Another outrage on Fox News Channel

Today, at the beginning of the 5:00 PM EDT hour on John Gibson’s program, Catherine Herridge read out loud, while the text was shown on the screen, Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s response to former FEMA Director Michael Brown’s congressional testimony yesterday referring to his “lies and misstatements under oath” as “appalling.” (I’m quoting from memory.)

Then, as she read other news items, I noticed that the graphic at the bottom of the screen read:
BIG STORY
LA GOVERNOR DECLINES TO
RESPOND TO BROWN’S ATTACKS

Seems to me like someone was asleep at the switch.  Actually, it’s worse than that.

Brown did not “attack” the governor in his testimony yesterday. He merely recited his and his staff’s contacts and attempted contacts with her and faulted himself for not being able to persuade her to order an evacuation of the New Orleans area sooner.

Brown did go on to say that the delay in ordering the evacuation, and the insufficiency of implementing the plan which the city and state had prepared for managing that evacuation, played a major role in exacerbating the subsequent problems of people trapped in their homes by rising floodwaters, overcrowding at the Superdome, and the wholly unplanned mob scene at the Morial Convention Center.

This doesn’t sound like an attack to me. And it certainly doesn’t sound like lies in the light of the facts as they have appeared so far.

This incident reminds me of the story about the candidate who was told by one of his supporters, “You’ve got to go and work the south end of the county, they’re telling lies about you down there.” And the candidate responded, “No, I have to go to the north end; they’re telling the truth about me up there.”

Richard Sennett on Fragmented politics, fragmented lives

spiked-politics | Article | Fragmented politics, fragmented lives:

"Yet history has granted the New Left its wish in a perverse form. The insurgents of my youth believed that by dismantling institutions we could produce communities: face-to-face relations of trust and solidarity, relations constantly negotiated and renewed, a communal realm in which people became sensitive to one another's needs. This certainly has not happened. The fragmenting of big institutions has left many people's lives in a fragmented state: the places they work more resembling train stations than villages, family life disoriented by the demands of work; migration is the icon of the global age, moving on rather than settling in. Taking institutions apart has not produced more community."

A very thought-provoking article from Prof. Sennett who teaches sociology at the London School of Economics. Highly recommended, as are companion articles by his fellow panelists at a debate scheduled for Friday evening in NYC. Lots of interesting stuff turns up on spiked-online.com and you can get free email alerts. Check it out.

In the paragraph quoted above, Prof. Sennett is speaking of the disappointment of the signers of the Port Huron Statement in the result of the political changes they helped bring about. Port Huron in 1962 was the scene of a meeting at which the Student League for Industrial Democracy (the youth component of a movement I think Lenin would have dismissed as, in his famous phrase, "left deviationism, an infantile delusion") was transformed into the Students for a Democratic Society (better known by its initials - SDS). Being a bit of cynic, I suspect that many of those involved were not quite so dewey-eyed.

Of course, my perspective may be biased by the fact that I became, about three years later when I was in high school, a subscriber to the Sharon Statement. In 1960, the younger veterans of the abortive effort to make US Sen. Barry M. Goldwater (D-AZ) the GOP nominee for vice-president met at the Sharon, CT, home of the Buckley clan to form Young Americans for Freedom. The relationship between the two youth groups, SDS and YAF, has a curious history.

YAF, the Goldwater campaigns, and the modern conservative movement generally, were all subject to a certain degree of tension between traditionalists and libertarians, often referred to in YAF circles in the 60s and 70s as Trads and Libs. Common ground could often be found in a shared view that the general government should be confined strictly to constitutional subjects. The late Frank Myer, who wrote for National Review in its early days, labored mightily to create and maintain a fusion of the Trad and Lib tendencies because neither was strong enough to prevail alone and, in his view, the goals they had in common were worth fighting for.

These two youth groups, SDS and YAF, had a strange relationship in the turbulent 1960s. There is a tendency to recall FSM (the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in the early 60s) as a confrontation between SDS and other leftist students against the school administration in a pattern that persisted for a decade or so through the subsequent campaigns against the Vietnam War. But, in its origin, FSM united SDS and its left allies with YAF, Republicans and others on the right. The original issue at Berkeley was the stultifying political atmosphere of a constant parade of liberal speakers, mostly Democrats of the barely left of center variety mixed with the occasional Republican from the very left fringe of his own party. FSM at first aimed to open up the pursestrings of university-sponsored speakers to include some genuine debate on principles. On this, SDS and YAF at UCB were in agreement.

There were other factors involved of course, but the rise of the Vietnam War as a political issue after President Lyndon Johnson's ill-advised policy converting a purely proxy war of the Cold War period to a struggle directly involving US troops led to a fairly clean break between YAF and SDS. But, that old Trad/Lib business began to divide YAF, with the extreme libertarians moving toward sympathy with some of the rhetoric of the SDS, some due to the war issue, some due to the rising importance of what we have learned to call the "social issues."

In the run-up to the 1969 national convention of YAF these tensions came to a head. The national office worked furiously to halt what some feared might be a takeover of YAF by the New Left. At an emergency chapter meeting of the University of Virginia YAF that summer, I helped to pack our delegation with Trads. At the national convention (which I was not able to attend) a resolution was adopted to prevent cross-membership and one UVa YAFer who also an outspoken proponent of SDS was read out of the organization by name.

YAF was formally non-partisan and not engaged in electoral politics. In some ways it functioned as a lever to move the Young Republicans (and College Republicans and Teen-Age Republicans) to the right. Meanwhile, Nixon's standing with conservatives was falling and Gov. Ronald Reagan's star was rising. YAF had the idea of running a mock presidential nominating convention as a part of its activities at the 1971 national convention. Not only was this considered a lot of fun, but it would give YAFers a chance to practice skills they might want to put to work in the GOP national convention the following year.

It quickly became apparent, however, that the YAF delegates, if left to their own devices, would propose the nomination of Gov. Reagan. Reagan had run a late-starting and unsuccesssful effort to parlay his 1966 election as governor into the 1968 presidential nomination. This effort was doomed when Nixon sent US Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-SC) around to southern delegations assuring them that Nixon would tap Reagan for VP. I don't know if Sen. Thurmond knew this was false, but it is widely believed that Nixon had given a veto over the VP selection to Gov. Nelson Rockefeller (R-NY) in a meeting at the latter's Manhattan home. (It was also at this time that Nixon acquired from Rockefeller the services of Dr. Henry Kissinger.)

Reagan had been a great boon to YAF, helping the organization to raise great sums of money to support its growth. Now, the governor feared that a YAF repudiation of a sitting Republican president in preference for him would damage his chances to win the nomination in 1976. He told the national office that he would sever all connection to YAF and disavow their endorsement of him if the mock convention nominated him.

Faced with that unhelpful prospect, but unwilling to give up on the mock convention idea, the word went out to nominate Vice President Spiro T. "Ted" Agnew, the man whom Rockefeller had foisted on Nixon, as our nominee. Although a liberal Republican in his earlier career, Agnew had been given the assignment by the Nixon White House to feed raw meat to the conservatives to deflect attention from what they were doing to sell out the principles we naively thought Nixon shared with us.

To keep things interesting, the nomination of "favorite son" candidates by the various state delegations was encouraged, and I nominated US Sen. Harry Flood Byrd, Jr. (I-VA) whose predecessor in the Senate (his father) had actually received some electoral votes in 1960. Things went according to plan, Agnew was "nominated," we showed our displeasure with Nixon (not that he cared), and Ronald Reagan continued to support YAF and many of us worked for him in 1976.

In one of those curious twists that politics sometimes takes, a friend of mine from UVa Young Republicans and the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists convinced me in about 1973 that the time was right for us to join the nascent Libertarian Party as a way to campaign for limited government. Remember the times, Nixon was under fire over Watergate, Agnew was forced out in October for failing to pay income tax on bribes he received as county executive and governor, Nixon put Jerry Ford in as VP (some said as a poison pill to try to prevent his own impeachment) - a lot of Republicans were getting discouraged.

I became, in short order, a founder of the Virginia Libertarian Party, elected chairman of the party at its first convention, a delegate to the 1974 national LP convention, and then deposed in a coup led by Charlottesville attorney Roger McBride. And, that was the end of my interest in the LP.

They say if you can remember the Sixties, you weren't really there. That may be true of those who were on the left in those days (it's a drug joke), but I suspect it is mostly an unwillingness by most people to contemplate some of the things they did when they were "young and dumb." We who were on the right in those days also have some things we prefer not to remember, but they are not primarily political.

Our hurricane track models need educating, Rita shows

Predicting Rita:

"Alexander E. ('Sandy') MacDonald, Director of NOAA's Forecast Systems Laboratory in Boulder, CO, says a more precise model is in the works that would allow for sharper predictions.

"But getting it ready for deployment will require more computation and research dollars. 'We have a ways to go,' he tells Technology Review's Chief Correspondent, David Talbot, who interviewed him this week."

More robust modeling of hurricane tracks would be of great benefit in two ways. A public perception that the predicted tracks are accurate should encourage a higher proportion of persons in targeted areas to evacuate when advised to do so. And, more accurate prediction would mean fewer persons advised to evacuate, and discourage people unlikely to be hit from evacuating anyway, and these factors would reduce the cost of evacuations and put less strain on shelters and hotels in the areas to which persons are told to evacuate.

NOAA's MacDonald points out that we only spend about $50 million per year on hurricane tracking. That is a drop in the bucket compared to the economic cost of evacuating people who could safely stay home, let alone the human costs of people who should evacuate and don't because they lack confidence in the predictions. He wants to at least double that budget to make it possible to gather more data on each storm as it progresses and to run larger and more detailed computer models.

[Note: The awkward title is a cinematic reference, not a good one, but I do love movies and this one wasn't awful.]

