"To me that says someone else is benefiting from the $175 and logically it has to be related to whoever is going to build the bridge."
The transportation bill is corporate welfare for the likes of Bechtel and assorted other construction giants. It will produce jobs and make the economy look rosy though its a complete sham since its a government works program where government borrows hundreds of billions of dollars to pump in to the economy to fake growth while all the real economy moves to China. It is socialism or in this case Fascism is a more appropriate word. Roosevelt did the same thing to pump up the economy during the depression though more through government run jobs programs, not so much by pumping money in to corporations. So for Roosevelt it was Socialism, for Bush its more Fascism (vast government spending going to corporations run by faithful party members).
These programs wins votes for the Republicans since people like the new highways and the economic boost, and for the most part stopped caring that its built on top of borrowed money a few trillion ago. Borrowing money means the U.S. tax payer has to pay interest on in to eternity and in theory should pay it back someday and if it continues will eventually cause an economic collapse in the dollar and the U.S.
The Bush administration has been going down a check list of bills to create gigantic windfalls, at taxpayer expense, for all the corporate interests that back them:
- Medicare reform and drug benefit o drug companies o insurance companies o healthcare corporations
- Energy bill o Big oil o Big coal o Big nuke o Big electric
- Highway bill o Big construction o Widely distributed political pork
- Moon and Mars mission o Big aerospace o Votes in Florida and Texas, especially Florida
- War in Iraq/Afghanistan and massive defense spending increases o Big defense contractors o Halliburton/KBR and a host of other war profiteers in Iraq
- Tax cuts o All rich people
- Disaster handouts through FEMA o Especially good at winning votes in Florida in 2004
This leaves the last big one to push through which is Social Security "reform" which will transfer vast sums from government coffers in to Wall Street banks and brokers much to their benefit and all those who own stock when the money comes in to play.
Everyone who backs the Republicans has gotten billions in payoffs and windfall profits, at tax payer expense and with a flood of new debt, for thousands or at most millions in campaign contributions.
Well I stand corrected, if it works that well thats great, though since its classified we probably could never actually tell.
What you are describing is the antithesis of 99% of defense and government contracting.
Now if you were only doing work that was actually beneficial to society, instead of supporting the ever expanding military industrial complex in the U.S.
I'm glad they found a glitzy name for the way I've preferred working all my life.
"It was a chance to make a clean break from the old 32-bit legacy chips, however the price was and is too high and AMDs are cheaper and still very powerful."
Even if Itanic was selling at the same price point as Athlons and used the same amount of power it would still have failed. Of course the price points aren't even close and the power consumption is way worse. I bought a loaded Athlon 3400 without monitor for $800. Just an IA64 chip costs more than twice that.
The IA64 clock speed has consistently been behind expectations. Running IA32 code, which is what most people run, in the emulation built in to IA64 is slow. Getting performance out of code compiled for IA64 is hard and you only get it on some codes. The compiler technology to compile for VLIW is hard and the only real good success with it has been in vectorizable supercomputing style codes, especially Fortran codes, with relatively simple loops crunching a lot of data. IA64 is great for that which is why that is the only niche it is surviving in. Most code people run on their desks isn't anything like that.
Itanic simply had no chance to succeed in the high volume desktop market or even most low end server tasks. It was a chip designed for supercomputing. The amazing thing is the executives at Intel didn't grasp this before they sunk billions in to it they will never recoup. They built a chip for a market that simply isn't big enough to get a return to cover the investment.
Chances are your employer charges the DoD for %100 of your hours at work even if you only work %60. As long as they have billable hours defense contractors tend to not care about much else, though its nice if someday you deliver your project.
With as much flexibility as they are giving you I sure hope you are all still rigorous in accurately recording your hours. With all the flexing, if your team is putting in less actual hours than its billing its probably against the law. I'd be bit amazed if that much flex isn't illegal to begin with considering the rigor of Federal procurement rules.
It also be interesting to see your companies actual track record for delivering on budget and on schedule. Since its classified of course we can't. Most defense contractors are pretty bad in this regard, especially on classified projects because oversight is weak. As long as the DoD lets your company get away with it, its more profitable if they overrun because they make more on the project. If thats the case here your pleasant work environment is because your company actually wants to overrun and run up more billable hours.
I hazard to say if you were in the private sector you might be allowed to flex but there would be frequent crunches where you would be compelled to work 60-80 hour weeks to deliver a product so the company can make their revenue projections in a quarter. You wont get paid for it because you are salaried and if you are lucky you will get some comp time, probably less than what you actually put in in uncompensated overtime. You see in the private sector you don't have a vast pool of our tax dollars to pay you weather you work or not, or weather you deliver or not. Its pretty common to squander millions or billions on projects that fail and just get written off, or that require sinking extra billions in them to force them to an ugly completion. In the private sector, either you deliver products that make money or you end up unemployed.
"Then what explains Bill Clinton's failure to fix these problems?"
It can safely be said the Clinton administration funded the levees way better than the Bush administration did. The Bush administration has slashed EVERY Army Corps of Engineer funding request for the levees since they came to power. They've been to busy funding Iraq, squandering money on biowarfare gear for fire departments in Podunk, Wyoming and directing pork to their rich, white Republican friends.
I especially love the fact the Bush administration allocated $100 million, and transfered a key Army engineer in Louisiana, to restore the marshlands in Iraq. $100 million for the wetlands in Iraq this year versus $87 million for New Orleans levees. Really screwed up priorities there, with 20/20 hindsight.
Fortunately for the Bush administration it probably can't be established if the breeches would have been prevented if they hadn't gutted Army Corp funding and personel for levee maintenance and upgrade though an independent investigation will be interesting. Its a certainty that slashing funding for them didn't help. The fact is levees, especially at the extent they exist around New Orleans, are expensive to maintain. Either you have to committ to maintain them, abandon New Orleans or do what the Bush administration did, let them deteriorate in the face of a surge in hurricanes and their intensity and have a catastrophic disaster.
Follows is a great run down from from factchecks.org which is a pretty nonpartisan outfit:
"In the past five years, the amount of money spent on all Corps construction projects in the New Orleans district has declined by 44 percent, according to the New Orleans CityBusiness newspaper, from $147 million in 2001 to $82 million in the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30."...
A long history of complaints
Local officials had long complained that funding for hurricane protection projects was inadequate:
October 13, 2001: The New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that federal officials are postponing new projects of the Southeast Louisiana Flood Control Program, or SELA, fearing that federal budget constraints and the cost of the war on terrorism may create a financial pinch for the program. The paper went on to report that President Bushs budget proposed $52 million for SELA in the 2002 fiscal year. The House approved $57 million and the Senate approved $62 million. Still, the $62 million would be well below the $80 million that corps officials estimate is needed to pay for the next 12 months of construction, as well as design expenses for future projects.
April 24, 2004: The Times-Picayune reported that less money is available to the Army Corps of Engineers to build levees and water projects in the Missisippi River valley this year and next year. Meanwhile, an engineer who had direct the Louisiana Coastal Area Ecosystem Restoration Study a study of how to restore coastal wetlands areas in order to provide a buffer from hurricane storm surges was sent to Iraq "to oversee the restoration of the Garden of Eden wetlands at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, for which President Bushs 2005 budget gave $100 million.
June 8, 2004: Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, told the Times-Picayune:
Walter Maestri: It appears that the money has been moved in the presidents budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq , and I suppose thats the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees cant be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us.
September 22, 2004: The Times-Picayune reported that a pilot study on raising the height of the levees surrounding New Orleans had been completed and generated enough information for a second study necessary to estimate the cost of doing so. The Bush administration ordered the New Orleans district office of the Army Corps of Engineers no
May not have been your intention but it was the result, and you fell in to the same brand of rhetoric the Bush administration falls into when they want to win a point without risk of debate, just invoke 9/11 and Pearl Harbor and you can rationalize every government excess and accuse anyone who argues a counterpoint of being weak or unpatriotic.
"As to the 9/11 report..."
I wasn't referring to the 9/11 committee report. I was referring to the Congressional report which was harder hitting and laid some of the blame where it belonged on Saudi Arabia. The entire lengthy section on Saudi involvement with the plot was censored by the White House over the objections of Congressmen in both parties.
" I would think this is obvious after all the Abel Danger stuff that's been coming out in the past couple of weeks."
As nearly as I can tell Able Danger was a case of people with an agenda making something out of nothing. They are trying to con the nation in to legalizing and funding massive computerized spying on America by the Pentagon, and the easiest way to do it in the face of stiff opposition is to claim it would have prevented 9/11. I know Atta and a couple other hijackers were well known to the CIA as being potential Al Qaeda members. The fact a DOD mining project might have observed, quite vaguely, something that was already known is unexciting in the least. Its still open to debate if they made the whole thing up, or at least exaggerated it, because they have an agenda. Not hard to log all the Saudi nationals in the U.S. and assume some of them are Islamic extremists. Lot of 20/20 hindsight in Able Danger.
