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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Thursday, September 20, 2007

Wishing And Hoping And Praying With The FEMA Director 

...it may be that FEMA Director R. David Paulison is a strong administrator who is dedicated with a laser-like focus on fixing the problems that have plagued that agency since George W. Bush decided to redirect its purpose, or it may be that he is simply another Bushco talking head preaching another thread in the party line to the unwashed masses. If we're lucky, we'll never know which case is true in any event, but there are a couple of things we do know:

1) His assertion that FEMA is a new and improved product that will never again under the Bush tour of duty allow the travesty of the days after Hurricane Katrina, based on this years performance, is a charade. No single event and not all of the cited natural disasters put together compare in any degree to the circumstances that Katrina presented. Being proactive is nice and is a good place to get back to, but the Greenburg, Kansas, tornado is not an episode that the Bush Administration should point to with pride and the presence of 'X' number of buses and helicopters in Texas in response to possible landfall of Hurricane Dean doesn't respond to most of the issues that arose after Hurricane Katrina. For that matter, there are FEMA-related issues related to other hurricanes that struck Southeastern US coastlines months and years before Katrina that have yet to be addressed. It won't be time to declare that the Katrina problems are fixed until there is actually another Katrina against which to measure progress...

2) His seeming bragging about fixing 30 years of problems may at some level be true, but at another distinct and discrete level it is passingly strange and somewhat offensive. James Lee Witt , himself a person with way more experience with emergency management than with specific horse breeds, made great strides toward turning FEMA into an actual functioning agency after a long series of flailing and failure under Republican presidents. Paulison's second level supervisor in the White House intentionally threw all that away for mostly political reasons and, despite all the chest-thumping, there really hasn't been any meaningful demonstration that very much of that loss has been gained back. He is saying nice things, but none of his proactive moves fixing all of those Witt years (come on; you didn't really think he was casting accusations at Bush 41, did you?) haven't had to withstand the test of a hurricane or a California earthquake or a PacNW tsunami (hopefully not when I'm on holiday at the coast, thank you very much). Proof's in the pudding, they say, although I've never really figured out what is proved by pudding production....but in any case, until there is some event that actually taxes FEMA, singing the praise of a 'new way' that hasn't really been tested is not the hot ticket...

I don't wish ill to Mr Paulison, because he has a vitally important job that cannot tolerate vacuous talk in the stead of real live competency. It's too soon, however, to sing the praises of a new and improved disaster management agency until it actually has a...you know...big time disaster to actually deal with. Many disasters don't follow a "sequential failure" timeline so, while fixing that problem is a good thing, the potential problems of a fast-moving event will render all of that fixing useless. On top of that, many of the more gripping problems with the post-Katrina period were less a product of any incompetence on the part of Michael Brown than they were of the corrupt intransigence of the second-level Bushco ideologues and fixers and hanger's-on who interfered with the normal smooth running of a service and supply system to the benefit of faithful Republican supporters/contractors. If they aren't gone or 'reeducated', the fixes that Mr. Paulison touts will be a wasted fantasy the next time an earthquake levels some metropolitan center along the Pacific Coast...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:59 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Doesn't Anyone Around Here Read Spy Novels Anymore? 

...so today we came face to face with the underlying problem with reading-averse conservatives being in charge of any part of the Federal Government. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell told the House Judiciary Committee that even a greater unfettered authorization to eavesdrop on pretty much every old body was vital to protect the Homeland from not only evil Islamicist demons but also...welcome back to the 1960's...China and Russia. No. Seriously. He Really Said That:
(McConnell)...said China and Russia are aggressively spying on sensitive U.S. facilities, intelligence systems and development projects, and their efforts are approaching Cold War levels.

"Foreign intelligence information concerning the plans, activities and intentions of foreign powers and their agents is critical to protect the nation and preserve our security,"...

Stunning stuff, really. Just as neither Condi Rice or any other anti-literacy advocate in the Bush administration could have imagined that committed zealots could fly airplanes into buildings despite a reasonable collection of previously published books and reports that suggested just exactly that sort of possibility, the friggin' Director of National Intelligence can't conceive of the concept of stupid, evil, non-English-speaking furinurs ever coming up with the idea that the espionage powers of major foreign countries might just have the capability of communicating with their stupid, evil, non-English-speaking minions by means of chatting that don't rely on communications systems that any half-bright spymaster would assume to be compromised...

Its really hard to avoid breaking into the sort of laughter that sounds like mules at dinner-time at the total lame ham-handedness the McConnell has lapsed into in his desperate effort to justify what is primarily an effort to observe the communications of American citizens by coloring this ramped-up "surveilliance" need with all those worn-out Cold War crayons. Anybody who has even dabbled in the dark grim world of spy novels knows that the agents of major powers don't use Baby Bell Princess phones or prepaid cell phones or My Space or Face Book or G-Mail to discuss their on-going activities. Eavesdropping on normal legitimate communication channels will only yield information about Aunt Bessie's goiter, Uncle Zeb's objection to the Iraq occupation, or the fantasies of strange, twisted terrorist wannabe's who probably aren't bright enough to actually bring their evil plans to fruition. It won't catch a commie spy; that action pretty much hit its expiration date sometime around the original publication of "The Spy Who Came In From The Cold"...

