The Buck Doesn't Stop With George Will

George Will's recent editorial regarding Hurricane Katrina, and the problems of the poor, appalled me. Will's chutzpah is incredible: he blames the problems of the poor, and by extension, their vulnerability to Hurricane Katrina, to that old bogeyman - you guessed it - liberals!:

The idea that Hurricane Katrina would change the only thing that matters -- thinking -- perished even more quickly, at about the time Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, a suitable symbol of congressional narcissism, dramatized the severity of the tragedy by taking a television interviewer on a helicopter flight over her destroyed beach house. "Washington rolled the dice and Louisiana lost," she said in a speech on the Senate floor that moved some senators to tears. You can no more embarrass a senator than you can a sofa, so the tears were not accompanied by blushing about having just passed a transportation bill whose 6,371 pork projects cost $24 billion, about 10 times more than the price of the levee New Orleans needed. Louisiana's congressional delegation larded the bill with $540,580,200 worth of earmarks, one-fifth the price of a capable levee.

Will's part of the blame game ignores lots of factors, like the historic role of race in determining the settlement patterns around New Orleans. In addition, the nation's spending priorities have largely been under the control of conservatives for many years now - since 1980, actually. For years now, even during the Clinton Administration, liberals have not had that much influence over determining what pork gets into highway spending bills, or what the priority is on levee maintenance, but conservatives have had that influence, and continue to do so.

Will's complacent ignorance is amazing. Referring to statements by Illinois Senator Barack Obama:

He might, however, care to note three not-at-all recondite rules for avoiding poverty: Graduate from high school, don't have a baby until you are married, don't marry while you are a teenager. Among people who obey those rules, poverty is minimal.

Has Will ever heard of health problems? Or extended periods of unemployment? It's very easy in America for married and unmarried people of all ages to fall into poverty!

Will is not content to blame liberals, but rather blame the victims as well, even if many of them are children, or the elderly:

Liberalism's post-Katrina fearlessness in discovering the obvious -- if an inner city is inundated, the victims will be disproportionately minorities -- stopped short of indelicately noting how many of the victims were women with children but not husbands. Because it was released during the post-Katrina debacle, scant attention was paid to the National Center for Health Statistics' report that in 2003, 34.6 percent of all American births were to unmarried women. The percentage among African American women was 68.2.

Given that most African Americans are middle class and almost half live outside central cities, and that 76 percent of all births to Louisiana African Americans were to unmarried women, it is a safe surmise that more than 80 percent of African American births in inner-city New Orleans -- as in some other inner cities -- were to women without husbands. That translates into a large and constantly renewed cohort of lightly parented adolescent males, and that translates into chaos in neighborhoods and schools, come rain or come shine.

Forgive me, if you will, if I never care again about conservative priorities. If conservatives can't be bothered to extend a quick helping hand to African-Americans whose lives are in immediate jeopardy, people from whom they expect services when on vacation in New Orleans, like hotel-room cleaning (then whom they pay a pittance), particularly when those same workers have already been taxed for the service, then conservatives have exiled themselves from their own community - why should I care any longer what they think?

Conservatives underestimate what active, engaged government can do. Big Government can't do everything, or even many things, but it should do those things it can, like work closely with state and local governments to ameliorate natural and man-made catastrophes, as well as ameliorate poverty, which Big Society programs have done well, despite Will's calumnies, for many years now.

Making A Connection

Nora Ephron wonders if Cheney and Bush had a falling out. Which reminds me of something Digby wrote last year, about how Bush was bound to break free of his minders once he won a second term - 'Let Bush, Be Bush,' so to speak - and then NO ONE would EVER tell George W. Bush what to do, ever again - including that good, old (moping) SOB, Cheney!

Famous Bush Apologist

Christopher Hitchens, finally getting a clue, from Hurricane Katrina.

Under The Gun

The "Cabaret" cast moved into the Varsity Theater, yesterday evening (a day later than we are accustomed to for shows). The set looks fairly simple, and my costume changes are (mercifully) easy to handle in this show. Nevertheless, there's room for improvement of the show itself. It's always odd to finally move around on the actual stage, and to work under show-like conditions: people stepping on toes, forgetting lines, forgetting props, getting distracted by bright, shiny objects. Tonight will be better.

Has Anyone Seen Mousy?