The more disturbing thing is the President had a briefing paper in August about Al Qaeda attacking the U.S. with airplanes and he didn't even bother to have the FBI follow up on it. If they had it might registered that field agents had red flagged Arabs in U.S. flight schools training to fly but not land airliners.
"my post into a strawman...but it's not feasable, due to the cost of transporting workers and whatnot."
Well you obviously didn't read my port. The number of workers you need to run a port plunged in the last 50 years thanks to container shipping. You could support a large port with a small town now. Times changed.
A big percentage of the people who were left in New Orleans were unemployed and on welfare. It is a city with vast poverty. They weren't people who had longshoreman jobs. They were freed slaves who landed there after abolition, they started with nothing and in formerly segregated and still racist South they still having nothing today.
"but farming is simply not the reason they're on the floodplain in New Orleans."
New Orleans is where it is because it was a great port 200+ years ago, its still a good one now but you don't need the large urban city for the port.
When it was built there the French didn't grasp that it was sinking. Now in light of the fact its sinking you do either two things:
- Abandon it because its now prohibitively expensive to repair and defend in an era of super hurricanes, or you at least abandon all the low income housing which was substandard before and now is just rank and unlivable.
- Do what the Dutch do and spend billions building massive new levees and pumping systems to reclaim and defend it.
What you don't do is put hundreds of thousands of people in a bowl below sea level AND cut back on the money you spend on the levees which is what the U.S. has been doing for years and which accelerated under the Bush administration, in particular as it diverted the Army Corp of Engineers to rebuilding Iraq instead of the U.S. Bush just signed a bill to build a $231 million bridge to an island in Alaska with 50 people on it some of whom probably like the fact there is no highway. Thats WAY more than New Orleans levees have seen in the last 5 years. What is going on here? Alaska has a powerful Republican congressional delegation and they get a vastly disproportionate percentage of pork. New Orleans being poor, black and Democratic gets nothing from this regime which lead to an accident waiting to happen and then it did. A constant of the Bush administration is they direct their pork to their own. They spend billions to rebuild Jeb Bush's Florida every year, they took care of Republican run Mississippi this time. Democrat leaning Louisiana and overwhelmingly Democrat New Orleans was dead last on their partisan priority list and it showed.
"Industrial scale fertilizer is very useful in the Midwest, the Ukraine, and other farming areas, but farming is simply not the reason they're on the floodplain in New Orleans."
Not sure why you think I said it was. You were referring to all the ancient civilizations that built on flood plains and I was pointing why they did it, that it was by design and with the realization floods were inevitable and in fact desirable.
New Orleans is where it is because its at the mouth of America's largest river. During an era when various factions were fighting for control of a new continent it was a strategically essential location. Times changed.
Another important point is that when New Orleans was built it had a lot of land around it to provide a buffer. Most of that land has sunk in to the gulf thanks to human beings messing up the natural floods of the Mississippi. Its made New Orleans less viable with each passing year.
"New Orleans is a fairly unbeatable location for a port"
Don't think you actually need to build a large city around a port these day. In this day and age you need a bunch of cranes to move containers, and a mix of truck friendly freeways and rail lines. You need a town big enough to support the people that work in it but the number of people needed to run a container shipping port is dramatically lower than it was when everything was loaded and unloaded by hand.
In fact all the big ports I've seen are actually counterproductive to have in cities. They are an eyesore, they consume expensive real estate and are expensive to operate in an inflated urban environment. The truck and rail traffic ties traffic in the area in knots. They end up being warehouses/industrial, steep on urban blight and drug use when in the middle of cities. Good planning would suggest you build a port in one place, an industrial area near it but not in a place prone to flooding, and an urban/suburban area where lots of people live, not close to it at all and sure not below sea level.
All in all if you were a good planner I'd say you put a port where New Orleans is, make the French Quarter which is on high grand in to a tourist attraction enclave and move the rest of the city elsewhere. It was for the most part a failed city anyway with entrenched poverty and unemployment, steep crime, and rampant police corruption.
As for building on flood plains, that was done out of pure necessity in more ancient era. They didn't have industrial scale fertilizer and agriculture was very labor intensive. You pretty much had to build the agriculture part of your society on flood plains, and you had to build them with a degree of transience. You WANTED the floods because they replenished and fertilized the soil, otherwise it would have just been depleted with a few years of agriculture with no fertilizer. You WANTED to build minimal housing and infrastructure with the realization floods would destroy it every year or every few years. Building huts in a flood plain is different from building expensive homes, industrial capacity and high rises in a flood plain.
I was amused to hear on the news this morning, though not confirmed yet, that George W. this morning attempted to strong arm the Democratic governor of Louisiana in to signing over control of the Louisiana National Guard inside here state to him in complete defiance of the Constitution.
Pretty sure that, as is typical for the Bush family and Rove, they've turned this in to a power grab and a political game. Its hard to tell but I suspect the Bush administration, FEMA, etc. go balls to the wall to provide relief and hand out billions in FEMA checks in Republican controlled states, especially his brother's Florida, and Mississippi run by good ole redneck and former RNC chairman Halley Barber. Barber a few days ago was pointing out how great the relief effort was going in his state with the implication it was all the fault of the Democrats in Louisiana the relief effort went bad(glossing over the situation there is a 100 times worse). So this has turned in to just another case of the Bush administration dividing instead of uniting, make the Democrats look bad, so they can run them out at the next electoral opportunity.
It also seems to be designed by the Bush administration to get the Congress and American people to gleefully overturn Posse Comitatus and dramatically expend the martial law powers of the Executive branch and the Federal government which should come in handy if there are future emergencies like mass protests against this incompetent administration.
"there is a bit of legislation that actually forbids the FBI and the CIA from working closely with one another, to prevent the two from launching a coup (I don't remember under which President that was - I think it might have been Ford)."
Its was mostly thanks to J. Edgar Hoover, LBJ, Richard Nixon and a series of CIA fuck ups in the 60's and 70's. The CIA was being used to spy on Americans, intervene in American domestic affairs, and play dirty tricks on political opponents of those in power, not to mention all the crackpot schemes they hatched in places like Cuba. Most of the abuses that were Watergate were perpetrated by people affiliated one way or another with the CIA. The Church Committee in particular resulted in a major reining in of the CIA and domestic spying. It was a Democrat led effort and the Republican's, especially the hard right, have been pissed about it ever since. Luckily for them all those restrictions are now gone thanks to the Patriot Act and the National Intelligence Reform Act which created a unified all seeing spy agency which is ripe for abuse by those in power.
All people hear about these days is about how those firewalls led to the failure to stop 9/11 well chances are it didn't. If you think removing them is a good idea you should read the Church reports and remember the massive abuse the CIA and FBI were engaging in before they were enacted. Those who fail to learn their history are doomed to repeat it. If you want to experience what life was like in the U.S.S.R with the KGB you really want a unified spying agency and domestic law enforcement agency with no restrictons on what they can do to American citizens in America.
"imagine what would have happened if the CIA and the FBI hadn't been in the middle of a proverbial pissing match at the time, and the information about the upcoming attack had been passed on"
Probably very little would have changed. The Republicans just wanted to con everyone in to thinking it would have made a difference because they wanted to get the Church restrictions removed, something they've wanted since they were passed in 1973. It worked. The information the FBI has on 9/11, mostly Arabs at flight schools, didn't even get through the channels in the FBI, it had no chance of going to the CIA. About the only thing that might have helped if the CIA had flagged a couple of the hijackers to the FBI when they entered the U.S. and if the FBI had followed up on it which is a big if.
"since nobody wants to be the one who releases data that turns out to help an enemy launch the next Pearl Harbor or 9/11 attack"
I don't think any leaked classified data made any contribution to Pearl Harbor or 9/11 though it is clever on your part to invoke those two traumas to win points for your argument.
In fact much of the "suprise" part of the "suprise attack" on Pearl Harbor was due to the high classification of Japanese communication intercepts which led to the many signals the Japanese were preparing an attack from being acted on.
There were certainly some strong indicators an attack at Pearl Harbor was imminent. It has created the long running conspiracy theory that FDR actually knew it was coming and wanted a devastating "sneak attack" so he could get a nation that was isolationist and pacifist mobilized for war. Weather it was FDR's intention or not it did work. Pearl Harbor propelled the U.S. into World War II with an enthusiasm that wouldn't have been there otherwise.
9/11 is not quite as clear cut, but it is clear a "classified" briefing in W.'s daily intelligence brief spelled out the danger of Al Qaeda launching an attack on the U.S. using airplanes while W. was on vacation in August and the attack came in September. All indications are the brief went unheeded and no action was taken. Little George apparently didn't for example tell the FBI to look in to this, because if they had they might have "connected the dots" that suspicious Arab men were training in the U.S. to fly airliners, a fact they knew but which had been sat on if not classified.
