Category: observations

Weather Underground: Wunder Blog:

SEP 21 2005 – 1:20PM CDTThe latest RECON reports confirm RITA is now a CATASTROPHIC CATEGORY 5 Hurricane.Center Pressure is down to 920mb, and MAX Sustained winds of 153KTs at Flight level — implying 155mph surface winds. with gusts to 175mph.

Looks like some folks in Iraq have the same instincts as some of ours. Procurement is just the place for people with sticky fingers and no ethics.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Ex-Iraqi defence minister wanted over $1bn fraud:

Iraqi authorities are preparing an arrest warrant for the country’s former defence minister in connection with a massive fraud case involving the “disappearance” of more than $1bn from ministry coffers. Judge Raid al-Radhi, who is head of Iraq’s commission on public integrity, said yesterday that he had given Iraq’s central criminal court a dossier of evidence against Hazim Shaalan, who was minister of defence under the former government of Ayed Allawi.

“What Shaalan and his ministry were responsible for is possibly the largest robbery in the world. Our estimates begin at $1.3bn [£720m] and go up to $2.3bn,” Judge Radhi, who is Iraq’s senior anti-corruption official, told Reuters.

The “robbery” is believed to include the signing of multimillion-dollar deals with companies to supply equipment that was sometimes inappropriate for the new army or was years out of date. It is also alleged that the ministry paid huge premiums for some military hardware.

Today the FBI arrested the former (as of last week) GSA chief of staff on ethics charges. This guy is well-connected: perhaps he’ll be the one to rat out the kingpins.

Former White House Official Arrested:

WASHINGTON — A former Bush administration official was arrested Monday on charges he made false statements and obstructed a federal investigation into his dealings with lobbyist Jack Abramoff, according to court documents and government officials.

David Safavian, then-chief of staff of the General Services Administration and a former Abramoff lobbying associate, concealed from federal investigators that Abramoff was seeking to do business with GSA when Safavian joined him on a golf trip to Scotland in 2002, according to an FBI affidavit and the officials.

See how you do: I ended up with a deficit of $125 Billion, down from the projected $401 billion, or as a commenter at Pandagon suggested, $401 thousand million, for those who don’t realize the difference between billions and millions.

National Budget Simulation:

This simple simulation should give you a better feel of the trade-offs
which policy makers need to make in creating federal budgets and dealing with deficits.
This simulation asks you to adjust spending and tax expenditures in the the 2006 budget proposed by the White House in order to achieve either a balanced budget or any other target deficit. In order to make the choices we face in the budget clearer, we assume that you make the adjustments all in one year.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the 2006 fiscal deficit is projected to be $296 billion. This does not include the costs of the Iraq War, so in the simulation the deficit has been increased by $105 billion, the costs of the supplemental appropriations for Iraq and Afghanistan operation for fiscal 2005, for a total projected deficit of $401 billion. These costs and the associated deficits can be adjusted in the similuation based on your estimates of the likely continuing costs of the war or whether to scale back or end those operations.
The Simulation also allows you to adjust the costs of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, either cutting or cancelling them to raise revenue, or increasing them to create larger tax cuts. It also allows you to increase or decrease tax expenditures, also known as tax deductions, credits or “loopholes.”

Harper’s Index for August 2005 (Harpers.org):

Number of new U.S. soldiers the Army would need in 2006 to replenish ranks abroad : 80,000[U.S. Army Recruiting Command (Fort Knox, Ky.)]

Percentage of this goal it expects to meet : 9.9[U.S. Army Recruiting Command (Fort Knox, Ky.)]

Number of Iraqi troops that have been “trained and equipped,” according to President Bush in April : 150,000[White House (Washington)]

Number that the U.S. military considers ready to deploy independently : 1,500

So we’re 90% undermanned on US troops and 99% undermanned on Iraqi troops. This is what “mission accomplished” looks like?

Seriously, what will be the legacy of this mess? It may stabilize in 5 or 10 years — largely driven by how soon the US forces are withdrawn — but in the meantime, how much bloodshed will there be? And all so avoidable.

Now playing: Shanty Town by Desmond Dekker from the album “The Harder They Come” | Get it

Technorati Tags: ongoing victory

In the wake of the loss of New Orleans at the hands of the least competent kleptocracy this country has yet seen, there has been a lot of talk about what this reveals about the leadership that brought us to this point.

The mantra for years has been that the government should be run like a business, with goals and accountability (we’ll set restoring honor and integrity to the office to one side).

