Ted

1. There are still incentives available for donors to hurricane charities. Eszter has given away all of her books, but requests for CDs have been entirely manageable, and I’m very happy to keep burning them. Jane Galt has kindly offered to send everyone who donates $100 a homemade pound cake. For $250, she’ll write a blog post about anything you like, besides her personal life.

2. Amanda at Pandagon has a Texas-specific list of ways that people can help. According to this news report, both the Astrodome and the Convention Center are accepting volunteers. I’m going to find out.

3. I don’t think that there’s anyone in America (besides, maybe, the President) who’s satisfied with FEMA head Michael Brown right now. His previous experience was as an estate planning lawyer. He’s a GOP activist with no previous qualifications in disaster management. His last private-sector job, before becoming the head of FEMA, was as the commissioner for the now-defunct International Arabian Horse Association, where he was asked to resign from his position. I believe that a diarist at the Daily Kos realized this first:

The man responsible for directing federal relief operations in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, sharpened his emergency management skills as the “Judges and Stewards Commissioner” for the International Arabian Horses Association… a position from which he was forced to resign in the face of mounting litigation and financial disarray.

And the Boston Herald is backing it up (via Josh Marshall):

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.

I don’t know what to say. TheAdministration had absolutely no business putting this man in this position. But I’m completely unable to understand why Brown accepted this responsibility.

4. A few heartbreaking, gut-punching links from Making Light– John Scalzi’s Being Poor and Respectful of Otters’ Why The Aid Wasn’t There

First, neither this offer (for a free book for donors) (UPDATE: she might have run out of books by the time you read this, please check) nor this offer (for a free mix CD for donors) have expired (UPDATE: nope, still not expired). Don’t be shy.

Second, Houston is going to absorb quite a few of the refugees. This note about what Houstonians can do to help is taken directly from an email from my Representative, John Culberson, who (hopefully) ought to know. It’s long and local, so I’m putting it below the fold.

Third (thanks, nada!), MoveOn has put up a bulletin board to help match up people who need housing with people who can shelter them.

[click to continue…]

If you make a donation of $100 or more to the American Red Cross or another hurricane-relief charity, and you live in the United States, I will burn and send you a custom mix CD.

Email me at ted.barlow+katrina@gmail.com. Include:

– a receipt, or just your word. (If you’ve already donated, that’s fine. If you donated through your employer, and they’re matching funds, even better.)

– your address

– your music preferences. If you hate/ love a certain genre, if you’re hoping for more/less obscure stuff, or you want an uptempo/downtempo mix, I’ll do my best to accomodate you. Left to my own devices, I’ll probably pick a lot of rock, soul, and hip-hop.

Offer ends in the unlikely event that I can’t keep up with the volume.

My lovely fiancee alerted me to this, from Houston’s alternative rock station, The Buzz:

Starting at 6 a.m. Wednesday, we’ll be taking song requests for cash to help residents of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. We’re dusting off ALL our records, ’cause anything goes!

Here’s the price list:
$30 – Buzz Songs
$60 – Non-Buzz Songs
$80 – Way off The Buzz Path (example: Barry Manilow)
$200 – Local Bands

You say it … and pay it … we’ll play it!! Call 713-212-5945 to place your request.

For the first time ever, The Buzz is appointment radio. Assuming that it’s funding a legit charity, I’m so doing this.

Jesse at Pandagon finds Kathryn Jean Lopez wondering why the media isn’t covering an Amnesty International report on terrorism in Iraq. He notes, among other things, that “this may constitute the first time since September 11th that any conservative commentator has honestly admitted that Amnesty writes anything that isn’t a direct attack on America.”

Publius at Law and Politics has a marvelous look at Hitchens’ “sister cities” article.

I understand the emotional need to attack those who you don’t care for anyway. But the idea that the anti-war Left and the sister city program have one damned thing to do with our problems in Iraq is nothing short of full-blown delusion (though it is interesting from a psychological perspective)…

You may hate the Left so bad that you’d like to wring all their necks. But that hatred has exactly zero relevance to the larger truth that you may or may not be willing to confront – if this war is lost, then Bush lost it.

