Stick a Fork in Him

"The temporary departure of Tom DeLay as the majority leader of the United States House of Representatives is a loss to the Republican majority in Congress and the nation," Mr. Pence said in a statement, a sentiment repeated by various ranking members of the House.

"When this is over, I go back to being majority leader automatically," said Mr. DeLay.

"The important thing that is driving this is the temporary nature of it," said Kevin Madden, Mr. DeLay's spokesman.

It's temporary. It's temporary. It's temporary!

Who's kidding whom?

Here's the reality:

"Right now, the conference is interested in getting through this session under the current arrangement," said Representative Zach Wamp of Tennessee, who said he intends to run for the No. 3 post, party whip. By next year, he said, "I think the leadership team being formalized and finalized would be appropriate."

Though Mr. DeLay's absence is portrayed as temporary until the conspiracy charge lodged against him in an indictment filed in Texas on Wednesday is resolved, many lawmakers are skeptical that he will be able to return if the matter drags on. As a result, many of the ambitious politicians in this institution are surveying their chances for top positions should they open up.

"People have been waiting for somebody at the top to slip on a banana," said Representative Ray LaHood, Republican of Illinois. "This creates a once-in-a-lifetime political opportunity for people to get into leadership."

DeLay is done.

Ending with a Whimper

Perhaps I am just too cynical, but I must confess to a touch of incredulity at the explanation for Judy Miller's decision to testify in the Plame case. Recall, she went to jail in July because she refused to reveal a source (who now turns out to be Scooter Libby, surprise, surprise) even though she and the New York Times acknowledged that "the source" had given Miller a waiver. Now, after 12 weeks in jail she has decided that she can testify after all. What changed for this woman of principle? Why, she got a waiver from her source! Oh and this time it was voluntary and uncoerced:

"Judy has been unwavering in her commitment to protect the confidentiality of her source," Mr. Sulzberger said. "We are very pleased that she has finally received a direct and uncoerced waiver, both by phone and in writing, releasing her from any claim of confidentiality and enabling her to testify."

This just seems all too preposterous. If you assume the first waiver was coerced, why would you assume the second was not? Because it came both by phone and in writing? More to the point, I guess, why would you have ever considered the first one to have been coerced.

Perhaps there really is something of substance here. But from the facts we know, it is also possible that the Judith Miller is simply a drama queen who decided that being a martyr would be cool and good for her tattered journalisitc credentials, but then found that jail was boring and got Scooter Libby to give her a fig leaf so she could come back in from the cold -- and get her name back in the news.

An Alternative Approach To College Rankings

Here's something interesting for anyone frustrated by the methodology used in the USNWR annual college rankings. The Washington Monthly has published its own list based on an entirely different set of criteria, and,not surprisingly, the list looks a lot different.

The USNWR criteria are summarized here, but fall into 7 general categories: Peer Assessment (i.e. reputation) - 25%, Retention(% of freshman who return)- 20-25%, Faculty resources - 20%; Admissions Selectivity - 15%, Financial Resources - 10%, Graduation Rate - 5% and Alumni Giving - 5%.

I have never been a big fan of these criteria or of the relative weightings assigned to them because the seem to be less designed to measure the quality of the education and educational experience than to assure that Harvard, Princeton and Yale are always on top.

The Washington Monthly apparently had a similar problem and came up with a completely different set of criteria:

The first question we asked was, what does America need from its universities? From this starting point, we came up with three central criteria: Universities should be engines of social mobility, they should produce the academic minds and scientific research that advance knowledge and drive economic growth, and they should inculcate and encourage an ethic of service. We designed our evaluation system accordingly.

(For a more detailed breakdown on how they measured colleges and universities on these criteria see this "Note on Methodology").

Using these criteria, the came up with the following rankings, which, not surprisingly, look quite different from the USNWR rankings:



I don't know whether the WM criteria are the right ones either. Frankly, they seem a bit biased in favor of an egalitarian impulse. But it is interesting to look at how colleges and universities stack up on criteria other than reputation.

Tom Friedman on "The Endgame In Iraq"

Now that the Times has moved it's Op-Ed columnists to a new web site that is accessible only to paid subscribers, I'm not sure that links to their articles will work. But, if they do, Tom Friedman's piece today on "The Endgame In Iraq" bears reading.

Friedman's thesis is that the next few months will "tell the tale" on whether future efforts to stabilize Iraq are worth the effort and lives that will be required. As Iraqis go to the polls to vote first on a constitution and next for a new government (assuming the constitution passes), Friedman thinks that we will be able to see just what role that the minority Sunnis intend to play. If they decide to "play nice," then Iraq will be on the road to stability; if they do not, then there is no hope.

The role that the Sunnis play in the political process is unquestionably one of the key uncertainties. But it is not the only one by any means. And, even that one is hardly so simple as to make it reasonable to expect we will have an answer to it anytime soon. In short, I think that Friedman's analysis is simplistic in describing the hurdles Iraq faces and naive in suggesting that the one hurdle he does describe will resolve itself one way or the other in the next few months.

