Secret Watch List

Lost City

2007-07-17T11:18:00.000-05:00

Most people, myself included, move to NYC based largely on a perception of the city developed from portrayals in books, on TV, and in movies, supplemented by a few brief visits. The first time I visited was about 1993, when things hadn't calmed down as much as the present. One could still buy drugs on the streets of the East Village, for example. But to those out there thinking of making the move, consider this:

And for those in “Weimar” and the other shows, the sexy, risqué material feels like a throwback to an earlier New York, before the new Times Square and the newer, posher Lower East Side.
“You want to remind people why we all moved here in the first place,” said Mike Jackson, a bassist who performs with the Citizens Band and in “Weimar.” “No one moved here from their hometown, U.S.A., to go to the Disney store.”

Which pretty much sums up where we are now. The problem is that the Disney store is pretty much what you will find. If you are a frat boy majoring in business administration, and your parents are willing to help out with the rent, this is probably your best destination. If you're looking for something edgier, probably not. Out there in Bushwick somewhere maybe, but forget Manhattan. It will probably be fun again after the crash, partying in the ruins of the unsold condos. I'd wait for that though.

Are Hookers Part of Traditional Marriage?

2007-07-16T11:59:00.000-05:00

It is always so satisfying when a hypocrite finally gets his or her well-deserved comeuppance. Yes, it's a David Vitter post.

I had the misfortune of having to listen to this guy on a regular basis while working at the Louisiana Legislature a while back. When he stood up to speak even his own side would groan and roll their eyes. I was shocked when this tool actually made it to the Senate, even given the low bar presented by Louisiana politics.

Beyond the basic hooker story, rumors of bizarre fetishes abound. Hopefully we'll get the whole story. Slowly, over weeks and weeks as he refuses to resign. Gotta love it.

Join the Culture of Life

2007-06-25T23:07:00.000-05:00

From the White House website:

"In the debate about the rights of the unborn, we are asked to broaden the circle of our moral concern. We're asked to live out our calling as Americans. We're asked to honor our own standards, announced on the day of our founding in the Declaration of Independence. We're asked by our convictions and tradition and compassion to build a culture of life, and make this a more just and welcoming society."

- President George W. Bush, November 5, 2003

Too bad all that compassion doesn't extend to the kids once they've actually been born, especially if they are foreigners.

Marwa Hussein watched as gunmen stormed into her home and executed her parents. Afterward, her uncle brought her to the Alwiya Orphanage, a high-walled compound nestled in central Baghdad with a concrete yard for a playground. That was more than two years ago, and for 13-year-old Marwa, shy and thin with walnut-colored eyes and long brown hair, the memory of her parents' last moments is always with her.
"They were killed," she said, her voice trailing away as she sat on her narrow bed with pink sheets. Tears started to slide down her face. As social worker Maysoon Tahsin comforted her, other orphans in the room, where 12 girls sleep, watched solemnly.
Iraq's conflict is exacting an immense and largely unnoticed psychological toll on children and youth that will have long-term consequences, said social workers, psychiatrists, teachers and aid workers in interviews across Baghdad and in neighboring Jordan.
"With our limited resources, the societal impact is going to be very bad," said Haider Abdul Muhsin, one of the country's few child psychiatrists. "This generation will become a very violent generation, much worse than during Saddam Hussein's regime."

While Republican types often do not seem to even grasp the concept of hypocrisy, I think deep down a lot of them do. That's why so many of them have to listen to blowhards on talk radio repeat talking points for hours every day - it gives them some answer, no matter how ridiculous, to repeat ad infinitum when some example of hypocrisy is pointed out. It's a defense mechanism that also explains why talk radio is unappealing for most progressives, who can usually come up with their own arguments.

But I digress. The point is that this particular situation could and should be used to publicly and relentlessly point out the hypocrisy of nattering on about a "culture of life", when you support an endless and largely pointless war that has killed tens of thousands of innocent young people (on both sides). For example, the next time the anti-abortion folks have a sizable rally, there should be a contingent there to demand an end to the war - on "culture of life" grounds. While the fanatical hard core of the anti-abortion movement won't be shaken by this, as they don't see any dissonance between being anti-abortion and supporting airborne attacks on neighborhoods full of families, the juxtaposition will likely have an impact those they seek to influence. Which is why it is a point that should be made, over and over again, wherever the "pro-lifers" gather.

