perfidy

Every once in a while I read a quote that's so monumentally stupid I recoil. You may have read about the recent woes the Coast Guard has had refitting ships; modernizing and extending its cutters was intended to upgrade their capabilities. Alas, somehow it went wrong, and the eight ships "refitted" so far have been removed from service, as dangerous cracks in the hull plating appeared under stress. Steel bands were wrapped around the ships to try and keep them together, but they were sidelined anyway.

It's another clusterfuck courtesy of Northrop-Grumman and Lockheed-Martin, who currently receive a very large slice of your tax dollars. A few congressoids got enthusiastically in favor of the program after being bribed (oops, sorry, lobbied). N-G and L-M take their 30-50% cut for doing nothing but handing it to a subcontractor. That sub was Bollinger Shipyards, whose colossal fuckup this predominantly is.

So back to stupid. There's no explanation for how Bollinger managed to get their engineering calculations so very, very wrong. The Coast Guard's own engineers predicted the problems (by doing, you known, math stuff). Bollinger's explanation?

Bollinger, it turned out, had overestimated how much stress the modified boats could handle, a miscalculation it cannot fully explain. “The computer broke for some reason,” said T. R. Hamlin, a senior Bollinger manager. “Whether it was a power surge or something, who knows?” The cursory oversight by the Coast Guard meant the mistake was not caught in time.

The computer broke? A fucking power surge? Who knows? Apparently the Coast Guard didn't even bother to fill up the oversight positions on the procurement panel. My cynical, Occam's-razor take on that? The fix was in, and there wasn't any point in overseeing a damn thing. The engineers who knew the difference between a lunchbox and a torpedo moved on to someplace they could make a difference.

So I search for "bollinger shipyards republican", on a hunch -- which these days we can also define as a "certainty". Yep, there it is. Hit #1:

Donald T. “Boysie” Bollinger is Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Bollinger Shipyards, Inc., a family-owned business established in 1946 by Boysie’s father. Bollinger Shipyards, Inc. is a full service marine construction and repair operation headquartered in Lockport, Louisiana with 12 divisions in Louisiana, two divisions in Texas, and activities extending into the international market.

Boysie Bollinger participates at both national and state levels in the political area. He served as a delegate to every Republican National Convention since 1976, and was the State of Louisiana’s Finance Chairman for the George W. Bush for President Campaign and Campaign Chair for his General Election. Boysie Bollinger was State Finance Chairman of the Louisiana Republican Party on three occasions and served on the Louisiana Republican State Central Committee.

Boysie Bollinger currently serves on the National Petroleum Council. He previously served on the President’s Export Council under the administration of President George H.W. Bush. He is past Chairman of the Governor’s Maritime Advisory Task Force, on the board of the Governor’s Advisory Commission on Military Affairs, and former Chairman of the Board of Commissioners, Port of New Orleans.

Great. Your tax dollars at work. And for half of you (perhaps less these days) -- welcome to your ideology at work.

Always foolin' with stuff that should just be legislated. Like sandwiches. Is a Burrito a sandwich?. Judges pokin' their noses in where they don't belong.

I thought a lot about the election in the lead-up. I thought about the things I wanted to say to voters, figured out positions on issues, and all of that. In the end, I just decided to keep it shut and let nature take its course. I think the results were positive, and given how delicate the results were in Virginia we can all see that butterflies in Argentina influenced this election.

I'll make one general observation, though. For years now we've been hearing that the "liberal media" was distorting the truth of what's been going on in Iraq, and we've been hearing that from the very top of this administration. I think it is generally recognized now that the "liberal media distortion field" theory was BS, and that the reality distortion field was being emitted directly from the White House.

Take a moment to consider what this means for other top-shelf issues. Administration policy on environmental issues was and is being created by the same folks who brought you the Iraq war, and lied about what we really going on there (as distinct from the reason for the war). Tax policy is being created by these people as well -- we've had a massive tax cut for the wealthiest, and the numbers are in. They got a lot richer. Otherwise, median incomes are down, and Joe Average is worse off than before. And that doesn't even begin to include Joe Average's debt for the war, and for the tax cuts.

