Cohen Contracts Krugmanitis

Richard Cohen insists President Bush follow the fiscal restraint of Lyndon B. Johnson, of all presidents, and raise taxes to pay for the Iraq War. He accuses Bush of irresponsibly throwing away huge tax surpluses and demands a choice between guns and butter. Cohen usually has lots of unkind things to say and his column today is no exception:

For Bush, facts are neither hard nor inescapable. He believes in "magical math"... Bush...came into office -- as he did life itself -- with a huge surplus. He spent it...

But look past the snide insults and there's not much substance to Cohen's charges. He spills a well of ink comparing Iraq and Vietnam (again), but conveniently fails to mention any hard numbers beyond counting the war-dead in Iraq--which he anticipatorily rounds up from 1,900 to "almost 2,000." Here are the hard numbers: Vietnam cost the United States a total of $111 billion nominal dollars from 1964-72. That works out to 1.34% of the nation's GDP for those eight years. Iraq will cost about $250 billion even if we maintain present spending rates well into 2006. That's .72% of GDP over just 3 years. The direct economic burden of Vietnam was therefore about five times that of Iraq. Then you have the indirect costs. The Vietnam War shrank America's productive workforce by 8.7 million for at least two years. The 58,000 war-dead were permanently removed from the labor force. They never built businesses, paid taxes, invented new products, etc. (They certainly did make an essential contribution to America's general security and prosperity, but that's a hard number to quantify economically.) These indirect costs of the Vietnam War are easily 50 times that of Iraq. (See here for the Vietnam cost breakdown and here for GDP numbers.) The "huge surplus" for which Cohen pines resulted from an unusual convergence of three elements: Helpful demographic trends which swelled Social Security receipts; surging capital investment which reduced unemployment and spiked income tax revenues; and President Clinton's overwhelming fondness for butter. From 1992 to 2000, surplus Social Security receipts doubled from .8 to 1.6% of GDP. From 1997 to 2000, individual income tax receipts jumped from 9.0 to 10.3% of GDP. And from 1992 to 2000, defense expenditures were slashed from 4.8 to 3.0% of GDP. These three factors combined for a surplus of .8 to 2.4% of GDP from 1998 to 2000. Remove them and the $236 billion surplus in 2000 turns into a $150 billion deficit. Remove the Social Security surplus altogether as you would if federal budgeting occurred outside Wonderland and that's a $225 billion deficit. (See here for a comprehensive overview of federal budget numbers.) Politicians of both parties prove over and over that huge deficits are the only check to their spending. Since 1962 the budget deficit has averaged 2.7% of GDP. That's the real deficit, not the Wonderland deficit which papers over congressional plunder of the federal 401k in an accounting fiction that dwarfs Enron's by several orders of magnitude. During the Bush presidency the real budget deficit has averaged 3.3% of GDP--not good, but no worse than normal considering the economic and security challenges faced in his term. Given political realties, it seems our choice is really between the European model of high taxes, high unemployment, tepid growth, and moderate deficits; and the American model of low taxes, low unemployment, rapid growth, and high deficits. That doesn't seem like a tough choice to me. UPDATE: This piece applies to today's E.J. Dijonnaise column so I'll link it in as well.

Major Blogs with Regular Open Posts

For bloggers: Here's a list of popular blogs which offer regular open posts you can link to publicize your blog. I've included their ecosystem classification as of when I added them. I'll update the list periodically.

Higher Beings

• Little Green Footballs - Open post each morning, but registration closed.

Mortal Humans

• Eschaton - Multiple daily open posts.
• Mudville Gazette - Open post nightly.
• Stop the ACLU - Occasional open posts.

Playful Primates

• The Political Teen - Daily open post.
• Basil's Blog - ?
• Indepundit - ?

Large Mammals

• Cafe Oregano - Occasional open posts.
• Bright & Early - ?
• Jo's Cafe - ?

Bush: Rita is New Orleans Mop-Up Operation

NEW ORLEANS - President Bush announced today that Hurricane Rita, likely to make catastrophic landfall near Houston, was his "mop-up operation to finish exterminating poor and black New Orlinians who fled to Texas."

Bush, aka God, said it saddened him to do this to his home state, but "the people of Houston knew there would be severe consequences for attempting to thwart [his] judgment by harboring Superdome refugees."

When asked why he hated poor and black Americans Bush said, "I have no malice toward any American. Poverty numbers are up and this is part of my plan for getting them back down."

When asked why the government didn't help the poor by simply giving them the billions to be spent on Katrina relief, Bush laughed and said, "That's where my omniscience comes in handy. I already know they'll just spend it on drugs and booze. And we wouldn't get back much tax revenue that way because the poor don't pay taxes in America. Your way would cut a bunch of government agencies and contractors, like Haliburton, out of the loop. And I still owe my supporters a huge debt for helping me steal the 2000 election. My plan will stimulate the economy and keep this recovery on the move up."

Bush said he was comfortable admitting to being selected, not elected, in 2000 because "there are no witnesses to testify against [him] now that [late Supreme Court chief justice William H.] Rehnquist has been called home."

Bush promised to be more open about his future machinations. "Now that the secret of my divinity is out it's no fun pretending Karl Rove is the brains behind everything anymore," Bush said.

Bush also disclosed that Senator John F. Kerry did once possess a magic hat given to him by a cherub posing as a CIA agent in Cambodia. The hat was part of a complex plan to discredit Kerry's 2004 presidential bid.

"Are you sure you aren't the devil?" asked one member of the Whitehouse press pool.

In response Bush smirked, winked, and said, "Well, we have a sayin' back in Texas that one man's God is another man's devil," before ascending into the clouds.

Skins Win! Skins Win! Skins Win!