Guns and Privacy

2007-06-16T12:50:00.000-05:00

In America, the citizenry has for the most part passively accepted that the government will read and archive all of our personal emails, telephone calls, Internet activity, and medical records, as well as sell a lot of personal information to private companies. All of this can now be obtained without warrants by any FBI agent who so chooses, without oversight from anyone. But the privacy of one group remains sacrosanct - so important that a specific law was passed to shield their activities, despite decades of erosion of privacy for everyone else. And who would this be?

Gun traffickers, of course.

If you are an average citizen who would like the government and private companies to stop tracking you, sorry, we can't interfere with commerce and the rights of corporations, and of course there's always national security. But if you want to deal in products specifically designed to kill people, well, that's a different story.

Democrats Give In on Racist Judges

2007-06-10T19:19:00.000-05:00

Alright, that hasn't actually happened yet. But usually all it takes for the Dems to cave over this sort of issue is an article like this, followed by some administration chiding over being "obstructionist", followed by another article in the WP or the NYT decrying the lack of bipartisanship in Congress (like this one) that uses the issue as an example. The Dem's consultants will refer to their polls and focus groups that tell them the good citizenry doesn't like obstruction and partisanship, and the leadership then will dutifully give the administration whatever it wants.

The sad thing is that even if they didn't act on a single judicial nominee for the remainder of Bush's term, or rejected them all outright, no one would care. At least no one outside the wingnut base who pays attention to these things, and pissing them off is just a bonus. The Republicans seem to understand this dynamic - that people say they don't like political gridlock and partisanship, but in reality only care if it's blocking something that has broad popular support. The Republicans paid the price for this over the governmental shutdown in 1995 because people cared about the entire federal government shutting down. The lesson the Democrats took from that epsiode seems to be to roll over any time someone utters the word "obstruction". To their credit, Rove and company looked at it a little more carefully, and likely realized that regarding smaller, more arcane issues, very few people going to care about inaction even if the pundits point it out.

This would be an easy case for the Democrats to stand up, with virtually no long-term risk. I'm not holding my breath though. We'll probably see Southwick confirmed for the Court of Appeals any day now. Given that the administration has essentially told Congress to shove it regarding Gonzales and the politicization of the Justice Department, Congressional Dems should just say no to confirming any more Bush judicial nominees, which is well within their power. The pundits will raise hell at such a show of spine from the opposition, but ultimately with Bush' approval numbers at historic lows no one will pay attention. The drumbeat of bad news from the Iraq debacle makes it look like a peripheral issue anyway, which of course in comparison it is.

But this course would require some actual leadership from Congressional Democrats. Oh well.

A Better Way Out for Cowardly Democrats

2007-06-07T12:14:00.000-05:00

In their recent collapse on setting an end date for the Iraq war, the Democrats have missed an opportunity to recast the war debate in a way more favorable both to our security interests and to their political fortunes. The Bush administration has so far successfully framed the terms of the debate as over support for “the troops”, fighting terrorism, and for war in general. Their plan is apparently to drag out the Iraq war until it becomes the problem of the next administration, onto which it will attempt to shift the blame for the catastrophe that will follow the inevitable withdrawal. With public support rapidly eroding, this type of “stay forever” argument is unlikely to prevail.

Instead the Democrats should place themselves on the GWOT high ground, and make supplemental funding contingent on a substantial redeployment to Afghanistan, with the goal of decisively crushing the Taliban, apprehending key Al-Quaida suspects in neighboring Pakistan, and building a functional state. The effort in Afghanistan, which was justified by the 9/11 attacks and is a key to our credibility and security in the region, has languished as a result of the Iraq misadventure. The chance to do it right, however, may still be available.

