Looks like most are with me on not rebuilding the bulk of NOLA... (HT WND)

Time for a laugh:

"When my husband was president, we were ready for the end of the
world," said Mrs. Clinton. "And if Bill should ever become the First Gent, we'll
be ready again."

A Bush administration spokesman agreed that "having a Clinton in
the White House does create a certain sense of expectation."

Read it!

"No amount of spin will overcome the heads of the Red Cross and the Salvation Army telling this story."

How Fake Time Flies

Just in case some suspicious docs appear about how W personally ordered the levees blown up by Karl Rove, it will be Ra^ther easy to notice they're fake:



The definitive analysis is here.

You Don't Deploy Troops Beneath A Bombing Run

I'm not sure that this is an open access article so I'm going to post a good chunk so you see it:

"When you fly over the Gulf, it looks like a WMD exploded," Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul McHale told me this week. "Katrina very nearly approached the operational requirements of a WMD event; this was the first test of the high-end capability envisioned by the strategy."

The "strategy" is a three-month-old document called "Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support." It describes the Defense Department's plans to defend the U.S. from a WMD attack or deal with the rubble and mass casualties of such an attack. Traditionally DoD has always helped civil authorities contend with the ruin of natural disasters. That Katrina's massive scale mirrored a WMD attack, obliterating a city, is a coincidence. But it raises the question of whether the states, or relatively vulnerable states like Louisiana, are up to the job of being "first responders" to a WMD attack or its natural equivalent. If they are not, we need to change some laws.

The popular impression left the past week-- that the government was wholly unprepared for Katrina--is not true. Significant U.S. military assistance was on alert throughout the week prior to Katrina's landfall. Why those highly trained and drilled assets did not move into New Orleans sooner is a question that should now sit at the center of a debate over who should have the authority--the states or the federal government--to be the "first mover."

According to accounts provided by several sources involved with preparations for Katrina, the Pentagon began tracking the storm when it was still just a number in the ocean on Aug. 23, some five days before landfall in Buras, La. As the storm approached, senior Pentagon officials told staff to conduct an inventory of resources available should it grow into a severe hurricane. Their template for these plans was the assistance DoD provided Florida last year for its four hurricanes.

And a week earlier than this, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld issued an executive order delegating hurricane decision authority to the head of the Northern Command, Adm. Timothy J. Keating. Four days later, as the tropical storm soon to be named Katrina gathered force, Adm. Keating acted on that order.

Before the hurricane arrived in New Orleans, Adm. Keating approved the use of the bases in Meridien, Miss., and Barksdale, La., to position emergency meals and some medical equipment; eventually the number of emergency-use bases grew to six. And before landfall, Adm. Keating sent military officers to Mississippi and Louisiana to set up traditional coordination with their counterparts from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. As well, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England ordered the movement of ships into the Gulf.

By the Pentagon's account, it carried out these preparations without any formal Katrina-related request from FEMA or other authorities. The personnel behind the massive military effort now on display in Louisiana--airlift evacuation, medical, supply, and the National Guard--was on alert a week before the hurricane. According to Assistant Secretary McHale, "The U.S. military has never deployed a larger, better-resourced civil support capability so rapidly in the history of our country."

So where were they on the two days of globally televised horror? Why, for instance, didn't DoD fly all this help close to New Orleans as soon as it saw Katrina coming? The answer, in military argot, is that you don't deploy troops beneath a bombing run; Katrina predictably would have wiped out any help put in her uncertain path, just as she rolled over the Big Easy's wholly unprotected "first responders."

Then there's American history, tradition and law. Once disaster arrives, several federal laws designed to protect state sovereignty from being swept aside by a Latin-American-style national police force dictate that a state's officials, specifically the governor, is supposed to phone the federal government and describe what they need. If asked by Homeland Security, DoD will send in the cavalry. But this is one audible at the line even Don Rumsfeld doesn't get to call.

The MSM has bungled perspective on this whole thing so badly it just defies comprehension. Although I WAS quite amazed tonight to see CNN actually showing the submarine buses. I guess even they have to start getting it when the web has material like this (HT Hugh):



(OK, OK ... I have developed a fixation with buses...)

And yes, this was a dry run for the full-on Tinfoil Apocalypse -- we will be updating the implications soon...

Bus Case Closed

Finally we have closure on the swamped NOLA buses. A caller to the Tony Snow show just pointed out that "if it was an election, those buses would have been running" [bringing the Democrat voters to the polls].

No. Kidding.

Nagin. Guilty.

Of course, you still do need to read "NOLA Machine No Go". And "Kneebones and Thighbones" for the latest on Blanco.

NOLA Machine No Go

I have been just speechless about the pitiful inching of Mayor Nagin toward mandatory evacuation. I'm still not certain he's ordered it yet! And as posts on this blog point out, it should have been ordered the second Bush and the meteorologists asked for it BEFORE the hurricane.

And I just can't bear to talk about the buses anymore. Apparently, Nagin is now claiming that school and city buses just weren't good enough -- he was waiting for Greyhounds from all over the country to converge on NOLA and save his people. It was more important for his residents to be saved in "style" than to be saved at all, apparently.



This man is just beneath contempt -- and has no ability to do any commonsense reasoning about logistics whatsoever. For instance, even if Greyhound dumped all its current passengers out on the side of the road wherever they were (unprecedented and crazy in and of itself) and headed straight for NOLA, how long would it have taken them to get there from hundreds if not a thousand or more miles away? Simple division will tell you this is just simply nuts on first glance.

This is why first responders have to be local: moving great quantities of ANYTHING over large distances may take much more time than you have in an emergency.

Now I will give you that the first responders in NOLA were themselves casualties as well as their families. But they wouldn't have been if they had planned to get everyone including their own families OUT OF THERE.

But now Thomas Lipscomb brings us some fresh perspective with "The Machine Stops". Now we can understand why there was no evacuation to start with -- as well as why it hasn't happened yet and reports of shooting at relief workers continue:

Of course behind all this is a dirty little secret well-known in New Orleans
which is also the reason almost 30% of New Orleans police precinct members
deserted during the Hurricane Katrina emergency. The police were afraid to try to enforce any kind of evacuations in the violent ghettos of a city that remains one of the most lawless in America. Anyone driving a school bus down a street in one of New Orleans's "projects" trying to enforce the mayor's evacuation order would be risking his life. Had the Mayor ordered police escorts, the desertion rate of the police would have been far higher than 30%. And that is the reason for the current argument between the Mayor and his own Police Commissioner, who still refuses to enforce his "mandatory evacuation" order.

More reinforcement for the "NOLA is two cities" concept: one a "Europe-like" tourist destination and the other fetid terrorist gang-land in the swamp. Apparently, the best course of action is to let these terrorist thugs die of disease in filthy squalor due to their complete inability to operate as rational beings. I guess I can't argue too much with that.

But did so many others have to die for this small piece of justice?

Kneebones and Thighbones?

