Coyote Blog

Kevin Drum passes on this Times-Picayune story that apparently, New Orleans in general and the Superdome in particular were not quite the post-apocalyptic-mad-max killing zone they were portrayed as:

"I had the impression that at least 40 or 50 murders had occurred at the two
sites," he said. "It's unfortunate we saw these kinds of stories saying crime
had taken place on a massive scale when that wasn't the case. And they (national
media outlets) have done nothing to follow up on any of these cases, they just
accepted what people (on the street) told them....It's not consistent with the
highest standards of journalism."

....The picture that emerged was one of the impoverished, masses of flood
victims resorting to utter depravity, randomly attacking each other, as well as
the police trying to protect them and the rescue workers trying to save them.
[Mayor Ray] Nagin told [Oprah] Winfrey the crowd has descended to an "almost
animalistic state."

Drum has an odd way of introducing the story, saying that "conventional wisdom about the Superdome and Convention Center was wrong" and introducing the story as an "urban legend".  Conventional wisdom? Urban legend?  This isn't a story that was created around water coolers, this is a story that was reported like this by the major media.  If the Times-Picayune story is right, then a better lead would be "Major Media Greatly Exaggerated Deaths and Disorder at Superdome". 

What Drum is so coy about pointing out is that this is yet another example of the media falling in love with a story line and selectively choosing facts, and where necessary, suspending disbelief, to support that story line.  First, the media wanted what it always wants in a disaster:  the big story that will draw viewers  (Did anyone else notice last week during Rita that when the hurricane went from category 3 to 5, all the media said it was much more dangerous at 5, but when it went back down to 3, they all said its just as dangerous at 3 as 5).  As the days progressed, the media fell in love with a new story, the story of a racist administration that was abandoning blacks to chaos.

OK, well here is my new story line:  Its about a media that won't even trust General Honore when he announces the location of the hurricane Rita evacuation site without peppering him with 20 useless questions but is willing to believe, without evidence, that a mostly black population would in a period of two days descend into Lord-of-the-Flies level violence, murder, and yes, they even mentioned cannibalism.   Message to blacks from the media: The elite media types feel your pain, support litmus test issues like affirmative action, but they will assume that at your heart you are all murderers and cannibals.   Who are the freakin' racists here, anyway?   Heck, a black "social justice advocate" started the cannibalism rumor in print.  With leaders like these, do African-Americans need enemies?

And, by the way, there is a second really interesting story line here about how the major media's desire to portray the situation in New Orleans as bad as possible, even if the facts did not support it, actually slowed the pace of help to victims.  Any number of volunteers shied away from entering the damaged area, afraid for their own safety.  Many more were turned away from the area by authorities who were afraid they could not protect them.  There is no doubt in my mind that the media's fact-free coverage, skewed to make things look as bad as possible, made things worse for victims in the early days after the hurricane, all in the name of higher ratings.  If Walmart or Haliburton had done something to impede the rescue in the name of higher profits, they would be hung out to dry.  OK, I am waiting for a similar outcry against ABC and CNN and FOX, because it seems that that is exactly what they are guilty of.

Update:  From the LA Times:

"If the dome and Convention Center had harbored large numbers of
middle class white people," [New Orleans Times-Picayune Editor] Amoss said, "it would not have been a
fertile ground for this kind of rumor-mongering."

A lot of the blame, though seems to also fall at the footsteps of the Mayor and Chief of Police:

Mayor C. Ray Nagin told a national television audience on "Oprah" three
weeks ago of people "in that frickin' Superdome for five days watching
dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people."...

Some of the hesitation that journalists might have had about using the
more sordid reports from the evacuation centers probably fell away when
New Orleans' top officials seemed to confirm the accounts.

Nagin and Police Chief Eddie Compass appeared on "Oprah" a few days after trouble at the Superdome had peaked.

Compass told of "the little babies getting raped" at the
Superdome. And Nagin made his claim about hooligans raping and killing.

Mayor Nagin has for some reason chosen the strategy, which seems insane in retrospect, of hoping that making the situation look as bad as possible would somehow enhance his personal reputation.  This strategy seems nuts, but I will say that it is one that has worked well for black politicians for years, making political hay by pointing out how bad their black constituents have it because of outside racist forces and powers outside their control.  In this case, though, the chickens come home to roost as Mayor Nagin has been unable to shed that nasty, nagging question that African-Americans should have been asking of their black leaders for years: "Uh, but in this case weren't you the one in charge?"

Technorati Tags:  Katrina, Media

If you didn't see it on Instapundit, LSU professor Jeffrey Sadow has a great post on the huge corrupt porkfest that is being proposed in Louisiana:

The $250 billion [in proposed federal aid] is not far behind the $350 billion
estimated spent on the military aspects and their aftermath of the war
of terror since Sep. 11, 2001 "“ which means in reconstruction terms
(leaving out the actual war-making expenses), Louisiana actually is
asking for more than countries with 10 times its population which face
far more damage.

The $40 billion [in proposed Corps of Engineering spending for Louisiana] is ten times the annual
Corps budget, and 100 times the annual amount typically received by
Louisiana which gets more such funding than any other state.

Also, it is nearly three times the size of the entire request for coastal restoration efforts in the state.

He concludes:

So, let's get this straight. Louisiana, from some of her federal officials through some state officials all they way down to city and other local governments,
countenanced negligence from benign to irresponsible in ensuring proper
flood protection and in dealing with hurricanes. And now these same
people have formulated a plan wanting the country to pay an incredible
sum of money to the state controlled by people from the state to deal
with the aftereffects and, apparently, Louisiana's past inability to
utilize our resources efficiently in other areas?

The rest of the country is going to look at this and think we're still stuck on stupid.

Glenn Reynolds also has a long post with other good links on the topic here.  I particularly liked this bit he quotes from John Fund:

Put bluntly, the local political cultures don't engender confidence
that aid won't be diverted from the people who truly need and deserve
it. While the feds can try to ride herd on the money, here's hoping
folks in the region take the opportunity to finally demand their own
political housecleaning. Change is past due. Last year, Lou Riegel, the
agent in charge of the FBI's New Orleans office, described Louisiana's
public corruption as "epidemic, endemic, and entrenched. No branch of
government is exempt."