Lost Israel among Christians in India

WorldNetDaily: Rabbis convert 'lost tribe of Israel' :

"... Their return to Israel had been halted in 2003 when then-Israeli Interior Minister Avraham Poraz froze their immigration, prompting Freund to turn to the chief rabbinate so Bnei Menashe members in India can be converted and can return as legally recognized Jews, circumventing the Interior Ministry.

"According to Bnei Menashe oral tradition, the tribe was exiled from Israel and pushed to the east, eventually settling in the border regions of China and India, where most remain today.

"In the 1950s, a man named Tchelah, the chief of an Indian village, said he had a vision, which he shared with his people, that his community was the lost tribe of Menashe. Most in his town had customs similar to Jewish tradition, but they couldn't explain why. They were told by Tchelach to return at once to Israel and embrace the Jewish faith."

If my memory serves, the reason the Interior Ministry had suspended the aliyah claims of the Bnei Menashe revolved around the question of the antiquity of their claim to being Jewish. These people come from a region of India where Christianity goes back to the evangelism of the apostle Thomas. Over the centuries, of course, there were intermarriages, intermingling with other communities, and some fell away from Christianity.

Some Israeli authorities were suspicious that persons of Christian or other faiths might be claiming Jewish identity to escape India without the money and a lot of paperwork needed to emigrate elsewhere. Such a suspicion was not without foundation, especially given the reassertion of a particularly militant Hinduism in recent decades making life difficult for all minority faiths in India. By performing Orthodox conversion rites in India, the Sephardic rabbinate sidesteps the issue of their ancestry and qualifies these converts for aliyah based on the validity of their conversions.

In all likelihood, at least some of these person's ancestors were Israelites. The Parthian Empire was centered on Israelite communities carried into exile. Eventually, the Parthian Empire reached well into India. So, it should not be surprising that, in carrying out Christ's commission to seek out the lost, St. Thomas should encounter some of these Israelites in India to whom he preached the Gospel of the Messiah for whom they had been waiting.

Spreading the Gospel of Christ in Mozambique

WorldNetDaily: 1 woman and Jesus change a nation :

"As you might imagine, this spiritual eagerness produces thousands of miracles. At the Bakers' meetings, God heals the blind, deaf, mute, paralyzed and AIDS cases. Also, they have counted 55 resurrections so far, all with witnesses.

"Today, they have 2,000 orphans fed day-to-day by faith. Their team has started over 5,000 house churches. Yet they have never once solicited support."

It's hard to know what to make of this remarkable story. It boggles the mind. But it does so in the way that all truly good things look a bit lop-sided and hard to understand, so accustomed are we to the crookedness that surrounds us in this fallen world.

Rasmussen Reports: Americans divided on Iraq withdrawal

WorldNetDaily: Most Americans against troop withdrawal:

"Overall, 44 percent of Americans view the U.S. troops in Iraq as a liberating force while 35 percent say they are an occupying force."

The most remarkable thing about this poll, in my view, is that the question that elicited the foregoing response could be asked at all. It ought to be apparent that liberating and occupying are both essential functions of the Anglo-American venture into Iraq.

WND's headline is a bit off the mark. The key finding is not that a bare majority recognizes the danger of a precipitate withdrawal, but that so many Democrats don't understand that you can't unring a bell. By a margin of only 33 to 30 percent Democrats agree that withdrawal now would make things in Iraq first. The plurality of 37 percent, whose views are not reported here, presumably include those who are unsure of the effect of a quick pull-out, those who are unsure what or where Iraq is, or those who don't know how to pull out.

I have often said that I would not have chosen to invade and occupy and liberate and try to plant democracy in Iraq. Perhaps I do not love Iraqis enough, but it is not a course I would have chosen. A policy short of all this that gave promise of getting rid of Saddam Hussein might have been worth the candle, but this was a reach too far in my view. Yet, "in for a penny, in for a pound" as the old saying goes. Or, if you prefer another old saying, remember that sign in the china shop, "if you break it, you've bought it." We are in and we will have to stay in until some semblance of stability is reached, even if it falls short of someone's ideal of democracy, so that leaving won't make us look weak and defeated.

John Stossel blames pork for crowding out levee construction funds

John Stossel: Dammable pork:

"... Iowans don't need levees in Louisiana."

Well, Iowa farmers (and by extension a great many more farmers from the Plains, Midwest and south-central portions of the country) do need reliable navigation of the Mississippi and efficient functioning of the Port of New Orleans in order to export grain to the far corners of the world.

Other than that quibble, I highly recommend Stossel's column.

Source for official historical data on Gulf Coast hurricanes

Site Map - National Weather Service Office - Lake Charles, LA:

Atlantic Tropical Storms and Hurricanes Affecting The United States:1899-2000

A Historical Study of Tropical Storms and Hurricanes That Have Affected Southwest Louisiana and Southeast Texas

Louisiana Hurricane History
16th Century Hurricanes
18th Century Hurricanes
Early 19th Century Hurricanes
Late 19th Century Hurricanes
Early 20th Century Hurricanes
Late 20th Century Hurricanes
Brief Climatology of Louisiana's Tropical Cyclones

Texas Hurricane History
Late 19th Century Hurricanes
Early 20th Century Hurricanes
Late 20th Century Hurricanes

Above is a list of topics included in the historical hurricane data available from the website of the National Weather Service at Lake Charles, LA.

You can find all sorts of interesting details of previous storms in the Texas and Louisiana coasts including five storms that have flooded New Orleans, three of them since WW2, and the season when the Texas Gulf Coast was hit three times. Gives you a different perspective on all that stuff from Al Gore and company that global warming caused Katrina and Rita, that Bush is to blame for not implementing Kyoto, etc.

Note particularly that we have relatively little information on these storms the farther back you go in history. The first storm ever to be penetrated by an airplane was one that hit Texas during WW2. The first ever real-time radio report of a tropical storm by a ship at sea was from a ship in the Gulf of Mexico reporting to New Orleans in 1909.

For many storms before the 1950s, our pressure and wind speed data are limited to the point where the equipment failed or the operators fled. Frequently we are limited to instrument readings from land stations or ships that were well off the track of the center of a storm's circulation. Thus, there is some bias toward under-rating storm categories for these older storms.

In Plans to Evacuate U.S. Cities, Chance for Havoc - New York Times:

"New York, more than most American cities, has the advantage of a sprawling mass transportation system. Eight million people a day use the system, and officials count on it to be useful in an emergency as well. That could be vital, because city traffic, already a problem in an ordinary rush hour, would pose a significant challenge.

"Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said the city has two general evacuation plans, one for hurricanes and another for terrorist attacks. The plans include the opening of hundreds of shelters, mostly in schools. But officials acknowledge that many elements of an evacuation would have to be improvised."

Leave aside for the moment the airy notion that millions of evacuees can be accommodated in hundreds of shelters (i.e., on the order of 10,000 evacuees per shelter), and let's give this idea of evacuating New York City for a hurricane a test drive.

Start with the comforting thought that the transit system serves eight million riders daily and that eight million is approximately the population of the city. But a high proportion of those eight million riders are city residents going from one point in the city to another. The subway portion of the transit system doesn't leave the city at all.

Only one of NYC's five boroughs is on the mainland of North America. The other four cover two large islands and a small part of a very much larger one. This means there are a relatively few bridges and tunnels by which trains, buses or cars can exit. On the positive side, unlike most of the barrier islands on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, Staten Island and Manhattan Island are not low-lying sand bars. The highest point of land on Manhattan is well over 200 feet - a far cry from Galveston.

The other thing in New York's favor in a hurricane scenario is that much of the architecture is stone, brick, concrete and steel; and, athough there are many neighborhoods of wood frame housing, especially in the outer boroughs, you don't have mile after mile of highly vulverable mobile homes as you do in much of the South. So maybe a lot of New Yorkers, including nearly all of Manhattan, can shelter in place and others can be accommodated in shelters in the city.

Now, let's go back to the bad news. In a hurricane so severe that the city, or even just the lower elevations and more vulnerable structures, must be evacuated, won't Nassau and Suffolk counties (the middle and eastern portions of Long Island) also need to evacuate? That adds around three million more people joining the exodus. And, aside from the ferry service to New London, CT at Orient Point (which will probably be committed to the evacuation of Plum and Fisherman's islands in NY and Block Island, RI) and another from Port Jefferson to Bridgeport, CT, the only ways out by rail or highway go through the Borough of Queens.

From Queens, there are three bridges to the Bronx, and three ways into Manhattan, although that may not be very useful as an evacuation route since there are only three routes from there to New Jersey and one highway and half dozen surface street connections to the Bronx. Or you can continue your drive into Brooklyn from which there are four entries to Manhattan and one bridge to Staten Island from which there are three ways one can get to the mainland in New Jersey.

Leaving out the handful of surface street connections from Manhattan to the Bronx, we have a total of eight highway bridge or tunnel connections as choke points for any evacuation of Long Island. Pulling everyone out of seven counties puts about a million people on the average bridge out of town even leaving out the Bronx which is part of the mainland and has a dense network of surface connections into Westchester Co. in addition to five major highways which will be clogged with folks evacuating from the island counties to the south. We can also leave out Staten Island in this analysis since whatever LI traffic comes across the Verazzano Narrows Bridge can continue into NJ using one highway, leaving two or three other routes open for the less than half million people on SI.

Assume that 25 percent will get out by rail, air and ferries, that leaves about 6 million and if most of Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn and Queens can shelter in place, maybe we can get down to only 4 million people on the highways. At a very optimistic equal numbers of cars carrying four people and buses carrying 40 people that puts about 44 people which, moving at even a slow speed takes up about 80 feet or around 2800 people per lane mile. At 30 mph (too optimistic) that moves 84,000 people per hour in one lane and, if there are 40 lanes available, we get over 3 million people out in an hour, except that can't happen from a standing start.

