On Monday morning I heard a report on NPR about the coming report (it was released on Wednesday, I think) detailing governement failures in the response to Katrina. They reported that it detailed “failures on all levels of government”. After the report there was commentary on the “political impact of the Katrina report”.
NPR takes a bit of flack from conservatives, mostly, acused of being liberalin their reportting. I don’t dobut that much of te NPR staff is more liberal than conservative, but their reporting is usually fairly ballanced. Every now and then, however, they let their biases show, and this was one of them. They report on failures at all levels, then their comentary on the fall out Katrina report talked only about the President’s problems. And they didn’t limit is just to Katrina, they talked about the leak investigation, the lobbying scandal and even Chney’s hunting accident under the guise of fall out from the Katrina report.
I’m not useually the ltter writing type, but I decided to call them on this. THey read letters on Morning Edition on Thursdays, but they didn’t think mine was worthy. Here’s waht I wrote:

I was disappointed in the commentary following the report this morning on the Katrina Report due out this week. The news story told how the report detailed failure at “all levels ” of government, but the commentary on the political fallout focused like a laser on the President. What of the failures at the state and local levels? If the failures were at all levels, why is the fallout only at the top? What is the fallout for the failures of Mayor Nagin or Governor Blanco?
I was then further disappointed when Cokie Roberts went into a litany of issues plaguing the president, the investigation into leaks, the lobbying controversy and even Mr. Cheney’s unfortunate hunting accident. What did all of this have to do with fallout from the Katrina report?
Many people, conservatives especially, like to paint NPR as a liberal organization. However, I find that your reporting is usually pretty even handed, but occasionally you let your colors show. This was one of those instances, where failures at “all levels” was turned into a focus on one. You can do better.

BTW – This post, in all its glory and creativity marks 400 posts here at salguod.net. Too bad I didn’t have anything more meaningful to say.

This fuzzy picture was taken with my cell phone a mile and a half from my home Sunday evening. That’s $1.89 for regular. Another mile from there and it was $1.86.
There’s a lot of talk these days about greedy oil companies and high gas prices. Yeah, they took a spike during the Katrina crisis, but they’ve fallen right back down again. Of course it put a scare into the mind of folks driving big vehicles. I admit I thought briefly that maybe having a 7 passenger van wasn’t such a good idea. Then I realized that renting one for the 10-15 days a year we actualy needed the space would cost much more than the gas we’d save driving something smaller for the rest of the year, even at $3 a gallon.
The other folks hollering about ‘Big Oil’ are the politicians. Of course, they’re never one to miss an opportunity to make points with the people. After all, those greedy oil companies made record profits. Well, according to Jeff Jacoby in The Boston Globe as reported in The Week magazine this week, Big Oil’s profit margins are actually lower than average, 7.7% compared to 7.9%. Pharmaceutical companies make 18.6% and banks make 19.6%. So while Big Oil made record profits, they also must have made record expenditures to get there.
I know, I know, facts can really ruin a good story.

I just listened to NPR’s All Things Considered recount the timeline of what happened leading up to and in the days following Katrina. It’s an amazing series of two reports, about a half an hour total. Audio will be available here and here after about 7:30 tonight Eastern time. It’s well worth a listen if you haven’t heard it already.
One of my perceptions prior to hearing this was that the majority of the blame here for the poor response should go to local officials who failed to understand the seriousness of the situation that lie ahead. They had been warned many time of the dangers of a storm like this to New Orleans, they should have been ready. The report paints a different picture of local, state (and neighboring states) and federal officials working together to be ready to respond.
The biggest problem, at least immediately, seems to have been the extent of the damage to infrastructure. They simply hadn’t planned for the fact that all the groups ready to mobilize would have no means at all to communicate with each other for reports and to give orders. There was simply no way to coordinate the plan and no plan for what to do without coordination.
Someone also pointed out that an evacuation order was given and that about 1 million people fled the city in the days prior to Katrina. Certainly countless lives were saved because of this.
The report paints a very poor picture of our president and FEMA in the days following. They seemed to be completely disconnected with what was happening on the ground. It’s not simply that they were saying they didn’t know what was happening, they were making assertions that were simply false. At one point, after the levy breach, an official in Washington says that New Orleans is not simply filling up “like a bowl” while that was precisely what was happening. Supplies were sent to the wrong places with no one to meet the drivers to unload them. Help offered by other states was not asked for. FEMA contractors ready to send aid waited for 2 days for orders on what to do, and then were sent to the wrong place.
One of the most disturbing things to me was the description of Bush’s first visit. Sitting on the runway at the New Orleans airport in Air Force One he met with the Governor of Louisiana and the mayor of New Orleans. He reportedly told the governor that he could send in troops but they would have to be completely under federal control. The governor reportedly asked for 14 hours to think about it.
The image of these two people jockeying for power while a couple hundred yards away doctors work frantically to save lives in a makeshift hospital in the airport terminal is sad, to say the least. I’m sure there was more to the context than what was reported, but why does it matter who’s in charge; just get the help in there.

