This is Ted Kennedy's idea, if you can believe such a thing.

That's the sort of idea you come up with when you've had ten or eighteen Chivas Regals. And also, when you're distracted because you're attempting to chat up a coed anthropology major from SFU while not wearing pants.

Charles Schumer is expected to question him vigorously about his "right-wing Federalist Society Constitution-In-Exile views" about the sinking of the Titanic, the Tunguska Fireball of 1908, and why Yahoo Serious was ever permitted to have something of a career.

Posted by: Ace at 09:09 AM | Comments (24)
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"Dennis Miller" opines:

I don't wanna go on a rant here but America's foreign policy makes about as much sense as Beowolf having sex with Robert Fulton at the first Battle of Antietam. I mean when a neo-conservative defenstrates it's like Raskalnakov filibuster dioxymonohydrostinate.

What, no subreference to the pig from Green Acres?

Attribution: Someone posted this in the comments; I figured it was a very nicely done amateur parody. But it's actualy nicely done because it's professional. I'm reliably informed it comes from The Family Guy.

Peter's reaction to the multisyllabic gibberish is "What does 'rant' mean?"

Posted by: Ace at 08:54 AM | Comments (24)
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For a limited time only; hurry, because this won't be here tomorrow:

DISASTER ASSISTANCE

Emergency management operations for disasters include three phases: preparedness, response, and recovery. In the preparedness phase, state and local governments administer emergency preparedness programs with ongoing activities to help ensure that they are ready to respond to disasters. The Louisiana Department of Emergency Preparedness is responsible for all initial damage assessment prior to federal involvement.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) partially funds disaster assistance and emergency preparedness programs. Victims whose immediate needs are not met by voluntary relief organizations, such as the Red Cross and the Salvation Army, can register with FEMA.

Note that, post-ante, she's changed her tune about who has primary responsibility for disaster preparedness.

Changing your betting position past post is usually considered fraud, even in the Big Easy. Unless, of course, you've bought off the corrupt police.

Big thanks to Cirby.

Correction: I first said that "post-ante" betting was illegal. I think the term is "past-post," making a bet after a contest has been started. I guess in some situations it's legal, and bookmakers will take during-the-contest bets.

But I was thinking of the con used to cheat at roulette and craps and blackjack and such, where a player has a stack of low-denomination chips and then slips in a big-denomination chip through sleight-of-hand only after he's seen that he's won-- and of course now gets paid off for a big fat bet he really didn't make, or "bet" after the contest was actually over.

I think they call that past-post betting or the past-post con or something like that.

Sometimes my analogies are overly complex, ill-informed, and/or half-baked.

I don't know what's wrong with me. I don't do this for a living.

Posted by: Ace at 08:51 AM | Comments (21)
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Those buses, again:

The story of buses has become the seminal tale of dereliction in New Orleans. Though the city owned hundreds of buses, it failed to use them to move its most vulnerable citizens — vulnerable either because of poverty or physical infirmity — out of the bowl-shaped city to safe higher ground. Initially it seemed as if the city that knew the levees protecting it would one day break just didn't have a plan to move so many people to safety. But it turns out that emergency-preparedness officials in New Orleans did have a plan, and they did think to use buses to evacuate the city before a major hurricane. They just decided not to fully implement it as Plan A. The plan was developed as a hurricane Georges lesson learned. This appeared in an article that appeared in November 2004 in the Natural Hazards Observer:

Residents who did not have personal transportation were unable to evacuate even if they wanted to. Approximately 120,000 residents (51,000 housing units x 2.4 persons/unit) do not have cars. A proposal made after the evacuation for Hurricane Georges to use public transit buses to assist in their evacuation out of the city was not implemented for Ivan. If Ivan had struck New Orleans directly it is estimated that 40-60,000 residents of the area would have perished.

So the question after dodging the Georges bullet seemed to be, "Do we figure out a way to use buses or do we allow 50,000 people to die for the crime of not having a car?" They chose Plan B.

Nagin and Blanco -- and a long line of incompetent and/or corrupt politicians before -- simply gambled that The Big One wouldn't hit, or that they could rely on "rescue welfare" from others to bail the city out.

