Global warming past the tipping point

From The Independent Sept 16, 2005.

By Steve Connor, Science Editor

A record loss of sea ice in the Arctic this summer has convinced scientists that the northern hemisphere may have crossed a critical threshold beyond which the climate may never recover. Scientists fear that the Arctic has now entered an irreversible phase of warming which will accelerate the loss of the polar sea ice that has helped to keep the climate stable for thousands of years.

They believe global warming is melting Arctic ice so rapidly that the region is beginning to absorb more heat from the sun, causing the ice to melt still further and so reinforcing a vicious cycle of melting and heating.

The greatest fear is that the Arctic has reached a "tipping point" beyond which nothing can reverse the continual loss of sea ice and with it the massive land glaciers of Greenland, which will raise sea levels dramatically.

Satellites monitoring the Arctic have found that the extent of the sea ice this August has reached its lowest monthly point on record, dipping an unprecedented 18.2 per cent below the long-term average.

Experts believe that such a loss of Arctic sea ice in summer has not occurred in hundreds and possibly thousands of years. It is the fourth year in a row that the sea ice in August has fallen below the monthly downward trend - a clear sign that melting has accelerated.

Scientists are now preparing to report a record loss of Arctic sea ice for September, when the surface area covered by the ice traditionally reaches its minimum extent at the end of the summer melting period.

Sea ice naturally melts in summer and reforms in winter but for the first time on record this annual rebound did not occur last winter when the ice of the Arctic failed to recover significantly.

Arctic specialists at the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre at Colorado University, who have documented the gradual loss of polar sea ice since 1978, believe that a more dramatic melt began about four years ago.

In September 2002 the sea ice coverage of the Arctic reached its lowest level in recorded history. Such lows have normally been followed the next year by a rebound to more normal levels, but this did not occur in the summers of either 2003 or 2004. This summer has been even worse. The surface area covered by sea ice was at a record monthly minimum for each of the summer months - June, July and now August.

Scientists analysing the latest satellite data for September - the traditional minimum extent for each summer - are preparing to announce a significant shift in the stability of the Arctic sea ice, the northern hemisphere's major "heat sink" that moderates climatic extremes.

"The changes we've seen in the Arctic over the past few decades are nothing short of remarkable," said Mark Serreze, one of the scientists at the Snow and Ice Data Centre who monitor Arctic sea ice.

Scientists at the data centre are bracing themselves for the 2005 annual minimum, which is expected to be reached in mid-September, when another record loss is forecast. A major announcement is scheduled for 20 September. "It looks like we're going to exceed it or be real close one way or the other. It is probably going to be at least as comparable to September 2002," Dr Serreze said.

"This will be four Septembers in a row that we've seen a downward trend. The feeling is we are reaching a tipping point or threshold beyond which sea ice will not recover."

The extent of the sea ice in September is the most valuable indicator of its health. This year's record melt means that more of the long-term ice formed over many winters - so called multi-year ice - has disappeared than at any time in recorded history.

Sea ice floats on the surface of the Arctic Ocean and its neighbouring seas and normally covers an area of some 7 million square kilometres (2.4 million square miles) during September - about the size of Australia. However, in September 2002, this dwindled to about 2 million square miles - 16 per cent below average.

Sea ice data for August closely mirrors that for September and last month's record low - 18.2 per cent below the monthly average - strongly suggests that this September will see the smallest coverage of Arctic sea ice ever recorded.

As more and more sea ice is lost during the summer, greater expanses of open ocean are exposed to the sun which increases the rate at which heat is absorbed in the Arctic region, Dr Serreze said.

Sea ice reflects up to 80 per cent of sunlight hitting it but this "albedo effect" is mostly lost when the sea is uncovered. "We've exposed all this dark ocean to the sun's heat so that the overall heat content increases," he explained.

Current computer models suggest that the Arctic will be entirely ice-free during summer by the year 2070 but some scientists now believe that even this dire prediction may be over-optimistic, said Professor Peter Wadhams, an Arctic ice specialist at Cambridge University.

"When the ice becomes so thin it breaks up mechanically rather than thermodynamically. So these predictions may well be on the over-optimistic side," he said.

As the sea ice melts, and more of the sun's energy is absorbed by the exposed ocean, a positive feedback is created leading to the loss of yet more ice, Professor Wadhams said.

"If anything we may be underestimating the dangers. The computer models may not take into account collaborative positive feedback," he said.

Sea ice keeps a cap on frigid water, keeping it cold and protecting it from heating up. Losing the sea ice of the Arctic is likely to have major repercussions for the climate, he said. "There could be dramatic changes to the climate of the northern region due to the creation of a vast expanse of open water where there was once effectively land," Professor Wadhams said. "You're essentially changing land into ocean and the creation of a huge area of open ocean where there was once land will have a very big impact on other climate parameters," he said.