The Dallas Cowboys scheduled the Washington Redskins as homecoming patsies, and Washington delivered tonight in Dallas. Washington gained just 160 yards of offense, averaged just 3.3 yards per play, turned the ball over twice, and gave up 5 sacks as their offense sputtered through it's eighth quarter with no touchdowns.

Unbelievable! The Redskins win on back to back deep touchdown passes to Santana Moss in the last three minutes of the game, the first on a fourth-and-15 play! This is how the Redskins have usually lost to the Cowboys over the last few years. Is this the end of the seven-year-curse--just 1 Redskins win in the past 15 tries? The announcers said Bill Parcels was 77-0 when leading by 13 or more in the fourth quarter. For Redskins fans this game will rank as one of the most memorable moments of all time--like rookie Darrell Green running down Tony Dorsett from behind to stop a breakaway touchdown run in 1983.

One Dallas fan held up a sign in the second half reading, "Danny Snyder Bought the Redskins but Dallas Owns Them." I think Joe Gibbs just paid off the mortgage!

Seriously, though, post-makeover Jerry Jones does make a good homecoming queen!

Maryland's Gosplanites Busy Again

Radio station WTOP in Washington, D.C reports that Maryland lawmakers are bothered by high gas prices. The pol's are demanding answers from oil and gas suppliers and considering legislation against price gouging.

They must have forgotten about that little law they passed in 2001 mandating minimum gas prices to protect independant service stations from competition with big chains like Sheetz and Wawa! Why not skip to the point and set the darn price at whatever they want it to be?!

UPDATE: Atlas Blogged reminds me that Maryland's brain trust stopped Wawa from offering free coffee with fill-ups last year. That was deemed a violation of the minimum price laws. Is it just me or are the governments of Maryland and San Francisco, CA disproportionately highlighted for their asinine legislative proposals? Hmmm. Annapolis and San Francisco are near the 39th parallel, as are Beijing and Pyongyang, capitals of the principal remaining communist countries on earth. Verrrry interesting.

FEMA Smoking Gun

William Arkin at The Washington Post finds the smoking gun behind FEMA's Katrina screwups. Ready for this? It's that the Bush administration is too obsessed with WMD and terrorism.

Now that's a nice inversion of the typical criticism we've heard from the left this week, which says the response to Katrina proves we can't handle a terrorist attack. A few words about that in a moment, but first back to Arkin.

His sophisticated analysis (I'm almost embarrassed for him) amounts to adding up the headings and subheadings in key homeland security planning documents to reach a priority score of 1,287 for terrorism and WMD versus 45 for hurricanes and all other natural disasters. He argues that Michael Brown was "set up" for failure by these misplaced priorities.

The giant flaw in his approach is that mother nature has a rather limited arsenal of large-scale disasters that play out much the same way over and over and over. (Ok, if you throw in supernovas, comets, giant meteors, black holes, giant flaming worms from beneath the earth's crust, and various other sci-fi phenomena the list can grow, but there's not much we can do about those anyway!)

Terrorists, on the other hand, have few natural limits when formulating their concoctions of evil. Attacks involving nuclear weapons, engineered plagues, nerve agents, aerosolated anthrax, or toxic chemicals would strain local response and cleanup capacities in ways that natural disasters don't. Coastal states already know how to deal with hurricanes; the South and Midwest understand tornadoes and floods; and California can handle earthquakes. Of course they still take plenty of foresight and cleanup, but they're dealt with repeatedly, and the really bad ones like Katrina are mostly a matter of scale. Chlorine tanks, however, don't explode in Chicago every year. Nor are office buildings routinely filled with anthrax in Atlanta. Simply enumerating and explaining these variegated considerations to local officials requires quite a bit more verbiage than do earthquakes and hurricanes.

The other side of the left's opportunistic criticism, that Katrina proves we can't handle a terrorist attack, is just as wrong. We've been hearing this stupid line all week--even from a few Republicans. If you believe it, I have a challenge for you: Peruse Homeland Security's terrorist attack scenarios to your heart's content, and let me know when you find the one that floods an entire city with water and wreaks devastation with 150-200 mph winds over hundreds of square miles. Find the one where the city must be evacuated by only boats and helicopters. Find the one with downed trees and smashed buildings strewn over hundreds of miles of roadway. And find the one we'll know about days in advance but can't stop because it roars along with the kinetic energy of a dozen atomic bombs. God forbid that we must ever respond to a WMD attack; but Katrina didn't tell us anything about it. (The coming decontamination of New Orleans is probably the more realistic test.)

Arkin's brilliant solution is splitting FEMA out of Homeland Security to protect it from the administration's infatuation with terrorism. Now I'll be the first to agree that creating the Department of Homeland security was a dumb idea. But will restacking the the agency letter blocks again really make things better? People like Arkin who belieeeeeeve that giant federal bureaucracies can work rapidly and efficiently are part of the problem. It. Doesn't. Happen. Frankly the only reason the military actually gets things done is that the warriors at the point of the spear can die when they screw up. Tying a few FEMA officials to an Outer Banks pier in front of Ophelia might best improve the agency's alactrity next time.

Side Note: Arkin claims the National Planning Scenarios document he references is "making its public debut here for the first time." (When will it make it's second private debut!) I'm not sure why he says that. The planning scenarios in this document have been discussed all over the Web. Maybe he means the newest version? Or maybe he doesn't google much.

AP Coins a New Anti-Bush Line

AP runs a story today headlined, "Over 40 Bodies at New Orleans Hospital." The lede:

NEW ORLEANS - On a day when President Bush declared "there is recovery on the way" in New Orleans, officials made a ghastly discovery of more than 40 bodies inside an evacuated hospital.

