The worst.
"The Corps also spends tens of millions of dollars a year dredging little-used waterways such as the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, the Atchafalaya River and the Red River -- now known as the J. Bennett Johnston Waterway, in honor of the project's congressional godfather -- for barge traffic that is less than forecast."
From failed Republican congressional candidate to ousted "czar" of an Arabian horse association, there was little in Michael D. Brown's background to prepare him for the fury of Hurricane Katrina.
Now, as the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Mr. Brown faces furious criticism of the federal response to the disaster that battered New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast. He provoked some of it himself when he conceded that FEMA didn't know that thousands of refugees were trapped at New Orleans' convention center without food or water until officials heard it on the news.
"He's done a hell of a job, because I'm not aware of any Arabian horses being killed in this storm," said Kate Hale, former Miami-Dade County emergency management chief. "The world that this man operated in and the focus of this work does not in any way translate to this. He does not have the experience."
Mr. Brown ran for Congress in 1988 and won 27 percent of the vote against Democratic incumbent Glenn English. He spent the 1990s as judges and stewards commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association...
The State Department said Tuesday it had raised with the Israeli government the approval of construction of 117 houses in the Ariel settlement in the heart of the West Bank...
Incumbent Mike O'Donnell said he has chosen to work with students, not against them, while combating underage and excessive drinking.
Amy Correia, Mitch Rotman, Garry Klein, and incumbent Connie Champion all agreed with O'Donnell and said they were against the 21-ordinance.
"I'm a supporter, but not at this time," said Champion, who has been considered as a swing vote on the 21-ordinance issue in the past. "I would not want my daughters drinking at a house party. I would want them downtown."
Meanwhile, ordinance proponent Larry Baker, who is running for an at-large seat, argued that the bars have created an atmosphere downtown that discourages other businesses from locating in the area.
Candidate Rick Dobyns also advocates implementing the 21-ordinance.
But the really interesting part was this: he ran regressions on nine different families of variables - everything from education to gender to religiosity to income - to find out what best explained expressions of support for terrorism. None of these shows any stasticially significant relationship. The only independent variables significantly correlated with support for terrorism were "negative views of U.S. foreign policy" and - and here's the interesting part - "negative views of one's own political system."
Discontent with their own government was vastly more significant than religion, education, culture, class, or anything else for explaining support for terrorism against the U.S. Which offers some really interesting support for the idea that there is a clear American interest in promoting reform in such countries - even if Greg Gause is right that doing so will not itself end terrorism.
"Katrina may change Louisiana politics for another reason: demographics. The storm forced a mass exodus from New Orleans and vicinity, and many residents surely will resettle out of state. The political effect will depend on whence the emigrants turn out to have come.
In the 2004 election, President Bush carried Louisiana by 281,870 votes, according to data from David Leip's election atlas. A breakdown by parish shows that the two candidates ran almost exactly even in the New Orleans area: John Kerry had a 109,763-vote margin within the city (Orleans Parish), while Bush beat Kerry by a combined 109,546 votes in the suburban parishes of Jefferson, Plaquemines, St. Bernard and St. Tammany.
Obviously if more New Orleans residents than suburbanites move out of state, Louisiana will become more Republican. Less obviously, the state will become more Republican even if flight from the suburbs equals that from New Orleans, since the evenly divided New Orleans region will account for a smaller part of the population than the heavily GOP-leaning rest of the state.
New Orleans's Mayor Ray Nagin is up for re-election in February 2006, Gov. Kathleen Blanco and Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu in November 2007, and Sen. Mary Landrieu in November 2008. All four are Democrats. When they point the finger at the federal government for whatever went wrong in the Katrina response, remember that they are fighting for their political lives."
There may be a need to look at tougher penalties on those who decide to ride it out and understand that there are consequences to not leaving.
In a segment at the top of the show on the surge of
evacuees to the Texas city, Barbara Bush said: "Almost
everyone I’ve talked to says we're going to move to
Houston."
Then she added: "What I’m hearing which is sort of
scary is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is
so overwhelmed by the hospitality.
"And so many of the people in the arena here, you
know, were underprivileged anyway, so this--this (she
chuckles slightly) is working very well for them."
"He's done a hell of a job, because I'm not aware of any Arabian horses being killed in this storm," said Kate Hale, former Miami-Dade emergency management chief. "The world that this man operated in and the focus of this work does not in any way translate to this. He does not have the experience."
"What will George W. Bush do now? Elevate Antonin Scalia to chief justice? Appoint someone who's not already on the court to the job? Will he wait until after the hearings on John Roberts to name his pick? That would be good politics. It would be foolish to add any other factor to the Roberts confirmation process, which, from a White House perspective, is going rather well. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, might Bush look to Edith Clement, a conservative federal appellate judge from New Orleans? Or how about Janice Rogers Brown, an African-American woman and sharecropper's daughter who is now a far-right California state judge (who seems to hate the federal government)? After all the recent talk about poor black people being shafted in New Orleans by the US government, Bush might enjoy standing in the Oval Office with Brown and talking about her personal story."