While Bush focused the tax relief "love" only at the highest income levels, he saw fit to spread the cost of the wars very evenly across all income brackets.

A tax cut for the wealthy that is not accompanied by spending cuts is a tax increase on everyone else. Period!

I can't help but think that the window for fixing some of the fundamental problems that this society has been facing is simply closed. The politically accessible surpluses that could have made headway on the real problems has been foolishly wasted on an incompetent attempt at nation-building, birthed by an untested superiority complex. The timing couldn't have been worse.

Massachusetts Governor-elect Deval Patrick crushed former Lt Governor Kerry Healey by at least a 2-1 margin statewide. Patrick is the first non-white to hold the post; Healey would've been the first woman. You'd a thunk that in absurdly PC Massachusetts, such a decision would've been tough to make, with voters just spinning in circles trying to decide which candidate was mroe deserving. But no- even the towns Healey ended up taking were closely contested. Not surprisingly Democratic candidates across the Commonwealth dominated their rivals, when in fact there were rivals- several races were unopposed.

The Boston Globe has a spiffy breakout of who did what where here.

Somehow, Deval's message of hope, reconciliation, rainbows and puppies resonated with a large majority of voters, voters who seem to think that paying higher taxes for the same services is a big step forward. His economic plan of taking more money away from people who produce through taxation in order to attract(!) business to the state frankly baffles me, but I'm sure an economist could explain to me.

Actually, better yet, I'd rather a business owner explain it to me.

But you know, I'm really not bitter about it- it's not like my guy lost. Mitt Romney washed his hands of the place awhile ago to pursue national attention, and he's been something of a ghost in Healey's campaign- lots of sightings or suggestive distant noises, but little conclusive evidence of his existence. Besides, I think everyone- yes, everyone, at that level of politics is a snake, so there's that.

What I am is surprised that so many people ate Deval up, especially from among such cynical people as Yankees tend to be. Well, now with a Dem governor, Dem legislature, and ridiculous judiciary, the Commonwealth may well finally be the utopian society that everyone's longed for for so long.

The thousands who fled the state over the last couple years were probably just mean-spirited hatemongers.

Well, that, plus I don't yet know what there is to say about the day's elections:

For what it's worth, all three alleged opinions are worth a chuckle.

What quest, I see you asking yourself?

The one designed to make sure that nobody ever takes a Libertarian candidate seriously, thanks for asking. In an article entitled "Loretta Nall campaigning on her cleavage", we're informed that:

Loretta Nall, the Libertarian Party’s write-in candidate for governor of Alabama, is campaigning on her cleavage and hoping that voters will eventually focus on her platform.

“It started out as a joke, but it blew up into something huge,” said Nall, a 32-year-old with dyed blond hair.

Sorry, dear - hate to burst your bubble, but it's still a joke.

I'm sympathetic to many of the ideas espoused by Libertarian candidates, insofar as I can separate the seemingly copious stupidity of some of the party's adherents from the ideas themselves. No fascist, I tend to think that people should be allowed to do many of the things that the laws of the various states presently prohibit. Many of those laws have only passing basis in maintaining an orderly society, and the Libertarians broadly support getting rid of such regulations.

However...

Here (from the linked article) are the things Nall stands for:

• Withdrawal of the Alabama National Guard from Iraq
• Tax credits for sending children to private school and home schooling
• Opting out of the No Child Left Behind Act
• Legalizing marijuana
• Not complying with the Patriot Act and the Real ID Act.

Well, all that, plus tits.

And of the items on her list, I only see one that's actually within the purview of a state governor, from Alabama or anywhere else in the US, to control.

So, loosely viewed, she's either pissing up a rope, or she thinks everyone's stupid enough to fall for her moronic platform. To my complete lack of surprise, I find that:

The Libertarian Party could not collect the 40,000 voter signatures needed to get her name on the ballot, and she has not reached the $25,000 threshold in contributions that would require her to file a campaign finance report.

She puts her cleavage behind her deeply held beliefs, however:

Early in her campaign, she talked about how her misdemeanor arrest for marijuana possession in 2002 led her to start the U.S. Marijuana Party.

