An 'Irregularity' On Flight 17 (Update: Nothing But Us Birds)

See update below.

A tip came to several bloggers tonight about an alleged attack on a domestic flight in the US, one that had not yet been reported in the media. Little Green Footballs posted the first notice of the rumors earlier today, but Michelle Malkin has spoken with the airline involved, America West.

The tipster told us that a surface-to-air missile had been fired at a flight earlier this week (Thursday, as it turns out) coming out of New York, but had missed. The shot presumably came from the swamps of New Jersey nearby JFK. Phil Gee, an associate manager of media relations, told Michelle that the captain reported an "irregularity" but continued his flight uneventfully to Phoenix. The FBI interrogated all passengers and crew, but Gee would not say whether anyone reported seeing a missile.

"Nothing is confirmed," Michelle reports as his response.

America West denies one element of the tip, that it alerted its flight crews of the missile attack. The airline does say that the story may have spread via the use of an online forum for its crews, however. Based on the language in the tip, that may well have been what was meant.

Michelle continues to investigate this story. Stay tuned. If any other passengers or crew from Flight 17 surface, we'll post on it immediately.

UPDATE: Michelle has a source that reports this as a false alarm:

The sighting was reported near Colt's Neck, NJ, which is a major route south out of NY. FAA set up a small temporary flight restriction around the area while checking radar files. Turned out to be nothing more than birds, and [a] big game of "telephone."

That's a relief.

Able Danger: Closed Hearings?

AJ Strata notes that the Senate Judiciary Committee has come under pressure from the Pentagon to close its Able Danger hearings to the public, just when it has finally acknowledged finding three additional witnesses that corroborate the identification of Mohammed Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers over a year before the attacks. Why would the Pentagon want the hearings closed? Curt Weldon apparently knows one reason:

Witnesses from the Pentagon are expected to testify at that hearing; that's why they want it classified. FOX News has learned that committee Chairman Arlen Specter's office is vigorously resisting the request.

Some former Able Danger analysts and Rep. Curt Weldon (search) say the formerly clandestine intelligence unit identified Mohammed Atta (search) and three other of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers one year before the attacks that left over 3,000 people dead. They also claim that their repeated requests to turn over the information to the FBI were ignored.

Weldon said a former Army officer will testify next week that he was also ordered to destroy data that included reference to Atta.

"In the summer of 2000, he was ordered and, or, he would go to jail if he didn't comply," the Pennsylvania Republican said. "He was ordered to destroy 2.5 terabytes of data specific to Able Danger, the Brooklyn [terror] cell and Mohammad Atta. He will name the person who ordered him to destroy that material."

Other witnesses will include an FBI agent who will testify that she set up three meetings in 2000 between the FBI's Washington field office and the Able Danger, but each was cancelled at the last minute, Weldon said.

The Pentagon has changed its position on this story, from originally questioning the very existence of Able Danger (search) to now confirming that the Defense Department has identified five former members of the unit who all say they remember Atta's picture or name, on a chart in 2000.

Why worry about whether this gets discussed in open session of Congress? The Pentagon now admits the program existed, that it mined open-source information, and that it identified Atta and others as al-Qaeda operatives. What they don't want discussed is what the Pentagon did with the data -- and what else Able Danger may have found. Some of that data, the part that focused on overseas threats, still exists and might still be in use. Col. Tony Shaffer made that clear in his interview with Government Security News earlier this month.

AJ Strata wonders who ordered the destruction of the data, and notes that the Pentagon's exclusion of military lawyers from that order somehow strikes an ominous note. He and I differ on this point. Under normal circumstances, the lawyers wouldn't make that decision anyway. Destruction of classified material gets handled through the normal chain of command, and receiving "orders" to destroy data on a closed program like Able Danger may not really be that unusual. If the lawyers had demanded it, I think that would lend itself to a more political explanation.

Now, if I had more faith in Weldon as a source, his pinpointing of the destruction in spring/summer 2000 would have more impact, as AJ notes in his blog. It would have been right when Atta made his move to the US. However, no one up to now has offered that kind of timeline for the destruction of the data. Shaffer noted that he had kept the Able Danger archive until February 2004, almost four years later, and that only after he went to the Commission did his security clearances get interrupted and his files removed. He provided AD data to other intelligence resources focusing on overseas targets. None of the other witnesses mentioned the destruction of data in 2000.

However, clearly something changed at the Pentagon which forced them into conceding almost every point Weldon ever made except in producing the documentation. What that change might have been could reveal itself during the course of the Judiciary Committee hearings. Since both the Pentagon and the 9/11 Commission have undermined their credibility severely over the last month on Able Danger, I think that it behooves Senator Specter to keep the hearings open to the public and allow all of us to find out why this crucial finding got ignored by both the military/intelligence bureaucracies and the 9/11 Commission later on.

UPDATE: AJ Strata has stayed on this like a bulldog today. The New York Post now reports that Able Danger tipped off the Pentagon that al-Qaeda planned on attacking out of Yemen three weeks before the suicide bombing on the USS Cole in October 2000:

Members of a secret Pentagon intelligence unit known as Able Danger warned top military generals that it had uncovered information of increased al Qaeda "activity" in Aden harbor less than three weeks before the attack on the USS Cole, The Post has learned.

In the latest explosive revelation in the Able Danger saga, two former members of the data-mining team are expected to testify to the Senate Judiciary Committee next week that they uncovered alarming terrorist activity and associations in Aden weeks before the Oct. 12, 2000, suicide bombing of the U.S. warship that killed 17 sailors.

Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, the Defense Intelligence Agency's former liaison to Able Danger, told The Post that Capt. Scott Phillpott, Able Danger's leader, briefed Gen. Peter Schoomaker, former head of Special Operations Command and now Army chief of staff, about the findings on Yemen "two or three weeks" before the Cole attack.

"Yemen was elevated by Able Danger to be one of the top three hot spots for al Qaeda in the entire world," Shaffer recalled.

This would explain why the Pentagon doesn't want the Able Danger hearings to go public. If this account can be verified, it makes the question of why the program got shut down. A successful prediction of terrorist activity should have resulted in an expansion of the program, not a disavowal of it. The intelligence that led to the prediction may also still have validity, which a public hearing might jeopardize -- but that seems highly unlikely after five years.

However, it also means that the documentation and the 2.5 terabytes of data that Weldon claimed got destroyed in the spring or summer of 2000 had to have been still extant, at least through September 2000, for the Able Danger unit to make this determination. It provides a real problem for that earlier allegation, unless the destruction only involved that data which applied to domestic cells of al-Qaeda. Could that data get separated from the information that accurately identified Yemen as the site of the next AQ attack? Perhaps, but again, it seems unlikely.

These hearings should be interesting indeed.

France To Iran: Export Nukes!

Reminding us all once again that the French have strange ideas about partnership and alliances, the Chirac government signaled to the Teheran mullahcracy that they would have no problem with Iran exporting nuclear technology to other Islamic nations:

A French Foreign Ministry spokesman said yesterday that Paris would not object to Mr. Ahmadinejad's suggestion that Iran share its nuclear energy technology with other Islamic countries, as long as the Iranian program fully adhered to the international treaty against nuclear proliferation.

That comment came after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other U.S. officials said the idea of Iran sharing nuclear technology with anyone only underscored the dangers of Tehran's nuclear ambitions.

Has France gone completely insane? The entire point of non-proliferation is to ensure that nuclear technology does not wind up in the hands of those who would use it for military purposes. Given that most of the Islamic nations that might want Iran to share their technology and capabilities have large stocks of cheap oil, why else would they want expensive and complicated nuclear reactors? Condoleezza Rice made the same point in her response, which now shows that the EU-3 cannot possibly represent the nonproliferation efforts of the West. France just offered Iran the right to set up another AQ Khan ring, only this time out in the open.

Russia matched France's retreat in the face of Iranian intransigence by refusing to support moving the issue to the UN Security Council. Despite personal diplomacy from George Bush, Putin instead talked in circles about diplomacy being the solution:

"The potential of diplomatic solutions to all these issues is far from exhausted," Putin said at a joint appearance with Bush in the East Room a day after meeting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. "And we will undertake all steps necessary to settle all these problems and issues, not aggravate them. . . . We do not want our careless actions to lead to the development of events along the North Korean variant."

By that, Putin meant the heretofore fruitless attempts to force Pyongyang to give up its own weapons program -- a program that the North Koreans now say has yielded several nuclear bombs. North Korea has been brought before the Security Council in the past, only to have China block action against it. Now North Korea has abandoned the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty altogether as it develops weapons, while six-party talks in Beijing involving the United States are stalemated.

None of that makes any sense at all. Part of the creation of the North Korean problem was the insistence in 1994 that the US meet unilaterally with North Korea rather than insist on a multilateral approach to pressure Pyongyang to comply. Now as then, Russia and others still insist that Bush's refusal to act unilaterally with the Kim regime keeps a solution from being reached. On Iran and North Korea, Russia and other nations abandon the multilateral UN approach that they claimed held the only legitimate authority to force Saddam Hussein to comply with his international obligations under treaty.

We are now faced with a nuclear Iran and allies that seem willing to offer endless appeasements, including the right to proliferate, rather than address the threat directly. The same nations that chastised George Bush for his unilateralism and lack of deference to the inaction of the UN now refuse to allow the UN to even hear the issue at all. If the UN had any value at all before this, the French and Russian capitulations show it as nothing more than an illusion of a global comity that spawns delusions of cooperation and friendship.

Louisiana DHS Officials Under Indictment As Levees Broke

One of the events that any inquest into Hurricane Katrina and its devastation must explain why the state and local agencies did not follow their own emergency plans or put all their assets in the field. The response appeared sluggish and confused, and the emergency operations plans approved by the state and on which the federal government relied never got implemented.

Now the Los Angeles Times reports that several officials of the Louisiana state Department of Homeland Security had already been indicted on charges of misappropriation of government funds, waste, and mismanagement. FEMA had sent millions of dollars to Louisiana to help them prepare for an event like Katrina, but no one knows what happened to the cash:

Senior officials in Louisiana's emergency planning agency already were awaiting trial over allegations stemming from a federal investigation into waste, mismanagement and missing funds when Hurricane Katrina struck.

And federal auditors are still trying to track as much as $60 million in unaccounted for funds that were funneled to the state from the Federal Emergency Management Agency dating back to 1998. ...

For instance, a Nov. 30, 2004, report by Tonda L. Hadley, a director in the Denton field office, examined $40.5 million sent to the Louisiana agency, mostly for the Hazard Mitigation program. The report found that the state's emergency office did not have receipts to account for 97% of the $15.4 million it had awarded to subcontractors on 19 major projects.

Even in the notoriously corrupt government of Louisiana, having receipts for only three percent of government spending has to set a new record for opacity. Those undocumented expenditures will no doubt implicate the subcontractors in some sort of money-laundering scheme, especially if the investigation finds that little of the work got performed -- and based on the response to Katrina, that appears to be the case in general, if not in specifics.

More money got sent to Aegis Innovative Systems, a consultant firm that ate up most of $2.8 million in government grants for that purpose. Aegis, it turns out, is run by Michael Howard, a former Louisiana DHS official. More money went to buying LL Bean parkas, a Ford Crown Victoria, a junket to Germany for the DHS director, and so on. $10.7 million earmarked for buying up low-level property for condemnation and conversion to non-residential use wound up in the coffers of other government agencies and consultants.

It looks like the DHS officials in Louisiana wanted to prepare for a rainy day, but just not for the kind of rainy day that Katrina brought the Gulf Coast. The feds had already tried to clean house where the state couldn't or wouldn't, bringing indictments against the deputy director of hazard mitigation, Michael L. Brown (no relation to the former FEMA director) and Michael C. Appe, who led a team tasked with identifying abuses. Louisiana put the foxes in charge of the henhouse, it seems.

All of this shows that Louisiana left itself woefully unprepared for the catastrophic damage of Katrina. Small wonder that state and local officials reacted like deer in the headlights of an oncoming truck in the days before and after landfall. Funds that could have gone towards emergency preparedness, identificantion and abeyance of hazardous materials, and especially identifying fraud and abuse went elsewhere. Now Louisianans and New Orleans' evacuees must pay the price for the corruption and incompetence of not only their leadership but also their bureaucracy. Is it difficult to understand why more than half of the displaced have little desire to return?

The Governator Will Be Back

Arnold Schwarzenegger has decided to run for a full term as California's governor despite sagging poll numbers. In a suprisingly early announcement, Arnold told a San Diego audience that he had no intention of leaving his reforms unfinished:

The announcement came at the end of a public forum here, after a carefully screened crowd questioned him about his efforts to revamp California's schools and its budget process. No one, however, asked him about his plans for next year, when his term expires, even though his appearance had been heavily promoted as the place for announcing his re-election bid. So he asked himself if he would run.

"Of course, I'm going to finish the job," he said. "I'm a follow-through guy."

"I'm not in there for three years," Mr. Schwarzenegger added. "I'm in there for seven years. Yes, I will run again." The crowd inside the auditorium applauded, as protesters outside chanted, "Hey hey, ho ho, Schwarzenegger's got to go."

Just as an aside: Do people really think that "hey hey, ho ho" chant demonstrates cleverness or wit? I've heard more original cheers at Little League games. Those protest chants sound like the equivalent of a Ted Kennedy panel examination -- the same droning language used with a fill-in-the-blank utility that does nothing but emphasize the mindlessness of those who employ it.

That mindless protest provides an example of how Arnold could still win with his approval ratings mired in the 30s for the moment. First, the gay-marriage bill shows that Californians do not get the representation they want at the Legislature, regardless of the merits or demerits of the bill itself. They voted against gay marriage five years ago, only to have their representatives try to pass it again and again and finally succeeding this year. Only the Governator's veto kept it from trumping the will of 60% of California's electorate, which has a significant Democratic majority. Arnold made himself the people's representative, restraining an imperial Legislature that has far too easy of a time maintaining a Democratic deathgrip on state politics.

That allows Schwarzenegger to run not only as a counterbalance, but as a reformer with more work to do. He wants to change the way California apportions its districts to disrupt that political deathgrip, a much better idea than the term limits that failed to do the job almost a generation ago. While he may have lost some popularity and luster of celebrity, that combination will be hard for any Democrat to overcome. It will take someone with star quality and a sense of reform to beat him, and the closest thing the Democrats have is Dianne Feinstein -- who has already ruled it out.

Instead, the Democrats point to state treasurer Phil Angelides and state controller Steve Westly. Both beat Arnold in mock elections held by their party, but no one thinks that either of them could take on Arnold in a real election. Remember that Arnold polled low early on in the recall race, as did the recall itself, but he knows how to campaign effectively. Neither of the technocrats have that kind of charisma or name recognition. That's why Democrats hope to draft another big-name Hollywood candidate to oppose Arnold. The New York Times mentions Warren Beatty or Rob Reiner, both of whom have been very politically involved with the far Left for decades. Neither, however, will have any credibility as moderates, which means that the Democrats will concede a large swath of the middle, especially with Reiner.

Never count Arnold out. When he says, "I'll be back," he usually means it.

Saudi Women To Vote, Hold Office

The Saudi kingdom has begun to offer elections at the local level in order to move towards moderation and limited democracy for the past several months. However, in a major shift for the highly repressive Wahhabist society, the monarchy has apparently demanded suffrage for women as well as men and will insist that women not only vote but become eligible as officers in an important trade organization:

Saudi women will be able to fully participate in an election for the first time in this ultraconservative Islamic kingdom, after the government ordered a local chamber of commerce to allow female voters and candidates.

The Jiddah Trade and Industry Chamber had rejected the nominations of 10 businesswomen to run for the chamber's governing board. Trade Minister Hashem bin Abdullah Yamani overruled this decision, a Saudi official said Friday. ...

The minister made his decision on Tuesday after receiving petitions from businesswomen asking to be allowed to run, the Saudi official said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't permitted to speak to the media.

The minister ordered the election for the 18-member board to be postponed until Nov. 15 to give time for new candidates — including women — to come forward, the official said.

The same government that has repressed women for decades, who have decreed that women can only hold a job with the approval of a male guardian and are forbidden to drive, now wants women to vote and hold office in business organizations. This shift towards liberalization shows significant progress in the strategy of positive engagement with the Saudis, but probably the eruption of Islamofascist terrorism against the royal family has more to do with convincing them of the need for reform.

What does this small step for the liberation of women mean, exactly? It could mean that the royal family wants more women involved in business alone, as unemployment creates a problem for the Saudi government. Estimates of the rate go between 15-30%, which led the Saudis to restrict the number of foreign workers in the country a couple of years ago. Allowing women and their capital into the workplace, especially in small businesses, could help prompt more local employment as those businesses grow and women integrate better into the local markets.

