In the week following Hurricane Katrina, as chaos was overtaking New Orleans, some on the Right were hooting that Mayor Ray Nagin and other state and local officials didn't follow their own disaster plan. For example, Captain Ed wrote,

Mark Tapscott, one of the best crossover bloggers and a fierce researcher, turned up an interesting document yesterday: the New Orleans comprehensive hurricane disaster plan. The plan exists on line and has a high level of detail, and yet the Exempt Media has given no coverage of its contents. The most obvious reason is that it shows that New Orleans and the state of Louisiana didn't follow their own plan.

Now we learn that the feds didn't follow their own plan. In fact, there are homeland security experts who wonder if Michael Chertoff had even read the plan.

 

Here's the story: Drew Brown, Seth Borenstein and Alison Young write for Knight Ridder that the Bush Administration was inexplicably slow to issue the proper orders to deploy active-duty troops.

Two days after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, President Bush went on national television to announce a massive federal rescue and relief effort.

But orders to move didn't reach key active military units for another three days.

Once they received them, it took just eight hours for 3,600 troops from the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, N.C., to be on the ground in Louisiana and Mississippi with vital search-and-rescue helicopters. Another 2,500 soon followed from the 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Hood, Texas.

"If the 1st Cav and 82nd Airborne had gotten there on time, I think we would have saved some lives," said Gen. Julius Becton Jr., who was the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency under President Reagan from 1985 to 1989. "We recognized we had to get people out, and they had helicopters to do that."

It has long been understood that "active-duty military is the only organization with the massive resources and effective command structure to handle a major catastrophe." Calling in the troops is not extraordinary; it's been done many times before for other disasters. Yet the Bushies approached this measure as if it were something new and controversial.

Addressing the nation on Thursday night in a speech from New Orleans, Bush said the storm overwhelmed the disaster relief system. "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," he said. ...

... "To say I've suddenly discovered the military needs to be involved is like saying wheels should be round instead of square," said Michael Greenberger, a law professor and the director of the University of Maryland's Center for Health and Homeland Security.

Most amazing of all, the timely deployment of troops is part of the National Disaster Plan Michael Chertoff's successor, Tom "Orange Alert" Ridge, released with much fanfare in 2003. The feds didn't follow their own disaster plan.

"Unless it can be credibly established that a mobilizing Federal resource ... is not needed at the catastrophic incident venue, that resource deploys," the plan says. The plan and a 2003 presidential directive put Chertoff, as Homeland Security secretary, in charge of coordinating the federal response.

Chertoff, who aides said has been engaged in the response to Hurricane Katrina, went to Atlanta the day after the storm hit for a previously scheduled briefing on avian flu. Aides also concede that Washington officials were unable to confirm that the levees in New Orleans had failed until midday on Aug. 30. The breaches were first discovered in Louisiana some 32 hours earlier.

Greenberger, the Maryland homeland security expert, said he wonders whether Chertoff and other top federal officials understand the National Response Plan or even had read it before Katrina.

"Everything he did and everything he has said strongly suggests that that plan was never read," Greenberger said of Chertoff.

President Bush continues to make noises about applying lessons of Katrina to future disasters.  "This storm will give us an opportunity to review all different types of circumstances to make sure that, you know, the president has the capacity to react." 

 

The fact is, these lessons were learned by previous administrations. The Bushies appear to require remedial class work.

Former FEMA Director James Lee Witt, who served under President Clinton, believes that the Bush administration is mistaken if it thinks there are impediments to using the military for non-policing help in a disaster.

"When we were there and FEMA was intact, the military was a resource to us," said Witt. "We pulled them in very quickly. I don't know what rule he (Bush) talked about. ... We used military assets a lot." ...

..."They're trying to say that greater federal authority would have made a difference," said George Haddow, a former FEMA deputy chief of staff and the co-author of a textbook on emergency management. "The reality is that the feds are the ones that screwed up in the first place. It's not about authority. It's about leadership. ... They've got all the authority already."

A Sheehan Misstep 

 

I admire Cindy Sheehan's efforts to call attention to the debacle of Iraq. But today righties are snickering about something she wrote for MichaelMoore.com, and I have to admit the righties have a point.