Prediction: For several weeks we'll get a running count of the bodies discovered in New Orleans "since President Bush declared 'there is recovery on the way'." Wait and see.

UPDATE: We get results! (Heh) The story was partially rewritten 3 1/2 hours later. It's now headlined, "Flights Resuming Into New Orleans Today," and begins:

NEW ORLEANS - Officials got ready for the arrival Tuesday of the first commercial flight at New Orleans' airport since Hurricane Katrina hit, and the coroner said autopsies were planned for the bodies of at least 44 people found at a hospital.

You can read the original version here and the updated version here. After a quick search it appears that only the UK Guardian still has the original version on it's site. A search of Yahoo News pulls up links to the original article but the links actually point to the new version. A number of other newspapers appear to have rewritten the lede before posting the article. The story was written by Adam Nossiter. It might be interesting to check out what else he's written lately.

UPDATE: The link at the top of the post again points to the original article as posted on Yahoo News. AP continues to update the story with new information so perhaps they weren't embarrassed by the original lede.

UPDATE: Thanks to Stephen Spuiell of the NRO Media Blog for the link!

Bitt Enders

Last week marked a big milestone for Bilges: After eight months of gradually accelerated blogging, culminating in a burst of post-Katrina commentary, I attracted links from some of the majors. Big thanks to Michelle Malkin, Sean Hackbarth of The American Mind, and especially Bryan Preston of JunkYardBlog. Since there's clearly a giant untapped market for my opinions I'm starting this semi-regular 'Bitt Enders' feature today. Thousands of Desperate Columnists Don't miss this entertaining piece of writing from Irish columnist Newton Emerson on the American press reaction to Katrina. Go Pats! When I learned of the NFL's opening-night lineup of unpatriotic, Bush-bashing musicians I decided to black-out the TV until after kickoff. When I heard that Kanye West was booed "thunderously...for much of his number" I regretted my decision. Bostonians, I'm sorry for half-heartedly rooting against your team. Now please do something about those two senators... All the Wrong Lessons The San Diego City Beat publishes a riveting firsthand account from inside the Superdome by UC San Diego employee Paul Harris. But some jarring discordances are sprinkled through his narrative, such as when, with order disintegrating in the dome's darkness, he snidely comments that:

Our anger toward FEMA and the Bush administration grew. We truly believed that we might die. Spoken or unspoken, most of us knew that if our resources and soldiers were not in Iraq, we would have had more than enough troops and support.

Was he really thinking this at the time? Does liberal Bushophobia run so deep? Or did this line of thought coalesce to conform with regnant press memes after his escape to San Francisco? And more:

Fortunately, a soldier, Staff Sgt. Ogden, saved our group of 100. I am thankful beyond words for the work he did in arranging to get us out. I don’t know if he did this because he liked us, or he knew we were in danger, or if it was racism, or if he realized that if one of the international students was raped or murdered that would be a huge embarrassment for President Bush.

He was worried his group was moved from the Superdome because of racism! But let's be realistic. Anyone who stands out in a hostile environment is more likely to become a target. His group was mostly white and mostly foreign--doubly different from most of those in the Superdome. Is this racism? Is it racism for an American in Iraq to use taxis for one-block trips in Basra? That's what journalist Steven Vincent neglected to do and the result was his kidnapping and death. When Americans in Central America hire bodyguards against kidnapping are they also racists? Racism is real among both blacks and whites. But it's not racism to realize that a white in a mostly black ghetto is more likely to be targeted by racist black criminals than another black. Harris goes on:

Finally, we made it out of the Hyatt under armed guard after more false hopes. We wrote our thoughts down on plywood inside the lobby, many of them about the federal government and how its inaction could have killed us, and how it led to the suffering and deaths of many others.

They wrote graffiti blaming the federal government for Katrina! This whole thing reminds me of the liberal writer (I can't remember his name) who recently had a stroke, woke up from his hospital bed, and first thing was upset to remember that Bush beat Kerry! Talk about backwards priorities. All is Not Well On the Anniversary of 9/11 Is it not a sign of the enervating intellectual debauchery of our culture that on the anniversary of 9/11 two of the most prominent stories in the blogsphere are the unveiling of a Flight 93 memorial modeled after the Islamic crescent and CNN's proud demand to show the bodies of Katrina victims as they are discovered? That's the same CNN who, as has been pointed out by many others, refused to show the bodies of 9/11 victims for fear of inflaming American opinion against our enemies. Post Bias The Washington Post ran a long story on New Orleans and Katrina this past Sunday. It has more problems than I have time to comment on, but I couldn't resist highlighting one gem:

The federal disaster response plan hinges on transportation and communication, but National Guard officials in Louisiana and Mississippi had no contingency plan if they were disrupted; they had only one satellite phone for the entire Mississippi coast, because the others were in Iraq.

Is there any doubt that the reporter's ears perked up, that his grin grew a little wider when he heard this? Would it have merited mention if the phones were in Germany, say, or South Korea? Of course not. But it fits the Bush-caused-Katrina story line doesn't it? Yet it tells us nothing really. How many of the phones are in Iraq? One? Two? A dozen? Do National Guard communication plans normally depend on satellite phones? If so why didn't they buy more? Is there any doubt that with a slight twist of fate--say a Mississippi Guard unit gets cut-off in Fallujah and takes heavy casualties--we could be reading that the incompetent Bush administration didn't send enough satellite phones to Iraq?

Orleans Parish Board Meeting Minutes

The Orleans Parish school board meeting minutes referenced in my Painfully Right on Buses post have disappeared from Google's cache. When I wrote that post I searched and reviewed the minutes and agendas from a number of other Orleans Parish board meetings to find out why they never resolved the outstanding issues preventing use of school buses by the city. Those other documents have also disappeared from Google's cache. I have archived a full copy of the June 9, 2005 Orleans Parish school board meeting minutes here.