Louisiana ranks third in the nation in the number of elected
officials per capita convicted of crimes (Mississippi takes top prize).
In just the past generation, the Pelican State has had a governor, an
attorney general, three successive insurance commissioners, a
congressman, a federal judge, a state Senate president and a swarm of
local officials convicted. Last year, three top officials at
Louisiana's Office of Emergency Preparedness were indicted on charges
they obstructed a probe into how federal money bought out flood-prone
homes. Last March the Federal Emergency Management Agency ordered
Louisiana to repay $30 million in flood-control grants it had awarded
to 23 parishes

Update: Lots more at Porkopolis. 

Louisiana population is 4,468,976, not all of which was
affected by the hurricane. A reasonable assumption is to say that half the
population was in the path of the hurricane. That would be about 2,234,488,
but to keep calculations simple we'll round up the affected population to 2,
500,000. That 2.5 million of affected Louisiana residents will make for an easy
calculation

$250 billion divided by 2.5 million affected residents
results in a disaster relief request of.....(drum rooooooooooll)...$100,000 per person!

And these juicy details:

• $100 million for "psychological trauma response early intervention,
  prevention, and disorder treatment by culturally competent counselors and mental
  health professionals for children who are 0 to 5 years of age; see page 38, line
  1.
• $100 million for mosquito abatement; see page 39, line 12.
• $1 billion "shall be used for a program to aid the travel and tourism
  industry"; see page 45, line 17
• $5 million for Project Serv under the Safe and Drug-Free Schools and
  Communities Act; see page 49, line 13
• NOAA weather radio for every eligible person; see Sec. 526 .

Occasioning this statement:

"It's all vital," said Landrieu. "There's not
anything in here that we would consider a wish list or pie in the sky. This is
what we really believe is essential."

This is just the macro-scale version of this, business as usual in Louisiana:

Police found cases of food, clothes and tools intended for hurricane
victims in the backyard, shed and rooms throughout the home of a chief
administrative officer of a New Orleans suburb, officials said
Wednesday.

Police in Kenner searched Cedric Floyd's home Tuesday because of
complaints that city workers were helping themselves to donations for
hurricane victims. Floyd, who runs the day-to-day operations in Kenner,
was in charge of distributing the donations.

The donations, including lanterns, vacuums and clothes with price
tags attached, had to be removed in four loads in a big pickup truck,
Kenner police Capt. Steve Caraway said.

"It was an awful lot of stuff," he said.

Technorati Tags:  Katrina, Porkbusters

Here is a copy of the letter I sent to my representative John Shadegg as part of the PorkBusters campaign:

Representative
John Shadegg
Arizona
3^rd District

306
Cannon H. O. B.

Washington,
DC  20515

Congressman
Shadegg:

I
am a blogger who lives and runs a business in your district.  I know
that you were one of only 8 people in Congress to vote against the
recent pork-laden highway bill, something I congratulated you for on
my blog.  I now want to encourage you to continue fighting to reign
in government spending.  I am frankly flabbergasted to see the
current Republican leadership in Congress working so hard to resist
fiscal sanity, and am amazed that the Republican Party could have
drifted so far from its philosophical roots.

I
know that there are tremendous pressures on you to play the game with
everyone else in Congress, and bring home your share of pork to your
district.  Often those in your district will root for you to cut
other people's pork but not their own.  Let me say that I am totally
supportive of your cutting our 3^rd district pork first, as
a message that everyone needs to contribute to the spending cuts the
President has called for to pay for Katrina-related expenses.  You
are probably aware that many of us in the blogging world have banded
together in the "Porkbusters" effort to signal our desire to cut
pork by identifying our own local earmarks for cuts first.

Technorati tag:  porkbusters.

This is a revival, in honor of our upcoming 1-year anniversary, of what used to be a regular feature on this site, and is explained here. Many of our ACME products come courtesy of this site.

In the spirit of what will probably be known as natural disaster month, comes this coyote favorite:

My mom, who lives in Houston, spent much of today trying to get out.  Getting on Interstate 10 about 4AM, she doesn't seem to have made even 60 miles my 8PM at night, where she just plain couldn't drive any more.  Since she somehow got separated from my sister in their driving convoy, she pulled to the side of the road to rest.  Fortunately, a local minister and a fireman took her to a local shelter at a fire station to sleep tonight, where she reports all is well (many props to those folks).  Hopefully she can make it to San Antonio tomorrow, and hopefully they have not given away her reservation.

She reports that gas availability seems to worry folks the most.  No one was running their air conditioning, to save gas, and traffic was moving so slow that several were pushing their cars with the engine off down the road rather than running the engine.  There is apparently gas in inventory in the area, but tank trucks can't get to stations since inbound traffic is blocked.  Also, cars seem to be taking literally hours just to get to the next exit.  Yuk.

Since I grew up in Houston and know the people there fairly well, I can make one prediction:  They will evacuate this time, if only as part of the post-Katrina panic, but if the city is not leveled they are not going to do it again any time soon, no matter what is coming at them.

Update: Mom is back on the road this morning, and traffic is moving much better.  She reports she is 99 miles from San Antonio and has a half tank of gas.  That means in her first 27 hours of travel she made less than 100 miles of progress.  She says that there are hundreds of cars by the sides of the road that have run out of gas.

Final Update:  Mom reached SA OK, and in fact as of Monday morning is back at home in Houston.  The power is on, the cable is running, and the house is fine.  Mom lives does not live in a low-lying area, and her house has survived many hurricanes.  I know that Rita veered off from Houston, but was it really safer for her to be on the road for 30 hours, with no place to sleep at night, worrying every minute about running out of gas?

Technorati Tags:  Katrina

Whether it is the French influence or the long shadow of Huey Long's patronage driven socialist experiment, Louisiana has a tradition of bad government.  I remember several years ago the governor's race featured a Nazi running against a convicted felon (convicted in office of bribery and influence peddling, if I remember right).

So one of the problems with the management of Katrina problems is that Katrina hit Louisiana, the US's own version of Haiti.  Don't believe me?  This is already coming out, and you can be sure there is more:

Police found cases of food, clothes and tools intended for hurricane
victims in the backyard, shed and rooms throughout the home of a chief
administrative officer of a New Orleans suburb, officials said
Wednesday.