The Captain has the best short summary of the madness in NOLA so far:

UPDATE II: Let's see if we can't paint the picture for Rev. Bobby K in the comments. FEMA positioned their assets in the area prior to the storm hitting, but not inside the impact zone, as that would have rendered them useless afterwards. A major component of that comes from the Red Cross. The Red Cross expected that either the local authorities would get the last of its citizens out of New Orleans or allow them to set up their relief provisions inside the city. To this day, the city and state have done neither, nor have they allowed the federal government to take control of the relief effort to make these decisions themselves. That means that the Red Cross personnel (and the relief provisions that FEMA helped them stage) have no way to reach those in the city anywhere, including the Superdome, the Convention Center, or any of the other shelters in New Orleans. Until Nagin and Blanco allow them to go to the victims or act to bring the victims out to them, the residents will not see any relief supplies except that dropped to them by air, a dicey proposition at best when facing toxic flood waters.

Of course, you won't hear about any of that in the MSM. How can anything not be Shrub's fault after all?

And even more amazing, even Glenn is linking to this post about racist misconduct by some local LA law enforcement. As Glenn points out, it's very possible that this is fakery of course. But it shows the utter incompetence of the MSM that they aren't all over something like this that fits their story line.

Unless they already investigated and discovered the Gretna Sheriff was a Democrat -- so they spiked the story of course...

"The Democrats may need to re-think their calls for an investigation." Of course, that makes the unrealistic assumption that they think in the first place...

Welcome to the land of the Kosmik Kuckoo Klock -- where the time is never korrekt. And the bongs are always filled. Time to go to bed folks -- can't top it...

Haiku! ... Excuse Me!

Thanks for the haiku complimenting my fonts Keith! I'm 4th from the end of this week's COTV:

Lefties blame the Bush
We were screwed from the word go
Nice use of fonts, Bob

At least I think that's haiku -- or possibly the sound I make when I sneeze ;)

Projections From The MSMemory Hole

Cold Fury has a nice little post pointing out that Tom Ridge's survival guide at Ready.gov -- including the supposedly stupid duct tape -- may not be looking quite so stupid anymore. (HT Glenn)

Even better, he digs out all the holier than thou comments from the Fascifist Gramscian Syndicalists such as Atrios and Kos mocking the whole concept of self sufficiency. (Well, OK, it probably gives them too much credit for actually having brains to call them Gramscian Syndicalists -- some of them are simply flighty emotive dupes; and they may not be self-aware Fascifists but more on that later.)

Anyway, what leaped out at me was a nice little 1-2 comment punch from Francis and sf responding to Cold Fury's post:

Francis W. Porretto 9/4/2005 2:15 pm
– You know, it never occurred to any of our leftist friends in the blogosphere or the MSM, that maybe Secretary Ridge went to the trouble of preparing a readiness web site with emergency kit lists, in the public interest. It never occurred to them that it could be anything other than partisan fear mongering. –

But this is because, were they in Ridge’s place, the use of the office to enhance their power, prestige, and partisan objectives is the only thing that would concern them. We always suspect and fear in others the darkness we know to be at the core of our selves.

Can you say "psychological projection"?

And then "sf" chips right in out of the "hole":

sf 9/4/2005 3:48 pm
Nice work!

Before the internet existed, Dems and leftists could (and did) say any outrageous thing they wanted without having to worry they’d ever be called to account, because they knew their Dem/left friends in the MSM would never publicize any spectacular goofs or outrageous comments.

While the latter is still true, fortunately for our nation the internet lets us find what they wrote and drag it out into the sunlight for all to see.

They’re like children caught doing something wrong: ‘No, really, I didn’t do it. It was, uh…my invisible friend Ralphie.”

Surely on an intellectual level they know that the ‘Net stores their past writings, but their old habit of saying anything outrageous to knife the GOP hasn’t changed yet. Oh well..

I call this the "MSMemory Hole" (in honor of Orwell, of course -- look up at that masthead folks). It's actually another form of projection in that the reason they don't believe anyone will call them on such risible hypocrisy is that many of them are simply unaware of it themselves. As emotives with basement level emotional intelligence scores (foul-mouthed Mayor Ray Nagin seems to be their current front man) they simply don't have the discipline to even check what they're saying from day to day for consistency.

After all, that wouldn't make them feel good.

And even if they did, they "project" that us righties are too stupid to call them on it.

I would suspect it's their intellectual brethren at Yahoo and Microsoft that are busy working to widen that Memory Hole.

My yardstick on when we'll actually have a chance to reverse this insanity is when Orwell's "Pacifism and the War" finally becomes widespread reading. It's barely over a page and is not all that highbrow:

The life of a clique is about five years and I have been writing long enough to see three of them come and two go — the Catholic gang, the Stalinist gang, and the present pacifist or, as they are sometimes nicknamed, Fascifist gang. My case against all of them is that they write mentally dishonest propaganda and degrade literary criticism to mutual arse-licking.

The problem of course, is that the Fascifist Gang has not yet gone lo all these many years -- and have managed to flush Orwell himself down his own Memory Hole!

Or as I've updated its name: the remodeled but perhaps even more dangerous "MSMemory Hole".

Tear Down That Levee -- Another Reason

Glenn links to this post on Rishon-Rishon pointing out that we should listen to Hastert and just buy out most of NOLA -- in the main NOT rebuilding it. He points out that this should simultaneously appeal "to both small government supporters and environmentalists" and points out the complications they were already facing just dealing with the channeling of the Mississippi. (I was also hinting at this in my "Intent On Burying Drowning The Lede Leader" post.)

I agree with all of that.

But there's another reason:

Unless we really have lost our marbles, we will not only have to ring a rebuilt NOLA with Cat 5 levees EVERYWHERE (like I said), but those levees will all have to be double/triple ringed and/or heavily patrolled IN ORDER NOT TO BE JUICY TERRORIST TRUCK BOMBING TARGETS.

The terrorists have just gotten one hell of lesson on the use of floods as a terror/economic weapon in NOLA. Imagine what the death toll would have been if there was NO WARNING AT ALL.

Culpable as I think Nagin and Blanco are (finally, even ABC has noticed), at least MOST PEOPLE GOT OUT!

And sadly, it appears the terrorists are/were already there with all the reports of shootings at emergency and repair workers!

The only good news is that NOLA is (was) uniquely vulnerable to this threat. We need to take it off the table -- but frankly, I'll be surprised if we do. The only hope I see to do the right thing is if the insurance companies start charging NOLA rebuilders a premium commensurate with the real risk.

"The sheep pretend the wolf will never come, but the sheepdog lives for that day."

"If Liberals could somehow be persuaded that Osama Bin Laden threatens their cherished social policy -- the ability to "make soup" -- then America might go to war against Islamic terrorism in peace."

Prepare for the new ice age melting of the ice caps all because of Clinton W.

Of gangs and kindergarten physics.

First we learned that Microsoft licks Chinese butt big time -- now we learn that Yahoo is objectively pro-fascist.