Average occupancy of cars will be less than 3, there will be more than 80,000 of them and we won't have 80,000 buses. MTA New York City Transit claims a fleet of 4566 buses serving 2.5 million riders daily in the five boroughs. There are other bus fleets serving the city, but this would be the largest source available for evacuation.

More reasonably, we get one million cars with 3 million people and we rustle up 10,000 buses to make three trips each to points in the suburbs. And, based on Houston's experience we expect them to move very slowly. This gets us about 1000 persons per lane mile leaving town and at 5 mph it takes at least 20 hours to get them all to the mainland, and substantially longer until they have reached shelters. But we likely won't have that many lanes leaving town, since some must be kept open to allow buses in for additional trips, to allow movement of ambulances in and out ferrying out some of the sick and injured, and to allow access to provide gas for cars that run out while caught in all day traffic jams, fire trucks to put out engine fires, cops to stop fights caused by fender benders, etc.

I'd be very interested to see how much time the actual NYC hurricane evacuation plan is expected to take, how many people are expected to participate, what mix of vehicles will be involved, and (most of all) where they plan to put all those folks when they get them out of town. I hope we never have to watch that plan collide with reality.

Widening UN financial scandal - why is anyone surprised?

FOXNews.com - U.S. & World - The U.N.'s Spreading Bribery Scandal: Russian Ties and Global Reach :

"Procurement and budgeting corruption may escape [Paul] Volcker's scrutiny, but they are central to the mandate of [UN Secretary-General Kofi] Annan.

"This scandal touches on almost everything the secretary-general is supposed to control. It is by way of procurement contracts, for goods and services ranging from cappuccino and paper clips at U.N. headquarters, to air freight services and food rations for peacekeeping troops worldwide, that the United Nations spends the billions contributed every year by member states — of which U.S. taxpayers provide the largest slice."

The US Attorney for the Southern District of New York has already gotten one guilty plea from a high ranking UN procurement official and indicted another. These two Russians with long tenure at the UN appear to be just the tip of the iceberg of a highly secretive thoroughly corrupt procurement system. This may go far beyond, in both money and time, the Iraq Oil-for-Food scandal on which Volcker's investigation reported last Wednesday.

But, my question is why would anyone be surprised? The media, even Fox, seems to think there is some presumption of high moral standing to which Kofi Annan is entitled. What rot!

There is an old saying about the slippery slope of immorality that goes something like this: A liar will cheat, a cheater will steal, a thief will kill. Well, on the public record it is clear that Annan did not scruple at facilitating the Rwandan genocide while employed as the head of peacekeeping at the UN. He did this by ordering the UN command to alert the government of Rwanda that their plans for mass murder had been leaked to the UN and ordering the UN forces to stand aside and allow the killing to proceed. For this singular service to humanity, Annan was promoted to head of the UN. Given this evidence of Annan's moral character, why should anyone be surprised that millions of dollars have gone missing on his watch.

As Gen. Honore says, Fox News Channel "Still stuck on stupid" in my view

FOXNews.com - U.S. & World - Engineers Try to Stop New Orleans Flooding:

"Although New Orleans escaped the worst of the storm, engineers said they need at least two to three weeks to pump water from the most heavily flooded neighborhoods after they plug a series of levee breaches."

This quote from the written material on the FNC website is fairly reasonable, but watching the wall-to-wall coverage of Hurricane Rita is making me wonder, again, if that fellow who invented the "Fox Blocker" for your TV wasn't on to something. (See my post on March 27.)

For those who missed it, Gen. Honore held a news conference while Rita was swirling around in the Gulf which he said would be to discuss what his command was doing to prepare for Rita. He specifically said that he would not be answering questions about Katrina at that time and asked the media not to "get stuck on stupid" by diverting attention from necessary preparations for Rita. Well, the very first question was on the order of how does your Rita plan compare to what was done to prepare for Katrina and the general said, as near as I recall it, "there you go, getting stuck on stupid again."

Here is a great example of Fox being "stuck on stupid" today. While reporting on new flooding caused by Rita in New Orleans' Ninth Ward, a Fox reporter and camera crew showed water up to about the top of the curb in the streets and then showed the high water mark from Katrina on the porches of some of the houses which were about three or four steps above ground level. Then the studio anchor asks a Corps of Engineers officer how it feels to be "back to square one" in the effort to remove water from the city.

Another unpopular opinion - bear with me fellow conservatives

The Pledge of Allegiance - A Short History:

"Francis Bellamy (1855 - 1931), a Baptist minister, wrote the original Pledge in August 1892. He was a Christian Socialist. In his Pledge, he is expressing the ideas of his first cousin, Edward Bellamy, author of the American socialist utopian novels, Looking Backward (1888) and Equality (1897).

"Francis Bellamy in his sermons and lectures and Edward Bellamy in his novels and articles described in detail how the middle class could create a planned economy with political, social and economic equality for all. The government would run a peace time economy similar to our present military industrial complex."

I got to thinking about the Pledge issue a few days ago when a friend asked when the words 'under God" had been added. She remembered how confusing it was as she and her grade school classmates struggled to relearn it for the daily recitation but did not remember the year. It was 1954. I only learned it the way it is now since I started school in 1956.

When this controversy about "under God" being unconstitutional, I was inclined simply to take the view that such language was by no stretch an establishment of religion. Thus the controversy was "godless" ACLU vs. the USA. Curiously, I had very early become aware of Rev. Francis Bellamy's socialist intentions, but didn't factor that into my thinking. I also didn't think much would be lost by junking the Pledge altogether since I am an unreconstructed Southerner and have long objected to the inclusion of the word "indivisible."

In the course of looking up that date and drafting a reply to my friend, I began to expand my remarks to her into a much closer look at the Pledge. She wrote back that she must have touched a nerve. Well, it wasn't a nerve before, but it is now.

"Under God" is the best part of the Pledge, but it seems certain to me that the courts will junk those two words. So, let's look at the rest of the Pledge in detail to see if it is worth keeping.

"I pledge allegiance ... "

The inferior pledges allegiance to the superior. The knight of old spoke of his superior as his "liege lord" - the authority to whom he owed allegiance. In the philosophy of government that underpins our Declaration of Independence and our state and federal constitutions, the source of sovereignty is the people, not the government. If the people are sovereign, to what or whom might they be required to pledge allegiance? Nothing and no one on earth. (I am not speaking here of our duty to God, because that transcends nationality and mere human governments.)

"... to the Flag of the United States of America ..."

Why the flag? Contrast this with the oath the Constitution requires of public officers to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution."

"... and to the Republic for which it stands, ..."

I grant that republic is the right word, rather than democracy, but we still have the problem that this republic is defined as the one with this flag, not the one that follows the Constitution.

"... one nation, indivisible, ..."

The formulation of "one nation" primarily defines our general government in its relations to to other nations. Under our federal system, we are citizens of of the states where we live and it is within those states that we exercise our political rights. And, of course, the general government is not indivisible. The Late Unpleasantness established no legal doctrine denying the right of the people of any state to withdraw from the union; it only proved that the particular correlation of political, military, diplomatic and economic forces during 1861-65 was unfavorable to those asserting their right of revolution as described in the Declaration of Independence.

"... with liberty and justice for all."

Nothing objectionable here as broad goals, but there is always the danger of confusion as to what such terms mean if they are divorced from such anchors as the Declaration and the Constitution. I am inclined to detect here a whiff of the "equality" which Bellamy dared not include in his original draft. The historical evidence seems to me to indicate that Bellamy was not merely concerned with equality of races or sexes, but with equality of economic outcomes in preference to equality of economic opportunities.

That's the way the Pledge of Allegiance looks to me. Let's junk the whole thing and say good riddance to bad rubbish.

Paralyzed mice helped by human stem cells

BREITBART.COM - Just The News:

"Injections of human stem cells seem to directly repair some of the damage caused by spinal cord injury, according to research that helped partially paralyzed mice walk again.

"The experiment, reported Monday, isn't the first to show that stem cells offer tantalizing hope for spinal cord injury _ other scientists have helped mice recover, too."

"...

"'Much more research must be done before testing stem cells in people with spinal cord injuries,' cautioned Anderson. 'One question is how soon after an injury cells must be administered to have any effect _ no one knows how nine days in a mouse's life correlates to the post- injury period for a person. Also, the mice were bred to avoid immune system destruction of the human cells, and suppressing a person's immune system because of similar transplant rejection risk poses big problems.

"'The last thing we want to do is take someone who's living a productive life _ if confined, we all understand that _ and make them worse,' said Anderson, who said the work also shows the need to study all types of stem cells. 'The exciting part is the potential is there.'"

With all due respect to the Associated Press and its medical writer Lauran Neergaard, work on injecting stem cells into humans to treat spinal cord injury has been going on for years. I posted a story about Dr. Carlos Lima in Portugal several months ago and just now found a story in Paraplegia News dated March 2003 about human clinical trials ongoing in Portugal, China and Australia.

Dr. Lima's work is particularly interesting since he is getting significant results taking stem cells from the patient's own nose to implant at the spinal cord injury site. This avoids both the ethical controversy surrounding fetal stem cells and the possibility of immune system rejection.

For me, the most exciting part of the mouse research reported in this AP story is the observation that the implanted stem cells appeared to be rebuilding myelin (the protective sheath around nerve cells) as well as neurons. Some members of my family suffer to varying degrees from Charcot-Marie-Tooth, an inherited degenerative disease in which the myelin deteriorates beginning in the hands and feet leading to loss of function. It doesn't directly shorten lifespan. My father was almost 83 when he died of cancer, but for many years he had been unable to oppose his thumbs to his fingers to grasp things. He could drive a car, but he couldn't button a shirt. A way to rebuild myelin could help a lot of people suffering with CMT.

