Posts from — October 2005

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Tropical Storm Tammy popped up off the Florida Atlantic coast this morning and doesn’t seem to have the time to spin up before it heads inland around Jacksonville.

Meanwhile there’s a disturbed patch of air acting feisty off the Yucatan Peninsula in the area that just spawned Stan.

Less than two months to go.

Update: This a link to the tropical outlook that talks about weather that might become hurricanes.

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Via Oliver Willis a Quicktime response to Intelligent Design for NASCAR dads.

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Out of the blue in his first news conference in a long time the Shrubbery starts talking about the probable bird flu pandemic. Now there are a lot of issues he might have addressed in regards to the response to bird flu, but he decided to talk about the possible need for quarantines and that the military would have to be in charge, so Congress needs to change the law.

Before he talks about the military he might want to clarify who in the Federal government is in charge of a flu pandemic. As reported in August, Michael Chertoff is under the impression that the Department of Homeland Security is in charge, while the Department of Health and Human Services thinks it’s their job.

Now the Shrubbery is talking about the Department of Defense.

The Pentagon doesn’t have the resources for the job. The military is not a police agency. The civil affairs units that are the military equivalent of local government services have been moved to the Reserves and National Guard, and they are tied down in Iraq. The military medical system is unable to adequately care for its current patient load, so how could they care for the victims of a pandemic?

The military is not the solution to every possible problem the country has. If there were some reasonable level of competence in this government, there would be no need to even bring it up.

Given that the military is the one government operation that hasn’t grown under the “borrow and spend” Republicans, why are they being forced to do all the work?

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Ron Franscell is an editor at the Beaumont Enterprise and in addition to everything else that has been going on with hurricane Rita, he has been posting on his blog, Under The News.

After a lot of hard work and jumping through a number of widely spaced hoops, the newspaper is finally putting out a print edition.

The first issue was a recap of the editions that have been on the paper’s website, but Monday they put out their first regular edition which only contained 8 pages, but that was just the local news, no ads, columns, comics, etc. In What passes for Normal, Texas he says that a reader called to cancel their subscription because the paper was so small.

You just can’t please some people.

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They way things are going it will probably be his favorite bank teller or Laura.

Remember, you heard it here first second.

Update: Billmon beat me by 22 minutes and he has a picture. I don’t know if the Shrubbery will search beyond whoever balances his checkbook.

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A new grand jury in Austin has issued a second indictment against Tom DeLay and company for money laundering that has a maximum penalty of life in prison.

It sounds like someone was looking for a deal and spilled their guts to the new grand jury. They must have had some convincing evidence to get three indictments in one day from a brand new grand jury.

It sounds like one or more rattus republicus spent the weekend learning to swim.

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If you remember that Karl is in charge of the hurricane rebuilding effort it will come as no surprise that after St. Tammany Parish President Kevin Davis complained about the slow response to the housing needs of his parish to CNN that:

FEMA had told CNN Sunday that the agency expected to have more than 1,000 housing units up and running in the area shortly, but that Davis himself had contributed to delays because he recommended to the agency that his construction company be hired to develop a property to which he has personal ties.

Davis said in his statement that he does not own a construction company, and that he owns no land other than the site of his flooded home.

Good luck to Mr. Davis on his demand for a FEMA apology.

Smear is the Pavlovian response of Karl to complaints. He can’t help himself ever since that little Catholic girl kicked his butt as a child.

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Drama queen/victim Roy Moore has announced his run for governor of Alabama.

Roy doesn’t think that Alabama has suffered enough from recent hurricanes, so he’s going to do his best to replace Bob Riley as the Republican candidate for governor.

For those who didn’t click through, Roy is the nutcase that was removed as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court for plunking a huge stone Ten Commandments monument in the entrance hall of the court building and refusing to remove it after a Federal judge told him to cease and desist being a jerk.

Bob Riley has actually been trying to fix some of the problems that Alabama has, so you know he’s not popular with the “Republican base”.

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Doesn’t the Shrubbery know anyone outside his small clique? I don’t know anything about Harriet Miers, which is rather normal for Bush appointments as most of them haven’t been known to anyone outside a small circle.

Look, FEMA was no place for someone with no emergency management experience, but Mike Brown has more experience with judging than Harriet Miers. While judging horse shows is a bit different than being a Federal judge, it is closer than anything Ms. Miers has done.

I have heard that she was charged with preparing the daily briefing for the Shrubbery. If that’s true, that’s not a good sign because we can all agree that the Shrubbery is one of the least informed Presidents we ever had.

Would it cause this White House extreme pain to actually look for someone who is obviously qualified for a job?

According to the CNN poll currently up I’m with the 78% of those taking the poll who believe that Supreme Court nominees should have previous judicial experience.

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Sun down tonight marks the beginning of Rosh Hashanah and the year 5766.

Happy New Year to my Jewish friends.

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Debbie Elliott is the new host for All Things Considered on the weekends and she is a good choice for hurricane coverage because she is a long-time resident of Orange Beach, Alabama.

This evening she interviewed Trent Lott about his book and the response to the hurricane in Mississippi.

Even though he agrees that FEMA shouldn’t have been under the Department of Homeland Security and wasn’t receiving all that it asked for in funding, he says they flat messed up providing assistance to Mississippi. He also supports using Medicaid to provide hurricane victims with access to medical care.