One thing that truly troubled me about my visit to Louisiana was the level of the military presence there. I imagined before that if the military had to be used in a CONUS (Continental US) operations that they would be there to help the citizens: Clothe them, feed them, shelter them, and protect them. But what I saw was a city that is occupied. I saw soldiers walking around in patrols of 7 with their weapons slung on their backs. I wanted to ask one of them what it would take for one of them to shoot me. Sand bags were removed from private property to make machine gun nests. ...

 

... George Bush needs to stop talking, admit the mistakes of his all around failed administration, pull our troops out of occupied New Orleans and Iraq, and excuse his self from power.

There is an overwhelming consensus that the horrific and dangerous aftermath of Hurricane Katrina didn't begin to turn around until the troops got there. And my understanding is that the troops have been considerably more respectful of the citizens of New Orleans than the cops and various mercenaries have been. Equating the rescue mission of New Orleans with Iraq undermines everything Sheehan is trying to do. I hope somebody takes her aside and tells her to chill out about the troops in New Orleans.

 

As I said above, the real problem with the troops in New Orleans is not that they are there, but that they didn't get there fast enough.  And they didn't get their fast enough because George W. Bush has the leadership qualities of spinach. That's the plain truth, and that's the message we need to stay on.

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The era of big government is back. President Bush is presiding over the most expensive government relief and reconstruction operation in U.S. history, casting aside budget discipline.

 

Bush and his Republican allies in Congress are deferring — for now — vows to finish the Reagan revolution against big government and turning to some of the same kinds of public health, housing and job assistance programs they once criticized as legacies of the Democrats' New Deal and Great Society. 

* Either Bush is being entirely forthright, in which case he's talking about something reminiscent of the biggest liberal government programs of the 20th century. That scares some conservatives, certainly fiscal conservatives, to death.

* Or maybe it's just a plan to transform the Gulf Coast into a big test bed for conservative social policy, where tax breaks flow to big business and tax money flows to Halliburton, churches and private schools. That utterly terrifies liberals.

F.D.R. presided over a huge expansion of federal spending, including a lot of discretionary spending by the Works Progress Administration. Yet the image of public relief, widely regarded as corrupt before the New Deal, actually improved markedly.

How did that happen? The answer is that the New Deal made almost a fetish out of policing its own programs against potential corruption. In particular, F.D.R. created a powerful "division of progress investigation" to look into complaints of malfeasance in the W.P.A. That division proved so effective that a later Congressional investigation couldn't find a single serious irregularity it had missed.

This commitment to honest government wasn't a sign of Roosevelt's personal virtue; it reflected a political imperative. F.D.R.'s mission in office was to show that government activism works. To maintain that mission's credibility, he needed to keep his administration's record clean.

... which has no stake in showing that good government is possible, has been averse to investigating itself. On the contrary, it has consistently stonewalled corruption investigations and punished its own investigators if they try to do their jobs.

That's why Mr. Bush's promise last night that he will have "a team of inspectors general reviewing all expenditures" rings hollow. Whoever these inspectors general are, they'll be mindful of the fate of Bunnatine Greenhouse, a highly regarded auditor at the Army Corps of Engineers who suddenly got poor performance reviews after she raised questions about Halliburton's contracts in Iraq. She was demoted late last month.

So, the Gubmint is about to borrow $200-bleeping-billion for the "reconstruction" (possibly not a good word to use in the South) of the Gulf Coast. And you know that when the dust settles or the water drains, as the case may be, those billions will be in the pockets of Bush cronies and K street lobbyists and the po' folks will be worse off than they were before the hurricane. And you and several generations of your descendents will be stuck paying for it all. God bless America.

Nobody explains the inner workings of BushCo better than Billmon. Yesterday he wrote, 

If Cheney had his way, there wouldn't be any government left to disinvent -- just a service desk for the pipeline companies to call when they need to get the power back on. And Halliburton could easily handle that.