Is this nefarious cache purging by Google? I don't know. Other older and newer boad meeting documents are stilled cached. On the other hand I've been meaning to write a post on the odd day-to-day behavior I've observed from Google lately.

UPDATE: A poster at Blogcritics goes through a great deal of effort to say the unused school buses don't matter because there were only enough to evacuate about 30,000 people before Katrina hit. I'm not sure these folks would appreciate his logic.

Painfully Right On Buses

When I read this Katrina response timeline a couple of things caught my attention.

First, to Mayor Ray Nagin's credit, he advised people taking shelter in the Superdome on Sunday morning to bring camping supplies and food and water for three-to-four days. On Sunday the Louisiana National Guard delivered ten truckloads of water and MREs--enough for 15,000 people for three days. But by Wednesday morning, just three days later, conditions at the Superdome were described as "desperate". The disorder and lack of sanitation may have warranted that description, but news reports indicated that food and water supplies were exhausted as well. At that point the dome held about 20-25,000 refugees, which indicates that almost none of them bothered to bring food and water supplies. In hindsight, no one should have expected those who depend on government to meet their basic needs in the best of times to suddenly become self-sufficient in the worst of times.

Second, much to Nagin's discredit, on Saturday night after issuing a voluntary evacuation order he consulted with his legal staff to determine the city's liability for closing hotels and other businesses before issuing the mandatory evacuation order on Sunday morning :

Nagin said late Saturday that he's having his legal staff look into whether he can order a mandatory evacuation of the city, a step he's been hesitant to do because of potential liability on the part of the city for closing hotels and other businesses.

"Come the first break of light in the morning, you may have the first mandatory evacuation of New Orleans," Nagin told WWL-TV.

It's stunning that Nagin would even admit such a thing and indicative of the exact mindset that, as I said on Monday, likely prevented the use of school and municipal buses to evacuate the city. This is worth pondering for a moment: If Nagin's lawyers had failed to assuage his liability concerns would Nagin have declined to issue the mandatory evacuation order? Shouldn't such legal questions have been thoroughly considered months, years, or decades ago? A cat-5 hurricane is bearing down on New Orleans. The real worst-case scenario that's been feared for decades--worse even than the terrible disaster we've watched unfold in the past week--is probable, and Mayor Nagin punts the mandatory evacuation decision to his lawyers!

That's not all. Minutes from a June 2005 Orleans Parish school board meeting show that the city and school district have been wrangling over a plan to use school buses for hurricane evacuations for some time. (The minutes were first posted here and mentioned at JunkYardBlog. UPDATE: The Google cached copy of the minutes has disappeared along with copies of many other board meeting minutes I reviewed when I wrote this. The link now points to a complete copy of the meeting minutes I archived on my own server.) Here are the highlights:

Regina Bartholomew (General Counsel):
If a hurricane should come to the City in order to save the school buses, those assets, the City had asked if we would loan the school buses to be utilized for those persons in New Orleans. A lot of the citizens of New Orleans do not have transportation and have no way of evacuating from the City if a hurricane should come this way. He had been talking with Dr. Kevin Stephens from the Health Department because the Red Cross said that they would not commit to opening any shelters in the City of New Orleans if a hurricane comes this way. It would be all for naught. They wanted to utilize school buses in order to transport those persons out of the City. I believe that the City had agreed to indemnify and hold harmless the School Board if any of those persons got hurt on the buses because that was one of my concerns. But after speaking with Ms. Bowers, who had spoken with certain persons at the City as well, they indicated they would release us of any liability.
...
Torin Sanders (Board President):
The children are even more important in terms of making sure they are safe. We know many of our children and families don't have transportation and even though it is a City responsibility to plan for emergencies and hurricane preparedness, we need to look at working even more cooperatively or seeking a more cooperative relationship with the City on behalf of the students that we serve. I did talk with Dr. Kevin Stephens in the Health Department of the City. It is our interest to get buses and other vehicles that we may own out of the City in the event it is being evacuated. So those buses should not be empty. It was also his suggestion and call that they should be filled with families and children that may need a ride out of City and may perhaps designate certain high schools in different neighborhoods as staging grounds for families to go to should the need arise for an evacuation. The City is working on arrangements with different Civic Centers in Houma and depending on where the hurricane is coming from, where we need to go. They are making arrangements with institutions in those areas such as Baton Rouge, Mississippi, or Hammond to wait out the hurricane.
...
Phyllis Landrieu (Board Member?):
I just wanted to remind you that if we are going to include buses, which are not part of this plan, then we need to include the personnel and communication with personnel.
...
Ms. Bowers (Not identified):
We have been meeting with City entities about the hurricane preparedness and we have talked to them about our buses. We still have not defined how many they want. They have agreed to indemnify the School Board for using the buses. They said if our bus drivers volunteer then they will make arrangements to take the families of the bus drivers and offer them secure places. They are talking about having City Officers on buses also.
...
Phyllis Landrieu: Ms. Bowers, please also include in here fuel preparations.
...
Ora Watson (Assistant Deputy Superintendent):
Not to the extent that it probably should. All of our SASE and student data is within the Technology so that is safe. But some of the written documents in the schools, the older documents, need to be protected. But all grades, all enrollment, all health records are completely being taken care of by the Technology Department. We do have things like books and other things that would be perishable in the schools. We do our best to make them safe in the event of a hurricane. I do want to assure you that the School District has worked with the City and worked with other entities within the community over the years when we are facing a hurricane. But we have always volunteered the use of our buses to evacuate citizens.