Daily Record - Local News - Morris Residents vent over immigration

Daily Record - Local News - Morris Residents vent over immigration :

"'I think the reason most people find amnesty objectionable is that there is no penalty to people coming here illegally,' [Morris County resident Arnold] Dunn said. 'None. We have not sent that message.'"

Mr. Dunn shows a simple and sensible appreciation of the problem than his congresscritter who hosted the town hall meeting. On the other hand, US Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ) demonstrated a position so nuanced as to be divorced from any connection to the real world.

Bear with me while I try to untangle the congressman's muddle-headed thinking on this issue.

"'There's a difference between legal immigration and illegal immigration,' Frelinghuysen said."

No there isn't. That is, the difference in the law doesn't matter if you don't enforce the law. And talk of amnesty (by whatever name President Bush tries to pretty it up), encourages more people to come illegally. Not just to get in on this amnesty, but even after the deadline to get in on the next one - remember, we already did this once during the Reagan administration.

"'We are a nation of immigrants. But if you look at who does the hard labor, who cuts the grass, washes the cars and dishes, many people in Congress raise the issue, why aren't Americans getting these jobs?'" Frelinhuysen continued before pointing out how tight Bush is with President Fox and mentioning their amnesty proposal.

That first sentence is designed to make all the Italians, Poles, Greeks, Jews, etc. feel guilty about objecting to to an uncontrolled flood of people pouring in over the southern border and a steady trickle over the northern border, plus the occasional ship or container load smuggled into one of our ports. Of course throughout our history as the USA (well at least since 1808) the Constitution has made the federal government responsible for setting immigration policy. When it suited the nation's needs immigration was very free, at other times there were tighter controls. We have chosen to give preference to persons from certain places, we have chosen to exclude persons with certain diseases or who had demonstrated bad character. The difference today is that we are not enforcing our own laws.

Regarding the second sentence, it simply isn't true, as President Fox (a member of the white clique which rules Mexico even though its population is predominantly Amerindian and mestizo) said, that his people come here to do jobs even blacks won't do. What the flood of Mexicans and OTMs crossing our southern border does do is to drive down wages, even when they aren't working off the books. Even though living costs may be a little higher here, they can still make so much more money here than where they come from that they can live better here and still send money home to pay for smuggling the rest of the family in.

"'I realize there's a school of thought that we ought to go to the Morristown train station, gather everyone who is here illegally up and fly them back to their countries. But they're entitled to due process by law,' Frelinghuysen explained."

This is a classic liberal answer in that it does nothing to address the issue itself (why we are not enforcing the immigration laws) but attempts to put the questioner on the defensive (by accusing him of lack of respect for our laws). It is the illegal alien who has disrespected us and our laws, not the honest taxpayers who want the laws enforced.

In that small number of cases where illegals are caught, they are routinely given the option of a ride back across the border with no mark against their record, or they can request a hearing which, if they lose and get formally deported, there will be criminal consequences for entering the country again. Most of the Mexicans and Central Americans caught near the southern border choose the bus ride and take another shot at walking back across later. The real travesty is that those who want hearings are generally not in custody awaiting a hearing. Nominal bail may be required of adults, but those who are or plausibly claim to be juveniles are simply turned loose. That's how Lee John Malvo was able to connect with John Muhammad and carry out the Beltway snipers murder. It's also how a Brazilian woman, released in Texas as a presumed juvenile with a paper directing her to appear for an interview in 30 days, managed to get to Massachusetts, borrow a car and run over a policeman.

We want due process, Mr. Frelinghuysen. But it must be a process that leads to illegal entrants being sent home.

If you thought the foregoing statements of Mr. F. were a bit fuzzy in the logic department, here's the real doozie:

"'I'm not saying that I endorse illegal activity, but it's a huge issue ... many of them have families. But my attitude is if they're working hard ... if they're not on welfare, and sending money back home, more people won't come here,' Frelinghuysen said."

He may not be saying that he endorses illegal activity, but no other construction can fairly be put on his words. Why is the scale of a problem relevant to whether the laws should be enforced? Auto theft, burglaries and murders are rampant in many cities, but that is not an argument for giving up on enforcing the laws against those things.

Many of them do have families, typically families they have brought in illegally although some have children who were born here. That doesn't change what they have done. (We need to clarify our laws so that a child born here to parents who lack legal status to be here do not acquire US citizenship jus soli. There are towns on the southern border where the maternity wards are full of women who crossed the border illegally just to give birth on our side of the border.)

Working hard at a job that an American ought to have is not an argument that someone ought to be allowed to stay who broke the law to get here. And, the congressman's reference to not being on welfare overlooks how much financial strain these individuals and families put on our social services by charity care in our hospitals, filling schools for which they pay little in taxes even indirectly, and the disproportionate burden on our prisons.

The real howler comes at the end when Frelinghuysen associates the idea that illegals sending money home is a good thing and that it makes further illegal immigration less likely! Quite the contrary, money they send back to their homelands often are used to enable even more of their friends and relatives to come here in defiance of our laws.

You need to get out in the real world congressman. The real world where over half the population of Mexico wants to be here and the majority of the planet is poorer than Mexico.

CDC confirms my earlier assessment of "toxic" water scare in N.O,

BREITBART.COM - Just The News:

"'It is contaminated with human and animal waste. But there isn't this sort of toxic soup out there,' said Dr. Tom Clark, an infectious disease specialist at the CDC."

The article goes on to note: "There are heavy metals and oil products such as diesel fuel in the water -- but not huge amounts. And as the mud dries, some compounds, especially metals such as lead and arsenic, will remain in the dirt."

Can the Constitution survive Katrina?

U.S. CONSTITUTION:

"... provide for the common defense and general Welfare of the United States ..."

The quote above is the middle third of Article 1, Section 8, Clause 1 of the Constitution. It's a good place to start this discussion since this section includes 18 clauses which together set forth most of the legislative authority of the US Congress. There is a tendency to regard that bit about "the general Welfare" (which also appears in the Preamble) to be so elastic as to stretch to cover any object those in power might wish to attempt. However, even the arch Federalist Alexander Hamilton declared that such a reading would render the recitation of specific grants of congressional authority entirely superfluous. Rather, the powers of the general government are few and defined and the phrase "the common Defence and the general Welfare" merely indicates the purposes for which those powers are delegated to the general government.

Search Article 1, Section 8 all you like and you will not find any authority to fix the damage from hurricanes or do any other act of charity, however worthy or needy the objects of that charity might be. (You will also find no authority for most of the other things the government does - education, health, etc. - but that is a subject for another day.) Just as US Rep. David Crockett of Tennessee found out in that story which I posted recently.

Clauses 11 through 16 relate to the Army, Navy and Militia. We shall return to them later.

Article 4, Section 4, provides that the general government "... shall protect each of them [the States of the Union] against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence." This was the crux of the problem with Gov. Blanco and the use of federal troops. Even if there is no doubt that local and state authorities are unable to maintain public order, the federal government cannot just move in; the assistance of the general government must be requested by the appropriate state authority.

By contrast, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 15 does give to Congress the power "To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;" which is a somewhat broader mandate. In response to the Whiskey Rebellion, where civil tax officers had been assaulted and killed, President Washington rode at the head of a column of militia into western Pennsylvania to enforce the tax on spirits. Fortunately, this sort of thing did not happen often. Rather, there was a significant history of the Army being used under the command of US Marshals (see the article on Posse Comitatus which I posted recently). Of course, some authorities argue that the militia referred to here no longer exists as Clause 16 reserves to the states the power to appoint the officers of the militia.

Some commentators try to stretch the president's power as commander in chief of the Army and Navy, and of the Militia when in actual service of the US, in Article 2, Section 2, Clause 1, to say that the president can send troops wherever and whenever he wants for any purpose. But this reading would make a nullity of any limit on the power of the executive. Placing the president at the top of the chain of command cannot extend to the armed forces powers and duties which they don't already have under the Constitution and laws of the US.

Following the War, the Congress set up a system of military government which superseded the operation of the duly constituted civil administrations elected after the end of hostilities. Known as "Reconstruction" this episode did not cover the Army with glory. As a part of the deal Republicans made to get Democrats to go along with the coup d'etat of 1876, a promise was made to end military government imposed by the prior Republican coup. The troops were removed from their pretended authority over the civil governments of the southern states in 1877 and the next year Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act.

Posse Comitatus is a very old concept in our British legal tradition and refers, literally, to the power of the county. Dating back to a time before full time police departments existed, there were occasions like the pursuit of fugitives where sheriffs, sergeants, constables, marshals and certain other officials having law enforcement responsibility could call forth the support of citizens to assist in enforcing the laws. Remember all those western movies where you've seen the sheriff leading a posse? This is where the legal authority of that band of armed men comes from.

Under the Posse Comitatus Act (PCA), the use of the Army as a posse comitatus for purposes of domestic law enforcement was greatly restricted. In recent years, however, especially in regard to the war on drugs, rather large loopholes have been opened in that prohibition. (See the Washington University Law Review article on this subject linked in a prior post.) PCA originally applied only to the Army, when the Air Force became a separate service, it fell under PCA. Although the Navy and Marines are not restricted by PCA, the Department of Defense has adopted policies which treat them as if they were covered. Yet, important as PCA is, it is more important to focus on the Constitution itself.

At least two articles of the Bill of Rights to the Constitution would seem to be implicated in disaster relief. Amendment 3 prohibits the peacetime quartering of soldiers in private homes without the owner's consent. Amendment 5 requires just compensation for property taken for public use.