Police in Kenner searched Cedric Floyd's home Tuesday because of
complaints that city workers were helping themselves to donations for
hurricane victims. Floyd, who runs the day-to-day operations in Kenner,
was in charge of distributing the donations.

The donations, including lanterns, vacuums and clothes with price
tags attached, had to be removed in four loads in a big pickup truck,
Kenner police Capt. Steve Caraway said.

"It was an awful lot of stuff," he said.

Technorati Tags:  Katrina

I mentioned in a post previously that I didn't like what Powerpoint was doing to presentations.  In fact, I have actually abandoned Powerpoint entirely even
for the few slides I do use in favor of the presentation package from the
free Open Office applications suite.
This package, which has really come into its own with the version 2
beta, opens and writes MS Office applications and is a pretty good
substitute, sometimes better, occasionally worse, for MS Office. 

I am
stress testing the whole package this winter, plus Thunderbird for email and of course Firefox
on which I am already sold for browsing, as a way to begin migrating
our company to having no MS Office at all.  I am tired of paying
hundreds of dollars per seat for applications that overwhelm and
confuse my employees.  Because of our need to interchange files with a
number of other entities, we need to be able to work with .xlw and .doc
files, so this makes for a nice solution for us.  My experience has
been very very good so far - let me know in the comments if you have
experience with these products.

Update: Thanks for the comments, keep them coming.  I continue to have very good luck in my stress testing.  Thuderbird is great, except that the spam filter sends to many good mails to spam - I would like the control to dial it back a notch.  OO Writer is good, with only some small formatting changes on tables from MS word.  I actually find its formatting and outlining tools better than MS word, and like the built in export to pdf.  The excel clone is working fine, and I can hardly tell the difference between the presentation package and powerpoint.  I have not played with the equation editor yet, but my daughter likes the draw package.  I had trouble with the database, but I find it is always hard to migrate to a new DB.  I never was able to switch from access to filemaker, and everyone tells me that filemaker is easier but I just got used to doing things in access.

One of my worries about migrating this to my employees is that many of my managers are computer noobs, and tend to go out and buy excel and word books from Barnes and Noble when they get the computer on the first day.  There are no such reasources for Open Office, and it is different enough from MS Office that the books don't really apply well.

For nearly six years I was a consultant at McKinsey and for another six I held corporate staff roles and marketing leadership roles.  In these twelve years, I did a lot of presenting.  By the end of those 12 years, I felt like I knew about functionality in PowerPoint that the guys in Redmond didn't know about.  But by the end of those 12 years, I had nearly abandoned Powerpoint as a medium and I avoid it like the plague today. 

The main reason is that I don't like to be a slave to my slides.  So many presenters become trapped by their slides, redefining the presentation as getting through the slides in a given amount of time rather than getting their message across.  Today, I like to present to people, looking them in the eye, without any other visual effects to take their attention away from me or my message.  I will use a flip chart or a computer projector from time to time - there is always a need to punctuate your points with data and charts and pictures, but I don't leave them up there after they have had their impact.  The projector goes off and focus is back on me and my message. 

At one company we made presentations using 2 or even 3 projectors
simultaneously, projecting multiple slides all at one time.  I remember
several key strategy presentations I gave using a hundred or more
slides.  Today, I know I could give those presentations better with
just 5 slides showing the key market research and cost data that drove
the decision, and then explaining the logic of our plan without any distractions behind me.

There is nothing I hate more than bulleted text slide after bulleted text slide.  There are only two possibilities from these slides:  Either they are easy to read, but then their message is so generic as to be meaningless; or they contain real content, making them hard to read in a presentation.  I prefer the latter, but save them for a leave behind that people can flip through after I am done.

Anyway, so much for my patented 20 minute semi-off-topic introduction to the real point of this post.  Via gongol.com comes this interesting analysis of how the use of PowerPoint might be affecting the quality of scientific presentations, and specifically looks at how PowerPoint may have impeded quality understanding of the risks that led to the Columbia accident.

Postscript: I must give credit where credit is due.  McKinsey takes the art of presentation very seriously, and did more for me than anyone in making me a good presenter of complex information, either in verbal or written form.  Their pyramid principal for writing was more useful to me than anything I learned in six years at Princeton and Harvard about the subject of communication.

Its not very often that you can tell, right at birth, that a new meme or catchphrase has been created, but General Honore's "Your Stuck on Stupid" seems to be such a case.  Radio Blogger has the context and transcript.  I will quote the key part, but its good to read the whole thing. 

The General had been trying to explain the evacuation approach so the press could get the message out to citizens who needed to know where to go.  Actually, the mayor had been trying to do that first, but was getting eaten alive by a press who were less interested in getting information out on the new storm than with scoring points** about the last storm. Both the mayor and the general kept getting peppered with questions like "why didn't we do that last time" and "That didn't work before".  At this point, General Honore was clearly frustrated with reporters who wanted to have a political finger pointing discussion when he was trying to communicate evacuation information.  So then there was this:

Honore: ...Right now, to handle the number of people that want to leave, we've got the
capacity. You will come to the convention center. There are soldiers there from
the 82nd Airborne, and from the Louisiana National Guard. People will be told to
get on the bus, and we will take care of them. And where they go will be
dependent on the capacity in this state. We've got our communications up. And
we'll tell them where to go. And when they get there, they'll be able to get a
chance, an opportunity to get registered, and so they can let their families
know where they are. But don't start panic here. Okay? We've got a location. It
is in the front of the convention center, and that's where we will use to
migrate people from it, into the system.

Male reporter: General Honore, we were told
that Berman Stadium on the west bank would be another staging area...

Honore: Not to my knowledge. Again, the current
place, I just told you one time, is the convention center. Once we complete the
plan with the mayor, and is approved by the governor, then we'll start that in
the next 12-24 hours. And we understand that there's a problem in getting
communications out. That's where we need your help. But let's not confuse the
questions with the answers. Buses at the convention center will move our
citizens, for whom we have sworn that we will support and defend...and we'll
move them on. Let's not get stuck on the last storm. You're asking last storm
questions for people who are concerned about the future storm. Don't get stuck
on stupid, reporters. We are moving forward. And don't confuse the people
please. You are part of the public message. So help us get the message straight.
And if you don't understand, maybe you'll confuse it to the people. That's why
we like follow-up questions. But right now, it's the convention center, and move
on.