A record loss of sea ice in the Arctic this summer has convinced scientists that the northern hemisphere may have crossed a critical threshold beyond which the climate may never recover. Scientists fear that the Arctic has now entered an irreversible phase of warming which will accelerate the loss of the polar sea ice that has helped to keep the climate stable for thousands of years.

They believe global warming is melting Arctic ice so rapidly that the region is beginning to absorb more heat from the sun, causing the ice to melt still further and so reinforcing a vicious cycle of melting and heating.

The greatest fear is that the Arctic has reached a "tipping point" beyond which nothing can reverse the continual loss of sea ice and with it the massive land glaciers of Greenland, which will raise sea levels dramatically.

Satellites monitoring the Arctic have found that the extent of the sea ice this August has reached its lowest monthly point on record, dipping an unprecedented 18.2 per cent below the long-term average.

Experts believe that such a loss of Arctic sea ice in summer has not occurred in hundreds and possibly thousands of years. It is the fourth year in a row that the sea ice in August has fallen below the monthly downward trend - a clear sign that melting has accelerated.

If this is correct, then we have delayed working to prevent global warming too long, and now can only hope to adapt to it.

Conservatives and ostriches will continue to react by placing thier heads in the sand and refusing to even explore the facts that are accumulating.

Newspapers have Bush's speech pegged

Here are some headlines:

• Washington Post: A Bid to Repair a Presidency
• New York Times: Amid the Ruins, a President Tries to Reconstruct His Image, Too
• Los Angeles Times: President Seeks to Revive a Region — and His Image
• Christian Science Monitor Bush's buffeted leadership
• Dallas Morning News Bush says reconstruction must lift the poor (no discussion of Bush's image except rather obliquely in the final paragraph, but DMN is very conservative.)

Bush sounds like he has recognized that there are poor and needy people in America because of the system, and that government needs to do something for them.

Don't believe it. He is reading a script written by someone else, and he famously has no real idea what he is reading. Rove told the script writers to write a script for him that might repair the damage his incompetent Presidency has brought on America, but Bush himself has no clue. He just stands in the limelight and mouths the words someone else wrote and approved. It will have no connection to government policies.

Gulf Coast reconstruction to be a patronage operation

Karl Rove has been put in charge of the reconstruction effort for New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Karl Rove operates everything as political patronage. This from Josh Marshall.

Graft and corruption can be expected to run amok. As soon as Democrats regain one of the houses of the Legislature we need to plan on an investigation of profiteering. Then we will need to expand the federal prison system a bit.

Of course, the White House doesn't understand what the project is, what is needed to accomplish it, or what government really needs to do. Karl Rove is an election strategist, for Christ's sake, not a bureaucrat! Here is Josh Marshall's comment on the idiocy of placing Rove in charge. (He is more polite about it than I am.) This is a key quote:

Then there's the president's great line from the speech: "It is now clear that a challenge on this scale requires greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces."

No, it's not. Actually, every actual fact that's surfaced in the last two weeks points to just the opposite conclusion. There was no lack of federal authority to handle the situation. There was faulty organization, poor coordination and incompetence.

Show me the instance where the federal government was prevented from doing anything that needed to be done because it lacked the requisite authority.

When you want to see pure stupidity in action, ask a conservative Republican to set up a government project.

They will not have a clue what to do or how to do it, and they won't have the curiosity to find out.

That's three disasters to hit the Gulf Coast and New Orleans. First Katrina, then the incompetence of the FEMA response, and now the third will be the "reconstruction effort" (read that as "institutionalized graft") run by Karl Rove.

The President's address last night

Josh Marshall reports that in New Orleans, the lights were turned on 30 minutes before the President's address, and then the power in New Orleans was turned back off when he left. More trickery-fakery for the cameras to conceal the incompetence and uncaringness of the Bush administration.

Just remember. When you elect Bush and the conservatives, you don't have a government. They own it and they don't share.

Brian Williams described the situation on his blog (referred to by Josh Marshall) and has a transcript of the President's address.

Since Bush is merely attempting to repair the political damage he has suffered because by his own incompetence and uncaring attitude, I will not bother to comment on it at this time. However, in the middle of the text of Bush's speech there is a poll on whether Bush has made up for his initial missteps. (poll) At this moment it is 68% negative ("No. There's no making up for the initial missteps."), 26% positive ("Yes. This is a bold response to a terrible disaster."), 6% don't know out of 74424 responses. The poll is unscientific, of course.

Why was FEMA stopping rescues in New Orleans?

