Bush Cronyism in FEMA Disaster

The polite word is "networking," the blunter term is "cronyism" --the result of Washington politics as usual in picking the head of FEMA has been calamity in New Orleans, according to
the Boston Herald (War and Piece had this tip earlier):

Before joining the Bush administration in 2001, Brown spent 11 years as the commissioner of judges and stewards for the International Arabian Horse Association, a breeders' and horse-show organization based in Colorado.

``We do disciplinary actions, certification of (show trial) judges. We hold classes to train people to become judges and stewards. And we keep records,'' explained a spokeswoman for the IAHA commissioner's office. ``This was his full-time job . . . for 11 years,'' she added.

Brown was forced out of the position after a spate of lawsuits over alleged supervision failures.

``He was asked to resign,'' Bill Pennington, president of the IAHA at the time, confirmed last night.

Soon after, Brown was invited to join the administration by his old Oklahoma college roommate Joseph Allbaugh, the previous head of FEMA until he quit in 2003 to work for the president's re-election campaign.

The White House last night defended Brown's appointment. A spokesman noted Brown served as FEMA deputy director and general counsel before taking the top job, and that he has now overseen the response to ``more than 164 declared disasters and emergencies,'' including last year's record-setting hurricane season."

Bush's strategy of spreading enough graft around to keep both Republicans and Democrats happy may come back to haunt him and his party. Newt Gingrich, who organized the Republican revolution that began with exposure of a Congressional check-kiting scandal, once said that people will tolerate corruption so long as they receive government goods and services, but that if they don't get them, they won't tolerate corruption--and it can become an explosive political issue.

Also, there are probably some other scandals lurking, such as questions about construction contracts on the New Orleans levees. Why did they give way, could shoddy construction or engineering, or improper inspections, due to corruption, be to blame?

If the Democrats stick to a "good government" political strategy, rather than race-baiting, they stand a good chance to take the House back in 2006 using this issue. Then, they will be in a position to impeach Bush over the New Orleans flood (even if the Senate stays Republican), which may help their chances in 2006. As the Washington Post editorial argued yesterday, literally billions of dollars have been spent on disaster preparedness since 9/11--yet America was totally unprepared for New Orleans. That means money has been lost, wasted, or stolen by President Bush and his administration. So it should be an interesting election year...

Galveston Hurricane of 1900

Wikipedia has interesting entry on the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, a forerunner to Katrina...

Bush Opens Begging Bowl

The most depressing news yet, from China's Xinhua News Agency:

 WASHINGTON, Sept. 1 (Xinhuanet) -- The United States, suffering from heavy death toll and economic losses wrought by Hurricane Katrina, will accept any offers of aid from abroad, the White House said Thursday.

    "We are open to all offers of assistance from other nations, and I would expect we would take people up on offers of assistance when it's necessary," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters.

    Also on Thursday, US President George W. Bush has asked his father, former president George Bush and his predecessor, former president Bill Clinton to lead fundraising efforts for the victimsof Hurricane Katrina.

Can't we take care of our own? Even India refused international aid, after the Asian tsunami...

Don't Blame the Neocons

Brendan O'Neill says the Clinton administration built up Al Qaeda, by turning a blind eye to Islamist militants funded and supplied by Iran during the Bosnian conflict in what is now former Yugoslavia. He notes that many reputed Al Qaeda terrorists have well-documented ties to groups active in Kosovo and Bosnia, as well as Chechnya. Unfortunately, the article in The Spectator.co.uk is available by paid subscription only. I hope they open it up...

War and Piece Says FEMA Head Not Qualified

Will Bush's cronyism do him in? War and Piece thinks it might:

My lord, the guy heading FEMA has no qualifications. What was he doing before getting pulled into FEMA by the Bush administration in 2003? He was an estate planning lawyer in Colorado and of counsel for the International Arabian Horse Association Legal Department. And yes, it is the same Michael D. Brown.

He Might Have Stopped...

This White House photo by Paul Morse says it all: Bush is unable or unwilling to get personally involved, in order to help people in New Orleans. He won't stop his plane to get out and take a look, comfort the suffering people of the Gulf Coast, or crack heads to be sure that the job is being done right.