But, aside from that, the startling part of Friedman's piece comes at the end, when he suggests the courses of action the United States should pursue:

Maybe the cynical Europeans were right. Maybe this neighborhood is just beyond transformation. That will become clear in the next few months as we see just what kind of minority the Sunnis in Iraq intend to be. If they come around, a decent outcome in Iraq is still possible, and we should stay to help build it. If they won't, then we are wasting our time. We should arm the Shiites and Kurds and leave the Sunnis of Iraq to reap the wind. We must not throw more good American lives after good American lives for people who hate others more than they love their own children.

Wow.

Friedman is obviously frustrated, as we all are, by the seeming mindlessness of the Sunni "insurgency," and perhaps this frustration has led him to be a bit intemperate in his proposed solutions. But, to me, the suggestion that we should ever -- to say nothing of soon -- "arm the Shiites and Kurds and leave the Sunnis of Iraq to reap the wind" sounds chillingly like a suggestion that genocide is the answer to the political violence and instability that currently plagues the country.

The danger we face in Iraq is that, if we leave, and even if we do nothing to promote it, the country could well descend into exactly the maelstrom of sectarian violence that Friedman seems willing to contemplate. If that occurs, the very best we could hope for would be the emergence of a secular autocrat not unlike the regime we went in to eliminate. As bad as that outcome would be, the alternatives are even worse: the rise of a Taliban-like regime that would pose an enormous threat to American security, to the fledgling Afghan Republic and, indeed, to the entire Middle East, or worse yet, a descent into barbarism comparable to that in Rwanda, Sudan and the former Yugoslavia.

As bad as "staying the course" is, the possible alternatives seem much, much worse. Inevitably, I think, we have to stay there until stability (not democracy) is assured. This might take a decade or more. And, it will costs thousands more Americans their lives. But, in the end, I don't see what choice we have. We have created a toxic stew of a mess, and, while it is sorely tempting to simply wash our hands of it, our own security, to say nothing of our moral responsibility, depends on seeing to it that the mess gets cleaned up.

A Coming Political Re-Alignment?

We could be in the midst of an historic political realignment in this country. "Moral conservatives" and "fiscal conservatives" have always made strange bedfellows, since enforcing morality requires a big, intrusive federal government, something that the fiscal conservatives are dead set against. Also, for moral conservatives, fiscal restraint is simply not an issue, while it is the whole nine yards for the fiscal conservatives. With Bush's ironclad hold on the Republican Party starting to slip badly, these fault lines are becoming increasingly obvious. See this: GOP Leaders Try to Soothe Conservatives. And this: Deep Pockets, Small Government and the Man in the Middle .

According to an Op-Ed piece by Brendan Miniter in yesterday's WSJ Opinion Journal, as "traditional" Republicans (those favoring small government, low taxes and low deficits) become increasingly disenchanted with the "borrow and spend" policies of their party, the Democratic Party is positioning itself to pick up the pieces:

If Democrats retake the House next year, we can mark the start of the party's resurgence to a speech Nancy Pelosi delivered on Capitol Hill last week. It was there, at a press conference called to attack Republicans over their response to Hurricane Katrina, that the House minority leader actually used the words "waste, fraud and abuse" in talking about government spending.

What Ms. Pelosi and a few other Democrats seem to be figuring out in the wake of Katrina is that Americans aren't happy with their government throwing billions of dollars around with little if any accountability. Therefore she's laying out a legislative agenda aimed at capturing the mantle of fiscal responsibility.

As if to confirm Miniter's point, the Washington Post (never a particular bastion of fiscal conservatism) published an editorial that same day comparing the Louisiana Congressional delegation to looters:

Like looters who seize six televisions when their homes have room for only two, the Louisiana legislators are out to grab more federal cash than they could possibly spend usefully. . . . The Louisiana bill is so preposterous that its authors can't possibly expect it to pass; it's just the first round in a process of negotiation. But the risk is that the administration and congressional leaders will accept the $250 billion as a starting point, then declare a victory for fiscal sanity when they bring the number down to, say, $150 billion. Instead, Congress should ignore the Louisiana bill and force itself to think seriously about the sort of reconstruction that makes sense.

When Nancy Pelosi starts railing against "waste, fraud and abuse" in federal spending and the Washington Post issues a call for "fiscal sanity" in helping vicitms of a natural disaster, something important may be going on.

The American electorate can, I believe, be broken down into three roughly equal groups. First, there are the traditional "liberals," more properly referred to as "progressives," who form the base of the Democratic Party. For these people, the political imperative is to assist the underprivileged, and they believe government programs are the best or at least only available instruments for furthering that goal. Second, there are the proto-libertarians who have, at least traditionally, formed the base of the Republican Party. These people believe that the best, maybe even the only, way to effectively help the poor is through economic growth and that economic growth and even freedom demands small government, low taxes, and low deficits. Finally, and newly come upon the scene, there are the social conservatives: those for whom the political imperative is to further and if necessary enforce a particular moral code. On issues other than morality, this group is amazingly diverse, including everything from ultra-progressive Minnesota DFLers to ultra-conservative John Birchers. But for all of them, morality now trumps any other domestic issue. The Republican Party has achieved its current political dominance by keeping most of the proto-libertarians within the Party while adding the social conservatives.