Terry Gross on "Fresh Air" (NPR) interviewed Douglas Brinkley, a history professor from Tulane University who was in New Orleans during Katrina. He said that he watched FEMA officials stop people from going back to rescue people in New Orleans, because the officials were angry that those people had ignored orders to evacuate the city.

These were elderly, poor, and sick people who needed help and didn't have anyone to give it to them. These are the people for whom government is the most important.

But they hadn't "followed orders" and evacuated, so the FEMA officials resented them. Since they hadn't followed orders and evacuated, they didn't deserve to be rescued. Besides, most of them are Black.

But these are conservatives. There are no ill, elderly, or mentally ill people who need help. Everyone is responsible for themselves. We are each on our own, and if we fall off the sleigh because we can no longer hold on, well, the wolves need to eat too. Compassion? Forget it. Only the strong and the wealthy are worthy of life in America.

If this is the kind of selfish, self-centered government the conservatives have brought to this country, then we don't need the conservatives.

The test of leadership is results, not press clippings

Is Bush the commanding, decisive, jovial president you've been hearing about for years in so much of the mainstream press?

Maybe not so much.

Judging from the blistering analyses in Time, Newsweek, and elsewhere these past few days, it turns out that
Bush is in fact fidgety, cold and snappish in private.
He yells at those who dare give him bad news and is therefore not surprisingly surrounded by an echo chamber of terrified sycophants.
He is slow to comprehend concepts that don't emerge from his gut.
He is uncomprehending of the speeches that he is given to read.
And oh yes, one of his most significant legacies -- the immense post-Sept. 11 reorganization of the federal government which created the Homeland Security Department -- has failed a big test.

This is from Dan Froomkin at the Washington post.

Oh, yes. The results. Bush has failed to stop 9/11, failed to occupy Iraq successfully, and failed to prepare to deal with the Hurricane that hit the Gulf Coast. The economy is marginal at best and about to get worse. Only the fed keeping interest rates low has maintained the marginal results we have seen in the last few years, and the increase in gasoline prices are going to cost business a lot.

The best Bush can say is that he got reelected. Sad for America.

Katrina puts final nail in coffin of Social Security phase out

from Bloomberg Sept 15th.

Prospects that the U.S. Congress will pass an overhaul of Social Security this year have vanished, leaving Republicans to debate how best to walk away from the centerpiece of President George W. Bush's second-term domestic agenda.

Lawmakers in the House and Senate said a comprehensive proposal had no chance of being acted on this year, even though Republican leaders such as House Speaker Dennis Hastert, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and Representative Roy Blunt haven't publicly abandoned the effort.

There hasn't been much likelihood of Social Secuirty phase out being brought up this year anyway, but the Republican leadership was looking for some way to do it anyway. Katrina pretty much kills it for this year.

With all the other things the Republicans have to answer for during the elections next year, there is similarly no chance it will be brought up again next year. They will be hoping that the voters don't remember their efforts this year.

"They have a basic problem that privatization was unwise and unpopular from the very beginning,'' he said. "Now you have mismanagement in response to Katrina, so they'd be more out of step if they dismantled a foundation program."

Polls have shown that almost two-thirds of Americans disapprove of Bush's private-accounts proposal. [...]

Stephen Wayne, a government professor at Georgetown University in Washington, said Katrina had provided Republicans with "an exit strategy'' from an unpopular proposal.

"The Republicans are using the hurricane as an excuse for not proceeding with the politically dicey Social Security legislation,'' he said.

"They can let it die a pleasant death'' by moving on to other initiatives and blaming Democrats for killing it.

Republicans lie, conduct government both incompetently and corruptly, and blame others for their own failures. They cannot be trusted to fix any problems in Social Security. This is a good move for America.

Third-world government in America

Tom Engelhardt presents an excellent comparison of the problems first exposed by Iraq, then exposed again by Katrina. It can be read over at Tomdispatch.com. This is an example:

New Orleans is not the only toxic sludge pool in sight. Let's not forget the toxic sludge pool of Bush administration policy which came so clearly into view as Katrina ripped the scrim off our society, revealing an Iraqi-style reality here at home. Unlike conquered and occupied Iraq, the strip-mining of this country in recent years has taken place largely out of sight. While Baghdad was turned into some kind of dead zone of insecurity, lack of electricity, lack of gas, lack of jobs, lack of just about everything a human being in a modern city has come to expect, American cities -- until last week -- stood seemingly untouched in what was still proudly called "the world's last superpower." But just out of sight, the coring, gutting, and dismantling of the civilian governmental support system of the United States, that famed "safety net," was well underway. Bush administration proponents and conservative ideologues had long talked about "starving the beast"; but, until Katrina hit, it remained for many Americans at best a kind of political figure of speech.