I’m afraid that we might be having this argument a lot more in the future.

Beautiful Horizons is a just a terrific blog that doesn’t get as much attention as it deserves, because few other bloggers can talk on Randy Paul’s level about Central and South America.

During the Vietnam war, John Steinbeck was writing to the White House with ideas about weapons and tactics, including the idea for a baseball-sized napalm weapon. Funny old world.

Living in Texas can drive a liberal crazy, but the people here do some things right.

Finally, Brad DeLong has the Concord Coalition’s plausible forecast of budget deficits.

Orin Kerr recently proposed a useful simplified framework of possible outcomes in Iraq:

1) The U.S. beats back the insurgency and democracy flowers in Iraq (call this the “optimistic stay” scenario),
2) The U.S. digs in its heels, spends years fighting the insurgency, loses lots of troops, and years later withdraws, leading to a bloody and disastrous civil war (the “pessimistic stay” scenario);
3) The U.S. decides that it’s no longer worth it to stay in Iraq, pulls out relatively soon, and things in Iraq are about as best as you could hope for, perhaps leading to a decent amount of democracy (optimistic leave), and
4) The U.S. decides that it’s no longer worth it to stay in Iraq, pulls out soon, and plunges Iraq into a bloody and disastrous civil war with the bad guys assuming control eventually (pessimistic leave).

Speaking only for myself, I’m entirely confident that we could achieve outcome 4, believe that staying the course will continue to lead to outcome 2, and can scarcely imagine outcome 3. What about outcome 1? Is it achievable?

There’s been some good discussion among some war supporters who believe that the situation in Iraq is dire, but salvageable. They aren’t spending a lot of time flailing against a stab in the back from the press or from tricksy liberals. They’re disturbed by the dialing down of expectations, and by official talk of troop withdrawls. See Charles and von at Obsidian Wings, Bill Kristol at the Weekly Standard, Greg Djerejian at Belgravia Dispatch (also here).
[click to continue…]

Good catch from Tristam Shandy– Bob Dole’s tears for the persecuted journalists, and his grave concerns that “dozens of whistle-blowers [won’t be able to] share information about government wrongdoing”, are of quite recent vintage. (Apparently, the term “kerfuffle” hadn’t yet been adopted by Republicans when Dole made his Watergate speech.)

A little bird forwarded this to my mailbox, and I’m pretty sure that it’s completely untrue. Still, it seemed too hot to bury. Enjoy.

Hugh,

I think that we’ve got a buyer for Unfit To Grieve: The Real Cindy Sheehan. Regnery is already covering their bases with a quickie by Michelle Malkin- In Defense of Public Stocks. I guess that Crown Forum is cashing in by retitling Michael J. Totten’s pop-up book (sorry, “3-D photo-Fisking with interactive elements”- whatever!) “LOOK, BAD SOLDIER MOMMY”.

But Joanne at Sentinel HC is very, very interested. If you can have an outline by Monday afternoon, and a manuscript by Sunday, they can send it to print before the end of August. (Jonah says he can guest-host your show next week, if you need him.) I know I don’t have to tell you this, but make sure to spellcheck thoroughly before you send it on- they don’t check shit there.

You’re a pro, and you’ve got Nexis, so I’m not worried. You’ve got a bunch of angles: the flip-flops, problems in her marriage, the Israel thing, the groups supporting her, the rumors surrounding Casey’s conception, the dirty hippies camping out with her. Karl’s got his hands full (obviously), but he’s trying to QUICKLY get his hands on her tax records. Plus, Ed Klein emailed to say that he’s got some dirt on Casey! I’m forwarding his contact info if you don’t have it. (Who luvs ya?)

I know you read PowerLine; I think the frame of “The Good” and “The Bad” is a strong one that readers can identify with. We’ve got the rights to about twenty pages’ worth of funny photoshops of Michael Moore, so we can always fall back on that if need be.