However, it also sets an expectation of respect for women in the businessplace that will undoubtedly carry over into politics, especially since economics inextricably links to politics in any society. The internal politics of the trade organizations also spill over into public policy, and if women hold offices within these organizations, they will have to be allowed to engage in the public debates about the direction of the trade and its importance to the communities it serves.

The Saudis certainly know this; it's one of the reasons they didn't allow women to do this before. King Abdullah and the abd-el-Aziz clan must have some strategy to not only liberalize the kingdom but to provide some framework for equal rights. In the next round of municipal elections, do not find yourself surprised to hear that women not only vote but win offices in the local governments.

Big Lizards In The Blogosphere

Dafydd ab Hugh, novelist and guest-blogger extraordinaire, has finally launched his own blogsite, Big Lizards. Dafydd has written numerous comments both supportive and critical of me at CQ, and his excellent writing led me to invite him to join me as a guest blogger for an open-ended run. Dafydd posted over fifty essays the past two months here at CQ, all of them provocative and intelligent, and I've thoroughly enjoyed his contributions to our site.

Now we will all have a single point of reference for Dafydd's insights, and much more than that. Big Lizards intends on offering a multimedia experience based on the blogosphere model, and Dafydd has done a fine job in designing the site to represent his writing and talent. Make sure you visit Big Lizards and blogroll it!

A Quiet Day, A Few Notes

Sorry for the quiet day. I have had a long week at work and have had a number of projects keeping me busy -- and to top it off, I had to wrap them up before I took a week off. Today and this evening turned out to be difficult for blogging, but I may still have some energy left this evening. To top it off, someone sent me a huge unsolicited attachment, twice, and filled up my mailbox. If you sent me mail that bounced back today, I have the fixed the problem now.

This next week should be more fun. I'm taking a vacation to visit Toronto. Assuming that the RCMP does not arrest me, I will speak at the University of Toronto on Tuesday evening as part of a panel discussion on journalism and blogging. The First Mate and I will spend a few days sightseeing in Canada, mostly in the Toronto area, as it is her first trip to Canada and the first one for me that allowed for any non-business time.

Tomorrow I will host the Northern Alliance Radio Network, as Mitch Berg takes a well-deserved day off from his center-mike duties. We're on every Saturday, noon to 3 CT, on AM 1280 The Patriot. Day By Day's Chris Muir joins us in the second hour to discuss his excellent comic strip. You can join us, too, by either listening to our broadcast in the Twin Cities or on the Internet stream at the station's website. Call in at 651-289-4488 and talk to the NARN and Chris Muir directly.

Keep a close eye on the blog this weekend. I have more information on Judge Karlton, who ruled that the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance harmed the Constitutional rights of children this week, and also more Able Danger details.

Confirmation Analysis: A Boomerang Borking

Now that the smoke has cleared on what many forecast as the Mother of All Political Battles -- the Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings on the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court -- we can see exactly who won and who lost. Despite their initial misgivings about taking Roberts head-on, the Democrats decided to go all out in an attempt to Bork Roberts as a civil-rights Neanderthal with no heart ... and they failed miserably.

For evidence of this, one need look no further than the editorial pages of the Washington Post, which notes that Roberts not only kept his cool under fire, but provided rebuttal after rebuttal to the out-of-context attacks on the Democrats:

IN HIS TESTIMONY before the Senate Judiciary Committee over the past two days, Judge John G. Roberts Jr. shed important light on his views and likely approach if confirmed as the Supreme Court's chief justice. To the apparent frustration of some Democrats on the committee, he declined, as nominees traditionally do, to give his specific opinion of the merits of matters that could come before the court. But he spoke with surprising clarity on several issues and displayed an agile legal mind and an appealing ability to disagree constructively, both characteristics of a good chief justice. While Americans still lack a road map to how he will handle the many important matters the court will face, Judge Roberts is less of a sphinx than he was at the time of his nomination.

The nominee affirmed that he regards stare decisis -- the doctrine of generally allowing even erroneous past decisions to stand -- as a critical foundation of the American legal system. While he rightly pointed out that precedents sometimes need to be overruled, his position distinguishes him from more radical conservatives such as Justice Clarence Thomas, who regards the doctrine as having limited value in constitutional cases. Those who might disagree with Judge Roberts's views have some assurance that he will not seek to rewrite large swaths of modern American law.

It isn't just the Post, either. The New York Times followed with two analyses today which both paint Roberts in a not-unflattering light. They couldn't even convince the Times and the Post that Roberts lacked mainstream credentials, and that should have been a slam-dunk.

The Democratic attack on Roberts, especially following the disgusting smear tactics at NARAL and even at the Washington Post earlier attempting to paint Roberts as a bigot and misogynist, backfired for those who watched Roberts field questions from the panel. His forthright answers as well as his efforts to explain when he could not give an answer demonstrated clear, concise thinking, a commitment to ethics, an ability to listen and engage in a friendly and open manner, and most of all a keen legal intellect that most of his opponents lacked -- a disadvantage that most of them insisted on showing over and over again.

It might be possible to arrange for a panel of dullards to appear on television for three days and nights in a row to make fools of themselves outside of an Average Joe revival, but the Judiciary Committee Democrats make it unnecessary. Ted Kennedy, by far, was the worst. Every time he started his questioning, you could count on three topics getting mentioned in a dull monotone in no particular order: Hurricane Katrina, the open wound of racism, and giving "a hand up, not a handout". About the fifteenth time Kennedy said this during the hearing or the attendant ad hoc press conferences, one wondered whether Kennedy has run out of gas to the extent that he can only hang on to one speech at a time. During the questioning, especially on the first day, he read his questions from a script and appeared not to understand or acknowledge the answers. The pathetic, mumbling performance not only calls into question his effectiveness but his health.

Joe Biden didn't have the excuse of infirmity. Whining and mugging for the cameras, Biden issued long-winded and snarky questions and then complained that when Roberts contradicted him by accusing the nominee of "filibustering". A chagrined Arlen Specter, who had to scold both Biden and Kennedy several times for interrupting Roberts, reminded Biden publicly that the reason for the hearing was to get answers from Roberts and not to hear questions from Biden. When corrected by Specter or by Roberts, Biden would sulk, pout, make faces, and toss out insulting quips. Roberts unfailingly responded with professionalism and patience, as one would to any unruly child not their own.

Chuck Schumer didn't act out like Biden nor did he seem out of it like Kennedy, but his act didn't improve his reputation, either. Schumer also whined when Roberts gave answers that stretched past two sentences, often complaining about how much of "his" time he had lost to Roberts. He then would go out to the press corps and complain about not getting answers from Roberts, a contradiction that most of them probably failed to report to their readers, but those watching or listening to the C-SPAN feed could hardly miss.

And then, just when one would suspect that the Democrats might have remembered the First Rule Of Holes -- when you find yourself in one, stop digging -- the entire panel demanded a third round of questioning to continue the debacle. Overjoyed, Karl Rove must have sacrificed yet another goat to the political gods. All the Republicans had to do was to relax, sit back, be boring, and let the Democrats continue to bury themselves in their own animosity, and they proved themselves masters at all four tasks. (That, by the way, isn't a compliment.)

Now the Democrats face a dilemma. Roberts has beaten them, and now they have to vote on his confirmation. If they vote against him, they will lose all credibility for the next confirmation hearings; as Orrin Hatch put it, if the Democrats can't find more than a handful of votes for Roberts, no appointee from Bush can hope to get fair consideration. If they vote for Roberts, it exposes all their rhetoric about him having "no heart," his nomination being "a roll of the dice", and their warping of his record to turn him into a pre-Brown deconstructionist as false and purely partisan.

My prediction: Roberts will get Feinstein and Kohl's vote, perhaps Feingold as well as Leahy, the one Democrat who may have improved his standing overall. That will be all.

Qatar Latest Arab Country To Greet Israel

Israel's withdrawal continues to pay diplomatic dividends. Yesterday, the two American allies held high-level meetings between their foreign ministers in public, making the emirate the third Arab nation in two weeks to extend some diplomatic recognition to the Israelis:

In a space of just two weeks, Qatar, Pakistan and Indonesia have all held high-level public meetings with Israel — a rare event for Muslim countries. The president of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, who had long taken an especially hardline stand against the Jewish state, even shook hands and exchanged pleasantries with Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, in front of a host of delegates to the world summit.

Arab countries like Qatar are encouraging efforts to renew and expand peacemaking as a way to ease the Palestinian conflict and to blunt the influence of Islamic militants, who are using discontent about the Palestinians and the war in Iraq to stir up unrest worldwide.

They have also concluded that Israel is not going to be destroyed — and that it might be in the Muslim nations' best interests to be involved in the Mideast peace process.

As I argued earlier, Gaza held almost no value for Israel and had become a millstone around the Israeli's necks. Pulling their vulnerable citizens behind the security wall and closing the borders allowed them to create a defensible perimeter and opened up more options for responses to provocative actions from the terrorists within the territory. Diplomatically, it signalled tho regional moderates that Israel would risk a first step in order to resolve the situation, and therefore put the Palestinians in the position of having to respond with a matching gesture.

So far, the Israelis have managed to turn this into a diplomatic triumph. It will find tougher slogging ahead when Muslim nations try to bargain with Israel on Jerusalem and the West Bank settlements. However, their direct diplomacy represents a marked improvement over the previous method that relied on the US and Europe as intermediaries; after all, peace cannot easily come between nations who cannot be seen talking with each other out of fear of deadly reprisals from their own subjects.

Moreover, the expanding diplomatic ties of Israel put more pressure on Mahmoud Abbas to meet his basic commitments of peacemaking before the other nations will press Israel for more concessions. They have belatedly found Islamist extremism and the American reaction to it highly unpalatable and want the region to stop producing it. If Abbas cannot handle the Palestinians, he may find the Palestinians losing even the public expressions of sympathy and support they have used to sustain their mythology of victimhood for decades. The Qatari minister makes this clear:

Addressing the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations on Wednesday, the Qatari foreign minister, Sheik Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabor Al Thani, saluted Israel for quitting Gaza and said Arab nations must respond with their own overtures.

"Failure to address internal political, economic and social grievances associated with the lack of a just and equitable settlement for the Palestinian question and the conflict in the Middle East strengthens the arm of extremism," he said.

On Thursday, al Thani said it was possible to establish full diplomatic relations with Israel before the formation of an independent Palestine.

Even the Arab nations have accepted Israel's existence. They have had their fill of the decades-old conflict and want this question settled -- and with Israel's pullout from Gaza, they finally see an opening. For the first time, they hold their fellow Arabs responsible for taking the next steps towards real peace.

Will Only Saints Come Marching Back?

George Bush's uplifting speech, designed to inspire the confidence of the people most affected by the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, may have less effect than he hopes. He delivered it well and introduced intelligent plans for renewal, but half of the New Orleans evacuees appear to have decided not to go back regardless of the circumstances, according to the Washington Post:

Fewer than half of all New Orleans evacuees living in emergency shelters here said they will move back home, while two-thirds of those who want to relocate planned to settle permanently in the Houston area, according to a survey by The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health.

The wide-ranging poll found that these survivors of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath remain physically and emotionally battered but unbroken. They praised God and the U.S. Coast Guard for saving them, but two weeks after the storm, nearly half still sought word about missing loved ones or close friends who may not have been as lucky. ...

Forty-three percent of these evacuees planned to return to New Orleans, the survey found. But just as many -- 44 percent -- said they will settle somewhere else, while the remainder were unsure. Many of those who were planning to return said they will be looking to buy or rent somewhere other than where they lived. Overall, only one in four said they plan to move back into their old homes, the poll found.

The polling sample consisted of 680 adults from eight different shelters, out of an estimated 8,000 currently awaiting more substantial living arrangements. That sample looks pretty solid, and statistically speaking, it results in only a 4% margin of error. It also gives a pretty good look at the demographics of those who fled into shelters, as opposed to family members or into their own temporary housing arrangements. Sixty percent earned less than $20K, 12% had no job when Katrina hit, 70% had no insurance for their property, half had no health insurance, and almost half have a significant health problem unrelated to the evacuation.

What does that tell us? It tells us that the poor in New Orleans have little stake in returning to their city. Given that the Big Easy had one of the higher poverty rates in the nation, that will result in the largest migration of the poor out of an area since the Dust Bowl sent refugees to the West Coast in the 1930s. Most of them will stay in Houston and the state of Texas, but some will strike out farther in an attempt to rebuild their lives.

That migration will complicate matters for the rebuilding of the city as well as the politics of the region. Congress expects to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the Katrina disaster area, and it hopes to earn some bona fides for its commitment to the poor as a result. Bush wants to show how we can build an ownership society to lift them up. If the poor don't return to New Orleans, neither will get exactly what they want from their efforts, and American voters may soon question the expenditure of federal dollars for the rebuilding efforts of individual states.

Politically, an exodus of the poor will change the face of Louisiana. Like most urban areas, New Orleans provides Democrats with their power base, and the poor comprise a major portion of that voting bloc. Thanks to a poor initial response from state and local officials -- all Democrats -- to Katrina, they already will find themselves on the defensive in the next statewide elections. If their allies do not return to New Orleans, they may lose the state to the GOP. Expect that possibility to fuel the Farrakhanish rumors that the Republicans bombed the levees on purpose to gentrify New Orleans, and the Democrats to continue their descent into Howard Dean nuttiness.

Bush talked about the triumphant second line of funeral marches in New Orleans for those jazz musicians which have passed away. When the time comes for that shift, the New Orleans Saints may well be the only ones enthusiastically marching back in behind the band when the bells begin to chime.

Bush Speech: Better Late Than Never

I missed the live broadcast of George Bush's speech on Hurricane Katrina this evening from New Orleans, attending a board meeting of a local non-profit and having dinner with good friends. When I came home, I went right to the computer and watched it with the First Mate via stream on CNN before I read any other commentary, and while I heard it late, I welcomed the tone and the messages.

In fact, I view his speech in exactly the same way. Bush did a marvelous job of touching on the despair, the heroism, the personal stories that touch hearts and motivate us to greater efforts, as well as the policy decisions that will spring from Katrina's aftermath. Unfortunately, this speech came about a week late. He may well undo the political damage done by the massive confusion of the first few days in the weeks and months ahead if he can quickly start rebuilding and returning people to their neighborhoods, but Bush missed an opportunity to not only demonstrate leadership but to instill a sense of confidence by getting out in front of the cameras like this last week or by the weekend at the latest.

I don't mean to advocate the ubiquitous "I feel your pain" response of the Clinton administration to every wounded soul and offended group in America. Eight years of that weepiness gave us our fill of empty and saccharine rhetoric. However, this unprecedented devastation called for our national leader to get on the ground early and show us his involvement. There are times for modesty, but on occasion a leader has to show a muscular and personal presence -- and Bush should have instinctually known that this was one of those times.

Intellectually, we knew that Bush had followed the efforts very closely and tried to manage problems from Washington, but that presented two significant problems for Bush. First, the nation didn't see him performing those tasks, and in a time of national crisis -- which the White House clearly did not immediately understand this to be -- Bush turned into a technocrat when we needed him with a bullhorn, lifting our spirits. People respond to leaders who roll up their sleeves and get involved, even if just to bring smiles to the faces of the nameless heroes and victims of the tragedy. The tone-deaf response of the flyover did some political damage, and it should have never happened.

Second, it turns out that Bush and the team in Washington didn't get good data from their team on the ground. They may have made their decisions based on good faith in the information and their sources, but even within FEMA and the other agencies involved, the confusion that snarled efforts after the levees broke clearly reached all the way to DC. Bush himself acknowledged that in tonight's speech by asking for new legislation allowing for federal intervention in disasters of this scope:

The storm involved a massive flood, a major supply and security operation, and an evacuation order affecting more than a million people. It was not a normal hurricane -- and the normal disaster relief system was not equal to it. ... Yet the system, at every level of government, was not well-coordinated, and was overwhelmed in the first few days. It is now clear that a challenge on this scale requires greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces -- the institution of our government most capable of massive logistical operations on a moment's notice.

Four years after the frightening experience of September the 11th, Americans have every right to expect a more effective response in a time of emergency. When the federal government fails to meet such an obligation, I, as President, am responsible for the problem, and for the solution.

However, he did finally give his speech, and I think delivering it from New Orleans itself sends a powerful message. Despite the not unreasonable misgivings of many, Bush passionately committed himself and the nation to rebuilding the city, "higher and better". Part of doing it better in Bush's vision is to rethink the economics of the area, and the new economic model will eventually vindicate Bush.