Male reporter: General, a little bit more about
why that's happening this time, though, and did not have that last time...

Honore: You are stuck on stupid. I'm not going
to answer that question. We are going to deal with Rita. This is public
information that people are depending on the government to put out. This is the
way we've got to do it. So please. I apologize to you, but let's talk about the
future. Rita is happening. And right now, we need to get good, clean information
out to the people that they can use. And we can have a conversation on the side
about the past, in a couple of months.

Awesome.  The press does a great job, and I couldn't do what I do as a blogger without them gathering the basic facts on which I comment***.  However, I think a lot of people are tired of their self-righteous shtick.

Footnotes:
**  While I am convinced that reporters seem more interested in scoring points in these press conferences than obtaining facts (have you ever watched a White House press briefing?), it is interesting to ask "score points with whom?"  With each other?  With CSPAN viewers?  Are either of these really a sustainable constituency?

***  Vodkapundit has a great analysis that I think is dead-on about the NY Times putting their editorial copy behind a paid firewall.  The WSJ charges for news, but puts out opinions for free.  The NY Times does the opposite. 

Look. I usually suspect any New York Times story to be biased - but I can
expect it to be researched and fact-checked. And in this day and age, I can rely
on some smart blogger somewhere to tell me exactly what the NYT got wrong. But
what I can't expect blogs to do - at least not yet - is to do the dreary,
day-in-day-out work of getting the news in the first place. For all its faults,
the MSM is still far better than blogs at reporting.

Given all that, do recent decisions at the New York Times make any sense?
They're forcing people to pay for opinions they can get most anywhere else for
free, while cutting back on doing the one thing they can still do better than
anyone else.

Cafe Hayek has a fabulous fisking of Missouri governor Matt Blunt's letter to the editor explaining why his call for price controls on gasoline is consistent with his free market principals.  Its all good, I can't pick out any one quote.  Read it all.

But wait!  This just in!  Maybe our governor IS this dumb.

Our great benevolent leader, Janet Napolitano, has stated in press conference
the she is going to investigate these fuel prices of ours. Mostly she was
ruffling her feathers right after Hurricane Katrina shutdown a good 30% of the
domestic supply source. So of course prices increased slightly to account for
the lack of supply. This trend that followed exactly what even very simple
supply and demand theory would predict was not enough to convince miss Gov. J.No
not to call for yet another investigation. No way! She was not going to be
swayed by facts, reality or "assurances from the oil industry" that these were
fair market prices. Nope. An investigation was needed.

A little over a year ago, a pipeline broke and the only source of gasoline into Phoenix was stopped.  Due to EPA regulations, Phoenix requires a special gas blend made in only one refinery coming to us through one pipeline, so it is not surprising that if that source is interrupted, gas might be short here for a while and prices might spike up.  Which they did.  Governor Napolitano at that time blamed the whole situation on the oil industry and called for investigations.  Tellingly, she took only three policy actions:

• Temporarily waived regulations for a special blend of gas in Phoenix
• Temporarily waived regulations on truckers that were preventing them from filling in for the broken pipeline
• Considered circumventing regulations that were preventing a local refinery to serve the Phoenix market from being built.

So the rhetoric at the time was "its all the oil companies faults" but the solution was "repeal government regulations".  Hmmmmm.  By the way, the Commons Blog created a nice chart showing how those filthy rich oil companies are making, uh, ahem, lower profits than average for US industry (click to enlarge).  I wish they were more profitable- we would probably have a lot more oil.

Cafe Hayek points out that Rep. Earl Blumenauer wants to make sure that New Orleans is rebuilt with a strong urban planning vision.  Since Mr. Blumenauer represents Portland, Oregon, the city beloved of planners that has been planned into having some of the highest priced housing and worst traffic of any city of its size in America, I presume he wants something similar for New Orleans (Portland was also the city that thought it had solved global warming).

Here is my urban plan for New Orleans:  Every person who owns property can build whatever the hell they want on it.  If other people want something else built on that property, and value this outcome enough, they can buy the property from its owner.  This novel concept is called "private property rights" and falls under the broader category of what are called "constitutionally protected individual rights" or even more broadly, "freedom".  It is a concept that used to be taken for granted in this country and but now is seldom even taught in schools. 

For the property owned by the government, well, they are going to build whatever dumbshit thing they want to on it anyway, so I'll just root for their choice to be fairly inexpensive.  We here in Phoenix built a half-billion dollar stadium for the for-god-sakes Arizona Cardinals that is used for its core purpose 3 hours a day for 8 days a year.  It couldn't be worse, could it?

Technorati Tags:  Katrina, Economics

With a hat tip to Cafe Hayek, comes this article from the Las Vegas Weekly:

The shade from the Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market sign is minimal around noon;
still, six picketers squeeze their thermoses and Dasani bottles onto the dirt
below, trying to keep their water cool. They're walking five-hour shifts on this
corner at Stephanie Street and American Pacific Drive in Henderson"”anti-Wal-Mart
signs propped lazily on their shoulders, deep suntans on their faces and
arms"”with two 15-minute breaks to run across the street and use the washroom at
a gas station....

They're not union members; they're temp workers employed through Allied
Forces/Labor Express by the union"”United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW).
They're making $6 an hour, with no benefits; it's 104 F, and they're protesting
the working conditions inside the new Wal-Mart grocery store.

"It don't make no sense, does it?" says James Greer, the line foreman and the
only one who pulls down $8 an hour, as he ambles down the sidewalk, picket sign
on shoulder, sweaty hat over sweaty gray hair, spitting sunflower seeds. "We're
sacrificing for the people who work in there, and they don't even know it."

The union accuses Wal-Mart of dragging down wages and working conditions for
other grocery-store workers across the nation. "Whether you work or shop at
Wal-Mart, the giant retailer's employment practices affect your wages. Wal-Mart
leads the race to the bottom in wages and health-care," says the UFCW's website.
"As the largest corporation in the world, Wal-Mart has a responsibility to the
people who built it. Wal-Mart jobs offer low pay, inadequate and unaffordable
healthcare, and off the clock work."