The Democratic surrender on Iraq funding, despite having much of the public on their side, seems to be based on a belief that an “anti-war” stance will hurt their long-term credibility on national security issues. I don’t really buy this, but even if this possibility exists, an Afghan redeployment would permit them to advocate an Iraq pullout without being “anti-war”. It would further allow them to highlight Republican bungling on security issues while actually casting themselves as tougher – because this plan involves going after the actors who attacked us, who Bush has allowed to remain on the loose for nearly six years. The Republican talking points that are endlessly trotted out to justify the Iraq debacle can all be turned easily subverted in this scenario. Who supports the troops more? We want to support the troops in going after the real culprits of 9/11 and their allies instead of putting them into the terror training ground that Bush has created in Iraq. Who is better at “staying on the offense”? A success in Afghanistan would be a greater blow to Islamic fundamentalism than leaving our troops tied down for years in a civil war they can’t suppress, and will demonstrate American resolve at least as effectively. Who is a cowardly anti-war surrender monkey? We are willing to fight for years if necessary to advance our interests but not to engage in a pointless bloodbath. And so on.

From a practical point of view, having a substantial troop presence in Afghanistan gives the U.S. a forward base in the region from which to intervene in other places if necessary. The less fractured political situation relative to Iraq would also provide the potential for success with fewer troops, allowing the military to reduce the lengths of deployments and the attendant strain on soldiers’ families. The reduction in troop commitments would also allow our strained forces to retrain and rearm more effectively.

While Afghanistan has long been the “graveyard of empire”, the military effort there at least has the virtue of being justifiable based on the Taliban’s terrorism ties. In the long term it is hard to say whether an American military presence will lead to a stable democracy and security. But if the American people really believe that the invasion and long-term occupation of foreign lands is the key to our security, as the Democrats seem to think based on their actions, then this is a better alternative than Iraq. Proposing such a move would bolster the Democrats’ standing in the long run a lot more than cowardly submission to Bush and his failed policies. If voters want “toughness” in their leaders, this plan is way to project that and if enacted would do more for our interests than dragging out the Iraq disaster.

There's a Light at the End of This Tunnel Somewhere

2007-04-24T13:20:00.000-05:00

The seeds are being planted for the future use of an old and useful myth: "we would have won the war if the politicians back home hadn't surrendered/cut off the funding/tied our hands." A fine example of the effort is found here. You see, the "surge" is working. The trends are positive, and things are looking up. And if those traitorous Dems just had the courage to stay the course and support the Commander in Chief everything would turn out fine.

Of course when even The Economist, hardly a bastion of perfidious liberalism, is quoting people referring to your movement as a "laughing stock" it is going to be difficult to make that stick. It gets better:

But, more important, neocons have been discredited for ideological reasons. Most of the recent mistakes can be traced back not just to flawed execution but to flawed thinking. The neocons argued that democracy might be an antidote to the Middle East's problems: but democracy proved too delicate a plant. They claimed that the assertion of American power might wipe out “Vietnam syndrome”: but it has ended up making America more reluctant to intervene abroad. They talked about linking American power with American ideals: but it turned out, at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, that power can corrupt those ideals.

The dwindling supporters of the war no doubt see that the end is coming sooner rather than later. Bush's basement-dwelling approval ratings, not helped by his rambling, out-of-touch public statements, have torpedoed Karl Rove's ability to shape the terms of the debate. All the increasingly shrill rhetoric coming from the right about "surrender" "treason" and "the troops" (as if they went off half-cocked to Iraq on their own) has not moved the polls showing support for setting a a deadline for withdrawal. The Democrats, shockingly, have shown a little backbone by not backing down in the face of being labelled traitors, which has dealt a further blow to Bush's public standing.

This won't stop the dead-enders from trying to set the stage for some future disaster, though, so we need to strangle this particular baby in its crib. Or to use a more conservative-friendly metaphor, since they are "pro-life", we need to blow this baby up with a cluster bomb from a safe altitude. Bush and company have had four years, at least $500 billion, and essentially complete control of the levers of government to "win" their war on Iraq. Instead, we have Al-Qaeda safe in their hideouts in Pakistan, no doubt reorganizing and planning new atrocities. The Taliban is surging into Afghanistan for a promised spring offensive. Plus Iraq is serving as a weapons-and-tactics training ground for new recruits that will haunt us for a generation as their CIA-trained forbears did from '80s Afghanistan, and no plausible military solution has been put forward.

There's only one logical place to assign the blame for all this, and it ain't on Harry Reid. Even though the Republicans are doing a pretty good job of digging this hole for themselves, we should work harder to make sure that the words "Republican", "incompetence" and "disastrous war" are as inseparable for the next twenty years as "Democrat" and "welfare" were in the 70s and 80s.