It is unavoidable that you do have to classify a lot of information in a world where you have enemies, especially ones intent on spying on you like the U.S.S.R, Russia, China and Israel.
But, a case can be made that classification causes as much harm as good since it destroys effective communication, WITHIN the government not just between the government and its people especially when it tilts of of control and delves in to excess.
Unfortunately classification is CONSTANTLY abused by people in government to conceal their failures and the failure of the government to do its job, and worse to hide some of its malevolent schemes. It's also integral in a government's creation of a false picture of the world in the minds of the population in order to manipulate them. Classification and propaganda go hand in hand.
A great example of out of control classification is the huge section of the congressional report on 9/11 in which the role of the Saudi people and government in 9/11 was spelled out in excruciating and embarrassing detail. Its hard to say why it was classified, most of the Congressman don't want it classifed. One guess is the Bush administration didn't want to embarrass their close personal friends in the House of Saud. The other is the Bush administration was engaged in weaving a propaganda web intent on connecting Iraq to 9/11 as an excuse for regime change and war, and 100 pages spelling out the Saudi's were in fact vastly more involved than Iraq would have been counterproductive to that propaganda effort.
A mostly forgotten case of classified data being released which exposed government malevolence and incompetence is the Pentagon Papers. Depending on your viewpoint this giant leak either exposed the bankruptcy of the American involvement in Vietnam and ended a misguidede war there, or their leak help collapse American resolve and contributed to its defeat there. Whichever it was, it was a high beam of truth about the reality of the situation there that classification would have suppressed were it not for Daniel Elsberg and his conscience.
" before mysql starts it's baseless lawsuits similar to SCO's."
This is silly sensationalism. Its was probably ill advised on MySQL's part to sign a partnership with SCO at this point, but the chances this has anything to do with SCO's legal insanity against Linux are about zero. MySQL probably just had some money thrown their way to do integration work on SCO's product which lots of people still use and rely on. That product and the people working on it, unfortunate as they are, have little to do with the insanity of Darl McBride and his Linux witch hunt.
MySQL being a for profit organization they probably just wanted the business.
Chances are they will regret it because they will probably lose more users and customers than they will gain from the deal with SCO.
Well its easy to explain how they will spin it, and in fact already have been in the last couple of days.
Disasters are state and local responsibilities by law and policy. The Federal government is only supposed to provide support at the call of governor's and mayors.
A. They will blame the governor of Louisiana and the mayor of New Orleans for not marshalling city buses and providing transportation for the poor and infirm. Its a bit unfair because even if they had done this I doubt they could have gotten very many more people out in the short time available. You just can't force people to evacuate a big city in this short time, but providing public transportation for those who want to leave seems like a local failure. Of course once you put them on buses where would they go.
B. They will point out the National Guard is under the control of the Governor so any failure in deploying it is the Governor's fault. This is true though it glosses over the Bush administration had 1/4 to 1/3 of the Guard manpower and 1/2 its equipment in Iraq. The Federal government is by law precluded from putting troops in to states and cities, thanks to the fact the Federal Army ran out of control after the Civil War and was reined in my the Posse Comitatus act in 1878. It is most of the time a good restraint and prevents martial law and dictatorship. In this case it caused problems though.
C. There will be finderpointing as to whose fault it was the levees broke. Maybe it was inevitable they were going to break under this stress, though I wager these localized failures were due to bad maintenance. More importantly there should have been helicopters surveying them the second the weather cleared and sending resource to plug leaks before they washed out leading to the massive failures. Its sad no one had a plan to survey and do emergency repairs on these levees, a stitch(or sandbag) in time might have prevented this though we may never know unless someone was watching how and why the levees actually failed.
Some things I want to come out in the investigation:
- Who stopped the Red Cross from entering New Orleans because it was "to dangerous". Was it FEMA, state or local. For whatever reason, the Red Cross is the one who insured people get food and water and it couldn't get in to New Orleans because someone stopped them.
- The President of Jefferson Parish in New Orleans accused FEMA on "Meet the Press" this morning of intentionally cutting the communication lines they local and state people were using, they had to patch the lines and post armed guards.
- How much did the levees degrade because the Army Corps of Engineers had its funding cut for them and had its personell and money redirected to rebuild Iraq versus how much was due to cuts from local levee districts.
At this point I'd really like to know did FEMA:
- Do everything possible but it was just to hard - Do a mediocre and inadequate job - Did FEMA make things worse and actually obstruct the recovery
I'm more than a little suspicious the Bush administration let things go bad on purpose, they just let it go to far and it backlashed on them. They were probably planning to have the President come in on his white horse followed an hour later by the Army moving in to save the day which is more or less what happened its was just to late.
As I said it depends on what you call Watergate's height. The press is just picking the point at which Nixon's approval rating was the same as W.'s because it makes it sound bad, "Bush's rating as bad as Nixon's during Watergate" though in reality Nixon hadn't bottomed at that point. Nixon's approval rating continued down to 24% when he resigned.
Lots of Presidents have been at the same level as W. has been recently and recovered. Reagan and Clinton were at the same level at their nadirs and recovered. Truman was even worse off after he fired McArthur.
The mechanism is the same. They could just as easily change the whole rule. Applying it to judicial nominations was just a way to get the ball rolling without getting as much backlash. People like yourself say, oh its just for judicial nominations, I'm OK with that. Having done it once there really isn't anything stopping them from doing it for everything other than moderate Republicans opposing it. Moderate Republicans are an endangered species. I wouldn't be surprised to see the Republican National Committee try to unseat any moderates they see as vulnerable in primaries and replace them with more extreme candidates.
"and just filibuster until the whitehouse is back in our hands."
Depends on exactly what point you call the "height of Watergate" but Nixon's approval rating was down in the 20's at its nadir, Bush is still in the 40's though it will be interesting to see what Katrina does to him. I suspect now that most of the people are evacuated and fed the outrage about New Orleans will blow over.
Wouldn't be surprised if the Republican spin machine manages to turn it in to a story of the Bush administration stepping in to save the day and blame everything that went wrong on the Democratic mayor of New Orleans and the Democratic governor of Louisiana. I assure you Rove and Co. were thinking about the political implications of this disaster from the get go.
I also wager sometimes this session or next Congress will pass a bill giving the executive branch and DOD sweeping new powers to intervene domestically and overturn Posse Comitatus facilitating future imposition of martial law. The catch phrase will be "Remember New Orleans" as they sell our freedom down the river again just like they did with the Patriot Act.
"and just filibuster until the whitehouse is back in our hands."
Wouldn't count on it. The only thing that stopped the Republicans from changing the rules on filibusters (the nuclear option) earlier this year was a coalition of 6 moderate Republicans and 6 Democrats. The Republicans want to change the cloture rules so a simple majority vote could end a filibuster. If they had succeeded the Republicans would have effectively seized nearly complete control of the government and the Dems in Congress could just stay home. It was a terrifying prospect to those 6 moderate Republicans that this power hungry, out of control, regime would have that much power.
If the Democrats really did start being obstructionist the coalition might fall apart. It could also fall apart if the Republican pick up more Senate seats in 2006 with far right candidates. They added quite a few extremists in 2004. The Dems are in such bad shape I wouldn't count on them to hold much any more.
Its pretty amazing Roberts is sailing through confirmation as well as he is. Its a near certainty he is a member of the Federalist Society and will be a far right wing judge if confirmed. He will breeze by because he's been smart enough to keep his mouth shut on the public record and hasn't shown his extremist side in a way that anyone can nail him.
There is actually something called the National Response Plan published by DHS in December 2004 which is just coming in to effect that outlines in excruciating detail how the DHS and the rest of the Federal government is supposed to respond to incidents such as this. It was obviously written with a major terrorism incident in mind but applies equally to natural disasters when they rich a threshold called "event of national significance".
It is mind numbing exercise in bureaucracy to read. The parts I've struggled through though suggest the burden for disaster response is almost entirely placed on the backs of state and local governments and the Feds only support them and can only step in and take control when the local officials "overwhelmed" which they obviously were in this case.
Having just seen Chertoff's press conference the cynic in me thinks that in fact the Bush administration probably intentionally sat on their hands for a few days because they want the situation to spiral out of control. They now have the opportunity to justify declaring an "event of national significance" and Federalizing the whole situation. Chertoff indicated this was in fact a golden opportunity to christen the National Response Plan.
There is a wicked double edged sword at play here. For disasters of this epic scale obviously the Federal government and the military have vast resources to bring to bear.
It is however setting a dangerous precedent. The reason we have the Posse Commitatus act passed in 1878 was that during and after the Civil War the U.S. military ran rough shod over the South, devastating most of it, and imposing martial law to the misfortune of Southerners who in many case had their land and property confiscated by carpetbaggers with military support. Sherman's march to the sea, though perhaps a legitimate military action in some books, is in others an act of savagery and gratuitous revenge in others. Its not open to dispute that it was a case of a Federal army applied a scorched Earth strategy to a huge swath of the South.