In my post Monday I predicted that exactly these types of concerns likely prevented use of the buses:

The buses may sit waterlogged instead of having been used to ferry people from the city because no one knew who's budget would be billed for driver time or fuel costs; or there weren't any licensed bus drivers available; or someone was worried about insurance liability or security for the drivers or some other simple consideration that wasn't detailed finely enough in the evacuation plan. At that point a Mayor Nagin needs to say, "Budgets, licenses, and insurance be damned! Get me 300 policemen to fuel-up and drive these buses. Call the TV stations and announce pickup points around the city--and tell people to bring food and water for a day! Call Houston and other cities and tell them we're coming!"

The board members later agreed to update the hurricane preparedness plan and discuss it at the next meeting, but that seems never to have happened. Instead, the next few board meetings were filled with wrangling over the sorry state of the Orleans Parish school system. We all understand that this is, unfortunately, how government bureaucracies normally operate. But this wasn't a normal situation. And the Mayor Nagin who needed legal cover for his evacuation order simply wasn't willing to take responsibility for seizing the school buses or even to use city transit buses to evacuate the city--the same buses that were already being used to fill the Superdome. But he was willing to dish out double portions of blame just a few days later on Thursday:

Nagin explodes -“You know the reason why the looters got out of control?” Nagin said. “We have most of our resources saving people. They were stuck in attics, man, old ladies. You pull off the doggone ventilator and look down and they’re standing there in water up to their fricking neck.”

“I need reinforcements,” he said. “I need troops, man. I need 500 buses.”

The relief efforts made so far had been pathetically insufficient, Nagin said.

“They’re thinking small, man, and this is a major, MAJOR deal,” Nagin said. “God is looking down on this and if they are not doing everything in their power to save people, they are going to pay the price. Every day that we delay, people are dying, and they’re dying by the hundreds, I’m willing to bet you.”

Rolling now, Nagin described distress calls he’d heard. Nagin mocked the efforts to block the 17th Street Canal breach.

“I flew over that thing yesterday and it was in the same shape it was in after the storm hit,” he said.
“There is nothing happening there. They’re feeding the public a line of bull and they’re spinning and people are dying down here.”

What else is there to say, except, what a disgrace.

Let Them Weep

I was ashamed to be a conservative after reading this today:

"There simply aren't enough grief counselors to help these people," said Michael Hyatt, CEO of TN Publishing, today as he announced plans to donate $50,000 and 100,000 copies of the world's bestselling grief and recovery handbook to victims of Katrina.

Hundreds of grief counselors in Houston and other cities hosting the more than 250,000 Katrina refugees have already volunteered to provide free counseling services. But there are simply more needs than can be met by the volunteers.

Not everyone is happy with Hyatt's plan. His blog was deluged with angry comments from conservatives hostile to the idea of grief counseling. Here's a sampling:

100,000 counseling books. That is the most asinine thing I have heard in years (and I've heard a few) You are fool of the first order. You sending books to people who need food, water, medicine, blankets, clothes and shelter. I shake my head in wonder and dismay.

Grieving manuals !!!! Unbelievable...... In my eyes you are a moron! Unbelievable.... there are people DYING and babies and old people suffering indignities beyond any comprehension and you send them BOOKS - aaaaggggghhhhh - America IS nuts - no doubt about it.

If I were starving, thirsty, homeless, and in need of medicine, and someone handed me a counseling manual, I would spit in their face. This is the most ridiculous, useless, self-serving thing I've ever heard, and anyone who gives money to this cause is going to hell.

Yeah, sure, grief books, you f***in Moron!!! In order to support this liberal ideology that got these poor people in this situation. One of the posters here got it right, these people are about to die - GOT IT???

Actually, I made this up. Parts of it, at least. And I'm not ashamed to be conservative. Michael Hyatt is CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers and he decided to donate $50,000 and 100,000 Bibles to victims of Katrina after reading that refugees in some shelters were requesting them. These comments were posted to Michael Hyatt's blog today, but referred to Bibles rather than grief counseling books. (Thanks to Bob Krumm via James Taranto.)

A short while before, I had received an email update from pcarelief.org which contained this from Richard Bailey, paster of Plains Presbyterian Church in Zachary, Louisiana:

When I stood up to lead the worship service Sunday I looked out at our shelter "guests" and choked up. It was tough to go on. So much hurt and pain. Our Pastor, Woody Markert, preached from Lamentations 3. It was a powerful, yet comforting message. Filled with hope in the Lord. [Read Lamentations 1:1-2 and weep for New Orleans]. We then served Communion. I needed it. What encouragement and strength the Lord provided through this his Sacrament. Pray for us. We are tired.

Lamentations 1:1-2:

How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! She is become as a widow, that was great among the nations! She that was a princess among the provinces is become tributary!

She weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks; Among all her lovers she hath none to comfort her: All her friends have dealt treacherously with her; they are become her enemies.

The commenters' words hold nothing of significance but the spores of beasthood and anarchy.

Donuts to Dollars

Kudos to my wonderful wife who with our kids setup a Kool-Aid and donut stand to raise money for Katrina victims today. The pain from this storm runs deep; the response from passersby was both enthusiastic and tearful (with lots of sad personal stories). They raised $187 dollars which will go to the Presbyterian Church in America's relief effort.

Random Katrina Thoughts

• Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) says, "[T]he $10.5 billion being approved by Congress to aid the hurricane victims so far won't rebuild "one corner, one block."

I'd heard about New Orlean's corruption problem, but I had no idea it was this bad! Much, much worse than even the United Nations!

• From Reuters (of course): Sri Lankan Sajeewa Chinthaka, on post-Katrina looting and disorder: "I am absolutely disgusted. After the tsunami our people, even the ones who lost everything, wanted to help the others who were suffering. Not a single tourist caught in the tsunami was mugged. Now with all this happening in the U.S. we can easily see where the civilized part of the world's population is."