Now we know for real. The beast has been starved; or rather, the beasts have been fed and the much-maligned part of the state that protected its citizens with something other than guns has been starved. What Katrina's course through Mississippi and Louisiana revealed was the real meaning of starvation. It seems we no longer have the capacity for a full-scale civilian response to a major disaster. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), absorbed into the Department of Homeland Security and led by an incompetent who had been fired from his previous job as head of the International Arabian Horse Association, has had "its ties to state emergency programs… weakened, and… has reduced spending on disaster preparation." In the same way, we now know that the Army Corps of Engineers was financially reined in on crucial levee work in New Orleans. Much of this sort of thing was done under the guise of preparing for, or fighting, or funding the war on terror at home and abroad. Many pundits, for instance, have remarked on the obvious fact -- which had previously worried the governors of many states -- that significant chunks of the National Guard and, just as important for disaster relief, its heavy equipment are to be found in Iraq, not here to be called upon in an emergency. (And when the avian flu, or the next health disaster, suddenly hits our country, consider it a guarantee -- the media will again be filled with the same sort of shock about the civilian response to the crisis, because our public health system has also been gutted and de-funded under the guise of the war on terrorism.)

Tom clearly lays out the utter failure of the conservative "small government" efforts.

There is a lot more worth reading. These lessons will sharply light up the November 2006 elections.

As for Iraq in America, here are Tom's comparisons:

Think of our last two years in Iraq, which has left the world's most powerful military running on baling wire and duct tape, as a kind of coming attractions for Katrina. In fact, so many bizarre connections or parallels are suggested by the Bush administration's war in Iraq as to stagger the imagination. Here are just six of the parallels that immediately came to my mind:
1. Revelations of unexpected superpower helplessness: A single catastrophic war against a modest-sized, not particularly dramatically armed minority insurgency in one oil land has brought the planet's mightiest military to a complete, grinding, disastrous halt and sent its wheels flying off in all directions. A single not-exactly-unexpected hurricane leveling a major American city and the coastlines of two states, has brought the emergency infrastructure of the world's mightiest power to a complete, grinding, disastrous halt and sent its wheels flying off in all directions.
2. Planning ignored: It's now notorious that the State Department did copious planning for a post-invasion, occupied Iraq, all of which was ignored by the Pentagon and Bush administration neocons when the country was taken. In New Orleans, it's already practically notorious that endless planning, disaster war-gaming, and the like were done for how to deal with a future "Atlantis scenario," none of which was attended to as Katrina bore down on the southeastern coast.
3. Lack of Boots on the ground: It's no less notorious that, from the moment before the invasion of Iraq when General Eric Shinseki told a congressional committee that "several hundred thousand troops" would minimally be needed to successfully occupy Iraq and was more or less laughed out of Washington, Donald Rumsfeld's new, lean, mean military has desperately lacked boots on the ground (hence those Louisiana and Mississippi National Guards off in Iraq). Significant numbers of National Guard only made it to New Orleans on the fifth and sixth days after Katrina struck and regular military boots-on-the-ground have been few and far between. No Pentagon help was pre-positioned for Katrina and, typically enough, the Navy hospital ship Comfort, scheduled to help, had not left Baltimore harbor by Friday morning for its many day voyage to the Gulf.
4. Looting: The inability (or unwillingness) to deploy occupying American troops to stem a wave of looting that left the complete administrative, security, and even cultural infrastructure of Baghdad destroyed is now nearly legendary, as is Donald Rumsfeld's response to the looting at the time. ("Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that's what's going to happen here." To which he added, on the issue of the wholesale looting of Baghdad, "Stuff happens.") In New Orleans, the President never declared martial law while, for days, gangs of armed looters along with desperate individuals abandoned and in need of food and supplies of all kinds, roamed the city uncontested as buildings began to burn.
What, facing this crisis, did the Bush administration actually do? The two early, symbolic actions it took were typical. Neither would have a significant effect on the immediate situation at hand, but both forwarded long-term administration agendas that had little to do with Katrina or the crisis in the southeastern United States: First, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it was relaxing pollution standards on gasoline blends in order to counteract the energy crisis Katrina had immediately put on the table. This was, of course, but a small further step in the gutting of general environmental, clean air and pollution laws that strike hard at another kind of safety net -- the one protecting our planet. And second, its officials began to organize a major operation out of Northcom, Joint Task Force Katrina, to act as the military's on-scene command in "support" of an enfeebled FEMA. The U.S. Northern Command was set up by the Bush administration in 2002 and ever since has been prepared to take on ever larger, previously civilian tasks on our home continent. (As the Northcom site quotes the President as saying, "There is an overriding and urgent mission here in America today, and that's to protect our homeland. We have been called into action, and we've got to act.")
There were to be swift boats in the Gulf and Green Berets at the New Orleans airport, and yet Donald Rumsfeld's new, stripped-down, high-tech military either couldn't (or wouldn't) deploy any faster to New Orleans than it did to Baghdad, perhaps because it had already been so badly torn up and stressed out in Iraq (and had left most of its local "first responders" there).
5. Nation-building: As practically nobody remembers, George Bush in his first run for the presidency humbly eschewed the very idea of "nation-building" abroad. That was only until he sent the Pentagon blasting into Iraq. Over two years and endless billions of dollars later -- the Iraq War now being, on a monthly basis, more expensive than Vietnam -- the evidence of the administration's nation-building success in its "reconstruction" of Iraq is at hand for all to see. That country is now a catastrophe beyond imagining without repair in sight. (For Baghdad, think New Orleans without water, but with a full-scale insurgency.) So as the Pentagon ramps up in its ponderous manner to launch a campaign in the United States and as the Marines finally land in the streets of New Orleans, don't hold your breath about either the Pentagon's or the administration's nation-building skills in the U.S. (But count on "reconstruction" contracts going to Halliburton.) If Rumsfeld's Pentagon -- where so much of our money has gone in recent years -- turns out to be even a significant factor in the "reconstruction" of New Orleans, we'll never have that city back.
6. Predictions: Given the last two years in which the President as well as top administration officials have regularly insisted that we had reached the turning point, or turned that corner, or hit the necessary tipping point in Iraq, that success or progress or even victory was endlessly at hand (and then at hand again and then again), consider what we should think of the President's repeated statements of Katrina "confidence," his insistence that his administration can deal successfully with the hurricane's aftereffects and is capable of overseeing the successful rebuilding of New Orleans. ("All Americans can be certain our nation has the character, the resources, and the resolve to overcome this disaster. We will comfort and care for the victims. We will restore the towns and neighborhoods that have been lost in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. We'll rebuild the great city of New Orleans. And we'll once again show the world that the worst adversities bring out the best in America.")