Two Virginia Techs A Day

2007-04-17T23:33:00.000-05:00

One thing that struck me in watching the endless coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings in the last couple of days was that almost none of the commentators made any parallels with the plight of civilians in Iraq, where this sort of thing seems to happen daily. This is not to downplay the tragic nature of the VT shootings. But one would think that someone would make the comparison.

Finally someone did, I think on the ABC nightly news (I was switching channels, it could have been NBC). I wish I had caught his name, but the gist of what he said was sure, this sort of thing happens all the time in Iraq, but you “sort of expect it” there. These were “innocent people” in Virginia, which makes it more shocking and therefore I suppose justifies the wall-to-wall coverage, complete with detailed histories of each of the victims.

There’s nothing wrong with covering the Virginia story. People should be shocked by this sort of violence and the stories of the victims should be told. But why doesn’t that apply to Iraqi civilians, who are dying by the thousands as a direct result of American actions? Is an Iraqi family who gets blown up while they shop at a market somehow less “innocent” than anyone else?

I know that the TV networks are in business to make money, and that the audience will want to see weepy coverage of dead American college kids rather than the gory results of our handiwork in the Middle East. It still feels kind of sick, though. I went looking for a daily average of Iraqi civilian casualties just for a comparison and came across this post from Juan Cole, which pretty much sums it up:

The profound sorrow and alarm produced in the American public by the horrific shootings at Virginia Tech should give us a baseline for what the Iraqis are actually living through. They have two Virginia Tech-style attacks every single day. Virginia Tech will be gone from the headlines and the air waves by next week this time in the US, though the families of the victims will grieve for a lifetime. But next Tuesday I will come out here and report to you that 64 Iraqis have been killed in political violence. And those will mainly be the ones killed by bombs and mortars. They are only 13% of the total; most Iraqis killed violently, perhaps 500 a day throughout the country if you count criminal and tribal violence, are just shot down. Shot down, like the college students and professors at Blacksburg. We Americans can so easily, with a shudder, imagine the college student trying to barricade himself behind a door against the armed madman without. But can we put ourselves in the place of Iraqi students?

Of course posting this kind of stuff with links to Juan Cole will probably get me on more secret watch lists.

Bush Abandons South Louisiana to the Gulf

2007-04-11T16:46:00.000-05:00

Yet another example of the administration's priorities:

The White House has quietly signaled its opposition to a 72-mile levee system in south Louisiana proposed to protect about 120,000 people who have watched the Gulf of Mexico creep ever closer to their homes as the coast erodes.
The Bush administration raises concerns about the $900 million project in a draft policy paper being circulated on Capitol Hill as the House of Representatives prepares to consider legislation that would authorize construction.

The amount in question would pay for about a week of waging war in Iraq. In order to provide political cover, however, the occupation must continue until Bush leaves office so that his successor can be blamed for the mess. Since only the dead-enders in the Republican "base" are going to buy this line of argument anyway, why not save a real piece of the good ole' US of A with the money instead?

Local Church School Cashes In on Gentrification

2007-04-10T16:27:00.000-05:00

Seems like the music clubs and coffee shops aren't the only places that are losing out in the relentless march towards the upper-middle-class homogenization of Manahattan. The Catholic Church is angling to get a piece of the gentrification action as well.

Lourdes Velasquez has seen it all in East Harlem. In the old days, it was a neighborhood for poor and working-class families. In the bad days, it was beset by guns and drugs. And now? Doormen. New high-rise buildings. Higher prices at the local supermarket. Young couples pushing strollers that cost more than a month’s rent in yet-to-be-renovated buildings.

While she resented these gentrifiers who “discovered” the only neighborhood she has known for all of her 35 years, she also tried to ensure that her daughter, Chrystal, would be able to deal with the changes. She sent the girl to St. Francis de Sales School on East 97th Street off Lexington Avenue, paying $3,000 a year to give her the kind of Catholic education that enabled previous generations of working-class children to become professionals.
...Ms. Velasquez and the other parents of almost 200 students in the school’s eight grades were abruptly told in early March that the school would close in June. But officials at the Archdiocese of New York, as well as other parents and clergy familiar with recent events, said they expected that the school would reopen in a year, possibly as a more expensive private academy or preschool.