Many have noticed the poverty of New Orleans as one of the factors in the ability to quickly evacuate the area. He proposed to make the entire Katrina disaster area a Gulf Opportunity Zone, using economic and tax incentives to draw businesses (especially, one presumes, manufacturing) to the area. Bush also wants Congress to fund business loans for small-business start-ups and do-overs in order to quickly reconstitute a solid middle-class for the economic restoration of the area. That will create jobs, which combined with smart use of funds for mortgages and building, can transform the region into a model for Bush's ownership society. In a relatively short period of time, the government may start recouping its investment through better tax revenues and an economically healthier and more diverse New Orleans and Gulf Coast region.

Call it the No City Left Behind strategy, if you will.

Bush delivered another brilliant and overdue message in asking for everyone in this nation to contribute and sacrifice for this effort. Everyone, he reminded us, can play a part in the resurrection of the Katrina area; all we need to do is ask, and our talents will find a way to apply. He called all of us to enlist in "this great national enterprise," a call that didn't clearly ring out from 9/11. Then, the Bush administration wanted to help us return to a sense of normalcy, an understandable but shortsighted impulse. Now he asks us to share a sense of mission, an impulse that resonates with Americans and our history, both good and bad, over the two centuries of our existence.

The hour has gotten a bit late, but I welcome the opportunity to engage in a positive manner in this enterprise. The President waited a few days too long to engage the public, but in the end, his efforts will overcome the initial stumbles. This speech puts him well on his way.

Dafydd: One Quick Roberts Prediction

One fast prediction, and I'll update this post when the vote occurs to either take a bow or eat my words!

I predict the vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee is going to end up with all in favor, Republican and Democrat alike, with only one dissent: Ted Kennedy.

Well, what do you all think?

UPDATE later that same day: I think I need an explanatory update even before the vote. I don't predict they'll vote for Roberts because he's won them over; my prediction is that they see the mene mene on the wall -- and they'll vote for him in order to give themselves some credibility for mounting a filibuster against the O'Connor replacement. I base the prediction on the fact that both Biden and Schumer have already given interviews in which they praised Roberts to the skies and said he was about the best nominee of either party they've ever seen come before the J-Com.

I just don't think they would say that much -- and then vote against the guy. They would look worse than partisan; they would look like weirdos.

The reason I gave them Kennedy is that I think he'll be too iconoclastic (or perhaps too inebriated) even to notice that the rest are voting for Roberts.

Again, I'm just talking about the Judiciary Committee. It will be a different matter on the floor, but I think Roberts will get 75 to 80 votes there.

Day 3 Analysis: Who Is That Masked Man?

One of the ethical mandates that any nominee to a judicial appointment must meet is to answer questions in such a way as to avoid any appearance of making commitments to rule in a certain way on any one issue. That preserves the independence of the judiciary as well as the individual jurists, who must approach their cases free of political encumbrances. The founders gave lifetime appointments to federal jurists with this latitude and political independence in mind; otherwise, the bench would fill up with political hacks, and the positions then would require votes and preset terms. The fact that we have calls for that now indeed shows that our politicians have succeeded in their attempts to pervert the process by demanding answers to such questions and openly asking about partisan leanings during hearings.

Have they succeeded in transforming Roberts into a known political quantity? Not according to these competing analyses from the New York Times and Washington Post. The Times editorial today follows Chuck Schumer's idiotic question about where Roberts saw himself on a political spectrum and answers the question that Roberts demurred:

Judge Roberts's record, on the bench and off, puts him well to the right end of the ideological spectrum. As a Reagan administration lawyer, he argued for a very narrow interpretation of the Voting Rights Act. As an appeals court judge, he wrote an opinion in an Endangered Species Act case that suggests he may have a very cramped view of Congress's power. The documents about his past legal work that have become public contain some troubling passages, notably his assertion that abortion rights are based on a "so-called 'right to privacy.'" ...

He did not say he agrees with Roe, for instance, only that it is entitled to deference. That is a truism: all of the court's decisions are entitled to such deference, but some are reversed anyway. Judge Roberts waved away questions about troubling statements in his older legal memos, saying he was just a staff lawyer in his 20's when he wrote them. But he and the White House have refused to release more recent memos, from his time in the Solicitor General's Office, which might give a better picture of his views as a mature lawyer.

In other words, Roberts refused to commit to any particular course of action -- the proper role for a judicial nominee. He talked about process and deliberation, which gives great insight into how he thinks and approaches his responsibilities as a jurist, but he may have just as well talked to a brick wall as far as the Times editorial board goes. They want outcome-based jurisprudence rather than the rule of law -- which Roberts repeatedly denounced over the past two days. The Times makes this clear in their summation, where they endorse the notion that Democrats should fight to ensure that the next nominee comes from a more moderate background to replace the vacillating Sandra Day O'Connor.

Speaking of which, for anyone listening to the hearings yesterday, O'Connor's inconsistencies got a lot of criticism yesterday without being assigned to her specifically. Both Leahy and Kennedy, who have spoken of O'Connor in beatific tones since she announced her resignation this summer, decried the competing 5-4 decisions on similar issues and used them as an excuse for attempting to get Roberts to commit to prejudicial positions on issues. At least some of those competing precedents came from O'Connor's inconsistent application of the law.

The Washington Post, meanwhile, gives a different analysis of what it sees in Roberts. Instead of a right-wing idealogue, Charles Lane sees more of a Rehnquist than a Scalia:

Still blurry at the edges, thanks to Roberts's refusal to declare how he would rule on abortion rights and other specific issues, it is nevertheless a picture of a conservative different in important respects from the two members of the Supreme Court whom Bush has said he most admires, Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

Scalia has said that courts should avoid basing their interpretations of laws on the history behind them; Roberts said there is a role for legislative history. Thomas has embraced an approach to constitutional interpretation that relies heavily on his view of the original intent of the framers; Roberts said that is not always possible.

Concretely, Roberts said he believes the Constitution creates a right to privacy. Such a right was recognized by the Supreme Court in modern cases protecting the use of contraception, abortion and consensual homosexual conduct, but which Scalia and Thomas have sharply criticized.

Asked by Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) if he considered himself "in the mold" of Scalia and Thomas, Roberts replied, "I will be my own man on the Supreme Court."

It would seem that people see what they want to see in Roberts. Moderates see moderation and idealogues see idealogues. In that small way, Roberts may present a perfect candidate for the court, one that reflects society back onto itself while focusing on the Constitution and its application within the law. The fact that he keeps all of us guessing to some extent shows his commitment to judicial ethics and his talent at debate, two key elements for any successful appellate post, including the Supreme Court. He has kept all his options open and made no commitment to anyone for his post, which in the end is all we can ask.

Day 3: The Democrats Read Their Reviews

Yesterday's grilling of Supreme Court nominee John Roberts continued the contentiousness of the previous day, when most of the first round of questioning took place. However, for the most part the panel's more rabid Democrats scaled back their open derision for Roberts and allowed him time to answer questions in between their monologues. That doesn't mean that Democrats got more satisfaction from the answers, as the Washington Post notes:

Democrats' frustration boiled over several times during the eight hours of questioning, as Roberts repeatedly declined to discuss his personal or judicial views on matters that he said could come before the court someday. Senators implored him to speak from the heart, but Roberts told them time and again that he would be guided by "the rule of law."

"We are rolling the dice with you, Judge," Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) said. "It's kind of interesting, this Kabuki dance we have in these hearings here, as if the public doesn't have a right to know what you think about fundamental issues facing them."

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) accused Roberts of treating the hearing room as a "cone of silence." "It seems strange, I think, to the American people that you can't talk about decided cases -- past cases, not future cases -- when you've been nominated to the most important job in the federal judiciary," the senator said.

Roberts asked for extra time to defend himself. "I think I have been more forthcoming than any of the other nominees," said Roberts, who had reviewed the confirmation hearing testimony of all the sitting Supreme Court justices in preparation for his hearing. "It is not a process under which senators get to say: 'I want you to rule this way, this way and this way. And if you tell me you'll rule this way, this way and this way, I'll vote for you.' Judges are not politicians. They cannot promise to do certain things in exchange for votes."

If they appeared frustrated, at least they avoided -- mostly -- the kind of silly and juvenile antics shown in the first round by Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden. I reviewed the taped testimony again last night and saw a marked difference in the tone from the Leahy side of the table. The questions remained tough, as did the nominee in insisting that he hew to the code of ethics regarding jurists making prejudicial statements about issues that they may see in cases brought before them in the future. However, the tone settled back into a more professional and restrained level than the day before.

That doesn't mean the Democrats still didn't act out. A number of them, including Biden and Chuck Schumer, kept complaining that their long-winded questions generated detailed answers that ate up too much of their microphone time. Biden again spent his 15 minutes mugging for the camera, using exaggerated and insincere compliments and smiling inappropriately, while making faces during Roberts' answers. I only listened to Schumer's remarks on the way home from work, but he made the same complaints about Roberts talking too much, while Schumer pontificated at length about his own points.

For a party that wants to proclaim this hearing as John Roberts' "job interview with America," this manager can tell you that the entire panel knows nothing about conducting such an interview. Rule 1: Let the candidate do most of the talking. Just as in a confirmation hearing for a judicial appointment, employers know that they cannot ask for certain information, most if not all of which has no application to the job anyway. However, if employers ask short, open-ended questions, they mostly get the information anyway. People like to talk, and if the interviewers don't get in their way, they will.

This hearing has nothing to do with job interviews; it's a forum for a group of politicians who like to hear themselves talk. In that sense, the hearings have been a rousing success for the Democrats, but it's the only victory won by the opposition. In contrast to Roberts' warm, friendly, and highly knowledgeable presentation, the Democrats have come across as surly, repetitive, whiny, and even shifty as the nominee has gently but clearly shown their readings of his carefully narrow writings as out of context and intentionally blown up into hyperbolic and sweeping accusations of bigotry and misogyny.

Inexplicably, the Democrats have demanded a third round of questioning, having lost the first two rounds by any accounting. The Republicans must hardly believe their luck; at any rate, none objected to extending the embarrassment for the Leahy contingent for an additional day of the demonstration of Roberts' skill and intelligence at the expense of showing the Democrats' lack of the same.

Able Danger: More Denial From Commission

Despite the discovery of five eyewitnesses to the Able Danger project who now insist that Mohammed Atta and other 9/11 hijackers got identified as potential al-Qaeda terrorists over a year before the deadly terrorist attacks, the 9/11 Commission has publicly asserted that the program did not produce any such analysis. This came as part of their public response to the performance of FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security to Hurrican Katrina (via Strata-Sphere):

Former members of the Sept. 11 commission on Wednesday dismissed assertions that a Pentagon intelligence unit identified lead hijacker Mohamed Atta as an member of al-Qaida long before the 2001 attacks. ...

[Commission co-chair Thomas] Kean said the recollections of the intelligence officers cannot be verified by any document.

"Bluntly, it just didn't happen and that's the conclusion of all 10 of us," said a former commissioner, ex-Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash.

Exactly how the ten commissioners came up with this consensus never gets explained by Kean or Gorton. Thanks to the work of their staffers, none of them ever heard testimony from either Col. Tony Shaffer, the DIA liaison, nor Captain Scott Phillpott, the program's director. Neither did they speak with civilian contractor J. D. Smith, whose work produced the documentation which has since disappeared. They don't even acknowledge that the Pentagon itself, while announcing that they could not find the program's data, did find three more witnesses that corroborate Phillpott, Smith, and Shaffer.

If one had to concoct a scenario which shows the methodology of the 9/11 Commission, it could hardly illuminate it better than this. Without hearing witnesses nor reviewing evidence, the Commission reached a hard and fast conclusion that, not coincidentally, fits within their determined narrative. They give no explanation for their blunt statement of "fact", and present no deliberation. Apparently the discovery of evidence that doesn't fit within their report makes the evidence untrue, no matter how many witnesses come forward to verify it.

To put it bluntly, as Slade Gorton says, the Commission did nothing but put a quasi-official imprimatur on a series of speculations that have collapsed since the discovery of Able Danger and other revelations about what the Commission missed in its investigation. It wrote the report it wanted to write, and ignored evidence and testimony that discredited its conclusions. The board of bureaucrats recommended an expanded bureaucracy while blaming operational personnel for not "connecting the dots", ignoring the fact that the bureaucracy -- aided by one of the Commissioners themselves -- created a Byzantine legal environment which actively suppressed the data-sharing necessary to make the proper analysis.

Now they want to shade their eyes and cover their ears as the evidence they missed or actively ignored comes to light. Let them. It will only demonstrate their lack of investigatory detachment and marriage to their preconceived narratives all the more.

Addendum: It's precisely this kind of unaccountable hackery that should advise against creating even more independent commissions that allow Congress to avoid the political responsibility for doing its own investigations. That's why the Senate's rejection yesterday of a Katrina panel is a step back towards sanity and responsibility. If Congressmen and Senators churn out something on Katrina with as little real value as the 9/11 Commission's Final Report, they should have to face their constituents with that failure ringing in their ears.

'Toxic' Flood Another Example Of Katrina Hysteria

The Washington Post debunks another part of the media hysteria that has surrounded the Hurricane Katrina devastation -- the myth of the supertoxic flood. We have heard over and over how the raw sewage and chemical brew unleashed by the levee break made the flood so toxic that mere skin exposure put people at extraordinary risk for major illnesses. Test, however, show nothing unusual about the flood water:

Early tests on the floodwater that covered most of this city do not suggest it will leave a permanent toxic residue or render residential areas uninhabitable for more than a short time, officials of both state and federal environmental agencies said yesterday.

The pollution consists primarily of fecal matter and slightly elevated concentrations of metals such as lead and chromium that were in the city's soil before Hurricane Katrina. There are also trace amounts of many petroleum-based chemicals and some pesticides.

Despite descriptions of the floodwater as a "toxic soup" and a "witch's brew" of contaminants, the preliminary tests reveal it contains little that is different from what has been seen after past floods in other cities and here.

The only exceptions to this come from localized contamination that will require spot abatements. Seven oil spills, including a significant one in the suburb of Mereaux, account for most of that damage. Another could well be the bus storage yard, where diesel fuel from the buses left a surface plume easily seen with overhead photography -- another good reason to get them to high ground in the face of a Category 4 hurricane bearing down on the city.

Other than the localized points, the water from the flood poses no special threat. The main problem for residents will not arise from a toxic exposure or contamination of buildings, but instead merely from the damage done by the water itself to the buildings. That, of course, will provide enough problems of its own without adding the media hysteria of Katrina coverage to the dread New Orleans residents face in getting their city back on its feet.

How did the "toxic soup" story start, anyway? So far we have heard ridiculous stories pushed over and over again by the national media that sounded just good enough to be true. The floods supposedly killed 10,000 people; now it looks like the casualties might not reach 1,000, still devastating but a completely different scale. Survivors supposedly resorted to cannibalism of corpses, according to civil-rights activist Randall Robinson, who later withdrew the story after the media spread it like wildfire.

Plenty of people want some accountability for government officials for their miscues during the response to Katrina. The Exempt Media has led that charge. If they want to see that, we should also demand an independent commission into the reporting that crossed over into hysteria and mythology, spreading falsehoods that unnecessarily have added to the burdens of Katrina victims from New Orleans.

Air America: More Than One Connection To Gloria Wise

When the news first broke about Air America's executive Evan Cohen using his paid position at the nonprofit Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club to funnel government funds into his liberal radio netlet, people found it strange that Cohen worked both jobs at the same time, drawing significant salaries at each. It turns out that Cohen had company, as Michelle Malkin and Brian Maloney report in their latest installment on the scandal that threatens to derail Air America:

What Air America has failed to disclose is that at least one other of its officials held a key job at Gloria Wise. Yesterday, we confirmed with Martta Rose of Rubenstein Public Relations, which is representing the Boys & Girls Club branch, that Air America's Vice President of Finance, Sinohe Terrero, worked at the inner-city charity as finance director from 2000-2002 under Cohen. Though he left Gloria Wise for Air America before the controversial loan scheme was initiated, it strains credulity to believe that Terrero was completely in the dark about what kinds of things Cohen and his former colleagues were doing.

The city Department of Investigation has undoubtedly explored these ties by now.

But somehow, Air America neglected to mention Terrero's employment with Gloria Wise in its public statements addressing the deepening scandal and the two government probes of the financial transactions between the two parties. Go figure.

Terrero has made himself scarce these days, refusing to comment and apparently resigning from Piquant Media and Air America. If so, he again follows Cohen, who dropped out of sight for months until Michelle and Brian turned him up in their last installment of this exposé. Terrero may want to get out before having to figure a way to meet payroll while a big chunk of their operating cash sits in an escrow account -- one apparently the DOI still cannot access to pay off Gloria Wise.