Apparently the solution Bush is working on is to throw money at the problems on the Gulf Coast. This is from the Washington Post via Talking Points Memo.

This worries me. Note the added emphasis. The clip comes from a piece in tomorrow's Post about yet another huge funding bill the president will roll out tomorrow for Katrina aid, which the Post says will cost more next year than the entire cost of the Iraq war thus far ...

Bush and Republican congressional leaders, by contrast, are calculating that the U.S. economy can safely absorb a sharp spike in spending and budget deficits, and that the only way to regain public confidence after the stumbling early response to the disaster is to spend whatever it takes to rebuild the region and help Katrina's victims get back on their feet.

Regain public confidence in who? Is the nation undergoing a crisis of confidence in itself?

Put that passage together with this one in Mike Allen's piece in the Time and I think you see where we're going ...

By late last week, Administration aides were describing a three-part comeback plan. The first: Spend freely, and worry about the tab and the consequences later. "Nothing can salve the wounds like money," said an official who helped develop the strategy.

What's driving this budgetary push is not a natural disaster but a political crisis, the president's political crisis. The White House is trying to undo self-inflicted political damage on the national dime.

Iraq and the tax cuts were already threatening to bankrupt the nation, in a manner much like Argentina went through over a decade ago because of similarly incompetent government. We have had third-world government in Washington since 1994, and 2000 just exacerbated it.

Behind the picture of Bush looking out the plane

The picture of Bush looking out the plane window as he flew over New Orleans has probably been seen by everyone with any interest by now. So what it the back story behind the picture?

First, remember always that it was staged. Now go look at Bagnewsnotes for more pictures and an explanation of what was happening.

Is the entire U.S. becoming like the South after 1877?

Here is an interesting view of how the South regressed as it was exploited by the North after Reconstruction. The author then suggests that rather than the South taking on the characteristics of the North, instead the rest of the U.S. is taking on more of the worst characteristics of the South.

Go read The United States Becomes Its Own Worst Enemy by Douglas Dowd.

TalkLeft offers this quotation from a description of "The New South."

Violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas, an incapacity for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought, an exaggerated individualism and a too narrow concept of social responsibiity, attachment to fictions and false values..., too great an attachment to racial values and a tendency to justify cruelty and injustice in the name of those values, sentimentality and a lack of realism... .