Rove, on the other hand, recognizes that government agencies [have] their uses, especially now that "to the victor go the spoils," has been firmly reestablished as the operative principle of the federal personnel management system. Let dweebs like Al Gore worry about making government work, the Rovians understand that the important thing is to make it work for them.

Billmon points to another must-read essay by Mark Schmitt at TPM Cafe.  He argues that a strong bureaucracy can function well even if the guy at the top is an incompetent political appointee.  The institutional structures, the career profressional staff, the established procedures, continue to function around the incompetence. But during the Bush II Regime career people are leaving federal agencies like FEMA, the FDA, Interior, and EPA in droves, and are being replaced by right-wing bleepheads who can't find their butts with both hands and a flashlight. And eventually any resemblence to competence breaks down.

According to Bush-Rove philosophy, however, it doesn't matter--

There was a terrifying quote in Mike Allen's story about the administration: "Katrina has shown the incredible weakness of the notion that you can have weak players in key spots because the only people who matter are in the White House" -- quoting a Republican lobbyist.

It would make sense to say, "you can have weak players in key spots because the people who matter are the operational bureaucrats." That's a familiar concept of government, it's how you survive an Ed Meese. But the idea that it's White House staff who would compensate for the weakness of individual cabinet officers -- that is really something new. And it's absolutely crazy. It shows a total disdain and disregard for what government does. White House staff can sometimes do the broad-brush development of a policy initiative. But even the most seriously qualified White House staff -- let's say the Program Associate Directors at the Office of Management and Budget -- can't manage an agency or implement an initiative or help it survive.

That's why it's so important to forget about Michael Brown or Chertoff or the individuals involved and focus some attention on the system that made it all possible -- a radical, unprecedented system of centralized, politicized control that is guaranteed to fail.

And now the main architect of that "system," Karl Rove, is in charge of the biggest and most expensive government relief and reconstruction operation in U.S. history. We're doomed.

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As a Christian, I do not say the Pledge of Allegiance because: (1) I cannot pledge to a flag; (2) I cannot pledge any allegiance to an earthly kingdom without substantial caveats, and (3) I resent a country presuming an association with God or God's mission.

 

These are all biblical principles, and they would be true for me in any country. It therefore remains a puzzle as to why it is not the Christians who are bringing these lawsuits.

Fundamentalists seem to have a strong impetus toward a "God and country" mentality. This attitude demeans their faith and complicates life for their countries. It's not a major issue. I won't be filing suit any time soon. I can continue to pray silently. But I am really quite puzzled by the Christians who will pledge their allegiance to any country or flag. I am just as puzzled by their desire to impose their views on others.

CRAIG A. REPP

Rancho Santa Margarita

 

I am old enough to remember reciting the Pledge of Allegiance without the added religious overtones. And when the new recitations began in 1954, I clearly remember being forced to stand in the hall at school as punishment for deleting "under God."

So it was in first grade that I was forced to ponder the meaning of "liberty and justice for all" in the pledge, as I bore the taunts and jibes of my classmates for innocently reflecting the views of my agnostic parents in my new role as 6-year-old apostate.

STEPHEN C. LEE

La Habra

No doubt Mr. Lee's classmates grew up to be righties. They show all the attributes. Only a rightie would persecute someone for his opinions while swearing allegiance to liberty and justice for all.

"They [the clergy] believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly; for I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." -- Thomas Jefferson

Update: Hunter on the Apocalypse. Absolutely brilliant; must read!

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But it is the image of the U.S. that will be the most affected. When El Salvador has to offer troops to help restore order in New Orleans because U.S. troops were so scarce and so slow in arriving, Iran cannot be quaking in its boots about a possible U.S. invasion. When Sweden has its relief planes sitting on the tarmac in Sweden for a week because it cannot get an answer from the U.S. government as to whether to send them, they are not going to be reassured about the ability of the U.S. to handle more serious geopolitical matters. And when conservative U.S. television commentators talk of the U.S. looking like a Third World country, Third World countries may begin to think that maybe there is a grain of truth in the description.

As we suggested last night, and as President Bush has now put us on notice, the Gulf Coast reconstruction effort is going to be run as a patronage and political operation.

That's not spin or hyperbole. They're saying it themselves.