But standing with a union-supplied sign on his shoulder that reads, Don't
Shop WalMart: Below Area Standards, picketer and former Wal-Mart employee Sal
Rivera says about the notorious working conditions of his former big-box
employer: "I can't complain. It wasn't bad. They started paying me at $6.75, and
after three months I was already getting $7, then I got Employee of the Month,
and by the time I left (in less than one year), I was making $8.63 an hour."
Rivera worked in maintenance and quit four years ago for personal reasons, he
says. He would consider reapplying.

LOL.  Frequent readers will know that I usually feel the need to restate the moral of the story to insure everyone gets it.  I don't think thats necesary here.  More on Walmart and wages here and here.

In the first of what promises to be the first of a number of lawsuits against 527 groups under the horrendous McCain-Feingold act, the Federal Election Committee is suing the Club for Growth for its television adds in 2000 and 2002.  Essentially, the FEC is attempting to declare the Club for Growth to be under the control of and an arm of the Republican Party, and therefore subject to McCain-Feingold spending and donation limitations. 

This is absurd.  First, current election law and McCain-Feingold are a brazen assault on the first amendment, and shouldn't apply to anyone.  Second, to the extent that they are allowed to be applied to the two major political parties, their reach should be limited as much as possible to allow private citizens full freedom of political speech.

While the Club for Growth often supports Republicans over Democrats, browsing their web site makes it clear that they are by no means a shill for the Republican party.  They are strong supporters of reduced regulation and taxes, and have been just as hard on Republicans of late when Bush, Delay and Company have apparently abandoned these goals.  I have supported The Club for Growth for years and I am by no means a Republican.

Several lefty blogs have gleefully piled on because they don't like the Club for Growth.  This is very very shortsighted.  My sense is that the case against CfG is no better or worse than the case they can have against MoveOn or Soros or whatever.  The CfG suit may well be a Trojan Horse first case to immunize the Bush Administration and the FEC against charges that they are going after the President's critics.  Once immunized, under this theory, lefty organizations will be next. 

Bloggers represent one of the strongest and most vocal constituencies for freedom of speech -- we should be united in opposing this kind of action, whoever it is against.

Update:  More from Reason's Hit and Run

Following up on posts here, here, here, here, and here is yet another in a series on government preference for control over results, this time via Overlawyered.com:

In the midst of administering chest compressions to a dying woman
several days after Hurricane Katrina struck, Dr. Mark N. Perlmutter was ordered
to stop by a federal official because he wasn't registered with the Federal
Emergency Management Agency. "I begged him to let me continue," said Perlmutter,
who left his home and practice as an orthopedic surgeon in Pennsylvania to come
to Louisiana and volunteer to care for hurricane victims. "People were dying,
and I was the only doctor on the tarmac (at the Louis Armstrong New Orleans
International Airport) where scores of nonresponsive patients lay on stretchers.
Two patients died in front of me.

"I showed him (the U.S. Coast Guard official in charge) my medical
credentials. I had tried to get through to FEMA for 12 hours the day before and
finally gave up. I asked him to let me stay until I was replaced by another
doctor, but he refused. He said he was afraid of being sued. I informed him
about the Good Samaritan laws and asked him if he was willing to let people die
so the government wouldn't be sued, but he would not back down. I had to
leave."

In a formal response to Perlmutter's story, FEMA said it does not accept the
services of volunteer physicians:

"We have a cadre of physicians of our own," FEMA spokesman Kim Pease
said Thursday. "They are the National Disaster Medical Team. ... The voluntary
doctor was not a credentialed FEMA physician and, thus, was subject to law
enforcement rules in a disaster area."

So for those of you who draw the conclusion from Katrina that we need more big government rather than less, that would help.... how?

Technorati Tags:  Katrina

After the Supreme Court's Kelo decision that effectively increases the power of local authorities to take whatever poperty they want and hand it over the private developers, a number of outraged politicians began reform efforts to limit takings in their state to true common-carrier public projects.  So what has happened to these efforts?  Virginia Postrel links to this update on California, but I will give you a hint:  They have had about the same level of success that every other effort to limit government power has had of late.

Predictably, local government and redevelopment officials reacted with alarm
that eminent domain could be severely restricted. The California Redevelopment
Association and other advocates geared up to kill the measures and in the
closing days of the legislative session, Democratic leaders ginned up a strategy
to cool off the anti-eminent domain fervor. They unveiled legislation that would
place a two-year moratorium on the seizure of private homes (but not commercial
property), and authorize a study of the practice, thus giving their members a
chance, or so it seemed, to side with the anti-eminent domain sentiment without
doing any real damage to redevelopment agencies.

Quietly, however, the moratorium bills were themselves put on the shelf as
the session ended - with Democrats blaming Republicans. "With every vote, they
tried to derail this prudent response," said Sen. Christine Kehoe, D-San Diego,
who carried one of the moratorium bills.

Kehoe's finger-pointing, however, was more than a little disingenuous since
the stalled bills required only simple majority votes and thus needed no
Republicans to go along. Clearly, this was a Democratic action, not a Republican
one, perhaps just a feint to pretend to do something about eminent domain
without actually doing anything to upset the apple cart.

She also points to this story in San Diego:

First came a report on the San Diego Model School Development Agency's push to
seize and demolish 188 homes in the thriving City Heights neighborhood to build
up to 509 town houses, condos and apartments more to its liking. The 30-acre
site is far from the decaying neighborhood normally targeted in redevelopment,
but blithe agency bureaucrats from the Soviet school of central
planning--knowing they could call the area "blighted" if they chose--didn't
care.

Then came yesterday's jaw-dropping story about National City's plan to use
its powers of eminent domain to force the Daily family to sell a parcel the
family leases to the Mossy family for one of its thriving car dealerships. After
the two sides couldn't agree on a sales price, Mossy representatives made plain
they would move their Nissan dealership--and the $1 million in annual sales and
property taxes it generates for National City--unless the city helped close the
deal. The City Council promptly caved in to Mossy's unsavory hardball tactics
and, in its role as the city redevelopment board, began looking into seizing the
land--after a mysterious epiphany in which members suddenly realized the site
suffered from a heretofore undetected case of "visual blight."

Yep, there's nothing like another large car dealership to fight visual blight.  Maybe San Diego should tear down the Del Coronado hotel and put a car dealership there too.