Last seen ascending over Berkeley:

Mousie, it should be pointed out, is not a live mouse but a 3-inch-tall stuffed mouse. That does not make Mousie any less real to Caroline, who has treasured Mousie since the day nine years ago when her dad brought the toy home from a business trip.

....The tale began to turn gray last week. During a birthday party for her kid sister on Sept. 1, Caroline tied a pair of helium balloons to Mousie and began pushing her around the house, partly to give her rodent friend an aerial view of his lodgings and partly to find out how many balloons it takes to float a mouse.

But someone left her bedroom window open and, as Caroline watched in horror, a sudden gust carried the floating Mousie out the window, past the maple tree in the backyard, over the rooftop and gone.

Caroline and her mother began running down the street, trailing the floating mouse, until it drifted past the Claremont Hotel and over the East Bay hills.

"I don't think he wanted to see the world," Caroline said. "He wasn't that kind of mouse. But he's seeing it now, whether he wanted to or not."

...Caroline checked the weather report for that day and learned that the wind was blowing eastward, at 15 mph. She checked with the balloon store and learned that the balloons were premium grade and can last a week or more. She figures the mouse could still be flying, somewhere over Ohio by now.

The family is coping, mother and daughter agreed.

..."This whole thing is a tragedy," Caroline said. "I know it's not a real mouse. I know there are bigger tragedies, like the hurricane. But it's a tragedy to me."

"Cabaret" Tech Week Begins

DMTC is now moving into tech week rehearsal for "Cabaret." Things have been pretty busy, with rehearsal, and also with DMTC Board activities. Normally, we'd be in the Varsity Theater already, but we actually move in there tonight.

Last night, working in the rehearsal space, W.H. fell (extent of injury unknown), as also apparently did W.C. (I had just left, so I missed it). That smooth concrete floor is unforgiving: in fact, it's unsuitability for serious theater work was the first thing I noticed when I entered the building for the first time in 2000, and it's been nothing but a menace. It will be nice to leave that floor behind, when we finally leave for the Hoblit.

Indecisive Ophelia

Current NOGAPS model shows Ophelia moving into the Wilmington-Camp Le Jeune-Cape Lookout, NC area on Wednesday morning, and stalling there well into Saturday night, before heading NE towards New England. Even though Ophelia is a fairly small storm, having it linger directly overhead for days at a stretch will likely mean lots of flooding for this area...

Progressive Blogs Rule!

Isn't this interesting!:

Two years ago, Instapundit had an audience three times larger than Dailykos. Now, Dailykos is the equal of nearly the entire conservative blogosphere, and five other progressive blogs, Talking Points Memo, Eschaton, Crooks and Liars and AmericaBlog, all have audiences larger than Instapundit, which remains the largest conservative blog in terms of audience size.

In a media and political world dominated by conservatives, the blogosphere is emerging as a rising island--soon, perhaps, a continent--of total progressive dominance. As we progressives begin to turn the tide all over the country, it should be noted that the first place where the tide began to turn was on blogs. The revolution really wasn't televised after all.

Daily Show Humor

From Daily Kos:

Jon Stewart: The president has vowed to personally lead the investigation into the government's failed response to Katrina? Isn't that a job perhaps someone else should be doing?

Samantha Bee: No, not at all, Jon. To truly find out what went wrong, it's important for an investigator to have a little distance from the situation. And it's hard to get any more distant from it than the president was last week.

"Ophelia Is A Peculiar Cyclone"

It should be hurricane now, but wind strengths are still a bit sub-par. The NOGAPS forecast keeps budging Ophelia's loop farther and farther north: landfall is now estimated to be Tuesday, in the Myrtle Beach, SC vicinity, with the storm heading almost straight north - Raleigh, NC; Virginia, New England.

A puzzle is why the storm is forecast to move so far north - presumably it's that mid-latitude trough tugging it north, that the following ridge can't counterbalance. The trough will also shear away a big part of the storm while it's completing its loop, which should be an interesting process to watch. In any event, Tampa, FL appears to be in the clear from this storm.

"My Goodness, Susy!"

"We almost became Muslims! I want Jesus!"

Jack T. Chick smacks down pesky Muslim evangelists (courtesy of the friendly folks at B3ta).