But, the proto-libertarians aren't all that happy with the arrangement. Being libertarian, they are pretty tolerant on social/moral issues. Moreover, the social conservative desire to see government take on an ever expanding role in enforcing morality is fundamentally at odds with the central premise of proto-libertarianism: that government governs best when it governs least. For this reason, I do not think that the current Republican coalition can endure.

In almost any other country in the world, the solution to this problem would be easy: form a third party designed to appeal to those who believe in being "liberal" on social issues and "conservative" on fiscal/monetary issues; a party of, say, "responsible liberals" and/or (truly) "compassionate conservatives." But in America, third parties just don't happen in any meaningful way. Rather, these sorts of tensions are resolved by shifts within the two major parties themselves.

Perhaps it is only because I am one of them, but I think the next few federal elections will be battles for the votes of what I am calling the proto-libertarians. It seems doubtful that the Republican Party can soon free itself of the influence of the social conservatives. And, more and more, the positions the Party takes in deference to that faction will tend to drive the proto-libertarians away. Whether they just give up or move to the Democratic Party probably depends to a large degree on whether the Democratic Party can move toward them on issues of fiscal responsibility, taxes and deficits. If Miniter is right, that movement is already starting to occur. And, if it continues, many more voters who (like I) once counted themselves as staunch Republicans will end up finding in the Democratic Party much the lesser of two evils. At that point, if it occurs, the rise of Republican political power that began with Richard Nixon will begin to wane.

Martha Stewart Redux

I couldn't help but smile when I saw this headline in today's Washingtomn Post: Frist Says He Had No Inside Data On Stock. Oh really? That's what Martha said too.

There is no escaping this kind of things once it has started. Just ask Martha. Frist is toast. I can only hope that he "takes his medicine" as gracefully as Martha did.

Roe: The Poisonous Decision

"In our lifetime has there been a more politically poisonous Supreme Court decision than Roe v. Wade?"

So asked Charles Krauthammer in a Washington Post Op-ed piece a week ago Friday (September 16). He goes on to explain that, even though he himself favors legalized abortion, he thinks the consequences of the Supreme Court's decision have been terrible for the Republic:

Set aside for a moment your thoughts on the substance of the ruling. (I happen to be a supporter of legalized abortion.) I'm talking about the continuing damage to the republic: disenfranchising, instantly and without recourse, an enormous part of the American population; preventing, as even Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said, proper political settlement of the issue by the people and their representatives; making us the only nation in the West to have legalized abortion by judicial fiat rather than by the popular will expressed democratically.

Actually, I think the damge is even worse that Krauthammer realizes. Roe did not, by any means, disenfranchise anyone. Those who hate abortion are still free to vote and have done so in ever increasing numbers, culminating in the re-election of Geroge Bush in 2004 despite a four-year record of deceipt and ineptitude that was almost mind-boggling. Had it not been for Roe, it is very possible that there would be no Christian Right as a political entity. Had there been no Roe, something other than morality might well be the deciding factor in national elections.

And, worse yet, it is very likely that abortion would probably be legal in many if not most jurisdictions.

One needs to ask if it was worth it.

The Latest From The Culture Wars

The latest round in the evolution/intelligent design debate is being played out in Dover Pa: "A Web of Faith, Law and Science in Evolution Suit."

Frankly, the suit looks like a tempest in a tea pot, since here is all that it is really about:

The legal battle came to a head on Oct. 18 last year when the Dover school board voted 6 to 3 to require ninth-grade biology students to listen to a brief statement saying that there was a controversy over evolution, that intelligent design is a competing theory and that if they wanted to learn more the school library had the textbook "Of Pandas and People: the Central Question of Biological Origins." The book is published by an intelligent design advocacy group, the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, based in Texas.

I am no intelligent design devotee (see this earlier post) and I tend to agree with Steven Stough, who is quoted as comparing the debate over intelligent design to a "debate" over whether we are tied to the ground by gravity or rubber bands. But, I have to say that we probably do neither our children nor the cause of science much good by trying to hide the fact that there is controversy. After all, the students themselves already know there's controversy. Ignoring that controversy makes the class a bit irrelevant.

It seems to me that there is a "teachable moment" in all this. Rather trying to bury the controversy, why not bring it right out into the open and use the controversy to teach the scientific method: "OK, we have two theories here. Let's see what the evidence for each is."

My sense is that the best way to end this debate is not to hide intelligent design from, but rather to expose it to, academic consideration.

I am reminded in this of a very famous statement by Oliver Wendell Holmes in his dissent in Abrams v. United States:

But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe . . . that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas - that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.

In the free marketplace of ideas, I have little doubt that evolution will triumph over intelligent design. By refusing to allow the competition to be waged, however, we give intelligent design a patina of fearsomeness that, perversely, makes evolution appear weak and intelligent design strong.

Things Fall Apart. The Center Cannot Hold.

The news ia awash in stories like this one from the Washington Post:

Congressional Republicans from across the ideological spectrum yesterday rejected the White House's open-wallet approach to rebuilding the Gulf Coast, a sign that the lockstep GOP discipline that George W. Bush has enjoyed for most of his presidency is eroding on Capitol Hill.