Its great that there is now aid flowing to those that need it but the thing to watch now is how far the Federal government overcorrects and uses this incident as a justification for dramatically expanding the ability of the Federal government and the military to exert martial law in the U.S. and to overrule the power of the states and their governors. It will be interesting in particular to see if they actually do deploy all the new DOD toys for "non lethal" crowd control here to establish precent for using them in times of anarchy, a precedent that could be used downt he road to suppress antiwar or anti government demonstrations.
9/11 was used as a basis by the power hungry Bush administation to justify the Patriot Act, National Intelligence Reform and dramatically expanding the powers of the executive to engage in arbitrary arrest and detention in the U.S of U.S citizens without due process.
I am willing to wager this incident will be used as the basis in coming months to overturn Posse Comitatus and to give the Federal government broad new powers to impose martial law and to seize control of cities and states in the U.S. in order to "restore order". They are still tiptoeing very carefully, for example in using the 82nd airborne in non policing roles to free up the Guard for policing duty because that is the law. Don't be at all surprised if six months from now laws will be passed the give the Federal government sweeping new power to intervene in domestic affairs. This will be a plus in dealing with major disasters. But, the other edge is it will give the President sweeping new power to impose martial law and approach dictatorship.
The cynic in me thinks the Bush administration saw the chaos in New Orleans, let it spiral out of control for a few days and, as is there way, saw a silver lining that it may turn in t a tool to let them vastly expand their alre
You would think that FEMA and the FCC would have figured out a while ago that they need to build some trucks with mobile cell phone towers and position them around the country. The trucks would have their own generators, a tanker for fuel, a tall tower that you crank up when you get the truck to the disaster area and either a microwave or satellite link to connect to the rest of the network. Maybe it would carry a stock of cell phones, cell phone batteries and chargers would be good too.
Cell phones being portable and requiring no land lines are a natural means for communication in a disaster area. They are also more ubiquitous than UHF radios, easier for ordinary people to use, better switched and routed.
You have the problem that people in an area with no power can't charge the batteries but if they leave them off most of the time, just turn them on to see if there is a signal and make a 911 call the batteries will last a while. If you could count on cell phone service being the first thing restored then a stock of spare batteries would be a natural addition to a home disaster survival kit.
Japan has an interesting idea in that they want to field a geosync satellite with a 66 foot dish that can communicate with regular cell phones from space which means they would always have comm in a disaster area no matter how bad it is.
As an aside looks I saw a Red Cross official on Larry King and part of the problem in New Orleans is FEMA is a disaster when it comes to recovering from a real disaster. As nearly as I can tell all they do is write checks and hand out pork post disaster. They in fact seem to be completely dependent on the privately funded Red Cross to actually supply and shelter disaster refugees using private donations. In the case of New Orleans someone, not sure if it was FEMA, state or city, told them to stay out of New Orleans because it was to dangerous so the normal channels for providing water and food sat outside the city letting people suffer inside.
So this would suggest it would take a staggering large number of soldiers to restore ordering in a city of.... I dunno.... maybe the size of Baghdad.... or maybe the whole country of Iraq. How exactly is the military keeping a lid on an entire country with 130,000 soldiers. You might retort the Iraqis are helping well there are at best 100,000 of them and they are badly trained, motivated and their ranks are filled with spies and saboteurs.
The Army invaded all of Iraq and in particular Baghdad which is a huge city with millions of armed residents in the middle of a shooting war with at most 3 times the force you are saying is necessary to contain one smallish American city which is at this point mostly empty. How come? Your numbers really don't add up. Of course we know Baghdad and Iraq descended in to anarchy too, the entire country was looted and it set the stage for the flourishing insurgency there is still there today.
There seems to be a trend. This administration does anarchy and looting EXTREMELY well.
No you are still not getting it, your cognitive dissononce reigns supreme.
The Corp has drastically reduced the amount of annual maintenance and emergency repairs they've been doing in 2003, 2004 and 2005 because their priorities have been diverted from the U.S to Iraq, that means their engineers, their funding and their time all diverted to a bottomless pit on the other side of the world while they let their domestic responsibilities slip.
You are stuck on the idea that it took some grand 10 year multibillion dollar project to fix the levees. Chances are it took a few millions more, and more importantly just focus and people, for annual maintenance to fix low spots and cracks. Its not like there was a massive failure in the levees because they needed a complete rebuild that would take years and billions of dollars. There were three small weak spots that started leaking and eventually washed out. They didn't even fail during the hurricane they failed a day later. Chances are if some smart Army engineer had used helicopter to survey the levies and a bulldozer or helicopter to do emergency repairs right after the storm they could have averted a catastrophe. Chances are all those smart Army engineers are in Iraq.
I quit. Arguing with you is a waste of time. You are one of those classic Bush fan boys, everthing his administration does is perfect, everything that goes wrong was Clinton's fault, Bush's shit don't stink. Siggggghhhhhh.
The problem with Clark's blog is he does the same thing Democrats always do these days. Criticize Bush a bunch, offer some nebulous statements about leadership, challenging people and sacrifice, about how they would do better but they never actually offer a better alternative.
Maybe Clark wouldn't have invaded Iraq if he had been President, no one with a half a brain would have done that, unless they are a Straussian neocon, but now that the U.S. is stuck there the Democrats offer no solution other than put in even more troops and dig a deeper hole. There is in fact no good solution at this point.
The alternative the Democrats offered in 2004 was so ridiculously bad that we got stuck with the same nitwit we had for another 4 years and he and his administration really looks like a nitwit this week. I saw him touring the disaster area today and the sound bite I heard was him saying how great it was the Colonial pipeline was going to do better than 40 some percentage of capacity. Shows you where his head is, not on the fact people are dieing of thirst, but that Exxon and Shell get their money machine going again.
Maybe after the disaster thats been this first year of his second term people will just throw the Republicans out next time, no matter how bad the Democratic alternative is but that is a pretty sorry way to pick your leaders. If your leaders are bad its a serious drag on everything your nation does.
Nice moderation. Marking something as flamebait that is just quoting an article on the historical record of spending by the Army on the levees around New Orleans. Hopefully you will burn in metamoderation and have your moderator privileges revoked. Now this you can mark as flamebait since I am baiting you Mr. Clueless vindictive moderator.
You are pretty dense. The money was already allocated and the Bush administration slashed it by 80%. Since the Iraq war, the lion's share of the Army Corp of engineers time , man power and our tax dollares are going in to a futile effort to rebuild Iraq instead of the U.S.
Please explain to me how that is OK. You don't have a leg to stand on on this one.
If there wasn't money at all and it was cut I can understand it but squandering it in Iraq instead of at home is pretty unforgivable.
Your the one being irrational. He is doing something completely wrong, diverting $300 billion dollars in to the otherside of the world in to a bottomless pit, while the U.S. goes down the tubes.
The key issue is that I'm not sure the Corp was even keeping up with basic maintenance and emergency repairs for two reasons:
- Their funding had been slashed by the Bush administration.
- The Corp has been severely stretched helping rebuild Iraq.
The officers heading the corp aren't going to admit that they let maintenance slip so I think an investigation is called for and not take them at their word. This is the same Army Corp of Engineers who gave Halliburton a 5 year no bid contract to rebuild Iraq's oil fields. Recently when a top Corp procurement officer savaged the impropriety of that contract before Congress the Corp retaliated by demoting and transferring her. You can't the Corp at their word unfortunately.
Now I can see you ranting about whether this is a Federal, State or Local responsibility. The fact is one or two of the failed levees are essentially owned by the Army. One I think was a local levee district.
BUT, and its a big BUT, you are basically saying that its the right thing to do for the Army Corp of Engineers to spend all of their time and energy, and our tax dollars, rebuilding Iraq, while their domestic obligations go to hell and it may, I repeat may, have contributed to a major disaster in the U.S. thats cost American lives and helped devastate the American economy. THAT IS SO RICH!!!!!!
It sickens me more and more everyday to see New Orleans degenerate in to anarchy exactly like Baghdad did because the Bush administration didn't do its job and get the guard in there to maintain order, just like Baghdad. Once you let anarchy and looting set in, its vastly harder to restore order than it is to keep it in the first place.
Its an unspoken fact here that the National Guard, and the U.S. military are stretched so thin, thanks to Iraq, they largely failed to respond to a crisis at home. The national priorities here are completely screwed up. I'm not sure I'm the only one to think this but to hell with Iraq and Iraqis if it means letting America go to hell.
I really wonder how much of the week Federal response was due to the vast numbers of people and equipment that are in Iraq, in particular things like Guard aircraft, tankers, trucks, water treatment equipment, generators, radios, etc.
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"To me that says someone else is benefiting from the $175 and logically it has to be related to whoever is going to build the bridge."