"Cabaret" Update

We will apparently be performing "Cabaret" at the Varsity Theatre, in downtown Davis, as has been the usual custom for DMTC shows: even the rental rate for the facility will be the usual 12% of the ticket sales.

In other news, Wells Fargo is contributing $10,000 to underwrite Young Performer's Theater (YPT) shows. Yay!

And construction on Hoblit Performing Arts Center - continues!

Went Late To Luna's...

So I missed Gil Rodriguez's performance, but he seemed happy. Everyone will sure miss him!

Google Purge

Gabe, our librarian, sees this in the news:

The new project, dubbed Google Purge, will join such popular services as Google Images, Google News, and Google Maps. As a part of Purge's first phase, executives will destroy all copyrighted materials that cannot be searched by Google.

Gabe continues: "Thank goodness! I've always felt that I would never get all that stuff cataloged. Now Google will make it simple and easy for me. My favorite item":

As a part of Phase One operations, Google executives will permanently erase the hard drive of any computer that is not already indexed by the Google Desktop Search.

"At long last! Finally, life is simpler, and far easier to contain. Messy humans!"

Superdome Video

One of the misfortunes of my having cancelled all cable television earlier this summer is that I never saw any video regarding Hurricane Katrina. Crooks and Liars has posted gripping video from Fox News of Shepard Smith and Geraldo Rivera just about losing it. Excellent television - for the history books.

Plus, paramedics describe their experiences.

Loop-Da-Loop

Tropical Storm Ophelia forecast for today shows a steady strengthening to hurricane status in a day or so. The storm will move NE, out over the ocean, but then stall, loop around, and likely move in on the coast, but exactly where is uncertain.

Today, the NOGAPS model shows the loop as being fairly tight, which should bring Ophelia marching directly up the Savannah River Valley, starting Wednesday morning. Still, exact movement is still shrouded in mystery, and Ophelia could still move across the Florida peninsula instead, and regenerate in the Gulf of Mexico.

New Theater Delay

Well, it looks like DMTC is going to eat a little crow here. If I understand correctly (my information is second-hand), some electrical switching equipment will be slow to arrive, and sheet rocking can't fully proceed until the equipment is installed. In addition, not all the sheet rock is yet available - our efforts to secure sheet rock donations came up empty, and so the massive purchase order for all the sheet rock didn't go out until fairly late. According to Steve Harrison, the contractor, sheet rocking will likely not even start until the day before the opening of "Cabaret" (scheduled for Sept. 19th): even miracle-worker Steve can't sheet rock such a large space in just a day!

So, we are faced with three options - perform "Cabaret":

1. at the Varsity Theater;
2. in the warehouse space immediately adjacent to the New Theater (within the same building);
3. at the DMTC rehearsal space (the Clubhouse); or,
4. at another theater (maybe not even in Davis).

The first option is probably the best, but we first need to come to an understanding with the city regarding Varsity Theater rent. If an agreement can't be reached, Option 2 is probably next-best. So, we'll see what happens! In any event, New Theater construction IS proceeding, and rather quickly too, but just not quickly enough to meet the "Cabaret" schedule!

Patience! Our journey's end is in sight, but still just slightly out-of-reach!

FEMA Is Broken....

....because that is exactly how the Bush Administration wanted it. It's conservative ideology in action, folks!:

During the 1990s, FEMA was routinely praised as one of the best-functioning federal agencies. Its response to the Midwestern floods of 1993, the Northridge earthquake of 1994, and 1995's Oklahoma City terrorist attack are considered models of emergency response. By contrast, its performance during Katrina is almost universally acknowledged to have been abysmally poor. At first, FEMA's post-Katrina failure appears baffling: What happened to the once-great FEMA?

...Indeed, the White House's new response to the political disaster prompted by Katrina -- one in which officials are attempting to blame authorities in Louisiana, rather than in Washington, for the slow aid -- underscores the Bush philosophy. According to Haddow, instead of working with local officials to try to minimize the impacts of an impending storm, the White House has decided its best strategy is to keep its distance from people on the ground. That way if anything goes wrong, the White House can "attack, attack, attack."