So there's that - she's a woman of her (misdemeanor) convictions. And she's an entertainer, it seems:

Then she entertained readers of her campaign Web site with lots of information about her personal life, including a discussion of why she doesn’t wear panties.

All due respect to the Libertarian Party, but next time somebody tells me, incorrectly, that my vote, two weeks hence, for Kinky Friedman as governor of Texas is wasted, I'll point them toward the story of Loretta Nall, and they'll know what a truly wasted vote would look like.

Who knew? In an opinion piece from today's WSJ, Kimberley Strassel writes:

In the Ohio governor's race, Ken Blackwell is trailing his Democratic competitor, Ted Strickland, by double digits. Save a last-minute miracle, Mr. Blackwell will lose the governor's mansion, and so end 16 years of GOP dominance.

In the Florida governor's race, Charlie Crist is leading his Democratic competitor, Jim Davis, by double digits. Save a last-minute misstep, Mr. Crist is set to give the state GOP a third term in the governor's mansion, overseeing a strong Republican legislative majority.

Their respective failure and success is not ideological: Messrs. Blackwell and Crist are both running on the same agenda of tax cuts, fiscal responsibility and broad government reform. This, instead, is a story of the state parties behind them. In Florida, Republicans have spent the past eight years keeping their promises to voters; in Ohio the GOP forgot what "promise" meant somewhere in the '90s. The tale of these two GOPs offers broader lessons for congressional Republicans, who are facing a rout this fall.

As my fellow Minister Ross pointed out just yesterday, it's important to hold politicians to their promises (after, of course, you've convinced yourself they're not morally lower than whale shit, and then voted for them). He spoke in terms of how the left side of the blogosphere should "declare its independence from the political order", and while I think he was being far too specific to one portion of this medium, it was, after all, his post, and thus his opinion. But his overall point was quite valid, even before I filtered it through my own worldview.

I am not intimate with Florida politics, though a proto-communist friend of mine claims that the state's a mess, with crumbling infrastructure and enough other woes that I'm curious why, oh why, he relocated to Tampa, having commuted to the area for quite some time (ironically, from Ohio) before deciding to move house. But if, as Ms. Strassel says, the Republicans are cruising to a victory there, I guess that some large proportion, a majority even, of the state's voters think things are fine.

And on the other side of the ledger, we have Ohio. I'm somewhat more current on my knowledge of that state's, uh, state. Ken Blackwell, aside from periodic flashes of near-zealotry that have no place in politics, has long seemed like a guy I could support if I were still an Ohio resident. Says Ms. Strassel:

"There hasn't been a bigger critic of the Taft administration than Ken Blackwell," says Ken Blackwell . . . again and again. Voters can't find it in themselves to make the distinction.

All true - Mr. Blackwell has been, rightly and deservedly, a complete pain in Bob Taft's ass. (And mine, now that I think about it, referring to himself in the third person. Who does he think he is, Bob Dole?) I can, however, understand the desire of the state's residents to "throw the bums out", as the stench of corruption, devil-may-care tax policy, and flat incompetence has gotten bad enough that I can almost smell it from South Texas.

More than once over the past several years, I've been reminded that Ohio was a good place to be from, and if a majority of the residents think the same, well I can't say as I blame them. I don't remember Ted Strickland as a scary guy at all, and he could hardly do worse for the state than the execrable Mr. Taft, who, along with the lachrymose George Voinovich, presided over tax increases of more than 70% since I left the state last century.

And there's the problem, as I think I intimated in a comment to Minister Ross' post - it sucks to have to wait so long to flush the toilet. And that goes quadruple at the Federal level, where our elected spastics can do some damage worthy of the moniker.

Some day, if this entire "Internet" thing ever takes off, there might be a way to coherently, and in an adult manner, express an opinion between elections that someone will listen to.

At least that's my hope.

It struck me a few days ago that now is the time for the blogosphere to declare its independence from the political order. In particular this is the time for the left wing blogosphere to send a strong signal to the politicians they're trying to get elected: We are watching you. We've been watching the right for a while now, and believe me when I say that we're going to be watching you the second you're elected. The GOP hoodwinked a lot of real conservatives and turned into garden variety crooks in astonishingly short order.

