Strangest Story of the Week

Now this looks like an accident to me, but I have to admit its alittle wierd.  This is the proposed memorial to UAL Flight 93, that crashed after its passengers challenged the hijackers on 9/11.

Many bloggers have observed that it looks like an Islamic crescent.

Now I have a hard time believing that the designers of the memorial have some secret agenda to glorify Islam.  They may have had something else in mind, and it may be a coincidence.  But it is wierd.

Who has the most to fear from an investigation of FEMA?

Republicans frequently claim that the Democrats enjoy a sympathetic Press, which is true, but probably not the main problem.  The problem is that Democrats are just better at playing the public perception game.  Right now pundits and politicians are vociferously complaining that FEMA was placed within the Department of Homeland Security, a move which presumably made it less able to do its original job.  But whose idea was it to do so?  Here is John Tierney writing in the New York Times.

Suppose . . . investigators try to find out who had the brilliant idea of putting the Federal Emergency Management Agency inside a new department with an organizational chart modeled on the Soviet Ministry of Agriculture and Food Economy. One Democrat, Hillary Clinton, did question whether FEMA would suffer, but the idea was originally championed by her colleagues, particularly Joe Lieberman.

Mr. Lieberman joined Mrs. Clinton this week in calling for a "re-examination" of FEMA's status, but he was against independence before he was for it. After the Sept. 11 attacks, he helped lead the charge to create the Department of Homeland Security.

Republicans first resisted, as the Democratic National Committee pointed out during the presidential campaign last year. Its radio advertisement declared: "John Kerry fought to establish the Department of Homeland Security. George Bush opposed it for almost a year after 9/11."

Likewise, many complain that FEMA lost out in appropriations to the war in Iraq.  But of course it didn't.  Federal Programs almost never lose funding.  The question is where the money was going.

Overall spending [by FEMA] hasn't declined since the Clinton years, and there has been a fairly sharp increase in money for flood-control construction projects in New Orleans.

The problem is that the bulk of the Corps's budget goes for projects far less important than preventing floods in New Orleans. And if the investigators want to find who's responsible, they don't have to leave Capitol Hill.  Most of the Corps's budget consists of what are lovingly known on appropriations committees as earmarks: money allocated specifically for members' pet projects. Many of these projects flunk the Corps's own cost-benefit analysis or haven't been analyzed at all. Many are jobs that Corps officials don't even consider part of their mission, like building sewage plants, purifying drinking water or maintaining lakeside picnic tables.

The Corps is giving grants to improve New York City's drinking water. In Massachusetts, the Corps offers BMX-style bike jumps at a lake near Worcester and runs a theater next to the Cape Cod Canal showing a video of "Canal Critters."

In rural Nevada, an area not known for hurricanes or shipping channels, the Corps has been given $20 million for construction projects. When I asked an official why so much was being spent in Nevada, he said that the money was paying for wastewater treatment and mentioned the name of Senator Harry Reid, the Democrat's leader in the Senate.  "Senator Reid is a great and  good man," the Corps official explained, "and he is on our committee."

If FEMA was slow to respond in New Orleans (which, despite unaimous assuming by the Press, remains to be proven) the Bush Administration surely has to take the heat.  After all, who else was in charge?  But the greater scandal is that Congress, after it funds an agency like FEMA, immediately proceeds to plunder it for all manner of local goodies unrelated to its mission.  This is, if not illegal, surely corrupt in substance.  To its credit, the Bush administration did try to reduce some of this larceny, which was gleefully practiced by both parties.  But any time an Administration tries to do that, Congress will shout that they are attacking this vital public agency, and starving disaster victims. 

This week Mary Landrieu, the Louisiana Democrat, lambasted Mr. Bush on the Senate floor. "Everybody anticipated the breach of the levees, Mr. President," she said. But she and others from the Louisiana delegation have been shortchanging the levees themselves. As Michael Grunwald reported in The Washington Post, they've diverted large sums to dubious Corps projects aimed at increasing barge traffic, not preventing floods. Ms. Landrieu forced the Corps to redo its calculations when a project to deepen a port flunked its cost-benefit analysis.

