove to be a lethal combination of an environmentalist group and a judge enforcing debilitating bureaucratic requirements eventually brought American efforts to engineer a similar solution to a grinding halt, and the project never recovered.

As editor of CourtZero, I constantly assess the costs versus benefits of the involvement of judges on a variety of issues; I also happen to enjoy a good story of courtroom drama, which is why this really caught my eye:

At this point the Save Our Wetlands attorney jumps up and points his finger at Judge Charles Schwartz, and the judge says something very weird. He says, I know what the problem is, it's that you do not like me. The Save Our Wetlands attorney goes right up to the Judge's cigar, pointing his finger and says to the Judge Charles Schwartz, it is not that I don’t like you it is that I am losing respect for you. The Save Our Wetlands attorney then says, You said you were going to issue an injunction now god damn issue it. At this point the Save Our Wetlands attorney breaks down and begins to cry, kicks open the chamber door, and enters the courtroom cursing profusely, to a courtroom packed with people. He then kicks open the courtroom door and goes immediately to his apartment and collapses; he had not slept in three days.

Being a litigator, I found that a vivid description of trial tactics that has never occurred to me to try. But this is not a narrative told by a group explaining why that lawyer should have been disciplined by his State Bar, rather it is a story told enthusiastically on the Save Our Wetlands website, of how they single-handedly stopped the Corps of Engineers from building those storm barriers to protect New Orleans back in 1977-1978.

So how does the story end? Judge Charles Schwartz, Jr. (who incidentally was replaced by Edith Brown Clement) ruled against the barrier project and the Corps and for the environmental group, ordering that construction would not be permitted without further order. He ruled that way not because the storm barrier would not have been effective. He ruled not because it wasn't worth it to protect the lives of the residents of New Orleans, nor did he rule against the project because he had found that the project would cause environmental damage. Instead,

[the Corps] is ENJOINED from any further construction of the Chef Menteur Pass, Rigolets, New Orleans East and Chalmette portions of the Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana and Vicinity Hurricane Protection project until such time as this Court shall have been satisfied that such defendants have complied in full with Title 42, United States Code, Section 4332 with respect to preparation of an environmental impact statement for such project by means of a revision of the August, 1974 Final Environmental Impact Statement in accord with Department of the Army Regulation 1105-2-507 Paragraph 7a.

Got that? That is the answer to, "Hey, how come they never built a Netherlands-style storm barrier to protect New Orleans?" A lawsuit by Save Our Wetlands, one judge, and that pesky Paragraph 7a is the answer. Now, I don't know why the Corps of Engineers didn't go ahead and take care of all those regulations and eventually get a judge to sign off on the project; I do know that litigation continued, and "the parties" (more on that in a moment) settled the lawsuit by agreeing to a different plan involving the sort of levees that failed last week.

I mention the parties because the people in the courtroom arguing over this did not, really, involve any representative of the people of New Orleans. The failure indispensable parties in cases like this is one of my ongoing gripes with activist-driven lawsuits.

Let's hear, from plaintiffs Save Our Wetlands themselves, what they think of the injunction to halt the project (picking up after their lawyer kicked in some doors):

The Save Our Wetlands attorney says "how can you possibly talk to me that way after all we have proven." Judge Charles Schwartz says, I have been waiting to hold you in contempt of court for sometime, one more peep out of you and you will go to jail. The Save Our Wetlands attorney collected no fees for the time and energy he invested in saving the wetlands of New Orleans East and the entire Lake Maurapus, Pontchartrain, Catherine, Bornge, ecosystem. Many people in this litigation are now dead and even though Save Our Wetlands did not recieve [sic] any monetary compensation SOWL's legacy lives on and on within the heart and spirit of every man, woman, child, bird, red fish, speckle trout, croakers, etc.

That last sentence speaks for itself.

Incidentally, I googled "vicinity hurricane protection barrier project" and got only two results. Both are from the Save Our Wetlands website. The one that includes a link to the story, at the time that I write this, returns an error. I don't pretend to know why that is, but I read the cached version and took the precaution of creating .pdf files of the applicable pages.