Let's try hard not to let that happen again. Let's tell them we're going to be watching. Positions on the issues don't matter if you're a crook and your ethics are in question. The starting point is honesty in opinion, self-reflection, and ethical discourse. These are dangerous times, and dangerous times require realism. Elected representatives need to engage in realism for the country as a whole; not for one part of it, or for themselves.

Harvard researcher Robert Putnam, a respected political scientist, natch, has released a study indicating that diversity sucks. Of course, distinguished researchers do not summarize the results of their study with phrases like, "Diversity sucks." Nevertheless:

His research shows that the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone – from their next-door neighbour to the mayor.

The core message of the research was that, "in the presence of diversity, we hunker down", he said. "We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it's not just that we don't trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don't trust people who do look like us."

Prof Putnam found trust was lowest in Los Angeles, "the most diverse human habitation in human history", but his findings also held for rural South Dakota, where "diversity means inviting Swedes to a Norwegians' picnic".

When the data were adjusted for class, income and other factors, they showed that the more people of different races lived in the same community, the greater the loss of trust. "They don't trust the local mayor, they don't trust the local paper, they don't trust other people and they don't trust institutions," said Prof Putnam. "The only thing there's more of is protest marches and TV watching."

Well, then. We have been informed by the most august of personages and institutions for some time that diversity is something to be encouraged, celebrated, nay, wallowed in. And now, we find that human persons when confronted with outsiders make like monkeys and throw post modern feces across the stream. Perhaps after all there is a human nature.

It would be without precedent for a Harvard researcher to present findings such as these without a prescription for the remolding of soceity to overcome such trifles as human nature and people's innate distrust of those they don't know. And, lo, Putnam delivers:

Prof Putnam stressed, however, that immigration materially benefited both the "importing" and "exporting" societies, and that trends "have been socially constructed, and can be socially reconstructed".

In an oblique criticism of Jack Straw, leader of the House of Commons, who revealed last week he prefers Muslim women not to wear a full veil, Prof Putnam said: "What we shouldn't do is to say that they [immigrants] should be more like us. We should construct a new us."

Right! We'll get right on that, and we should have a new us ready by next Tuesday. Meanwhile, I need to load my shotgun. There's some immigrants lurking in my neighborhood, and I can't trust my damn fool herring eating Norwegian Mayor to do anything about it.

... would have been Janet Reno.

Just watched, somewhat belatedly, the Zucker political ad. Have to say, it's funny. It's a shame more political ads aren't like this. People go on about negative campaigning, but this isn't it. Negative campaigning is calling your opponent's wife a whore, or claiming (absent any chat records or the like) that your opponent is gay, or a criminal, or the like. Making fun of actual policies and actions isn't what I call negative campaigning. I mean, what's the voter going to go by, except the record of an incumbant? Pointing at that record and saying, "This sucks" is entirely reasonable. Especially if it's funny. Now there is an entirely different argument to be made on aesthetic grounds - whether something is tasteless, or such. But this ad wasn't really that.

The beauty of the internets is that Zucker gets his ad viewed - it's on Drudge now - without having to go through the wusses in the political parties or through the filter of the major media. It's a new world, baby.

[wik] It is also the nature of this new world to be ruthlessly fact checked into the boards. My confrere Patton notes that the correct spelling of our illustrious ex-Sec'y State is Albright, not Albrecht. In my defense, I offer only that five years of German sometimes causes bizarre transliteration errors. I still think, though, that Janet Reno is scarier than any foot smeller, and indeed scarier than just about anything.

Senator John McCain is by most standards a major political figure. Seriously in the running for the oval office, respected by the essential middle of the electorate, a reliable source for the money quote and well liked by the media.

And now, a blogger, thanks to a guest post at the Captains Quarters.

McCain has some interesting things to say about the North Korean nuclear test - or fizzle – depending on who you talk to. Worth reading, and I recommend that you do. But what interests me at this moment is the fact of his appearance on a blog. The political world has been edging towards the blog world for some time now, though it has been a sideways crabbing motion rather than a full frontal embrace of the medium.

