Interesting Vilsack Comments
ArchPundit
Rep. John Fritchey comments on a conference call led by Tom Vilsack, the Governor of Iowa.
2005
Of Other Trainwrecks
Can someone, anyone explain why Sandy Berger can theoretically get access to classified documents ever again? I know that if someone who wasn’t that high level of a former official did the same thing, he would have his security clearance revoked never to be seen again.
Oh. My. God. Mike. Brown. Is. A. Bigger. Idiot. Than. I. Could. Imagine.
Who needs the Onion anymore (TNR–Subscription required)
To understand the Mike Brown saga, one has to know something about the intricacies of the legal profession, beginning with the status of the law school he attended. Brown’s biography on fema’s website reports that he’s a graduate of the Oklahoma City University School of Law. This is not, to put it charitably, a well-known institution. For example, I’ve been a law professor for the past 15 years and have never heard of it. Of more relevance is the fact that, until 2003, the school was not even a member of the Association of American Law Schools (aals)–the organization that, along with the American Bar Association, accredits the nation’s law schools. Most prospective law students won’t even consider applying to a non-aals law school unless they have no other option, because many employers have a policy of not considering graduates of non-aals institutions. So it’s fair to say that Brown embarked on his prospective legal career from the bottom of the profession’s hierarchy.
So what did Brown, who received his J.D. in 1981, do with his non-aals law degree? In 1985, Brown joined the firm of Long, Ford, Lester & Brown in Enid, Oklahoma. When I spoke to one of its former members, Andrew Lester (the firm no longer exists), he recalled that Brown was with the firm for only “about 18 months.” Lester, who is a longtime friend of Brown, believes that Brown spent most of his time in the first few years after law school pursuing his own legal practice and representing the interests of a prominent local family.
And more (I know it’s over fair use, but it’s just too juicy)
What, then, are we to make of the claim in Brown’s fema biography that, prior to joining the Agency, he had spent most of his professional career practicing law in Colorado? Normally, an attorney practicing law in a state for ten years would have left a record of his experience in public documents. But just about the only evidence of Brown’s Colorado legal career is the Web page he submitted to Findlaw.com, an Internet site for people seeking legal representation. There, he lists himself as a member of the “International Arabian Horse Association Legal Dept.” and claims to be competent to practice law across a dizzying spectrum of specialties–estate planning, family law, employment law for both plaintiffs and defendants, real-estate law, sports law, labor law, and legislative practice. With all this expertise, it’s all the more striking that one can’t find any other evidence of Brown’s legal career in Colorado.
So what legal work did Mike Brown perform before his stunning reversal of fortune? According to his fema biography, “[H]e served as a bar examiner on ethics and professional responsibility for the Oklahoma Supreme Court and as a hearing examiner for the Colorado Supreme Court.” Translation: In Oklahoma, he graded answers to bar exam questions, and, in Colorado, he volunteered to serve on the local attorney disciplinary board.
When Brown left the iaha four years ago, he was, among other things, a failed former lawyer–a man with a 20-year-old degree from a semi-accredited law school who hadn’t attempted to practice law in a serious way in nearly 15 years and who had just been forced out of his job in the wake of charges of impropriety. At this point in his life, returning to his long-abandoned legal career would have been very difficult in the competitive Colorado legal market. Yet, within months of leaving the iaha, he was handed one of the top legal positions in the entire federal government: general counsel for a major federal agency. A year later, he was made its number-two official, and, a year after that, Bush appointed him director of fema.
Embarrassing Admission of the Day
I cried at Oprah the other day. Probably the first time I’ve watched in 10 years.
Maureen Ryan reviews the episodes and I wholeheartedly agree.
I’m Guessing a Drowning Person Wouldn’t Mind a Little Sexual Harrassment
I love bureaucracies and think they are often the whiping boy of politicians who don’t wan to make tough decisions. Sometimes though, they veer out of control to the point that one seriously cannot tell the difference between parody and reality:
In a document that went out from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the agency asked for firefighters with very specific skills and who were capable of working in austere conditions. When they got to a center in Atlanta, they found out their jobs would be public relations.
“Our job was to advertise a phone number for FEMA,” said Portage Assistant Fire Chief Bill Lundy. “We were going to be given shirts and hats with a phone number on it and flyers, and sent to shelters, and we were going to pass out flyers.”
Lundy and Calhoun said they don’t want to bash FEMA or its mission, Rogers reported. They said they only want to help, and that there were plenty of other firefighters in the room who felt the same way.
“There was almost a fight,” said Portage Assistant Fire Chief Joe Calhoun. “There was probably 700 firefighters sitting in the room getting this training, and it dawned on them what we were going to be doing. And then it got bad from there.”
Lundy and Calhoun’s first task was an eight-hour course on sexual harassment and equal opportunity employment procedures, Rogers reported. Neither firefighter would be involved in technical rescues of trapped people or any of their other specialties.
NPR On Evacuation Limitations
Mark Schleifstein, who wrote several of the articles I linked to in this piece was on NPR explaining the limitations on New Orleans in evacuating individuals.
I Actually Do have a 10 1/2 EEEE Feet
John Kass suggests that’s the size of foot in Barbara Bush’s mouth after her comments the other day.
Looking at my feet–she has a pretty sore jaw right now.
Human Scum Gets His
The Missouri attorney general, Jay Nixon, filed a lawsuit this afternoon against InternetDonations.org, the hub for a constellation of Web sites erected over the last several days purporting to collect donations for victims of Hurricane Katrina.