Ward Churchill

Rocky Mountain News excerpt:

Seven charges of possible research misconduct leveled against University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill are being forwarded for full investigation, a CU official announced Friday.

The allegations, including charges of plagiarism, misuse of others' work, misrepresenting his sources and fabrication of material he presented as fact, could lead to the tenured ethnic studies professor's firing.

The Battle of New Orleans

While the storm rages over just how much the Katrina aftermath will affect George Bush's poll numbers, here are a couple of forward looking stories.  First, how many people really died?  I was always suspicious of the 10,000 speculation.  I heard that number when the Twin Towers fell, and the real toll, appalling enough, turned out to be about a fifth of that.  10,000 is just too round a number.  Besides, this just didn't seem to be the sort of catastrophe, like a tsunami for example, that would scour out that many human beings.  Well, it probably didn't.  From ABC:

Authorities said Friday that their first systematic sweep of the city found far fewer bodies than expected, suggesting that Hurricane Katrina's death toll may not be the catastrophic 10,000 feared.

"I think there's some encouragement in what we've found in the initial sweeps that some of the catastrophic deaths that some people predicted may not have occurred," said Terry Ebbert, New Orleans' homeland security chief.  Ebbert declined to give a new estimate of the dead.

That's at least some good news.  Jack Shafer, writing in Slate (HT to Arts and Letters) argues that New Orleans doesn't deserve to be rebuilt. 

The city's romance is not the reality for most who live there. It's a poor place, with about 27 percent of the population of 484,000 living under the poverty line, and it's a black place, where 67 percent are African-American. In 65 percent of families living in poverty, no husband is present. When you overlap this New York Times map, which illustrates how the hurricane's floodwaters inundated 80 percent of the city, with this demographic map from the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, which shows where the black population lives, and this one that shows where the poverty cases live, it's transparent whom Katrina hit the hardest.

New Orleans' public schools, which are 93 percent black, have failed their citizens. The state of Louisiana rates 47 percent of New Orleans schools as "Academically Unacceptable" and another 26 percent are under "Academic Warning." About 25 percent of adults have no high-school diploma.

The police inspire so little trust that witnesses often refuse to testify in court. University researchers enlisted the police in an experiment last year, having them fire 700 blank gun rounds in a New Orleans neighborhood one afternoon. Nobody picked up the phone to report the shootings. Little wonder the city's homicide rate stands at 10 times the national average.

I am not ready to climb on Schafer's bandwagon just yet.  I was lucky enough to visit the Big Easy three times recently, and I have to admit that I love the "Quarter," as locals call the French Quarter.  But I can't say it struck me as a healthy place.  I have never been anywhere that so many people are stumbling around drunk at 10 in the morning.  Still, the food was about as good as you are going to get anywhere.  And I really worry about Fritz's place: a little Jazz club on Bourbon.  But when I googled "Fritz" and French Quarter" I got the phrase "on the fritz."  That would be New Orleans. 

 

 

Poverty Rate Follies

Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Inter prize Institute has a great piece on the "Broken Yardstick" that is the official poverty rate.  (TH to Real Clear Politics).  Here's the problem:

According to the latest poverty rate estimates - released by the Census Bureau on Aug. 30 - the total percentage of Americans living in poverty was higher in 2004 (12.7 percent) than in 1974 (11.2 percent). According to that same report, poverty rates for American families and children were likewise higher last year than three decades earlier.

So what does this mean?  That George Bush has returned us to the 1970's?  Well, that's what I would say if I were on the other side of the aisle.  On this side I might say that this proves that the war on poverty, on which we spent billions, lost rather than gained ground over time.  In fact the rate has never inched down much.  But all this is absurd, for the following reasons.