...Haddow says that these requests should have been enough -- more than enough -- to prompt a full-scale federal response. Under the Clinton administration's FEMA, with Witt as the head, a storm of Katrina's magnitude would have prompted federal and state officials to actually meet in order to coordinate their response. "You were all working together to anticipate needs," Haddow says. "You're all sitting in the same room when the things happened -- the Midwest flood, the Northridge quake, the Oklahoma City bombing and all the disasters we responded to. We were in the same room together and nobody had to point fingers."

Close coordination with state officials was key to the Clinton administration's capacity to act quickly in the heat of a disaster, Haddow says. "We had a really solid partnership, so we received solid, timely information from the ground. Then we managed that information and turned it into a mission assignment." In other words, when people on the ground needed something, they knew who in the federal government to ask, and when the federal government had extra resources at the ready -- cops from Chicago, say, or water from Wal-Mart -- it would know where to send them. Contrast that situation to what happened after Katrina, when both Michael Chertoff, the secretary of Homeland Security, and Michael Brown, the FEMA director, admitted to several reporters that they had no idea that people were starving at the New Orleans Convention Center, even though the grim scene there had been played and replayed on television all day.

The Bush administration's distance from local disaster-relief officials is by design. From the moment Bush stepped into office, he's been determined to move away from the coordinated state/local/federal disaster-relief approach used by Clinton. Instead, as Joe Allbaugh, Bush's first FEMA dirctor, told a congressional panel in 2001, Bush wanted to pull the federal government out of the disaster-relief business and aimed to "restore the predominant role of state and local response to most disasters." The federal government became even less involved in natural disaster relief after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when FEMA's mission was shifted toward responding to terrorist attacks. In 2002, Congress created the Department of Homeland Security, and FEMA -- which Clinton had elevated to a Cabinet-level agency -- was made one department in the massive bureaucracy. As a result, although George W. Bush has a nickname for FEMA director Brown ("Brownie"), Brown enjoys far less clout under Bush than Witt enjoyed under Clinton, which Haddow says is an "incalculable loss of influence" for FEMA.

...And balance, Haddow agrees, is what's needed. "You gotta do both," he says. "You've got to fight terrorism." But you've got to respond to hurricanes and earthquakes, too. And when Bush declared a state of emergency in Louisiana on the Saturday before Katrina struck the Gulf, he made a promise to residents that he would respond, Haddow says. "People died because they couldn't get it right," he says. "People died because they didn't deliver on their promise."

Winter Gasoline

California might temporarily relax the Reid Vapor Pressure (RVP) limitation on gasoline, in order to help assure supplies, in view of the damage done by Katrina. They may have little choice, under the circumstances:

SAN FRANCISCO -- California air quality regulators want to temporarily relax gasoline pollution standards to help avert possible shortages and more price hikes stemming from the loss of petroleum imports from hurricane-battered Gulf states.

At a hearing today in Sacramento, the California Air Resources Board is scheduled to consider an emergency action reducing the standards normally in place until Oct. 31 in most parts of the state.

Essentially, the action would permit the early sale of so-called winter gasoline and waive the requirement to sell summer gasoline during the remainder of the high-ozone season.

Following Hurricane Katrina — which damaged oil rigs, refineries and other production facilities — the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would allow the nationwide distribution of gasoline with a lower evaporative standard than some states, including California, require.

Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and Washington were among states that subsequently moved to relax their standards.

On Tuesday, California air board staff members recommended similar action, saying the state is faced with a potential loss of 5% to 10% of its gasoline supplies due to its reduced ability to import what's known as finished gas and blend stocks.

"The decrease in supply would be expected to have a significant adverse effect on the availability and price of gasoline in California and surrounding states," a staff report said.

The proposal calls for increasing the allowable Reid Vapor Pressure — a measure of evaporation — from about 7 pounds per square inch to 9 pounds per square inch, meaning more gasoline vapor would escape into the atmosphere.

The result, said air board spokesman Jerry Martin, would be an increase of 50 tons daily of hydrocarbon emissions statewide — a boost of about 6% or 7%.

The board's staff also calculated that the ozone level would increase by about 1%.

"Potentially, on a very hot day in the Central Valley or Southern California, with very stagnant air, it might lead to a violation of federal ozone standards," Martin said.

Good Housekeeping

I suppose a broom was too much trouble:

BERLIN - A German woman laid waste to her family home by setting fire to it as she tried to kill spiders in a garage with a can of hairspray and a cigarette lighter.