Hmm. Didn't I recently read that much of the tsunami aid to Sri Lanka was still sitting on the docks pending bribes to Sri Lankan customs officials? Yep, here's yet another report from just a few weeks ago:

To some it is scandalous (to others inevitable) that Oxfam had to pay close to $1 million to Sri Lankan customs officials before their four-wheel drive vehicles were allowed in the country to deliver relief.

While these vehicles stood in port, Oxfam was charged around $5,000 a day -- all for the privilege of helping victims.

It is reminiscent of Col. Mengistu's regime charging duty on aid coming into Ethiopia during the 1984 famine, then diverting food aid to the army.

It gets worse. A dozen UNICEF ambulances sent to Indonesia spent two months idle on the dock.

Huge containers of drinking water sent by the Red Cross in January, are reported to still be in the port because their documentation can't be found.

Some 25% of the aid sent to Sri Lanka since the tsunami still sits in containers in Colombo, and a thousand large containers of aid are sit unopened and unprocessed, in the port of Medan.

• From the same Reuters piece: Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn, in a veiled criticism of U.S. political thought, said the disaster showed the need for a strong state that could help poor people.

On the left is Lake Pontchartrain. On the right (same scale), the entire country of Luxembourg. Need I say more?

• Finally, many newspapers have gone overboard in their criticisms of the government response to Katrina, calling the effort worthy of a third-rate nation. Sure, some New Orleans, Lousiana, and FEMA officials appear to have made major mistakes. But let's be realistic: If the United States was actually a third-rate (or third-world if that's the implication) nation we would be looking at a tsunami-size death toll in the tens of thousands. So let's be thankful, as we mourn, that we do have the tremendous resources and wealth to save so many lives that would otherwise have been lost.

The Simple Life

Douglas Adams revealed the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life the Universe and Everything in his Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series. (If you think Adams made up the answer you're wrong; you can check for yourself using the Google calculator.) Black leaders including Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin and Atlanta area Congressmen David Scott, John Lewis, and Cynthia McKinney have one-upped Adams and simplified life considerably by discovering the answer to every question: Racism. From the Sept. 2 Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

"I have been outraged and horrified at the level of response to this national disaster," Franklin said. "I'm not really sure what we're waiting for. Are we waiting for everyone to die?" The mayor and three Democratic members of Congress at Atlanta City Hall placed the blame for the mounting death toll on Bush's shoulders and suggested that the response might have been swifter in New Orleans if the suffering faces on the TV news were not black. "Many people in the African-American community are saying the reason that the federal government did not respond as quickly as it should is because those are black people in New Orleans," U.S. Rep. David Scott said. "Prove me wrong." Scott and Reps. John Lewis and Cynthia McKinney, their rage unconcealed, accused Bush of failing to prepare before the hurricane despite warnings of widespread flooding and said he had squandered the nation's resources on the war in Iraq instead of preparedness at home.

James Taranto points out that of the five Louisiana parishes hit hardest by Katrina, four are predominantly white. The rescuers should be very careful or they might accidentally save a black person. Part of the problem, it seems, is the media--or at least Mayor Frankin's reliance on television for her information:

In Atlanta, Franklin urged Bush to "get on board and lead us" and said he shouldn't need to fly over the Gulf Coast to comprehend the tragedy. "If you want to see what's going on, turn on the television," she said.

Certainly, if you watched television coverage of post-hurricane rescue efforts you saw mostly black faces. This was due to the media's focus on the dramatic flooding of downtown New Orleans--which is predominantly black. But Katrina's devastation cut across huge areas of two states, flooding out people of all colors, leaving them homeless and in need of rescue. Mayor Franklin's perspective might be more accurate and less prone to self-embarrassment if she had toured the hardest hit areas herself before lashing out. A bigger problem is the media's own poor judgement in reporting the press-conferences of these race-hustlers: What they have to say isn't news anymore. Black Americans would be better off if they stopped electing and, especially, stopped listening to such leaders.

For the Want of a Driver?

"Funerals are for the living, not the dead," goes the old folk-saying, perhaps adapted from the more cynical version penned by La Rochefoucauld. And post-disaster presidential speeches are for the unscathed, being of greatest utility to those who, like the New York Times, confuse talk with accomplishment.

While the Times and other newspapers were preoccupied with important matters such as sorting presidents by the number of vacation days taken per term and grading presidential speeches, more serious journalists like Bryan Preston of JunkYardBlog worked this weekend to uncover the mind-boggling chutzpah of New Orleans officials like Mayor Ray Nagin and Terry Ebbert, head of emergency operations for the city. Nagin, Ebbert, and, to a lesser degree, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, vacillated between vituperation and tears last week as they blamed federal officials and President Bush for a "slow and inadequate" response to hurricane Katrina. But Preston and other bloggers have uncovered the following facts:

• The city of New Orleans had an evacuation plan that called for the use of municipal and school buses for removing residents without other means of transportation.
• Previous evacuations were voluntary because some citizens lacked means of transport. The Katrina evacuation was also voluntary until President Bush called Nagin and Blanco and urged them to make the evacuation mandatory (and according to one report even suggested earlier mobilization of the Louisiana Guard, which Blanco resisted). (UPDATE: According to this timeline the mandatory evacuation decision had already been made before Bush called. But there was some legal wrangling over the decision by Nagin: He was worried about the city's liability for closing hotels and businesses.)
• Post-Katrina satellite photos show hundreds of municipal and school buses sitting waterlogged in depots just a couple of miles from the Superdome. See here, here, and here.