Even the most basic facts bearing on poverty alleviation confute the proposition that material circumstances in America are harsher for the vulnerable today than three decades ago. Per capita income adjusted for inflation is over 60 percent higher today than in 1974. The unemployment rate is lower, and the percentage of adults with paying jobs is distinctly higher. Thirty years ago, the proportion of adults without a high school diploma was more than twice as high as today (39 percent versus 16 percent). And antipoverty spending is vastly higher today than in 1974, even after inflation adjustments.

No reasonable or reasonably informed person can really believe that the situation of the poorest 12% is really no better today than in 1974.  Eberstadt goes on:

In 1972-73, for example, just 42 percent of the bottom fifth of American households owned a car; in 2003, almost three-quarters of "poverty households" had one. By 2001, only 6 percent of "poverty households" lived in "crowded" homes (more than one person per room) - down from 26 percent in 1970. By 2003, the fraction of poverty households with central air-conditioning (45 percent) was much higher than the 1980 level for the non-poor (29 percent).

Besides these living trends, there are what we might call the "dying trends": that is to say, America's health and mortality patterns. All strata of America - including the disadvantaged - are markedly healthier today than three decades ago. Though the officially calculated poverty rate for children was higher in 2004 than 1974 (17.8 percent versus 15.4 percent), the infant mortality rate - that most telling measure of wellbeing - fell by almost three-fifths over those same years, to 6.7 per 1,000 births from 16.7 per 1,000.

One of the most basic problems with the OPR is that it focuses on reported income, which is clearly not an adequate measure of how people really live.  Consider:

In the Labor Department's latest Consumer Expenditure Survey (2003), the average reported income for the bottom fifth of households was $8,201, while reported outlays came to $18,492 - well over twice that amount. Over the past generation, that discrepancy widened significantly: back in the early 1970's, the poorest fifth's reported spending exceeded income by 40 percent.

When the poor are spending more than twice as much money as they officially make, the official statistics are not worth a pitcher of New Orleans flood water.  The reason we keep it around is that is serves the interest of so many advocacy groups, for whom all news is always bad news.  How else can they insist that the crisis is growing, so they need more money themselves?

Book TV

CSPAN's "In Depth" program from Book TV has now video archived the Harvey Mansfield show from this past weekend.  Sure it's three hours long, but while the interview starts slowly (my kingdom for Brian Lamb!) you soon find out why Prof. Mansfield might be the nation's smartest conservative (is that a term of distinction?).  He is certainly a very thoughtful man.  Give it a watch. 

A Very Modest Proposal

Former Representative Tim Roemer is suggesting Jimmy Carter take over the New Orleans rebuilding effort.  Judging by how ol' President Goofy Tooth operated as president, I am not so sure this is a good idea, unless this is a clever move by those who don't want New Orleans rebuilt.  On the other hand, it would keep Mr. "Inordinate Fear of Communism" busy, stopping him from offering his incompetent opinions about American foreign policy. 

Katrina

Hugh Hewitt (HT to Power Line):

The Fox News Channel's Major Garrett made another appearance on the program this evening, following up on his blockbuster story yesterday. Among other things, Garrett got confirmation from the head of the Red cross --on camera-- of the Louisian State Department of Homeland Security's blocking of the delivery of relief supplies to the Superdome and the Convention Center. In addition, Garrett received confirmation from senior Salvation Army officials in Washington, D.C. that the Salvation Army's efforts at supplying the evacuees were also repeatedly blocked. Radioblogger will have the transcript up later, but the key takeaway was when I asked Garrett if characterizing Louisian's preparation for the storm as "abysmal" was accurate and he confirmed that indeed it was. Read the whole thing.

I also asked Garrett why no other network is on this story. He can't offer an answer for that, event hough he points out that this isn't a hard story to get, and Fox News needn't be credited. All CNN has to do (or MSNBC or CBS) is call the Red Cross and get a camera over there.

Of course that would interfere with the "blame Bush" conclusion being pushed by Jacked-up Jack Cafferty and Campbell Brown etc.

NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen, a thoughtful lefty, as a long post up on the conduct of MSM these past two weeks. He gently raises the issue of whether all the preening by MSM talking heads, all the faux anger and all the "hard-hitting" commentary is really worth a bucket of spit. Read his commentary here. Radioblogger will transcribe my interview of Professor Rosen and have it up on the web later.

You can guess what I think.

I ran out of time before I could ask Professor Rosen about this picture.

Rathergate

Power Line:  Happy Anniversary, Guys

Rove Going to North Dakota

This is from The Hill:

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove is planning to travel to North Dakota later this month to rally GOP activists and, Republicans hope, persuade Gov. John Hoeven (R) to challenge Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) next year.

pedro sa da bandeira Republicans are encouraging North Dakota Gov. John Hoeven (R) to challenge Sen. Kent Conrad, above, next year.

GOP officials are convinced that Hoeven, who won his second term last year with 71 percent of the vote, is the only Republican in the state who can beat the fourth-term Conrad. The senator won reelection in 2000 with 61 percent and, as of June 30, the end of the second quarter of this year, had nearly $2.7 million in his campaign coffers. ... The extra attention — state officials say they can’t remember the last time North Dakota played host to so many Washington power brokers — is meant to accentuate Hoeven’s ties to the White House, North Dakota Republicans have said. The strategy is similar to that employed by the White House in neighboring South Dakota in 2004, when leading Republicans recruited John Thune (R) to challenge successfully Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D). Conrad appears aware of the parallels between his race and the South Dakota contest. While Republicans slammed Daschle for “obstructing” Bush’s judicial nominees and other agenda items, Conrad has insulated himself from that line of attack.

When the Levee Breaks

Ryne McClaren has a nice piece on the pork that Federal dollars purchased in Louisiana, when they could have been spent, say, strengthening levees.  I especially liked this one:

Remember when then-Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge recommended that people stockpile some emergency supplies? Y'know: food, water, etc.? Remember how the compassionate Left laughed and laughed at silly ol' fearmonger Tom?  That was somethin'.

Ryne directs us to Cold Fury for a list of scathing remarks about Ridge's sensible proposal.  Of course if you lived in New Orleans it might have been a good idea to have a little bottled water and stable food around. 

And then there are the environmentalists, who are being rather quiet right now about their opposition to levee maintenance.  This from John Berlau in the National Review.

The national Sierra Club was one of several environmental groups who sued the Army Corps of Engineers to stop a 1996 plan to raise and fortify Mississippi River levees.  The Army Corps was planning to upgrade 303 miles of levees along the river in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas. This was needed, a Corps spokesman told the Baton Rouge, La., newspaper The Advocate, because “a failure could wreak catastrophic consequences on Louisiana and Mississippi which the states would be decades in overcoming, if they overcame them at all.”

But a suit filed by environmental groups at the U.S. District Court in New Orleans claimed the Corps had not looked at “the impact on bottomland hardwood wetlands.” The lawsuit stated, “Bottomland hardwood forests must be protected and restored if the Louisiana black bear is to survive as a species, and if we are to ensure continued support for source population of all birds breeding in the lower Mississippi River valley.” In addition to the Sierra Club, other parties to the suit were the group American Rivers, the Mississippi River Basin Alliance, and the Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi Wildlife Federations.

Lets play a little Led Zeppelin, shall we.  There's a nice shot of the four waiting for the levee to break at the corner of Burgundy and Toulouse in the French Quarter.

Conservative vs. Liberal Blogs and Disaster Relief

Here's an interesting tidbit from Bob Williams in the Wall Street Journal:

Conservative blogosphere hurricane relief
$1,115,369
http://www.truthlaidbear.com/blogleaderboard.php 

Liberal blogosphere hurricane relief
$161,047
http://www.dropcash.com/campaign/hurricanerelief/liberal_blogs_for_hurricane_relief

In comparison, the Liberal blogs had raised over $451,888 for Paul Hackett's race in Ohio: http://www.actblue.com/list/hackett

Questioning Mr. Roberts

Chad at CCK has a post on the Roberts nomination to be Chief Justice (I checked, Professor Schaff and it really was Chad).  The CCK position is perfectly reasonable.