Make sure you keep up with the ongoing saga!

UPDATE: Don't forget to also read David Lombino's excellent New York Sun coverage of Air America as well.

More Great Moments In Palestinian Self-Government

In another splendid example of the status of the Palestinian society and their readiness to join the circle of nations, their security forces stood by and watched as the terrorist group Hamas blew a hole in the wall separating Egypt and Gaza in broad daylight. The attack allowed Palestinians to stream into the Sinai despite Egypt's denial of a breach at the border:

Hamas militants have destroyed a section of a concrete barrier erected along the Gaza-Egypt border.

Palestinian and Egyptian troops have been trying to shore up the barrier to stop Palestinians crossing into Egypt after the withdrawal of Israeli troops.

In chaotic scenes, thousands of Palestinians have streamed over the border in the last few days without undergoing official checks.

Despite this, Egypt says that its Gaza border is officially closed.

Militants from Hamas cleared an area before setting off explosives that blew away a section of the wall. Palestinian security officers present did nothing to prevent them.

A local Hamas commander warned them not to try to intervene, AFP news agency reported.

The pullout of Israel from Gaza has revealed the Palestinian Authority's security apparatus as an empty shell, a patronage service that lacks any courage or will to impose its authority. Terrorist groups like Hamas now operate at will even to the extent of committing an act of war on the Egyptians, although Egypt has chosen not to view it in that light. Hamas has free reign in Gaza and might well wind up stealing the territory from Mahmoud Abbas altogether, either through the electoral process or simply by outgunning and overwhelming the lackluster PA security forces present in the area.

Egypt had promised to maintain border security on their border with Gaza. Israel has had long experience with weapons smuggling along the border, one of the reasons that they built the wall Hamas just blew up. They have warned the Palestinians who crossed over through the hole that they have to return to Gaza within hours or face arrest. The problem might not come from a reluctance to return, but the materiel they bring back across the border with them when they do.

The Palestinians have not lived up to the expectations of the advocates of their appeasement. When given land, they have used it to pursue terrorism instead of statesmanship. Instead of promoting order and the rule of law, we have seen the rise of a new Mogadishu on the Mediterranean. When they blow holes in the border wall with Israel, will the world expect the Israelis to sit still while Palestinian terrorists flood into Israel to put those weapons to use?

Flight 93 Memorial Will Be Modified

Our feedback has apparently caused some second thoughts on behalf of the Flight 93 memorial board and its selected designer, Paul Murdoch. Murdoch has agreed to consider modifications to his design that will address the concerns of his critics, probably by renaming the Crescent of Embrace:

The architect of the memorial to a plane downed in western Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001, said Wednesday he would work to satisfy critics who complained that it honors terrorists with its crescent-shaped design.

Designer Paul Murdoch said he is "somewhat optimistic" that the spirit of the design could be maintained.

"It's a disappointment there is a misinterpretation and a simplistic distortion of this, but if that is a public concern, then that is something we will look to resolve in a way that keeps the essential qualities," Murdoch, 48, of Los Angeles, said in a telephone interview. ...

"We called it a 'crescent' because it was a curving land form. We called it 'Crescent of Embrace' because of the symbolic gesturing of embracing this place," Murdoch said. "There's no desire to make this a divisive memorial."

Perhaps the intent did not exist -- although his defiance of the jury's request to rename the centerpiece makes it look otherwise -- but the use of a crescent that would naturally turn bright red every anniversary of the attack provides an unmistakable symbol of Islam, given the context of the attacks. Architects deal with symbolism as an integral part of their work, and the prominence of the "crescent" and its highlighting of a natural feature of the landscape in the most symbolic of all architectural projects, a memorial, cannot have come by accident.

Removing the crescent will handle the most objectionable part of the design. However, unless the design does more to memorialize the way these forty civilians galvanized the nation into action instead of defeatist paralysis, it will still do an injustice to their memory. The other elements of the Murdoch design sound and look beautiful, but communicate passivity and detachment. These qualities embody the antithesis of Flight 93, which demand action and involvement of all Americans in defiance of terrorism and the defense of the nation.

Let's hope that Murdoch will rethink his design to truly memorialize what Flight 93 meant to America. Otherwise, the jury needs to literally go back to the drawing board.

Hat tip, and many thanks, to Michelle Malkin.

I Pledge Allegiance To The Flag And So Become Unconstitutional

A federal judge ruled today that requiring schoolchildren to recite the Pledge of Allegiance violates the Constitution, a decision that comes in an odd and coincidental juxtaposition with the confirmation hearing of Supreme Court nominee John Roberts. US District Court Judge Lawrence Karlton sided with activist Michael Newdow, whom the Supreme Court decided lacked standing to bring this issue before, by claiming his case remained precedential:

A federal judge declared the reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools unconstitutional Wednesday, a decision that could put the divisive issue on track for another round of Supreme Court arguments.

The case was brought by the same atheist whose previous battle against the words "under God" was rejected last year by the Supreme Court on procedural grounds.

U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton ruled that the pledge's reference to one nation "under God" violates school children's right to be "free from a coercive requirement to affirm God."

Karlton said he was bound by precedent of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which in 2002 ruled in favor of Sacramento atheist Michael Newdow that the pledge is unconstitutional when recited in public schools.

The Supreme Court dismissed the case last year, saying Newdow lacked standing because he did not have custody of his elementary school daughter he sued on behalf of.

Newdow, an attorney and a medical doctor, filed an identical case on behalf of three unnamed parents and their children. Karlton said those families have the right to sue.

Michelle Malkin has already covered this well, and has gathered a comprehensive set of links on this story.

For my part, this particular crusade by Newdow does nothing but force the political Left to take an uncomfortable stand against the public expressions of even a watered-down, Deist notion of a Higher Power. The words 'under God' does not represent an affirmation of religion per se, no more than using the currency that reads 'In God We Trust'. It represents the same understanding of a natural order that first gets its expression in American history in the Declaration of Independence, where the text specifically references the Creator and the inalienable rights bestowed upon Man as a result of that creation.

Will the enforced reading of the Declaration soon become unconstitutional as well? Perhaps Karlton will ban this and the use of American currency at schools in order to shield children from abuse of their rights. When children study art in school, Michelangelo and Da Vinci and a host of Renaissance artists might get forced from the curriculum, since much of their art depicts religious themes, and making the study of such images compulsive could also fall under the same line of thinking.

If people think that's a stretch, that may only demonstrate an unfamiliarity with the career of Lawrence Karlton. Karlton has made a habit of issuing controversial decisions on a string of high-profile cases. Start with this case. Two months ago, Karlton narrowed the scope of Newdow's complaint, dismissing the argument that the Pledge itself violated the Constitution. It appears now that Karlton took it upon himself to tailor Newdow's suit in order for him to rule on it as he did -- an egregious action:

U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton indicated that he planned to block Newdow from having the pledge itself and the words "under God" declared unconstitutional. His lawsuit instead would focus strictly on whether reciting the pledge in public schools is an unconstitutional endorsement of religion, meaning Newdow could still have the pledge barred from schools if he prevails in the long-shot effort.

"What I'm doing is cutting out a whole lot of your case and making it narrow," Karlton said during the first hearing on the lawsuit.

However narrow Karlton made it, he clearly understood that a finding for Newdow on the grounds he left would still have the full effect Newdow sought, and could make him less susceptible for overturning the decision.

In another case in 1997, Karlton overturned water contracts for Northern California farmers and ranchers. He ruled that the contracts did not consider environmental concerns well enough, an overreaching piece of judicial activism that left farmers with no sure supply of water and discouraged agricultural use of the land. Water again played into another activist ruling in 2004 and reinforced earlier this year, when Karlton ordered the suspension of the damming of the San Joaquin River -- which spelled disaster for agriculture in the Central Valley and points south. The reason? The Sierra Club wants to reintroduce a species of endangered salmon, and Los Angeles wants the drinking water.

Even on issues on which I normally symapthize, such as the Constitutional erosion of campaign-finance "reform", Karlton manages to get it astoundingly wrong. He overturned a California referendum that had passed with over 60% of the vote that limited campaign contributions for state and local campaigns. Instead of warning about the potential to expand this reasonable restriction into a BCRA-like effort to equate speech with monetary contributions which almost always follows, Karlton decided that the money limits simply didn't give enough cash to politicians:

The proposition, which was approved by 61 percent of voters statewide in November, radically altered campaign fund-raising by limiting contributions to $100 for local candidates, $250 for legislative candidates and $500 for candidates running for a state office. Karlton's preliminary injunction mandates the California State Political Practices Commission send the proposition to the state Supreme Court for a decision on language contained within the law that Karlton maintains limits free speech.

"The effect of the initiative is not only to significantly reduce a California candidate's ability to deliver his or her message, but in fact, to make it impossible for the ordinary candidate to mount an effective campaign for office,'' Karlton said in his ruling.

Even Michael Dukakis had testified that the limits would create no overriding hardship. Thus did Karlton decide to substitute his value judgment for that of the 61% of Californians who thought that the limits as presented were reasonable and fair. He arrogated to himself the power to set public policy instead of just determining whether the new legislation passed Constitutional muster. (Some links courtesy of an anonymous CQ reader.)

Karlton should get overturned on this issue, maybe even in the Ninth Circuit. It certainly won't survive the Roberts Court. Democrats, however, will gnash their teeth at yet another easy example of the kind of activism that fuels George Bush's support on judicial nominations, and will probably wind up spending their dwindling political capital by defending the notion that any mention of God in any context somehow harms children and their rights.

Note: For a thoughtful dissent, read Brant at SWLiP's post. He may have a point in saying that the Pledge doesn't really represent the traditional understanding of the nature of liberty in the United States. However, at worst that would make the Pledge a questionable idea, not unconstitutional.

UPDATE: Here's another Karlton case, which Ankle Biting Pundits notes not only won Muslims in California prisons religious rights but forced the state to pay law-student volunteers on the case $60 per hour for their work:

Nearly three dozen law students who helped win religious rights for Muslim inmates garnered accolades Friday from a Sacramento federal judge, who awarded fees of $289,000 to the students and an attorney who supervised them. ...

In a seven-page order, U.S. District Judge Lawrence K. Karlton directed that the students be paid $60 an hour - a total of $114,780 - for work done from October 1997 through June 2001.

Attorneys for the state, which will have to pay the award to Christian and the clinic, questioned that hourly rate for students, but Karlton pointed out that they "worked on a wide variety of tasks, including discovery, taking and defending depositions, legal research and writing, and arguing motions in court."

Perhaps Karlton should get kudos for allowing Muslims to gather to celebrate their religion regardless of their status as convicted felons. However, that deference -- which cost Californians over $100K -- also may have led to this:

A militant Islamic prison gang may have been behind an alleged plot to attack synagogues and National Guard installations on Jewish holidays or the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, investigators said.

The group -- known as Jamat Ul-Islam Is Saheeh, or JIS -- is headed by an inmate at the California State Prison, Sacramento, law enforcement officials said. It has existed for about five years and is one of at least three Islamist groups operating in state prisons, officials said.

Federal and local investigators are examining possible ties between members of the group and Hammad Riaz Samana, a 21-year-old college student and Pakistani national who was arrested August 2 in Los Angeles, George Gascon, assistant chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, said Wednesday.

This should also give the GOP another argument for a Michael McConnell or Janice Rogers Brown as the antidote for judicial silliness at the District Court level.

Great Moments In Palestinian Self-Government

Yasser Arafat once replied to a question about his ubiquitous costume of battle fatigues that if the world gave him a state, he would wear a suit. He wanted to convince the world that the Palestinians would transform themselves into a stable, self-governing electorate once they ceased living under Israeli rule. They have their chance in Gaza, but unfortunately for those who bet millions on Arafat's predictions, the Palestinians show little evidence of desiring stability or self-government at all, including the so-called Palestinian Authority:

Palestinians looted dozens of greenhouses on Tuesday, walking off with irrigation hoses, water pumps and plastic sheeting in a blow to fledgling efforts to reconstruct the Gaza Strip.

American Jewish donors had bought more than 3,000 greenhouses from Israeli settlers in Gaza for $14 million last month and transferred them to the Palestinian Authority. Former World Bank President James Wolfensohn, who brokered the deal, put up $500,000 of his own cash.

Palestinian police stood by helplessly Tuesday as looters carted off materials from greenhouses in several settlements, and commanders complained they did not have enough manpower to protect the prized assets. In some instances, there was no security and in others, police even joined the looters, witnesses said.

With the Israelis disinclined to provide any economic assistance to people who burn synagogues to the ground when they act moderately, Palestinian leaders had hoped that the greenhouses would generate some high-tech jobs for the Gazans and allow them to create a middle class. Instead, the looters ransacked them, damaging 30% of the expensive systems, and even the police decided to take part in their dismantling.

It looks as though the Palestinians lack the confidence to bet with Yasser Arafat on the whole stability-through-statehood idea. They appear to have little confidence in their government to provide them with an environment which will create prosperity and security. Looting takes place in a power vacuum (as we saw in New Orleans), and the inability of the Palestinian Authority to protect its most vital economic assets in the region should demonstrate to everyone the empty shell that the PA has always been, especially in Gaza.

The $14 million went to the losing horse in this race.

The Point Of War Monuments

Michelle Malkin writes about the proposed Flight 93 memorial to the heroism of the 40 civilians who fought the first battle of the War on Terror and beat the terrorists in her weekly Townhall column today. She takes on the pacifist tone of the entire memorial as well as the Islamic symbolism in its most prominent feature, the Crescent of Embrace, which immediately created a firestorm of controversy:

These were Americans who refused to sit down and be quiet and allow Islamic terrorists unfettered control over the flight stick of history. These were doers, not hand-wringers, who engaged in a violent and valiant struggle against evil.

I remind you of all this because the official Flight 93 memorial unveiled last week is now embroiled in overdue public controversy. Funded with a mix of public money and private cash (including a $500,000 grant from Teresa Heinz's far-left Heinz Endowments), the winning design, titled the "Crescent of Embrace," features a grove of maple trees ringing the crash site in the shape of an unmistakable red crescent. The crescent, New York University Middle East Studies professor Bernard Haykel told the Johnstown, Pa., Tribune-Democrat, "is the symbol of ritual and religious life for Muslims." ...

Memorial architect Paul Murdoch, whose firm emphasizes "environmental responsibility and sustainability," did not return calls and e-mails seeking comment, but he did emphasize to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that his creation was about "healing" and "contemplation." He is also proud of his idea to hang a bunch of wind chimes in a tall tower at the site as a "gesture of healing and bonding." ...

The soft-and-fuzzy memorial design of "Crescent of Embrace" still does injustice to the steely courage of Flight 93's passengers and crew. It evokes the defeatism embodied by those behind a similar move to turn the 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero in New York City into a pacifist guilt complex.

A proper memorial should carry with it the spirit of the event and/or the people who we wish to remember with its creation. Flight 93 taught us that we have to stand up to terrorists and not be led as frightened sheep to the slaughter that Islamofascists have planned for us. Thanks to some inexplicable delays in initiating the hijacking, these 39 Americans and one Japanese man had the time and opportunity to formulate and execute a counterattack, and nearly succeeded in taking back control of the plane. They defeated the terrorists' plans by forcing the pilot to abort his attack and dive straight into the ground rather than lose control of his guided missile.

Nothing about this rather beautiful, beatific design reflects that courage and intrepidity. It instead insists on new-agey windchimes and areas of contemplation, which would have been excellent had the centerpiece of the memorial still recalled the valiant courage of the people who fought back instead of merely contemplated their fate. What do we have in place of that? A centerpiece that, inadvertently or not, invokes the religious symbol of the terrorists who used their religious fanaticism to rationalize their acts.

This memorial offends on multiple levels, again whether the offense was intentional or not. It simply does not meet the occasion. While the verdict of the families should have some weight in the approval process, the entire point of this memorial is the national implications of the event, which is why the government will run the memorial and is in charge of its construction and maintenance. A great many of us do not want the Islamic symbolism as a centerpiece for the Flight 93 memorial, but more importantly, we want a memorial that evokes the courageous and inspiring example that they provided with their last breath of life. They didn't teach us to sit around and do nothing, and a memorial that encourages that simply gets it wrong.

Day 2: Men Behaving Badly

The Democrats got their chances yesterday to play hardball with John Roberts during his confirmation hearing at the Judiciary Committee, but mostly got shelled as Roberts hit their curveballs out of the park. The Republicans mostly tossed change-ups, although Arlen Specter unexpectedly threw heat on Roe v Wade. Two of the most partisan among them got called for balks on a number of occasions by commitee chair Arlen Specter, who had to scold Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden for cutting off Roberts' answers. When Biden started whining about Roberts eating up his time with detailed answers, Specter rather forcefully reminded Biden that there was no crying in baseball.