And, no, I DID NOT imply that FEMA is perfect! It's a big, lumbering mess just like ALL government agencies. And for all I know, Brown is incompetent. The difference between this blog and the lefty blogs is that over there you will find ZERO self criticism. Michael has a good take on it also. 'Nuff said...

What 500 Buses?

Time to expand the looney bins and finally get serious about stocking them with the MSM:

Before residents had ever heard the words "Hurricane Katrina," the New
Orleans TIMES-PICAYUNE ran a story warning residents: If you stay behind during a big storm, you'll be on your own!

Editors at TIMES-PICAYUNE on Monday called for every official at the Federal
Emergency Management Agency to be fired. In an open letter to President Bush,
the paper said: "Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were
not. That's to the government's shame."

But the TIMES-PICAYUNE published a story on July 24, 2005 stating: City,
state and federal emergency officials are preparing to give a historically blunt
message: "In the event of a major hurricane, you're on your own."

Staff writer Bruce Nolan reported some 7 weeks before Katrina: "In scripted
appearances being recorded now, officials such as Mayor Ray Nagin, local Red
Cross Executive Director Kay Wilkins and City Council President Oliver Thomas
drive home the word that the city does not have the resources to move out of
harm's way an estimated 134,000 people without transportation." ...

That's some REALLY SERIOUS PSYCHOLOGICAL PROJECTION going on there. Looks like a case study for the record books to me.

Look, if you were complicit in the deaths of thousands of people because you were too lazy as a reporter to question Nagin about alternatives (like buses!) to this sort of lunacy, just think how your brain would re-wire itself with denial in order to avoid resorting to self-inflicted harm.

"The Coast Guard evacuated over 7,000 people the first three days. That probably would have been sufficient if THEY [Mayor Nagin et al] HAD FOLLOWED THE EVACUATION PLAN. "

That's Odd ...

... somehow I haven't heard about any of this on the MSM:

As a former Air Force logistics officer, let me clarify the following for the idiots in the Left Wing Media:

1. Things can get destroyed far more swiftly than they can get fixed.

2. The United States military can wipe out the Taliban and the Iraqi Republican Guard far more swiftly than they can bring 3 million Swanson dinners to an underwater city through an area the size of Great Britain which has no power, no working ports or airports, and a devastated and impassable road network.

3. You cannot speed recovery and relief efforts up by prepositioning assets since the assets are endangered by the very storm which destroyed the region.

4. We do not yet have teleporter nor replicator technology like you saw on "Star Trek" in college between hookah hits and waiting to pick up your worthless communications degree while the grownups actually engaged in the recovery effort today were studying engineering.

5. Getting people out of the stricken areas is the most pressing concern, since we cannot get enough supplies into it to safely sustain them.

6. Getting the airport, bridges, and roads repaired is the next priority, since the supplies and people needed to fix levees, drain the city, and repair the infrastructure cannot be transported via aircraft. You need to truck them in.

7. Once the infrastructure is repaired, it is vital to get the ports in working order. Equipment and supplies can only be moved into the area in large quantities by sea.

8. Only then can recovery efforts begin in earnest.

9. The above will take weeks and months, not days or hours.

10. No amount of yelling, crying, and mustering of moral indignation will change any of the facts above. Facts are facts. Opinion is cheap.

11. You could do more help actually keeping your damned satellite trucks out of the way of the folks doing the real work.

12. If you must vent your indignation, how about targeting the Louisiana officials who did absolutely nothing to protect their constituents? At least you can help ensure the populace doesn't elect these clowns again.

Oh, yeah. Doesn't fit the storyline, does it?

"... see, ya, we're goin' to Disneyworld." There are simply no words to describe my reaction to this so I won't. But you might have some words come to mind when you read it. And they won't be advised for use in polite company...

Denial Ain't Just A River In Egypt

From Drudge comes this incredible picture:

If he sits there like that for another couple of years, things may get better.

Or the bulldozers may knock down his house -- apparently with him in it.

Or he may die of dehydration and disease somewhat sooner than that...

No Parting By Moses W Allowed

`As I said in my post, "I swear, if President Bush had shown up like Moses, parted the waters and led the people to safety, the liberals would have sued him for violating the separation of church and state."`

Speaking of Biblical references, did I forget to mention that little note about Caesar and Jesus that Lee wrote recently? Well, no, but you really need to read it...

You might want to take his blather about what a great country Iran is with a grain of salt also...

The Soaking Surge Versus The Splintering Surge: What Will Be Learned?

Glenn links to a post today from Brendan Loy:

It is true, as some have pointed out in comments, that Katrina was not "likely" to hit New Orleans as of Saturday morning, or even Sunday morning for that matter. New Orleans was the hurricane's most likely target -- it remained in the crosshairs of the official forecast track all weekend -- but in terms of statistical strike probabilities, even the most likely target at 24-48 hours out still has a less-than-50% chance of getting hit, thanks to the uncertainties inherent in hurricane forecasting. However, given the technology that we currently have, you simply could not have a greater threat to a specific location, 48 hours before landfall, than the threat that New Orleans faced on Saturday morning. It was, as I said, a "high-confidence forecast," and one with enormously catastrophic potential. Thus, if an evacuation was not appropriate then, then it follows that an evacuation must never be appropriate at 48 hours. And that can't be, because really, 48 hours is already too late; studies have long shown that it would take 72 hours to completely empty the city of New Orleans. So unless the city's hurricane strategy was to throw up its hands and say, "there's nothing we can do," a mandatory evacuation -- school buses and all -- was most certainly called for on Saturday morning. As I wrote on Saturday afternoon, "If you knew there was a 10 percent chance terrorists were going to set off a nuclear bomb in your city on Monday, would you stick around, or would you evacuate? That's essentially equivalent to what you're dealing with here. I sure as hell would leave."

Finally, one last point. As horrible as the catastrophe has been, please realize that it actually could have been far worse. What occurred was not the long-feared "worst-case scenario," which involved not a levee breach equalizing the water level in Lake Ponchartrain and "Lake New Orleans," but rather a storm surge over-topping the levees and causing the water level in "Lake New Orleans," hemmed in by the still-intact levees, to rise substantially higher than the water level in the lake. If the storm had wobbled a meteorologically insignificant 20 or 30 miles to the west, and/or had not weakened from a Category 5 to a Category 4 at the last minute, that scenario would have occurred, and instead of a slowly developing 10-20 foot flood, New Orleans would have suffered a rapidly developing 30-40 foot flood. (Jackson Square would have been underwater, whereas in the real-world scenario it remained high and dry.) The whole thing would have happened Monday morning, and at the same time as the city was rapidly and massively flooding, the devastating winds that demolished the Mississippi coastline would have been tearing New Orleans apart instead. All of those attics where people took shelter would have been either submerged or shattered to bits. The French Quarter would have been swamped, instead of mostly surviving the flood. Second-floor generators in hospitals might well have drowned. Bottom line, there would be a lot fewer refugees and a lot more corpses.