Old Trent and his constituents are not a happy with the Federal response.

[Listen to the report – Debbie gets in some digs about Lott’s attitude toward “big government” and Medicaid prior to the hurricane.]

In Florida the Palm Beach Post added it voice to several other Florida editorial writers suggesting: As FEMA looks at 2006, repay Florida for 2004.

I don’t want people to forget this: FEMA did not do a competent job in 2004 and they are still holding up reconstruction. Congress gave them the money, but they aren’t covering their obligations.

The “response” was another charade, because after the election FEMA did everything it could to screw over local governments.

What happened in New Orleans was not an aberration, that is the way FEMA does its job: badly. It hasn’t been noticed before because Jeb was covering for the Shrubbery last year. People avoided making their complaints until after the election.

The scope of the disaster caused by Katrina made it impossible to hide and the Louisiana officials didn’t even make the attempt.

A small statistical aside – the death rate in Louisiana is only slightly ahead of Mississippi when you look at the numbers as a percentage of the population.

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In response to remarks made by Prince Saud al-Faisal, foreign minister of Saudi Arabia, about ties between Iraq and Iran, Iraqi Interior Minister Bayan Jabor, an honors graduate of the John Bolton School of Diplomatic Tact, said: “This Iraq is the cradle of civilization that taught humanity reading and writing, and some Bedouin riding a camel wants to teach us. This talk is totally rejected.”

Iraq blasts Saudi Arabia for anti-Shi’ite remarks, the article on the exchange at AlertNet, doesn’t portend smooth relations between these neighboring, oil producing countries.

I’m sure that Karen Hughes and Condi Rice can fly in and help these countries see the benefits of cooperation. It’s not like the current disturbances are going to degenerate into a regional conflict with Saudi Arabia and the Iraqi Sunni at the throats of Iran and the Iraqi Shi’ia. I mean the Shrubbery would never allow anything that would stop the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf for an extended period.

I’m sure the White House has a plan, right?

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California has been having a busy wildfire season and needed some help. Who you gonna call? Canada .

The CBC reports: Quebec sends waterbombers to help fight California wildfires

The Quebec government is lending a hand to help fight massive brush fires on the edge of Los Angeles.

The province’s forest fire prevention agency has sent two CL-415 waterbombers to help combat the flames. The crew includes eight pilots and three technicians who might remain on site until the end of December, depending on the situation.

Quebec said if the fires get worse, it will be ready to send more help.

Last month I talked about the Vancouver Rescue Teams that were first outside assistance St. Bernard parish received, and about the Canadian Ships that brought people and supplies to the Gulf Coast.

The Canadians have been helping a very long time. Many may have missed the story of the Canadian embassy getting 6 Americans out of Teheran during the Iranian Hostage Crisis in 1980.

They do these things and yet the Canadian budget is running a surplus and they are paying down their national debt.

They think that a single-payer national health system is a good thing and they manage to provide health care to everyone. This system as well as their educated work force convinced Toyota to build its newest North American auto plant in Canada, rather than in the United States despite major tax giveaways offered by several states.

General Dynamics has also moved several manufacturing plants to Canada, including one of the plants that build the US Army’s Stryker armored vehicle.

Obviously the Canadian government delivers a better product than the US government, so we should fire the current mismanagement team and outsource our government to Canada.

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It’s the first day of October, the beginning of the Federal fiscal year when we celebrate the fact that the Republican President and Republican Congress can’t get their act together and produce a budget, so we have another “continuing resolution”. Running the government like a business indeed! All these MBAs, CEOs, and corporate attorneys and they don’t seem to be able to plan anything, so everything is done by “emergency bills” to hide the huge deficit they are running while looting the pension funds – just like their corporate sponsors.

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My local K-Mart is advertising Flu shots for $25, free to Medicare participants. It’s probably a national plan and a good deal. I don’t normally get one, but this year I’m going to give it a go because the price is right and the location is convenient.

Some dogs in Florida kennels have come down with a form of influenza that is normally found in horses, and there is a danger of the bird flu mutating into something worse. With some many people coming in from other places, it can’t hurt. [Okay, it does hurt, but not for long.]

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I hear that Tom DeLay’s attorney is applying for a change of venue to a different space/time continuum because everyone in this universe knows he’s guilty which will prevent Mr. DeLay from getting a fair trail before they execute him. Normally he’d only get a couple of years in prison, but there’s an election year coming up and everyone has to get tough on crime. The current governor is way behind on executions, so I’m sure the Bug Man will understand.

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In a slight change of wording the Securities & Exchange Commission is no longer “looking at” Bill Frist’s stock sale, they are now “investigating” it. They have stopped “asking for” and started “subpoenaing” records.

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Let’s see, top aides to both the President and Vice President are “people of interest” in the Plame investigation. The majority leaders of both the House and Senate have legal problems. The head of contract oversight at OMB has been arrested. Obviously we have a slightly different definition of “integrity” with Republicans in charge. They are so bush league.

I wonder if the Shrubbery will push for tax breaks for convicted felons?

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Currently Tropical Depression 19 doesn’t look like it will amount to much, but Tropical Depression 20 seems ready to become hurricane Stan in the Bay of Campeche after passing over the Yucatan Peninsula. It looks to be headed for Veracruz state in Mexico, but you can’t trust them.

Oh, well there are only two months left in the season.

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