What is amazing about this story is not that the church would abandon the low-income parishoners who supported it through the "bad" days (they are a business, after all), but that the local pastor would be so up front about it:

A little over a year ago, Father Muzzin said as much in the Sunday bulletin distributed at Mass. In it, he described how the school — which parents said served primarily black and Latino students — needed to attract a greater “variety of people” from the area.
“Some parents have to wake up to the realization that they cannot afford Catholic Education,” he wrote. “Period.”
The pastor’s message became clearer a few lines later: “I see the day in the not distant future when it will become the school of choice of all the Catholic parents in the neighborhood who now send their children to prestigious and pricey private schools,” he wrote. “Why spend $25,000 when you can get the same thing for much, much less?”

By "much less" he apparently means about $12,000 a year, or quadruple the current tuition. While the corrupting influence of wealth on the church is a centuries-old story, it's striking that at this point they don't even feel the need to pay lip service to the needs or wants of the non-wealthy.

Borrow and Spend

2007-04-06T20:51:00.000-05:00

So this month's job data shows a gain of 180,000, and incomes are up as well:

The employment report offered a reason for consumers’ continued free spending: their incomes keep going up. The average hourly earnings for workers rose 4 percent in March compared with those a year earlier, to $17.22 an hour.

Great news, right? We can all breathe a sigh of relief and join in the bidding war for a new condo. Well, maybe not.

While consumers are spending more, much of that money is borrowed. The Federal Reserve reported yesterday that consumer debt rose in February by $2.97 billion to a record $2.41 trillion. Americans are putting more of that debt on credit cards. The Fed’s measure of revolving debt, which includes credit cards, rose $2.494 billion, after rising $1.229 billion in January.

Ironically, if median incomes really started climbing at rate that would allow for paying off all that debt the Fed would panic and raise rates, leading to higher interest rates and a cooling economy. Again, I have yet to see how this unwinds in a way that doesn't impact housing prices even here on our supposedly safe island.

NYC Real Estate Happy Talk

2007-04-04T13:34:00.000-05:00

While the Manhattan real estate market continues upwards...

The 2006 numbers stayed solid throughout the year (even in comparison to 2007’s strong first-quarter numbers), never descending to any depths—despite, one can imagine, the most fervent hopes of media and other analysts tired of the same story line.

The average sales price in the first quarter of 2006 was more than $1.3 million, above the first quarter this year. The median was nearly identical a year ago to the median now—a difference of only $10,000. (What’s $10,000 in Manhattan and its housing market?)

...the rest of the country seems to be running out of credit lines to keep the great consumption train rolling.

In January, revolving credit, made up largely of credit-card debt, was up $52.7 billion, or 6.4% from a year ago. Consumers haven't racked up revolving debt at such a clip since late 2001. And the pace looks set to quicken in February. A large chunk of the $6.8 billion increase expected by economists likely will be in the form of new credit-card debt, as nonrevolving credit probably cooled off with slower auto sales.

The timing of the acceleration in revolving credit suggests consumers are turning to their credit cards as a partial replacement for reduced mortgage equity withdrawal, says Goldman Sachs senior economist Ed McKelvey. According to his calculations, increases in revolving credit have offset about 20% of the decline in cash-out refinancing or increased home-equity lines of credit since late 2005.

As consumer spending falters, so too will the stock market, taking with it a lot of Manhattan financial-sector jobs. With the bubble bursting in the rest of the country, there will be no more home-equity cashouts to fuel consumption, and incomes certainly aren't going to rise enough across the board to make up the difference. Even if the Fed drops interest rates a bit by the end of the summer it will be unlikely to spark another national run-up in real estate now that uncertainty has reared its ugly head. The bubble depended on the belief that housing prices always go up, for which there is now recent evidence to the contrary.

I have yet to see any of the real estate cheerleaders explain how NYC real estate prices will continue to rise once the inevitable nationwide consumer spending slowdown kicks in and the financial markets react accordingly. The fallout will likely look like this:

Three months after the stock market collapse, an army of highly educated, highly paid executives, people used to sitting at the center of corporate power, are scrambling to salvage their careers, professional reputations and affluent styles of life.

Since the Oct. 19 debacle, investment companies and some of New York City's largest banks have moved quickly to trim their payrolls. More than 14,000 layoffs have been announced by the city's banks and securities concerns, and a complete tally would be higher because many have been quietly cutting jobs in a piecemeal way.