The transportation bill is corporate welfare for the likes of Bechtel and assorted other construction giants. It will produce jobs and make the economy look rosy though its a complete sham since its a government works program where government borrows hundreds of billions of dollars to pump in to the economy to fake growth while all the real economy moves to China. It is socialism or in this case Fascism is a more appropriate word. Roosevelt did the same thing to pump up the economy during the depression though more through government run jobs programs, not so much by pumping money in to corporations. So for Roosevelt it was Socialism, for Bush its more Fascism (vast government spending going to corporations run by faithful party members).
These programs wins votes for the Republicans since people like the new highways and the economic boost, and for the most part stopped caring that its built on top of borrowed money a few trillion ago. Borrowing money means the U.S. tax payer has to pay interest on in to eternity and in theory should pay it back someday and if it continues will eventually cause an economic collapse in the dollar and the U.S.
The Bush administration has been going down a check list of bills to create gigantic windfalls, at taxpayer expense, for all the corporate interests that back them:
- Medicare reform and drug benefit
o drug companies
o insurance companies
o healthcare corporations
- Energy bill
o Big oil
o Big coal
o Big nuke
o Big electric
- Highway bill
o Big construction
o Widely distributed political pork
- Moon and Mars mission
o Big aerospace
o Votes in Florida and Texas, especially Florida
- War in Iraq/Afghanistan and massive defense spending increases
o Big defense contractors
o Halliburton/KBR and a host of other war profiteers in Iraq
- Tax cuts
o All rich people
- Disaster handouts through FEMA
o Especially good at winning votes in Florida in 2004
This leaves the last big one to push through which is Social Security "reform" which will transfer vast sums from government coffers in to Wall Street banks and brokers much to their benefit and all those who own stock when the money comes in to play.
Everyone who backs the Republicans has gotten billions in payoffs and windfall profits, at tax payer expense and with a flood of new debt, for thousands or at most millions in campaign contributions.
Well I stand corrected, if it works that well thats great, though since its classified we probably could never actually tell.
What you are describing is the antithesis of 99% of defense and government contracting.
Now if you were only doing work that was actually beneficial to society, instead of supporting the ever expanding military industrial complex in the U.S.
I'm glad they found a glitzy name for the way I've preferred working all my life.
"It was a chance to make a clean break from the old 32-bit legacy chips, however the price was and is too high and AMDs are cheaper and still very powerful."
Even if Itanic was selling at the same price point as Athlons and used the same amount of power it would still have failed. Of course the price points aren't even close and the power consumption is way worse. I bought a loaded Athlon 3400 without monitor for $800. Just an IA64 chip costs more than twice that.
The IA64 clock speed has consistently been behind expectations. Running IA32 code, which is what most people run, in the emulation built in to IA64 is slow. Getting performance out of code compiled for IA64 is hard and you only get it on some codes. The compiler technology to compile for VLIW is hard and the only real good success with it has been in vectorizable supercomputing style codes, especially Fortran codes, with relatively simple loops crunching a lot of data. IA64 is great for that which is why that is the only niche it is surviving in. Most code people run on their desks isn't anything like that.
Itanic simply had no chance to succeed in the high volume desktop market or even most low end server tasks. It was a chip designed for supercomputing. The amazing thing is the executives at Intel didn't grasp this before they sunk billions in to it they will never recoup. They built a chip for a market that simply isn't big enough to get a return to cover the investment.
There is of course a catch to your rosy life.
Chances are your employer charges the DoD for %100 of your hours at work even if you only work %60. As long as they have billable hours defense contractors tend to not care about much else, though its nice if someday you deliver your project.
With as much flexibility as they are giving you I sure hope you are all still rigorous in accurately recording your hours. With all the flexing, if your team is putting in less actual hours than its billing its probably against the law. I'd be bit amazed if that much flex isn't illegal to begin with considering the rigor of Federal procurement rules.
It also be interesting to see your companies actual track record for delivering on budget and on schedule. Since its classified of course we can't. Most defense contractors are pretty bad in this regard, especially on classified projects because oversight is weak. As long as the DoD lets your company get away with it, its more profitable if they overrun because they make more on the project. If thats the case here your pleasant work environment is because your company actually wants to overrun and run up more billable hours.
I hazard to say if you were in the private sector you might be allowed to flex but there would be frequent crunches where you would be compelled to work 60-80 hour weeks to deliver a product so the company can make their revenue projections in a quarter. You wont get paid for it because you are salaried and if you are lucky you will get some comp time, probably less than what you actually put in in uncompensated overtime. You see in the private sector you don't have a vast pool of our tax dollars to pay you weather you work or not, or weather you deliver or not. Its pretty common to squander millions or billions on projects that fail and just get written off, or that require sinking extra billions in them to force them to an ugly completion. In the private sector, either you deliver products that make money or you end up unemployed.
"Then what explains Bill Clinton's failure to fix these problems?"
...
It can safely be said the Clinton administration funded the levees way better than the Bush administration did. The Bush administration has slashed EVERY Army Corps of Engineer funding request for the levees since they came to power. They've been to busy funding Iraq, squandering money on biowarfare gear for fire departments in Podunk, Wyoming and directing pork to their rich, white Republican friends.
I especially love the fact the Bush administration allocated $100 million, and transfered a key Army engineer in Louisiana, to restore the marshlands in Iraq. $100 million for the wetlands in Iraq this year versus $87 million for New Orleans levees. Really screwed up priorities there, with 20/20 hindsight.
Fortunately for the Bush administration it probably can't be established if the breeches would have been prevented if they hadn't gutted Army Corp funding and personel for levee maintenance and upgrade though an independent investigation will be interesting. Its a certainty that slashing funding for them didn't help. The fact is levees, especially at the extent they exist around New Orleans, are expensive to maintain. Either you have to committ to maintain them, abandon New Orleans or do what the Bush administration did, let them deteriorate in the face of a surge in hurricanes and their intensity and have a catastrophic disaster.
Follows is a great run down from from factchecks.org which is a pretty nonpartisan outfit:
"In the past five years, the amount of money spent on all Corps construction projects in the New Orleans district has declined by 44 percent, according to the New Orleans CityBusiness newspaper, from $147 million in 2001 to $82 million in the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30."
A long history of complaints
Local officials had long complained that funding for hurricane protection projects was inadequate:
October 13, 2001: The New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that federal officials are postponing new projects of the Southeast Louisiana Flood Control Program, or SELA, fearing that federal budget constraints and the cost of the war on terrorism may create a financial pinch for the program. The paper went on to report that President Bushs budget proposed $52 million for SELA in the 2002 fiscal year. The House approved $57 million and the Senate approved $62 million. Still, the $62 million would be well below the $80 million that corps officials estimate is needed to pay for the next 12 months of construction, as well as design expenses for future projects.
April 24, 2004: The Times-Picayune reported that less money is available to the Army Corps of Engineers to build levees and water projects in the Missisippi River valley this year and next year. Meanwhile, an engineer who had direct the Louisiana Coastal Area Ecosystem Restoration Study a study of how to restore coastal wetlands areas in order to provide a buffer from hurricane storm surges was sent to Iraq "to oversee the restoration of the Garden of Eden wetlands at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, for which President Bushs 2005 budget gave $100 million.
June 8, 2004: Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, told the Times-Picayune:
Walter Maestri: It appears that the money has been moved in the presidents budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq , and I suppose thats the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees cant be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us.
September 22, 2004: The Times-Picayune reported that a pilot study on raising the height of the levees surrounding New Orleans had been completed and generated enough information for a second study necessary to estimate the cost of doing so. The Bush administration ordered the New Orleans district office of the Army Corps of Engineers no
"I didn't mean to imply it either"
May not have been your intention but it was the result, and you fell in to the same brand of rhetoric the Bush administration falls into when they want to win a point without risk of debate, just invoke 9/11 and Pearl Harbor and you can rationalize every government excess and accuse anyone who argues a counterpoint of being weak or unpatriotic.
"As to the 9/11 report..."
I wasn't referring to the 9/11 committee report. I was referring to the Congressional report which was harder hitting and laid some of the blame where it belonged on Saudi Arabia. The entire lengthy section on Saudi involvement with the plot was censored by the White House over the objections of Congressmen in both parties.
" I would think this is obvious after all the Abel Danger stuff that's been coming out in the past couple of weeks."
As nearly as I can tell Able Danger was a case of people with an agenda making something out of nothing. They are trying to con the nation in to legalizing and funding massive computerized spying on America by the Pentagon, and the easiest way to do it in the face of stiff opposition is to claim it would have prevented 9/11. I know Atta and a couple other hijackers were well known to the CIA as being potential Al Qaeda members. The fact a DOD mining project might have observed, quite vaguely, something that was already known is unexciting in the least. Its still open to debate if they made the whole thing up, or at least exaggerated it, because they have an agenda. Not hard to log all the Saudi nationals in the U.S. and assume some of them are Islamic extremists. Lot of 20/20 hindsight in Able Danger.
