So? Paris is delightful. With enough money, most people would be very happy to live there.

Given the lack of free money, I prefer to live in Texas, but one on one and in small groups (heck, even large ones) the French these days are enjoyable to be around and France is pleasant.

The rest of the world should shout loudly to the US government: “Don’t you dare, don’t you ever dare, to tell anyone, anywhere, how to run their affairs! Don’t you dare pretend you are spreading freedom when you are condemning your own people to die in filthy flood waters! Don’t you dare!”

I think that most of the world, the UK and Australia excepted, woke up to that two years ago.

Objections in the general form of “there’s no clear constitutional authority for…” aren’t valid when delivered on behalf of the Bush administration. Bush explicitly claims unlimited power with regard to matters of national security, and if anything is, surely the largest port in the country and 25% of our oil refining capacity is. Certainly jurisdiction over it has been assigned to the agency made specifically for matters of national security. If the survival of New Orleans and its people matter to the war effort, then the Bush administration has complete authority to do as it wishes – to require New Orleans and Louisiana to make plans and pay for them, to run its own plan, to requisition forces, to deputize forces, anything at all.

It doesn’t much matter whether I personally agree with the general doctrine of presidential supremacy in times like this. The fact is that Bush does, and his attorneys back him up, and the whole weight of the executive is behind it, and the legislative seems to be willing to along with it. So they have no excuse by their actual standard for this kind of problem.

The question of what some other administration with a different view of executive power might do is an altogether separate issue.

Oh please. The Constitution hasn’t been interpreted that way since the 1930s, despite what you might fervently desire. Whether you agree or not, the vast majority of Americans do believe that disaster relief should be a Federal responsibility. First and foremost, only the Feds actually have the resources to perform these functions.

Since there was nothing anyone could do to prevent this from happening, it’s perfectly clear that once it did happen no one should be blamed for a nearly complete failure to offer timely aid and assistance to the survivors, even though we’ve demonstrated such an ability on numerous occasions in the recent past.

And whatever you want to say about the rescue efforts since Monday, if the huuricane hadn’t weakened and shifted east, there would be ALMOST NO ONE TO RESCUE. Of the three phases that had to go wrong for this to happen, (1) prevention, (2) evacuation, and (3) response, only the first had any realistic possibility of stopping a mass tragedy if NO number came up in the hurricane roulette wheel. And if someone deserves the blame for not building higher and thicker levees, that blame is spread over several decades, two political parties, and three levels of government.

Very, very, very true.

BTW, most drug dealers make so little net that they live at home with their mothers—though it is important to remember that most of these people (the huge, huge majority) are not drug dealers or any other kind of criminal.

(People can’t survive by selling drugs to each other any more than you can get full employment by having everyone wash their neighbor’s laundry).

BTW, is there a reliable central site that tells how many refugees are going to each state. It is pretty easy to find out how many are going to Dallas, but hard to determine how many are going to San Francisco (for example) or Portland.

Thanks!

(This is not to say that the distribution of the DVD was an adequate response, or that government at all levels should not have done more. I’m just addressing the not-everyone-has-DVD-players point).

The media by giving the impression that all inner-city black people are criminals and drug dealers has also given the impression that all of them have a lot of ill-gotten money to dispose of.

You can get a decent new DVD player for less than $50. Computer units, S30-40. Aftermarket, such as it is, $10-20. In a given neighborhood, I would expect there to be quite a few, for sharing.

In terms of FEMA and the Constitutional argument, sure, there could be some technical legal issues there, but Blanco asked for federal help on the 27th and FEMA was just getting in touch with some parishes and towns in Mississippi on Saturday. Blanco certainly has made some significant mistakes and I don’t hold her blameless at all, but if you are the President, don’t you call and ask if you can send some rescue helicopters from Northcom?

Add to that FEMA’s issues of blocking several things like deliveries and it seems hard to say the Feds weren’t already controlling a lot of those decisions so in that case—aren’t they already in a position of taking some control? I’m honestly confused about that.

There’s a lot more we’ll learn and like I said, no one is going to come out looking good.

On the DVDs—-the problem is that to get a station to run it is really hard. And honestly, if its on over the air, people will turn it off.

I’ve done some evaluation work on trying to reach similar audiences with some child care programming and the focus group findings were that there were specific media you could hit with short messages, but longer programs would be ignored.

Second, the target was churches and other organizations first—-remember the idea was to create networks were people could make plans with fellow church members. The other thing—DVDs are relatively cheap to reproduce compared to other types of communication.