Can we finally dispense with the baseball analogies now?

Yesterday's performance by John Roberts continued to show his mastery of the panel-interrogation form that he knows so well from his 39 appearances at the Supreme Court. As I watched a significant portion of the testimony on rerun last night, his answers always came back on point, even when he took the judicial equivalent of the Fifth Amendment on answers. His professionalism and detailed recall seemed to irritate the Democrats, starting with Patrick Leahy, who appeared intent on arguing minutiae with Roberts.

At least Leahy allowed Roberts to answer and appeared to listen to the responses. Ted Kennedy had his head buried in his notes while sonorously reading aloud, and simply moved on awkwardly to his next prepared question regardless of whatever Roberts answered. He seemed to understand that Roberts was getting the best of him by pointing out Kennedy's mischaracterizations of his positions, because he stopped pausing between the questions at about the midpoint of his scheduled time. Specter had to rebuke him several times to allow Roberts to answer, which seemed to surprise Kennedy, who at times looked rather confused. (At a break with reporters shortly afterwards, he looked very ill, flushed and panting as though he could not catch his breath.)

But Joe Biden, as usual, provided the nadir of the opposition. A legend in his own mind, Biden laid what he must have thought was a brilliant rhetorical trap for Roberts by pouncing on Ruth Ginsburg's answers on a specific case to argue that Roberts' refusal to comment on specific cases did not meet the so-called "Ginsburg rule". However, he rather stupidly glossed over the fact that Ginsburg had written extensively about that case and her personal opinion of it, and therefore had already blown her judicial distance on the issue. Roberts pointed out the difference and implied that her testimony didn't violate the Ginsburg test as a result, whereupon Biden started waving around papers and said he could come up with a half-hour of other examples, but chose to cite ... none.

It got worse after that.

Biden then asked a series of questions based on old staff memos, each time getting more and more animated and each time cutting off the answers. Specter not only repeatedly reminded Biden to allow Roberts to answer, but finally had to remind Biden that the entire purpose of the committee hearing was to get Roberts' answers, not Joe Biden's filibustering. Biden, unbelievably, then complained not once but several times that Roberts' answers ate up too much of Biden's time. When rebuked, Biden made childish asides that he confused with wit, such as "But his answers are misleading," when Biden could hardly have heard anything Roberts had tried to say.

What a pathetic display.

Not that anyone reading Charles Lane's analysis in the Washington Post or the single analysis at the New York Times will ever read about this. The two analyses fail to mention any of the repeated attempts by the two Democrats to bulldoze Roberts by cutting him off at the mike. Lane writes:

Under detailed public questioning for the first time since President Bush tapped him for a seat on the Supreme Court, John G. Roberts Jr. appeared to sound a less conservative note on abortion-related issues than he had in the memos and briefs he wrote as a lawyer in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.

He offered a surprisingly emphatic endorsement of a constitutional right to privacy -- the basis of the Roe v. Wade decision recognizing a right to abortion, which he seemed to disparage as a young lawyer in the Reagan administration.

Nothing at about the contentiousness from Kennedy and Biden appears in Lane's report. It almost looks like Lane reviewed a transcript instead of watching the hearings live or on tape. He did catch one exchange later that I missed, although he didn't note its significance:

Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) seemed pleasantly surprised when Roberts told him that he agrees with a 1965 Supreme Court decision declaring "that there is a fundamental right to privacy as it relates to contraception."

Kohl said he was "delighted" to learn that Roberts had just endorsed an opinion which, Kohl said, leads logically to "a woman's right to choose to terminate her pregnancy," the right recognized in Roe v. Wade.

But, once again, Roberts slipped the punch. "That's an area that I do not feel it appropriate for me to comment on," he said.

For those who have a dog in the abortion fight, it seems like Kohl revealed a bit too much in his delight. Normally, the pro-abortion advocates distance themselves from the idea that abortion equates to contraception, arguing for the legalization of the procedure from the extremes instead. Kohl makes the point that 43 million abortions in 32 years shows that abortions obviously occur for overwhelmingly retrocontraceptive reasons.

However, Dana Milbank at the Washington Post does cover the Kennedy-Biden-Roberts tussle rather extensively, although he makes stare decisis his lead. Milbank recalls some of the highlights:

As Roberts answered, Kennedy interrupted him half a dozen times, drawing three rebukes from Specter.

"You vehemently opposed the Civil Rights Restoration Act," Kennedy accused.

"No, senator," Roberts replied. "You have not accurately represented my position." Kennedy interrupted twice more, drawing two more Specter interventions.

"I was not formulating policy," Roberts finally managed to say. "I was articulating and defending the administration's position."

Specter stepped in. "This," he said, "is a good time for a 15-minute break."

Roberts stood up and exhaled deeply. Kennedy gritted his teeth, then went to the television cameras and pronounced himself "disappointed" and "troubled."

The hearing proceeding rather calmly and respectfully -- until Biden had his turn. The senator sought to extend -- and, indeed, torture -- Roberts's baseball metaphor from Monday. "The founders never set a strike zone," Biden reported, and Roberts smiled politely. Biden spent nearly nine of his 30 minutes of question time delivering an opening statement, then said: "Let me get right to it."

Milbank didn't get fooled into believing that this was just colloquy. He notes at the end of his analysis that Biden appeared to be looking for a battle of wits, but didn't appreciate it when Roberts unmasked him as largely unarmed:

Biden was caustic and personal. Discussing an old Roberts memo on gender discrimination, the senator accused Roberts of "very poor staff work" and said: "I hope you don't still hold that view, man."

Roberts got his revenge when Biden quizzed him about gender discrimination. Biden cut the judge off repeatedly, saying "my time's running out."

Roberts indulged in a small measure of revenge. While Biden fired off a series of questions without allowing Roberts to answer, the nominee finally replied: "Well, I was about to lay it out. You said you didn't want to hear about it." The room filled with laughter. Biden did not smile.

Round 3 comes today. I will review the tapes tonight when I come home from work and have more commentary then, but only if I can get massive doses of caffeine.

Get Dead Soon!

The terror rumor mill has spit out yet another Osama-is-sick announcement, although this one comes from a named source, Reuters reports. The London Arabic newspaper quotes an American colonel in Kabul as stating that the US knows that Osama bin Laden has urgently sought medical attention recently, although he declined to say how he knew or what kind of health problems the terror leader might have:

Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is in poor health and is seeking medical attention, the London-based Arabic newspaper al-Hayat said on Wednesday, quoting a U.S. officer in Afghanistan.

"Osama bin Laden is trying to obtain medical attention," Colonel Don McGraw, director of operations at the Combined Forces Command in Kabul, told a group of British reporters, including one from al-Hayat, it said.

"He (McGraw) refused to say what the Qaeda leader is suffering from or whether it is the same kidney disease which Pakistani officials said in the past he was suffering from," the newspaper added.

If true, and we've heard about Osama's bad kidneys for four years now, my reaction would be joy tempered with the slight disappointment that he could die of natural causes after commanding the murders of thousands. His capture would make a large impact on the morale of the Islamofascists arrayed against us. A natural death, on the other hand, would tend to perpetuate his reputation for elusiveness and cleverness, especially in relation to American efforts to get him.

However, on further reflection, one has to wonder why Colonel McGraw made such a statement at all. The news that the boss may soon die or at least may become incapacitated might be a trigger for hidden "sleeper" cells to jump into action. His death almost certainly will have that effect. Unless the FBI has identified these cells already but want to see an interaction between them and the network, giving these kind of signals could get dangerous fast -- especially given the way Katrina has our resources stretched at the moment. So why repeat an old piece of information that really reflects little progress anyway?

I'd love to see us pick up Osama on his way to the doctors' office, but that doesn't appear terribly likely. We may want to keep the rumors to a minimum until we actually have him in hand for the time being.

Waiting For Hef's Call

Earlier today, Kurt from Writing History dropped me an e-mail informing me that CQ had won recognition from a major national magazine as one of the top five "winning political blogs", certainly an honor considering the quality of writing across the blogosphere. However, when the magazine that honored me turned out to be Playboy, I have to admit that I didn't quite know how to respond.

First, I am certainly grateful to the editors at Playboy for selecting CQ for such an honor. While I haven't indulged myself in reading the magazine for many years, the publication has always had a sterling literary reputation, apart from its more controversial, er, photography. My first efforts at creative writing regularly got sent to their fiction editors, as Playboy paid top dollar for short stories in the market. At the time, I recall that they offered $2,000 for any submissions that got published, and twenty-five years ago, that was pretty darned good money. Unfortunately, it was darned good money for authors like Stephen King, and not like me. I did have a nice collection of Playboy rejection notes, which I actually kept for a while.

Given that history, having them recognize my writing now has a certain sense of vindication, if not a sense of 200,000 cents crossing my palm.

Kurt, in his funny (and R-rated) notice of this honor, lamentably says that the quality of the literary content of Playboy has not maintained its former high standard. I don't know whether Kurt's disappointment reflects reality, but I hope it doesn't. I doubt I will get the chance to find this out firsthand, however. When I checked it with the First Mate about picking up the latest copy to find out what Playboy said about CQ, she launched some completely unreasonable objections to other sections of the magazine I fully expected to skip over. (No, really. Trust me. Quit laughing.) In the end, however, we did reach a compromise. She's allowing me to buy the Braille edition of the magazine, and she will read it to me aloud.

Somehow, I just don't think it will be the same ...

Chad at Fraters Libertas also noted the honor, and evokes the J. Geils Band from about the same time Playboy kept rejecting my creative output. He also wants me to remember who my friends are when the inevitable invite from Hef comes to my door ...

UPDATE and BUMP: Daniel Radosh wrote the feature on page 50 of this issue, and it's really quite clever. The layout has four columns; the first lists the blog and an image that represents one of our posts. The second tells you when to bring each blog up in conversation when someone claims that X is the best of a certain type of blog. In my case, they recommend mentioning CQ when Power Line comes up as the best conservative blog. The third gives Radosh's review of each blog, and here's mine:

THE QUICK AND clever Morrissey leavens gleefully partisan analysis with doses of gleefully partisan humor. Not content to rely on linking to news reports, Captain Ed rolls up his sleeves and does his own reporting when it's called for.

The other bloggers honored by Radosh and Playboy:

Low Culture (Funniest political blog)
Matthew Yglesias (Best liberal blog)
Buzzmachine (Most influential blog)
Hit and Run (Best libertarian blog)

LA Congressman Hires Starving Guardsman Movers

While thouands of New Orleans residents waited for rescue from Hurricane Katrina's devastation and the rising flood waters from the levee breaks, a Louisiana Congressman tied up National Guard resources for over an hour so he could retrieve his belongings from his house in the beleaguered city. ABC News reports tonight that Guardsman tell them of the use of their time and resources on September 2nd to work as personal movers for Rep. William Jefferson (via The Anchoress and CQ reader Alicia G):

Military sources tells ABC News that Jefferson, an eight-term Democratic congressman, asked the National Guard that night to take him on a tour of the flooded portions of his congressional district. A 5-ton military truck and a half dozen military police were dispatched.

Lt. Col. Pete Schneider of the Louisiana National Guard tells ABC News that during the tour, Jefferson asked that the truck take him to his home on Marengo Street, in the affluent uptown neighborhood in his congressional district. According to Schneider, this was not part of Jefferson's initial request. ...

The water reached to the third step of Jefferson's house, a military source familiar with the incident told ABC News, and the vehicle pulled up onto Jefferson's front lawn so he wouldn't have to walk in the water. Jefferson went into the house alone, the source says, while the soldiers waited on the porch for about an hour.

Finally, according to the source, Jefferson emerged with a laptop computer, three suitcases, and a box about the size of a small refrigerator, which the enlisted men loaded up into the truck.

Two weeks later, the vehicle's tire tracks were still visible on the lawn.

If that seems unbelievable, the story gets better. The truck that the Guard used to give Jefferson a "tour" of his own house got stuck in the mud because of the long time Jefferson took getting his belongings out. It required the dispatch of a helicopter, which twice attempted to rescue Jefferson, who refused to get on board. After wasting 45 minutes, it went on to rescue other people, but had to cut its mission short thanks to the time spent on the Congressman.

Coincidentally, Jefferson found himself the host of federal authorities earlier this summer, investigating financial shenanigans at a high-tech firm. After his use of the state National Guard to put his computer above the desperate victims of the flood, perhaps he can expect another visit to the old mansion after the restoration.

Farrakhan Craters On Katrina

Louis Farrakhan brought his normal measured rationality to the issues surrounding the devastation tonight in Charlotte, North Carolina. He told his audience, gathered to raise relief funds for the victims of Katrina and the subsequent flooding in New Orleans, that evidence showed that the levee had been blown up to kill black people and keep whites alive (h/t: CQ reader Rick S):

He had harsh words for FEMA too. But that was just the warm up. Farrakhan also shared his thoughts on how the levee breached in the first place.

"I heard from a very reliable source who saw a 25 foot deep crater under the levee breach. It may have been blown up to destroy the black part of town and keep the white part dry," Farrakhan said.

Gilton Balanos lived in the very neighborhood Farrakhan was talking about.

"I think that's ludicrous," Balanos said. "When this happened we were caught by surprise. Individuals, the government and everybody were caught by surprise."

I know that expecting rational discourse from Farrakhan equates to anticipating coherence from Ted Kennedy, but this just beggars belief. In the middle of a category 4 hurricane, Farrakhan believes that the government snuck out to the levees, planted bombs, and blew up a levee with enough force to leave a 25-foot crater ... and that the water would somehow find all of the African-Americans?

The sad fact that Farrakhan has any following at all should embarrass anyone remotely connected to his supporters.

Fabled Danger?

Reason's Paul Sperry tries to do his best to rebut the Able Danger story about two weeks after the Pentagon not only stopped debunking it but also admitted finding three additional witnesses that corroborate Col. Tony Shaffer, Captain Scott Phillpott, and J.D. Smith. Normally, I'd have taken some time to rebut such a silly and poorly conceived article, but in this case it would only detract from the effort already expended by AJ Strata:

Accuracy is not one of Mr. Sperry’s strong suits. There were something like 60 possible terrorists in the final version of the chart, with about one third having photographs. And there were at least two versions of the chart: the one supporting the study publish around April 2000 and the one published at the end of the program around February 2001.

As we said, a good fisking uses the author’s own words to rebutt his own words:

Are there other copies of the chart floating around? Unfortunately not. The Pentagon has found no evidence that such a chart ever existed.
…
the Pentagon did turn up a “similar” chart showing links to a “Brooklyn cell.” But it did not contain a photo or a reference to Atta (or any of the other 18 hijackers), just two individuals with similar names—Mohammed Ajaz and Mohammed Arateff—who could easily have been confused for Mohamed Atta.

Similar chart? You mean a version without Atta on it? That is evidence a chart could have existed with Atta’s name on it! But Mr. Sperry is very, very gifted in the art of twisted logic. You see, a similar chart of that type made by Able Danger is evidence that no chart of that type ever existed! The mind staggers at the intellect that came up with that rationalization.

Reason usually does better than this. Read all of AJ's post.

Will New Orleans Death Toll Escalate?

CQ reader Pajamaguy points to this Washington Post report about the gruesome discovery of 45 bodies found at a New Orleans hospital that appear to have been abandoned patients that drowned in the flood. While that story may well wind up as one of the most disturbing -- who would have left 45 helpless people to die? -- the Post buries the lead past the jump. Only 279 deaths have been confirmed, and it doesn't appear at this point that the toll will escalate much further:

The city braced for more grim discoveries as the receding waters allowed search parties to reach isolated buildings. But the death toll -- 279 for Louisiana -- was still far below the initial prediction of the city's mayor that 10,000 perished.

"It's hot. It smells. But most of the houses we are looking at are empty," Oregon National Guard Staff Sgt. James Lindseth, 33, said as his platoon, inspecting for people dead or alive, worked its way through dank and broken homes that had been in the water a few days ago.

That prediction by Mayor Ray Nagin may yet still come to pass as more of the city emerges from the floodwaters. At this point, though, it will provide yet another example of the hysteria that finds its home with the unprepared and the passive, those who want others to do the work that should have already been done by themselves. The figure got a lot of press play because of its spectacular nature and because of the official status of the man proclaiming it.

The Exempt Media should ask themselves whether the estimate of 10,000 casualties had any other basis in fact. If so, they need to explain what else prompted them to report that as a reliable range. If not, then they need to rethink using reports from overwhelmed local politicians who used such estimates to shove attention off of their own performances.

