Three Little Pigs and their Houses
Once upon a time three little pigs left the litter to make homes of their own. Louie went south to live in the crescent of the Big River. Arnold went west to live on the peninsula that served as the golden gate to the Great Bay. Rudy went east to live on Rocky Island. They each built the home they could be truly comfortable in. Louie loved to party, so he built a straw house that let the balmy breezes and the good times roll through the walls. Arnold built a house of wood as insulation against the fog that formed at the entrance to Great Bay. Rudy made efficient use of Rocky Island’s stones, building a house well-suited for keeping out its undesirable elements. The three pigs lived happily in their houses, often visiting each other to revel in the unique character of each. Then one day Bad Wolf came up the Big River. He smelled Louie inside his straw house, and huffed, puffed, and blew his house down! Louie, evacuating almost too late, fled to Arnold’s house by the Great Bay, Bad Wolf in hot pursuit. No sooner did Arnold close the door to his wooden house behind Louie than Bad Wolf started huffing and puffing. When this failed to have an effect, Arnold started chastising Louie, saying to him that there were “some real tough questions to ask,” that it made “no sense” for him to be living in a house so prone to disaster and that “your house ought to be bulldozed.” Suddenly Bad Wolf started pushing on the house in time to the resonance frequency of its construction, causing it to shake itself apart! Both Louie and Arnold ran for their lives to Rocky Island. The Wolf huffed and puffed, and pushed and pulled, but was unable to disturb the stone house in the least. Rudy sniffed at Louie and Arnold, calling them “underprivileged” for living in houses so prone to disaster and that “at least this place is working well for you.” Meanwhile the Wolf became more and more angry that the smug pigs were ignoring him. He became so frustrated that he climbed onto a big boulder on the mountain next to the stone house, causing it to fly down the slope right into the house! Everyone died.
Moral: As Rush and Rumsfeld say, excrement happens!
09.10.05 @ 08:32 PM EDT [link]

Feature of the Week
Our elected leaders have finally realized the full scope of the disaster, and are feverishly moving to meet their job responsibilities; specifically, making sure they tap into the enormous flood of posterity’s money that a national event of this magnitude can inspire. Expect off-the-books borrowing to reach unprecedented levels as legislators find creative ways to funnel money to districts untouched by Katrina. Don’t expect anyone to be asking current voters to pick up the tab – it’s just so much cleaner to push the bill off in full to future voters! Since we started the week with a test let’s finish it with another.
09.09.05 @ 10:06 PM EDT [link]

Reagan and the New Orleans Disaster
“Hate the government” rhetoric comes home to roost when a weakened government can no longer protect the homeland. Here are some words from someone who really got the ball rolling:
- Facts are stupid things.
- The taxpayer - that's someone who works for the federal government but doesn't have to take the civil service examination.
- The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'
- You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.
- The problem is not that people are taxed too little, the problem is that government spends too much.
- Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem.
09.08.05 @ 09:34 PM EDT [link]

Drowned in the Bathtub
Watching the waters flowing over the levees last week, and absorbing the new zeitgeist formed by an entire country riveted to broadcast visions of death, destitution, and chaos, I had a sense that we had reached a tipping point, the ebbing of the great right wing tide that began with Reagan. Iraq clearly represented the top of the arc, with the triumphal entry into Baghdad the final ascent and Iraq’s descent into quagmire as the flat top of the parabola. With the debacle in New Orleans, the right is clearly in a power decline. They are of course in denial, their defining quality. They deny the significance of the event, saying only that (to use a Rush phrase) “excrement happens.” They claim that Bush bears no responsibility for an act of nature, that this event was unprecedented in its severity and thus beyond the reasonable capabilities of any government. What they don’t understand, but what everyone else seems to well understand, is that with this event the bankruptcy of their world view is fully revealed for all to see. For decades they have aggregated political power by trumpeting their certainty that all the glories of citizenship in the world’s greatest power could be achieved with greatly reduced government and particularly with greatly reduced taxation. The country now realizes, even if right wing mouthpieces don’t, that an effective government headed by a visionary leader has a vital role in defending the homeland against disaster, man-made or not. History will look back on this horrendous disaster as the point where the reality-impaired pretensions of a greedy, self-absorbed, and cowardly clique were drowned in the great geological bathtub that is New Orleans.
09.07.05 @ 08:00 PM EDT [link]