I see America as taking a similar set of social, governmental, and economic paths that are leading us to become uncompetitive in the international economy and willing to accept extreme injustice here at home. Dowd's description of the South as:

The symbol of what ensued in the South [after the compromise of 1877] became the hooded Klansman at a riotous lynching party; for the North, its easy access to the South's cheap natural and human resources served both to strengthen and greatly to speed up overall industrialization. Over the next several decades, the South's economy became "modernized," with what were almost entirely northern-owned -- with "whites only" workers -- textile factories, mines, railroads, steel mills and banks. However, in that "modernization" the overwhelming majority of both its white and its black population sank into deep poverty. What is especially striking were the political attitudes of the "poor whites" as their material lives worsened.

We no longer accept the KKK lynching parties, but we avoid providing social help to the poor, probably because so many of them have Black or Brown skins and clearly because of disdain for the poor. We are already the major single market helping to modernize the Chinese economy, and our Universities have trained the entrepreneurs and scientists in both China and India that are causing us to lose competitiveness to those nations.

The key is going to be human resources, not capital. We may have the finest capital markets in the world, but without nurturing, developing and using our human resources - all of them no matter what race - we are losing our global competitiveness. We are also ignoring what Paul Kennedy wrote in his book "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" about imperial overreach and spending so much on the military that the economy was damaged.

I may be reading more into what Dowd wrote than is really there, but then, maybe I'm not. China and India are growing in both power and economic effectiveness. America is declining in both. The economic conservatives want to take us back to the economics of Adam Smith and early Industrialism, and the religious conservatives want to take us back to Medieval religious control of government and society. Somehow I don't think either provide an adequate solution to the problems being presented by the 21st century.

Looking back at 9/11 in light of Katrina

The government permitted the 9/11 Commission to release the following findings on airport security prior to 9/11:

• U.S. aviation officials had been warned as early as 1998 that al Qaeda might hijack commercial jets and use them to slam into high profile American landmarks.
• Two of the three airports used by the 9/11 terrorists were known to have severely flawed security as demonstrated by repeated lapses.
• A report to FAA officials in early 2001 stated that the ability of airport security screeners to detect weapons had declined a great deal in the years prior to 2001.

[Source SF Gate Also reported in Dallas Morning News 9/14, 2005 p. 10A ]

Prior to 9/11 they were warned of terrorism dangers by the Clinton administration, and Richard Clarke remained with the National Security Council to deal with it. Clarke and the warnings were ignored. The three items above show that the warnings were numerous and were factual, not political.

Now compare this with the inaction of the federal government in preparation for the destruction of New Orleans when it was hit by a major hurricane as was certain to happen sooner or later. FEMA itself put out a report in 2001 that listed a major hurricane hitting New Orleans as one of the three top threats likely to face America (the other two were a major terrorist incident in New York and an earth quake that hits San Francisco.) FEMA practiced a similar exercise designated Hurricane Pam last year, and the New Orleans Times Picayune had a lengthy series of reports on what to expect.

Just like 9/11, Katrina caught the Bush administration flat-footed and unprepared.

The Bush administration lives in its own world, and is not ready to deal with reality. The looting in Iraq after the statue of Saddam was brought down should not surprise anyone. Nor should the rise of effective insurgency in Iraq after this failed administration attempted to occupy Iraq. Reality keeps catching these guys flat-footed and unprepared.

When there is a conflict between what people want the world to be and what the world really turns out to be, then the government needs to be prepared to deal with reality. The Bush administration and American conservatives in general seem to not understand this.

John Roberts - My impression

Listening to the Senate confirmation hearings today I heard John Roberts dominate the day. He presented a perfect description of the ideal advocate, willing to take any case presented and then arguing that case to the best of his (impressive) ability, then leaving the decisions up to the court. His apparent knowledge of law and legal procedures was impressive, and his ability to present his views, quickly, cogently, and precisely, must be the envy of every lawyer he has ever argued against.

What I did not hear was any hint that might tell me he had a single personal opinion of his own regarding how America should be governed. He came off, in my opinion, as the perfect legal technician without any strongly held personal opinions of his own.

Since he is a strong conservative with wide-held conservative support, that impression has to be a facade. I'd guess he has honed it for a quarter of a century.

Talk about your stealth nominee...

Did Bush intentionally let Osama get away?

Cenk Ugar posted this today on The Huffington Post.

The New York Times reported this weekend that we sent in 36 U.S. Special Forces troops to get Osama bin Laden when we knew he was in Tora Bora. By contrast, we sent nearly 150,000 soldiers to get Saddam Hussein. In case you're keeping count at home, we got Saddam and we didn't get Osama.

What does that tell you about this administration’s priorities? This goes beyond incompetence. If you send only 36 soldiers to get somebody in the middle of Afghanistan, it means you don’t want to get him.It gets worse. The piece in the Sunday New York Times Magazine also says there was an American commander with 4,000 marines standing by within striking distance. Brig. Gen. James N. Mattis requested permission to join the fight. He was denied.