No one seems to know yet why the buses weren't used to evacuate more people from the city as described in the plan, instead of sending thousands to the Superdome and other shelters. I've done some consulting work for the state of Georgia (unrelated to emergency planning), and in my experience these types of bad decisions are often driven by very mundane budgetary or legal considerations--exactly the types of roadblocks an effective executive must be poised to clear in an emergency situation. In the midst of a crisis, cutting red tape is the most important job of a president, governor, or mayor--certainly more important than making speeches, holding press conferences, or touring for the television cameras.

The buses may sit waterlogged instead of having been used to ferry people from the city because no one knew who's budget would be billed for driver time or fuel costs; or there weren't any licensed bus drivers available; or someone was worried about insurance liability or security for the drivers or some other simple consideration that wasn't detailed finely enough in the evacuation plan. At that point a Mayor Nagin needs to say, "Budgets, licenses, and insurance be damned! Get me 300 policemen to fuel-up and drive these buses. Call the TV stations and announce pickup points around the city--and tell people to bring food and water for a day! Call Houston and other cities and tell them we're coming!"

I emailed Preston Saturday night to point this out and asked him if anyone had figured out the real reason the buses weren't used. He disagreed that drivers or budgets might be the issue, responding:

I've wondered about the drivers issue too, but I came to the conclusion that since they're school buses, NO had a cadre of qualified drivers right there--school bus drivers. Since they're employed by the school system, and they have a supervisor, the city knows that it can reach them through that supervisor, who knows how to reach them. So the supervisor calls a pre-determined group of 5, who all then call a group of five each, etc etc until the city has at least tried to reach all of them. It's not perfect, but you'd get a majority of them. And in driving everyone else out, they drive themselves out too. Let them bring family, whatever. Just get them behind the wheel.

But as Preston agrees today while recounting our exchange (He's guest-blogging at Michelle Malkin's blog, but no link--guess next time I'll blog first and email later! UPDATE: That was just an oversight--thanks for the link, Bryan!), a smooth mobilization of school bus drivers can't be assumed since the school system is no exception in New Orlean's panoply of governmental dysfunction:

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AP) -- Students return to class Thursday in a school system in such turmoil that no one is sure how many employees it has, the new budget is millions of dollars out of balance, and the buildings are old and deteriorating.
...
"We've had to start over in some cases and recreate data from scratch," said Sajan George, an executive of New York-based Alvarez & Marsal. The rate of payroll errors when he arrived was around 20 percent, he said.
...
Budget problems forced closure of some schools and elimination of some classes at schools that remained open. It was unclear until a few weeks ago which schools would shut down.
...
Last spring, when the district appeared close to missing its payroll, the federal government said $70 million of its money couldn't be accounted for.
...
When a new budget was adopted in July, 800 jobs had to be eliminated. Five schools were to be closed, numerous others were involved in consolidations or relocations and some lost classes because enrollment has declined. And just two weeks ago, the budget adopted in July was found to be out of balance -- by perhaps as much as $48 million -- because revenue was overestimated and salaries and benefits were undercounted.
...
School board president Torin Sanders, who is black, denounced the plan as a means of "disenfranchising" those who elected him and other board members. But the board voted 4-3, with the three black members dissenting, to hire the firm.

UPDATE: More on the Orleans Parish school board and Mayor Ray Nagin's legal dickering over buses and liability.

Homes for Katrina Victims

Here's a list of sites matching Katrina victims with host families:

www.craigslist.org

katrinahomes.billhennessy.com

www.theopenhouseproject.org

www.hslda.com (Home school legal defense)

www.namb.net (Baptist North American Missions Boad)

www.hurricanehousing.org

www.pca-mna.org (PCA Mission to North America)

www.ajc.com (Atlanta Journal-Constitution - Atlanta area only)

Since the major airlines are certainly about to ask for another massive federal bailout to prolong their profitless lives, perhaps they could sweeten the deal for us taxpayers by removing the restrictions on frequent flyer miles donated to transport Katrina victims to their new homes. We have enough miles to fly three or four people to the east coast if it wasn't for the 3-week advance purchase restriction on our MilesOne card miles.

Who Are The Real Looters?

Mr. Robert Person of Madison, Wisconsin thinks the real looters in every disaster are the gas and oil companies. He writes in a letter to the editor of the Capital Times (for some reason Yahoo News highlighted this):

In the immediate aftermath of the devastation, gasoline pump prices have gone up a huge amount. Now, it takes a month or more for oil to be refined and gasoline to be produced and delivered. Yet current pre-disaster stocks of gasoline are being sold at inflated prices. Who is the looter in this case? The oil companies? The marketers? The wholesalers? Are security forces out to nab them?

I've already explained why a gas station owner must raise prices as soon as his supply is interrupted and most of what I said applies here. Mr. Person seems to mistakenly assume that a single entity controls oil through the entire delivery and refining process. But oil and gasoline flow through networks of wholesalers and distributers just like other products. I'm not certain of this, but I wouldn't be surprised if most big oil companies like Exxon and BP have distribution franchises just like PepsiCo and Coca-Cola. They certainly have station franchises which take ownership of the gas delivered to them. Each entity in the supply line must respond to supply and pricing changes just like the service station owner at the retail end of the line. If you don't understand why go read my earlier post.

The second thing Mr. Person doesn't understand is that pricing must reflect current conditions as well as uncertainly about when those conditions will change. The gas flowing through retail pumps now may have been purchased before Katrina struck (though I seriously doubt the refining and delivery process takes a month), but prices started to rise before the hurricane struck to reflect the risk of a supply interruption. The interruption then became certain and prices rose further. They will remain high because no one knows exactly when or to what degree supply will be restored or what future demand will be. If you know in advance the price of gasoline for next month please tell me and we'll make a killing trading gasoline futures. (Right now the NYMEX says wholesale prices will be $2.40 per gallon in October--about $1 more than last October.)