I don’t claim to be any expert on the nomination process. But I sure am curious about the views held by a guy who has such a short record of handing down decisions from the bench. Asking questions at the confirmation hearings may be our only chance before we give him a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land.

I too would like to know what Robert's opinions are on all sorts of questions.  I can't resist pointing out that when Ginsburg and Bryer were up for confirmation, Democrats fell all over themselves to insist that they did not have to answer any really interesting questions.  I note that both were confirmed with substantial Republican support. 

But I am not sure I agree with Chad that this really is a chance to find out anything about the nominee.  What we really want to know is not what he says he thinks now, but what he will really do in the future, and that requires a crystal ball.  Since the successful and unscrupulous campaign to derail Robert Bork, Judiciary Committee interviews of nominees have rarely had anything to do with fact finding or judgment.  They resemble some primitive hero ritual where the aspirant must charge through a wall of spears and leap over flaming motes.  The only thing we will find out is whether Democrats have the will and the means to stop Roberts.

Perhaps Chad and I might agree on this: real radicals, whether of the right or left, are unsuited for the high court.  So I suggest this: baring evidence that we indeed have such a radical before us, let Presidents of either party get the nominees they choose.  Sooner or later a Democratic President will get another nomination, and then you will see whether I am honest or not.

*ALERT*

SD War College:  *ALERT* Save the state GOP from taking a step backwards!

BRAC Blogging

Excerpt from  the Sept. 4, 2005 edition of the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

GOING THE EXTRA MILE?;
YOU CAN TAKE BRAC OUT OF POLITICS, BUT . . .

Isn't BRAC supposed to be immune from political influence?

Yes, the powers-that-be did take the politics out of BRAC by setting up a panel to make the final call on which bases to shutter, removing it from congressional horse-trading.

But, no law could take BRAC out of politics.

...

The most persistent politician was easily the one politico standing to lose the most if a home-state base closed -- South Dakota Senator John Thune.

Last year, he defeated Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle in a bitter campaign marked by pronouncements that Thune would protect Ellsworth Air Force Base better than Daschle would.

When the Pentagon recommended Ellsworth's closure in May, the freshman's political career light flashed yellow for caution.

For three days, he alternately sat in the hearing room, paced the foyer, or conducted interviews with reporters as the panel decided the fate of dozens of Army, Navy, and Marine Corps bases. Air Force bases were last on the agenda.

When the commission voted to save Ellsworth, Thune was all smiles.

Base and career rescued.

Iraq

Good news from the Washington Post:

The U.S. military pulled hundreds of troops out of the southern city of Najaf on Tuesday, transferring security duties to Iraqi forces and sticking to a schedule that the United States hopes will allow the withdrawal of tens of thousands of its forces by early spring.

Plus, this is worth noting from Reuters:

Ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein "confessed" to ordering executions and a campaign against Kurds in which thousands of people are said to have been killed, President Jalal Talabani said.

But Talabani did not say whether Saddam had actually admitted to committing any crimes or merely acknowledged that he was head of state and commander in chief of the army at the time of various military operations.

"I met the investigator who questioned Saddam," he told Iraqiya state television in an interview late on Tuesday. "He said he had extracted important confessions from Saddam Hussein and he signed them."

Freedom Fighters

John Leo on the MSM "Looking the Other Way."  Excerpt:

On August 6, as her 15 minutes of fame was just beginning, Cindy Sheehan used an odd term in a TV interview with Mark Knoller of CBS. She referred to the foreign insurgents and terrorists in Iraq as “freedom fighters.” Knoller cut those words out of his report, he told me, because he “really wasn’t interested.” He should have left them in. In fact, alarm bells should have rung in his brain. First of all, it’s startling that an antiwar mother would talk that way about people who blow up children and who may have killed her own son. Second, “freedom fighters” in this context is the telltale lingo of the hard, anti-American left. When the grieving mother starts talking that way, it’s news.

