Category: News

Katrina could cost 400,000 jobs: CBO:

The damage from Hurricane Katrina could include up to 400,000 lost jobs and slower U.S. growth, a congressional report said on Wednesday, as President George W. Bush sought $51.8 billion in fresh aid for the disaster zone.

If the Congressional Budget Office is so sure of the number, perhaps that’s the number the Federal government plans to lay off.

Otherwise, they’re just pulling smoke out of their arse.

So what?

Is it any coincidence he’s not a member of our national security or foreign policy team? No, I think it’s the lack of credentials.

Nothing is as comforting as the certainty of leaders. For example, we can cull the following list from the story entitled Roundabouts are coming – and traffic flow may never be the same:

• city officials say
• officials believe
• traffic engineers say
• “They are definitely gaining in popularity,” said Larry Hagen of the Center for Urban Transportation Research at the University of South Florida.
• The proliferation of roundabouts could do more than ease traffic congestion, some hope.
• proponents say
• some roundabout advocates hope
• “I’d like to see us go like France,” Russell said. “They’ve got about 25,000 now.”

But perhaps I too-easily mock leadership. After all, there’s some definitive certainty in the article:

Columbus Circle, built in New York City in 1904, is considered the country’s first traffic circle, and was followed by hundreds more, mostly in the northeast, Russell said. Now, in some parts of the northeast, transportation officials are working to get rid of the circles and replace them with signalized intersections or updated roundabouts.

“We’re currently initiating a program where we’re attempting to eliminate as many as possible,” said Brendan Gill, a spokesman for the New Jersey Department of Transportation. “Essentially, they’re antiquated. They’re not built to handle the volume of traffic we’re currently handling.”

But it’s hard to blur and soften the edges of those sentiments, wot?

Hillary Clinton: “This time, you won’t get away with only having been in office for eight months, Mr. President.”

With many blaming the growing scope of Katrina’s devastation on the Bush administration, Sen. Hillary Clinton called yesterday for a 9/11-style probe into how the federal government responded to the crisis.

“It has become increasingly evident that our nation was not prepared,” Clinton (D-N.Y.) said in a letter to Bush asking him to set up a “Katrina Commission.”

“The slow pace of relief efforts in the face of a mounting death toll … seems to confirm that our ability to respond to cataclysmic disasters has not been adequately addressed,” she said.

On the other hand, if she does become president, imagine the fun her opponents will have when conducting “non-partisan” commission-based and tax-wasting inquiries like the one she proposes here.

Brother Paranoia Shidoshi Ray Nagin saith:

“Today was a turning point, I think,” he said. “My philosophy is never get too high, never get too low. … I always try to keep my emotions in check and yesterday I kind of went off a little bit. I was worried about that, but it maybe worked out. I don’t know. If the CIA slips me something and next week you don’t see me, you’ll all know what happened.”

A marvel of paranoid thought which I admire.

Speaking of which, I haven’t posted much about Katrina, neither denigrating foolish government idiocy on one hand or grasping, needling mewling from dependent citizenry on the other hand. And if the CIA slips me something and next week you don’t see me you will all know what happened.

I will have gotten too busy doing my freaking job to find a blog entry form or a television camera.

(Although I’d seen this story all day, it was Baldilocks’s entry that I saw last before I couldn’t take it any more and had to post.)

Friends and family plan on the cellular phone? Hell, no.

If you and your spouse or you and your friends have contracts with different companies, you’ll also be on different networks. Ergo, you’ll have redundancy so that if one cellular network goes down, you’re not dependent upon it and can call for help if the second cellular network remains operational.

Relatives file wrongful death suits:

Relatives of five people killed July 28 in a fiery wreck on Interstate 44 in Eureka, near the Six Flags St. Louis amusement park, have filed wrongful death suits in St. Louis County Circuit Court.

The suits were among 1,400 filed in the county last week, before a new law capping damage awards in civil cases took effect.

The situation:

A dump truck loaded with rock and driven by Thomas Miskel, of Imperial, smashed into the back of Huckaba’s 2000 Dodge Caravan, shoving the minivan into four vehicles and across a frontage road before the wreckage erupted in flames.

How many suits? Five: one for each victim of the single accident.

The plaintiffs?

• The driver of the truck, natch.
• Bourbeuse River Hauling, the company that owns the truck.
• H & H Freight Services, which provided the contract driver for Bourbeuse.
• Millstone Bangert Inc., the company that hired the truck to deliver the rock to its construction site.
• Kenworth of St. Louis, the mechanics who worked on the truck and should have known it wouldn’t stop in time.
• Six Flags, for apparently building a theme park nearby which people would look at or attend.
• The state of Missouri for its poor design of the highway.
• The city of Eureka, for not stopping traffic backup at the highway exit where the accident occurred.