Why wouldn’t you want to send in whatever we have at our disposal to get the guy who attacked us on 9/11? Why would you care so little about the person who actually attacked this country and so much about someone like Saddam who had no role in attacking us?

I can't forget that Bush gave both Tenet from CIA and General Tommy Franks (who commanded the Afghanistan operation during Tora Bora) the Medal of Freedom. We know that Tenet got his for screwing up the Intelligence on Iraq and WMDs. Did Franks get his for letting Osama get away?

Was Osama's escape intentional or purely a typical Bush administration screw-up? Because by the looks of the New York Times Magazine story, if Franks had wanted Osama he would have had him. I have read eleswhere that the CIA Commander at Tora Bora has stated publicly that he knew for a fact Osama was there.

I'll speculate that Bush and Cheney did not want Osama caught then, because he was the impetus needed to get the invasion of Iraq started. If Osama had been caught at Tora Bora it is unlikely that we would have invaded Iraq.

Anyone who does not consider that a top possibility simply does not understand how utterly stupid and unscrupulous Cheney and Bush really are. That is "unscrupulous" because they think they can actually do stuff like that, and "stupid" because they really think it will work.

If they really did this, then as Ugar says, it borders on Treason.

So - tell me again - Why did Tommy Franks get the Medal of Freedom?

End of the Bush Era

Yesterday we got this from E. J. Dionne Jr. in the Washington Post:

The Bush Era is over. The sooner politicians in both parties realize that, the better for them -- and the country.

Recent months, and especially the past two weeks, have brought home to a steadily growing majority of Americans the truth that President Bush's government doesn't work. His policies are failing, his approach to leadership is detached and self-indulgent, his way of politics has produced a divided, angry and dysfunctional public square. We dare not go on like this.

The Bush Era did not begin when he took office, or even with the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It began on Sept. 14, 2001, when Bush declared at the World Trade Center site: "I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon." Bush was, indeed, skilled in identifying enemies and rallying a nation already disposed to action. He failed to realize after Sept. 11 that it was not we who were lucky to have him as a leader, but he who was lucky to be president of a great country that understood the importance of standing together in the face of a grave foreign threat. Very nearly all of us rallied behind him.

If Bush had understood that his central task was to forge national unity, as he seemed to shortly after Sept. 11, the country would never have become so polarized. Instead, Bush put patriotism to the service of narrowly ideological policies and an extreme partisanship. He pushed for more tax cuts for his wealthiest supporters and shamelessly used relatively modest details in the bill creating a Department of Homeland Security as partisan cudgels in the 2002 elections.

As much as I hope he is right, we still have over three years with Bush as head of our government. During that time he will continue to dominate the media attention and set the national agenda. If America is lucky, Rove and Libby will be indicted by Fitzgerald, but frankly, I'm not counting on it. Hoping, yes, but not counting on it. But take Rove out of the White House and he still has telephones. Perhaps in November 2006 the Republicans will lose the House, but that will only give us gridlock. We don't get out government back.

Still, no government at all is better than the one we have with Bush as President.

I think E. J. Dionne is being too optimistic. Bush has for his own personal reasons put America through the worst period since WW II, and I don't see that it is over yet.

---

Addendum
Ruy Teixeira agrees with E. J. Dionne and provides data from a bunch of polls to show why he thinks so.

I am going to attempt an interpretation of their position versus mine.

We all agree that Bush is now no longer the dominiating political presence that stands across American national politics as he has been since 9/11. Neither Dionne nor Tiexiera seem to believe that he can recover. As I look forward to the next three plus years in which we must suffer Bush's presence in the White House, I am less optimistic about his ability to either recover or to lash out in some manner that really screws things up even worse than he already has.

FEMA failure - the plot thickens

According to Knight Ridder the original FEMA delay was caused by Chertoff, the new Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

As thousands of hurricane victims went without food, water and shelter in the days after Katrina's early morning Aug. 29 landfall, critics assailed Brown for being responsible for delays that might have cost hundreds of lives.

But Chertoff - not Brown - was in charge of managing the national response to a catastrophic disaster, according to the National Response Plan, the federal government's blueprint for how agencies will handle major natural disasters or terrorist incidents. An order issued by President Bush in 2003 also assigned that responsibility to the homeland security director.

But according to a memo obtained by Knight Ridder, Chertoff didn't shift that power to Brown until late afternoon or evening on Aug. 30, about 36 hours after Katrina hit Louisiana and Mississippi. That same memo suggests that Chertoff may have been confused about his lead role in disaster response and that of his department.