Noxious Numbskullery: the Katrina Edition

This from Robert Scheer, the LATimes version Paul Krugman. 

Instead of the much-celebrated American can-do machine that promises to bring freedom and prosperity to less fortunate people abroad, we have seen a callous official incompetence that puts even Third World rulers to shame. The well-reported litany of mistakes by the Bush administration in failing to prevent and respond to Katrina's destruction grew longer with each hour's grim revelation from the streets of an apocalyptic New Orleans.

So the Bush administration is guilty of "failing to prevent . . . Katrina's destruction."  No doubt were Kerry President he would have diverted it to Cuba.  But it gets better:

For half a century, free-market purists have to great effect denigrated the essential role that modern government performs as some terrible liberal plot. Thus, the symbolism of New Orleans' flooding is tragically apt: Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Louisiana Gov. Huey Long's ambitious populist reforms in the 1930s eased Louisiana out of feudalism and toward modernity; the Reagan Revolution and the callousness of both Bush administrations have sent them back toward the abyss.

The logic of this paragraph is so convoluted that a satirist would scarcely have thought it possible.  The incredible incompetence of state and civil government in Louisiana is precisely the kind of thing that "free-market purists" base their case upon.  It wasn't Enron that was responsible for having and executing a disaster response plan.  Besides, very few free market advocates would deny the Federal Government a role in responding to catastrophes of this magnitude. 

But what is really amazing is Scheer holding up Huey Long as a hero.  "Progressive" he may well have been.  Populist he surely was.  He was also the closest America came to producing its own homegrown tyrant.  And he was steeped in corruption, of the kind that makes Louisiana government so incompetent today.  This is what the left has come to?

Economist: "The air force has a future in South Dakota. Do the Democrats?"

From The Economist:

A big decision for South Dakota

The air force has a future in South Dakota. Do the Democrats?

IT WOULD take a direct hit from an enemy warhead to breach the 25 tons of steel and 12 inches of concrete that encase the nuclear missile silo on Ellsworth air force base in South Dakota. But the Minuteman missile it so snugly houses is now just for show—the armed missiles were retired between 1991 and 1994. Now a site that once helped deter the Soviet threat attracts tour groups and the occasional rabbit.  The base itself survived a near miss last week.  ...

At Ellsworth, the Pentagon wanted to cut about 3,800 jobs. It also wanted to realise economies of scale by putting all its B1 bombers in one place: Ellsworth's 24 "birds" would join the rest of the flock at Dyess air force base in Texas. This "legacy fleet" was inherited from the cold war. The aircraft were scattered around the country to prevent them all being destroyed in a single Soviet attack. Some commissioners wondered whether this cold-war wisdom was being dismissed too lightly. What if the Dyess runway were disabled by terrorism or tornadoes? Or tort lawyers for that matter. Dyess has been embroiled in litigation with local landowners who complain that the aircraft disturb their cattle, putting them off the vital business of breeding. ...

The base is deeply woven into the state's politics. Tom Daschle, the Democrat who served the state in the Senate for 18 years, cast himself as Ellsworth's protector in Washington. Despite this, he famously lost his seat last November to John Thune, a Republican 13 years younger and a good bit taller. Had Ellsworth closed, as many people expected, the vanishing tribe of Plains Democrats would have claimed that Mr Thune was a walking example of the dangers of replacing a senior figure with a fresh face.

Instead Mr Thune mounted an energetic campaign to defend Ellsworth that some Republicans thought bordered on disloyalty. But the non-closure of the base will help his party. Six in ten South Dakota voters plumped for George Bush last November. The state's other senator, Tim Johnson, a Democrat, held on to his seat in 2002 by only 500 votes. South Dakota has kept its "legacy fleet" of B1 bombers; whether "legacy" Democrats can survive in the Plains is another matter.

The News Gets Worse

Bob Denver, aka Gilligan, has died.  He's finally off the island.  Happy trails little buddy. 