I alluded to this worst case in my "Intent on Burying Drowning the Lede Leader" post. I also pointed out that even IF the Cat 5 flood walls HAD ALREADY BEEN BUILT they would not have stopped the current form of the disaster (the "soaking surge scenario") -- even though what we are seeing now is not actually the worst case that could have happened NOW given that there are no Cat 5 walls yet (the "splintering surge scenario").

As my modified graphic from the May 2005 Popular Science points out, the location of the levee breaks (indicated by the red rectangle added by me) was NOT where the Cat 5 levees were projected to be built (the red line separating NOLA from the Gulf to the right):

(Note that this graphic is not available in the on-line article at PopSci -- only in the print version)

So the the only way to avoid what just happened would have been to have spent the (probably) billions of dollars it would have taken to upgrade EVERY LEVEE IN THE NOLA AREA to Cat 5 levels!

And even then -- and assuming perfect engineering and flawless levee construction virtually throughout -- if the hurricane had shifted 20 miles to the west NOLA would be a lot less flooded but still be looking nearly as splintered as Mississippi looks like right now and likely with a still awful loss of life.

As Brendan highlights -- and I pointed out in my post -- the only way to avoid serious loss of life was to get everyone out of there in the first place.

Including the use of these now useless buses:


The "hurricane sensationalism" of the media and its creation of a Chicken Little mindset dulling the urgency of evacuation needs as much examination as what could have been done to physically protect NOLA.

Makes sense to me -- but I've figured out how bad it really is. Most folks are doing their best ostrich imitation...

I would say "significantly degraded" would be quite an understatement...

EMAIL of the day at the Corner:

If Bush was a Dictator things would have gone smoother:

- He wouldn't have had to ASK Gov. Blanco to order a mandatory evacuation, he would have done it himself.

- He wouldn't have had to ASK Gov. Blanco to send in her National Guard, he would have done it himself.

- He wouldn't have to ASK Gov. Blanco to let the feds come in and run the show. (below) If Bush was a dictator he could have FORCED residents to evacuate at gunpoint. He would be giving orders to the Governor, not requests. It may come as news to the moveon.org crowd, but BUSH IS NOT A DICTATOR!

Well, yeah...

UPDATE: Boy am I slow lately. Just wait a few news cycles and the MSMeme will be: Bush didn't declare himself dictator because he wanted all those poor black folks to die! Just watch...

"An older equilibrium is returning."

... the same square mileage as England.

Don't forget to keep giving -- this is going to be a long haul...

Burying the lede part 45,589: Blankety Blanco!

Intent On Burying Drowning The Lede Leader

(UPDATED 9/11/05: With the latest leftie attack about Bush being a liar for saying that nobody anticipated the levees would breach now heating up, I went back to the PopSci article and added the relevant paragraph RE overtopping versus breaching to my excerpt. No surprise: it talks about overtopping, not breaching -- and then goes on to suggest that the levees would "serve as a bathtub"! They couldn't do that very well if they were breached could they now? It then goes on the say that this is a "highly improbably event" to close it out. But please do continue on to read at least the last half of this post -- I guarantee you'll still learn something interesting even if the first half has become somewhat dated!)

Since we have the Gramscian, emotive MSM and lefty bloggers spending most of their coverage playing the "blame game" with their bully pulpits,



us poor stupid righty bloggers are all that remains to actually consider the facts.

The two main MSMemes of the disaster are of course:

1) BusHitler hasn't done enough to cope with the immediate disaster (and what "little" has been done has come too slowly)

and

2) Shrub McChimpy is giving all our money to those da*n "brownies" in Iraq that are too stupid to be interested in democracy and therefore he's the one responsible for killing New Orleans since everything would have been just fine if part of the Louisiana National Guard wasn't gone and all that money hadn't been diverted from levee construction

Let's look at each in turn:

1) BusHitler Hasn't Done Enough Right Now!

Well, let's open with this from Power Line:

The mayor called the order unprecedented and said anyone who could leave the city should.

Gov. Kathleen Blanco, standing beside the mayor at a news conference, said President Bush called and personally appealed for a mandatory evacuation for the low-lying city, which is prone to flooding.

Whoops! The MSM has been trying to bury that one BIG TIME through the whole disaster. Unfortunately for them, that will likely mean they will have to stop covering Chertoff's press conferences since he made a point this afternoon of mentioning that W made the call!

So the left has done a face plant right out of the gate but are either too self-deluded, venal or dim to realize their position.

Did I forget to mention that both the governor and mayor are Democrats? And did you notice this little newsflash from Drudge?

WHY DIDN'T YOU DEPLOY THE BUSES DURING THE MANDATORY EVACUATION, MAYOR?...

Louisiana disaster plan, pg 13, para 5 , dated 01/00

'The primary means of hurricane evacuation will be personal vehicles. School and municipal buses, government-owned vehicles and vehicles provided by volunteer agencies may be used to provide transportation for individuals who lack transportation and require assistance in evacuating'...

Then Drudge shows the picture of the New Orleans buses:



WHOOPS!

So W is supposed to sit on their shoulders and make the local Dem politicos implement their own plan? Junkyardblog has the nutshell:

As for Mayor Nagin, he and his profile in pathetic leadership police chief should resign as well. That city's government is incompetent from one end to the other. The people of New Orleans deserve better than this crowd of clowns iscapable of giving them.

If you're keeping track, these boobs let 569 buses that could have carried 33,350 people out of New Orleans--in one trip--get ruined in the floods.

In other words, we have the "Mayor Ray Nagin Memorial Motor Pool" -- but of course it's all W's fault... (More here, here, and here.)

And then after the fact we have the MSM TV airwaves filled with right after reports of how things aren't so bad on Canal Street. Everybody just calm down. Just more of our standard fare of "Hurricane Porn".

Whoops! Maybe not this time. What the h**l? Why wasn't the National Guard here already? What? It takes more than a day to mobilize and move HUNDREDS of helicopters? Incompetence I tell you! Incompetence!

For every hurricane we're supposed to have sufficient resources constantly on the move for optimal delivery to disaster areas hundreds of miles on each dimension even if all the roads and bridges are wiped out? I'll make a deal with you to do this for only, oh, say, a cost equivalent of 10% of the U.S. GDP. Chinooks aren't cheap folks. And just imagine what shape we'd be in if we were France and didn't have a military capable of flying out of a brown paper bag!.

Did I forget to mention that all new buildings in the southeast may have to look like concrete bunkers? What's that? You say you're thinking of moving to Denver instead?

2) Without Bush, all the money for levee construction would have been there!