As near as I read it, that is all the Constitution says that relates to this issue.

So, leaving aside the question whether any of the charity and natural disaster activities of the general government are permitted under the Constitution, what can the the military do?

First, it is obvious that using the armed forces to deliver bottled water and MREs does not present any issues related to PCA or the requirement of a state request to suppress domestic violence. This would also seem to be the case for sending in helicopters, boats, LAVs, etc. to rescue stranded persons. And, for using engineers to clear and make temporary repairs to roads and bridges. Or, to set up clinics and hospitals to serve the ill and injured.

The problems all revolve around the law enforcement role. And the trouble there is that they have to either restrict the law enforcement role of federal troops to federal laws or get the state's consent. In a terrorist incident response, you might get away with calling it a response to invasion or insurrection, but that still doesn't get to the point of enforcing the laws of the states and localities.

Using the military, even the military police, in a domestic law enforcement role is highly problematic. In today's army, military police have several roles, but the primary one is a fast-moving light infantry operating in small units. Yes, they do train to establish and operate prisoner of war camps, expedite logistics by controlling traffic in rear areas, and some other things that superficially resemble civilian law enforcement. But the use of force doctrine is much different.

Some background on the Posse Comitatus Act

Washington University Law Quarterly: THE POSSE COMITATUS ACT: A PRINCIPLE IN NEED OF RENEWAL :

"The need for reaffirmation of the PCA's principle is increasing because in recent years, Congress and the public have seen the military as a panacea for domestic problems."

So wrote Matthew Carlton Hammond in an excellent 1997 article on the Posse Comitatus Act - 75 Wash. U. L.Q. 953.

I include the link to this article as background for the discussion of the constitutional issues raised by the response to Hurricane Katrina.

As an aside, gun rights fans should check out note 28 to this article for a quote from the Articles of Confederation which parallels the wording of the Second Amenment to the Constitution.

Defining the DHS role vis-a-vis Katrina-type events

Defense Tech: Why Katrina Matters:

"But the City of New Orleans' ability to cope with a crisis isn't a matter of national security. The Department of Homeland Security's ability is. Ray Nagin isn't going to be responding to terrorist attacks. That's what DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff and his team have been hired to do."

Except that, when the bomb goes off or the plane crashes, it is the mayor, or township supervisors, or county commissioners who will be in charge until the feds show up which might be anywhere from minutes to hours after the event. It is up to the locals to coordinate police, fire, EMS and other public sector responses.

Anyway, I included this link because it contains quotes from Department of Homeland Security's puff about what they are going to do. And there are links there to the DHS website, etc. All the buzz words are included - coordinated, efficient, comprehensive, pro-active, etc. But, this is all just plain silly.

Does anyone really expect that DHS is going to have a plan to deal with each contingency in each community in each of the nation's more than 2,000 counties? No. They will have some plans for moving in feds to beef up local security at special events like the Superbowl, or plans to protect key sites like the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore. They might even come up with disaster plans for the 20 or 50 largest cities. But that still leaves a lot of territory not covered.

And, are they going to do everything with federal resources? They can federalize the local NG, they can bring in the regular and reserve armed forces, the coast guard, FBI, BATF, etc.; but they have no legal means to command local and state police, fire services and EMS, or highway maintenance and public works crews.

Charity begins at home, not in the House or Senate

Sockdolager!--A Tale Of Davy Crockett:

"Mr. Speaker--I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the sufferings of the living, if suffering there be, as any man in this House, but we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for a part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument to prove that Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of the public money."

Thus Col. Crockett is quoted as addressing the House on the question of a private bill to provide funds to the widow of a naval hero of the War of 1812. Somewhere in my disordered files I may still have my copy of the Virginia Commission on Constitutional Government pamphlet where I first encountered this story back in the Sixties.

I was reminded of this by Judge Andrew Napolitano's remarks on John Gibson's Fox News Channel show this afternoon in regard to the president's plans to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast after Katrina. The Judge pointed out, correctly, that there is no constitutional authority to spend money in this way. He also noted that the courts have repeatedly refused to hear cases claiming Congress has acted outside its authority in the spending of public funds on the grounds that the people have it in their power to change the membership of Congress if they do not approve of what it is doing.

This is, of course, an unconscionable cop out. One of the purposes of the Constitution is to restrain mere majority action. What if Congress voted to deny blacks the right to vote? Would it matter if all the members who voted for such a proposal were re-elected? Of course not; such an act of Congress would be null and void because it is in direct contravention of the Constitution and no court would hesitate to say so.

I haven't investigated the links at the bottom of the page where the Crockett story appears, so I can't say whether any of the rest of the materials are useful. But I have read Sockdolager! as it appears on the linked page, and it is as I remember it from forty years ago. I have put this on the blog as a preface to my own remarks on the constitutional issues raised by FEMA, Katrina, etc.

George "Delano" Bush offers a New Deal vision

Bush Pledges Historic Effort To Help Gulf Coast Recover:

"Vickie Johnston, 37, a hairdresser, sneaked into the city Thursday only to learn she had lost everything -- her clothes, furniture, and irreplaceables such as correspondence and photos. She voted for Bush twice but feels betrayed by all government. 'They knew New Orleans was a fishbowl. They knew,' she said. 'Now it's a toilet bowl. How can they do this to us? Why did they let the water get so high?'"

While interviewing Jack Kemp on Fox News Channel this afternoon about the president's plan, John Gibson noted that Judge Napolitano, off-camera, had referred to the president as "George 'Delano' Bush" (at least that is the way I heard it). The link is to a Washington Post report on last night's speech which promised a massive federal effort that some are beginning to liken to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. Later, on camera, the Judge discussed the constitutionality of the president's plan and ended by calling him "Franklin Delano Bush." I'm going to take up the constitutional issue shortly.

As I write, Fox has a chopper in N.O. transmitting video of an apartment house burning. The commentary mentions the stress the local firefighters are under, but nothing about FEMA's folly of sending 1400 professional firefighters to Atlanta for sexual harassment training.

To return to the quote from the Post piece, an uncharitable observation might be that the people of New Orleans were aware they were in a bowl. I was there once for a Young Republican convention and the realization that, standing at street level, you had to look up to see the ships at the docks on the river was quite a jolt. I knew I wasn't at Penn's Landing in Philadelphia or Maine Avenue in DC where river level is lower than the streets, even at high tide.

The president expressed some not very deep thoughts himself; for example:
"As all of us saw on television," Bush said, "there is also some deep, persistent poverty in this region as well. That poverty has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America. We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action."
One wonders if the president somehow managed to sleep through four decades of anti-poverty programs which haven't worked very well.

On the other hand, he also said some things that make sense, like this:
"... he suggested that local authorities would have to revisit zoning laws and building codes 'to avoid a repeat of what we've seen' and suggested that sections of New Orleans be rebuilt on 'higher ground.'"

As wagons are circled in DC and Baton Rouge, Brown offers his version of Katrina debacle

Ex-FEMA Chief Tells of Frustration and Chaos - New York Times:

"Mr. Brown, then director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said he told the officials in Washington that the Louisiana governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, and her staff were proving incapable of organizing a coherent state effort and that his field officers in the city were reporting an 'out of control' situation."

Very little that is new in this account; but, organized as Brown recalls it, the effect is a bit different. Makes you wish there were going to be public hearings on the Katrina response.

Left and Right talking past each other on 'right to privacy'

WorldNetDaily: Does Constitution include 'right to privacy'?:

"'Can you guess who made the following statement: 'The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy.' Who said that?,' Kupelian asks.

"'Was it the National Right to Life, or some other pro-life group? No, it was Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, in his Roe vs. Wade majority opinion, in which he admitted that the U.S. Constitution, which the court swore to uphold, contains no so-called 'right to privacy.''"

Although it pales in importance compared to the tens of millions of children murdered under Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, and subsequent abortion litigation, the ongoing debate over the right to life has had the unfortunate effect of making the conservative, pro-life side of the debate the enemies of privacy.

This is not a minor problem. And it is not a necessary consequence of the legal reasoning (if such it can be called) of Griswold v. Connecticut in which the world first learned of "emanations from a penumbra" - an particularly ill-chosen phrase since a penumbra is a shadow and shadows do not produce emanations.

The mistake lies in reading the Constitution in a positivist manner. By that I mean, in this context, that one can only assert a right to privacy if the Constitution contains such a right. But the Constitution is intended to be read negatively. That is, it permits certain things to be done by the general government (e.g., regulate interstate and foreign commerce), forbids a few things to be done by the states (e.g., conduct an independent foreign policy), and leaves the rest of life's concerns to the people who may or may not, in their wisdom, assign some of those responsibilities to their respective states. Thus, you don't need to find an explicit right to privacy, merely the lack of a specific grant of regulatory power to intrude on that privacy.

The Bill of Rights is, in fact, largely a recitation of privacy rights.

Amendment I - Forbids the Congress to create a national religious establishment or interfere with religious expression, either of which would intrude on the private liberty of conscence of citizens.

Amendment II - Forbids interference with the right of citizens to act in defense of themselves and their property by their own private means.

Amendment III - Secures our privacy in our homes against the quartering of troops in peacetime and requires that such quartering in wartime be done according to law (and not the whim of military commanders or the executive).

Amendment IV - Secures the private enjoyment of our persons, houses, papers and effects against "unreasonable" searches.

Amendment V - Secures privacy by forbidding compulsory testimony by criminal defendants and further says they may not be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process. Finally, it requires just compensation for the seizure of private property for public use.

Amendment IX - "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

Connecticut may have been foolish to control contraceptive practices, but I don't see anything in the US Constitution that says the state lacked that power. Thus Griswold should never have been heard in the federal courts.