The Republican Party has painted itself into a corner from which, barring a miracle, I very much doubt they can extricate themselves. Abadoning the grandiose, "we will do whatever it takes" promises their President made to the Gulf Coast last week will make Bush look even more ridculous and inept than he already does, will make Republican Congressmen look cheap and uncaring, and will give still more ammunition to those who argue that the Republican Party is racist and concerned only with the rich. Yet, they cannot keep those promises without totally alienating a significant chunk of their "base", since keeping the promises will involve tax increases (or at least deferral of promised tax cuts), massive increases in the national debt, and/or a Vietnamesque declaration of victory in and withdrwal from Iraq.

The situation we are in now demands genuine leadership. We are once again coming up against the Limits of Power, and we need to make hard choices. But, I am not at all sure where we will find the leadership needed to define those choices and make the right ones.

The Roe Effect

I missed it when it was first published, but in July James Taranto published an Op-Ed piece in the WSJ arguing (apparently serioulsy) that Republican political ascenedancy was the result, at least in part, of the fact that "The right to abortion has diminished the number of Democratic voters."

It is a statement of fact, not a moral judgment, to observe that every pregnancy aborted today results in one fewer eligible voter 18 years from now. More than 40 million legal abortions have occurred in the United States since 1973, and these are not randomly distributed across the population. Black women, for example, have a higher abortion ratio (percentage of pregnancies aborted) than Hispanic women, whose abortion ratio in turn is higher than that of non-Hispanic whites. Since blacks vote Democratic in far greater proportions than Hispanics, and whites are more Republican than Hispanics or blacks, ethnic disparities in abortion ratios would be sufficient to give the GOP a significant boost--surely enough to account for George W. Bush's razor-thin Florida victory in 2000.

Taranto goes on to suggest that this process has become something of a vicious circle for the Democratic Party:

It seems self-evident that pro-choice women are more likely to have abortions than pro-life ones, and common sense suggests that children tend to gravitate toward their parents' values. This would seem to ensure that Americans born after Roe v. Wade have a greater propensity to vote for the pro-life party--that is, Republican--than they otherwise would have.

There was another article I read a while back that made a similar argument about the well-publicized drop in the nation's crime rate; i.e. that the reduction in crime was due, in part, to the fact that the poor had a disproprtionately large number of abortions. My guess is that one could probably make a similar argument with regard to welfare: since the poor have more abortions per capita than the rich, and since the children of the poor are much more likely than children of the rich to be on welfare, abortion is the answer to the problem of welfare and, indeed, to poverty itself! Far from being a "bad" thing, it seems, abortion may be the key to solving many of the nation's most intractable problems.

In case you are wondering, I think all of this is nonsense. Moreoever, even if abortion has produced some collateral benefits, there is something profoundly depraved about thinking of abortion in these terms. Still, there is an enormous irony in Taranto's piece that made me smile. If he is right, then the Republican position on abortion is an act of attempted political suicide. If they succeed in making abortion illegal again, their "reward" will be a tide of poor, Democratic-voting, welfare- abusing criminals. One can almost hear Karl Rove tellling his acolytes: "We have to appear to be opposed to abortion to keep the 'base' happy, but the very last thing we ever want is for abortion to actually be limited." If the Democrats had soimebady like Karl Rove, of course, he would be saying the converse.

As they say, be careful what you wish for.

Causes of the New Orleans Levee Breaches

The sequence of events that resulted in the breach of the New Orleans levees, and how those breaches related to Karina itself, has puzzled me ever since my brother pointed out that the breaches appeared to have occured after the worst of the winds (and therefore, presumably, the worst of the strom surge) had passed. I have not fully figured it out yet, and I expect that it will be months if not years before all of the gory details are available. But I did finally find an article on that exact subject by John MacQuaid of the New House News Service entitled Anatomy of a Disaster.

The entire article is reprinted below. However, when I first read it, I had some trouble with the geography it describes, so I have added a couple of maps that helped sort that part out.

The first of these is a very simple map from CNN showing the levee system and points of collapse :

















(BTW: CNN also has by far the best set of satellite images I have seen so far. Well worth exploring).

Two other useful maps are linked below:

From the NYT: a whole series of maps showing more info on elevantions, Parish/Ward names, areas of flodding, etc., etc. For present purposes the most useful of those maps is the "Elevation Information" map under the "In New Orleans" tab at the top of the page)

From Google maps: an interacitve map of the entire area (linked with satlellite images) that you can zoom in and out and scroll up/down/right/left to get a good overview of the entire area.