Since one, two, three (part 1), three (part 2), four (part one), four (part 2), five , six (part 1), six (part 2), seven, eight of the blogs linked at left have already commented on Pat Robertson’s comments on assasinating Chavez, I’ll spare you my tirade.
For the record, I also think his comments, on this an many other things political, have nothing to do with Christ and Christianity, but instead seem to serve his need to be in the spotlight.
BTW – There’s an interesting discussion going on at the Thinklings around this question: Why is what Pat Robertson said wrong? Now that’s an interesting question.

The other day I got one of those email forwards. You’ve probably gotten this one too. It’s the one that says that Microsoft is testing an email tracking program and will pay you $200+ for each person you send the email too.

When you forward this email to friends, Microsoft can and will track it (if you are a Microsoft Windows user) for a two-week time period. For every person that you forward this email to, Microsoft will pay you $245, for every person that you sent it to that forwards it on, Microsoft will pay you $243, and for every third person that receives it, you will be paid $241.

Well, I decided to do some digging into the hoax and found this article from the July 2004 issue of Wired Magazine on the history of this, the oldest of email hoaxes. They actually tracked down the guy who started it back in 1997:

It all started on November 18, 1997, when the guy sitting beside him in the computer lab received a get-rich-quick email, one of the first examples of spam that either of them had seen. “I can come up with something better than that,” Mack boasted. Three minutes later, Bill Gates’ email-tracing program was born. Mack thought it was funny enough to send to a friend at Loras College in Dubuque, with “bill gates here” in the subject line. It made the guy laugh, so he passed it on.

Interesting article.
BTW – If you’re going to send these emails on to your entire mailing list, by all means use BCC instead of the To or CC fields. I went through my copy of the MS email tracking message and found 108 email addresses. If I was a spammer, I just found 108 new victims. By using BCC, you only annoy your friends with useless hoaxes without exposing them to a spam risk.
BTW 2 – In addition to the usual email spam I get offering to make parts of my anatomy larger, get me low cost better prescriptions drugs to make that anatomy perform, software at low, low prices and other, uh, interesting products; I’m now getting spam offering to help me train my dog. Huh? Anyone else getting those?

Go read Jared’s excellent review of the movie Hotel Rwanda. I haven’t yet seen the film, but I’m intrigued by it. Jared’s review is part commentary, part review, emotional and gut wrenchingly honest. I think I need to see this movie.

Quick post during lunch. Check out Digital Globe, a site with amazing before and after satelite pictures of the tsunami devestation. I’ve been hearing little anecdotes on NPR over the last week about fathers who lost their wife and kids, kids who lost both parents and their siblings, etc. Some of those were vacationers from Europe. Can you inagine being a kid and being swept away by a huge wave in a foreign land and then discovering you were alone and far from home? Unfathomable.

I’m not sure if I should feel good about this or not, but I do.
Alan and Bonnie Aerts have been putting up $150,000 worth (!) of Christmans decorations at their California home for the last 6 years. Not this year though:

This year, though, the merry menagerie stayed indoors. Instead, on the manicured lawn outside the couple’s Tudor mansion stands a single tiding: a 10-foot-tall Grinch with green fuzz, rotting teeth, and beet-red eyeballs.
The Aertses erected the smirking giant to protest the couple across the street — 16-year residents Le and Susan Nguyen, who initiated complaints to city officials that the display was turning the quiet neighborhood into a Disneyesque nightmare.
Alan Aerts, who makes sure the Grinch’s spindly finger points directly to the Nguyens’ house, says the complaints killed the exhibit.

I guess I can understand the frustrations with traffic etc., but it’s hard not too see the grinch in this.