President Bush's call for Katrina spending to be offset by budget cuts has spurred a blogosphere effort to identify local pork urge Congress to cut the pork.  I am 98% behind this effort (the missing 2% being that the effort is spurred by a desire to spend the money somewhere else, rather than sending it back to taxpayers where it belongs).  Glenn Reynolds post that got the ball rolling is here.  His followup posts are here and here.  I will note the irony that I recently compared Don Young (of Alaska bridge to nowhere fame) to Huey Long (of multiple bridges to nowhere fame), given that we are looking to cut Don Young's pork to help Huey Long's old stomping ground.

Edward at Zonitics has already identified one of the most visible chunks of AZ pork, that is our earmarks in the recent highway bill.  These include nearly five million for a couple of pedestrian bridges, plus hundreds of millions for a rail system to run empty trains to compete with our empty buses.  Why does the rest of the country need to pay for Phoenix's growth?  Heck, we just took the money the feds saved us on this junk and spent it subsidizing a stadium for the Cardinals, for god's sakes.   I will note that of the mere 8 people who voted against the highway bill, 2 were from Arizona, including my 3rd district Congressman John Shadegg and libertarian Jeff Flake.  Flake, consistent with his libertarian principles (or in retribution for them?) represents the only district in the country without an earmark in the highway bill.

So, to push the ball forward, I will add another bit of Arizona pork.  I wanted to include some items form the energy bill, but I can't find a state by state impact.  But I can find, thanks to the environmental working group, a nice summary of farm subsidies to Arizona.  Here is a summary for the most recent year they have data:

And here is the same data but cut by recipient, with just the top 20 included:

I don't know all these folks, but I can say that all of the first three have extremely profitable casinos they operate.

I am writing my letter now to the my Congressman and Senators, and will post a copy as an update when I am done.  The ubiquitous NZ Bear has a data base he is building of pork identified.

Technorati tag:  porkbusters.

Via Lynne Keisling of the Knowledge Problem comes two good articles on supply and demand in the gasoline markets. 

The first is from James Hamilton, who analyzes the effect of gasoline price increase on demand and finds, amazingly to some I guess, that demand has fallen substantially.

We have certainly seen this in the camping and travel business, as visitation has fallen off the map of late, though fortunately it comes right at the end of the season.  It appears that demand has fallen about 10% with the increase to circa $3 gas, about matching the shortfall in US refining capacity post-Katrina.  Does anyone doubt that we would have seen gas lines had prices not risen?

The second article is from Steve Chapman. Apparently, Democratic senators are separately working to make sure that higher oil prices are not allowed to spur either lower demand or higher supply.   First he takes on serial-stupid-statement-making Maria Cantwell who is working the demand-side with her desire to have the US President set retail gasoline prices:

This week, as gasoline prices remained above $3 a
gallon, [Maria Cantwell] proposed giving the president the power to tell retailers
what they can charge at the pump.

A lot of people grew anxious
seeing long lines forming last week, as motorists rushed to fill their
tanks in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. But Cantwell apparently
enjoyed the sight well enough that she'd like to make those lines a
permanent feature of the landscape. If so, she has the right approach.
The government does many things badly, but one thing it knows how to do
is create shortages through the vigorous use of price controls.

That's what it did in the oil market in 1979-80, under President Jimmy
Carter. He was replaced by Ronald Reagan, who lifted price caps on gas
and thus not only banished shortages but brought about an era of low
prices.

Cantwell thinks oil companies have manipulated the
energy market to gouge consumers, though she is awaiting evidence to
support that theory. "I just don't have the document to prove it," she
declared. Her suspicions were roused when she noticed that prices
climbed in Seattle--though most of its oil comes from Alaska, which was
not hit by a hurricane.

Maybe no one has told Cantwell that oil
trades in an international market, and that when companies and
consumers in the South can't get fuel from their usual sources, they
will buy it from other ones, even if they have to go as far as Prudhoe
Bay.

If prices rose in Dallas and didn't rise in Seattle, oil
producers would have a big incentive to ship all their supplies to
Texas--leaving Washingtonians to pay nothing for nothing. When a freeze
damages Florida's orange juice crop, does Cantwell think only
Floridians feel the pain?

Then, he turns his attention to Senator Dorgan, who wants to make sure we get no new oil supplies by having the government confiscate "windfall profits"

Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), meanwhile, was outraged by
the thought of giant oil companies making money merely for supplying
the nation's energy needs. He claimed they will reap $80 billion in
"windfall profits" and wants the government to confiscate a large share
of that sum through a special federal tax.

But the prospect of
occasional "windfall" profits is one reason corporations are willing to
risk their money drilling wells that may turn out to be drier than Alan
Greenspan's reading list. Take them away, and investors may decide
they'd rather speculate in real estate.

Speaking of real
estate, Americans seem to feel no moral compunction about getting rich
from unforeseen increases in the price of another vital necessity. You
think home sellers in Baton Rouge haven't raised their asking prices in
the last 10 days? You think Dorgan wants to tax their windfall?

It's hard to see why oil companies shouldn't make a lot of money when
the commodity they provide is suddenly in short supply. After all, they
are vulnerable to weak profits or even losses during times of glut.
Back when Americans were enjoying abundant cheap gasoline, the joke was
that the surest way to make a small fortune in the oil industry was to
start with a large fortune.

Oil companies are also subject to
the whims of nature. No one is holding a charity fundraiser for the
businesspeople whose rigs and refineries were smashed by Katrina. No
one will come to their aid if prices drop by half.

Maybe Senator Dorgan can go back and confiscate the windfall profits that Maria Cantwell made in the Internet Bubble, where she made a fortune cashing out to later investors who took a bath.  At least oil companies are creating value with new oil production with their windfall profits:

Calgary"” Penn West Energy Trust is holding
a huge land sale -- looking to sell exploration rights to more than
500,000 hectares of undeveloped territory in Western Canada -- and the
offering has stirred a frenzy among many oil and natural gas companies
hungry for new drilling options.

"Demand is phenomenal," said Moya Little, president of Western
Divestments Inc., the firm brokering the sale. "It's a wide spectrum of
companies, startups, majors, any company that needs to drill."

And more here:

The world's biggest oil producers have significantly
boosted investment in oil exploration for the first time in nearly two
decades.

The Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries,
the cartel controlling 75 per cent of the world's oil reserves, on
Monday revealed its most important members had drilled 7.5 per cent
more wells last year than in 2003 in response to the oil price boom.
Opec's annual statistical bulletin also showed that the number of rigs
in operation within the 11-member cartel rose 18.8 per cent last year
after dropping by almost 6 per cent a year earlier.

What useful purpose is Cantwell using her windfall Internet stock profits for, other than financing her own run for the Senate?  Could the Democratic Party be any more clueless about economics?  Jeez, why is it that our opposition party in this country has to be such a joke?

Technorati Tags:  Economics, Energy

Those of you who wanted a strong federal welfare-nanny-state response to New Orleans, you have got your wish:

It is impossible to over-emphasize the extent to which this area is
under government occupation, and portions of it under
government-enforced lockdown. Police cars rule the streets. They (along
with Humvees, ambulances, fire apparatus, FEMA trucks and all
official-looking SUVs) are generally not stopped at checkpoints and
roadblocks. All other vehicles are subject to long lines and snap
judgments and must PROVE they have vital business inside the vast
roped-off regions here. If we did not have the services of an off-duty
law enforcement officer, we could not do our jobs in the course of a
work day and get back in time to put together the broadcast and get on
the air.

This is not poor federal management - this is exactly-what-you-always-get federal management.  Putting a premium on control and process over results is built into their DNA.  My prediction is that those areas outside federal control and allowed to be accessible to private aid and to individuals who want to, yeah I know its crazy, come into the area and take responsibility for fixing their own house rather than waiting for the feds to do it for them will fair much better in the long run.  More on the federal urge for technocratic control here  and here and here and here.

Something about this reminds me of an observation made over and over in interviews with American soldiers from WWII.  They recounted that in German villages, after a battle, the German citizens were out in the streets, starting to clean up and rebuild before the dust had even settled, while in France, villagers would just sit forlornly in the debris and wait for someone to come do something about it.

Update:  I know you are getting tired of these stories, but here is yet another example of the FEMA folks opposing private relief efforts in the name of "control". 

Starting right after midnight I began receiving calls from FEMA, HHS,
TRANSCOM and other groups whose acronyms I still cannot explain.  LCDR
Kennedy from FEMA called to understand what I was trying to do.  I told
him.  Fifteen minutes later Mimi Riley, Deputy Director from NDMS
called to beg me in a plaintive and exhausted voice not to carry out
this mission.  She had many reasons "“ you need doctors on the plane,
Chicago is too far from their home, how will we track the patients,
this is a military operation and we were not military. 

I
explained to her that we had two doctors on the plane one of whom was a
retired Air Force Doctor who had run the military hospital in Baghdad
after the invasion.  I thought we could trust him to run an airplane of
people from New Orleans to Knoxville.  We were working with NDMS
hospitals in Tennessee and Chicago so they would have a good tracking
system.  (I guess Mimi never heard of the Great Migration of African
Americans from New Orleans and the south to Chicago after the flood of
1927 and during the Depression.  Many people from New Orleans are more
at home in Chicago than Houston. )

Mimi was unmovable.  We
were not military and that was that.  She tried to sound grateful for
our intentions but she was not going to have outsiders help.  I even
offered to GIVE her the planes and the crews and the hospitals and let
her run it through her NDMS system but she would have none of it.  She
asked me at least to delay until noon the next day and I said I would
try.

A good revamp of FEMA after this is all over would put a heavy emphasis on private action and FEMA's role in aiding rather than controlling and limiting this effort.  Unfortunately, I don't expect that to be the outcome.  I fear that large government technocrats and lefties who are always suspicious of private bottom-up action will control the agenda in framing the FEMA debate.

OOPS:  Did I say that technocrats and lefties distrusted anything but top-down federal power.  I forgot the righties as well (from dubya's speech the other day):

It is now clear that a challenge on this scale requires greater federal
authority and a broader role for the armed forces -- the institution of
our government most capable of massive logistical operations on a
moment's notice.

Sounds like Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society.  As a libertarian, I dread the next election.  Two parties competing to see who can enhance federal power more.  Blech.

Yet another:

The patients and staff at Methodist could have been evacuated before
Hurricane Katrina hit. But instead they were condemned to several days of fear
and agony by bad decision-making in Louisiana and the chaotic ineptitude of the
Federal Emergency Management Agency. Some of the patients died.

Incredibly, when the out-of-state corporate owners of the hospital responded
to the flooding by sending emergency relief supplies, they were confiscated at
the airport by FEMA and sent elsewhere.

From the Mises Blog:

For those who maintain that the government "failed" its "mission," I must say
that they are wrong. True, the government with its ham-fisted policies of
blocking relief missions, imposing price controls, and acting in a dictatorial,
but incompetent style, seems to have "failed" in making things better,
especially in the days directly after the storm passed. But, if you understand
that government is a mechanism by which some people impose their will by force
over others, then you would have to admit that the government succeeded and
succeeded beyond its own expectations.

Thus, I leave readers with this question: If you believe that the government
"failed" in the aftermath of Katrina, will the government then have less or more
"authority" when the next disaster strikes? I think all of us know the
answer.

You can always expect government to behave exactly like government. When you
consider your political position, consider whether this institution ought to be
put in charge or disaster relief at all, or the economy, or society, foreign
policy, health care, education, courts, the environment or anything at all.
Katrina and its aftermath is only the latest exhibit in the ongoing historical
documentary in favor of a government-free society

I had similar thoughts here and here.

I have never been a Richard Branson groupie, but I must say for once I am appreciative of his efforts.  Branson has helped to make crystal clear the process by which governments take control of the economy.  The story comes to us via the Mises Economics blog, and starts this way:  According to Branson:

"The big oil companies are making extortionate profits out of the current oil
price," he announced, in his most calculating, populist style.

How anyone who runs the Virgin Megastores can complain about someone else's high pricing is beyond me, but lets let him run a little further:

"The biggest problem with the oil price is the lack of refinery capacity. There
is enough oil for everyone in the world, but the refineries are just not there."

And they are not there because...governments do not allow oil companies to build new refineries.  The government having created the problem, the solution would seem to be for the government to repeal the offending restrictions that caused the problem.  But here is where we get to the great tool of statism:  The problem created by the government is blamed on private enterprise and "market failure" and portrayed as necessitating... more government intervention:

"There has been talk of a windfall tax on big oil companies. Perhaps the
Government should use that money to invest in refinery infrastructure."