Any other President--or mayor, or governor, or normal elected official in a democracy--would have been down on the ground, in hip boots, wading through the muck, encouraging rescue and recovery efforts. If he didn't want to get wet, Bush might have more closely inspected the damage from a helicopter, as he did in NYC after 9/11. Instead, Bush chose to stay above it all, peering down from the comfort of his Air Force One seat.

The White House has long had the reputation of refusing to put the President in "uncontrolled" situations. He took three days to get to NYC after 9/11, something this New York native has never forgotten. Better late than never...but if Bush can't deal with "uncontrolled" situations in his fifth year in office, IMHO he's not qualified to be President of the United States.

Human Rights Activist Arrested in Moscow Terror Plot

Little Green Footballs tipped us off to this Mosnews story about the activities of former Guantanamo prisoners.

All in all, of the seven Russian Guantanamo prisoners extradited from Cuba in 2004, only two are not in custody.

Airat Vakhitov, arrested Saturday, was engaged in human rights activities in Moscow, Vremya Novostei reports. He wrote articles and was working on a book about rights violations in Guantanamo, was going to travel to London for the former Guantanamo prisoners Round Table, as was Rustam Akhmyarov.

If the police manage to link the two Guantanamo prisoners arrested in Moscow and those arrested in Tatarstan, it may prove that they are related to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, the newspaper summed up.

Creative Wins MP3 Patent Fight

Never heard of Pocket Lint before, but this sure is an interesting story about iPods and other MP3 players.

New Orleans Paper Predicted Flooding

You can read the 2002 Times-Picayune series mentioned in today's Wall Street Journal here.

And here's todays' flood coverage.

How to Help Hurricane Katrina's Victims

Instapundit has posted a list of websites for charities that are trying to help. (ht Little Green Footballs)

Free Judy Miller

I don't often agree with the New York Times editorials, but on this one, we're on the same page. Judy Miller interviewed me during the NEA debate, and she was 100 percent accurate, a good and honest reporter. If she's not going to crack, and she seems like a tough cookie, what's the point, exactly?

The French Were Right...

This article from 2003 by Paul Starobin seems worth a second look.

The Times of India: Looting, Rioting in New Orleans

The Times of India headline about Hurricane Katrina reads: "Looting, rioting in storm-ravaged New Orleans."

Yushchenko Condemns Kiev Attack on Yeshiva Students

The Guardian quotes Yushchenko's condemnation of the recent skinhead attack near the Central Synagogue School in Kiev:

"Such incidents are unacceptable in Kiev and Ukraine...I will persistently ask all authorities to work hard to prevent any shameful reoccurrence.''

According to the story, Ukrainian authorites now admit the attackers appear to be members of "a skinhead nationalist group."

Starbucks Fights for Russian Trademark Rights

The Moscow Times has this story, that explains why there were no Starbucks in Moscow when we lived there this past winter. We wondered how it could be, since there were reportedly thousands of Starbucks in China. Turns out that a trademark dispute has held up the company's Moscow plans for several years. As a result, the only Starbucks coffee is found in Mariott hotels; and the only place a Starbucks could legally open would be in the US Embassy--because it is officially American territory. The case is winding its way through the Russian courts, Starbucks v. 000 Starbucks (the Russian company that claims the rights). It seems to be a matter of $600,000, not principle, so perhaps they'll find grounds for a settlement...

Another Iraq Blog

Seraphic Secret tipped us off to Michael Yon's reporting from Iraq...

John LeBoutillier on Iraq

He's worried:

Did US troops fight and die so that a Muslim Theocracy could be imposed in Iraq?

Our whole adventure in Iraq is an example of American intervention run amok. It is why true conservatives never liked the notion of a pre-emptive invasion and we don't believe in 'nation-building.'

We have ended up having the President of the United States calling Abdul Aziz Hakim, the head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and asking him to undo a previous Bush de-Baathification Plan that Bush himself ordered 3 years ago!!! And Hakim is so pro-Tehran that he actually fought on the side of Iran against Iraq in the 1980's!

Iraq is a mess - and no fancy-pants words from Washington are going to change that reality. We have - through the ignorance of a naive and arrogant President with no foreign policy background or understanding - unleashed a monster in Iraq: fundamentalist Islam.

Ironically, it is this strain of Islam that attacked us on 9/11. And we have now helped it advance through the Middle East by handing it another nation - Iraq - in which to establish itself.