One final note: Hurricanes rotate counterclockwise. Thus, as the eye of Katrina passed east of New Orleans, the winds initially came from the east and then gradullay shifted in a counterclockwise direction: coming from the east, then northeast, then the north, then the northwest, then, finally, the west. In a storm that moves north onto an east-west coast, as Katrina did, the worst of the storm surge generally occurs in the northwest quadrant of the storm, since this is the quadrant that is blowing seawater directly at the coast. This the reason the Gulfport/Biloxi area was so devastated. It is also the reason why initial reactions were that New Orleans itself had "dodged a bullet." It did dodge one bullet, since the last-minute northeasterly turn of the storm meant that Mississippi, rather than New Orleans took the brunt of the initial northerly surge of the Gulf waters. But New Orleans' peculiar geography meant that there were a couple bullets yet to come, since New Orleans also has signifianct bodies or water on its eastern side (Lakes Borgne and the Mississippi Sound -- see the Google Map linked above) and, more importantly, to the north (Lake Pontchartrain).

With the geopgraphy lesson complete, here's McQuaid's Article:

Hurricane Katrina dealt a devastating double blow to the New Orleans area on Monday, Aug. 29. First, storm surge waters from the east rapidly swamped suburban St. Bernard Parish and eastern New Orleans before the eye of the storm had passed the city around 9 a.m. Within hours, surge waters collapsed city canal floodwalls and began to "fill the bowl," while top officials continued to believe for another day that the danger had passed.

A rough reconstruction of the flooding, based on anecdotal accounts, interviews and computer modeling, shows that the huge scale of the overlapping floods -- one fast, one slow -- should have been clear to some officials by midafternoon that Monday when city officials confirmed the 17th Street Canal floodwall had been breached, say experts familiar with the city's extreme flood risks.

At that point areas to the east were submerged from the earlier flooding, trapping thousands, and low, gradually rising waters stretched from the Lakefront area near the breach across the city's center.

Federal officials have referred to the levee breaches as a separate and much later event from the flooding to the east, and said that they were unaware of the gravity of the problem until Tuesday, Aug. 30, suggesting valuable response time was lost.

"It was midday Tuesday that I became aware of the fact that there was no possibility of plugging the gap and that essentially the lake was going to start to drain into the city. I think that second catastrophe really caught everybody by surprise," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Sunday, adding that he believed the breaches had occurred that Monday night or Tuesday morning. But flooding from at least one and probably both of the two breached canals was under way all day that Monday.

Even that Tuesday, as still-rising waters covered most of New Orleans, FEMA official Bill Lokey sounded a reassuring note in a Baton Rouge, La., briefing.

"I don't want to alarm everybody that, you know, New Orleans is filling up like a bowl," Lokey said. "That's just not happening."

Once a levee or floodwall is breached by a hurricane storm surge, engineers say, it often widens and cannot be quickly sealed. Storm surges push waters in Lake Pontchartrain well above sea level and they may take a day or more to subside. So they keep pouring into the city -- most of which lies below sea level -- until the levels inside and outside the levee are equal.

Experts familiar with the hurricane risks in the New Orleans area said they were stunned that no one had conveyed the information about the breaches or grave risk they posed to upper-level officials, or made an effort to warn residents after winds subsided that Monday afternoon.

"I'm shocked. I don't understand why the response wasn't instantaneous," said Louisiana State University geology professor Greg Stone, who studies coastal storm surge dynamics.

"They should have been monitoring this and informed people all the way to the top, then they should have warned people," said Ivor Van Heerden, who models storm surges at the LSU Hurricane Center and provided officials in the Louisiana Office of Emergency Preparedness headquarters with models indicating the potential for flooding that could result from Katrina.

As Katrina approached the coast early that Monday, the easterly winds from its northern quadrant pumped a rising storm surge from the Gulf of Mexico into a marshy area due east of the city. There, two hurricane levees come together into a large V-shape. Storm surge modelers say that point acts as a giant funnel: Water pouring into the confined area rises up -- perhaps as much as 20 feet in this case -- and is funneled between the levees all the way into New Orleans.

The water likely overtopped the levee along the north side adjacent to eastern New Orleans, according to Army Corps of Engineers New Orleans project manager Al Naomi.

The surge poured into the Industrial Canal running through New Orleans before dawn and quickly overflowed it on both sides, the canal lockmaster reported to the corps. At some point not long afterward, corps officials believe a barge broke loose and crashed through the floodwall, opening a breach that accelerated flooding into New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish.

The floodwaters moved quickly.

By around 8 a.m., authorities reported rising water on both sides of the Industrial Canal in New Orleans, in St. Bernard and in eastern New Orleans. The Coast Guard reported sighting residents on rooftops in the Upper Ninth Ward.

At 9 a.m., there was six to eight feet of water in the Lower Ninth Ward, state officials said. Less than two hours later, most of St. Bernard was a lake 10 feet deep. "We know people were up in the attics hollering for help," state Sen. Walter Boasso said that morning.

Sometime that Monday morning, the 17th Street Canal levee burst when storm surge waters pressed against it and possibly overtopped it, corps officials say.

Naomi said he believed the breach occurred mid- or late-morning after Katrina's eye had passed east of the city. By that time, north winds would have pushed storm surge water in Lake Pontchartrain south against the hurricane levees and into the canals, which normally drain water from the city into the lake.

Then the wind shifted to the west.

"As I remember it the worst of the storm had passed when we got word the floodwall had collapsed," Naomi said. "It could have been when we were experiencing westerly winds in the aftermath of the storm, which would have been pushing water against it."