Best,

Lucianne

Cheers to Eugene Volokh for opening commments on this post. If it weren’t for that decision, I might have simply been appalled by Professor Volokh’s willingness to pass on a vicious smear of war opponents. I would likely have missed how poorly sourced the insinuations about the marital faithfulness of a dead man were. A commenter notes:

Steven Vincent was married for 13 years. His widow posted a touching memorial outside their house, just a few short blocks from me. While I don’t know a thing about their personal lives, the accusation that he was going to divorce her and marry his Iraqi translator is a hell of a thing to say about a dead man, if it turns out to be unfounded.

Jeers for posting it in the first place. Who, may I ask, are all the “Westerners who side with the ‘Iraqi resistance’ against America and its allies”? Generally speaking, the “Iraqi resistance” is killing our troops in the interest of a fundamentalist ideology that liberals find appalling. If our countrymen are actually taking their side as they try to kill coalition troops, that seems like a (conversational, if not legal) accusation of treason. Who are we talking about? Ward Churchill? George Galloway? Michael Moore, for comparing the insurgents to the Minutemen? Some Guy With A Sign Once? Could this vast conspiracy fit into a VW minibus?

Of course, James Taranto carelessly uses this sort of language all the time, and readers know damn matl who he’s talking about. It’s not referring to a handful of psychopaths and extremists who hardly need refuting. It’s aimed at opponents of the war in Iraq, who aren’t anti-war, just on the other side. In the past few years, we’ve seen a constant, sickening effort on the part of supporters of the war in Iraq to conflate opposition the war with support for terrorists.

I’ve come to expect this sort of rhetoric from the mainstream conservative media and blogs. I don’t expect it from Eugene Volokh. He has earned the respect and readership of a wide swath of left-leaning readers for his intelligence, his fair-mindedness, and for his ability to express a right-wing viewpoint without displaying contempt for the other side. There are a million places that war opponents can go to get accused of siding against their country. It appears that there’s now one more.

UPDATE: Daniel Davies writes, in the Volokh comments:

DK above is absolutely correct that this post is ignorant as well as unpleasant. The Shi’ite gangs who killed Steven Vincent are not part of “the resistance”; they are operating to institute Iranian-style sharia law under the eyes of the British troops which control (in the loosest sense of “control”) the city of Basra. Furthermore, this fact was the main theme of Vincent’s journalism and his blog. I have no idea how anyone could possibly not know this, unless of course they had never read a word Vincent wrote and did not care about him at all except as a subject for a blog post that might make a useful smear on anti-war opinion.

UPDATE II: Volokh has updated his post to say:

Some people interpreted the OpinionJournal item, and this one, as criticizing all opponents of the Iraq War. That’s an interpretation that’s in the mind of the interpreters — I see no support for it in the text of the post.

The item is quite clearly a criticism of those Westerners who do endorse the Iraqi “resistance,” or at least explain its actions in ways that lessen or eliminate the killers’ culpability (poverty, supposed desire for “self-determination,” supposedly justifiable anger at various American, Israeli, or other Western sins). That’s the group the item identifies. It’s the group against which the item’s argument makes sense. The item doesn’t criticize any broader group of Iraq War opponents.

Fortunately, the group being criticized is not a vast group. So? They’re still worth condemning.

I’ll believe that Volokh meant to criticize a small group. (Although, if that’s all he meant, I have a hard time seeing the point. As a commentor adds: “I condemn Republicans who drink puppy blood with breakfast. Fortunately, this is not a vast group. So? They’re still worth condemning.” We could play this game all day, and how enlightening that would be.)

But I don’t believe it about Taranto. He’s the guy who called Congressional Democrats “The al Qaeda Cheering Section”. He thought it appropriate to title his criticism of the New York Times editorial page “Root, Root, Root for the Bomb Team”. He churns out lines like “we wish (Naomi) Klein well in her efforts to persuade “progressives” actually to embrace an idea of progress rather than serve as apologists for fascism.” I don’t doubt that some of Taranto’s readers read “Westerners who side with the ‘Iraqi resistance’ against America and its allies” and interpreted it narrowly. I also don’t doubt that some interpreted it rather broadly.

This is unrelated, but it’s a funny example of Taranto’s approach to commentary:

For God’s sake, won’t someone think of the mountain climbers?

This seems like an awfully big deal.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 9 – Armed men entered Baghdad’s municipal building during a blinding dust storm on Monday, deposed the city’s mayor and installed a member of Iraq’s most powerful Shiite militia.