Being the nerd I am, and with a budding nerd 8-year-old son, you won't be surprised we have a subscription to Popular Science. Well, smart as David is, wouldn't you know that he pulls out the May issue with this little gem in it:

Hurricanes
At 20 feet below sea level, new orleans is a prime target. An ambitious new levee system would decrease the risk

By Michael Behar April 2005

It takes Scott Kiser only a split second to name the one city in the U.S., and probably the world, that would sustain the most catastrophic damage from a category-5 hurricane. "New Orleans," says Kiser, a tropical-cyclone program manager for the National Weather Service. "Because the city is below sea level—with the Mississippi River on one side and Lake Pontchartrain on the other—it is a hydrologic nightmare." The worst problem, he explains, would be a storm surge, a phenomenon in which high winds stack up huge waves along a hurricane’s leading edge. In New Orleans, a big enough surge would quickly drown the entire city.

...

UPDATE 9/11/05: ADDED THIS GRAPH TO THE QUOTE: The Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale defines a category-5 storm as one with "winds greater than 155 miles per hour and storm surge generally greater than 18 feet." Although hurricanes of this magnitude slamming directly into New Orleans are extremely rare—occurring perhaps every 500 to 1,000 years—should one come ashore, the resulting storm surge would swell Lake Pontchartrain (a brackish sea adjoining the Gulf of Mexico), overtop the levees, and submerge the city under up to 40 feet of water. Once this happened, the levees would "serve as a bathtub," explains Harley Winer, chief of coastal engineering for the Army Corps’s New Orleans District. The water would get trapped between the Mississippi levees and the hurricane-protection levees. "This is a highly improbable event," Winer points out, "but within the realm of possibility."

New Orleans has nearly completed its Hurricane Protection Project, a $740-million plan led by Naomi to ring the city with levees that could shield residents from up to category-3 storm surges. Meanwhile, Winer and others at the Army Corps are considering a new levee system capable of holding back a surge from a category-5 hurricane like Ivan, which threatened the city last year.

Now, needless to say, my eyebrows nearly shoot through the ceiling! But not primarily because of the text of the article. (As I looked for blog links to this article, I found a number of folks like Jeff and Carol linking through to the Redstate reference to the PopSci article.)

But it turns out that the online article doesn't include the graphic -- and what REALLY blew me away was the graphic (that I have slightly modified here by adding a red rectangle):



Look at where the upgrade to Cat 5 protection (indicated by the red line) was planned to be built: between the city and the Gulf of course. What kind of dummy would do otherwise? But check out the location of the big red rectangle that I have added on the north side of N.O. That's where at least one of the major levee breaks was! As we all know now, the city was flooded at least largely by Lake Pontchartrain, not from the Gulf!!!

So basically the only prayer in h*ll we had to save the city from Katrina's trajectory would have been a complete upgrade of the levee system to Cat 5 protection!

And even that looks questionable to me if Katrina had hit N.O. full on like it did Mississippi. Look at how buildings there were just utterly splintered by the storm surge.

I hate to tell you this, but if you think the fact that that complete Cat 5 upgrade wasn't up yet was because of W and the war, you deserve the stupor you live in. This was a problem that stretched through multiple decades and multiple city, state and federal administrations. And even if W made saving N.O. from hurricanes his #1 priority in life immediately upon election in 2000, the odds of it being ready for Katrina are about the same as N.O. ever being restored to its former glory.

NIL.

And I leave the whole topic of rational cost/benefit analysis and scoping of various types of natural and man-made disasters for further posts. Lucky y'all...

The Perfectly Predictable Perfect Storm

Via Power Line, City Journal has something you need to read about the looting portion of the New Orleans Apocalypse:

This week’s looting was predictable. When Hurricane Georges, another potentially catastrophic storm (it spared New Orleans at the last minute) was about to hit in 1998, I foolishly refused to evacuate my Uptown apartment. More than one person said I should evacuate not due to the storm, but because looters would terrorize the city afterward.

Was this week’s looting preventable? Failure to put violent criminals behind bars in peacetime has led to chaos in disaster. New Orleans’ officials had only the remotest prayer on Monday of coordinating police officers with no electronic equipment to rescue survivors while at the same time stopping looting before it descended into wholesale terror. Now, those uncoordinated police officers are themselves victims—according to multiple accounts, dead officers, their bodies marked with gunshot wounds, litter the city.

WOW. RTWT.

My Good Friend James?

You know something's wrong with the picture when James Carville is your ally:

I think CNN would turn Noah's flood into a partisan attack on George Bush. Even such a hardened politico as James Carville had to tell their brain dead reporter to shut up and deal with the reality in front of him, rather than casting blame. What is wrong with these CNN people? What culture do they come from? Their lack of moral and psychological sophistication is truly stunning.

When I see this kind of reporting, I know we are doing the right thing at Pajamas Media in trying to organize the blogosphere, just a little bit, as the beginning of an antidote.

Keep your eye on the Pajamas. The one that remains after watching too much Communist News Network.

Perspective From The Trenches

This is straight through from one of Glenn's readers. You need to read the whole thing:

I run a trade association of tank truck carriers trying to assist in the relief efforts by transporting food and potable water. I'm in regular contact with many of the companies, and here are some "on the ground" facts: 1) Large trucks (80,000 lbs. gross weight) almost always have to use the Interstates. For trucks attempting to come in from outside the area, most of those roads (approaching the disaster area) are either closed or have bridges out. The so-called secondary roads may be somewhat passable, but their bridges (over rivers and streams) are not built to sustain such loads. Simply stated, you can't get there from here.

2) Trucks domicled in those areas (because that's where the companies traditionally serve customers) are still underwater, thus the equipment is not accessible;

3) Nobody in their right mind is going to take loads of gasoline and fuel oil into a city controlled by unfriendly folks carrying automatic weapons. A tank truck loaded with 8,000 gallons of gasoline can produce a very impressive fire;

4) Those local trucking companies can't contact their drivers. There's no power, thus (even) cellular is unavailable, and many of the drivers homes (in places like Kenner, Slidel, Metarie, etc) have been destroyed and families dispersed. I have one member with about 120 drivers and mechanics in that immediate area. To date, management has been able to contact 12. Those in the National Guard have been mobilized and are not available to drive.

5) Pumps -- needed to load the vehicles -- don't work because there's no power.

UPDATE: It keeps getting better and better:

Oh yeah, it [the venality of the press coverage] is just that bad. If anything Jeff understates the case. One begins to wonder if the founding fathers got that freedom of the press thing right, after all.

Okay, it's not that bad, but it has been pretty shameful. When all is said and done the press will be stunned to discover that the only people they have impressed are themselves.

Yup.

The problem with ankle-biting.

"They got that one right."

Things are getting tough when Beslan no longer seems quite so unthinkable.

The most sobering refugee tale you'll ever read...

And then there were 3 more.

Did I forget to mention that it's always all about W? But don't worry, they'll assure you it's not a psychological disorder as they blink blankly...

And just when I get done criticizing the Captain, he turns around and criticizes the Israelis -- and gets it right... (Yes, I know you're shocked but he's actually supporting Sharon after all.)

"Given how many local politicians whose fiefdoms would disappear, that will not happen, and so we will see this disaster occur again." ... If we're senseless enough to rebuild it.

At least Katrina got her to take a breather from assassination exhortations...

