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Bush, Chertoff Warned Before Katrina

Wed Mar. 1, 2006 5:11 PM PST

New video footage shows that Bush was briefed on the probable disaster that could result from Hurricane Katrina, including busted levees, before the storm struck. The video also shows Bush not asking a single question during his final briefing before the hurricane hit. The footage, obtained by the Associated Press, shows

in excruciating detail that while federal officials anticipated the tragedy that unfolded in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast, they were fatally slow to realize they had not mustered enough resources to deal with the unprecedented disaster…

.A top hurricane expert voiced "grave concerns" about the levees and then-Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown told the president and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that he feared there weren't enough disaster teams to help evacuees at the Superdome. "I'm concerned about their ability to respond to a catastrophe within a catastrophe."Just five days later the levees had burst, and Bush stated that he didn't think anyone had any idea that that could happen.

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Predicting the Insurgency

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| Wed Mar. 1, 2006 3:35 PM PST

The latest scoop by Knight-Ridder's Jonathan Landay and Warren Stroebel has been linked around quite a bit:

U.S. intelligence agencies repeatedly warned the White House beginning more than two years ago that the insurgency in Iraq had deep local roots, was likely to worsen and could lead to civil war, according to former senior intelligence officials who helped craft the reports.

Among the warnings, Knight Ridder has learned, was a major study, called a National Intelligence Estimate, completed in October 2003 that concluded that the insurgency was fueled by local conditions - not foreign terrorists- and drew strength from deep grievances, including the presence of U.S. troops.

The reports received a cool reception from Bush administration policymakers at the White House and the office of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, according to the former officials, who discussed them publicly for the first time. Okay, so Rumsfeld and the people in the White House are fools. We knew that. And however wrong our intelligence agencies may have been about various things over the years, this is yet more evidence that they were always considerably less wrong than the civilians—hacks, one might call them—in the Bush administration. We've known that too.

But here's a question that doesn't really get answered in the piece. What could Rumsfeld or anyone else have actually done if they had taken the reports seriously? Was there a window of opportunity in October 2003 when the U.S. military could have shut down the Iraqi insurgency, with a change of tactics or whatnot, if only Rumsfeld had just listened to the NIE? Or was it just that the insurgency was inevitable and unstoppable and no amount of forewarning by U.S. intelligence could have changed any of that? I certainly don't know, and it's an important question, at least for those debating whether the occupation of Iraq was a catastrophe because it was a good idea that was completely bungled in the execution (as many a disgruntled hawk now believes) or because it was a bad idea that was bound to fail from the start.

Demographics and Patriarchy

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| Wed Mar. 1, 2006 3:03 PM PST

Philip Longman makes a somewhat novel argument in Foreign Policy this month. He notes that population growth rates in the industrialized world are slowing down, because families aren't having enough kids these days. Eventually populations will shrink in many countries—it's already happening in Japan. But Longman argues that, in most of these countries, what he calls "patriarchal" families will still reproduce faster than their godless liberal counterparts. So the world of the future will "disproportionately be descended from parents who rejected the social tendencies that once made childlessness and small families the norm." More kids will come from socially conservative families, basically.

Longman thinks that this explains why America is becoming more conservative; the right-wingers are having more babies. "Among states that voted for President George W. Bush in 2004, fertility rates are 12 percent higher than in states that voted for Sen. John Kerry." Well, maybe. But probably not. Even granted that conservatives tend to have more kids than liberals, that doesn't mean that the kids all stay conservative. Polls in the United States show that every generation tends to be more liberal than their parents, at least on social issues. George W. Bush may be president, but the country as a whole is far more socially liberal than it was, say, thirty or twenty years ago. (Really.) So it's not clear that demographics are necessarily going to lead to "religious revivals and a rebirth of the patriarchal family [rebirth? did it ever die?]" all around the industrialized world. But Longman's argument's worth reading all the same.

Stalemate on Darfur

Wed Mar. 1, 2006 12:06 PM PST

When we wrote last week about Darfur, the UN was talking about taking over peacekeeping duties from the African Union there. Now top UN officials are claiming that the African Union is backing away from the plan. The Sudanese government has opposed UN involvement, and has helped fuel anti-UN sentiment around the continent, with other African leaders expressing concern that outside involvement will only cause more violence in the region.

Among other things, the UN's special envoy for Sudan, Jan Pronk, said that "there has been talk" that Sudan will become the "same situation as Iraq a couple years ago"—i.e., that an insurgency will appear to fight the intervention force, or that al-Qaeda will become more active in the region. Just days ago, Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir warned that Darfur would become a graveyard for any military force entering the region without Sudan's permission.

It's questionable how long the African Union can remain effective in Darfur. A larger intervention force will be needed not only to stop the Sudanese militias that continue to carry out genocide, but also to enforce negotiations between Darfur and a president who demonstrates a lack of regard for his own citizens. Today the United States will hand the rotating Security Council presidency over to Argentina. That leaves a month before the seat goes to China, which has significant oil and trade interests in Sudan and is extremely unlikely to take any sort of lead in halting genocide there.

Under Their Thumb

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| Wed Mar. 1, 2006 11:21 AM PST

Via the Guardian, the Stones sex it down.