Naomi and other corps officials say they believe that the water in the canal overtopped the levee on the Orleans Parish side, weakening its structure on the interior side and precipitating its collapse. However, Van Heerden said he does not believe the water was high enough in the lake to top the 14-foot wall and that instead the pressure caused a "catastrophic structural failure."

It's not clear when floodwalls in the London Avenue canal were breached, but Naomi said it may have been around the same time.

Once the floodwalls failed, water -- then at about eight feet or higher in the lake -- began to pour into New Orleans from the west, beginning the full-scale nightmare emergency managers and other officials most feared.

Naomi said that he believed corps officials had communicated the information about the breaches to the Baton Rouge Office of Emergency Preparedness

"It was disseminated. It went to our OEP in Baton Rouge, to the state, FEMA, the corps," Naomi said. "The people in the field knew it. The people here (in corps offices) in Louisiana and Mississippi knew it. I don't know how communication worked in those agencies."

Officials at the OEP and the Federal Emergency Management Agency could not be reached for comment. New Orleans officials were also aware of the 17th Street Canal breach and publicly confirmed it at 2 p.m. that Monday.

As the day wore on, the flood from the breaches made its way across the city, penetrating neighborhood after neighborhood.

As night fell that Monday, many outside New Orleans breathed a sigh of relief believing the city had been largely spared the worst.

But thousands were stranded on rooftops. And waters continued to rise overnight throughout central New Orleans from the breaches. By dawn, the flood stretched all the way from east to west and south into the city's crescent-shaped Uptown neighborhoods, and was coursing through the Central Business District. As TV helicopters flew over the city and beamed out pictures of the flooding, the extent of the catastrophe was clear. For most, help was days away.

Sept. 8, 2005

(John McQuaid can be contacted at john.mcquaid@newhouse.com)

Newsweek Stuff: And the "Duty To Die"

Newsweek rakes W over the coals, with considerable justification. But, what really caught me was this haunting suicide note, from Hunter Thompson, (in "Perspectives" via Rolling Stone):

No more games. No more bombs. No more walking. No more fun. No more swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No fun -- for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax -- This won't hurt.

Is this what all of we baby boomers need to think through as we age, consuming more and more of our childrens' resourses, returning less and less value as each year passes?

It's an idea that haunts me.

Feeling Bad For Brownie -- And Mad At The Senate

Michael Brown has resigned as the head of FEMA. He and the White House both maintain that "This was Mike Brown's decision. This was a decision he made." But the fact that Bush nominated a replacement within minutes of Brownie's announcement makes that claim a bit preposterous. He was thrown to the lions, pure and simple.

Certainly, it is appropriate that Brown be replaced. His total lack of experience and his incredibly bad judgment in choosing his words have made him the butt of innumerable jokes and the lightening rod for all of the anger and frustration engendered not only by the problems with the relief effort but with the storm itself. But, I don't think Brown actually deserves the vituperation that has been visited on him. Brown is probably a good man, with a good heart, and he probably did the very best he could in responding to the emergency. Frankly, that is about all you can demand of a civil servant. The problem, in short, is not with Brown himself but with the fact that he was placed in a job for which he clearly was not qualified and the duties of which he was plainly not competent to discharge. The jokes, snide remarks, and particularly the anger directed at Brown would be far more fairly directed at the President who appointed and the Senators who confirmed him.

In this regard, I find particularly contemptible the righteous indignation of Senators. Senator Clinton, says "'I would never have appointed such a person.'" So, where were you, Senator, when the Senate voted to confirm his appointment? "'Let's bring in someone who is a professional,' urged Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md." That advice would have been a heck of a lot more helpful before Brown was confirmed.

The "advice and consent" duties of the Senate are imposed by the Constitution precisely to provide a safeguard against the appointment of incompetents to posts of national importance. Rather than piling on Brown or even the President, these Senators, indeed the Senate as a whole, should be apologizing to the American People for so completely failing to perform their own duties.

UPDATE: This from an editorial in today's Washington Post:

As we wrote yesterday [see "Congress Heal Thyself"], Mr. Brown received only a 42-minute Senate confirmation hearing when he was nominated to be deputy director of FEMA, and no hearing at all when he became its boss. . . . Congress and the administration should now focus hard on R. David Paulison, head of FEMA's emergency preparedness force, who has been nominated to replace Mr. Brown. A former Miami-Dade County fire chief who helped Florida cope with Hurricane Andrew, Mr. Paulison may be qualified. But before coming to that conclusion, it would help if Congress and the White House take a bit more than 42 minutes to find out.

42 minutes?! Yes, indeedy, it sure would "help" if the Senate took its Constitutional responsibilities a bit more seriously than that.

Why I Like John Roberts

On the way home tonight, I heard on NPR the very end of John Robert's "opening statement" in the hearings on his confirmation. I found what little I heard to be appealing, so I got the full transcript of his statement (from USA Today of all places). (BTW: USA Today is actually turning into a pretty decent newspaper. Check it out some time).

The most puzzling part of the statement was this:

Judges are like umpires. Umpires don't make the rules; they apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules. But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ball game to see the umpire.