They were warned, quite officially, that while help would be forthcoming, it would not be immediate help:

Other federal and state officials pointed to Louisiana's failure to measure up to national disaster response standards, noting that the federal plan advises state and local emergency managers not to expect federal aid for 72 to 96 hours, and base their own preparedness efforts on the need to be self-sufficient for at least that period. "Fundamentally the first breakdown occurred at the local level," said one state official who works with FEMA. 'Did the city have the situational awareness of what was going on within its borders? The answer was no."

From the Post article linked by the NRO article:

For years, said another senior FEMA official, he had sat at meetings where plans were discussed to send evacuees to the Superdome. "We used to stare at each other and say, 'This is the plan? Are you really using the Superdome?' People used to say, what if there is water around it? They didn't have an alternative," he recalled.

But remember, this is all Bush's Karl Rove's fault.

Posted by: Ace at 08:46 AM | Comments (18)
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Get ready for a shock: Louisiana and New Orleans didn't spend money to protect them from floods, and in fact a lot of the federal money earmarked for just that seems to have been pissed away through corruption:

But research into more than ten years of reporting on hurricane and flood damage mitigation efforts in and around New Orleans indicates that local and state officials did not use federal money that was available for levee improvements or coastal reinforcement and often did not secure local matching funds that would have generated even more federal funding.

In December of 1995, the Orleans Levee Board, the local government entity that oversees the levees and floodgates designed to protect New Orleans and the surrounding areas from rising waters, bragged in a supplement to the Times-Picayune newspaper about federal money received to protect the region from hurricanes.

"In the past four years, the Orleans Levee Board has built up its arsenal. The additional defenses are so critical that Levee Commissioners marched into Congress and brought back almost $60 million to help pay for protection," the pamphlet declared. "The most ambitious flood-fighting plan in generations was drafted. An unprecedented $140 million building campaign launched 41 projects."

The levee board promised Times-Picayune readers that the "few manageable gaps" in the walls protecting the city from Mother Nature's waters "will be sealed within four years (1999) completing our circle of protection."

But less than a year later, that same levee board was denied the authority to refinance its debts. Legislative Auditor Dan Kyle "repeatedly faulted the Levee Board for the way it awards contracts, spends money and ignores public bid laws," according to the Times-Picayune. The newspaper quoted Kyle as saying that the board was near bankruptcy and should not be allowed to refinance any bonds, or issue new ones, until it submitted an acceptable plan to achieve solvency.

Blocked from financing the local portion of the flood fighting efforts, the levee board was unable to spend the federal matching funds that had been designated for the project.

By 1998, Louisiana's state government had a $2 billion construction budget, but less than one tenth of one percent of that -- $1.98 million -- was dedicated to levee improvements in the New Orleans area. State appropriators were able to find $22 million that year to renovate a new home for the Louisiana Supreme Court and $35 million for one phase of an expansion to the New Orleans convention center.

Less than 0.1% spent on improving and reinforcing decades-old levees.

Well, who could have foreseen a major hurricane topping or breaking the levees?

Apart from everyone, I mean.

Posted by: Ace at 08:28 AM | Comments (16)
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Bumped: Name-drop your blog or any others you think I should have on the 'roll. Once I get a good number of them, I'll add them.

BTW: I deleted Jeff Goldstein a while ago as a joke. I made some kind of announcement about wanting to start a random delinking war. Trouble is, I never added him back. I will, I promise. There's no bad blood (or, at least, not enough bad blood) between us that I shouldn't have him on the blogroll.

Just added Patterico, Lifelike Pundits, GOPVixen, Charmaine Yoest, Greg Gutfeld, Seraphic Press, JihadWatch, Feisty Republican Whore (hey, the name sells itself), Dawn Eden, The People's Cube, Cake or Death?, and Stop the ACLU.

I promised many of those people I'd add them months ago.

There are more I'm supposed to add, but those were the ones I thought of just now.

If you want to be added, drop a note here. My blogroll is getting kinda big, but if you're a regular commenter or tipper then I'll add you.

Posted by: Ace at 08:00 AM | Comments (57)
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Couple of questions:

Is there any way to put in some sort of slugline immediately following a headline identifying the author? Mechanically, I mean; I know that everyone could just add such a slug to every post manually.

And... why the heck can't I get the profile of each author to include their email address? I've added the emails for me and a couple of other of the contributing bloggers, hoping the "By Ace" part would come up red and clickable, but it doesn't seem to have worked.