This brings us back to the dead bodies in the hospital. Questions have arisen about why the city did nothing to evacuate the hospitals, which (again) comprise part of the New Orleans EOP:

The bodies of 45 patients left in a hasty evacuation were recovered from a New Orleans hospital, officials said Monday, as the city braced for the scenes left by the receding waters. ...

Officials said the bodies found Sunday in the Memorial Medical Center were left there after a frantic evacuation, days after the storm passed and floodwaters began to rise. An official of the hospital owners said the patients died before the evacuation and their bodies were left in the facility.

But the discovery was certain to raise new questions about why so many city hospitals were not evacuated before the storm. Two medical professionals inside the Memorial Medical Center said conditions began to turn desperate shortly after the floodwaters cut off roads. The darkened corridors were jammed with families. Drinking water grew scarce. Medical supplies exhausted quickly; even IVs were being rationed, they said.

"Things looked like they were going downhill quickly," said Scot Sonnier, an oncologist there. He left before the evacuation, thinking other doctors were handling it, he said.

Mayor Nagin's failure to follow the emergency operations plan again resulted in more deaths and unnecessary panic. The hospitals should have been the first sites evacuated when the voluntary evac order got published, and certainly should have been at the top of the list for the mandatory evacuation. The buses should have rolled to the hospitals before anywhere else, but even without the buses, the mayor's office should have contacted the hospitals and ordered them emptied by the Friday before landfall.

Will this gruesome discovery finally wake up the Exempt Media to the utter failure of New Orleans city management in minimizing the deaths and hardship of Katrina's effects?

Iraqi Forces Training Faster Than Expected?

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani surprised Washington and the press corps with his suggestion that Iraqi security forces have rebounded well enough that the US could consider a significant withdrawal by year's end, perhaps a drawdown by as much as one-third if all goes well. That statement might unsettle such critics of the administration such as Joe Biden, who claimed that the US bungled the training of Iraqi troops and as recently as January insisted that Iraq only had 4,000 trained soldiers:

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said in an interview yesterday that the United States could withdraw as many as 50,000 troops by the end of the year, declaring there are enough Iraqi forces trained and ready to begin assuming control in cities throughout the country.

After the White House and Pentagon were contacted for comment, however, a senior adviser to Talabani called The Washington Post to say Talabani did not intend to suggest a specific timeline for withdrawal. "He is afraid . . . this might put the notion of a timetable on this thing," the adviser said. "The exact figure of what would be required will undeniably depend on the level of insurgency [and] the level of Iraqi capability."

In the interview, Talabani said he planned to discuss reductions in U.S. forces during a private meeting with President Bush today, and said he believed the United States could begin pulling out some troops immediately.

"We think that America has the full right to move some forces from Iraq to their country because I think we can replace them [with] our forces," Talabani said. "In my opinion, at least from 40,000 to 50,000 American troops can be [withdrawn] by the end of this year."

That sounds like a far cry from the situation Biden and the New York Times described during the Condoleezza Rice confirmation hearings in January of this year. Biden claimed that Rice used deceptive numbers, exercising more caution than our own Senator Mark Dayton, who just called Rice a "liar" on the Senate floor during the open debate that followed. Biden insisted that only 4,000 Iraqis had been trained for the security forces at that point.

Talabani's statement makes clear that the US has worked efficiently to rebuild Iraq's army and national security capability. This kind of training takes time, especially when building from the ground up in the middle of a bloody terrorist insurgency. It has been just seventeen months since the US returned sovereignty to Iraq, and in that time we have built up over 200,000 Iraqi troops with at least preliminary training, and a large percentage now have battle experience and operational expertise, thanks to the impulse of Zarqawi to seize towns and expose his assets to the concerted force of American and Iraqi military units.

Talabani's timeframe may be somewhat optimistic, and the upcoming elections are too important for the US to withdraw anything more than a token prior to the vote. However, it shows that the Iraqis feel increasingly able to handle the insurgency themselves, and if they can reach an accommodation with the Sunnis on a constitution, their optimism may well be justified. Too bad some Americans can't have as much faith in America and our military as Talabani does.

Tick Tock, Bashar

America has sent a strong signal to the Assad regime in Damascus that our patience has almost run out on their unwillingness or inability to stop the flow of Islamofascist terrorists into Iraq. The New York Times notes the diplomatic shot across Syria's bow from the US envoy to Iraq, Zalmay Khalizad:

Mr. Khalilzad, in remarks to reporters in Washington, made it clear that the United States believed that Syria was providing assistance to insurgents operating in Iraq and that such help might have increased.

Government-controlled Syrian newspapers "glorify the terrorists as resistance fighters," he said. Syrian authorities "allow youngsters misguided by Al Qaeda - from Saudi Arabia, from Yemen, from North Africa - to fly into Damascus International Airport," attend training camps and then cross into Iraq, he contended. ...

"Our patience is running out," said the ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad.

This pressure comes at a bad time for the beleagured Assad regime. Not only did the US presence in Iraq and the Gulf force them to heed the calls of the Lebanese to end their long occupation of their western neighbor, but the UN will soon interrogate senior members of the Syrian government about the assassination of Lebanese politician Rafik Hariri, perhaps as early as today. Lebanon arrested four former security chiefs with strong ties to the Assad intelligence corps in the murder, and they may have started talking about their work on Syria's behalf.

The Syrians claim that they have done all they can do to close the border, but no one believes that for a moment. They stand to gain too much through Iraq's destabilization, while a successful Iraqi democracy presents a danger to Assad's grip on power. Not only will a free Iraq (along with a free Lebanon) inspire the dissidents within Syria, the economic power of a stable, united, and prosperous Iraq would quickly eclipse Syria in the region. Lacking the ability to exploit Lebanese resources, Syria will quickly wither into an economic backwater unless it engages in market reforms -- which will also require an end to Assad and his quasi-fascist reign.

The only reason for Assad to stop the insurgent flow into Iraq is the credible threat of American action. However, as the Americans build the Iraqi security forces into a credible army, the Syrians may soon find themselves at the mercy of an Iraqi effort to push back against Assad. He can expect that Kurdish elements would enthusiastically take to that mission, and that the ethnic Kurds in Syria would probably welcome them.

If the Americans want to get serious with Assad, they need to pick a clear target along this line of communication feeding the Zarqawi network -- somthing whose loss will hurt Assad's regime -- and take it out. Make it clear that we will follow the Bush Doctrine. All Assad has left is a couple of good body shots anyway, and he doesn't have the political juice any longer to seriously threaten the US in a confrontation. That will also demonstrate our commitment to the Iraqis, and also to the other regional players who may be tempted into interference with Iraqi progress towards democracy and stability.

WaPo Analysis Misses Roberts' Eloquence

Dan Balz at the Washington Post provides an uneven analysis of the first day of the Roberts confirmation hearing. While he correctly notes that the Democrats turned down the heat for the start, he fails to note at all Roberts' eloquence and charm. He also puts too much stock in the moderate tone taken by most Democrats for their opening remarks:

The first day of confirmation hearings for Judge John G. Roberts Jr. to become the 17th chief justice of the United States proved to be a tepid opening to what once was billed as a battle of monumental proportions between left and right.

There may yet be some of the fireworks that were predicted when the first of two Supreme Court vacancies opened up two months ago -- particularly this morning, when members of the Senate Judiciary Committee begin to question Roberts. But with Roberts's confirmation seemingly assured, some of the fight appears to have gone out of the Democrats and they have been forced to shift their strategy.

The confirmation hearings are now only partly about Roberts and what he thinks about the law. Instead, they have become a prelude to the coming battle over President Bush's as-yet-unnamed successor to Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and a forum with broader political implications for a debate about deep philosophical differences between Republicans and Democrats over the role of government and the courts in American society.

Balz misses the point of the opening remarks, unsurprisingly since most of them had no point at all. The Democrats on the Judiciary Committee have to present themselves as credible judges of Roberts' credentials. Thanks to their allies at PFAW and especially at NARAL, the kind of firebrand stemwinder speech that Balz appears to have expected would only serve to reinforce the notions that the Democrats have gone completely rabid.

I doubt that they strategized the path of pure boredom prior to the start of the confirmation hearing. However, they clearly needed to ensure that they greeted Roberts with respect for his standing at the bar, his accomplishments, and his skills -- especially since all of that would undoubtedly shine during this kind of a hearing. The real test of whether the Democrats have given up will come today. The Democrats made plain that they would ask him to make commitments to rule in certain ways on issues, a position which would disqualify him from the bench. If he refuses, they could make this an ugly scene.

Instead, Balz relied on recounting the pointless blathering in each speech without even mentioning the content of Roberts' opening statement. Since the ostensible reason for this hearing is Roberts and his judicial philosophy (rather than an opportunity for the Judiciary Committee to get into the news), including this weak review of his own testimony as the thirteenth paragraph indicates a poor focus on what should be the center of the story:

Roberts was largely a bystander as the 18 members of the committee gave opening statements. When his time finally arrived, he spoke briefly and without notes, outlining a view of the judiciary as one that requires humility, an open mind and a deference to precedent.

Balz focused instead on the festival of irrelevancies without analyzing them at all. He produces quotes from Dianne Feinstein and her speech glorifying abortion on demand, never explaining once why Congress didn't address that public policy itself. Lindsey Graham laughably asserted that the hearings were meant to settle whether Reagan conservatism is in the mainstream -- as if Reagan had never won a single election, let alone two and remain one of the most well-respected presidents of the modern era, and as if that should ha anything to do with confirming Roberts. Even a Notre Dame University law professor gets a quote, while nothing Roberts said makes it into the Post's analysis.

That won't last. The bombast of the questioning will undoubtedly catch Balz's ear and eye today, but he won't be able to ignore the answering volleys from Roberts.

UPDATE: Dan Balz, not Dan Eggen. Thanks to CQ reader The Maryhunter for catching the error.

A Fine Performance Amid The Bloviating

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

When Shakespeare wrote this passage of Macbeth, he assigned it to the eponymous Scotsman mulling over his rebellion. He could well have written it about the opening of a Congressional committee hearing, where the gathered politicians each have a chance to pontificate for endless hours, or at least what seem like endless hours, talking about almost everything that comes to mind. Unfortunately, most of it has no bearing on the actual matter at hand.

Today's opening to the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on John Roberts' confirmation to the Supreme Court provided an excellent example. Almost from beginning to end, the bloviating reminded listeners why the Senate has produced so few Presidents but so many blowhards. The bloviation may have been the only bipartisan effort by the Judiciary Committee, which will end up splitting 10-8 in all likelihood in recommending Roberts to the full Senate.

Specter had a fetish for the year 2040, projecting to what he saw as the end of the Roberts Era, but then at the end almost argued for Roberts to voluntarily retire in 2020:

Your prospective stewardship of the court, which could last until the year 2040 or longer -- the senior justice now is Justice Stevens, who is 85, and, projecting ahead 35 years, that would take us to the year 2040 and would present a very unique opportunity for a new chief justice to rebuild the image of the court away from what many believe it has become as super legislature and to bring consensus to the court with the hallmark of the court being 5-4 decisions: a 5-4 decision this year allowing Texas to display the 10 Commandments; a 5-4 decision, turning Kentucky down from displaying the 10 Commandments; a 5-4 decision four years ago striking down a section of the Americans with Disabilities Act; and last year a 5-4 decision upholding the Americans for Disabilities Act on the same congressional record. ...

In one of your early memoranda, you came forward with an intriguing thought, one of many in those early memorandas as your conceptualization power was evident that justices ought to be limited to a 15-year term.

And with that idea in play, if time permits, it's something I'd like to explore: voluntary action on the part of a justice, or perhaps the president can make that a condition.

So which will it be? Does Specter expect that Roberts will commit to a term limit, or have the President insist on a voluntary commitment to one? What rubbish.

At least Specter stayed somewhat on topic. Leahy dove right into the murky flood waters of the New Orleans flood, which has bupkis to do with a Supreme Court selection:

Today, the devastation, despair facing millions of our fellow Americans in the Gulf region is a tragic reminder of why we have a federal government, why it's critical that our government be responsive.

We need the federal government for our protection and security, to cast a lifeline to those in distress, to mobilize better resources beyond the ability of any state and local government -- all of this for the common good.

The full dimensions of the disaster are not yet known. Bodies of loved ones need to be recovered. Families need to be reunited. The survivors need to be assisted. Long-term health risks and environmental damage have to be assessed.

But if anyone needed a reminder of the need and role of a government, the last two days have provided it. If anyone needed a reminder of the growing poverty and despair among too many Americans, we now have it.

All these good reasons apply to having a Congress that allocates its resources wisely and quits blowing money on pork-barrel projects. None of them have anything to do with confirming a Supreme Court justice who has nothing to do with public policy except to ensure that it doesn't violate the Constitution. If one needed a reminder why Leahy has no fitness to serve on this committee, his selection of Katrina as his first issue in his speech firms it up quite nicely. Leahy wanted to pander to the national news media, which I'm quite sure will reward him with glowing editorials tomorrow morning.

Kennedy, of course, performed at his usual level of irrelevance and hyperbole:

The people have a right to know that their government is promoting their interests, not the special interests.

When it comes to the price of gasoline and the safety of prescription drugs, the air we breathe and the water we drink and the food and other products we buy, the people have a right to keep government from intruding into their private lives and most personal decisions.

But the tragedy of Katrina shows in the starkest terms why every American needs an effective national government that will step in to meet urgent needs that individual states and communities cannot meet on their own.

I forgot to mention incoherence, didn't I? Not only does Kennedy jump on the Katrina bandwagon, but then he argues against just about every Democratic program ever designed. Government shouldn't set the price of gasoline? Great -- quit taxing it and allow refineries to be built. Kennedy wants the government out of the business of food and drink? Air and water? Can anyone tell what the hell Kennedy was talking about in his speech? This shouldn't have been extemporaneous; these were his prepared remarks.

The only Senator to stay on point was Orrin Hatch. He kept his remarks focused entirely on the confirmation process, running interference for Roberts and leading the way for the jurist to keep his answers within the bounds of ethics and precedent. He spoke eloquently about the brief confirmation hearing of George Sutherland in 1922, when the Judiciary Committee simply forwarded the nomination directly to the Senate floor. (Grassley later mentioned Byron "Whizzer" White's 1962 hearing -- which took all of fifteen minutes, before television made these hearings into spectacles during the Bork debacle.) He reminded everyone that all past nominees have stuck to the so-called Ginsburg standard, and that they have all received bipartisan approval as a result:

This has been a procedure which has been followed in the past and is one which I think is based upon sound legal precedent.

Justice Marshall drew his line, yet we confirmed him by a vote of 69-11. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor drew her line, yet we confirmed her by a vote of 99-0. Justice Kennedy drew his line, yet we confirmed him by a vote of 97-0. Justice Ginsburg drew her line, yet we confirmed her by a vote of 96-3. Justice Breyer drew his line, yet we confirmed him by a vote of 87-9.

We must use the judicial rather than a political standard to evaluate Judge Roberts' fitness for the Supreme Court. That standard must be based upon the fundamental principle that judges interpret and apply, but do not make the law.

Biden, of course, just told Roberts that unless he kowtowed to the Left's litmus tests, he'd vote against his confirmation, having heard nothing of what Hatch spoke:

Like most Americans, I believe the Constitution recognizes a general right to privacy. I believe a woman's right to be nationally and vigorously protected exists. I believe that the federal government must act as a shield to protect the powerless against the economic interests of this country. And I believe the federal government should stamp out discrimination wherever -- wherever -- it occurs.

And I believe the Constitution inspires and empowers us to achieve these great goals.

Judge, if I look only at what you've said and written -- as used to happen in the past -- I would have to vote no. You dismissed the constitutional protection of privacy as, quote, a so-called right. You derided agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission that combat corporate misconduct as constitutional anomalies, quote.

And you dismissed gender discrimination as, quote -- and I quote -- merely a perceived problem.

This is your chance, Judge, to explain what you meant by what you have said and what you have written.That's what I said when I was chairman. That's what this is about.

And so on, and so on. Not one of the Senators said anything surprising, original, or witty. Not one of them, save Hatch, kept their remarks focused on the task at hand. Every single one of them could bottle their speeches and give Sleep-Eze tough competition in the marketplace.

Roberts, on the other hand, appears to have performed very well, given the circumstances. Not having had access to the remarks made but obviously anticipating them well in advance, he gave a poised, well-reasoned opening statement which sought to allay the fears and rebut the charges made by various members of the committee. In just a few sentences, he communicated what hours of bloviating could not about the heart of the process before us:

Mr. Chairman, when I worked in the Department of Justice, in the office of the solicitor general, it was my job to argue cases for the United States before the Supreme court. I always found it very moving to stand before the justices and say, I speak for my country. But it was after I left the department and began arguing cases against the United States that I fully appreciated the importance of the Supreme Court and our constitutional system.