The deposed mayor, Alaa al-Tamimi, who was not in his offices at the time, recounted the events in a telephone interview on Tuesday and called the move a municipal coup d’état. He added that he had gone into hiding for fear of his life.

“This is the new Iraq,” said Mr. Tamimi, a secular engineer with no party affiliation. “They use force to achieve their goal.”

The group that ousted him insisted that it had the authority to assume control of Iraq’s capital city and that Mr. Tamimi was in no danger. The man the group installed, Hussein al-Tahaan, is a member of the Badr Organization, the armed militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, known as Sciri.

The militia has been credited with keeping the peace in heavily Shiite areas in southern Iraq but also accused of abuses like forcing women to wear the veils demanded by conservative Shiite religious law.

“If we wanted to do something bad to him, we would have done that,” said Mazen A. Makkia, the elected city council chief who led the ouster on Monday and who had been in a lengthy and unresolved legal feud with Mr. Tamimi.

“We really want to establish the state of law for every citizen, and we did not threaten anyone,” Mr. Makkia said. “This is not a coup.”

As Justin Delbar notes, this militia is trained and funded by Iran. It seems that the coalition hasn’t had time to respond to this. However, through a spokesman, the Shiite Iraqi prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, announced that “the prime minister would not stand in the way of the move.” That’s very depressing. It should go without saying that the blossoming of the rule of law is incompatible with armed coups by Iranian-backed militias. I’m ignorant about so many things in Iraq, but I can’t see how coalition forces can let this stand. (Maybe Christopher Hitchens could suggest an appropriate bake sale for us liberals to support.)

On the same day, Iran broke the seals on an atomic processing facility. More on Iranian nuclear plans here and here.

UPDATE: More on Al-Tamimi. He was appointed by the Baghdad city council under Paul Bremer’s supervision. (He’s also a former engineer in Saddam’s nuclear weapons program who managed to escape the country in 1995.) Neil (in comments) notes that according to Wikipedia, he resigned on June 21st in response to charges of corruption, but apparently had not vacated yet. Apparently, the Shiite-dominated city council has been actively pressuring him to leave office since 2004.

UPDATE II: Picking on Hitchens isn’t the most important point here, but Steve at No More Mister Nice Blog points out:

This is the mayor Christopher Hitchens wrote about Monday in Slate.

Question: Why have several large American cities not already announced that they are going to become sister cities with Baghdad and help raise money and awareness to aid Dr. Tamimi?

Steve points out that Tempe, Philadelphia, Dallas, Tuscon, and Denver have established sister cities in Iraq since the war. He then notes:

It has been pointed out that, strictly speaking, Denver’s link to Baghdad isn’t a formal sister-city relationship. Whatever it is, though, it didn’t prevent this coup. Then again, neither did billions in federal tax dollars, 1,800 servicemembers’ lives, and semi-permanent occupation by 130,000 U.S. troops.

I can’t imagine a person who voluntarily reads political blogs who wouldn’t enjoy The Columnist by Jeffrey Frank. It’s the hilariously self-serving autobiography of a fictional arrogant, oblivious Washington hack pundit with a keen antenna for suspect ethnicities. Here, the narrator recalls learning about the assasination of John F. Kennedy at his office at the weekly journal of opinion, New Terrain.

I wandered the corridor at New Terrain, sharing my grief with Johnny, Lionel, Tobias and Esther. It was, we knew, our duty to make over the magazine, which was scheduled to go to press that evening, and we met in Tobias’s messy office, stumbling over piles of books.

“It is as if a great athlete has been cut down in his prime,” I said, and they looked at me with astonishment. “As if Ted Williams was stopped in midswing. The game goes on- the demands of history assure that- but joylessly.”

Tobias looked, I thought, strangely impressed, his eyebrows aloft; I saw that Lionel was nodding vigorously, yet seemed unable to stop nodding. Esther’s wide lips parted as if to express a thought. Johnny Stapling, as if overcome by emotion, left the room.