That analogy is completely bogus. The difference between an umpire and a judge is as simple as it is profound: the rules an umpire applies are so clear they require no interpretation; the rules a judge are anything but clear. The role of an umpire is to apply undisputed rules to disputed facts. The role of a Supreme Court Justice is to apply disputed law to undisputed facts.

In a way, I find the absurdity of the umpire analogy comforting. Roberts is, by all accounts a very, very smart man with a ton of experience in Supreme Court practice. I am reasonably confident, therefore, that he recognizes how lame the umpire-to-judge analogy is. If that is so, then the only explanation I can think of for him to use the analogy is to reassure the Right that he is not an activist. Yet, while the analogy may actually serve that purpose, it does not actually say anything about how Roberts will actually approach the only really important cases: where it is the law that is in dispute, not the facts. Perhaps it is I who is naive, but I take some comfort in the notion that Roberts has endeavored to appear to assure the Right without actually doing so.

The speech also includes emotive paeans to the endless fields of his boyhood home in Indiana and the glories of "the rule of law" that serve no purpose but to wave the flag. But interspersed in this I think is actually the nub of John Roberts:

Judges have to have the humility to recognize that they operate within a system of precedent, shaped by other judges equally striving to live up to the judicial oath. And judges have to have the modesty to be open in the decisional process to the considered views of their colleagues on the bench.

* * * *

Mr. Chairman, I come before the committee with no agenda. I have no platform. Judges are not politicians who can promise to do certain things in exchange for votes. I have no agenda, but I do have a commitment. If I am confirmed, I will confront every case with an open mind. I will fully and fairly analyze the legal arguments that are presented. I will be open to the considered views of my colleagues on the bench. And I will decide every case based on the record, according to the rule of law, without fear or favor, to the best of my ability.

Perhaps this is so much BS. Perhaps this is simply his way of trying to reassure the Left. But, I don't think so. Everything I have read about Roberts leads me to believe that this is what he truly believes. And, if so, I am satisfied. I can ask no more of any person nominated for the Supreme Court than that he come to each case with an open mind, that he fully and fairly analyze the arguments presented, that he be open to the considered opinions of his colleagues on the bench, and that he decide every case based on the record, according to the rule of law as he understands it, without fear or favor, to the best of his ability.

In short, I am pretty comfortable with Roberts. I just hope the next one is as good.

Bush Bashing

I don't really like ad hominens, but these two are are just too rich to pass up.

First, there is this from from the Bush Family Vacation Photo Album (courtesy of Denise):

Then there is this from Billy Bob (posted it as a comment earlier but now being promoted)

Dear Mr. Bush:

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from you and understand why you would propose and support a constitutional amendment banning same sex marriage. As you said "in the eyes of God marriage is based between a man a woman." I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination... End of debate.

I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some other elements of God's Laws and how to follow them.

1. Leviticus 25:44 states that I may possess slaves, both male andfemale, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friendof mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?
2. I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
3. I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanness -Lev.15: 19-24. The problem is how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.
4. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates apleasing odor for the Lord - Lev.1:9. The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?
5. I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus35:2. clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligatedto kill him myself, or should I ask the police to do it?
6. A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination - Lev. 11:10, it is a lesser abomination thanhomosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this? Are there 'degrees'of abomination?
7. Lev.21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is theresome wiggle-room here?
8. Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev.19:27. How should they die?
9. I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?
10. My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev. 9:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyesterblend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? Lev. 24:10-16. Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair, like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws?(Lev.20:14)

I know you have studied these things extensively and thus enjoyconsiderable expertise in such matters, so I am confident you can help.Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.

Hermeneutics, Exegesis and Exposition

How's THAT for a title to a blog post?

A minute ago, I turned on the TV to see what football games were on, and for some reason (I didn't do it, I swear!), the TV was tuned to our 24-hour religious broadcasting station. I got there just in time to hear the following sentence:

"In hermeneutics, exegesis must precede exposition."

One doesn't often hear any of these words on television, much less all three in one six word sentence, so I was intrigued. Hermeneutics is the science and art of determining the meaning of biblical text. The point the speaker was making was that before you can "expound" (even to yourself) on those meanings, you have to engage in a process of exegesis in which you seek to discover, first and foremost, what the language used meant to the original audience. The point, I take it, is that the meaning of a message gets blurred by translation (from Greek, say, into English, or worse yet from Arameic into Greek into English) and further, even with a "perfect" translation, the words themselves may not have the same meaning for us that it they had for the initial audience for those words. As a consequence, before one can really even begin to talk meaningful about the "message" embedded in a biblical text, one must first endeavor to discover what the language meant to those to whom it was initially directed. Context, in other words is, if not everything, at least essential to understanding. It is only when you have un\covered as much as you can of he context that you can even begin to discern, much less "expostulate on," the implications of the message for ourselves and our times.