The reasoning of Roe and Doe, which were allegedly decided on the precedent of Griswold, fails in two ways. If, as abortion proponents have often said, the termination of a pregnancy is simply a matter between a woman and her doctor, then there was no federal cause of action because the national government has no Constitutional authority to regulate the practice of medicine. On the other hand, if this is a question about rights, it must be about the right to life which is recognized in the Constitution - but this would lead to a pro-life conclusion.

What we are left with is the idea that the unborn child is not a person invested with rights and thus must be merely property which may be disposed of at the whim of the owner (the mother only, as even the lawfully married father has no property interest in the unborn child). Yet, once born, the child has rights including the right to be supported by its father whether he was married to the mother or not.

Conservatives historically have been the defenders of the greatest possible sphere of privacy. Restricting government power to create a private space in which individuals, families, communities, etc. can craft their own responses to life's challenges and opportunities ought to continue to be a fundamental goal of conservative politics. We should not allow the flimsy legal arguments of Griswold and its progeny to divert us from our historic mission. We can defend unborn life without abandoning our attachment to privacy.

Joseph Farah of WND on what's wrong with John Roberts

WorldNetDaily: I was wrong about Roberts:

"Even I, the ultimate skeptic, am just beginning to fathom the extent of the shell game that has been played on conservatives – most of whom are actively working on behalf of the confirmation of a new chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court who will make Ruth Bader Ginsberg look like a moderate."

I was not surprised, I expected Bush to manage another Souter stealth appointment and it appears I was right. I am more concerned about making a new justice the Chief Justice right off the bat. To my mind a Chief Justice should have been on the court for a while or at least been a state chief justice or headed up a federal appellate court for long enough to judge their temperament.

Wag The Dog - not just a Hollywood movie

WorldNetDaily: Terrorists' 'poster boy' exposed as media fraud :

"In 2003 an independent journalistic investigation concluded that the al-Dura affair [the alleged 30 September 2000 murder of a 12-year old Arab boy by the Israeli military] was actually a piece of Palestinian street theater, similar to the dramatic Palestinian funeral processions that were observed after the Israeli incursion into the Jenin refugee camp. During that public spectacle, a martyred 'corpse' twice fell off the stretcher, only to hop back up and retake his place in the procession. (The Palestinians had claimed 3,000 deaths in Jenin – the actual toll turned out to be 52.)"

Read this story, read David Gelernter's piece in the LA Times, read David Kupelian's book "The Marketing of Evil." But, for all that, watch the movie Wag The Dog - you won't think about public relations the same way again. And, besides, its a wonderful film with DeNiro and Hoffman, backed up by Heche, with Harrelson, Macy, Dunst, etc. in a set of wonderfully cast supporting roles.

Christian husbands might not be violent brutes

Conversations :: View Forum - Religious Studies

I regret that I cannot supply a link to the article ("Religious Studies: From family to community, two professors research the role of faith.") from the October 2005 issue of Arts & Sciences, alumni magazine of UVa, but it is not on the web. The link is to a comment forum on the alumni website. The article discusses the separate work and books of two UVa profs.

First, we have the book "Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands" by W. Bradford Wilcox, assistant professor of sociology. Prof. Wilcox studied three groups of husbands and fathers - evangelicals with traditional views on gender and family roles, mainline Protestants with more egalitarian views, and those with no religious affiliation - with respect to their relationships with their wives and children.

Among the findings that Wicox says have surprised his colleagues and journalists is "that churchgoing evangelical family men have the lowest rates of domestic violence of any major religious or secular group in the United States." This is so in spite of the fact that such men are stricter disciplinarians and do less housework than other husbands.

Wilcox finds that women evaluate the quality of their marriages less by perceived equality with their husbands or shared domestic chores and more by how much time their husbands spend meeting the emotional needs of the family. Churchgoing evangelical husbands do more of this "emotional work" which is one of the lesser appreciated results of the work of organizations like Promise Keepers and Focus on the Family.

As Wilcox puts it, in their pursuit of strong, traditional families - stable two-parent households, delaying sex until marriage, etc. - these men have resorted to "progressive strategies." Thus, the ideal of male servant-leadership produces husbands and fathers who are more inclined than their liberal or secular counterparts to do the hard and time-consuming work of actually tuning in to the emotional needs of their wives and children.

The second work examined in this article is "The Beloved Community" (the title is a quote from a 1956 speech by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.) by Charles Marsh, professor of religious studies. Marsh, a white man who grew up during the civil rights struggles as the son of a Baptist minister in Mississippi, describes his work as reclaiming the role of of faith in informing the struggle for social justice and the care of the poor and oppressed.

Engineering challenge of rebuilding a safer New Orleans

- toledoblade.com - :

"Experts in coastal geology, storm surge behavior, levee engineering, and other disciplines who focus on the unique coastal region of Louisiana point to the critical work that mud, sand, and river sediment must play in creating a city that would be able to withstand another devastating natural disaster."

For a small city paper in a part of the country not much menaced by hurricanes, this is a remarkably good article about the need to restore barrier islands and wetlands to blunt future storm surges.

Of particular interest is this advice from Joseph Suhayda, emeritus professor of engineering at LSU:

“Let’s build a category 5 levee, but let’s assume it will fail,” said Mr. Suhayda. “We have to have back-up plans B and C.”

Plan B, in Mr. Suhayda’s view, would prevent the near total inundation of the city by a single levee breach, as happened in Katrina.

“We have to compartmentalize the city like waterproof chambers in an ocean liner,’’ he said.

“A majority of the levees performed exactly as they should,’’ he said, but that didn’t save the city. Compartmentalizing would allow the good levees to do their protective job.

In plan C, the most critical buildings — like hospitals or places where people might evacuate to — would have another layer of levee protection.

“I would flood-proof the critical things,’’ he said. “Hospitals never intended to evacuate.’’ But they were not prepared for what hit them.

“Their emergency power was in the basement.’’ Under his proposal, “no more. They elevate the power equipment.’’

Prof. Suhayda also discusses filling in low spots of the city to raise them above sea level, an idea I mentioned last week.

Brown out - new career?

BREITBART.COM - Just The News:

"Federal Emergency Management Agency director Mike Brown resigned Monday, three days after losing his onsite command of the Hurricane Katrina relief effort. The White House picked a top FEMA official with three decades of firefighting experience as his replacement."

They say Brown had been planning on returning to the private sector this fall. I've got a suggestion for him. Since he is a lawyer, he should go to work suing insurance companies over rejected claims for Katrina damages. As noted here recently, there is expected to be a litigation explosion in the wake of Katrina. Brown would seem to be uniquely qualified to cash in on this.

It's an ill wind that blows no good for any man

FT.com / In depth / Hurricane Katrina - Louisiana set for an epic legal fight:

"Experts said disputes are likely to arise over whether a storm surge will be classified as a flood."

Just in case you thought no one would profit from Hurricane Katrina, it seems it will provide lots of work for trial lawyers.

Another Katrina and the New Chinese Empire

Chinese dragon awakens�-�Special Report�-�The Washington Times, America's Newspaper:

"'We may be seeing in China the first true fascist society on the model of Nazi Germany, where you have this incredible resource base in a commercial economy with strong nationalism, which the military was able to reach into and ramp up incredible production,' a senior defense official said."

The link is to part one of a two-part report on Chinese espionage and politicomilitary developments over the last 15 years or so. Read both. Unless you have been following this issue the way I have for years, you will be amazed. And, The Washington Times only scratches the surface. For example, these stories mention that the pace and effectiveness of PRC espionage against the US increased in the mid 1990s - but they don't mention the massive infusion of illegal campaign funds from Red China to Bill Clinton.

The other Katrina is Katrina Leung and FBI informant in Los Angeles. The Justice Department is appealing the dismissal of espionage charges against her. That, and the Wen Ho Lee case at Los Alamos which ended with a guilty plea to only one of 59 counts on which he had been indicted, have put a bit of a crimp in our counterespionage activities aimed at China.

The Washington Times story does address racial profiling in this passage:

"In some cases, so-called political correctness can interfere with FBI counterspying. For example, Chinese-American scientists at U.S. weapons laboratories have accused the FBI of racial profiling.
"But Mr. Szady said that is not the case.
"China uses ethnic Chinese-Americans as a base from which to recruit agents, he said.
"'They don't consider anyone to be American-Chinese,' Mr. Szady said. 'They're all considered overseas Chinese.'
"So the answer he gives to those who accuse the FBI of racial profiling is: 'We're not profiling you. The Chinese are, and they're very good at doing that.'"

This point about there being no such thing as a Chinese-American or Chinese-Canadian, etc. in the view of the PRC government is also made in The New Chinese Empire by Ross Terrell. He goes into some detail citing the various ways China's dynasties over the millenia have addressed the us-them dichotomy. For the PRC it wouldn't matter if you are fifth generation Canadian, if your ancestors were Chinese, you are Chinese. I had a roommate about 25 years ago who was a fifth generation Canadian of Chinese ancestry, and he had a somewhat different view, objecting vehemently to Canadian government policies that passed over persons like him to give university preferences to Chinese newly arrived from Hong Kong.

Another interesting point from The New Chinese Empire that throws light on The Washington Times reporting linked above is the idea that any place or people that were ever ruled by China are still, in some sense, a part of China. This goes far beyond the issue of Taiwan to include people and places that never knew they were under Chinese authority; it is enough that China once claimed authority over them. Thus, Chinese history records delegations bearing gifts to the Emperor who thought they were merely conducting diplomacy as bearing tribute to acknowledge their dependence on the Son of Heaven.