Blogs have certainly had their impact on politics – one need only think back to the fall from grace of Majority Leader Trent Lott, the swift boats and the blogosphere’s moment of glory, folding memogate til it was all sharp corners and inviting Dan Rather to sit on it. And politicians have made use of blogs, as well. Dean’s staff, during his presidential campaign, made notable effect of a blog both to disseminate the governor’s message and for fund raising. Hilary Clinton’s campaign in waiting has hired a blog outreach director.

But here, here we have an actual political personage making an appearance on a blog, rather than being sandbagged by one, or having staffers manage one. This is a first, and it is a significant milestone in the growth of the political blogosphere as a force that does not merely discuss politics, but changes and directs events. In the recent past, the blogs, collectively, have been the kids exiled to the kitchen table while the adults ate the sumptious Thanksgiving dinner in the dining room.

By making yelling loud enough, the kids could on occasion prod the adults into action. Their cries were viewed with the same disdain as parents often feel when judging the concerns of the young – there’s probably nothing going on here, and if we find that you’ve been fibbing, well, there’ll be trouble. For the blogs to make a case, it was uphill all the way – first to overcome the natural disdain of the elder media, and only second the facts of whatever issue they pushed.

We can look at this as either a promotion to the adult’s table. Which, really, is still a bit of a stretch. But at least one of the adults has come into the kitchen and sat down with us and treated us, for a moment at least, as one of the adults. A precedent has been set, though. McCain, and his handlers must have had a discussion about what was the proper venue for the dissemination of this message – and not some random policywonkish statement on, say, the advisability of instituting ethanol quality standards or something equally banal but a national security issue of the greatest importance – and they decided that the best place for McCain to make this statement was on a blog, as a guest poster.

The blog world is poised in the archway between the kitchen and the dining room.

Political figures will now be taking even more interest in the blogosphere. They will be making more efforts to communicate to, and through, the blogworld. Some of these efforts will be hamfisted, clumsy or even desperate, since knowledge of the blog world is vanishingly rare outside our community. There will be those that get it, or know someone who does, and their success in this medium will add to their efforts in others, and in close races, or in hotly argued debates, having this additional means of communication and rallying support will make a difference.

[wik] Linked to OTB's Linkfest.

I could go on and on about the political and electoral ramifications of the small tactical nuclear explosion that is the decline and fall of Representative Foley (R-Fla). But I won't. Instead, let me make a simple comment on the transcript of one of his IMs, the which can be read here. Just creepy. Creepy.

Another post long delayed is an update to my post on the laws of civilized warfare. Or as Ken McLeod would have it, “Civilised Warfare.” Shortly after writing my piece, I was cruising around my internet neighborhood, and dropped in on the Maximum Leader. He had posted a link to an editorial by one Sam Harris in the LA Times. Mr. Harris is a liberal, and recently the author of a book that slams religion. All of them. (At least he is even-handed in his contempt. Like the saying goes, you’re not a bigot if you hate everyone.) Normally I avoid reading the LA Times, so I would likely have missed this article if not for the intervention of our Dear Leader.

Now, one would expect that a liberal religion hater would also hold a typical package of left-leaning beliefs. You would be wrong. The whole article is worth reading, and you should be reading Naked Villainy on general principles. But one bit bore directly on my post of last week.

In their analyses of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy, liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral distinctions. For instance, they ignore the fact that Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so. Muslims routinely use human shields, and this accounts for much of the collateral damage we and the Israelis cause; the political discourse throughout much of the Muslim world, especially with respect to Jews, is explicitly and unabashedly genocidal.

Given these distinctions, there is no question that the Israelis now hold the moral high ground in their conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah. And yet liberals in the United States and Europe often speak as though the truth were otherwise.

We are entering an age of unchecked nuclear proliferation and, it seems likely, nuclear terrorism. There is, therefore, no future in which aspiring martyrs will make good neighbors for us. Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies.