As concepts, these are hardly novel to any lawyer. One of the very first lessons taught in law school is that, when reading and trying to understand a judicial decision, the first and frequently most important question you have to ask yourself is "What was really going on here; what were the facts that led to the decision and what interests were really at stake; what did the decision mean to the people involved?" In short, the decision itself is simply the tip of a vast iceberg; the endpoint of an involved and sometimes long process involving much more than the particular litigants that end up before the court. To understand what the decision really means and how it relates to issues of concern to you and your clients, you have to try, insofar as possible, to understand what preceded the decision and what it meant to the people actually involved.

Thus, it should not have surprised me to hear a theologian argue that the same process needs to be used in trying to understand the Bible. Yet, it did. Few people I respect take the Bible literally. Most see much of what the Bible says as metaphor. However, even these people tend to think that the metaphors have a single meaning that has not changed over time. And, I have largely thought that one had to accept at least that premise to treat the Bible as "gospel." Yet, even a moment's reflection makes me realize that even this is not true. Having recognized the metaphorical nature of the message one still has to ask "What did that metaphor mean to the original audience?" The message is buried in THAT meaning, and if we automatically assume that the meaning of the metaphor has not changed we are very likely to miss the true message altogether.

There is not enough in this to allay my doubts that the Bible is divinely inspired. However, it does tend to help me understand how those who do believe it to be divinely inspired can "live with" some of what's in it.

Also, there is a relativism buried in this approach to the Bible that makes me smile.

Note to New Orleans?: Next Time You Are On Your Own

Here's a provocative -- perhaps incendiary -- thought that we probably should, but almost certainly will not, think seriously about as we move away from responding to the Katrina catastrophe and toward the process of rebuilding New Orleans: Should we tell the City and its residents that, while we will help them re-build this time, the next time they are on their own.

I don't pretend to have the answers to that question. But I do think it needs to be debated, and, for the moment, I propose to play devil's advocate. That is, I want to try to make the case for telling New Orleans that, while we are willing to help them re-build, we are not willing to subsidize a reconstruction in the same location.

Several hundred billion dollars of taxpayer money will be spent responding to the Katrina catastrophe. The vast, vast majority of that money will come from taxpayers who do not live in or anywhere near New Orleans and obtain little or no benefit from its particular location. I do not begrudge the victims that money. However, I do question the extent to which taxpayers in the rest of the country have the duty to act as insurers of New Orleans' future if the residents choose to rebuild the City in the same, utterly stupid, place.

There is something bordering on madness in building a City of a million or more people in a bowl that is mostly below sea level and located only a few miles from a stretch of ocean that sees multiple hurricanes every year. That madness has always been obvious to anyone who has ever thought even briefly about the issue. Yet, prior to Katrina, we were faced with a fait accompli: the City already existed, and moving the City and its people to some more sensible location was simply not possible.

Things have changed now, though. A significant proton of the City has been destroyed and virtually all of its residents have been driven into a diaspora. The homes and businesses of these people need to be rebuilt, and the rest of the country does have an obligation to assist in this effort, since it is so plainly far beyond the resources of both the victims themselves and local governments. But, to the extent the rest of the country is footing the bill, we also have some say in how our money is spent.

The instinctive impulse of everyone involved will be try to restore what was lost and to seek to better protect the affected people and property with ever higher levees and ever stronger anti-flood defenses. But that impulse is driven more by nostalgia and stubbornness than it is by good sense. Moreover, the enormous costs of that alternative will be borne primarily by millions of people who obtain no benefits from New Orleans' location while the benefits, if any, will be enjoyed only by those who live or visit there.

If there were some way to assure that a similar catastrophe will not recur, nostalgia and stubbornness might provide sufficient justifitication for the investment. But there is no such assurance. In fact, regardless of what is done to provide greater protection, another similar catastrophe is a statistical certainty so long as the City remains where it is. And, at that point, the rest of the Country will be faced with yet another fait accompli requiring the residents of Iowa to spend yet more money to extricate the residents of New Orleans from the consequences of their folly in living where they do.

We cannot refuse to help the City re-build itself. We can, however, refuse to subsidize folly. The current situation must be stabilized. But before we pour hundreds of billions of dollars into the effort to re-build New Orleans and protect it from the consequences of Katrina II, the alternative of using that money to relocate the City to higher ground ought to be seriously considered.

In light of this, I offer the following modest proposal. First, we should refuse to invest in significant improvements to the existing levee system. What is there already should be repaired and we should be willing to participate in that effort. However, since there is no way to construct a system of defenses that will eliminate the risk that areas below sea level will be inundated, we do not intend even to try.

Second, federal dollars should only be used for the construction or reconstruction of buildings and infrastructure that are above sea level. Areas of the City that are below sea level need to be abandoned so as to provide "defense in depth" as a backup to the existing levee system. The additional land needed to replace abandoned homes and businesses will have to be found on the landward side of the Mississippi River or in other locations that are above sea level if federal help is expected.

Finally, and perhaps most important, if State and local authorities choose to allow sub-sea-level portions of the City to be restored, they, the people who elect them, and most especially the people who choose to build in such locations, must be made to understand that the nation is not responsible for protecting those homes and businesses and will not pay to have the damage repaired if they are destroyed by another hurricane.

Contrary thoughts are welcome, even hoped for.