The president has put Karl Rove in charge of the reconstruction, with a budget of a couple hundred billion dollars.

(A local black businessman being interviewed on MSNBC is saying the contracts so far have gone to big, out of state companies. He seems skeptical that local businesses are going to be helped much by federal money.)

Billmon:

Not surprisingly, the post-Katrina autopsy is focusing fresh attention on the Cheney administration's bold "disinventing government" initiative -- although in this case I probably should call it the Rove administration's initiative, since it's been more Karl's pet project than the veep's.

If Cheney had his way, there wouldn't be any government left to disinvent -- just a service desk for the pipeline companies to call when they need to get the power back on. And Halliburton could easily handle that.

Rove, on the other hand, recognizes that government agencies has their uses, especially now that "to the victor go the spoils," has been firmly reestablished as the operative principle of the federal personnel management system. Let dweebs like Al Gore worry about making government work, the Rovians understand that the important thing is to make it work for them.

Read all of  Billmon's post--fascinating.

A white local guy on MSNBC says they are whipping through money at a tremendous rate, and Bush's federal programs are going to require transparency and accountability. Fat chance. Oh, it's Senator Vitter of Louisiana (R).

The consensus seems to be that the speech was OK, but forgettable. Right.

Here's a transcript.

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"Republicans said Karl Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff and Mr. Bush's chief political adviser, was in charge of the reconstruction effort."

 Rove's leadership role suggests quite strikingly that any and all White House decisions and pronouncements regarding the recovery from the storm are being made with their political consequences as the primary consideration. More specifically: With an eye toward increasing the likelihood of Republican political victories in the future, pursuing long-cherished conservative goals, and bolstering Bush's image.

That is Rove's hallmark.

So long as Bush could wrap himself in 9/11 his image was shielded; he could even justify Iraq by flashing the non sequitur to his base. But once another event of magnitude thundered over his central claim as national defender, the Bush myth crumbled. It would take another event of this scale to begin to restore it. But it would also require a different set of responses from Bush. Now his evocation of 9/11 only reminds the public of his failed promise.

 President Bush continued to try to spin his own inaction yesterday, but he may finally have reached a patch of reality beyond spin. Now he's the one drowning, unable to rescue himself by patting small black children on the head during photo-ops and making scripted attempts to appear engaged. He can keep going back down there, as he will again on Thursday when he gives a televised speech to the nation, but he can never compensate for his tragic inattention during days when so many lives could have been saved. ...

 

... The president should stop haunting New Orleans, looking for that bullhorn moment. It's too late.

Why should we believe that Bush will take names and boot buttocks about Katrina when he has not done so over Iraq? On the contrary, the principal architects of the inadequate military plan remain in the Pentagon -- Rumsfeld and his crew. Others have gone on to plushy appointments -- the World Bank for Paul Wolfowitz, for instance, or the entire State Department for Condi Rice. Still others have been given the once-hallowed Presidential Medal of Freedom, now as tainted as a pardon from Bill Clinton.

If anyone at the top has been held responsible for an intelligence debacle without precedent, then his name is unknown to me -- or, for that matter, to the president. Only the hapless Michael Brown failed to understand Bush. If he had hung on to his FEMA job, in another month or two Bush would surely have honored him on the White House lawn. ("Brownie, you did a heck of a job.")

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I would really be curious to hear the opinions of actual Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists about the pledge, as opposed to the opinions of lawyers speculating about them. [Link]

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On Monday, Roberts told the Senate Judiciary Committee, "Judges have to have the humility to recognize that they operate within a system of precedent."

On Tuesday, Roberts demonstrated how a clever judge, veiled in humility, can operate within a system of precedent to overturn precedents.

Roberts was asked about Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 opinion that reaffirmed Roe v. Wade based on precedence. He called Casey "one of the precedents of the court, entitled to respect like any other precedent." Five times he repeated the phrase "like any other precedent."

Why couch the point this way? Because if Casey deserves no more respect than any other precedent, all you need to overturn it is a contrary precedent. That's what happened to some of the court's other landmark opinions, according to Roberts: The court decided that "intervening precedents had eroded the authority of those cases." So, the recipe for overturning Casey, and ultimately Roe, is to create intervening precedents, starting this fall with Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood.