Stunned Atlantis-Gazing

Needless to say, I have been massively stunned watching and reading about the Katrina disaster and it has put quite a crimp on my posting productivity -- not to mention having quite a week at work. My last post finally did break the torpor a bit.

And it looks like my Salvation Army donation recommendation was even more prescient than I thought:

A lot is going on down here that is not in the news. First, our esteemed governor and the mayor of NO are both idiots. This is the real reason for problems. Second, the NO police force is second only to the mafia in corruption and much of the looting and theft are coming from them as well as their lassitude in doing their job. Third, all Louisiana communities need clothes of any kind. See if your local Salvation Army will send to the shelters throughout the state and blog to give any clothes to the [Salvation] Army. You notice I did not say the Red Cross, they do not have a sizable presence here and are only fishing for money like after 9/11.

WOW. Maybe I was going too easy on the Red Cross and mayor Nagin after all. That will teach me to be Christian :(

And then there's the small matter of the pecking order in congress. While -- ironically -- the leader of the House started to "channel" the somber reflections on rebuilding New Orleans of my previous post -- until his political instincts came back to life.

But one can count on Wretchard for some perspective on the sudden appearance of our modern-day Atlantis.

UPDATE: The Captain has more: "There is not enough money in the gross national product of the United States to dispose of the amount of hazardous material in the area." And in spite of this he doesn't want to throw in the towel! That IS optimism! I love the Captain -- but he needs to read his own posts more carefully once in a while :(

Please Help Our Southern Neighbors Recover From Their Apocalypse

Biblical. Sized. Help. Is. Needed.

Please. Give. Generously!

I just made a good-sized contribution to the Salvation Army -- and expect to make more contributions as the scope of this clarifies.

Glenn has a blogburst round-up of charitable donation options. I have some personal/political reservations about the Red Cross, but frankly this is such an awesome situation that it would be a mistake not to see that their substantial distribution network isn't fully utilized. If that doesn't give you some perspective on how bad I think this is then nothing will.

In fact, that's probably my key insight: We probably need to keep spreading donations among the major relief organizations so that no one of them burns out -- because they're going to be afterburners-on for MONTHS if not YEARS.

In fact, this situation is so sobering that I have trouble imagining rebuilding New Orleans like it was. And certainly not without an ENORMOUSLY expensive 3-ringed dyke system like the Netherlands finally invested in after their catastrophe in the 1950s...

And this just rips your heart out while making you want to scream. Frankly, it's probably not appropriate to tear Nagin a new one even though every fiber of my body wants to. Odds are that he and his administration as well as the police and fire leaders are probably now virtually sleepwalking -- and in the knowledge that they have personally lost everything as well.

All the usual puerile bile is now targetting W for how this is all his fault because of Iraq (funny how Clinton wasn't on national TV mobilizing the country to put a 3-ring dyke around the Big Easy -- or did I just happen to miss it?)

But in retrospect, we'll probably have to have some sort of FEMA team in future that can literally replace or spell a local administration trying to cope with this scale of disaster.

Oh, and by the way, this looks to be a dry run for what a small nuke will do to one of our major cities -- only not quite as severe. After all, there's still SOME chance that the residents may be able to move back within the next few years.

Did I forget to mention that we'll be really lucky if it's only one nuke and one city?

APOCALYPTIC UPDATE: "Or does it haunt the landscape like a ghost?" (HT Michael)

HEARTENING UPDATE: From Michelle.

Please be generous in your help to them -- it looks very bad for New Orleans and the surrounding states...

French Gone Missing (Part 36,359)

Callimachus suggests that there should have been this before this: "I solemnly withdraw the German signature from the declaration, extracted by force from a weak Government against its better judgment, that Germany was responsible for the War. "

Nicely done Calli!

Of course, the Gramscianization of our educational system is now so complete that Hitler's January 1937 speech is now as good as down the memory hole.

I have been pointing out the missed opportunity for a long time. It's one of the reasons I love the French so...

Foxy Chickens Huff And Puff...

... and only sometimes blow your house down.

I was teaching my 8-year-old about this tonight and used the analogy of Chicken Little. Slam dunk he got it. At first he couldn't believe that I was criticizing Fox about it too -- but I think he got that too...

"Probably the notion that half the country thinks their entire staff should be in jail hasn't quite sunk in yet."

BARKING BULEMIC BEAST BELLIES.

It's going to be fascinating watching the MSM ignore this one... I expect that by the time it's all over they'll be claiming all the men in the west are racist for not wearing burkas themselves...

ALL.
CREDIBILITY.
TOAST.

Hitch Delivers

the political equivalent of the Maxell commercial. Just to calibrate you, this is perhaps one of the least remarkable of its paragraphs:

At once, one sees that all the alternatives [to the invasion of Iraq] would have been infinitely worse, and would most likely have led to an implosion--as well as opportunistic invasions from Iran and Turkey and Saudi Arabia, on behalf of their respective interests or confessional clienteles. This would in turn have necessitated a more costly and bloody intervention by some kind of coalition, much too late and on even worse terms and conditions. This is the lesson of Bosnia and Rwanda yesterday, and of Darfur today. When I have made this point in public, I have never had anyone offer an answer to it. A broken Iraq was in our future no matter what, and was a responsibility (somewhat conditioned by our past blunders) that no decent person could shirk. The only unthinkable policy was one of abstention.

When that's the thin gruel, you need to sit down in your comfy chair and savor this work of art and logic for the better part of the day...

W's perpetually blood-soaked Groundhog Day farce. It's clear to me that he's missed some critical history lessons -- or is keeping them inside of Al Gore's lock box...

More and more dangerous.

More On Democrats "Projecting" Democracy's Failure

The al-Reuters/ Liberal Democrat party line is that Democracy is bound to fail with (those stupid brownie) Muslims:



WHOOPS! Looks like al-Reuters let a dose of actual reality from Afghanistan get by their thought police! I'm sure it will be noticed and taken down soon. Problem is, I've linked to a copy on Power Line so just like my previous post on the Palestinians, they can memory hole to their hearts content but to no avail...

Has anyone noticed the irony of our "Democratic Party"?

They're the one's who don't think democracy is working in America! (W "stole" the election, yada, yada, yada... The last one to the tune of some 3 million votes as I recall -- did I forget to mention that I control Karl Rove?)

Is it any wonder they don't think democracy can work anywhere else?

Can you say projection?

The Trouble With The Internet

"Palestinians flying airplanes into New York. Hmm. Why does that not give me a warm, cozy feeling?"

The trouble with the internet is that it makes it harder to bury history like this over at LGF:

Atlas Shrugs on misogyny and apocalypse.

There are no more than, oh, say, tens of millions of conservatives a lot like this. But the lamestream brainwashing goes on...

Look around you. You might see some people like this.

I love the lamestream media. (HT Power Line for the terminology -- and a nice reminder what amazing folks are keeping us free...)

UPDATE: And check out WoC's take on it -- especially the last paragraph...