Of course, the big oil companies would invest those windfall profits in refining capacity on their own had they been allowed by government, but lets ignore that messy detail.  Ahh, but here is the best part.  Not only does the government now get to invest in refineries, but it gets to do it by channeling the money to the political supporters (i.e. Branson) of those in power, thus cementing their power and control.

According to the paper, Britain's favourite "entrepreneur" aims to put $100
million behind his latest scheme to build an oil refinery for airline fuel. Yes,
the Bearded Wonder is said to be about to launch a new company called - you
guessed it! - "Virgin Oil" within four or five months and is "seeking to attract
funding from other airlines and the Government...."

But, not content with this, our man from the tropical paradise has scented an
easier mark, for Sir Richard has seemingly exploited the crass celebrity-worship
of our New Labour masters, while also playing up to our ineffable Chancellor's
ever present desire to meddle in the markets.

For those of you who have held up Branson as some archetype of entrepreneurship: Stop it.  Here you see a man who is attempting to finance his entry into an industry by getting the government to take money by force from the current competitors in that industry and to give it to him to finance his startup.  I have always suspected Branson of being from the Orrin Boyle school of business and this just proves it.

Technorati Tags:   Economics

I had trouble getting going this morning on work -- I had to drop my son off at school at 5AM for a field trip, and I am sitting in my office refusing to address the pile of work in front of me.  So I skimmed over some of the transcripts from the Roberts confirmation hearings.  He seems like a pretty qualified guy, and since he is conservative I expect to agree with him some and disagree with him other times (which is different from my reaction to liberal judges, whom I disagree with some and agree with at other times).

But from reading the transcripts, I was left with one overriding impression:  While I might agree to confirm Roberts to the Supreme Court, I probably would not, if given the chance, confirm many of the Senators on the judiciary committee to their office.  What a bunch of posturing morons.  Many of them seemed like wind up toys reading questions from their staff that they didn't really understand, and all of them come from the Sean Hannity school of interviews, where in a 20 minute interview the questioner talks for 18 minutes.

Jeff Taylor at Hit and Run:

It is official. The GOP is now exactly in the same position Democrats
were in circa 1993 -- the disconnected, unapologetic party of bloated
federal government. Only demographic trends and the Democrats'
steadfast refusal to evince a lick of sense will keep 2006 from being
1994 in reverse.

I gave my take on why this Katrina disaster does not somehow validate statist technocracy, as has been argued, here and here.  I am willing to admit that Colby Cosh says it better:

So let's just recap briefly, shall we? We've got a million or so human beings
living in a low-lying area created in the first place by government engineers.
The local government of New Orleans, apprised of an approaching storm, summarily
orders everybody out of the city about 36 hours too late without lifting a
finger to provide the means to do so. At the last minute it occurs to somebody
to herd those left behind into a large government-built structure, the
Superdome; no supplies are on hand for its inhabitants, and the structure itself
is rendered--according to the government's assessment--permanently useless. Even
though the storm misses the city, government-built levees fail in unforeseen and
catastrophic ways. Many of the New Orleans cops opportunistically quit their
jobs, many more simply fail to show up for work, others take the lead in looting
supplies from storm-stricken neighbourhoods, and just a few have the notable
good grace to shoot themselves in the head. The federal government announces
that assistance is on its way, sometime; local and state authorities--who have
the clear-cut burden of "first response" under federal guidelines nobody seems
to have read--beg for the feds to hurry up while (a) engaging in bureaucratic
pissing-matches behind the scenes and (b) making life difficult for the private
agencies who are beating the feds to the scene. Eventually the federal
government shows up with the National Guard, and to the uniform indignation and
surprise of those who have been screaming for it, the Guard turns out to have a
troubling tendency to point weapons in the general direction of civilians and
reporters. I'm not real clear on who starts doing what around mid-week, but the
various hydra-heads of government start developing amusing hobbies; confiscating
guns from civilians, demanding that photographers stop documenting the aftermath
of America's worst natural disaster in a century, enforcing this demand by
seizing cameras at gunpoint, shutting down low-power broadcasting stations in
shelters, and stealing supplies from relief agencies and private citizens. In
the wake of all this, there is probably no single provision of the U.S.
Constitution left untrampled, the Posse Comitatus Act appears destined for a
necktie party, and the 49% of Americans who have been complaining for five years
about George W. Bush being a dictator are now vexed to the point of utter
incoherence because for the last fortnight he has failed to do a sufficiently
convincing impression of a dictator.

Apparently FIRE has won another victory, this time against Double Secret Probation at Brooklyn College.

I enjoy many professional sports casually, attending an event or two every year, but the NFL is by far my favorite.  In the pre-season, there was a lot of hype that maybe the long-time hapless Cardinals would be decent this year.  I knew better, even from the pre-season.   Heck, my 8-year-old daughter knew better.

We went to see the last pre-season game against Denver.  In that game, the Arizona starters played for quite a while against the Denver 2nd team, and got beaten up.  Specifically, they could not run the ball and in turn their defense could not stop the run.  So it was no surprise to see them get blasted in their first regular season game against the Giants. 

The problem with the Cards is this:  They have spent the last several years drafting high-profile position players, including spending a jillion 1st round picks on receivers.  Great teams got that way because they invested in their lines - both O and D, even when such picks might be less popular with the fans on draft day.  The Cards have instead focused on drafting "names" who might help sell season tickets in the new stadium.  This neglect is very apparent today.  It doesn't matter how good your position players are if there are no holes for the backs and the QB is getting plowed to the turf on every play.  This is a 5-11 team that is fortunately playing in the NFL's worst division, so they may eek out 7 wins.  You heard it here first.

By the way, if you are an avid football fan, I recommend two sites to you.  The first is Football Outsiders, who have taken a Bill-James-like approach to football stats, rethinking metrics to provide a better insight into what teams really are good.  Make sure to check out their DVOA rankings - basically they compare every teams performance on every play against other teams in the same situation (e.g. 3rd and 8 on their own 45).  The other site is Greg Easterbrook's always entertaining Tuesday Morning Quarterback column, providing large doses of football clear thinking and haiku.