So what about the constitutional right to privacy John Roberts claims to support? Never mind...

Saletan again:

On Monday, Roberts told the committee, "President Ronald Reagan used to speak of the Soviet constitution, and he noted that it purported to grant wonderful rights of all sorts to people. But those rights were empty promises, because that system did not have an independent judiciary to uphold the rule of law and enforce those rights. We do."

On Tuesday, Roberts demonstrated how our own judiciary can purport to grant rights while leaving them nearly empty.

Roberts was asked to locate the right to privacy in the Constitution. He quoted parts of the Bill of Rights pertaining to military occupations and invasions of citizens' homes. Does the right to privacy extend beyond those contexts? Roberts offered one addition: "I agree with the Griswold court's conclusion that marital privacy extends to contraception." Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., pressed him about the extension of contraceptive rights to unmarried people. "I don't have any quarrel with that conclusion," he allowed. What about Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 case that interpreted Griswold to bar prosecution of private sex between consenting adults? Roberts ducked the question, citing "the difference between the issue that was presented in Griswold and its ramifications." In other words, any claim of privacy beyond the specific "issue" in Griswold—the right to marital contraception—is a "ramification" Roberts might reconsider.

In other words, Roberts thinks people have a right to privacy from government interference in their personal lives, as long as they are not engaging in behavior to which Roberts objects. But if Roberts objects to your behavior, whether you are hurting anyone else or not, the "right" flies out the door. Saletan:

Privacy is a principle so general that its assertion against any "particular restriction" unspecified in the Constitution, aside from a ban on married people using birth control, is a mere "ramification" or "application" open to review. By refusing to define privacy's "scope," Roberts eviscerates it.

Some are trying to be optimistic--in the Boston Globe, Thomas Oliphant writes,

President Bush may have made no bones about his admiration for Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, offering them as his models for the Supreme Court. But in nominating Roberts, and off his diligent performance in the confirmation process, Bush has ended up disquieting his conservative supporters more than antagonizing progressives. The guy is coming off like a judge who happens to be conservative as opposed to a conservative judge.

Charles Lane of the Washington Post writes that Roberts is less extreme than Scalia or 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.

But let's not kid ourselves. Roberts is a long-time Washington insider with considerable ties to the Bush family. It doesn't matter what he says his principles are. He can be trusted to side with the powerful against the weak, the rich against the poor, and corporations against individuals. And he can be trusted to at least weaken, if not overturn, Roe.

That said, I don't think there's a snowball's chance in hell he's not going to be confirmed. Roberts comes across as personable, and the media has been tripping over itself praising his qualifications and smarts. If the Dems block him, it will appear to be on ideological grounds. And I disagree with Oliphant that the choice of Roberts is "disquieting" conservatives. Maybe Oliphant has witnessed disquiet righties, but the ones I've seen are all winks and nudges. He's our guy, and he's gonna get in! 

The real fight is going to be over the next nominee. On cases dealing with Roe, the next nominee will be the tiebreaker.  

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... we cannot say that a failure, because of religious scruples, to assume a particular physical position and to repeat the words of a patriotic formula creates a grave danger to the nation. Such a statutory exaction is a form of test oath, and the test oath has always been abhorrent in the United States.

Words uttered under coercion are proof of loyalty to nothing but self- interest. Love of country must spring from willing hearts and free minds, inspired by a fair administration of wise laws enacted by the people's elected representatives within the bounds of express constitutional prohibitions. These laws must, to be consistent with the First Amendment, permit the widest toleration of conflicting viewpoints consistent with a society of free men.

Neither our domestic tranquillity in peace nor our martial effort in war depend on compelling little children to participate in a ceremony which ends in nothing for them but a fear of spiritual condemnation. If, as we think, their fears are groundless, time and reason are the proper antidotes for their errors. The ceremonial, when enforced against conscientious objectors, more likely to defeat than to serve its high purpose, is a handy implement for disguised religious persecution. As such, it is inconsistent with our Constitution's plan and purpose.