The Weekly Standard at 10

Peter Carlson celebrates ten years of The Weekly Standard in today's Washington Post:

Without a doubt, the most important idea yet advanced by the Standard came in the essay 'Saddam Must Go,' written by Kristol and Robert Kagan and published in November 1997. The idea was: Hey, let's invade Iraq, conquer Baghdad and overthrow Saddam Hussein for expelling American weapons inspectors.

At the time, nobody paid much attention to the suggestion. But five years later, President Bush dusted off the idea and ordered the Pentagon to execute it. And, as we all know now, it worked perfectly.

Or maybe not. You make the call.

I mixed feelings on this anniversary, since my own Weekly Standard memories are bubbling up, and I am certainly no longer a neoconservative, if I ever had been tending that way. In fairness, Bill Kristol has always been nice to me. When I last saw him, at the Kennedy Center revival of Gian Carlo Menotti's opera, The Consul, he was perfectly friendly. And from time to time I link to some interesting articles they have online. So my perspective on this anniversary illustrates the cliche that success has a thousand fathers.

A decade ago, I actually discussed the prospect of a new conservative magazine with Bill Kristol. At the time, the National Review published bi-weekly, so by the time it arrived the articles were often out of date. Commentary was a monthly, so really couldn't deal with breaking news. Bill's father had a couple of publications that were also slow to appear, namedly the Public Interest and the National Interest. Even David Horowitz's Heterodoxy was a monthly. On the other hand, The Nation and New Republic came out weekly. Therefore, they seemed to have a timeliness that conservative magazines lacked. So I suggested that any new magazine should not be a monthly or a bi-weekly, but come out weekly, to give liberal journals of opinion a run for their money. He said nothing, but when it came out, it was "The Weekly Standard." Of course, others might have had similar ideas.

The second point I made, and this may have been to someone else involved in the early days, regarded the so-called "back of the book". At the time there was reportedly a debate among the founders, over whether there should be any cultural coverage at all--or just policy oriented serious news and analysis. I believed the back of the book was the most important part of any magazine, that many readers of the New Republic or the Nation read the book reviews, movie reviews, and art reviews, even when they weren't interested in a political question. Since there was a shortage of respectable places that would, for example, review conservative books, or art exhibits, or films, I thought the new publication might provide such a venue. Again, the magazine ended up with a substantial back-of-the-book section, that Peter Carlson called "consistently literate, readable and intelligent. Its cultural essays are excellent." Again, I'm sure I wasn't the only one with this idea, just that I weighed in, as a kibitzer, at an early stage.

Carlson praises writers Andrew Ferguson and Matt Labash, and I have a story there, too. I had my first contact with Ferguson when he was researching an article about Bill Moyers, before I came to Washington. He interviewed me on the phone. Later, he would call from time to time when he was doing a story, as would other Weekly Standard writers. Ferguson is a former speechwriter for President Bush (41) and a funny guy. So, when my PBS book came out, and no review appeared in the Weekly Standard, I called him. Oh, he said and paused, and then added something like, so many books come out, we can't review them all...

I cancelled my subscription.

Bend It Like Beckham

Speaking of beautiful girls...just saw Bend It Like Beckham (2002), made by the husband-wife team responsible for Bride and Prejudice, Gurinder Chadha and Paul Mayeda Berges. The film is sort of a peep-and-giggle view of women's soccer, showcasing both Indian and English beauties. It has many of the same themes of East meets West, as Bride and Prejudice. There is, as well, similar family dynamic: domineering mother vs. kindly father dealing with problem children. It seemed more calculated, and the montage sequences were pedestrian than the Bollywood-style musical numbers in Bride and Prejudice. Yet, it also had a nice feeling, wasn't ugly or mean, and brought a tear to the eye. The all-star cast was fun to watch, though Juliet Stevenson may have had too much plastic surgery. Can't wait to see what Chadha and Berges do next...

Russia's Beautiful Girls

Stop the presses! The Wall Street Journal has discovered that Russian women look marvelous. But what Edvard Radzinsky isn't telling is that young Russian beauties somehow evolve into tough old Russian babushkas, the kind of women who can force even President Putin to back down--as he did, after protesting pensioners blocked streets in Moscow and St. Petersburg earlier this year...