Daschle Defeat Helps Judge Roberts

As Bush nominated Judge Roberts to be the next Chief Justice, the Washington Post says that Democrats from conservative states are supportive of Roberts because of Daschle's defeat:

Sen. Kent Conrad, a Democrat from North Dakota, sounds like a swooning Republican when he talks about Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr.

"I am impressed with his demeanor, his intelligence, his sense of humor, his modesty," said Conrad. "Absent some bombshell, which I don't expect, I think he will be confirmed and quite handily."

Praise like this is bad news for the nearly 30 liberal special interest groups calling on Democrats to block Roberts's rise to the Supreme Court. But it is good politics for Democrats such as Conrad who are running for reelection in states that President Bush won, according to several senators and strategists. ...

At the same time, some White House officials argue that a close vote would allow GOP candidates to wage a successful battle on cultural issues with Democrats in Republican-leaning states, as they did during the past two elections, according to Republican strategists familiar with White House planning.

If this happens, "Democrats will run into what Tom Daschle ran into in South Dakota: You will not be able to toe the liberal line in Washington and communicate about values with constituents back home," said a strategist privy to White House deliberations, referring to the senator's reelection defeat.

Where does Senator Johnson stand on Roberts?

New Blog

Looks like a new blog by someone connected to South Dakota.

Annual Labor Day Joke

I just got my new Lexus   and returned to the dealer the next day complaining that I couldn't  figure out how the radio worked.

The salesman explained that  the radio was voice activated. "Watch this," he said.   "Nelson!"

The radio replied, "Ricky or Willie?"

"Willie!"   He continued and "On The Road Again" came from the speakers.

I drove away happy, and for the next few days, every time I'd  say, "Beethoven!"  I'd get beautiful classical music, and if I  said, "Beatles!" I'd get one of their awesome songs.

One day, a couple ran a red light and nearly creamed my new car.  I swerved in time to avoid them.  "A##HOLES!" I yelled .

The French National Anthem began to play, sung by Jane Fonda and Michael  Moore, backed up by John Kerry on guitar, Al Gore on drums and Bill  Clinton on sax . . .

I LOVE this car!

On Labor Day

How about some miracle baby stories from New Orleans?  Now off to get my yearly dose of Jerry Lewis. 

Bush Picks Roberts

John Roberts will be up for Chief Justice.  This was a move widely expected in the last 24 hours.  Todd Zywixki over at Volokh wonders what the status of Sandra Day O'Connor is.  It's a good question. 

DC on the Cusp of September

I spent the last five days in the gorgeous District of Columbia straddling two academic conferences: The annual meetings of the American Political Science Association, and the Association of Politics and Life Sciences.  APLS was more interesting to me because I get to hob nob with all sorts of experts there.  In fact, I got to have a couple beers with Napoleon Chagnon, probably the most famous (and infamous) living anthropologist.  Chagnon won the everlasting hatred of most of his discipline when he demonstrated that the Yanomomo, one of the last isolated tribes, had a murder rate higher than that of any developed nation.  Anthropologists wanted desperately to believe that human beings were originally peaceful huggers.  Chagnon burst that bubble. 

I also got to see Marine One (I think) dropping down over the mall to its landing spot at the White House.  I suspect that it was coming to take Bush down to New Orleans.  The Mall really is a magnificent achievement.  Planes now have to approach Ronald Reagan Airport from the Northwest, so as not to overfly the White House or the Pentagon.  With a window seat on the left of the plane, I got a great view of the Mall from the air. 

At APSA I attended a panel on blogging that included Scott Johnson and Paul Mirengoff of Powerline.  When it came my turn to ask a question, I announced myself as a representative of SouthDakotaPolitics, the blog that brought down Tom Daschle.  For reasons of time, of course, I didn't bother to mention that I joined this blog only after the election.  At any rate, a lot of folk in the audience had heard of SDP. 