This summary is, tragically, far better written than my own. But it again hits the point that unless we are to completely discard any sort of moral viewpoint of human action in the world, we have no choice but to view some people, groups, and actions as inherently better than others. (The alternative is to view the world through a lens of expediency, which is what McLeod seems to suggest, despite his claims of compassion.)

Tolerance, compassion and fairness are virtues. What liberals so often fail to realize is that they are far from the only virtues. When we look out at the world we must make judgments, we must discriminate between the good and the bad. If we lack the courage and confidence to look at someone and say, “That’s wrong” we have no compass for guiding our own actions in the world.

Fresh from my inbox to your screen, Kinky's campaign answers questions related to his scuffle with the interestingly-monikered and intellectually challenged Senfronia Puff-n-Stuff:

Kinky Friedman Campaign Statement

Friends and neighbors,

While Rick Perry was cheerleading in college and Chris Bell was being potty trained, Kinky Friedman was picketing segregated restaurants in Austin to integrate them. Now that Kinky’s in second place and a serious threat to the two-party system, Perry and Bell have paid political assassins to dig back as far as 30 years through fictional books, comedy shows and song lyrics, desperately seeking to paint Kinky as a racist.

Republicans and Democrats have created an entire industry -- called Opposition Research -- whose sole purpose is to tarnish and destroy people’s reputations. This is why regular citizens don't run for office. If you do, and you start to threaten the system as Kinky has, you’re going to be attacked.

Kinky has overcome all of the obstacles placed before him -- getting on the ballot, raising millions of dollars, building the largest grassroots network Texas has ever seen, and breaking 20% in the polls months ago. He's a serious threat to the establishment, and when you threaten the political establishment, they use the money generated from their formidable fundraising machines to pay for "dirty tricks" tactics to manipulate the press.

It's a slimy industry that exists for the sole purpose of destroying people and -- like cockroaches -- scurries for the shadows whenever a light is shined on it.

The latest political assassination attempt takes completely out of context a controversial word that Kinky was using in a 1980 stand-up performance to lampoon racists. Playing a character on stage, Kinky was exposing bigotry through comedy and satire.

It’s pathetic that the major-party candidates have sunk to this -- trying to paint Kinky as a racist when, in fact, he was poking fun at racists. Shame on the press for being complicit. Rather than confront our opponents on their tactics and get the full story, they are allowing industries like opposition research to exist and operate outside the understanding of most voters.

-The Kinky Friedman Campaign for Governor

Hmmph. That'll show 'em. Why the hell not?

The Post has a follow-up to their article on George Allen's pseudo-Jewishness.

At the table in Palos Verdes, Calif., Allen's mother, who is 83, said she told her son the truth: That she had been raised as a Jew in Tunisia before moving to the United States. She said that she and the senator's father, famed former Redskins coach George Allen, had wanted to protect their children from living with the fear that she had experienced during World War II. Her father, Felix Lumbroso, was imprisoned by the Nazis during the German occupation of Tunis.

"What they put my father through. I always was fearful," Etty Allen said in a telephone interview. "I didn't want my children to have to go through that fear all the time. When I told Georgie, I said, 'Now you don't love me anymore.' He said, 'Mom, I respect you more than ever.' "

I can't help but wonder exactly why Etty Allen was worried that "Georgie" wouldn't love her any more? I mean, a mother usually knows her child pretty well. And she was worried.

Let's also point out that it is quite clear that Allen flat-out lied about it when asked by a reporter. Good thing he wasn't under oath, huh? No double standard, right? Anybody recall George Allen's position on the Clinton/Lewinsky crap?

The other George, fool! :)

Speaking with The Times-Dispatch, Allen said the disclosure is "just an interesting nuance to my background." He added, "I still had a ham sandwich for lunch. And my mother made great pork chops."

Everybody repeat after George: I am not a Jew!

Remember the whole "macaca" thing? Turns out that macaca is common slang for n---g-er in French/Northern Africa(Wiktionary). Turns out that Allen's mother is from Tunisia.

Maybe his cradle songs were a little different. Maybe when he said it was a "made-up word" he wasn't being entirely truthful.