In the business world, leaders are known for the decisions they make.

The incumbent has demonstrated no leadership qualities. Consider the choices he made when he learned from the Governor of LA. just how bad things were.

There are a number of steps Bush could have taken, short of a full-scale federal takeover, like ordering the military to take over the pitiful and (by now) largely broken emergency communications system throughout the region. But the president, who was in San Diego preparing to give a speech the next day on the war in Iraq, went to bed.

Did he ask his staff, his DHS secretary, for a briefing on his plans? Did he request a status report to be made available the following morning? No, he went to bed. If this has been a terror attack, would he have been any less blasé, any less incurious? He went on to become the target of a thousand PhotoShoppings as he played his guitar: I think we have to assume he didn’t ask for, nor did he receive, any further information.

UPDATE: TIME.com Print Page: TIME Magazine — Living Too Much in the Bubble?:

The day after Katrina’s landfall, Bush awoke in San Diego and just after 5 a.m. local time talked to an aide about the seriousness of the storm, then convened an emergency conference call of his top staff. He was scheduled to spend a few more nights at the ranch, but an aide said he blurted out, “We’re going back.” Bush also said he wanted Cabinet members recalled from vacations. At a Cabinet meeting last week, according to a participant, Bush said he knew he had “a big problem to solve.”

So he did have more information, but yet he continued on with a planned luncheon stop.

If we take a business-like approach to this, how do we reward someone who, through callous disregard or complete ignorance, allowed the world’s fourth business seaport to be disrupted, allowed more than 100,000 people to be flooded out of their homes, and saddled the state and the nation with the costs of rebuilding one of the country’s most visited cities?

100 years ago, this kind of performance would get you escorted into a small room with a revolver on the table, and the expectation that you would do the Right Thing. A simple resignation, preceded by a clean slate by firing the entire cabinet, would suffice.
Continue reading “grading performance”

This is just what I want to see on the anniversary of the Sept 11 attacks: a cartoon Osama, complete with Kalashnikov, selling video games.

On a related note, I saw some of SLEEPWALKING APOCALYPSE: 9/11, a bit of in-your-face political theater at Green Lake today. Nothing like people made up to look like they just fell off the embalmer’s table to make you think solemn thoughts.

Subtle as a bag of hammers, you might say.

There was one interesting element of it: there was a large red-draped shape (anthropomorphic and/or cross-shaped) that passers-by were invited to tag with small red cards saying what they were afraid of. Some of the sentiments were disappointingly predictable — Bush, the government — but others were more throughtful. One read “ignorance” while others said “being apathetic”, “becoming irrelevant.”

Now playing: Porrohman by Big Country from the album “The Crossing”
Continue reading “from terrorist mastermind to advertising icon”

A newly-minted American recalls why he chose to his new home:

Today, I am an American:

On Friday, I took the oath and became an American citizen. I can’t claim to be escaping an authoritarian regime or hopeless poverty. Indeed, the security guard at the INS saw my passport and said “What you doing here? Why you want to be American? Free medical care, free welfare. I want to be Canadian.” So why did I make the leap? There are plenty of pragmatic reasons. I have a home here, a job, a life. The United States has been good to me.

But the deciding factor in my choice was emotional. Four years ago when I awoke to the devastation, I felt that my country had been attacked. And if that is how you feel then what more needs to be said?

While a native expresses his frustration at how little has been done in the name of steadfast resolve:

9.11.05: They Have Forgotten, And They Do Not Care:

Four years later, we are no safer, our murdered remain unavenged, and our reputation and ability to lead remains devastated. The spinmeisters and propagandists will try to say otherwise, but those are the facts.

My guess is that Professor Tabarrok was actually feeling the outrage of an attack on freedom of thought, of speech, of religion, as well as the all-too-human revulsion at a cowardly attack on civilians.
Continue reading “4 years hence”

Better hope there are no real natural disasters between now and the end of the current trainwreck administration: this is the guy who will oversee the relief and recovery effort.

The Seattle Times: Local FEMA chief had little disaster experience:

John Pennington, the official in charge of federal disaster response in the Northwest, was a four-term Republican state representative who ran a mom-and-pop coffee company in Cowlitz County when then-Congresswoman Jennifer Dunn helped him get his federal post.

Before he was appointed regional director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Pennington got a degree from a correspondence school that government investigators later described as a “diploma mill.”

Pennington, 38, says he worked for his degree and he is qualified for the FEMA job.

And then read this.
Continue reading ““Walking through an emergency room doesn’t make you a doctor.””