Skins Better Off Good Than Lucky

The Washington Redskins' luck turned in a big way the first three games of this NFL season as they defeated Chicago, Dallas, and Seattle by a total of six points. But luck is a shaky foundation for rebuilding a football dynasty. The sputtering offense, retooled in the offseason by Joe Gibbs and his staff, produced a total of just 43 points in the first three games--nine less than Green Bay dropped on soggy New Orleans last Sunday. Worse, last year's sterling defensive unit looked a bit tarnished after losing several key starters in the offseason and giving up big yardage to Dallas and Seattle.

I expected the bubble to burst resoundingly at Mile-High stadium last Sunday, especially after watching Denver shred Kansas City two weeks ago on Monday night. The Broncos repeatedly gashed the Chiefs' defense for big gains on the ground, and the Chiefs once-great offensive line barely slowed the Broncos' pass rush as Denver cruised to a 30-10 win. So as hard as it was to watch the Redskins' last-second rally fail on a missed two-point conversion (I didn't actually watch it thanks to the NFL's byzantine TV market rules*), I'm feeling better about their chances for a playoff berth after the 21-19 defeat.

The game was one that leaves you scratching your head in disbelief after comparing the stat sheet and the score. The Redskins outgained the Broncos by nearly 200 yards, had 25 more plays, a seven minute time-of-possession advantage, nearly three times as many first downs, gave up no sacks, had just one turnover and still lost (Denver had a slight edge in penalties and rushing yards). The Redskins' luck did run out in Denver as they had a safety overturned on an arguably invalid invocation of the infamous "Tuck Rule"; a 54-yard field goal wiped off the board by a false start penalty (special teamers around the league seem especially fond of the yellow hankies this year); a 38-yard field goal blocked; and a two-point conversion pass to a wide-open receiver tipped away near the line of scrimmage. Any one of those plays could have turned the game into a win.

Here's the encouraging part: They've just been through a second four-game preseason with Mark Brunell as the starting quarterback and the offense has improved each week. The Redskins have two new receivers, a reworked offensive line, and are still tweaking their offseason improvements. Because Patrick Ramsey was the starting quarterback through the entire preseason, Brunell had very few game-condition reps with the starting offense. But the offense has already improved dramatically over last season, even though the points have been slow coming.

Despite playing the 3rd, 10th, 17th, and 18th ranked defensive teams the Redskins offense has improved in the following areas from 2004 to 2005 (league rankings in parentheses):

• Yards per game - from 275 to 367 (30th to 8th)
• Yards per play - from 4.3 to 5.1 (31st to 18th)
• 3rd down conversion rate - from 32% to 47% (28th to 2nd!)
• Rushing yards per carry - from 3.7 to 4.1 (29th to 11th)

So far this has led to just a half-point improvement in scoring per game from 15 to 15.5, perhaps due to a turnover differential that's slighly worse this year. Blame the defense for that--the unit has forced just two turnovers in four games. The defense has also allowed more yards than last year, but is still ranked 5th in the league. A postseason appearance seems very likely!

(Aren't fan delusions sad?)

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* I can best sum up the NFL's TV market rules like this: If the local team is playing at home, any other game you're interested in won't be on TV. I believe I once briefly grasped the formula completely, but immediately fell unconscious for 30 minutes and woke up confused again. In this instance, those of us in the Atlanta market were treated by FOX to every excruciating minute of the Philadelphia Eagles' 33-10 disassembly by the Dallas Cowboys. To. The. Very. End.

Here's how ridiculous it got at one point (remember, the local affiliates can show highlights of the banned games, but no live action): The Eagles-Cowboys game is winding down just as the Redskins begin driving for their final score. Surely they'll switch to the game now! I'm rushing back and forth from the TV to the computer to refresh the NFL.com live game stats. The Eagles-Cowboys game ends and FOX returns to the studio where James Brown drones on-and-on and shows highlights of the blowout that just ended! Back to NFL.com: Oh, my gosh! The Redskins just scored to pull within a two-point conversion of tying the game! Back to FOX: Brown's still blathering. Wait! They're switching to the game! Nope, they're showing a highlight of the Redskins' touchdown and refusing to cut to the game even for the two-point conversion try! Back to NFL.com: Oh, no! The conversion failed! Back to FOX: Still in studio. Going to a commercial. Ok, now they're showing a highlight of the failed conversion. Sheesh!

And don't tell me to buy DirecTV's NFL Sunday Ticket. I've tried that twice since we moved to Atlanta and both times the Redskins stunk and appeared on regular TV something like eight or nine times to boot!

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Current Washington Post stories on the Redskins: The Broncos game. Skins need turnovers. Sally Jenkins. Tony Kornheiser. Kornheiser on Lavar. Michael Wilbon. Arrington in the doghouse.

John Fund Turns On Miers

John Fund changes his mind about Harriet Miers in a big way. He first took a wait-and-see approach, but after interviewing "dozens of her friends and colleagues" he says

I came away convinced that questions about Ms. Miers should be raised now--and loudly--because she has spent her entire life avoiding giving a clear picture of herself. "She is unrevealing to the point that it's an obsession," says one of her close colleagues at her law firm.

Fund then recites a litany of assurances just like those we're hearing now for Miers originally given in support of Earl Warren, William Brennan, Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Conner, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter. Read the whole thing. It's extremely important.