The more disturbing thing is the President had a briefing paper in August about Al Qaeda attacking the U.S. with airplanes and he didn't even bother to have the FBI follow up on it. If they had it might registered that field agents had red flagged Arabs in U.S. flight schools training to fly but not land airliners.
"my post into a strawman...but it's not feasable, due to the cost of transporting workers and whatnot."
Well you obviously didn't read my port. The number of workers you need to run a port plunged in the last 50 years thanks to container shipping. You could support a large port with a small town now. Times changed.
A big percentage of the people who were left in New Orleans were unemployed and on welfare. It is a city with vast poverty. They weren't people who had longshoreman jobs. They were freed slaves who landed there after abolition, they started with nothing and in formerly segregated and still racist South they still having nothing today.
"but farming is simply not the reason they're on the floodplain in New Orleans."
New Orleans is where it is because it was a great port 200+ years ago, its still a good one now but you don't need the large urban city for the port.
When it was built there the French didn't grasp that it was sinking. Now in light of the fact its sinking you do either two things:
- Abandon it because its now prohibitively expensive to repair and defend in an era of super hurricanes, or you at least abandon all the low income housing which was substandard before and now is just rank and unlivable.
- Do what the Dutch do and spend billions building massive new levees and pumping systems to reclaim and defend it.
What you don't do is put hundreds of thousands of people in a bowl below sea level AND cut back on the money you spend on the levees which is what the U.S. has been doing for years and which accelerated under the Bush administration, in particular as it diverted the Army Corp of Engineers to rebuilding Iraq instead of the U.S. Bush just signed a bill to build a $231 million bridge to an island in Alaska with 50 people on it some of whom probably like the fact there is no highway. Thats WAY more than New Orleans levees have seen in the last 5 years. What is going on here? Alaska has a powerful Republican congressional delegation and they get a vastly disproportionate percentage of pork. New Orleans being poor, black and Democratic gets nothing from this regime which lead to an accident waiting to happen and then it did. A constant of the Bush administration is they direct their pork to their own. They spend billions to rebuild Jeb Bush's Florida every year, they took care of Republican run Mississippi this time. Democrat leaning Louisiana and overwhelmingly Democrat New Orleans was dead last on their partisan priority list and it showed.
"Industrial scale fertilizer is very useful in the Midwest, the Ukraine, and other farming areas, but farming is simply not the reason they're on the floodplain in New Orleans."
Not sure why you think I said it was. You were referring to all the ancient civilizations that built on flood plains and I was pointing why they did it, that it was by design and with the realization floods were inevitable and in fact desirable.
New Orleans is where it is because its at the mouth of America's largest river. During an era when various factions were fighting for control of a new continent it was a strategically essential location. Times changed.
Another important point is that when New Orleans was built it had a lot of land around it to provide a buffer. Most of that land has sunk in to the gulf thanks to human beings messing up the natural floods of the Mississippi. Its made New Orleans less viable with each passing year.
"New Orleans is a fairly unbeatable location for a port"
Don't think you actually need to build a large city around a port these day. In this day and age you need a bunch of cranes to move containers, and a mix of truck friendly freeways and rail lines. You need a town big enough to support the people that work in it but the number of people needed to run a container shipping port is dramatically lower than it was when everything was loaded and unloaded by hand.
In fact all the big ports I've seen are actually counterproductive to have in cities. They are an eyesore, they consume expensive real estate and are expensive to operate in an inflated urban environment. The truck and rail traffic ties traffic in the area in knots. They end up being warehouses/industrial, steep on urban blight and drug use when in the middle of cities. Good planning would suggest you build a port in one place, an industrial area near it but not in a place prone to flooding, and an urban/suburban area where lots of people live, not close to it at all and sure not below sea level.
All in all if you were a good planner I'd say you put a port where New Orleans is, make the French Quarter which is on high grand in to a tourist attraction enclave and move the rest of the city elsewhere. It was for the most part a failed city anyway with entrenched poverty and unemployment, steep crime, and rampant police corruption.
As for building on flood plains, that was done out of pure necessity in more ancient era. They didn't have industrial scale fertilizer and agriculture was very labor intensive. You pretty much had to build the agriculture part of your society on flood plains, and you had to build them with a degree of transience. You WANTED the floods because they replenished and fertilized the soil, otherwise it would have just been depleted with a few years of agriculture with no fertilizer. You WANTED to build minimal housing and infrastructure with the realization floods would destroy it every year or every few years. Building huts in a flood plain is different from building expensive homes, industrial capacity and high rises in a flood plain.
I was amused to hear on the news this morning, though not confirmed yet, that George W. this morning attempted to strong arm the Democratic governor of Louisiana in to signing over control of the Louisiana National Guard inside here state to him in complete defiance of the Constitution.
Pretty sure that, as is typical for the Bush family and Rove, they've turned this in to a power grab and a political game. Its hard to tell but I suspect the Bush administration, FEMA, etc. go balls to the wall to provide relief and hand out billions in FEMA checks in Republican controlled states, especially his brother's Florida, and Mississippi run by good ole redneck and former RNC chairman Halley Barber. Barber a few days ago was pointing out how great the relief effort was going in his state with the implication it was all the fault of the Democrats in Louisiana the relief effort went bad(glossing over the situation there is a 100 times worse). So this has turned in to just another case of the Bush administration dividing instead of uniting, make the Democrats look bad, so they can run them out at the next electoral opportunity.
It also seems to be designed by the Bush administration to get the Congress and American people to gleefully overturn Posse Comitatus and dramatically expend the martial law powers of the Executive branch and the Federal government which should come in handy if there are future emergencies like mass protests against this incompetent administration.
"there is a bit of legislation that actually forbids the FBI and the CIA from working closely with one another, to prevent the two from launching a coup (I don't remember under which President that was - I think it might have been Ford)."
Its was mostly thanks to J. Edgar Hoover, LBJ, Richard Nixon and a series of CIA fuck ups in the 60's and 70's. The CIA was being used to spy on Americans, intervene in American domestic affairs, and play dirty tricks on political opponents of those in power, not to mention all the crackpot schemes they hatched in places like Cuba. Most of the abuses that were Watergate were perpetrated by people affiliated one way or another with the CIA. The Church Committee in particular resulted in a major reining in of the CIA and domestic spying. It was a Democrat led effort and the Republican's, especially the hard right, have been pissed about it ever since. Luckily for them all those restrictions are now gone thanks to the Patriot Act and the National Intelligence Reform Act which created a unified all seeing spy agency which is ripe for abuse by those in power.
All people hear about these days is about how those firewalls led to the failure to stop 9/11 well chances are it didn't. If you think removing them is a good idea you should read the Church reports and remember the massive abuse the CIA and FBI were engaging in before they were enacted. Those who fail to learn their history are doomed to repeat it. If you want to experience what life was like in the U.S.S.R with the KGB you really want a unified spying agency and domestic law enforcement agency with no restrictons on what they can do to American citizens in America.
"imagine what would have happened if the CIA and the FBI hadn't been in the middle of a proverbial pissing match at the time, and the information about the upcoming attack had been passed on"
Probably very little would have changed. The Republicans just wanted to con everyone in to thinking it would have made a difference because they wanted to get the Church restrictions removed, something they've wanted since they were passed in 1973. It worked. The information the FBI has on 9/11, mostly Arabs at flight schools, didn't even get through the channels in the FBI, it had no chance of going to the CIA. About the only thing that might have helped if the CIA had flagged a couple of the hijackers to the FBI when they entered the U.S. and if the FBI had followed up on it which is a big if.
"since nobody wants to be the one who releases data that turns out to help an enemy launch the next Pearl Harbor or 9/11 attack"
I don't think any leaked classified data made any contribution to Pearl Harbor or 9/11 though it is clever on your part to invoke those two traumas to win points for your argument.
In fact much of the "suprise" part of the "suprise attack" on Pearl Harbor was due to the high classification of Japanese communication intercepts which led to the many signals the Japanese were preparing an attack from being acted on.
There were certainly some strong indicators an attack at Pearl Harbor was imminent. It has created the long running conspiracy theory that FDR actually knew it was coming and wanted a devastating "sneak attack" so he could get a nation that was isolationist and pacifist mobilized for war. Weather it was FDR's intention or not it did work. Pearl Harbor propelled the U.S. into World War II with an enthusiasm that wouldn't have been there otherwise.
9/11 is not quite as clear cut, but it is clear a "classified" briefing in W.'s daily intelligence brief spelled out the danger of Al Qaeda launching an attack on the U.S. using airplanes while W. was on vacation in August and the attack came in September. All indications are the brief went unheeded and no action was taken. Little George apparently didn't for example tell the FBI to look in to this, because if they had they might have "connected the dots" that suspicious Arab men were training in the U.S. to fly airliners, a fact they knew but which had been sat on if not classified.