Also named in the lawsuit, Mr. Nixon said, is the apparent operator of the donation sites, Frank Weltner, a St. Louis resident and radio talk show personality with ties to neo-Nazi organizations and the notorious Web site JewWatch.com.
That site, which indexes Adolf Hitler’s writings, transcripts of anti-Semitic radio broadcasts, and other materials, drew wide headlines last year when it appeared at or near the top of Google search results for the query “Jew.” It remains at No. 2 today.
The Missouri lawsuit seeks to freeze the assets of Internet Donations Inc., a nonprofit entity registered with the Missouri secretary of state’s office by Mr. Weltner on Sept. 2, and to shut down the dozen or so Web sites with names like KatrinaFamilies.com, Katrina-Donations.com and NewOrleansCharities.com. Those sites appear to have been hastily registered and mounted since Hurricane Katrina devastated large swaths of Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi last week.
The Web sites, which use similar imagery and slight variations on the same crude design, all point back to InternetDonations.org, which advises visitors interested in donating to the Red Cross, Salvation Army or other relief organizations, that “we can collect it for you in an easy one-stop location.”
Most of the affiliated Web sites appear to have been registered using DomainsByProxy.com, a service that masks the identity of a domain name registrant. But Mr. Weltner’s name appeared on public documents obtained through the Missouri secretary of state’s Web site, indicating that he had incorporated Internet Donations as a nonprofit entity last Friday.
It is unclear whether any of the sites successfully drew money from any donors or if Mr. Weltner, who did not respond to repeated telephone calls and e-mails, had channeled any proceeds to the better-known charities named on his Web site.
“It’s the lowest of the low when someone solicits funds” this way, Mr. Nixon said in an interview prior to announcing the lawsuit. “We don’t want one more penny from well-meaning donors going through this hater.”
Of course, since Weltner is a Neo-Nazi and a member of the National Alliance, collecting money on the back of thousands of black victims only enrages me further.
Weltner’s been mentioned previously here, here and here. Weltner used to have a radio show here in St. Louis.
You can see his normal site here
The Intelligence Report covers his show. And yes, I’m the guy who got the tirade from another racist WGNU host here.
Ben Westoff does a good article on dipnuts here.
Here is one of his other sites. He’s currently has Chertoff and Lenin on the front.
I’d like nothing more than to see Weltner find the inside of a largely black prison–no I don’t want him hurt, but I do want him really, really, uncomfortable for a long time.
How Bureaucracy Can Work
Lots of cynicsim about bureaucracies, but some did a bang up job:
In the control tower at Armstrong, air traffic controllers and
technicians worked long shifts just after Katrina passed to clear the runways and help bring in the first “mercy flights” by several airlines, which brought in supplies and took out evacuees.Within 24 hours of the storm, a Federal Aviation Administration truck loaded with radar and telecommunications gear rolled west from Jacksonville, Fla., stopping at airports along the Gulf Coast to get their radar and communications systems back online. At Armstrong, the technicians placed a radio repeater atop the 220-foot-tall control tower. The repeater replaced many that were lost in the storm.
“Not did it enable our people to talk with each other, but it helped
police and firefighers communicate in 37-mile radius of the tower,” Brown said.By Sept. 1, three days after Katrina passed, the airport’s primary radar site near Slidell was back on line. With the help of E-3 Airborne Warning and Control System military aircraft, it began steering the fleet of rescue aircraft into Armstrong.
To Be Clear–No one Is Blameless
I’ve been explaining the situation with relation to New Orleans evacuation plan and I don’t think anyone is going to say it was a plan that served anyone very well. The basic idea was that an after storm evacuation would occur quickly after the storm and it didn’t. And that exacerbated the problem of an evac plan built on available resources.
Going back to 2004 and earlier this year, there were a number of modifications to the New Orleans evacuation plan. The problem was the biggest improvement simply helped move people with cars out faster–that’s important in itself when you look at the Ivan fiasco. Nagin, and he was the first to do this, actually did initiate programs to reach out and educate people without their own transportation–click the link to the previous post for links to all of this. In addition, he was planning retrofits to the Superdome to make it more suitable to being a large shelter in such cases. Unfortunately, Katrina hit first.
The most important point is that the evacuation plan was understood by federal, state and local officials. Everyone signed off on it and were working with Nagin and other City officials to improve education to those without their own transportation. He did exactly as the three level of governments planned to do except he didn’t call a mandatory evacuation as soon as he should have.
FEMA knew there would be a large number of individuals left in the City in need of evacuation immediately after a horrible storm. They reportedly signed off on a document to be actively responding within 48 hours.
Blaming Nagin for doing what every level of government planned to do in the case of a Hurricane is silly since every level of government agreed. Does that mean it was adequate? Hell no. Does it mean Nagin shouldn’t have been pushing harder to get federal and state help in such a scenario? Hell no.
Does it mean this was all his fault? Hell no. He did exactly what everyone planned for him to do–and as with many tragedies we look back and see our collective stupidity at not doing more soon (notice I don’t blame Bush for not funding the levees–that’s why–that’s all of our responsibilities). We make these compromises concerning safety all of the time–the problem is that you can’t remove risk from life. However, when you have a situation of not if, but when such as New Orleans we can and have to do better.
After the jump (Meaning click the continued link), today’s Times-Picayune Editorial on Turf Wars
Read More