Katrina timeline

It's important, in a lessons learned sense, to make a dispassionate record of what has happened. Here is a good resource in the way of a timeline of the events surrounding government response to Hurricane Katrina.

bold action in extraordinary circumstances -- let's do less

Since Chief Justice Rehnquist has passed away, leaving two Supreme Court positions vacant with the October session just weeks away, the Senate has decided that the right thing to do is to slow down confirmation hearings.

In any other business, would that be acceptable?

Federalizing Weather

Be careful what you wish for. In the case of political and press reaction to the horrific natural event called Hurricane Katrina, we need to be careful what we demand. I’ve been angry over the irrational path that many politicians and reporters are leading us down, and though I realize that my few words here can do nothing to counter all of that, I can add my small voice in the way of a warning for my fellow citizens.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a truly dangerous drumbeat of blame has erupted and promises to do much damage to all of us before subsiding. Why is it dangerous? Because, in the future, under this President, or the next, or the one after that, the political risks of "not acting quickly enough" will be far too high, and we will be living under a very different system of government, at least as long as the wind blows between June and November every year. We will be living under a very different system because you, my fellow citizen, have demanded it, loudly and even viciously.

Here is my one and only disclaimer for this piece: yes, in hindsight the federal state and local authorities could have and should have done any number of things differently. If one wishes to learn lessons from painful experiences, then that is healthy and good. If one wishes to level blame borne more from personal prejudice than from reason or thought to the consequences, however, one is only asking for a different kind of pain in the future.

So what is going to happen the next time a tropical system is forecast to make landfall on the coast of the United States? The way we’ve collectively reacted to the destruction in New Orleans (the rest of the Gulf Coast has been effectively ignored) has set a new standard for what must happen the next time.

Here is the mainstream media / White House press corps / hostile politician protocol for federal action in the case of a storm warning from now on (and not one word of the following is meant to be satirical; I am being quite literal based upon what I’ve seen and heard on TV and the blogs):

1. FEMA, rather than being an agency charged with coordinating the response to a disaster (“response” is a word that has a certain temporal quality to it; you can’t “respond” before something happens), will now be expected to take firm charge of all tactical decisions on a local level, meaning that FEMA will have to become an extraordinarily large agency. It’s hard to know what form FEMA will take, but the most efficient would be if we stationed federal watchers who could make sure that the directives and will of the powerful central government and its leader were not compromised by local decisions. The best model, unfortunately, is something like the old Soviet Union’s commissars. In the future, in order to meet the expectations of today’s critics, we’d have to have FEMA officials with the job of kind of hanging out in police precincts, firehouses and mayor’s offices, ready to alert the Oval Office when a local decision is incorrect and the President has to take over. The fact that one person, the President, will be expected to take over the day-to-day and on-the-ground decisions of local leaders on a hair-trigger may be uncomfortable, particularly if the mayor is Black and of the opposite political party, and the governor is female and of the opposite political party, but this is what we now seem to be demanding.

2. When a storm approaches land, we now know that if a president simply “implores” a governor and mayor to order a mandatory evacuation when those officials have been unwilling to do so more than a day before landfall, there will be hell to pay – not for the local officials, but for the president. President Bush did, in fact, call up Governor Blanco and (this is her word) “implored” her to order the evacuation that she and the mayor had not ordered. Clearly, we’ve learned, that is not nearly enough. The only politically acceptable thing to do from now on is for mandatory evacuations be ordered, and personally by the President of the United States, at least 72 hours before landfall. In reality, under this new system there will be a lot more evacuations of a lot more areas, clogging all the roads and taxing public transportation assets, so I’m not exaggerating by saying that mandatory evacuations will likely creep to five days or more before landfall. In the cases when storms suddenly appear out of nowhere (as Katrina did just off the east coast of Florida), evacuations will be immediate and without any warning at all.