Maybe, just maybe, this guy is exactly what he appears to be. Which to me is a very stupid version of Cartman.

Found this fantastic graphic, courtesy of the NO Times-Picayune. It challenges a lot of "common wisdom" about the flooding, with a very clear depiction of how and why flooding occurred. I was curious about the effects of Mr. GO (the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet) on New Orleans during Katrina. Mr. GO is a 70-mile canal dug from the gulf straight through the wetlands to New Orleans' inner harbor, creating a kind of "express highway" for storm surge. It and the other artificial constructs (canals and levees) are the real reason that Katrina had the devastating effect on New Orleans that it did. Each mile of wetlands reduces storm surge by approximately 1 foot, according to what I've read. Wetlands could have reduced away five, ten, or fifteen feet of storm surge if they had been present. By eliminating hundreds of square miles of wetlands over the past 70 years (and even farther back on a more limited scale) the "protection" of New Orleans has resulted in its inevitable destruction. If you watch the graphic, pay close attention to the locations of the levee breaks. The river didn't flood its banks, and neither did the lakes. The breaches occurred at points along the artificial canals.

Each year that the river's sediment has been prevented from being spread out over the flood plain (a natural result of flooding) the land has declined. The sediment has actually ended up out in the gulf, wasted, because the "bird's foot" extension of the Mississippi into the Gulf extends out to the edge of the continental shelf. The bottom line is that the continued survival of the landmass depends on consistent flooding by the river so that that replacement land is created at (or above) the rate at which the soil is removed (into the Gulf).

Enough with the science already. Since I'm writing this post, everyone must be curious as how to how this means Republicans suck. To be fair, it's not just the GOP -- it's been a number of governments not paying attention to the problem. First, the fix.

The fix is an engineering program that uses the Mississippi river like a muddy garden hose, moving it around and "spraying" the delta with the sediment, replenishing over many years what has been taken away. There's universal agreement on both sides of the political aisle that this is the best and only long term solution. The problem is the cost, which prior to Katrina was considered to be absolutely prohibitive.

The price tag was $14 billion, in 2000. The current price tag from Katrina's damage is at $100 billion and climbing. Way back in 2000-2001 politicians of all stripes and bents came together in recognition of the long term problem and solution, and went with their proposals to the federal government. Bush struck nearly the entire program from the budget, replacing it with a single $250 million allocation for further "study". Decades of study had already been done, and the enormously difficult work of pulling together many parts of the political spectrum too. All of this was tossed away like garbage by a President that treats science like an unwanted stepchild.

Around the same time, Bush's "Iraq Recovery Fund" proposed over $100 million in spending to replenish wetlands in Iraq. Congress struck that provision from the package, but it gives you an understanding of the priorities at the time.

$14 billion is what this nation spends every six weeks in Iraq. Iraq is costing this country a sum of money (say a minimum of $500 billion) that could have cured cancer, or introduced a hydrogen infrastructure to the entire continent, or compensated the victims of Katrina many times over. That's what you've given away.

Sure, hindsight is 20-20. And yes, previous governments could have done something about this, and didn't. But Bush was the one who rejected the "real solution" when it was finally put in front of a national politician. And he is the one who presided over emergency mangement so incompetent that people were dying while standing on the interstate after waiting for five days in the sun for a bus to arrive.

Bush wants to talk about anything but New Orleans and Katrina in this election cycle. The same goes for the GOP as a whole. During Katrina, we found out exactly how the Bush administration would react if disaster struck a major American city: They would fuck it up beyond belief, and the well-connected would make money from it.

New Orleans and the disaster's management is the Bush Presidency in a microcosm. Incompetent from top to bottom, winking at corruption, ignorant of science, lacking the common sense necessary to compensate for lack of knowledge, and above all, utterly lacking in compassion for hardship, heartache, death and destruction their policies cause.

Could Bush have prevented Katrina? Of course not. But he could have begun the process, and if the post-hurricane disaster had had anything resembling leadership much suffering would have been prevented.

We have heard hundreds, if not thousands of evocations of Saddam Hussein's evil gassing of his own people, which killed perhaps 5,000 of them in an afternoon. Where does this adminstration note that its policies and activities have resulted in or contributed to the deaths of at least 30,000 Iraqi citizens?