Why not sue Dodge, for not making fourth, fifth, and sixth brake lights? The parents of the driver, for bringing a child capable of such evil into the world? The painting contractor who puts the lines on the highways and the makers of the asphalt for not providing enough traction for stopping?

Perhaps those are defendants for another day.

Bush may tap strategic oil reserve as prices soar:

Hurricane Katrina disrupted Gulf Coast petroleum output and rattled energy markets on Monday, sending oil and natural gas prices soaring and setting the stage for a spike in the retail cost of gasoline.

The Bush administration said it would consider lending oil from the nation’s emergency stockpile to refiners that request it and the president of OPEC said he will propose a production increase of 500,000 barrels a day at the cartel’s meeting next month.

Given that the Middle East remains relatively unstable, that one of the largest exporters in this hemisphere has a mad-on for freedom, and that a rising rival power’s consumption of the existing supply is growing, I’d rather we save the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for just in case the s really hits the f beyond consumer inconvenience and price increases. Call it a foolish consistency, but I opposed the last president’s proposed release as well.

I mean, where does the government’s meddling in free markets end? With increased home seizures when the housing bubble “bursts,” so better to spur demand and keep the supply tight? Oh, no, you say? Why the heck not?

In a story entitled City worker surrenders to face drug charges, we have this novel means of immobilizing cars:

A veteran municipal employee, Meyer has been suspended without pay from the parking division’s boot crew, which immobilizes cars with unpaid parking tickets.

Thieves specialized in taking change from unlocked cars, police say:

Bicycle-riding bandits rode the trails between Edwardsville and Granite City at night, hopping off their bikes to steal from hundreds of unlocked cars in subdivisions during the past six months, Granite City police allege.

They didn’t damage any vehicles, and it appears they ignored expensive stereos, preferring to steal cash and change, said Capt. Jeff Connor. “Their main goal was to gather all the change they could,” he said. And they ignored vehicles with locked doors, he said.

One would hope this crime would bring less of a sentence than, say, a football player killing someone while driving drunk, but with today’s court system, who can say?

This story made a big splash in the conservative blog clique yesterday and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch covered it, but we can begin the countdown until it’s forgotten: Girl’s story of dad was a hoax, paper says:

For two years, Carbondale residents have been riveted by the writing of a little girl imploring her father in Iraq: “Don’t die, OK?”

Only now are they learning there was never any danger of that.

The Daily Egyptian, Southern Illinois University’s student-run newspaper, today will admit to its readers that the saga – of a little girl’s published letters to her father serving in Iraq – was apparently an elaborate hoax perpetrated by a woman who claimed to be the girl’s aunt.

In fact, the newspaper will report today, the man identified as the girl’s father was never in Iraq, and it was the woman who apparently wrote the letters and regular columns that were published under the little girl’s name – and even impersonated the girl in telephone interviews.

For starters, let’s be clear this is not a Carbondale newspaper, it’s a University newspaper. This doesn’t excuse the way it occurred, but it does explain. They weren’t professionals. They were professionals in training. As sad as that prospect is, we’re not talking reporters nor editors with decades of experience. One would expect most editors on the paper had a couple of years of experience at the most.

It also might explain how the students’ ideology could have played a greater role in their ignorance if possible: students don’t even have to temper their drive to improve the world by remaking it in their image. In real papers, editors, publishers, and the positions to whom student reporters often aspire have to at least genuflect to the concepts of circulation and shareholders, but school papers exist at the indulgence of the schools and don’t have to even consider remaining palatable to customers.

Here’s a sample of the writing that “captivated” Carbondale, or at least the university students, or perhaps no one really but the paper itself:

“I’m rily mad at you and you make my hart hurt,”‘ she purportedly wrote in one published letter to the president. “I don’t think your doing a very good job. You keep sending soldiers to Iraq and it’s not fair. Do you have a soldier of your own in Irak?”

Still, I’m probably not the only one to notice that scandals involving more populist/liberal newspapers involve making it all up, a la Michael Barnicle, Jayson Blair, the rest of the staff of the New York Times, Stephen Glass, and so on. Conservative commentators tend to get smeared not for making crap up, but for selling their writing talent for money (numerous lesser lights whose names I forget), for payola (that Armstrong guy I never heard of) or for unrelated issues (Rush Limbaugh).

So there you have my thoughts on the matter. Here are some others:

• Ace of Spades
• Michelle Malkin
• Tim Blair
• Free Will

Lawsuit calls execution method cruel:

Even as the state prepares to execute Timothy Johnston next week for killing his wife, a lawsuit questioning the method of execution remains unresolved.

The suit on behalf of Johnston, 44, claims Missouri’s three-drug method of lethal injection violates his constitutional right against cruel and unusual punishment. It was filed more than a year ago in U.S. District Court in St. Louis, and the court denied the state’s motion to dismiss it as frivolous.

