April 19, 2009
"College men from LSU...
...went in dumb, come out dumb too." LSU is doing its best to make Randy Newman right about this, with a remarkably ham-handed firing to shut up one of its most distinguished faculty (more here). Apparently, like so much of Louisiana, they would rather have a nice steady flow of federal money coming into the engineering school than actually know...
September 01, 2008
Planning v. luck
We got away with it: this time. But the levees aren't going to be back in shape for another three years. Dumb luck. Sheer dumb luck.
November 14, 2007
Woo hoo
Here's a Cat4 cyclone (called hurricanes in the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf of Mexico) drawing a bead on Kolkata and Bangla Desh. Satellite photo here. It reminds me of the days before Katrina, with some interesting differences: (1) The people in the path of Sidr are poor as churchmice. (2) They live in one of the largest, flattest, lowest, river...
October 21, 2007
Heckuva job, Karl!
Just as the White House planned, a Republican is now Governor of Louisiana. And none of the people who died in the process was a significant Republican contributor. Mission accomplished!
January 20, 2007
The Big Easy isn't coming back
Shortly after Katrina, this blog had a discussion of whether pre-hurricane New Orleans could recover, and whether it should be encouraged to do so. On the whole, we said no, and no. Here's some indication that we were right, and here's some more....
June 09, 2006
"A cowardly way"
If GWB said that he'd rather have Heckuva Job Brownie criticized than take the criticism himself, that was a vulgar thing to say, though not an unreasonable thing to think. But to have an anonymous spokesgeek half-deny it is beneath contempt.
March 03, 2006
Nice try, fellas!
No, no one "anticipated" a levee breach, if "anticipated" means "thought it was more likely than not." But a competent chief executive, having been told that the levees might be topped, would have asked what the risk was that they would fail entirely. And an honest human being wouldn't have pretended, afterwards, that the failure to plan for the worst wasn't ultimately his fault.
January 24, 2006
What are they hiding? (Part CLXXVI)
If the Congress won't do its job, the voters will have to do theirs.
January 23, 2006
No one, that is, who was on vacation
and not paying attention
The White House was warned that Katrina might breach the levees. The President stayed at the ranch, then said "no one anticipated the breach of the levees."
September 26, 2005
Emily Litella lives...but it's not funny
Here's new evidence of the complete moral breakdown of the New Orleans underclass. While everyone else was working day and night to construct a really good story of raping, killing, and looting, the undisciplined savages in the superdome and elsewhere apparently ignored the roles assigned to them by Fox News (and their own police chief), and insolently denied us the...
September 21, 2005
More on rebuilding the coast
Lindsay Beyerstein invokes George Friedman's article detailing the importance of the Port of Southern Louisiana (roughly, the 50-odd miles of the Mississippi from New Orleans to Baton Rouge) to the US economy to cast doubt on my doubt (and by inference, Steve Teles') that rebuilding New Orleans as it is or even where it is makes sense. I'm awash in...
September 20, 2005
Shrinking Gracefully
Steve Teles writes: Mike O'Hare asks a good question below--how, if at all, can you help an area whose economic raison d'etre has degraded shrink gracefully? I'm not sure, but here are a couple of suggestions: a) One thing that would seem to be imperative would be to make whatever resources that are given to individuals as mobile as possible....
New Orleans Governance
Steve Teles writes: Last Friday Paul Krugman wrote in his column in the NYT that: “Our sympathy for the people of Mississippi and Louisiana shouldn't blind us to the realities of their states' political cultures. Last year the newsletter Corporate Crime Reporter ranked the states according to the number of federal public-corruption convictions per capita. Mississippi came in first, and...
September 19, 2005
September 16, 2005
Bush Speech
To universal press agreement that the administration's entire record, and perhaps Republican control of the congress, is at risk, Bush gave a typically awful speech last night. The man continues to have the blatant shamelessness typical of an enormous, cynical, ignorance protected by toadies and cowardly aides. A précis, with my bitter thought balloons, follows: All the loss and pain...
Waste, fraud, abuse, and Katrina
How come there's $200 billion per year of unnecessary spending in the Federal budget? Aren't the Republicans in charge?