The number of unemployed Wall Street professionals, experts say, is reaching a point where thousands must consider changing careers, and thousands may be forced to leave the New York region. [New York Times, "Thousands of Executives Seeking Wall Street Jobs in Bleak Market," January 17, 1988]

The years that followed were not good ones for the local housing market.

Condo Land

2007-03-30T15:14:00.000-05:00

The pace of suburbanization in Manhattan seems to be accelerating to the point that by the time the next financial panic finally stops it, there may be nothing left but identical condo buildings, bank branches, and chain stores. Any business that doesn't specifically cater to the condo crowd, such as a music venue or art gallery, is doomed. Or at least has to move to Bushwick.

But if you have a couple million to drop on a condo at this place, you can live within easy walking distance of Walgreens, Kmart, and not one but two Starbucks within two blocks. Try that in Boise (where you can probably have only one Starbucks that close). This was built on what used to be a parking lot where you could live in your van. I guess the elite are willing to pay a few extra bucks to be a part of that cool "downtown" thing, which is now distinguished from the Upper East Side mainly by the aforementioned Kmart.

Classroom for Depravity

2007-03-28T00:50:00.000-05:00

So says an article in the NY Times from June 25, 1984, titled 'Growing Up in Hell: The Children of Times Square", about children from homeless families housed by the city in "welfare hotels" in the area.

The sour stench of garbage and alcohol rose from the sidewalk in hot waves. In front of the Carter Hotel on West 43d Street, there were children everywhere, hanging off the door of the Rose Saigon restaurant, swinging on fire hydrants, wrestling in piles of beer cans in paper bags.

Angel, 4 years old, played with an empty Bacardi rum bottle. Ann, 6, mimicked a common sight on the street, pursing her lips and sucking in, as though dragging on a marijuana cigarette. Michael, 9, held on to his baby sister's carriage and watched wide-eyed as police officers led away a handcuffed woman, in a purple jumpsuit, screaming obscenities.

They are the children of Times Square. They grow up quickly in the neighborhood of drifters and derelicts, where sex and drugs are bought and sold on every grimy corner and violence and pornography and exploitation are the traditional values. They see things every day that other children only see through the glossy filter of television.

''It's got to be one of the rottenest places in the world to grow up,'' said the Rev. Bruce Ritter, president of Covenant House, an organization in Times Square that cares for homeless and runaway children. ''It's a street right out of hell. Every vice in the world is extant in Times Square. It's the largest classroom in the world for the teaching of depravity.''

I suppose the suburbanization of New York City has a bit of an upside. At least all the depravity kept the rents lower, though.

Texas GOP Wants to Buy Your Baby

2007-03-27T11:09:00.000-05:00

Via Mother Jones - in Texas they are proposing to buy babies from poor people.

Republican State Senator Dan Patrick recently proposed the Adoption Incentive Program, which some are calling the "Texas Baby Purchasing Act of 2007." Patrick's bill calls for the development of a program to encourage adoption over abortion and mandates that every woman who chooses to carry her baby and then yield her parental rights in lieu of having an abortion receives $500.

There seems to be a pattern emerging here. A few days ago rightwing NYU prof Lawrence Mead suggested in the WaPo that low-income males be forced to work for the government as a means of turning them into compliant drone...uh, sorry, I mean to instill a proper work ethic in them. Now we have the Texas Republicans opening the door to creating a market for the babies of the poor. What's the connection? Just about the only thing that turns on the American right as much as Winston Churchill is the Confederacy. Deep in their hearts, a lot of them would like to bring back those grand old days. These could be the first steps. Of course they won't use the 'S' word, they'll call it something else as a concession to modern sensibilities and PR needs. Come to think of it, maybe that's what they mean when they are talking about the "ownership society".

Real Secret Watch Lists

2007-03-26T14:52:00.000-05:00

These city lawyers must be angling for a job in the Gonzales justice department:

Lawyers for the city, responding to a request to unseal records of police surveillance leading up to the 2004 Republican convention in New York, say that the documents should remain secret because the news media will “fixate upon and sensationalize them,” hurting the city’s ability to defend itself in lawsuits over mass arrests.