UPDATE: Paul Mirengoff disagrees:

In the case of Harriet Miers, though, we are not even talking about someone in the O'Connor mold--we are talking about someone who might be another O'Connor but is just as likely to vote with Scalia in the vast majority of big cases. In this situation, it seems imprudent to blow up the confirmation process---and possibly the Bush presidency and the Republican party--to block her nomination. Thus, conservative senators should be prepared, barring new and damning information, to vote in favor of Miers.

But earlier in his piece Mirengoff cut to the heart of the criticisms of the Miers nomination:

In any case, conservatives justifiably feel disappointed that they should have to rely solely on the president's legal and psychological acumen as they try to become comfortable with his nominee. There were at least two dozen candidates, including women, African-Americans, and Hispanics, whose conservative bona fides would have been apparent to the naked eye. Bush's rejection of these candidates in favor of Miers feels like cronyism or political weakness.

That's exactly right. Bush went to the mat for a dozen(?) Federal appeals court nominees who were proven strict constructionists. When it comes to the most important judicial nominations of all why won't he do the same? I haven't yet heard a satisfactory answer, and I do think this issue is worth blowing up the Republican Party.

That would be the same party that's forgotten what small government means. The same party that wasted political capital creating a massive new Federal entitlement when they should have been fixing the old ones. The same party that forgot about term limits and non-partisan redistricting as soon as they were comfortably ensconced as the majority. The same party that restricted political speech with another campaign finance reform bill. The same president who signed that bill into law after saying it was unconstitutional during his campaign. The same president who's done little but pander on illegal immigration.

And we were supposed to grit our teeth and bear the foolishness because it was all leading up to this: The opportunity (again) to replace 2-4 Supreme Court justices and change the direction of the court for a generation. Sorry, but I'm finished with forbearance. Time to pay the bill.

Sekulow for Supreme Court

Like many conservatives I was stunned by President Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. The only plausible point in Bush's favor is that he believes Miers to be a reliable conservative who can be confirmed with a minimal expense of political capital, giving him time to flog languishing legislation on social security and a host of other issues early in his term. But he may have underestimated conservatives' deep desire for a political battle royal over judicial nominations and constitutional interpretation.

Frankly, I'm tired of supposedly conservative office-holders who shy from defending the eminently defensible view that constitutional interpretation should be based on what the Constitution actually says. The central function of the Constitution is to serve as a buffer against vicissitudinous political opinion--a function which directly conflicts with the constitutional origami of leftist judges. That's not a difficult point to make. But rather than proudly defending that point when, for example, a nominee like John Roberts comes under fire for his Federalist Society membership, Republican leaders instead downplayed his involvement.

Here's some perspective on just how cowed are conservatism's Republican representatives: Consider that those who oppose abortion in all circumstances (21% according to this 2005 Harris poll) outnumber U.S residents who are black (13%), hispanic (14%), or liberal (18%). They are statistically tied with the 23% who would allow abortion in all circumstances. Consider that abortion is consistently one of the single most important issues among Republican voters. And consider that majorities of both conservative and liberal constitutional scholars believe that Roe v. Wade was a horribly reasoned case.

And yet, while Democratic senators candidly make support for Roe the sine qua non of judicial mainstreamism, bork-wary Republicans scrape and scrounge for nominees who are closet-conservatives at best. Despite controlling Congress and the Presidency for several years Republicans have failed to end partial-birth abortion--which is opposed by a huge majority of Americans. Nor have they seriously made the case for blaming their failure on Roe or linked it to Democratic obstruction of judicial confirmations.

So when will conservatism have won in America? When a Republican president unashamedly nominates Jay Sekulow, chief counsel for the ultra-conservative American Center for Law and Justice, to the Supreme Court. I'm not joking. And the fact that you think I'm joking shows how firmly the left still controls political debate in America.

Sekulow has argued nine cases before the Supreme Court bench. He's been named one of National Law Journal's "100 Most Influential Lawyers" and one of The American Lawyer's top 45 public-sector lawyers. His post-academic credentials are nearly as impressive as those of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the last Democratic nominee to the court, and the justice who is most nearly Sekulow's polar opposite.

Ginsberg, confirmed with a 96-3 Senate vote, was a director of and general counsel for the ACLU before becoming a Federal judge. National Review's Edward Whelan summarized Ginsburg's pre-confirmation opinions thusly:

Let’s assume, for example, that this nominee had expressed strong sympathy for the position that there is a constitutional right to prostitution as well as a constitutional right to polygamy.

Let’s say, further, that he had attacked the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts as organizations that perpetuate stereotyped sex roles and that he had proposed abolishing Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and replacing them with a single androgynous Parent’s Day.

And, to get really absurd, let’s add that he had called for an end to single-sex prisons on the theory that if male prisoners are going to return to a community in which men and women function as equal partners, prison is just the place for them to get prepared to deal with women.

Let’s further posit that this nominee had opined that a manifest imbalance in the racial composition of an employer’s work force justified court-ordered quotas even in the absence of any intentional discrimination on the part of the employer. But then, lo and behold, to make this nominee even more of a parody of an out-of-touch leftist, let’s say it was discovered that while operating his own office for over a decade in a city that was majority-black, this nominee had never had a single black person among his more than 50 hires.

...

The hypothetical nominee I have just described is, in every particular except his sex, Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the time she was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993.

When a Republican president nominates a judge who is as open and unabashedly conservative (or even libertarian) as Ginsburg is liberal, with virtual certainty of his confirmation, we'll know conservatism controls the battlefield of political debate. But for now our elected leaders are still afraid to join the fray.

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Current Washington Post articles on Miers nomination: Miers Profile, Colbert King's Miers schaudenfreud, Miers life in Dallas, Bush refuses to withdraw Miers.

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.