Theoretically, any named storm would trigger this (after all, Katrina killed people in Florida while it was still a category 1 storm). Also, you may have noticed, big hurricanes cover an enormous area. Sometimes one single storm in the Gulf of Mexico can have damaging winds that extend over three, four, or even five states, affecting hundreds of counties and parishes. It’s difficult to know what impact on our nation evacuating literally millions of people at least a few times every single year from now on will have, but I don’t imagine it will be a very pleasant routine. Perhaps future presidents can meet political demands but minimize the chaos by ordering the evacuation only of predominantly Black and poor neighborhoods.

Oh, and if you live in the southeast, get rid of your pets now. Most hurricane shelters don’t take them. For understandable reasons, the military helicopter crews aren’t going to let you load them on. Since the evacuations from now on will all be mandatory, and require public transportation assets for many citizens, and since you cannot take your pets with you to government-run facilities, it is simply not feasible for us who live in the southeast coastal regions to have them in the first place.

Likewise, don’t buy a gun to defend yourself from wild animals or other dangers in the aftermath of a storm. You know full well you won’t be allowed to carry your personal weapons with you on a bus or helicopter or into a shelter. Just sell the ones you’ve got. As another by-product of the deafening public demands following Katrina, it is crystal clear that taking care of oneself is unacceptable. That’s now the President’s job.

3. When the National Weather Service issues a prediction of a storm track, National Guard troops from the area and surrounding areas, and from areas surrounding the surrounding areas, will deploy immediately, in the tens of thousands over several hundred miles of coastline.

The troops will no longer wait to see what bridges and roads will be passable after the storm. They will not wait to see what areas have emergency services intact and which need their help the most. They will not wait to see what areas will have an intact infrastructure for fueling, etc. Waiting until after the storm now carries an unacceptable political cost, no matter how much it makes operational sense. Instead, the troops will be ordered on the scene before or even as the storm hits. Unfortunately, those troops will potentially become as devastated, tired, and disoriented as the other victims, but at least they will have been on the scene immediately, and that’s what is now demanded of them.

Since hurricane season lasts nearly half a year the National Guard will have to be deployed quite a bit, on standby for months on end. Odds are that this will be a problem for their civilian employers, so we’ll simply have to make the active duty component of the military larger, so that these tens of thousands, at the strength of at least two divisions, can spend half of the year on duty here in the United States as a particularly lethal police force.

As I said, none of what you’ve just read is meant as satire. I don’t know how, in the face of all the criticism of President Bush this week, a president is supposed to behave in the future other than to do exactly what I’ve mentioned in the items above. I know that many libertarians and conservatives are familiar with the “frog in the slowly heated water” theory of losing individual liberties. The week of coverage and pontificating following Hurricane Katrina has instead convinced me that we will lose the lion’s share of our liberties because we ourselves will loudly demand it.

Chief Justice Rhenquist has died

Rest in Peace, Jurist. More comments later.

excellent links to help Katrina victims

I've been searching all over, and I think I've found the best -- or at least very good -- resources, at least for those who can get to the internet, and who are looking for either temporary housing or information about loved ones displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

I only hope that very soon some site emerges as the recognized nationwide contact site, and I hope that someone is posting a roster of those at the various large shelters on the net.

Anyway, here you go. The first two are to look for or conact displaced loved ones, and the last is to volunteer housing (or to register a need for housing)

http://www.katrinaupdate.com/

http://www.gulfcoastnews.com/

http://www.shareyourhome.org./

How many did the President save?

I've been praying a lot for the people of the Gulf Coast, from before landfall and continuing. So much has been said about this unprecedented and heartbreaking disaster, that I can't pretend to add much to the discourse here on this blog.

I will say this: I hate how our focus nationally seems to be on hatred and blame, instead of the better angels of our nature. And I'll pass on this story, written before landfall of Hurricane Katrina and before the professional hate-mongers lit up the coverage of the aftermath.

I just ran across something fascinating. 80% of the people of New Orleans evacuated. The number of lives saved because of that is probably enormous.