So the rationale for not releasing information collected by a local public agency is that the information will make it more difficult for the city to cover up related illegal behavior (such as rounding up people nearly at random and then holding them for days past the legal limit without charging them)? Given that the whole effort was primarily intended to keep the Republicans from having to face legitimate expressions of dissent, these guys should be a shoe-in for all the positions opening up as various fall guys at DOJ resign.

Florida Trailer Trash Appropriate Park Slope Boy

2007-03-25T15:06:00.000-05:00

Over at Gothamist, there's a post from a distraught Park Slope baby-blogger about someone copying the photos of her kid and then posting the photos on another blog as their own child. Wrong, yes, but not that surprising. If you post things publicly on the net you should be aware that this sort of thing could happen. But then here's the kicker:

There were pages of odd stories about her Latino boyfriend, Marco (in fact my husband - not Latino either) and her step-mother (this was actually a photo of me...27 and already a grandmother). Included with the baby photos were shots of her drinking in bars, partying with friends. This girl is 19 years old at most and is bragging about her adorable love-child. As you would expect, I was horrified. Why would somebody do this? Is this allowed, is it legal? And maybe unexpectedly, the absurdity of her story bothered me even more. Suddenly, my Manhattan born Park Slope boy was Hispanic and living in trailer conditions somewhere in Florida. His college educated, former school teacher, stay-at-home mom replaced with a party-girl teen who wears shirts that say "Nail Me".

The horror! Bad enough that someone copied her son's picture, it had to be trailer-trash Latinos!

The more I think about this the more I think the whole thing must be a parody, I mean on the part of the Gothamist poster as opposed to the trailer folks. Even in Park Slope I wouldn't think most people are tone-deaf enough to post something like that. Maybe it's a subtle sendup of shallow, grasping, baby-obsessed Slopers. I love how she sneaked in "Manhattan-born" - if that doesn't signal high-class, what does, right? If it is a parody, bravo! You had me going there for a minute.

If it's not a parody, then the race and class prejudices embedded in the post are really disturbing (yes I know, I'm stereotyping Park Slopers, but c'mon some of them at least deserve it). I guess we should just be able to see the upper-middle-class white goodness radiating from this kid, so we couldn't possibly believe he's a half-Hispanic Floridian. Or maybe it's just jealousy - that chick on the other blog with the fake tan and the "Nail Me!" shirt is hotter than the Sloper mom, even if she is pretty cheesy. And she's obviously out there somewhere having a good time, even if the other blogger stole those pics too. Maybe for the Sloper pushing the Bugaboo to the park where she can tell everybody how much the condo has appreciated is not giving her the kick that it used to, so now she's taking it out on the Latinos?

UPDATE: After looking a bit more through the baby-stealer's blog, I agree with one of the Gothamist commenters that it looks like the setup for a scam. There are lots of meandering posts about "Marco", supposedly the baby's father, that seem to be leading to a "breakup" and then pleas for money to help out with the baby. The pictures of the girl are obviously lifted from some Florida sorority girl's photo blog. I wonder if anyone really falls for this stuff. Hmmm...

Rich White Kids Explode in Manhattan!

2007-03-23T14:27:00.000-05:00

OK, the number of rich white kids explodes, not the kids themselves.

Since 2000, according to census figures released last year, the number of children under age 5 living in Manhattan mushroomed by more than 32 percent. And though their ranks have been growing for several years, a new analysis for The New York Times makes clear for the first time who has been driving that growth: wealthy white families.

The analysis shows that Manhattan’s 35,000 or so white non-Hispanic toddlers are being raised by parents whose median income was $284,208 a year in 2005, which means they are growing up in wealthier households than similar youngsters in any other large county in the country.

Some of the parents like the "diversity" that Manhattan offers:

“I like them to see the variety of what’s in New York and have interactions with different kinds of people,” Ms. Lustig said. “If we lived in the suburbs, I don’t think my daughter would know much about the Trinidadian way of life or the Muslim holidays that are celebrated. She accepts that like it’s water or air.”

Yes, I suppose it's easier to find a Trinidadian or Muslim nanny in Manhattan than in Connecticut. Now Manhattan can be as boring as Westchester or Westport, accelerating a trend that has been going on for a while.