No remorse. No explanations. No admissions of error. In general, no information is provided by this administration other than jingoistic rhetoric directed at staying the course.

You are not safer with these people in charge, or with anyone they've trained or groomed.

This could leave a mark:

AUSTIN - A Houston-area lawmaker said Tuesday that she is "vehemently insulted" by independent gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman's derogatory comments about Hurricane Katrina evacuees.

Friedman last week attributed a spike in Houston's crime rate to the "crackheads and thugs" who evacuated New Orleans.

I haven't a clue how "She" could both be offended by his comments and simultaneously be an elected representative from Houston, since Kinky wasn't talking about Houstonians with funny names, but instead was speaking of Katrina evacuees, but "She" continues:

"He has demonstrated a total lack of human sensitivity," said state Rep. Senfronia Thompson, D-Houston. "The people of Katrina have lost everything and are suffering not only from the loss of loved ones, but the trauma of the event itself. What has precipitated from this tragedy is behavior that results from a disastrous event."

Damn - is it just me, or did Senfronia just say that, yeah, the Katrina evacuees laid waste to large parts of Houston, but that it's OK, because it was to be expected under the circumstances? Ouch. And that will leave a mark, but probably not on Kinky Friedman.

Sadly, it probably won't leave a mark on Senfronia, either, because Houston proper has a wicked habit of electing maundering assholes to minor functionary legislative positions. (See "Sheila Jackson Lee", though, to be fair, the tony suburb of Sugarland hasn't covered itself in electoral glory either, and the city does sometimes do right, such as with Mayor Bill White and Judge Bill Eckels, true studs, both)

After all, something more than 20% of the year's homicides (through Aug 26) in Houston have involved Katrina evacuees (though that includes both perps and victims). Kinky appears, as always, to just be saying what everyone can see with their own damned eyes.

Stretching fair use to its limits, just in case that link up top goes stale, I have to also include the following excerpts:

"Kinky Friedman has called himself a 'compassionate redneck,' " said Thompson, chairwoman of the Texas Legislative Black Caucus. "He would do well henceforth to highlight his compassion while de-emphasizing his redneck tendencies."

Yeah, there's that. But it's not like the governor in Texas actually has to do much of anything. Honest. And this:

Friedman earlier this week also said that we would not pander to different ethnic groups while campaigning for governor.

"I don't eat tamales in the barrio, I don't eat fried chicken in the ghetto, I don't eat bagels with the Jews for breakfast," said Friedman, who is Jewish. "That to me is true racism."

Tell it, brother! I continue to particularly like the cut of the man's jib.

He's #2 in "the polls" so far, but he's both still pretty far behind our current pretty-boy Governor, Rick Perry, and damned by the press to defeat because of his proclivity for action and fun, rather than the slog of executive life.

All that said, if I have to waste a vote in the race for Governor of Texas (a presumption I'm not willing yet to stipulate), I'm happy to waste it on a guy who knows that the job is virtually all public relations and bully-pulpit, and who also knows that in Texas, it's generally defensible to just speak your mind, particularly as long as you're stating the bald-faced obvious.

Kevin Drum notes that the California legislature has passed a measure that would direct the state's electoral votes based on the national results, rather than the results in California. There's speculation on whether or not the Governator will sign it; I hope that he does. The odd and divisive strategies of national elections are driven by the craziness of the electoral vote system, and if enough states adopt this legislation, the country will be heading firmly back in the direction of "one person, one vote". With any luck the tyranny of rural America will end.

Under the legislation, California would grant its electoral votes to the nominee who gets the most votes nationwide — not the most votes in California....The California legislation would not take effect until enough states passed such laws to make up a majority of the Electoral College votes — a minimum of 11 states, depending on population.

It's bad for Republicans, of course. More populous states would gain in overall power. I do note the irony that under this system California's electoral votes would have gone to Bush in the last election, which is fine with me (in the numerical sense).

Christopher Hitchens on the sputtering end to a massively hyped scandal. Worth reading.