The very large distraction.

And then there were 3. Not to mention Mickey and Minuteman.

"To stay cheerful when involved in a gloomy and exceedingly responsible business is no inconsiderable art: yet what could be more necessary than cheerfulness? Nothing succeeds in which high spirits play no part."

He invented the internet war.

Did I forget to mention that tribal mysogyny leads to ... INBREEDING?

Rethinking Viral Terrorism

WOW:

"Cindy Sheehan just finished her morning media event. When asked by reporters, Sheehan said she believes that while she supports the continued hunt for Osama bin Laden she believes the U.S. should withdraw from Afghanistan and “stop bombing innocent people.” She also described Osama bin Laden as being “allegedly” behind the attacks of 9/11." -- The Buzz

In other words: Osama didn't do it, and we should withdraw from Afghanistan but still hunt for him.

Cuckoo. Cuckoo. Cuckoo.

It appears that just as a meme has arisen about treating terrorism as a virus, the MSM/Dems have a virus of their own to contend with -- terror lunacy.

This raises the disturbing possibility that they're actually NOT Gramscian neo-Syndicalists.

They're just escaped inmates. Time to enforce the laws, folks.

Specter Into Danger???

One could be forgiven for reading this letter from Sen. Specter to FBI Director Mueller as evidence that Specter is not a lightweight after all.

Interestingly, the Captain seems to speculate that it's the FBI who refused the meetings -- but Shaffer seems to be saying that it was the Special Ops legal eagles that caused the Able Danger folks not to show up for the meetings.

Around and around we go ... orbiting the invisible Jamie Gorelick the whole time.

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT EUROPE: "A Belgian city, having banned wearing the burka, has convicted and fined the first offender. But since the woman is on benefits, the city will almost certainly pick up the 125 Euro fine. One wonders, had there been a prison sentence, whether the city would have provided someone to serve the time for her. " (HT WoC)

D'OH. (HT WoC)

"That's the difference between the terrorists and us," Chaplain Wilson kept saying. "Don't you understand? That's the difference." (HT Glenn)

UPDATE: Hugh reminds us that Thucydides had some words relevant to Michael Yon and the soldiers he follows: "The secret to happiness is freedom and the secret to freedom is courage."

My ELCA appears to have joined some wonderful racist company...

The Innumerate Left (Part 42,643)

I have made previous posts about the left's innumeracy in assessing the war's casualties. Now, Power Line hits one into the left field bleachers:

Sometimes it becomes necessary to state the obvious: being a soldier is a dangerous thing. This is why we honor our service members' courage. For a soldier, sailor or Marine, "courage" isn't an easily-abused abstraction--"it took a lot of courage to vote against the farm bill"--it's a requirement of the job.

Even in peacetime. The media's breathless tabulation of casualties in Iraq--now, over 1,800 deaths--is generally devoid of context. Here's some context: between 1983 and 1996, 18,006 American military personnel died accidentally in the service of their country. That death rate of 1,286 per year exceeds the rate of combat deaths in Iraq by a ratio of nearly two to one.

That's right: all through the years when hardly anyone was paying attention, soldiers, sailors and Marines were dying in accidents, training and otherwise, at nearly twice the rate of combat deaths in Iraq from the start of the war in 2003 to the present. Somehow, though, when there was no political hay to be made, I don't recall any great outcry, or gleeful reporting, or erecting of crosses in the President's home town. In fact, I'll offer a free six-pack to the first person who can find evidence that any liberal expressed concern--any concern--about the 18,006 American service members who died accidentally in service of their country from 1983 to 1996.

The point? Being a soldier is not safe, and never will be. Driving in my car this afternoon, I heard a mainstream media reporter say that around 2,000 service men and women have died in Afghanistan and Iraq "on President Bush's watch." As though the job of the Commander in Chief were to make the jobs of our soldiers safe. They're not safe, and they never will be safe, in peacetime, let alone wartime.

Did I forget to mention that there are an average of over 40,000 TRAFFIC FATALITIES ALONE in the U.S. each year?

And they happened on McChimpy's watch! He simply MUST be impeached!!! Why even Hitler never killed this many innocent and gullible motorists!

Holy Ground Of Contrasts

Mr. Ott hits one out of the park. The meat of it starts like this:

Dear Mrs. Sheehan,
You have asked me to identify the noble cause for which your son died. I have not answered you personally out of respect for the nobility of your son's sacrifice.

Being president forces me into the spotlight, but I would rather stand in the shadows of men like Casey Sheehan.

Directing national attention on my response to your protest creates a distraction from what matters. The focus of our attention, and our admiration, should rest on people like Casey Sheehan, who stand in the breach when evil threatens to break out and consume a helpless people.

The running story on the news networks should be the valiant efforts of our troops -- the merchants of mercy who export freedom and import honor. They trade their own lives for the sake of others.

As a result, we live in a nation where a woman can camp outside of the president's house and verbally attack the president for weeks on end without fear of prison, torture or death. And the number of nations where such protest is possible has multiplied thanks to the work of our military.

You ask for what noble cause your son died?

In a sense he died so that people like you, who passionately oppose government policies, can freely express that opposition. As you camp in Crawford, you should take off your shoes, for you stand on holy ground. This land was bought with the blood of men like your son.

READ. IT. ALL.

The holy ground reference made me think about why there is no one monument for Christianity that would cause us to become unhinged if it were destroyed -- unlike the Muslims. Yes, the Catholics would get plenty mad if the Vatican were wiped out, and even us Protestants would be plenty ticked.

And maybe the Jews would get rather irritated were the wailing wall to really be destroyed. But I still can't imagine this being even close to the kind of fury that seems to be provoked in Muslims at even the thought of the destruction of their holy stone in Mecca.

But try as I might, I cannot strain my neck to see the kind of lunatic hatred that any slight to Mecca stimulates among Muslims ever being provoked from Christians over the destruction of any place or thing. Quite an irony for us Christian "materialists".

Because Christians are tasked with carrying the holy wherever they go -- even to near a ranch in Texas.

The contrast is stark:

The love of Christ infused with the wonders of Einstein on the one hand.

And the tribal idol worship and misogynistic hair-triggered hatred of the Caliphascists on the other.

We will pray. They will hate-in-rote.

The great mystery continues.

But how long is there before the apocalypse on the ground of Planet Zongo?

Cindy Sheehan -- useful idiot for Supreme Overlord Q'klogmu.

"Why did they take the word of two terrorists over that of two high-ranking American intelligence officers when constructing this timeline?"

A Wee Bit Of Perspective

... For when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an assembly can a perfect production be expected? It therefore astonishes me, Sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our enemies, who are waiting with confidence to hear that our councils are confounded like those of the Builders of Babel; and that our States are on the point of separation, only to meet hereafter for the purpose of cutting one another's throats. ...

from Ben Franklin care of Glenn.

Of course, we do have some chutzpah trying to do this with what may be the original builders of Babel!