The erosion of personal freedom and civil rights is going to be a story that we will be stuck with at least until that day 15 months from now when the last personal belongings of George W. Bush are hurled into some U-Haul van backed up to those big double doors on the South Lawn entrance of the White House. McConnell is doing his master's bidding, pushing the rights envelope to the benefit of his employer and those who tend to cast a suspicious eye at a bunch of dirty farkin' Murika-hatin' hippies running around slipping Viagra into the punch bowl and powdered yak horn into the wine bottles in order to make this once great country of ours spiral off into a sick destructive tailspin of treachery, treason, sex and debauchery that would render the biblical-era Corinthians absolutely purple with envy. Linking some new liberalization of eavesdropping rules to alleged ramped-up activities by Red China and nearly Red Russia is no less than a simple ham-handed scare tactic that has no particular connection to real life. It may sound good, but it is an embarrassment to anyone who has ever read even the most simplistic 'I Spy' novel. I mean, good grief, doesn't anybody know about hollowed-up pumpkins around here...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:29 PM 0 comments

Sunday, September 16, 2007

Gunning Down The Bad Guys in Thomas Sowell's World 

...one of the problems for a smaller-market newspaper that is always working hard to properly service its conservative editorial masters is that there sometimes isn’t enough space on the editorial page to squeeze in all the ‘proper’ editorials. Sunday, for my little Bend, Oregon, daily, is the "big dump" day, where a weird sort of supposed balance is sought by mixing in a couple of supposedly liberal columnists - such as David Broder - with a few front-line members from the home team. Today we Bend Bulletin readers came face to face with a dynamic daily double, being able to read both Victor David Hansen and Thomas Sowell, proud and productive employees of the Center For Truly Outside-The-Mainstream Right-Wing Pundrity, also referred to as the Hoover Institution because it is an important Stanford University effort to vacuum up the most eye-poppingly extreme examples of conservative thought and confine them safely in a single location where they can be closely watched. For today’s exercise we can ignore Hansen’s effort, which is a fairly run-of-the-mill attempt to nurture the idea that any consideration of criticism of Israel is a blatant act of antisemitism. No, today we need to consider Thomas Sowell’s positive consideration of the proposition that executing drivers of cars attempting to elude the police is an important law enforcement function to be encouraged...

As Sowell sees it, there is a tremendous risk to the continuance of proper social order if law enforcement agencies were forced to let it be known, because of the pressure of all those dirty farking hippies of the left and their fellow travelers in the daily newspaper editorial-writing community, to that whole "hot pursuit" thing that has almost single-handedly paid for an entire squadron of local news helicopters over the years. Sowell’s counter-suggestion to the - to him - disturbing understanding on the part of bad guys that a bit of high-speed fleeing will cause law enforcement officers to stand down and allow the perps to get away is simple in a brutally elegant way: shoot a few of them to death to send a message to the others...

As a father of a teenage girl, I will admit to being an advocate of Charles Barkley’s similar treatment of the young men that might want to start hanging around the house: kill the first few and leave their bodies laying around as a warning to the others. As a matter of jurisprudence, however, there may be some problems with the underlying premise of Sowell’s argument. The obvious difficulty lies in trying to decide just exactly the point at which it is appropriate to go all Dirty Harry on some meth-head who decides to outrun the police in his ‘93 Buick. There is obviously also a concern about the culpability of any passengers who might be subjected to the hail of gunfire intended to bring the miscreant to ultimate justice. The biggest problem, however, revolves around the manner in which physics is understood on Sowell’s planet of residence. On this particular Blue Marble, momentum matters. Firing discrete rounds from a helicopter into the driver’s side roof of a fleeing vehicle may certainly remove the evil, dirty bad guy from the gene pool, but it won’t remove the vehicle that said villain was piloting from the road. On our planet, vehicles to which a certain amount of momentum has been imparted will continue on a path until that momentum has been exhausted by opposing forces. Those forces can be provided by a large immovable roadside object or by the skidding and flipping of the vehicle on its own side of the road or by the impact of an oncoming vehicle across the centerline or the freeway median strip...

It’s easy to argue that serious punishment needs to be applied to those who try to flee the police in a high-speed chase to serve as a deterrent to that sort of behavior. On the other hand, the seemingly inexhaustible supply of death row inmates - even in places like Texas with it’s sterling record of carrying out capital punishment - suggests that the threat of deadly force in a police pursuit may not be all that zippy a deterrent to such action. Nevertheless, we should never let it be said that we can’t count on Hoover Institution stalwarts like Thomas Sowell to expand the use of extrajudicial executions into our society...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:57 PM 0 comments

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