“The shocked crowd does not like the pinch hitter,” I continued. “We cannot boo, because we know that he did not enter the game on his own volition, yet we resent him. Just minutes before we were watching someone else and the world was right.”

It became clear from their approving silence that these thoughts would be included in the memorial edition of New Terrain, and I took notes even as I uttered them.

Now that blogs have removed arrogance, narcissism and hackery from political punditry, we can look back at this and laugh.

(recommended by McSweeney’s)

I noted a few days ago that Senator Rick Santorum made a claim in an online interview about federal taxation. Senator Santorum said that the federal tax rate for the average family has gone up from 2% (in 1950) to 27% today. Furthermore, he claimed that income from a second worker simply replaces the money that the family pays in increased federal taxes. They would enjoy the same net income if taxes went back to 1950 levels and the second worker stayed at home.

I’m really rather sure that this isn’t true. I’m relying on the Tax Policy Center: They say that federal taxes on a family of four at the median income have gone up from about 7.4% to about 14.4%, and that the family would have saved $4436 if we could roll back tax rates. That doesn’t correspond to the Senator’s story.

I checked last night, and Santorum repeats this point in his book, It Takes a Family. It’s on page 123 and 124, and there’s no source. (There’s a bibliography of sorts, but it just lists a series of sources used in each section. There’s no way to connect any specific point to any source.) When I called his press office again to ask for a source, they referred me to the publisher, who couldn’t help me. Nonetheless, he’s repeated this claim at least two more times, on Hardball with Chris Matthews and on Fox News.

Shouldn’t the Senator care whether what he’s saying is right or wrong? Wouldn’t it be nice if a journalist asked him about it?

(Incidentally, is there anything more depressing than the “Current Events” section of a modern-day bookstore? There are so many rows of hastily-written, 200-250 page books with giant print, huge margins, and a cover featuring a smug bastard under a title like “THEY’RE ALL AGAINST YOU: How Hollywood, the French, and the CIA Have Conspired to Pollute Your Precious Bodily Fluids and What You Can Do To Stop Them.” Robert Bork’s Slouching Towards Gomorrah looks like Winston Churchill in all that dreck.)

I recently criticized the New Republic, so I should point out that this week’s cover story is really very good. It collects the most forceful criticisms of the Bush Administration’s anti-terrorism program, and puts them into a larger framework. Scoblic argues that the Administration’s focus on regime change led them to target Iraq in large part because it was the least painful to overthrow. At the same time, their logic led them to de-emphasize, or even sabotage, efforts to reduce the threat from Iran and North Korea.

Unfortunately, regime change was not only the administration’s preferred end in Iraq, but its preferred means everywhere else, as well. If negotiating with evil regimes equals appeasement, then diplomacy to resolve rogue-state nuclear threats is out of the question. But, aside from military action, conservatism suggests few courses of action, and, with the bulk of our combat forces tied up in Iraq, forcible regime change was not an option in North Korea or Iran. So, not only did conservatism lead us to war against a nation that was not threatening us, it paralyzed us from dealing with those nations that were.

I don’t see that the faults that Scoblic identifies are endemic to conservatism as such- I could imagine a very different course, pre- and post-9/11, under a different Republican President- but it’s still worth the cover price. The critique of Bush’s approach to North Korea is especially maddening.

[click to continue…]

I recently made a one-night trip from Houston to Chicago with very little notice. I managed to save almost $200 off of the lowest-price plane ticket by adding a hotel room at a Super 8 outside of Gary, IN, which I didn’t use.

A quick look at Travelocity shows me that it was no fluke- for brief trips with very little notice, it’s much cheaper to book a flight to Chicago if you book a room at a Super 8 at the same time. At the time that I originally wrote this post, Delta would sell a flight from Houston to Chicago for $616 without a hotel room, $340 with. If I needed to leave tomorrow, I could buy a ticket on American for $606 without a hotel room, or $350 with.

How does this make sense? I can imagine that, all other things being equal, it would be worth a few bucks to an underutilized hotel to boost its occupancy rates. They might gain a customer for the future. However, even if the hotel in question incurred no costs at all for a housing a guest, I see no way that the hotel could derive $200+ worth of benefit. I must be missing something obvious, but I can’t figure out what.