Posted by: Ace at 07:56 AM | Comments (12)
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Excitable Andy hasn't been this gushingly exercised since the Vatican did the unthinkable and elected a Catholic as Pope.

Speaking of which, I hope John From Wuzzadem doesn't mind me leeching bandwidth to post this old favorite about the MSM's (and Excitable Andy's) views about Pope Benedict:

I'll make it up to him, I hope, by noting that Part II of his takedown on the LLMSM's DisasterPornStars is now up.

Posted by: Ace at 07:46 AM | Comments (22)
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Gay marriage approved by California Legislature:

In 2000, 61 percent of voters approved Proposition 22, a statute which states that "only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California."

Leno's legislation doesn't change Proposition 22, but overturns a law passed by the Legislature in the 1970s that defines marriage as between a man and a woman.

Leno argues that Proposition 22 should be narrowly interpreted, meaning that it only bans California from recognizing same-sex marriages from out of state, but not from allowing them within California.

Opponents say Proposition 22 applies to all marriages.

Holgate said that if for some reason Schwarzenegger decides to sign the same-sex marriage bill into law, it would be immediately challenged in court. Opponents argue that only the people – not the Legislature – can change a ballot measure approved by voters.

Does anybody else find it ironic that this may eventually be settled by Judicial fiat after all?

Posted by: LauraW. at 07:21 AM | Comments (27)
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The LLMSM will (as it already has) call this a "blame-shifting and smearing coordinated by the White House."

But it's not really coordinated, guys. It's just what we think. Kind of like how you guys were able to peddle the "Bush was slow and out-of-touch on Katrina line due to either incompetence or racism" line, all repeating it simultaneously. You didn't have to "coordinate" anything; you're 90% preening liberals. It just came naturally.

Anyway:

Geraghty:

I would also note that this is one hell of a police force your local officials hired and that you and your neighbors tolerated. 50 percent turned in their badges during the crisis and quit. Your police superintendent is conceding that some cops were looting. Just want to refresh your memory — four years ago, New York and Washington, planes falling out of the sky, thousands dead, no idea what the hell is coming next… and the cops, among others, showed up to work.

To save you guys now, I — and a lot of other Americans — will pitch in. We are witnessing the biggest mobilization of civilian and military rescue and relief crews in history. But I have a sneaking suspicion you’re going to want the rest of us to pay for the rebuilding of your city. (In the near future, we’re going to have to have a little chat about the wisdom of building below sea level, directly next to large bodies of water.) And if you’re going to come to the rest of us hat in hand, demanding the rest of us clean up after your poor judgment, I’d appreciate a little less “you failed us” and a little more “we’ve learned our lesson.”

Goldberg:

For the first day or two of this horrible story, the media held off talking about the now holy duality of “race and class.” A few writers, most notably Jack Shafer of Slate, thought the silence was a bit odd and raised some interesting questions about media coverage. Suddenly, within 24 hours the press couldn’t get enough of the subject. Cable-news anchors were demanding to know “what it says about America” that those left behind in New Orleans were disproportionately poor and black.

That newscasters were suddenly shocked by this development is a bit odd. Under what scenario, one might ask, were they expecting the Superdome to fill disproportionately with rich white folks while the poor watched from safety and comfort?

Michael Goodwin:

Start with crime. That looters ran unchecked after the hurricane isn't surprising when you consider that criminals have had the run of the city for years.

It is a perennial contender for Murder Capital. The 264 homicides last year were a drop of only 11 from 2003 - and the first decline in five years.

New Orleans, with fewer than 500,000 people, had almost half the murders of New York, which had 570 homicides last year in a city of more than 8 million. Put another way, if New York had New Orleans' murder rate, we would have more than 4,200 murders a year.

That the New Orleans police are hardly the Finest was proven by a shocking report yesterday: Nearly a third of New Orleans cops - some 500 of the 1,600 - are now unaccounted for. The department says some quit, but it doesn't know where most of them are.

The top cop, Eddie Compass, has responded by offering all officers paid vacations to Las Vegas and Atlanta. Yes, that's right - he is pulling all cops off the street, even while bodies lie in the open. Never in New York.

A commenter wondered how many of those missing cops were actually "missing" as opposed to "fictitious." In a city as corrupt as New Orleans, you have to wonder how many of these "missing cops" were actually phantom hires with the paychecks being deposited in some ward-heeler's account.

Posted by: Ace at 06:59 AM | Comments (7)
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