Being a logician who understands Boolean logic, if everyone gets the three-drug execution, it’s not cruel and unusual.

One wonders what number of injections it takes to be humane.

This distinction seems rather superfluous:

Al-Banna has been accused of carrying out one of Iraq’s deadliest suicide bombing — the February 28 attack in Hillah that killed 125 people.

But the Jordanian government and al-Banna’s family said he carried out a different suicide bombing in Iraq in which he was killed. The terrorist group al Qaeda in Iraq claimed responsibility for the Hillah bombing.

I mean, does this affect some sort of over/under betting or what?

Someone loves them, and no surprise, it’s the unelected legislatures themselves:

Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont came together in 2003 to form a coalition, known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, in order to explore a market-driven cap-and-trade system for carbon dioxide emissions in the absence of mandatory emissions reductions at the national level.

Phil Cherry, policy director at Delaware’s Department of Natural Resources said the proposal, as it is currently written, caps emissions of carbon dioxide at 150 million tons a year starting in 2009. Under the proposed guidelines, emission reductions would be required starting in 2015, which would ramp up to a 10 percent cut in 2020.

“The proposal is a draft and some of the details have yet to be worked out,” Cherry told Reuters. He said that the document will be sent to power producers who will have a chance to comment on it formally at a meeting on September 21.

Once a final agreement is reached, legislatures or regulators in the nine states will have to approve it.

Not a state legislature and not Congress, but a “regional initiative” appoints itself to make laws for the states under its jurisdiction. I fail to see how this could pass an Interstate Commerce Clause challenge, but then again, it regulates interstate commerce and not individual states’ internal legislation.

Well, what else can the rulers do when the unwashed, power-loving masses elect people of the wrong mindset?

Samples of good governance and bureacracy, August 2005:

• Country Club Hills Mayor is charged with theft and forgery:
  

  In a plea deal between Hood and defense attorney Clinton Wright, [Country Club Hills Mayor Felton E.] Flagg must come up with restitution at his sentencing or face at least three years in prison. If he pays back the money he stole, Flagg can expect five years of probation, and either 90 days in jail or 120 days on an electronic monitor.

  Afterwards, Flagg said he intended to remain as mayor of Country Club Hills where he was re-elected in April to a two-year term. He referred all other questions to Wright, who said Flagg planned to pay back the money he took. Flagg has been mayor of the city adjacent to Norwood Hills Country Club since 1997.

• Two convicted in vote-buying scheme in East St. Louis rehired:
  

  Two people recently convicted in a vote-buying scheme in East St. Louis have been rehired by the city.

  Sheila Thomas and Jesse Lewis were back at their jobs in the department of regulatory affairs yesterday. Thomas is a clerk and Lewis a housing inspector.

  Both were fired after their June convictions and they’re due to be sentenced in October.

New fuel economy rules unveiled:

Speaking from Atlanta, Department of Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta and Jeffrey Runge, the current administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said that under the new plan, the light truck segment will be broken into six different categories based on weight and vehicle type, with the smallest vehicles forced to get better mileage than larger ones.

Minivans, which are currently bound by federal standards to get 21 miles per gallon, will be required to have a fuel efficiency of 23.3 miles per gallon by the time the program is fully implemented in 2011.

The fuel economy of small SUVs would improve by as much as nine miles per gallon from their current standard of 19 miles per gallon, Mineta said.

“This plan is good news for American consumers because it will ensure that the vehicles that they buy will get more miles to the gallon and ultimately save them money,” said Mineta.

Personally, I await the dicta that:

• Bubblewrap completely surround all exterior vehicle surfaces to ensure that the vehicles that American consumers buy will not sustain damage in accidents;
• Catalytic converters include potpourri burners to ensure that the vehicles that American consumers buy will produce sweet-smelling pollution with each mile driven.
• Onboard computer vocal reminders of local laws being broken to ensure that the vehicles that American consumers buy will remind them, but not prevent them, from committing moving violatations. (Removed at request of local municipalities and states)
• White noise machines to ensure that the vehicles that American consumers buy will block out distractions like cell phone conversations, conversations with passengers, the radio, and other sounds which might prove distracting and make driving more dangerous.

Because The Government must make decisions for you, infantile citizen. Increasing costs of petroleum prices won’t cause you to alter your travel habits or inspire you to purchase more fuel-efficient vehicles. Instead, like all addictions, your dependence upon petroleum will drive you to steal, rob, and murder to support your habit.

Thought, circa 2011, when Venezuela fields its first North Korean- or Chinese-provided medium range nuclear missiles capable of raining fire upon the entirety of the 48 contiguous states:

You know, maybe Pat Robertson was right.