Think about it this way: You're an English colonist at Jamestown. It's 1609 and your community is not yet self-sufficient. John Ratliff, the president of the colony is dead. You need regular shipments of supplies from England or you'll starve. You expected a ship to arrive in early September, but now it's mid-October, and there's no sign of the ship. It could have been delayed crossing the Atlantic. But it might have been sunk by the Spanish or captured by pirates. A difficult winter lies ahead. The summer harvest was poor--especially since John Rolfe wasted his time growing tobacco instead of corn--and without additional supplies many will starve. Do you A) Start conserving food now in case the ship never shows up; or B) Reason that there wasn't a shortage in August when you harvested the corn in the storehouse so you'll wait until the ship definitely doesn't show up to begin conserving? Congratulations if you chose option A. I'm sure Mr. Person would as well in those circumstances. The reason you chose option A is that the food you have now became more scarce/valuable/costly because of current conditions of supply, regardless of the conditions when you first obtained it.

Changing prices are the fastest, most accurate signal of current supply conditions at each level of distribution--so long as we let them work. And they work in reverse as well: When supply improves prices sometimes drop so quickly that sellers are forced to sell goods for less than they paid for them! That's one of the reasons companies are willing to invest billions of dollars streamlining supply chains and collecting oceans of data about who buys what, when, and for how much--because the more inventory stuck in their warehouses the more vulnerable they are to unfavorable supply and demand changes. Which is why accusing oil companies of secret conspiracies to shrink their inventories and artificially boost prices is so ludicrous--every major company on the planet has been trying to shrink their inventories for at least the past two decades!

Maybe next time I'll explain why people like Mr. Person and the politicians who pander to them are themselves the real looters!

Turf Wars Coming in Houston and San Antonio

Don't expect the Superdome violence to end with transfers to Houston and San Antonio. Let's be realistic: You scoop up 50,000 residents of the New Orleans ghetto, many now desperate for a fix, concentrate them in a new city and they become prime customers. Nor should we be surprised by gunshots and deaths in the Superdome. Most of these folks have probably lived with nightly gunshots and neighborhood murders their entire lives. It’s just that now the whole world is watching.

After reading Jason DeParle's Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare and Theodore Dalrymple's Life at the Bottom back to back a few months ago, I'd say this might--might--be the best chance the younger ones get to escape the ghetto for good. Relocation away from the old neighborhoods, either independently, by joining the military, or moving in with distant relatives seems to be the common characteristic of those who escaped their old lives. It all depends on where these kids end up.

UPDATE: An eyewitness account of just how bad things are at the Superdome.

UPDATE: Some more sad personal stories and pleas for help:

There are still approximately over 300 Vietnamese people stranded in sewage water up to the necks in many areas gathered at the Church. We've contacted USCG, Red Cross, news media but no help has come out to their way yet. As you all know, Versailles is so far on the eastern edge of New Orleans that by the time any helicopters come that way, they're already filled with people and have to turn back towards the Superdome to drop people off.

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My coworker's brother is one of seven doctors who have been left behind at Charity Hospital. His name is Vinroot, I'm sorry, I don't know the first name. He is in a panic--the doctors have barricaded themselves on the seventh floor because armed gunmen are outside threatening them and demanding access to the roof so they can be rescued first. He is desperate. Someone needs to help these people NOW!

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There are 7 people trapped in the Gallary Row apartments at 448 Julia Street (corner of Julia and Magazine). They were attacked by armed gang who hijacked their truck and drove it through a locked gate in the parking garage. They are unable to leave the building due to the heavy presence of large, well-organized armed looters. They expect the building to be attacked at any moment. The trapped people are lightly armed (one shotgun and one pistol) but there are numerous entry points into the apartments. Currently the trapped people are holed up on the roof. Please send help ASAP.

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University hospital has apparently slipped through the system and has yet to receive assistance as rescue efforts have been directed elsewhere. The hospital is absolutely non-functional and patients are dying at an alarming rate. My father in law (Dr. Oscar Ballester a treating physician at this hospital who is in need of food, water, and insulin) is stable, but we are unaware how long this will hold, possibly less than 48 hours.

Commissar Bush

Bush lumps so-called price-gouging with criminal activities such as looting and insurance fraud:

I think there ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this, whether it be looting, or price-gouging at the gasoline pump or taking advantage of charitable giving, or insurance fraud, Bush said in an interview on ABC's Good Morning America.

But we still don't know what it is...and I guess price-gouging for coffee and bananas is still ok.

Commissar Perdue

Little did I know when writing last night's post defending so-called price gouging that Commissar Sonny Perdue was in the process of signing an executive order authorizing fines against price gougers! What does this mean, exactly? No one seems to know:

The governor gave no specific examples of price gouging but said prices at some stations rose from $3 per gallon to $5 and $6 per gallon by Wednesday afternoon. He acknowledged consumers may not always know if they are being gouged as gas prices change. "You just have to report this and our Office of Consumer Affairs will investigate," he said.

Meanwhile, "price gouging" was working exactly as I described in my last post:

John Harper, an east Cobb County resident, pulled up to a gas station in Stockbridge Wednesday evening when he saw an enticing empty parking lot. He promptly turned around once he the manager told him the gas prices - $5.87 for a gallon of unleaded fuel. "It's highway robbery," Harper said. He was one of a half-dozen people who left after pulling up to the station. Soon after, the gas station manager decided to lower the gas prices by $2 a gallon.

And stations that weren't "price gouging", including the Kroger station behind our house, ran out of gas:

Police in Sandersville had to direct traffic during a mid-morning rush on the pumps after two small stations ran out of gas, Police Chief John Harden said. In Washington, long lines for gas stretched into the town's main street, disrupting traffic.