So why did they evacuate. An AP story from Sunday, August 28, tells us:

8/28/2005, 10:48 a.m. CT
The Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — In the face of a catastrophic Hurricane Katrina, a mandatory evacuation was ordered Sunday for New Orleans by Mayor Ray Nagin.

Acknowledging that large numbers of people, many of them stranded tourists, would be unable to leave, the city set up 10 places of last resort for people to go, including the Superdome.

The mayor called the order unprecedented and said anyone who could leave the city should. He exempted hotels from the evacuation order because airlines had already cancelled all flights.

Gov. Kathleen Blanco, standing beside the mayor at a news conference, said President Bush called and personally appealed for a mandatory evacuation for the low-lying city, which is prone to flooding.

How about that?

Obsessive government bashing

[Note: As some know, PiratePundit writes for the Free Market News Network, and they have been very good to me. Today, however, I got rather ticked off at their coverage of Hurricane Katrina, and decided to put my "chief legal correspondent" title on the line by writing the following]

When I checked in on FMNN today, as I do every day, I was disappointed at the scarcity of coverage of Hurricane Katrina’s impact on hundreds of thousands, even millions, of our fellow, private citizens. When I read the two articles that do deal with the situation on the Gulf Coast (one in the news section, one in the commentary section), I was distressed enough at what I read to write an article of my own, even though I normally confine my articles to legal issues, (right now it is a bit difficult to find an obvious legal angle in this story). I had to write this, however, because I am concerned that it seems either too easy or too tempting to miss the real stories impacting individual liberties because of a myopic view of significant events borne of an obsession with finding fault in government rather than critiquing and highlighting those private solutions to public problems that we are always talking about. I appreciate your indulgence, therefore, if you read on.

The top story on FMNN today in the news section links to a website called Counterpunch; I don’t like the site, but since FMNN linked to it, I won’t elaborate as to why. Counterpunch has several articles relating to Hurricane Katrina; I’ve read them, and without exception they have the general theme that United States foreign policy is responsible for all of the disaster in the Gulf (our Gulf, not that other one). The article linked to by the FMNN top link today makes the point in its first sentence: “Chalk up the city of New Orleans as a cost of Bush’s Iraq war.” How is that? I’ll get to that in a moment.

First, can we back up from that sentence for a moment and take another look at it? I presume that the author meant to insert words like “destruction in” into that sentence, as the sentence as written tends to suggest that New Orleans ought not to exist in the first place, and only does, damnthatbush!, because of the war. I’ll give the author the benefit of the doubt and edit it for him to say “Chalk up the destruction in the city of New Orleans as a cost of Bush’s Iraq war.” Once again, how could that be?

I live in Florida. Tropical storms and hurricanes are – and always have been – a fact of life. The barrier island that I grew up on, I was taught in high school, only exists because of the awesome effects of hurricanes that came, regularly over hundreds and thousands of years. Basically my hometown of Satellite Beach is on a giant sandbar created by hundreds of enormous storms. To turn the clock ahead to the present age, just last year my family and I lost four trees, one of them an enormous oak that nearly crushed not only my house but my neighbor’s (it fell instead at a most fortunate angle), and we lost most of our roof, and at least two weeks of work, mental health, and normalcy. We were lucky.

In my most sleep-deprived, stressed-out, over-protective, and manic moments during Hurricane Charley and the week afterward without water, electricity, or a reliable source of fuel, it would not have occurred to me that it was Operation Iraqi Freedom that had caused the damage and my situation. If I had thought that, I would have been deluded. I would have been crazy. I would have been incorrect. Reality check: I can tell you that I heard the freight-train sound of a tornado in the black of night lit only by our aptly-named hurricane lamps and by flashes of lightning saw the wind and rain, and George Bush was nowhere to be seen. Hurricanes cause damage. They level things. They kill. They flood. They always have. For anyone to suggest that things would be significantly different in New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast if there were no National Guard troops deployed to Iraq, one would have to either not be able to distinguish between a category 4 hurricane and a cotton candy stand, (or, to go ahead and insert my “legal” angle, lacking in the ability to distinguish between proximate cause and a sham pleading), or else is so obsessed with the government and its leaders as to lose sight of the individual stories all around us.