It is unavoidable that you do have to classify a lot of information in a world where you have enemies, especially ones intent on spying on you like the U.S.S.R, Russia, China and Israel.
But, a case can be made that classification causes as much harm as good since it destroys effective communication, WITHIN the government not just between the government and its people especially when it tilts of of control and delves in to excess.
Unfortunately classification is CONSTANTLY abused by people in government to conceal their failures and the failure of the government to do its job, and worse to hide some of its malevolent schemes. It's also integral in a government's creation of a false picture of the world in the minds of the population in order to manipulate them. Classification and propaganda go hand in hand.
A great example of out of control classification is the huge section of the congressional report on 9/11 in which the role of the Saudi people and government in 9/11 was spelled out in excruciating and embarrassing detail. Its hard to say why it was classified, most of the Congressman don't want it classifed. One guess is the Bush administration didn't want to embarrass their close personal friends in the House of Saud. The other is the Bush administration was engaged in weaving a propaganda web intent on connecting Iraq to 9/11 as an excuse for regime change and war, and 100 pages spelling out the Saudi's were in fact vastly more involved than Iraq would have been counterproductive to that propaganda effort.
A mostly forgotten case of classified data being released which exposed government malevolence and incompetence is the Pentagon Papers. Depending on your viewpoint this giant leak either exposed the bankruptcy of the American involvement in Vietnam and ended a misguidede war there, or their leak help collapse American resolve and contributed to its defeat there. Whichever it was, it was a high beam of truth about the reality of the situation there that classification would have suppressed were it not for Daniel Elsberg and his conscience.
" before mysql starts it's baseless lawsuits similar to SCO's."
This is silly sensationalism. Its was probably ill advised on MySQL's part to sign a partnership with SCO at this point, but the chances this has anything to do with SCO's legal insanity against Linux are about zero. MySQL probably just had some money thrown their way to do integration work on SCO's product which lots of people still use and rely on. That product and the people working on it, unfortunate as they are, have little to do with the insanity of Darl McBride and his Linux witch hunt.
MySQL being a for profit organization they probably just wanted the business.
Chances are they will regret it because they will probably lose more users and customers than they will gain from the deal with SCO.
Well its easy to explain how they will spin it, and in fact already have been in the last couple of days.
Disasters are state and local responsibilities by law and policy. The Federal government is only supposed to provide support at the call of governor's and mayors.
A. They will blame the governor of Louisiana and the mayor of New Orleans for not marshalling city buses and providing transportation for the poor and infirm. Its a bit unfair because even if they had done this I doubt they could have gotten very many more people out in the short time available. You just can't force people to evacuate a big city in this short time, but providing public transportation for those who want to leave seems like a local failure. Of course once you put them on buses where would they go.
B. They will point out the National Guard is under the control of the Governor so any failure in deploying it is the Governor's fault. This is true though it glosses over the Bush administration had 1/4 to 1/3 of the Guard manpower and 1/2 its equipment in Iraq. The Federal government is by law precluded from putting troops in to states and cities, thanks to the fact the Federal Army ran out of control after the Civil War and was reined in my the Posse Comitatus act in 1878. It is most of the time a good restraint and prevents martial law and dictatorship. In this case it caused problems though.
C. There will be finderpointing as to whose fault it was the levees broke. Maybe it was inevitable they were going to break under this stress, though I wager these localized failures were due to bad maintenance. More importantly there should have been helicopters surveying them the second the weather cleared and sending resource to plug leaks before they washed out leading to the massive failures. Its sad no one had a plan to survey and do emergency repairs on these levees, a stitch(or sandbag) in time might have prevented this though we may never know unless someone was watching how and why the levees actually failed.
Some things I want to come out in the investigation:
- Who stopped the Red Cross from entering New Orleans because it was "to dangerous". Was it FEMA, state or local. For whatever reason, the Red Cross is the one who insured people get food and water and it couldn't get in to New Orleans because someone stopped them.
- The President of Jefferson Parish in New Orleans accused FEMA on "Meet the Press" this morning of intentionally cutting the communication lines they local and state people were using, they had to patch the lines and post armed guards.
- How much did the levees degrade because the Army Corps of Engineers had its funding cut for them and had its personell and money redirected to rebuild Iraq versus how much was due to cuts from local levee districts.
At this point I'd really like to know did FEMA:
- Do everything possible but it was just to hard
- Do a mediocre and inadequate job
- Did FEMA make things worse and actually obstruct the recovery
I'm more than a little suspicious the Bush administration let things go bad on purpose, they just let it go to far and it backlashed on them. They were probably planning to have the President come in on his white horse followed an hour later by the Army moving in to save the day which is more or less what happened its was just to late.
As I said it depends on what you call Watergate's height. The press is just picking the point at which Nixon's approval rating was the same as W.'s because it makes it sound bad, "Bush's rating as bad as Nixon's during Watergate" though in reality Nixon hadn't bottomed at that point. Nixon's approval rating continued down to 24% when he resigned.
Lots of Presidents have been at the same level as W. has been recently and recovered. Reagan and Clinton were at the same level at their nadirs and recovered. Truman was even worse off after he fired McArthur.
The mechanism is the same. They could just as easily change the whole rule. Applying it to judicial nominations was just a way to get the ball rolling without getting as much backlash. People like yourself say, oh its just for judicial nominations, I'm OK with that. Having done it once there really isn't anything stopping them from doing it for everything other than moderate Republicans opposing it. Moderate Republicans are an endangered species. I wouldn't be surprised to see the Republican National Committee try to unseat any moderates they see as vulnerable in primaries and replace them with more extreme candidates.
"and just filibuster until the whitehouse is back in our hands."
Depends on exactly what point you call the "height of Watergate" but Nixon's approval rating was down in the 20's at its nadir, Bush is still in the 40's though it will be interesting to see what Katrina does to him. I suspect now that most of the people are evacuated and fed the outrage about New Orleans will blow over.
Wouldn't be surprised if the Republican spin machine manages to turn it in to a story of the Bush administration stepping in to save the day and blame everything that went wrong on the Democratic mayor of New Orleans and the Democratic governor of Louisiana. I assure you Rove and Co. were thinking about the political implications of this disaster from the get go.
I also wager sometimes this session or next Congress will pass a bill giving the executive branch and DOD sweeping new powers to intervene domestically and overturn Posse Comitatus facilitating future imposition of martial law. The catch phrase will be "Remember New Orleans" as they sell our freedom down the river again just like they did with the Patriot Act.
"and just filibuster until the whitehouse is back in our hands."
Wouldn't count on it. The only thing that stopped the Republicans from changing the rules on filibusters (the nuclear option) earlier this year was a coalition of 6 moderate Republicans and 6 Democrats. The Republicans want to change the cloture rules so a simple majority vote could end a filibuster. If they had succeeded the Republicans would have effectively seized nearly complete control of the government and the Dems in Congress could just stay home. It was a terrifying prospect to those 6 moderate Republicans that this power hungry, out of control, regime would have that much power.
If the Democrats really did start being obstructionist the coalition might fall apart. It could also fall apart if the Republican pick up more Senate seats in 2006 with far right candidates. They added quite a few extremists in 2004. The Dems are in such bad shape I wouldn't count on them to hold much any more.
Its pretty amazing Roberts is sailing through confirmation as well as he is. Its a near certainty he is a member of the Federalist Society and will be a far right wing judge if confirmed. He will breeze by because he's been smart enough to keep his mouth shut on the public record and hasn't shown his extremist side in a way that anyone can nail him.
There is actually something called the National Response Plan published by DHS in December 2004 which is just coming in to effect that outlines in excruciating detail how the DHS and the rest of the Federal government is supposed to respond to incidents such as this. It was obviously written with a major terrorism incident in mind but applies equally to natural disasters when they rich a threshold called "event of national significance".
It is mind numbing exercise in bureaucracy to read. The parts I've struggled through though suggest the burden for disaster response is almost entirely placed on the backs of state and local governments and the Feds only support them and can only step in and take control when the local officials "overwhelmed" which they obviously were in this case.
Having just seen Chertoff's press conference the cynic in me thinks that in fact the Bush administration probably intentionally sat on their hands for a few days because they want the situation to spiral out of control. They now have the opportunity to justify declaring an "event of national significance" and Federalizing the whole situation. Chertoff indicated this was in fact a golden opportunity to christen the National Response Plan.
There is a wicked double edged sword at play here. For disasters of this epic scale obviously the Federal government and the military have vast resources to bring to bear.
It is however setting a dangerous precedent. The reason we have the Posse Commitatus act passed in 1878 was that during and after the Civil War the U.S. military ran rough shod over the South, devastating most of it, and imposing martial law to the misfortune of Southerners who in many case had their land and property confiscated by carpetbaggers with military support. Sherman's march to the sea, though perhaps a legitimate military action in some books, is in others an act of savagery and gratuitous revenge in others. Its not open to dispute that it was a case of a Federal army applied a scorched Earth strategy to a huge swath of the South.