Here was the United States, the most powerful entity in the world, aligned against my client. And, yet, all I had to do was convince the court that I was right on the law and the government was wrong and all that power and might would recede in deference to the rule of law.

That is a remarkable thing.

It is what we mean when we say that we are a government of laws and not of men. It is that rule of law that protects the rights and liberties of all Americans. It is the envy of the world. Because without the rule of law, any rights are meaningless.

That opening statement should have the Senators conferring with their speechwriters, scolding them for not having a tenth of the eloquence of John Roberts. It also should put them on notice that Roberts will likely outclass every single one of those foolish enough to try to engage him in a head-on debate. None of them, save Hatch and perhaps Specter, have the intellect for the effort. Kennedy, Durbin, Schumer, and Biden will all try, nonetheless -- and wind up making themselves look even more foolish than ever.

It should make for a much more interesting spectacle than today's self-indulgent yawnfest.

A Sad Coda

Last month, we cheered as a comatose Susan Rollin Torres gave birth to Susan Anne Catherine Torres, the child that she would never see with living eyes as cancer doomed her. Unfortunately, little Susan Anne could not overcome her premature birth, and died today while undergoing emergency surgery for a perforated intestine.

The Torres family could use our prayers tonight.

No Great Surprise

To no one's great surprise, Michael Brown resigned as head of FEMA this afternoon. Brown, who got publicly rebuked by his recall to Washington last week, apparently knows how to take a hint:

The White House picked a top FEMA official with three decades of firefighting experience to be FEMA's new director, senior administration sources said Monday.

R. David Paulison, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s emergency preparedness force, will lead the beleaguered agency, according to three administration sources who spoke on condition of anonymity because the announcement had not yet been made.

Bush's decision followed FEMA Director Mike Brown's announcement that he was resigning “in the best interest of the agency and best interest of the president,” three days after losing his on-site command of the Hurricane Katrina relief effort.

No one seriously thought that Brown would continue as head of FEMA after the past two weeks. No matter what a later investigation determines as the cause of delays in getting aid to the people trapped in New Orleans, Brown didn't give any personal impression of urgency in the first few days of the storm. For that matter, neither did Blanco and Nagin, but they will eventually answer to the people of Louisiana for their performance. When the situation called for a Patton, he gave an impression of the bureaucrat that he is. That doesn't necessarily mean he did anything wrong -- we'll find out later -- but in disasters, the man in charge of the federal response needs to project confidence, urgency, competence, and action all at once. Brown didn't measure up to those expectations.

His resume padding, however, probably finished him. And one has to ask, no matter who appointed him, why this White House seems to have so much trouble vetting its DHS appointees. Bernard Kerik thoroughly embarrassed the Bush administration with his troubled background, which took the press about 24 hours to unravel. If Bush has Giuliani's recommendation as an excuse for Kerik, he has no such excuse for Brown. Someone needs to join Michael Brown on the unemployment line for blowing a standard background check.

The administration looks like it picked a better choice for Brown's replacement, and it begs the question as to why they didn't start with Paulison from the start. He has real-life experience in disaster recovery (or we presume so, assuming he doesn't have Brown's talent for creative writing), having worked on the ground during Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and the Valujet crash in 1996. That doesn't necessarily mean he will make a great administrator, but as the lead man in disaster response, he can hire people who do that. His main role will be to inspire confidence from the public and the responders ... a task that Brown could not accomplish once the situation spun out of control.

Brownstein Tries Humor At Joke Newspaper

Ronald Brownstein must have intended his latest political analysis for The Onion, the satirical newspaper best known for its interviews with the 9/11 hijackers from their new residences in Hell. Instead, he found it published by his usual joke newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, which buried a news report of an explicit al-Qaeda threat in its back pages this weekend. Brownstein indulges in wishful thinking from the Left by spending an entire article detailing why he thinks Bush might consider appointing a Democrat to the Supreme Court:

A Bush gesture to Democrats "would be seen as panic — or that he is willing to offer us up," says veteran conservative strategist Jeff Bell.

But Bush may find such discontent an acceptable cost for reaching out beyond his core coalition to independent and moderate voters who have soured on him so much in recent surveys that independent pollster John Zogby says Bush now "is president of the Republicans" alone.

Any Democrat would require some ideological concession from Bush. But prospects such as Jose A. Cabranes, appointed by Bill Clinton to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, or even Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), might bring judicial philosophies Bush could tolerate. And by compromising ideologically, Bush could make a dramatic gesture of national reconciliation and conceivably improve his own political standing as well.

Brownstein either is kidding us or himself. In the first place, Bush has no more elections to win. Even if he did, he wouldn't win even a single state by appointing Democrats after such a long struggle to gain control of the Senate and the White House simutaneously by the GOP. Thanks to the ill-advised selections of justices such as William Brennan by Dwight Eisenhower -- one of Brownstein's examples of how past presidents made themselves more popular -- the Supreme Court has transformed itself into a superlegislature that further leftward expansion will only exacerbate.

Nor does Brownstein find many examples of such largess on the part of Presidents. Lincoln did it once, but anyone with a sense of history should understand why Lincoln would reach out to those Democrats who still found themselves in the Union. Republicans crossed the aisle nine times, the last of which was Brennan, while Democrats returned the favor only three times, the last of which was Truman appointing his personal friend Harold Burton. None of these gestures had any lasting impact on the political standing of the presidents involved. Eisenhower still gets unreasonably low marks from liberals, while Truman's popularity has much more to do with his steadfastness in foreign affairs than his appointees to the Supreme Court.

Brownstein doesn't even bother to argue that such a move would reduce the irrational Bush-hatred of the Left even an iota. Bush has appointed more African-Americans to higher positions of power than any other President in history, and what did he get for his efforts, other than arranging one of the most distinguished and competent Cabinets in memory? Kanye West telling America that Bush doesn't care about black people, and the Congressional Black Caucus this week providing echoes of West in their floor speeches. He worked with Ted Kennedy to develop the largest spending increases in decades for education, and Kennedy winds up accusing him of secretly concocting wars on his ranch in Crawford.

Other than the war and cutting taxes, most of Bush's presidency has focused on centrism and reaching across the aisle for solutions. The response has consistently been hatred and irrationality. Why waste a Supreme Court nomination just to win approbation with that crowd?

Perhaps Brownstein should consider working directly for The Onion from now on, or the Los Angeles Times should rethink his status as political analyst.

UPDATE: Professor Bainbridge looks at the history that Brownstein recounts and figures that the GOP could call itself the Sucker Party if it tries what Brownstein suggests again.

Gray Lady Shrieking Over ID Requirement

Leave it to the Gray Lady to start shrieking over a state requiring the same level of identification it takes to cash a check as it will to cast a vote. Georgia passed a law requiring that voters present a state ID in order to identify themselves at polling booths for elections, a common-sense manner of avoiding the kind of voter fraud that Milwaukee experienced in the last presidential election. Despite the fact that Georgia will offer the IDs for free to indigent citizens, the New York Times still finds itself screaming about "poll taxes":

In 1966, the Supreme Court held that the poll tax was unconstitutional. Nearly 40 years later, Georgia is still charging people to vote, this time with a new voter ID law that requires many people without driver's licenses - a group that is disproportionately poor, black and elderly - to pay $20 or more for a state ID card. Georgia went ahead with this even though there is not a single place in the entire city of Atlanta where the cards are sold. The law is a national disgrace.

Until recently, Georgia, like most states, accepted many forms of identification at the polls. But starting this month, it is accepting only government-issued photo ID's. People with driver's licenses are fine. But many people without them have to buy a state ID card to vote, at a cost of $20 for a five-year card or $35 for 10 years. The cards are sold in 58 locations, in a state with 159 counties. It is outrageous that Atlanta does not have a single location. (The state says it plans to open one soon.) But the burden is also great on people in rural parts of the state.

The Republicans who pushed the law through, and Gov. Sonny Perdue, also a Republican, who signed it, say that it is intended to prevent fraud. But it seems clear that it is about keeping certain people away from the polls, for political advantage. The vast majority of fraud complaints in Georgia, according to its secretary of state, Cathy Cox, involve absentee ballots, which are unaffected by the new law. Ms. Cox says she is unaware of a single documented case in recent years of fraud through impersonation of a voter at the polls.

Perhaps that is because the New York Times failed to cover the unusual appearance of almost 10,000 ballots in the city of Milwaukee in 2004. Wisconsin does not require any form of ID except having someone "vouch" for their legality at the polling station, and allows same-day registration on the same basis. The difference came to almost the amount of the gap between John Kerry and George Bush, who had been expected to win the state based on late polling data, but who lost by less than 0.5% thanks to the Milwaukee surge.

In an economic environment where consumers need a state-issued photo ID to cash a check, and where states require them to purchase alcohol and firearms, such an identification requirement for voting hardly appears onerous. The state has a compelling interest in ensuring that elections have safeguards to eliminate fraud and abuse. Georgia has allowed for those too poor to buy an ID to get one for free, which eliminates an insurmountable obstacle for voting. The people that the law keeps from the polls are those who aren't eligible to be there in the first place.

Every citizen in this country has the right to vote, absent felony convictions. That does not mean that states cannot put requirements for voters to demonstrate their eligibility in order to avoid fraud and the undermining of confidence in the electoral system it brings. Requiring a state ID has no relation to a "poll tax" but a common-sense and common-practice method of identification. Hopefully, the rest of the states will follow Georgia's lead and help eliminate the voter fraud that occurs through "vouching" and other useless requirements.

Der Spiegel Takes Liberties With Poverty Stats

The German magazine Der Spiegel provides an inept analysis of American economics and politics in today's hack job on Hurricane Katrina. The article starts off with a twisted take on poverty statistics:

America is not only licking its wounds, but also confronting underlying race problems revealed by the floodwaters. Just how racially imbalanced is the world's richest country? Poverty under the Bush administration has climbed by 12 percent. ...

On the same day the levees broke, Charles Nelson of the US Census Bureau in Washington presented the most recent report on income and poverty in the United States. The numbers and graphs he unveiled offered an appalling insight into the USA.

The number of those in America living in poverty climbed by 1.1 million to fully 37 million people - the fourth jump in a row. While the official number of US poor dropped steadily during Bill Clinton's presidency, it has grown by 12 percent under George W. Bush.

Our overall population grew by 3 million people during the same one-year period. It doesn't take a genius to understand that a significant chunk of that growth comes not from births outstripping deaths in a closed system, but from immigration, legal and illegal. In fact, the poverty rate rose from 12.5% to 12.7%, year to year, and has risen from 11.3% in 2000, which was the lowest rate since 1973, when Nixon had been in office for 5 years.

However, our current poverty rate beats all but the final two years of the Clinton administration, which saw the population grow by 22 million over eight years. Bush has had a population growth of 12 million in four years. Again, it hardly seems likely that the increase represents the rich flocking to our shores. Does Der Spiegel tell anyone that? No, of course not. It's all about hating Bush.

Frank Hornig then turns this contextless stat into an indictment of the effects slavery has on Louisiana, noting wide disparities between the economic status of the poor and the rich. Louisiana does have a high poverty rate, but Hornig fails to note that it has improved over the past three years. He also quotes Frank Rich's contention that New Orleans had "Titanic syndrome ... Only the first-class people had access to the lifeboats." Hornig should ask Mayor Ray Nagin about why he didn't get the lifeboats, in the form of buses, rolling as the city emergency operation plan demanded prior to the hurricane's landfall. It didn't have anything to do with poverty, except perhaps for poverty of thought and preparation.

If this drivel represents the norm of German journalism, small wonder the Germans have such a skewed view of America.

Remembering 9/11

Note: This entry will ride on top all day. Keep scrolling to see new posts.

Last year I wrote my remembrance of my personal 9/11 story, one I think that duplicates what most people experienced on that day. On the fourth anniversary of the worst attack on American soil since the Civil War, I think I'd like to focus on the post-9/11 experience -- how it changed me and how it continues to do so.

Prior to 9/11, politics played a small role in my life. While I followed the news and had my opinions, I rarely involved myself in political issues. In younger days, I eventually learned that politics quickly transformed into a kind of bloodsport that didn't have any appeal to me. I preferred quiet conversation, and that required me to remain silent even when others around me openly expressed their own opinions. Oddly enough for those who read CQ, I became a closet conservative. Only the 2000 election debacle pushed me to argue politics with my friends, and only for a short time.

On September 11th, 2001, watching the collapse of the Twin Towers and knowing full well what kind of terrorists executed these attacks -- anyone following the Khobar Towers/African embassies/USS Cole thread knew it -- I grew more and more angry ... with myself. I had allowed myself to become impotent; I had silenced my own voice. I had long believed that our track record of compromise and retreat in the face of terrorist attacks in Teheran, Lebanon, the Beirut kidnapping sprees, and our shameful pullout of Somalia had only encouraged enemies to consider us weak and vacillating and therefore easy to defeat.

One of the first actions I took was to create a flyer for my office with a photo of Manhattan, Statue of Liberty in the foreground, and smoke rising from Ground Zero prominently displayed. Underneath, I wrote REMEMBER SEPTEMBER 11! and posted it up on my office wall at work -- where it remains to this day. I also printed out an American flag on paper and taped it next to this reminder. Looking back, it seems silly, but I wanted to make sure that I remembered this attack every day I came to the office.

At the time, I had begun to study Catholic apologetics and the Irish language and had joined Delphi forums that debated these points. That's where I discovered that the so-called outpouring of global sympathy in the wake of these attacks was a myth. Users from around the world took great delight in castigating the United States for its arrogance and foreign policy, especially for its support of Israel, as the cause of these attacks and scolded the Americans in these forums for creating the environment that led to the murder of our civilians. (Not surprisingly, my Irish-language forums were the worst.) I'm not talking about a month later; I mean that very night. Scores of posts went up on these boards, mainly from European contributors, taking delight in the schadenfreude of the moment. Wan responses about the lack of civility evoked nothing but derision.

I decided that night that I would fight back. I was too old to join the service, but I could start by finding my voice and putting it to use. Eventually I found blogging, two years after the attacks, and decided that this gave me the most effective voice in a national debate. Thanks to CQ readers, it has proven very successful in that regard.

When I sometimes wonder whether I can have any impact, whether what I do matters at all, I try to remember how I felt after the planes hit their targets -- and especially after hearing how Flight 93 missed theirs because a handful of Americans did whatever they could to thwart the enemies of freedom and liberty. That taught us all a lesson, I believe. Sometimes whether an individual effort succeeds or fails isn't really the point. It's that the effort can inspire others to act -- and once we all act in defense of freedom, America cannot be beaten in the long run.

Feel free to add your 9/11 remembrances in the comments section. Visit Michelle Malkin for an excellent roundup of links, and Lori at PoliPundit as well.

Remembering 9/11: The Pentagon

Note: This post will ride second all day long. Keep scrolling for new posts.

When the First Mate and I went to the Pentagon this past Fourth of July, we got a wonderful guided tour from a CQ reader who gave up half of his holiday to take us through the entire building. The Pentagon has so much history and so many fascinating stories, but by far the most moving portion came at the beginning of the tour. The Pentagon has a memorial to the lives that ended on 9/11/01, as the third attack plane plowed into the very place where we now stood.

I wrote about this during our vacation, but I want to share with you all of the pictures I took of the memorial.

This image actually comes from another memorial inside the Pentagon, one that lists the name of the dead from the US Navy. My apologies for the flash.

The centerpiece of the memorial.

An explanation of the Defense of Freedom medal, given to civilian DoD workers as an equivalent of the Purple Heart. Donald Rumsfeld created this award on September 27, 2001, as a result of the terrorist attack on the Pentagon.

A list of the missing and the dead at the Pentagon from the attack.

The altar in the chapel of the memorial. I thought the back-lit seal was especially beautiful, and I kept the flash off so that I could pick it up better. That's why the rest of the picture is so dark; the chapel normally is not.

The true memorial of the Pentagon attack, however, cannot be found at the Pentagon itself but at the Smithsonian Museum of American History. This flag hangs just off the lobby, a two-story tall flag that earned its fame as the flag that Pentagon workers draped over the gaping hole at the crash site in the days following the attack. They wanted the world to know that we may have suffered a tremendous attack -- but that we would not run, we would not hide, we would not be intimidated into retreat. The Pentagon would rebuild, and we would fight the war that the terrorists provoked, and that we would prevail.

UPDATE: Here's a picture of the event, from 9/12.