Counterpunch claims that “The mayor of New Orleans was counting on helicopters to put in place massive sandbags to repair the levee. However, someone called the few helicopters away to rescue people from rooftops.” I’m sorry, but I’d really have to see a source for that, because it doesn’t make sense. In other words, I think it is simply made up. Rotary wing assets suitable for repairing levees and search and rescue birds are different things. Besides, even if the story happened to be true, I don’t know that it is such a horrible thing that helicopters might leave a futile effort for a sure-thing rescue of some humans.

Still, it’s worth pointing out that the Louisiana National Guard doesn’t have a whole hell of a lot of helicopters to start with. It consists of some command and training units, and also the units where the rubber meets the road: the 256th Mechanized Infantry Brigade, the 225th Engineer Group (those are combat engineers, not civil engineers), and the 204th Air Traffic Services Group (air traffic controllers). To make a long story short, they wouldn’t have had many helicopters at all, and not the sort of helicopters that can be used to fix levee breaches in the first place, no matter where on the globe they might happen to be at the moment.

Second, even if, as claimed, there is no legitimate and acceptable use for all of the military’s helicopters except to hover above levees that might be breached, it wouldn’t matter a whole lot anyway. The Army Corps of Engineers, despite its name, is mostly run by civilians (again, it’s important to distinguish between combat engineering and civil engineering; they are different things), and has its own assets and methods for managing the Mississippi River, Lake Pontchartrain, and their attendant levees. Ranting about military assets that may or may not be available, but which are in any event not suited to complex civil engineering efforts is, in a word, irrelevant.

I’ve said enough about the Counterpunch article. My point is not so much to counter-counterpunch holes in it as to articulate the fact that, no matter what one thinks about the President, US foreign policy, or Operation Iraqi Freedom, looking at a natural disaster through the lens of how one feels about George Bush is to miss entirely the real stories to be told. Either we are obsessed with government, or we really do care about private solutions to public problems. While a disaster of this magnitude impacts families, groups, communities, and the broader society, it is in essence a series of stories about individuals. For instance, all of the 1.5 million residents of New Orleans were ordered to evacuate. By some estimates, all but about 100,000 did so. That in itself is remarkable, and in fact unprecedented in American history. Why those who didn’t evacuate did not (and I recognize that some were too poor or infirm or isolated to get out) is an interesting question, and we can debate that. Why the masses wandering on the I-10 overpasses seem to have no knowledge of what’s going on, even though those living in southern coastal areas are constantly reminded during hurricane season to have a portable radio with extra batteries ready, is another good question. We can also disagree and debate about that. Those are good stories in which to discuss private solutions to public problems, not gratuitous and, frankly, repetitive complaints about the Iraq War.

This leads me finally to the brief commentary posted on FMNN by one of my colleagues, who repeats the lament that President Bush has caused a shortage of National Guard troops. Personally, having left active duty service in the Army in 1992 during an enormous draw-down of American military strength known as a RIF (“Reduction In Force”; you can think of the fact that I am now an attorney instead of a soldier as your own personal Peace Dividend), it seems to me that blame for “not enough troops”, either at home or abroad, can be placed at the foot of more than one President, if one is inclined to turn this story into one of blame, and nothing else.

My colleague’s commentary suggests that there are not enough National Guard troops to police New Orleans. Frankly, I do not know if that is true or not, as the operational ability to police changes somewhat when there are several feet of water in the city. I will say this, however: According to a 2004 article I found about the reduction in the city’s police force, there are about 1,500 cops on the New Orleans force to police a population of 1.5 million. Theoretically, it would take only about 150 (or we can triple it to 450 because of the difficult conditions) to police the city with the vast majority of its citizens already gone. The military has already mobilized 4,200 military police to the area, and is sending an additional 10,000 guardsmen. So what is the point of ignoring every other aspect of the story of Hurricane Katrina, and focusing only upon criticizing the President, the military, and Operation Iraqi Freedom? I’d love to know.