Consider the Ryukyu Islands (Okinawa, The Teahouse of the August Moon, The Karate Kid 2), now part of Japan. Less than 200 years ago, the independent Kingdom of the Ryukyu Islands was still carrying on a centuries old tradition of making a formal request to the Son of Heaven to invest each new king. At some point, it may suit the current rulers in Beijing to assert their historic claim to this strategic island chain. At various times, China has ruled all or part of Vietnam, Korea, Japan, etc. These also remain as potential territorial claims for the future.

Against this backdrop, we might take a slightly different view of the PRC's rapid buildup of amphibious forces. While The Washington Times piece focuses on Taiwan, there are also other uses to which China could put such a capability. For example, if North Korea decided to attack South Korea, an amphibious landing in the southern end of the peninsula could capture Pusan and prevent re-inforcements and supplies from reaching allied forces via Japan.

Brian DeBose tries a bit too hard in The Washington Times

Blacks fault lack of local leadership�-�Nation/Politics�-�The Washington Times, America's Newspaper:

"While a few black leaders, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Congressional Black Caucus, have singled out the president for blame, others say Mayor C. Ray Nagin, who is black, is responsible for the dismal response to the flooding that stranded thousands in the city's poorest sections.

"'Mayor Nagin has blamed everyone else except himself,' said the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, founder and president of the Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny."

That first sentence quoted above ought to substitute "most" for "a few." I appreciate the work Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson does as the anti-Jesse Jackson, but one swallow doesn't make a summer.

However, one of the challenges for the GOP - which they are not up to - is to pin this tail squarely on the donkeys of the Democrat power establishment. both black and white.

Gulf Shores, Alabama. open for business

Gulf Shores Alabama Vacation & Dining Info:

"We had some high water in the Beach Blvd. area, but that is expected during Tropical Storms and people build accordingly. We have a lot of sand to be moved."

If you want to help the Gulf Coast economy, head for Gulf Shores, Alabama. The ferry is running; the bars are open, and the beaches, golf, etc.

High tech look at N.O. after Katrina

New Orleans Flood Map

This link is to a commercial site which has created a geographical information system (GIS) that allows you to click on a point on the map of the N.O. area and get an estimate of the water depth at that point. It makes you wonder why the State of Louisiana isn't doing this.

Of course, if people who have evacuated had an easy way to find out that their home wasn't really underwater, they might be tempted to return. That can't be allowed. The rich get to send in hired guns to protect what's left of their property, but the poor and the middle class can be pushed around at will.

New York Times analysis of Katrina failures misses mark

Disarray Marked the Path From Hurricane to Anarchy - New York Times:

"FEMA appears to have underestimated the storm, despite an extraordinary warning from the National Hurricane Center that it could cause 'human suffering incredible by modern standards.' The agency dispatched only 7 of its 28 urban search and rescue teams to the area before the storm hit and sent no workers at all into New Orleans until after the hurricane passed on Monday, Aug. 29."

This is as good a place as any to begin to analyse the analysis. The first sentence quoted above is equivalent to saying "It's gonna be big, really big!" But that doesn't really tell you much about what help will be needed where.

The second sentence is more interesting from my point of view. USAR is primarily a structural search function focusing on collapsed and partially collapsed structures. What you ended up with in N.O. was a lot of largely intact structures partly of entirely submerged which is a slightly different problem requiring different skills and equipment. But, the last part is the most critical - the first rule of emergency response (they really drum this into you in EMS) is "Don't become a victim." If you do, you subtract yourself and those who have to rescue you from the resources available to deal with the incident. So, getting rescuers positioned to respond quickly is not more important than keeping them out of harm's way until their skills can be used.

This pretty well characterizes the Times story - fairly solid reporting, but little understanding of what the facts mean.

Completely missing from the Times piece was any discussion of why there was such a disconnect between the public pronouncements of the principals about the situation and what they have had to say about one another. From where I sit, you can't begin to sort this out without a nodding acquaintance with the politics of the situation. Including Louisiana's uniquely "non-partisan" primary system.

Republicans (including the top officials of FEMA and the Bush administration) are reluctant to appear critical of Mayor Ray Nagin. There are two reasons for this - he is a prominent black political leader and the party does not want to appear to be anti-black, and Nagin has shown in the past his willingness to endorse the GOP candidate in a state-wide race and they would like him to do so again.

Governor Blanco, although being a white Democrat, also gets at least a partial pass because of her sex. Republicans hate running against women (this is why Hillary Clinton scares them so much) because they find it hard to criticize a woman without sounding like they are critical of women generally and that cuts into their courting of the "soccer mom" demographic.

I believe this is the only way to explain why the administration refuses to defend itself vigorously on certain points where it is becoming clear that the mayor and governor not only dropped the ball but lied to the public about non-cooperation from the feds. Most famously, refusing to let the ARC bring in supplies to the Superdome while pleading on TV for help for the people suffering there.

This is not to say that FEMA's performance was flawless. The Times story mentions the screw-up with the 1400 firefighters in Atlanta but fails to convey the full dimensions of the insanity. For more details on this, see my blog entry on the subject.

"The Louisiana National Guard, already stretched by the deployment of more than 3,000 troops to Iraq, was hampered when its New Orleans barracks flooded. It lost 20 vehicles that could have carried soldiers through the watery streets and had to abandon much of its most advanced communications equipment, guard officials said."

Assuming this is true, it is a failure of disaster planning on the part of the Louisiana NG. All sorts of corporations and government agencies managed to limit the damage they suffered by prudent planning, why not the Guard? For instance, the Post Office diverted mail bound for N.O. to a warehouse in Houston and moved mail already in N.O. and awaiting delivery to an upper floor where it appears to have been saved from the flood. On the other hand, the local court system let its records fall victim to the flood and now has hundreds of prisoners in custody with no paperwork to show why they are being held.

"As the city become paralyzed both by water and by lawlessness, so did the response by government. The fractured division of responsibility - Governor Blanco controlled state agencies and the National Guard, Mayor Nagin directed city workers and Mr. Brown, the head of FEMA, served as the point man for the federal government - meant no one person was in charge. Americans watching on television saw the often-haggard governor, the voluble mayor and the usually upbeat FEMA chief appear at competing daily news briefings and interviews."

The whole system is predicated on the state governor being the responible official. If Louisiana state law does not give the governor sufficient authority to direct local government resources within the state, that is not a failing of FEMA.

I won't attempt to list every quibble I have with the Times presentation which seems to me overly slanted to the view that FEMA and the Bush administration generally were at fault. Suffice to say that if, as the Times reports, the governor didn't know what to ask for, that was a failing of her staff in the state homeland security office and the adjutant general of the state guard.

One last thought. Comparisons to 9/11 are entirely off the mark. For starters, there was no advance warning and therefore no evacuation issue. There was very limited need to evacuate after the fact and relatively little search and rescue to do. There was also no significant damage to housing, so shelters were not a large issue either. Lastly, Federal pre-emption could easily by justified on 9/11 by treating the attacks as acts of war, yet NYC managed its own response rather well despite losing its emergency operations center in the destruction of WTC 7. The Pentagon attack was on federal property and presented few jurisdictional issues and the plane crash in PA was just a matter of picking up pieces in farmers' fields.

St. Bernard dogs not welcome in St. Bernard Parish?

St. Bernard residents told to leave, or else:

"... the rousting of residents was left to deputies from neighboring parishes, and law enforcement members from as far away as Oklahoma City.

The forced eviction of stubborn occupants of this parish, the first community downriver from New Orleans, is more aggressive than similar efforts in the city. Though New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said late Tuesday that he was ordering troops and police to force residents to leave, National Guard officials said they didn't take orders from the mayor. And they plan to continue providing food and water to people found in their homes.

Even the city police superintendent equivocated, saying so many still need to be rescued and evacuated that officials don't have time to drag people into boats or armored troop carriers.

Though state law gives officials the right to 'compel the evacuation' of cities and parishes, police said they realized it would be a public relations disaster to march people from their homes at gunpoint. Still, a National Guard official said they would help New Orleans police if they decided to take on the stubbornest of the survivors.

Despite such political wrangling in the city, cops in St. Bernard Parish made it clear Wednesday that they weren't interested in taking no for an answer. Nor were they taking dogs they deemed too big or dangerous."

In Iran a few years ago, some of the mullahs launched a campaign against dogs starting with short-legged dogs. Now St. Bernard Parish is reversing priorities by shooting the long-legged dogs first and letting folks keep the short-legged ones for now. Isn't it ironic that a parish which shares the name of one of the largest and sweetest breeds of dog should be the place where shooting big dogs in the presence of their unwilling owners is now official policy.

I am reminded of a story from Nazi Germany that elite military trainees had their loyalty tested at graduation by each being ordered to strangle a dog he had hand-raised from a pup during training. A man who could do that to a dog that loved him was a good prospect for killing people for no better reason than he was ordered to do so.

I hope those who lose their dogs for the convenience of police in St. Bernard Parish will sue for the needless loss of their property.

More good news for the shipbuilding industry in Mississippi

KRT Wire | 09/08/2005 | PASCAGOULA: VT Halter Marine puts 350 to work:

"VT Halter Marine Tuesday opened its doors and found work for 350 employees, and he expects to begin calling back hundreds of its contract workers over the next few weeks. Ship production will restart in the last week of September, and will ramp up from that point."

VT Halter Marine had seven vessels under construction when Katrina hit and a substantial backlog of future work. If that work can be kept at its three Mississippi facilities, that will be very good news for the local economy.

Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) on FEMA's Michael Brown

KRT Wire | 09/09/2005 | OCEAN SPRINGS | Center offers multiple relief services, long waits:

"LOTT'S STATEMENT: U.S. Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss, talks about the decision to replace former FEMA Director Michael Brown. Replacing Brown as FEMA Director is Coast Guard Vice Admiral Thad Allen."

Sounds like Sen. Lott is a bit ahead of the curve, Brown is not the "former" FEMA director ... yet.