Flight 93 - The Flight That Fought Back

I just finished watching Flight 93: The Flight That Fought Back. This well-made docu-drama recalls immediately the fear and dread that we all felt on 9/11, making excellent use of real recordings, interviews, and recreations to piece together a credible narrative of the last 30 minutes or so of the lives of 40 American heroes. I want to thank Ask Jeeves for sponsoring the commercial-free presentation of the film. Both the First Mate and I had tears streaming down our faces during the more personal moments that the families chose to share with the nation.

I also want to thank the Discovery Channel for their presentation of this film on the fourth anniversary of 9/11, especially given what the broadcast networks decided to put on the air tonight. I won't bother to link to any of them, but one network ran repeats, another ran a four-year-old heist movie; not one of them even acknowledged the anniversary.

Discovery Channel will run this film two more times tonight. If you read this, take the two hours and tune it in. Bring Kleenex, and thank God for forty Americans who beat al-Qaeda before most of us knew who they were.

Could 9/11 Happen Again?

The United States extensively revamped airport security after 9/11, intending on taking away commercial airliners as weapons of opportunity for al-Qaeda terrorists. In the four years since the attacks, we have yet to see another attempt to hijack flights in the US to use as guided missiles for massive suicide attacks. We believe that we have successfully blocked that modus operandi for the future, forcing terrorists to try something else instead.

A new book by Annie Jacobsen, Terror in the Skies: Why 9/11 Could Happen Again arrived in the mail on Friday, which may cause us to rethink our sense of security. Jacobsen originally wrote about this in Women's Wall Street last year, shortly after the flight which she claims experienced a dry-run at another hijacking attempt, or possibly a "probe", a mission to test response and gather intelligence about potential defensive in-flight measures. At the time, I remained a bit skeptical. I'll be trying to read through the book over the next couple of days, but so far, she presents a compelling argument that something happened on Northwest 327.

WaPo Gives Roberts A More Balanced Perspective

A funny thing happened after Bush shifted John Roberts to William Rehnquist's seat rather than Sandra Day O'Connor's after the death of the Chief Justice: the Washington Post suddenly began to treat Roberts more rationally. After early stories insinuating that Roberts was a closet racist, the Post now publishes more balanced and neutral reporting on Roberts' background. Today's Post survey of Roberts leading up to his confirmation hearings this week actually shows Roberts in a mostly positive light, as a man willing to go out of his way to connect to the nuts and bolts of the cases he argued:

"It's helpful for someone who's going to be a judge to have dealt with ordinary people," says Peter B. Edelman, a Georgetown law professor and former Clinton administration official who opposes Roberts's nomination. "Institutionally, it's better for the court to have as many people with real-life experience as possible."

Then again, no one would describe the current Supreme Court as streetwise; as Edelman pointed out, none of the liberal justices were digging ditches before their nominations, either. All the justices have been federal judges for at least 15 years (for some, including their time on the high court), and several were once law professors. And Roberts's colleagues say he did at least try to break out of the appellate bar's ivory tower. When he defended Toyota against a claim for a repetitive-motion injury, he visited a factory to get a better understanding of the work in question. When he defended Alaska against a native land claim, he flew over the Arctic Circle, boated up pristine rivers and visited native villages to get a feel for the back country.

"This kind of advocacy can be an academic exercise, but John always wanted to make sure he could explain his arguments in real-world terms," says Gregory Garre, who worked for Roberts at Hogan & Hartson and is now the firm's top appellate lawyer. "He's not the kind of guy who makes up his mind right away. He goes through cases brick by brick."

It's a lengthy piece, but by far the best news reporting I've yet read from the Post on the Roberts nomination. Michael Grunwald paints a picture not just of John Roberts as a committed, principled, and highly effective attorney at the Supreme Court bar, but of the entire bar itself. It's too bad that the Post didn't take this approach from the beginning instead of its selection of out-of-context snippets of memos in order to paint Roberts as a slavering bigot or mindless idealogue.

Beldar has much more on this piece, including a rebuttal to one particular point which his expertise addresses well.

Reimagining The UN

James Traub provides a thought-provoking analysis of the systemic problems of the United Nations in today's New York Times, and what might be done to ameliorate them. Traub notes that John Bolton might have disrupted the so-called reform effort at the UN by insisting on real reform, but that the US hardly stands alone among nations that put their national interests above the UN:

If U.N. reform falters this week, or if only a few noncontroversial measures pass, the blame is bound to fall on the Bush administration and its confrontational ambassador, John Bolton. It's true that Bolton has shattered a great deal of crockery since arriving in Turtle Bay last month, loudly disparaging the laboriously assembled reform package and then submitting a new version with 750 amendments, as well as making common cause with the Chinese to block Security Council expansion. And it's true as well that the United States, owing to its unique position of power and the ideological proclivities of this administration, is willing - no, eager - to make a very public bonfire of the high-minded principles of multilateralism. What is less noticed, however, is how many other states - Russia, China and many members of the U.N.'s still-extant "nonaligned movement" - are perfectly content to dance around the embers. Many members of the U.N. are simply not willing to sacrifice whatever they define as their national interests for the collective good that the organization aspires to represent and advance.

Traub, who is currently developing a book about the United Nations, proposes instead a Peace and Security Union, modeled on NATO but not limiting itself to the democracies. Instead, he would allow nations to join once they committed themselves to non-negotiable core principles:

Terrorism must be unambiguously defined and confronted both through police and, where necessary, military means; states have a responsibility to protect their own citizens, which in turn confers an obligation on the membership to intervene, at times through armed force, in the case of atrocities; extreme poverty and disease, which threaten the integrity of states, require a collective response.

Traub argues that non-democracies would not get excluded, but allows that most would probably fail to qualify. Why bother with the subterfuge? Democracies do not always agree on foreign policy. India, the world's largest democracy, regularly opposed American policy regarding almost any issue, especially Israel, and aligned itself with the Soviets for most of the Cold War. It still would deserve a place at a PSU, once constituted. Would a repressive regime like Iran belong there, even if it did commit to upholding these ideals?

The problem with the UN is that includes nations like Iran, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia, and others that oppress its own people and either actively or passively allow their resources to be used to fund terrorism. Making them pledge to stop in order to join a new club does nothing but elevate naiveté to new heights. One cannot combat corruption and incompetence unless one removes the corrosive elements that generate them in the first place.

Part of the problem with the UN is the elevated expectations that people have of the organization. The UN functions well as a debating society and in maintaining a status quo. In fact, the founders designed the entire structure with that in mind: a way to freeze the world into a bipolar arrangement and keep it there. The UN was perfectly content to consign millions, even billions, of people into oppression as long as it stopped any major wars from breaking out -- and in that cause, it was largely successful. The UN became the battleground for the US-Soviet Cold War, a venue which saw the US lose most of the major battles while it eventually won the war through attrition, especially in the 1980s when the Reagan administration took the strategy of ignoring most of what went on at Turtle Bay.

The UN carries with it the expectation of world government, but that's hardly realistic. For people living in democracies, that would mean surrendering sovereignty to an unelected organization populated mostly by representatives of non-democratic nations. As the Oil-For-Food scandal has proven, the organization has no mechanisms for checks and balances against corruption and abuse in its executive. Dictators find even less to like about the idea of submission to the UN; they have fought and struggled to claim power in their nations, and they do not conceive of willingly passing it off to foreigners, for high-minded ideals or any other reason.

Our efforts should go towards establishing and supporting democracies. While we can continue our membership in the UN debating society, the US and UK should establish not a PSU but a Union of Democratic States, one that requires free elections, multi-party politics, freedom of speech and of the press, and free-market economic principles (especially private property rights) as prerequisites for entry. The UDS would exist to present a formidable momentum towards transforming regions like Southwest Asia into liberal democracies and therefore aggressively confront not just terrorism but poverty and injustice as well. A UDS could hardly do worse than the UN at that mission, and almost certainly do much better.

UPDATE: Brant at Strange Women Lying In Ponds has a great takedown of a Guardian article that gripes about John Bolton. In fact, strange women lying in ponds choosing leaders makes more sense than the current UN system, although it would take someone to turn a plowshare back into a sword to do it. (Glad to see Brant back to regular blogging, too!)

FEMA Response Not The Issue

Jack Kelly writes about the widely-reviled FEMA response to Hurricane Katrina in today's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and wonders why people consider it so poor. Looking at the historic response to disaster from the federal government, FEMA actually improved its rate of transferring assets to the affected area, he argues -- especially when one considers that the disaster area comprises an area the size of Great Britain:

Journalists who are long on opinions and short on knowledge have no idea what is involved in moving hundreds of tons of relief supplies into an area the size of England in which power lines are down, telecommunications are out, no gasoline is available, bridges are damaged, roads and airports are covered with debris, and apparently have little interest in finding out.

So they libel as a "national disgrace" the most monumental and successful disaster relief operation in world history.

I write this column a week and a day after the main levee protecting New Orleans breached. In the course of that week:

* More than 32,000 people have been rescued, many plucked from rooftops by Coast Guard helicopters.

* The Army Corps of Engineers has all but repaired the breaches and begun pumping water out of New Orleans.

* Shelter, food and medical care have been provided to more than 180,000 refugees.

Kelly also points out the difficulties of getting assistance into devastated areas once the disaster has struck. FEMA, in an attempt to avoid these problems, pre-positioned aid on the outskirts of what it guessed would be the impact areas of Katrina, and for the most part guessed correctly. It could not foresee that Louisiana would not allow their responders, the Red Cross and Salvation Army, access to victims for days on end while Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin played chicken with the trapped residents, trying to get them to leave instead of stay in place.

Kelly describes what FEMA faced for moving additional resources to address the evacuation operations that the state and local authorities should have completed before landfall:

Guardsmen need to receive mobilization orders; report to their armories; draw equipment; receive orders and convoy to the disaster area. Guardsmen driving down from Pennsylvania or Navy ships sailing from Norfolk can't be on the scene immediately.

Relief efforts must be planned. Other than prepositioning supplies near the area likely to be afflicted (which was done quite efficiently), this cannot be done until the hurricane has struck and a damage assessment can be made. There must be a route reconnaissance to determine if roads are open, and bridges along the way can bear the weight of heavily laden trucks.

And federal troops and Guardsmen from other states cannot be sent to a disaster area until their presence has been requested by the governors of the afflicted states.

Failure to properly recon these routes doesn't speed up the effort -- it creates a high probability of transforming rescue personnel into victims themselves, who will then require even more resources to rescue later. They have to use heavy vehicles to transport the goods and personnel to the afflicted. Journalists can get by with satellite vans and a handful of crew, and therefore might get by on marginal routes, but the military travels heavier than Geraldo Rivera and has to ensure that they can make the trip successfully in order to eliminate wasted time driving around looking for alternatives.

These are the reasons why FEMA makes clear that local and state authorities should plan on having their own resources in place for the first 72-96 hours after a disaster strikes. In this case, FEMA had significant resources in place prior to the disaster, and followed up with a massive response within their time frame after the levees broke and the disaster overwhelmed New Orleans and Louisiana. Unless people think that, as Kelly quotes a Guardsman, we can have Scotty beam the military down from the USS Enterprise at the snap of the fingers, the fact is that FEMA responded as designed to this disaster.

Louisiana Failed To Follow A Flawed Plan: Florida

Today's Palm Beach Post takes a look at the Katrina response from a Floridian point of view, one that has plenty of experience with hurricane devastation and response. The verdict of Florida's emergency response officials is that not only did Louisiana fail to properly plan and train for an eminently forseeable disaster, but it also failed to follow the flawed plan it had (h/t: CQ reader Barnestormer):

One thing Florida knows is hurricanes.

Florida emergency planners criticized and even rebuked their counterparts -- or what passes for emergency planners -- in those states for their handling of Hurricane Katrina. Gov. Jeb Bush, the head of Florida AHCA and the head of Florida wildlife (which is responsible for all search and rescue) all said they made offers of aid to Mississippi and Louisiana the day before Katrina hit but were rebuffed. After the storm, they said they've had to not only help provide people to those states but also have had to develop search and rescue plans for them. "They were completely unprepared -- as bad off as we were before Andrew," one Florida official said. ...

Louisiana also lacked an adequate plan to evacuate New Orleans, despite years of research that predicted a disaster equal to or worse than Katrina. Even after a disaster test run last year exposed weaknesses in evacuation and recovery, officials failed to come up with solutions. ...

But the most recent Louisiana emergency operations plan doesn't address how to evacuate in the case of flooding from storm surge, saying simply that "The Greater New Orleans Metropolitan Area represents a difficult evacuation problem due to the large population and its unique layout."

It continues, "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."

That part of the EOP occurs on Page 13, under Part II-B, Assumptions. The plan assumes those resources would be available for use, and yet no one at the state level thought to ask for them until a day after the flood waters submerged them almost to their roofs. No one even thought to move them to higher ground before the storm hit New Orleans so that they could ferry people in and out of the city. Instead, after the levees broke on Tuesday morning, FEMA had to arrange for buses out of Houston to travel over damaged roads to get to the outskirts of New Orleans, which they did on Wednesday evening -- not a bad turnaround time considering the widespread road damage and travel hazards Katrina caused.

However, the plan does discuss, in rather generic and passive terms, how to plan evacuation into the response. The EOP section that deals with evacuation, Part III, states clearly that even a voluntary evacuation should initiate local transportation assets to assist in getting people out who cannot transport themselves. This is Part III-B, 1.a.7-8, which lays out the expectations of local officials:

7. Local transportation resources should be marshaled and public transportation plans implemented as needed.

8. Announce the location of staging areas for people who need transportation. Public transportation will concentrate on moving people from the staging areas to safety in host parishes with priority given to people with special needs.

When that escalates to a "recommended" evacuation order, the language gets stronger for the local authorities, who must then "mobilize parish/local transportation to assist persons who lack transportation or who have mobility problems [section III-B 2.a.2]."

That means that Nagin's call on Friday for a recommended evacuation should have prompted him at that point to start the buses rolling -- and Blanco's office should have made sure that happened. Not only should they have provided oversight on Nagin's response, they had the responsibility to provide Nagin with regional and state transportation resources specifically for evacuation of at-risk populations, according to section III-B 2.c.6:

6. Mobilize State evacuation traffic control active and passive resources and people. Position barriers and people where they can take up their duties within an hour of being ordered to do so.

Did this get done? Blanco didn't even know about buses until three days after landfall, and at least five days after "recommending" that New Orleans residents evacuate the city. When the evacuation order escalated to "mandatory", the plan called for the locals to assertively mobilize all transportation resources for evacuation assistance [3.a.5] and for the state to take charge of the evacuation of at-risk populations [3.c.4]:

4. Direct the evacuation and shelter of persons having mobility limitations, including persons in nursing homes, hospitals, group homes and non-institutionalized persons.

Did Louisiana and Governor Blanco follow any of its plan? Based on the report we read in the New York Times yesterday, it appears that Blanco didn't even know what the plan required, or even have any knowledge of the resources and responsibilities that the state government had.

Also note the date on Lousiana's EOP. Its last revision came in January 2000. No one in Louisiana has updated this plan despite the events that followed after that date:

* 9/11
* Hurricane Ivan (Sep 2004)
* Natural Hazards evaluation of LA/NO response (Nov 2004)

Florida officials have called this correctly. The response to Katrina and its unnecessarily deadly consequences started years ago, when Louisiana and its officials refused to take emergency planning seriously and neglected to make what slight planning did take place known to the various agencies expected to respond. No amount of federal intervention could have overcome the mistakes made by state and local response agencies in the days and hours before landfall, and even afterwards the reluctance of Blanco to allow federal authority to take over the area cost more time and lives while she dithered.

Sheer incompetence. Louisiana needs to ask itself why their elected officials left them so vulnerable to this kind of disaster.

UPDATE: Llamaschool, in the comments, thinks that I left out two points in which the locals responded to avoid being disproven in my thesis. However, if all that the state and local authorities did was to fulfill two points of their EOP, that definitively shows that they didn't accomplish hardly any of the rest of it.

As far as police exhorting people to go to the Superdome, that isn't what the response plan called for. First, that relied on people to self-evacuate, when the response plan clearly indicated that the evacuations should have buses ready for that kind of movement for those who could not self-evacuate -- the poor people that Kanye West and others accused Bush of "murdering" last week. The Superdome was meant as a last-resource refuge, after the buses got the people out of the city. And that evacuation was to take place before a hurricane hit the city, not three or four days afterwards.

Go back and read the plans, Llamaschool. It is not a restaurant menu where one selects one from Column A and two Column B and declares their responsibilities at an end. The state and local authorities are responsible for implementing their entire plan, and they faild miserably at doing so.

UPDATE II: Welcome, Instapundit readers!