One issue that is well below the current condition of the FDR monument.  I didn't get around to visiting it this time, though I have seen it before.  I am not sure that FDR really deserved a monument, though I would say that he was almost certainly the greatest president of his century.  But the monument itself is ridiculous.  It is absurdly large for one thing.  The few identifiable exhibits are dwarfed by all the granite.  But now, according to the story, a lot of the vegetation is dead, making it even more ugly that it started out.  Somehow its supporters neglected to provide for proper tending.  But maybe that's an appropriate symbol of the federal government that FDR gave us. 

Rapid City Journal: "Thune proved to be one of the major factors in keeping Ellsworth open"

The main editorial in today's Rapid City Journal:

Journal editorial, 9-4: Give credit to John Thune

By The Journal Editorial Board

"Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan." - President John F. Kennedy

Many people deserve credit for their hard work in getting Ellsworth Air Force Base off the Department of Defense's base closure list. It was truly a team effort that convinced members of the Base Closure and Realignment Commission that it was in the nation's best interest to keep a portion of the Air Force's B-1 Lancer fleet stationed at Ellsworth, just outside of Rapid City.

In no way do we mean to slight the efforts of Gov. Mike Rounds, Sen. Tim Johnson, Rep. Stephanie Herseth, members of the Ellsworth Task Force and many others who spent endless hours working to save Ellsworth. With that said, Sen. John Thune worked tirelessly on the problem from the day the Pentagon announced that Ellsworth was slated for closure, and he played a major role in persuading the BRAC commission to keep the base open. Consider: It was Sen. Thune who pitched the "don't put all of your eggs in one basket" argument at the June 21 BRAC hearing in Rapid City; it was Thune who brought in Gen. John Michael Loh, former commander of the Air Force's Air Combat Command, to testify in favor of keeping Ellsworth open to preserve strategic redundancy; it was Thune who arranged to have Gen. Loh meet with seven of the BRAC commissioners prior to their decision to keep Ellsworth open; and it was Thune who brought to the attention of the BRAC commission that Dyess Air Force Base's training area was compromised by a federal lawsuit that prevented low-level flying.

Taken together, the work done by Sen. Thune proved to be one of the major factors in keeping Ellsworth open.

Sen. Thune has graciously declined to be singled out as responsible for saving Ellsworth.

But consider also that if the base had remained on the base closure list, who would have been singled out for blame for losing Ellsworth? John Thune, fairly or unfairly, would have been faulted by some people for failing to keep South Dakota's second-largest employer open.

When Ellsworth was put on the base closure list on May 13, letters to the editor appeared in the Journal that tried to fix the blame squarely on Sen. Thune and the voters who elected him:

"When it comes to political clout, South Dakota folded the winning hand again. ... You thought it was 'Time for a Change,' well, you got it!"

"We were all snookered by Thune and the Republican propaganda machine in Washington."

"If people in South Dakota were smarter they wouldn't have gotten rid of the highest ranking Democrat in the Senate."

"You got exactly what you deserve."

"For those of you who still have 'Dump Daschle' bumper stickers, you can now add 'And Ellsworth.'"

It was clear that some supporters of Sen. Tom Daschle, whom Thune defeated, were trying to associate the loss of Ellsworth with Thune's election. If only Daschle were still senator ... was a common refrain. A story even came out that Daschle was able to rescue Ellsworth from closure in 1995, thanks to his political savvy with then-President Clinton.

John Thune had the most to gain from saving Ellsworth because he had the most to lose if it closed. He would have taken the fall and be labeled by political opponents as a senator with no clout who lost Ellsworth.

So it's fair to give credit to Sen. Thune when credit is due.

The effort to keep Ellsworth open succeeded because many people worked hard to sell the base to the BRAC commission - and Sen. Thune deserves thanks for leading a successful campaign to keep Air Force B-1s flying over his home state.

Perspective on Katrina

As usual, Julie Neidlinger has it cold.  It's worth reading.  Keep blogging Julie. 

This Just In

William Rehnquist has died.