Its great that there is now aid flowing to those that need it but the thing to watch now is how far the Federal government overcorrects and uses this incident as a justification for dramatically expanding the ability of the Federal government and the military to exert martial law in the U.S. and to overrule the power of the states and their governors. It will be interesting in particular to see if they actually do deploy all the new DOD toys for "non lethal" crowd control here to establish precent for using them in times of anarchy, a precedent that could be used downt he road to suppress antiwar or anti government demonstrations.
9/11 was used as a basis by the power hungry Bush administation to justify the Patriot Act, National Intelligence Reform and dramatically expanding the powers of the executive to engage in arbitrary arrest and detention in the U.S of U.S citizens without due process.
I am willing to wager this incident will be used as the basis in coming months to overturn Posse Comitatus and to give the Federal government broad new powers to impose martial law and to seize control of cities and states in the U.S. in order to "restore order". They are still tiptoeing very carefully, for example in using the 82nd airborne in non policing roles to free up the Guard for policing duty because that is the law. Don't be at all surprised if six months from now laws will be passed the give the Federal government sweeping new power to intervene in domestic affairs. This will be a plus in dealing with major disasters. But, the other edge is it will give the President sweeping new power to impose martial law and approach dictatorship.
The cynic in me thinks the Bush administration saw the chaos in New Orleans, let it spiral out of control for a few days and, as is there way, saw a silver lining that it may turn in t a tool to let them vastly expand their alre
You would think that FEMA and the FCC would have figured out a while ago that they need to build some trucks with mobile cell phone towers and position them around the country. The trucks would have their own generators, a tanker for fuel, a tall tower that you crank up when you get the truck to the disaster area and either a microwave or satellite link to connect to the rest of the network. Maybe it would carry a stock of cell phones, cell phone batteries and chargers would be good too.
Cell phones being portable and requiring no land lines are a natural means for communication in a disaster area. They are also more ubiquitous than UHF radios, easier for ordinary people to use, better switched and routed.
You have the problem that people in an area with no power can't charge the batteries but if they leave them off most of the time, just turn them on to see if there is a signal and make a 911 call the batteries will last a while. If you could count on cell phone service being the first thing restored then a stock of spare batteries would be a natural addition to a home disaster survival kit.
Japan has an interesting idea in that they want to field a geosync satellite with a 66 foot dish that can communicate with regular cell phones from space which means they would always have comm in a disaster area no matter how bad it is.
As an aside looks I saw a Red Cross official on Larry King and part of the problem in New Orleans is FEMA is a disaster when it comes to recovering from a real disaster. As nearly as I can tell all they do is write checks and hand out pork post disaster. They in fact seem to be completely dependent on the privately funded Red Cross to actually supply and shelter disaster refugees using private donations. In the case of New Orleans someone, not sure if it was FEMA, state or city, told them to stay out of New Orleans because it was to dangerous so the normal channels for providing water and food sat outside the city letting people suffer inside.
So this would suggest it would take a staggering large number of soldiers to restore ordering in a city of .... I dunno .... maybe the size of Baghdad .... or maybe the whole country of Iraq. How exactly is the military keeping a lid on an entire country with 130,000 soldiers. You might retort the Iraqis are helping well there are at best 100,000 of them and they are badly trained, motivated and their ranks are filled with spies and saboteurs.
The Army invaded all of Iraq and in particular Baghdad which is a huge city with millions of armed residents in the middle of a shooting war with at most 3 times the force you are saying is necessary to contain one smallish American city which is at this point mostly empty. How come? Your numbers really don't add up. Of course we know Baghdad and Iraq descended in to anarchy too, the entire country was looted and it set the stage for the flourishing insurgency there is still there today.
There seems to be a trend. This administration does anarchy and looting EXTREMELY well.
No you are still not getting it, your cognitive dissononce reigns supreme.
The Corp has drastically reduced the amount of annual maintenance and emergency repairs they've been doing in 2003, 2004 and 2005 because their priorities have been diverted from the U.S to Iraq, that means their engineers, their funding and their time all diverted to a bottomless pit on the other side of the world while they let their domestic responsibilities slip.
You are stuck on the idea that it took some grand 10 year multibillion dollar project to fix the levees. Chances are it took a few millions more, and more importantly just focus and people, for annual maintenance to fix low spots and cracks. Its not like there was a massive failure in the levees because they needed a complete rebuild that would take years and billions of dollars. There were three small weak spots that started leaking and eventually washed out. They didn't even fail during the hurricane they failed a day later. Chances are if some smart Army engineer had used helicopter to survey the levies and a bulldozer or helicopter to do emergency repairs right after the storm they could have averted a catastrophe. Chances are all those smart Army engineers are in Iraq.
I quit. Arguing with you is a waste of time. You are one of those classic Bush fan boys, everthing his administration does is perfect, everything that goes wrong was Clinton's fault, Bush's shit don't stink. Siggggghhhhhh.
The problem with Clark's blog is he does the same thing Democrats always do these days. Criticize Bush a bunch, offer some nebulous statements about leadership, challenging people and sacrifice, about how they would do better but they never actually offer a better alternative.
Maybe Clark wouldn't have invaded Iraq if he had been President, no one with a half a brain would have done that, unless they are a Straussian neocon, but now that the U.S. is stuck there the Democrats offer no solution other than put in even more troops and dig a deeper hole. There is in fact no good solution at this point.
The alternative the Democrats offered in 2004 was so ridiculously bad that we got stuck with the same nitwit we had for another 4 years and he and his administration really looks like a nitwit this week. I saw him touring the disaster area today and the sound bite I heard was him saying how great it was the Colonial pipeline was going to do better than 40 some percentage of capacity. Shows you where his head is, not on the fact people are dieing of thirst, but that Exxon and Shell get their money machine going again.
Maybe after the disaster thats been this first year of his second term people will just throw the Republicans out next time, no matter how bad the Democratic alternative is but that is a pretty sorry way to pick your leaders. If your leaders are bad its a serious drag on everything your nation does.
Nice moderation. Marking something as flamebait that is just quoting an article on the historical record of spending by the Army on the levees around New Orleans. Hopefully you will burn in metamoderation and have your moderator privileges revoked. Now this you can mark as flamebait since I am baiting you Mr. Clueless vindictive moderator.
You are pretty dense. The money was already allocated and the Bush administration slashed it by 80%. Since the Iraq war, the lion's share of the Army Corp of engineers time , man power and our tax dollares are going in to a futile effort to rebuild Iraq instead of the U.S.
Please explain to me how that is OK. You don't have a leg to stand on on this one.
If there wasn't money at all and it was cut I can understand it but squandering it in Iraq instead of at home is pretty unforgivable.
Your the one being irrational. He is doing something completely wrong, diverting $300 billion dollars in to the otherside of the world in to a bottomless pit, while the U.S. goes down the tubes.
The key issue is that I'm not sure the Corp was even keeping up with basic maintenance and emergency repairs for two reasons:
- Their funding had been slashed by the Bush administration.
- The Corp has been severely stretched helping rebuild Iraq.
The officers heading the corp aren't going to admit that they let maintenance slip so I think an investigation is called for and not take them at their word. This is the same Army Corp of Engineers who gave Halliburton a 5 year no bid contract to rebuild Iraq's oil fields. Recently when a top Corp procurement officer savaged the impropriety of that contract before Congress the Corp retaliated by demoting and transferring her. You can't the Corp at their word unfortunately.
Now I can see you ranting about whether this is a Federal, State or Local responsibility. The fact is one or two of the failed levees are essentially owned by the Army. One I think was a local levee district.
BUT, and its a big BUT, you are basically saying that its the right thing to do for the Army Corp of Engineers to spend all of their time and energy, and our tax dollars, rebuilding Iraq, while their domestic obligations go to hell and it may, I repeat may, have contributed to a major disaster in the U.S. thats cost American lives and helped devastate the American economy. THAT IS SO RICH!!!!!!
It sickens me more and more everyday to see New Orleans degenerate in to anarchy exactly like Baghdad did because the Bush administration didn't do its job and get the guard in there to maintain order, just like Baghdad. Once you let anarchy and looting set in, its vastly harder to restore order than it is to keep it in the first place.
Its an unspoken fact here that the National Guard, and the U.S. military are stretched so thin, thanks to Iraq, they largely failed to respond to a crisis at home. The national priorities here are completely screwed up. I'm not sure I'm the only one to think this but to hell with Iraq and Iraqis if it means letting America go to hell.
I really wonder how much of the week Federal response was due to the vast numbers of people and equipment that are in Iraq, in particular things like Guard aircraft, tankers, trucks, water treatment equipment, generators, radios, etc.