"As you know, the President has established the `White House Task Force on Hurricane Katrina Response.' He will meet with us tomorrow to launch this effort. The Department of Homeland Security, along with other Departments, will be part of the task force and will assist the Administration with its response to Hurricane Katrina," Chertoff said in the memo to the secretaries of defense, health and human services and other key federal agencies.

That suggests that Reducing FEMA from a cabinet level agency and putting it into DHS was part ot the problem.

Since 99% of all decisions in a large orgranization are based on routine and habit, bureaucracy is critical. But it has to be done in such a way that the critical non-routine decisions are directed to the right person quickly, and that person must know what to do and must have the power and authority to act. Initiating the fderal government response to a disaster is clearly one of those decisions, and the organization in this case what assembled haphazardly so that Chertoff did not know he was the critical decision-maker.

I wonder if Brown knew to demand that he act quickly? In any case, it is a good bet they never ran an exercise to expose these problems.

If this sounds arcane to you, it is. But I studied Organization Theory for about five years, and have over 20 years experience as an Army and Army Reserve commissioned officer. Large organizations are bureaucracies for good reasons, and to make them work, you have to understand them. It is NOT a job for an amateur - or for a Presidential campaign advance man.

[Thanks to Talking points memo]

Tried to switch brands of cat food

The damned cat doesn't like it. Apparently it is Frisky's or nothing. She is following me around and harassing me. I was just pouring a cup of tea and she came up and pushed her nose against my hand - the hand with the tea pot in it. When I left the room she followed me, and is rubbing my ankles. Not something she normally does.

If she had opposable thumbs, she would have picket signs saying "Bring back the Frisky's!"

Damned cat!

Did LA Governor Blanco delay asking for Federal help?

Rep. John Conyers asked for a defenitive statement from the Congressional Research Service. This is their report. [Report courtesy of Talking Points Memo.]

The report confirms that the Governor did everything she could to secure relief for the people of Louisiana in a timely manner. The problem was that the State and local agencies knew they could not handle the problem, and FEMA dropped the ball.

Governor Blanco requested the help from the President Saturday, August 27th, and President Bush declared an emergency taking direct responsibilty that same day. Hurricane Katrina made landfall early on August 29th.

Digby comments on the report and quotes parts of it.

The Republican war on science

Chris Mooney has a new book, The Republican War on Science. Kevin Drum recommends it, and refers to two other on-line reviews by Brendan Nyhan and Henry Farrell.

Kevin's key statement is:

The Post editorial Chris refers to is indeed extraordinary. You can read it here and it's as good a primer as you'll find on the willingness of the Bush administration to flatly lie about science in the hope that no one will bother to check up on them. The Post did, and everything they had been told was untrue.

This is the real difference. Science informs policy but doesn't drive it, and administrations can legitimately propose a wide variety of policies regardless of what the science says. But that's not what modern Republicans do. Instead, they try to subvert science itself. Global warming doesn't exist. Intelligent Design is a legitimate scientific theory. Condoms don't prevent STDs. Needle exchange programs don't work. As Chris put it last night, Republicans want to turn science into yet another of the he-said/she-said shouting matches that work so well for them in other areas, generating uncertainty where none exists and undermining one of the few sources of objective knowledge we have.

The Republican War on Science exposes this effort for what it is. Highly recommended.

I haven't read the book myself, but I will when I get time. What I have seen in the news certainly confirms the conclusion above.

How does the Bush admin get its way?

Jon Chait describes what has been making the Bush admininstration seem so invulnerable in Washington - and actually be such a disastor in Iraq and on the Katrina disaster response.

why it is that the Bush administration is so ruthlessly effective at getting its way in Washington but so bumbling when it comes to handling Iraq. I concluded that Bush's domestic triumphs all rely on three elements: massive partisan discipline, buying off interest groups, and (for lack of a better term) lying. Unfortunately none of those tools is very useful in helping occupy or rebuild Iraq.

This was originally published before Katrina in the LA Times.

Now go back and read the following:

• Why is the Bush administration so incompetent?
• How does Bush think?
• Confidence Men: Why the myth of Republican competence persists,
  despite all the evidence to the contrary.

We are beginning to find the little guy behind the curtain. It's time to keep digging.

Sunday evaluations of Katrina

This is what three major newspapers wrote today about the Katrina response:

New York Times: "Breakdowns Marked Path From Hurricane to Anarchy"
Washington Post: "The Steady Buildup to a City's Chaos"
Los Angeles Times: "THE RESPONSE Put to Katrina's Test"

I offer them without further comment.

[Thanks to Kevin Drum]

Then we have this from Newsweek entitled "How Bush blew it." It does as much damage to Bush's image as a decisive leader as Katrina did to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.