When the [Rolling] Stones make their Chinese debut next month, they will succumb to government pressure by dropping Brown Sugar, Let's Spend the Night Together, Honky Tonk Woman and Beast of Burden from their playlist, an associate told Reuters.

The Chinese ministry of culture told the band in 2003 that these four songs -some of the most sexually explicit in the band's repertoire - were unacceptable. ...

It has been a long time coming. The British band has been in talks about playing in China since the late 1970s, when a concert was denied by a government concerned about "spiritual pollution" from western culture.

Scientists enlist cruise ships to collect oceans data

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| Tue Feb. 28, 2006 4:40 PM PST

Speaking of the ocean, AP reports:

Scientists are enlisting cargo ships to measure water temperatures, ocean currents and even the height of clouds in the hope of revealing the oceans' secrets.

Peter Ortner, chief scientist with the Atlantic Ocean Marine Laboratory of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said that in order to address questions such as the changing path of the Gulf Stream scientists need more than the few years of data most missions can provide.

The long-term data that commercial ships can yield is what has been historically so difficult to obtain and what the latest project hopes to achieve.

And did we mention that the current issue of Mother Jones has a special report on the fate of the oceans?

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How Medicare Wastes $80 Billion a Year

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| Tue Feb. 28, 2006 4:13 PM PST

Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy and Research has just put out a new, and easily readable, report arguing that the Bush administration's 2003 Medicare bill will essentially "waste" $800 billion over the next decade because it was so poorly designed. Among other things, Republicans in Congress refused to allow Medicare to use its buying power to bargain down the price of drugs—something that is down in virtually every other industrialized country around the world—which would have saved $600 billion over ten years.

Not only that, but this route would have been much simpler too—all Congress would have had to do was to establish an add-on drug benefit to the existing Medicare program. As Baker notes, the bill was deliberately structured to "ensure that multiple private insurance companies would provide the benefit rather than Medicare." It was great for those insurance companies; bad for everyone else.

It's a good paper, although I suspect Congress could wring even more savings from Medicare if it really wanted to. Baker is only comparing the current program with a more ideal program that would have Medicare run things (saving billions in administrative costs) and bargain down the price of drugs. But you could also eliminate the $86 billion in subsidies that the government is paying to prevent companies from shifting costs onto the government—a mostly ludicrous provision and "pure windfall" for many companies—as well as the $6.4 billion over the next decade to subsidize health savings accounts. A lot of that money could be used to expand the current drug benefit and still have savings left over. In fact, that's exactly what the House Democrats have been proposing all along, and it's a pretty good start.

Will the Birthing Suit Save Lives?

Tue Feb. 28, 2006 4:11 PM PST

The invention of the birthing suit is upon us, and while it may sound silly, this Velcro contraption can save lives of at-risk women in remote locales by preventing haemorrhaging, which causes a third of the 500,000 deaths during delivery a year, can potentially be averted by this new invention.

Assembled from a mass of Velcro and tight fitting material, the reusable suit circulates blood from the legs to the vital organs, thus delivering oxygen. While it is not a permanent solution, it buys time, and according to Sullen Miller, lead researcher at the University of California, "in our research, women who appeared clinically dead, with no blood pressure and no palpable pulse, were resuscitated and kept alive for up to two days while waiting for blood transfusions." This technology could have major effect in developing countries, as the suit requires no medical training to apply, and if it allows enough time to get the appropriate care, can rescue women from deadly situations.

An Anti-Adoption Bill to Get Behind

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| Tue Feb. 28, 2006 3:02 PM PST

Via Needlenose, Ohio Democrat Robert Hagan has a modest proposal:

State Sen. Robert Hagan sent out e-mails to fellow lawmakers late Wednesday night, stating that he intends to "introduce legislation in the near future that would ban households with one or more Republican voters from adopting children or acting as foster parents." The e-mail ended with a request for co-sponsorship.

Hagan said his legislation was written in response to a bill introduced in the Ohio House this month by state Rep. Ron Hood, R-Ashville, that… seeks to ban children from being placed for adoption or foster care in homes where the prospective parent or a roommate is homosexual, bisexual or transgender.

To further lampoon Hood's bill, Hagan wrote in his mock proposal that "credible research" shows that adopted children raised in Republican households are more at risk for developing "emotional problems, social stigmas, inflated egos, and alarming lack of tolerance for others they deem different than themselves and an air of overconfidence to mask their insecurities."Priceless.

Prison and Debt

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| Tue Feb. 28, 2006 1:19 PM PST

The New York Times notes in an editorial today that convicted felons are often saddled with debts from state-mandated legal fees and treatment programs that they can't possibly repay when they leave prison. And very often, until they repay them, they aren't allowed to vote:

Last week, an article by The Times's Adam Liptak introduced us to a disabled woman named Beverly Dubois who lost the right to vote because she could not pay about $1,600 of charges that were assessed in connection with her marijuana conviction. The debt is growing rapidly because of the interest charged by the state. Ms. Dubois, who served nine months in jail, has paid her debt to society. But until she settles the one to the state, she is stripped of her rights as a citizen. Disabled in a car accident, she can send in only $10 per month. At that rate, she is likely to die before paying off the debt.
All that for a "marijuana conviction," already the most asinine charge on the book. Fortunately the federal government spends about $4 billion a year to make sure Ms. Dubois and other pot-smokers have their lives destroyed before they cause any "trouble."