September 11, 2005
Not knowing v. not caring
The FBI background check surely told the White House personnel office everything we now know about Michael Brown's previous career, such as it was.
September 10, 2005
September 09, 2005
Rebuilding decisions
Giving money to individuals sounds like a good idea; abolishing self-government in the City of New Orleans is a decision for the state, not for Washington.
What to rebuild?
What, exactly, in New Orleans is worth saving, and how do we save it? Steve Teles has some thoughts.
Naughty, naughty!
Padding your resume to get a federal job is a felony. Michael Brown seems to have padded his resume to get his job at FEMA.
September 08, 2005
$100 billion for Katrina: policy analysis and politics
Is this really a good way to spend $100 billion?
September 07, 2005
Rebuild what?
Update: (29/IX/05) Lindsay Beyerstein disagrees (cautiously) and I reply. Dennis Hastert has been backpedaling furiously from his question about the wisdom of rebuilding New Orleans, at least rebuilding it where it is. Too bad, because brave declarations of indomitable spirit and promises to "restore" the Crescent City need an extended, hard, look. It will be very sad if brave refusal...
September 05, 2005
Coulda guessed this one
Hear hoofbeats, expect to see horses. Hear "White House sliming operation," expect to see Karl Rove.
September 04, 2005
River Access for Relief
A reason repeatedly cited for slow delivery of relief supplies to New Orleans after the storm, and slow evacuation, was the obstruction of the roads, and of navigation through Lake Pontchartrain owing to collapse of the bridges across its connection to the Gulf. But the levees on the Mississippi River side of the city have held throughout the storm, and...
Comparative disastro-musicology
Andrew Sullivan likens Katrina to the Galveston flood of 1900. How likely is it, do you think, that Katrina's victims will have as graceful a musical monument, or a Tom Rush to sing and play it? No, I didn't think so, either....
Unbelievable!
The President of Jefferson Parish says that FEMA officials turned away truckloads of water, told the Coast Guard not to make fuel available, and cut off communications capacity. WTF?
Disaster communications
Two potential sources of emergency communications capacity for the Katrina impact area: ham radio, and the big media companies.
Slander on background
The White House tells another whopper: the Governor of Louisiana did indeed proclaim a state of emergecy a week ago Friday, before the storm hit.
R-i-i-i-i-i-ght!
The President doesn't seem to know the difference between unbelievable incompetence and "doing a helluva job." Well, he wouldn't, would he?
A tough row to hoe
Even with more competent performance than we've had, cleaning up after Katrina wasn't going to be easy.
Paying the price of feckless local government
New Orleans is a grasshopper city. That's its charm. Eventually, though, winter comes.
September 03, 2005
President Potemkin
The White House apparently set up a fake "food distribution point" for the President to stand in front of for the cameras, and then tore it down as soon as he left.
Fake sympathy and fake relief efforts
Bush poses in front of construction equipment working to plug the hole in the levee. He leaves. So does the equipment.
Thoughts toward an after-action report
Some questions about what went wrong from Mike O'Hare. Why didn't the evacuation use buses instead of cars?
The operation was successful
but the patient died
President Clueless says one for the history books.
GWB as Baghdad Bob
When a Republican political consultant compares Bush and the DHS folks to Baghdad Bob, you know things aren't going well for the Red Team.
Time for Michael Brown
to decide he wants
to spend more time with his family
CNN isn't pleased with his performance.
September 02, 2005
The levee failure was predictable and predicted
Either the President doesn't know what he's talking about, or he's not telling the truth.
September 01, 2005
A non-foolish inconsistency
Considering moral hazard in providing disaster insurance makes sense; but that doesn't mean leaving people to drown.
Dan Froomkin asks some damned good questions
If the reason Bush returned to Washington is that he is more effective here, then why didn't he come back two days ago?
GWB, gasoline prices, and demagogy
GWB is against "price-gouging." Does he understand that the alternative to rising gasoline prices in the face of a supply shortfall is a physical shortage and either rationing or long lines at the pump? Probably. His cynicism is truly breathtaking.