Baghdad on the Mississippi
Did anyone else experience the same feeling of déjà vu as I at the mayhem and chaos in New Orleans last week? It seemed to me exactly like what happened in Baghdad in the face of the “desert storm” of American forces approaching the city. Maybe there are some superficial differences (which Secretary Rumsfeld will describe as “too numerous to list”) but at their core the events were fruit of the same vine. The root of this vine was Bush Administration obliviousness, incompetence, and indifference. I’m not sure which is the most damning. Both Baghdad and New Orleans were totally foreseeable. Anyone who has ever watched the Weather Channel during hurricane season knows that if there was any prospect of a named storm making it into the Gulf of Mexico Weather Channel reporters would breathlessly tell how New Orleans was below sea level and that the levees were only constructed to withstand a category 3 storm on a 5-point scale. That’s like saying your air bags only deploy for moderate crashes! In other words, it was a disaster guaranteed to happen sooner or later. In addition, standard hurricane models have predicted for years that the mid-decade years would mark a high point in the cycle, and experience over the last several seasons has borne this out well. In other words, a likely risk. Then look at the Iraqi looting. It was certainly clear to the academy colleagues I conferred with that disbanding the Iraqi Army during the invasion was a recipe for chaos and looting. And in both cases the anarchy will have repercussions for years to come. One of the lessons of the tsunami was that a village that by chance got early warning from a village member with a cellphone who was traveling to a place closer to the epicenter weathered the event without fatality. A simple early warning system could have saved tens of thousands. Similarly, a relatively small expenditure on flood control could have saved thousands of lives, tens of billions in tax dollars, and the sight of Baghdad-style anarchy in a city that so many Americans know and love.
09.06.05 @ 08:14 PM EDT [link]

Bush Speaking Before-the-Fact on the New Orleans Disaster
- I am a person who looks long-term, and I recognize the path we need to take.
- I believe the most solemn duty of the American president is to protect the American people. If America shows uncertainty and weakness in this decade, the world will drift toward tragedy. This will not happen on my watch.
- Leadership to me means duty, honor, country. It means character, and it means listening from time to time.
- On September 11 2001, America felt its vulnerability even to threats that gather on the other side of the Earth. We resolved then, and we are resolved today, to confront every threat from any source that could bring sudden terror and suffering to America.
- There's no bigger task than protecting the homeland of our country.
- Today we affirm a new commitment to live out our nation's promise through civility, courage, compassion and character.
- Use power to help people. For we are given power not to advance our own purposes nor to make a great show in the world, nor a name. There is but one just use of power and it is to serve people.
- We concluded that tomorrow is a moment of truth for the world. Many nations have voiced a commitment to peace and security, and now they must demonstrate that commitment to peace and security
- The action we take and the decisions we make in this decade will have consequences far into this century.
- There's no such thing as legacies. At least, there is a legacy, but I'll never see it.
09.05.05 @ 08:00 PM EDT [link]

Fourth Grade Logic Exam – Part II
4. As President of your country, you have a choice of spending $140 million to fortify levees against an hurricane disaster that may or may not occur during your term, or spending this amount plus tens of billions more to rebuild. What is the most logical course of action?
A. Bite the bullet and fortify the levees.
B. Roll the dice.
C. Repeal the death tax.
Scoring:
A. A dumb move for so many reasons, including 1) sending money to just a few Blue State congressional districts makes no sense when there are so many needy Red State districts; 2) As Speaker Hastert points out, we should be bulldozing rather than rebuilding cities like New Orleans that need as much $140 million of the US budget of $2.5 trillion (.0056%) to be safe; 3) think how stupid you’d feel if you got to the end of your term and the city hadn’t flooded even once!
B. Why not? This approach got Bush reelected!
C. Bonus points for staying on message through petty distractions that everyone will forget by the next election cycle.

5. Write an essay on government’s responsibility to protect citizens from natural disaster.
Scoring:
A. More than four words: no credit.
B. Full credit for the following phrases: “It’ll just flood again,” “Waste, Fraud, and Abuse,” “Let them eat cake,” or “Huh?”
C. Extra credit for “Repeal the death tax.”
09.04.05 @ 08:58 PM EDT [link]