But I grow so weary of our Gramscian neo-Syndicalist Dems going on and on about how what they're effectively calling the "backward brown-skinned people" aren't "good enough" for democracy. And then they call me the racist...

"Thurgood Marshall, former chief counsel for the NAACP, lion of civil rights litigation and hero of Brown v. Board of Education, Sweatt v. Painter and Murray v. Pearson agreed with Roberts’s advocacy position 67 percent of the time — nearly the same as Scalia and Thomas and more than O’Connor, the justice who upon her retirement was praised as “moderate” by many of those now opposing Roberts.

Unless Roberts’s opponents are prepared to call Thurgood Marshall a civil-rights extremist they need to acknowledge that Roberts’s advocacy positions, as well as his judicial decisions are squarely within the mainstream."

Posted without requiring comment to non-Xenorxians.

The political hemophiliacs take on that old-time caliphascism.
UPDATE: If you found Bryan's post so mesmerizing that you forgot to click through to Frum and his letter writers, don't forget to do so!

UPDATED AGAIN: Glenn has more.

Very close to what even I would consider Jaw Dropper material. Not quite a cigar though...

200-1

"Can’t you just smell a peaceful state emerging?"

"... These Hollywood liberals spend their lives negotiating. They believe that when the time comes they will sit down with Osama bin Laden and cut a deal. Imagine how surprised they’ll be when the cold blade hits their necks..." (HT Roger)

Let Me Make This Perfectly Clear

I have always thought Pat Robertson a dope at best and a stain on the reputation of Christianity at worst. Lest there be any ambiguity, let me say the following: You're not a valid religious leader if you call for the killing of ANYONE, no matter how vile and brutal that person may be.

No double standards here: This means that Pat Robertson does not qualify as a religious leader in my book -- right along with what is probably the vast majority of Imam's in the world. Comprende padre?

With that out of the way, Scrappleface has nailed the big picture just beautifully:

Robertson Issues Fatwa Against Venezuela's Chavez
by Scott Ott
(2005-08-23) -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez beefed up security at his residence and offices today after reports that Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson has issued a fatwa calling for the assassination of the South American communist dictator.

Venezuelan police have begun detaining and searching "clean cut, Bible-toting men in unfashionable clothing" as likely followers of the wealthy, charismatic religious personality. However, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) immediately lodged a protest with the Venezuelan government over the "profiling" of '700 Club' devotees by security forces.

Mr. Robertson is revered among his fanatical TV viewers, who each year contribute millions of dollars to advance his so-called "ministry," as much as he's feared by the teams of U.S. journalists who track his movements and record his remarks.

The Pentagon immediately denied that Mr. Robertson's name had previously appeared on any Defense Department "watch list," but a spokesman discouraged news networks from airing video of the Robertson fatwa announcement, fearing his remarks might contain coded instructions for Christian cell groups around the world.

Hoo haw!

The ACLU will come to Pat Robertson's rescue right about the time of the rapture I would venture!

All the above said, Hugo Chavez is a vile and brutal blossoming devil -- Jimmy Carter's defense of his "election" is pretty much all you need to know in confirmation.

Like a stopped clock, Pat Robertson can be right twice a day. But I don't need waste my time listening for it -- I can count on the venal MSM to point those occasions out to me whether I want to know about them or not...

Maybe not so disastrous after all?

Ad Hominem Ad Nauseum

"Well, you've succeeded in thoroughly confusing us." Hello ELCA and Presbyterian puerile fascifists! Anybody home?

Accident? Theft? No -- something else to the Pharoah!

Phillpott pastes Prague poster.

Clement Attlee Channeled

... via Aristides over at Wretchard's:

"The Germans Islamists kill not only men, but ideas."

[Extra channeling help courtesy We The Free.]

WOW.

The connections are all over the place including here and here and here.

Steyn via Power Line was mighty fine...

More and more dangerous?

... a little Iraqi girl named Grace.

Hiding In Plain Sight Update

"The notion that Gorelick's memo had no effect outside the DoJ does not stand up to scrutiny at all, once the fact and intent of including Scruggs and the OIPR become known. This shows why Mary Jo White objected so strenuously to this memo and its implementation, and why she went out of her way to antagonize her bosses at the DoJ with a second and more heated memo predicting, correctly, that such a policy would leave America unprotected against the very people she had just successfully prosecuted.

It's bad enough that Gorelick erected that wall in 1995. It's ludicrous that four years after 9/11, people waste their time defending her and her participation in the 9/11 Commission as a panel member instead of a witness."

Big Mushroom Moderate Herbicide Considered

Shrinkwrapped over at Wretchard's has today's update on the looming mushroom clouds:

Blanknoone
said...

Wretchard,
The Pope is (mis)projecting a Christian philisophical perspective on the Muslim world, and it will fall on deaf ears. Muslims know what Islam teaches...and that is why there is virtually no denunciation of radical Islamists by the supposed Moderate Muslims...."

On the contrary, I think the Pope knows exactly what he is talking about. Much of what we are doing in Iraq, what the Israelis are doing in Palestine, and what the Pope is saying is designed to avoid a world wide conflagration which will occur if the West becomes frightened and enraged by further atrocities. Our responses remain measured, but an Islamic nuke, or a successful chemical weapon attack with mass deaths and, while no one can predict in advance what will tip us, once it happens we will "Let loose the dogs of war" and the Muslim world will be devastated. (I leave out bio attack because if an infectious disease spreads it will destroy the third world via "blowback" much more than damage us.) No one can truly desire such an outcome and thus we wage war with one hand tied behind our back. It is up to the Islamic world to recognize what they are risking and begin their reformation and join the civilized world. Thus far, the omens do not look good but we need to do all we can to diminish their risk and ours. 8:39 AM

However, if we are finally forced to let loose the dogs, any use of nukes by us will likely be quite limited. People forget the fire bombings of Tokyo and Dresden -- I have no doubt that we have modern "black programs" that will produce results just as deadly...

Faiths, Laws and Looming Apocalypse

Wretchard points out that the new pope comes to bat in an eerie and oh so tentative parallel to the fiery beginning of John Paul's reign:

Therefore, the Pope seems to say to the Muslims in the room, survival is in our hands and that means yours too. "You guide Muslim believers and train them in the Islamic faith. Teaching is the vehicle through which ideas and convictions are transmitted. Words are highly influential in the education of the mind. You, therefore, have a great responsibility for the formation of the younger generation."

But W and his State Beheader Apologist Department IS HAVING NONE OF IT. They know oh-so-much more than us little people.

UPDATE: Wretchard's commenters are sharp today. Herewith james h.m. :

Muslims might wish to take note that, for reasons both obvious and obscure, freedom of religion and equal rights for women go hand in hand with prosperity and advancing civilizations. (And so WHY is the US tolerating the prospect of a country we liberated from a hideous dictator becoming an Islamic republic in which individual liberties are circumscribed from the outset and surely will be restricted further in these Islamist times?) 9:24 AM

Has State come up with blackmail material on W?