Lott also makes a curious criticism:

"When you're in the middle of a disaster, you can't stop to check the legal niceties or to review FEMA regulations before deciding to help Mississippians knocked flat on their backs."

Say what you will about Michael Brown, he is an attorney and he came to head the agency after serving as its general counsel. Of course he's going to follow the law, both as an officer of the courts and like all federal officials, he took an oath to do so. For Lott, who has played a major role in writing our laws for many years, to fault a federal employee for following the law is deeply troubling to me.

As I said before, "How dangerous is the water?"

KRT Wire | 09/09/2005 | Rumors of dysentery, cholera are unfounded, health officials say:

"There was no dysentery and no cholera, health officials say. Lab tests showed that the outbreak of diarrhea that raised fears of dysentery was caused by Norwalk virus. Norwalk, which sometimes hits travelers on ships, is also known as 'the cruise ship virus.'"

That's the word from Biloxi in a report on improving conditions at 15 Red Cross shelters in the six-county Gulf coast region of Mississippi.

GULFPORT: FEMA specialist advises officials to document everything

KRT Wire | 09/08/2005 | GULFPORT: FEMA specialist advises officials to document everything:

"City and county officials dealing with debris removal and disposal after a storm should document everything to avoid getting into trouble and to get reimbursed from the federal government for as much as possible.

"That's the advice Harry Sherwood, a public assistance program specialist with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, gave Wednesday during a meeting with Harrison County officials."

This is FEMA doing what it does best - processing forms and writing checks.

PASS CHRISTIAN: Mayor incommunicado

KRT Wire | 09/07/2005 | PASS CHRISTIAN: Mayor incommunicado:

"There are only two points of access in and out of the Pass: Menge and Espy avenues. They are only letting in electrical crews, emergency personnel. Otherwise, residents who wish to check their homes must be accompanied by a FEMA representative or an insurance agent or adjuster.

"People still living in the city as of Sept. 5 will be the only residents allowed to stay in the city after dark."

The board of aldermen and city attorney have been struggling to keep local government functioning while the mayor has been mostly missing in action. I suppose that means the mayor will be one of those residents not allowed to spend the night in the city.

Makes you wonder if maybe those people refusing to leave their homes in places like N.O. weren't just being paranoid when they feared they might not be able to return.

BAY St. LOUIS | Residents improvise unsanctioned shelters

KRT Wire | 09/09/2005 | BAY St. LOUIS | Residents improvise unsanctioned shelters:

"With no official shelters in town, local people say they're doing the best they can.

"'The authorities are saying that things can't be willy-nilly -- that they didn't want church groups and other folks coming in and doing things,' said waitress [Tricia] Bliler.

"'But it's got to be willy-nilly -- it's all we have.'"

Hundreds of persons had taken shelter in the local high school, but the Red Cross refused to organize it as an official shelter - its in a flood plain. The result was that portable toilets overflowed, school property was damaged and eventually the school board had to order the people out. That impromptu shelter held over a thousand persons at its peak, some from as far away as New Orleans.

There is a Red Cross shelter in a school 15 miles north of Bay St. Louis if you can arrange your own transport to get there. It has a shrinking population, now only 85, but is rated for only 300 people so it couldn't handle all the folks from Bay St. Louis if they could get there.

The bureaucratic mentality at work - letting the perfect become the enemy of the good.

FEMA engineers financial hit for Mobile

Holiday won't dock in Mobile:

"Removing the ship from the city completely rather than just halting its vacation schedule could mean additional financial losses for the city, Mobile Mayor Mike Dow said Thursday morning.

"'I have no commitment right now to pay for the out-of-pocket costs, much less (the additional revenue),' Dow said Thursday morning. When the Holiday leaves, he said, 'The stevedores are out of work, the people who work the terminal are out of work.'"

The Law of Unintended Consequences has risen up to take a large bite out of Mobile, Alabama's municipal finances. When FEMA announced a deal with Carnival Cruise Lines to lease three of their Gulf-based ships as temporary housing, it was thought they would be used at their home ports: Mobile, New Orleans, and Galveston. Then it appeared that N.O. would not be in condition to supply services (water, sewage, etc.) to its ship very soon so it would go to Galveston. Then FEMA found an embarassing lack of volunteers among evacuees at the Astrodome willing to go live on the water in Galveston. Now the plans are to port the ships in Louisiana and Mississippi.

If, in fact, it will be possible to dock one or more of these ships in N.O., FEMA should consider using them to house workers hired to work on the clean-up. Ideally, FEMA should be recruiting men from N.O. to work on the N.O. cleanup. Idle men in refugee camps is a prescription for disaster, whereas employment would provide the workers and their families with money and dignity and purpose.

UPDATE (at 4:30 AM) - MSNBC is reporting from Houston that FEMA has cancelled plans to use two cruise ships docked at Galveston. No word on the Mobile ship.

Local government and disaster response

Current View:

"FEMA should be restructured and preferably renamed to become a coordination office with federal resources to be applied in assistance to local Civil Defense organizations. In days to come I'll try to spell out what a Civil Defense organization ought to look like: volunteers, with training, with identification, with communications, with military or semi-military ranks and titles; people who know what they are supposed to do, where they are supposed to go in the event of a crisis whether that be invasion, fire, flood, earthquake, hurricane; semi-autonomous even from the local government with its own chain of command so that much of it is self-actuating."

The quote above is from Jerry Pournelle's website. It reflects some fairly common misconceptions about what FEMA is and what it does, particularly in relation to local governments during emergencies. I have chosen to use it as a jumping off point for giving my perspective on this subject, although I could easily have quoted similar sentiments expressed in other places.

My experience in this business (detailed previously under the heading "Who am I ...") is limited to Pennsylvania, and our state, unlike those in the south, has functioning townships which somewhat complicates our local government situation. But I will offer a brief sketch of how we are organized here.

Pennsylvania state law places disaster response planning and operations as a local government responsibility. This means that not only every city, but each borough (what is often called a town or village in other places), and each township must have its own plan and operating structure for dealing with disasters. In other states, primary responsibility will often be at the county level because the county may be the lowest level of organized government and/or have direct responsibility for large "unincorporated" areas. Pennsylvania does permit groups of local governments to set up joint emergency management agencies (EMAs).

My own rural township (Windsor Twp. in Berks Co.) although it is rapidly developing a more suburban character, has a population of less than 3,000 persons. It adjoins several similar semi-rural townships as well as the local metropolis, the Borough of Hamburg, with a population of less than 5,000. We were ill-prepared to go it alone although for many years we struggled with mostly ad hoc responses which were never tested by anything more serious than the occasional blizzard or wind storm. We have no local police force (like most townships we rely on the state police), the volunteer fire company and emergency medical service (EMS) for the area are based in the borough which pays their workers' compensation taxes and makes them borough employees. Our supervisors maintain the township roads and plow snow, so we have some plow trucks and a large wheel-loader. The only other staff, at that time, was two men working part-time in zoning and code enforcement, a part-time secretary for the planning commission, a part-time secretary-treasurer, plus a couple of lawyers and some engineers handling sewage permits.

This is not to say that things didn't get done when needed. There is a cooperative spirit and impatience with red tape that characterizes rural and small town life. When a particularly nasty thunderstorm with lots of rain and high winds went through about ten years ago, our road crew cleared away a downed tree, even though the road it was blocking was state-maintained, because we could do it immediately and who knew how long it would take the state to get round to it. While working on that, we learned that a much larger tree had come down on a street in the borough and their loader (much smaller than ours) couldn't shift it, so our road crew went into the borough with our big loader and solved their problem. During a blizzard, a carload of workers leaving a mushroom house were trapped in their car and overcome by carbon monoxide. Our loader opened up the road from the state highway to the scene while the borough arranged a plow truck to clear a path for the ambulance to the scene; meanwhile, a call was made to the state highway department to arrange a relay of state plow trucks to clear a way for the ambulance all the way to Allentown (about 25 miles) to the nearest hospital with a hyperbaric chamber.

We never could recruit people for all the required boxes in the organization chart and would have had no authority to control the most important services (police, fire and EMS). Now, there is a joint agency which includes the borough and can control and coordinate vital services throughout the local area covered by the participating local governments.

Whether single or joint, the local EMA is required to make plans for handling emergencies within its jurisdiction and is responsible for putting those plans into effect when a local emergency is declared. The EMA coordinator is responsible to the local governing body and acts in their name when running the local emergency operations center. The EMA coordinator draws on both volunteers and local government employees to coordinate the actions of local police, firefighters, fire police (volunteers who direct traffic), EMS, streets and public works, etc. The EMA will also assist utility companies in gaining access to sites in need of repair. The county unit of the American Red Cross has the responsibility for opening and operating emergency shelters when requested by the the EMA. The county operates a hazardous materials (HazMat) team which will respond when needed. The county EMA can also assist in locating special skills or equipment needed by the local EMAs.

In the event of a more widespread emergency affecting many local governments (an evacuation called by the Limerick nuclear power station, for example), the county EMA can activate its emergency operations center and direct the response. But, even then, the bulk of the resources - both personnel and equipment - will likely be drawn from the local EMAs. Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA) can provide additional resources via such state assets as the National Guard and State Police.

FEMA has these basic roles. First, it works with state EMAs like PEMA to establish training programs for EMA participants including seminars, printed materials, table top exercises, and mass casualty simulations. Second, it sets standards for the content of disaster plans prepared by state and local EMAs. Third, it provides money for emergency shelter and disaster recovery. Fourth, in major disasters it serves as a clearinghouse to process state requests for federal assets.

Taking charge of a disaster from the responsible state and local officials is not FEMA's role and, as we see in the Katrina debacle, not something it does very well.