The reporter sought out a couple of academics for quotes on this phenomenon as well:

Some advocates of affordable housing say the trend toward Manhattan becoming more wealthy and white is another troubling sign that longtime lower-income and minority communities will inevitably be displaced by gentrification.
But Fred Siegel, a history professor at Cooper Union, said a growing population of upper-middle-class residents was an asset. “How different it makes Manhattan from other cities,” Mr. Siegel said.
Kenneth T. Jackson, a Columbia University historian, said: “Imagine the reverse — that nobody with money wants to live here, and then you have Detroit. I don’t see how anybody benefits in that circumstance.”

It's kind of sad that even the historians define everything now strictly in terms of money and what benefits the wealthy. Those two probably secured housing here before the bubble started. Future historians won't be able to live in Manhattan on academic salaries, only the people who devote their lives to pushing money around (and who let the hired help raise their kids).

Hail the King of the Holy American Empire!

2007-03-22T14:10:00.000-05:00

Apparently Tony Snow declared this morning that Congress "does not have oversight ability" and therefore cannot compel employees of the executive branch to testify.

The time to challenge this is now. I have seen some commentators (sorry I can't find who it was or I'd link to it) suggest over the last few days that it would be risky to bring this to the current Supreme Court, which might well rule in favor of the administration no matter how silly their arguments are. However, it's worth the risk. Letting their claim to unlimited power go unchallenged, or wimping out and agreeing to some sort of deal short of public, no-holds-barred, on-the-record testimony by Rove and others would essentially hand them the same victory. The idea that the administration as a whole is beyond the reach of the law is just too damaging to let stand. The Republican Court may be hesitant to ratify this "unitary executive" malarkey for a number of reasons anyway, including that the next occupant of the White House is likely to not be one of theirs.

Plus the whole ensuing public debate will be about whether to make a highly unpopular, bumbling fool the king, rather than about the obscurities of the rules and customs for firing US Attorneys. We may want to have that debate now, when the authoritarians in the Republican Party are weak, than at some future point when they will undoubtedly seek to take advantage of some incident as their Reichstag fire.

Thank You for Smoking

2007-03-22T01:00:00.000-05:00

In a development that will surprise no one who's been paying attention, it turns out the politicization of the Justice Department under Bush has gone much farther than the recent USA firings. I'm sure this is still just the tip of the iceberg as well.

The leader of the Justice Department team that prosecuted a landmark lawsuit against tobacco companies said yesterday that Bush administration political appointees repeatedly ordered her to take steps that weakened the government's racketeering case.
...She said a supervisor demanded that she and her trial team drop recommendations that tobacco executives be removed from their corporate positions as a possible penalty. He and two others instructed her to tell key witnesses to change their testimony. And they ordered Eubanks to read verbatim a closing argument they had rewritten for her, she said.
"The political people were pushing the buttons and ordering us to say what we said," Eubanks said. "And because of that, we failed to zealously represent the interests of the American public."

Bush's invocation of executive priviledge on the grounds that his flunkies should be free to suggest anything that they want, apparently including breaking the law and lying to Congress, is ridiculous. These people are public employees, on the public payroll. So it follows that our elected representatives have every right to question them about the activities that we are paying for, under oath if necessary. Hell, I'll even let Tony Snow explain why (via Glenn Greenwald, in reference to Clinton's invocation of executive priviledge)...

Evidently, [the President] wants to shield virtually any communications that take place within the White House compound on the theory that all such talk contributes in some way, shape or form to the continuing success and harmony of an administration. Taken to its logical extreme, that position would make it impossible for citizens to hold a chief executive accountable for anything. He would have a constitutional right to cover up. [...] Most of us want no part of a president who is cynical enough to use the majesty of his office to evade the one thing he is sworn to uphold -- the rule of law.

Yes, Tony, exactly.

The Democrats, or indeed anyone who generally cares about the direction of this country, simply cannot let Bush's actions on this stand. Part of the intention of the people who pull his strings has been to set precendents for effectively unlimited excutive power (the "unitary executive", because I guess "king" and "dictator" have negative connotations to the average American. Why didn' they just go with "Maximium Leader"?) That's why this needs to been seen through to the finish, regardless of how many times the DC press corps decries "partisanship" on the part of the Democrats.

I suppose turning DOJ into a political enforcement arm for the Republican Party wasn't partisan?

Bring Back Slavery?

2007-03-21T00:25:00.000-05:00

At least, that's what one NYU prof wants to take a step towards:

Reforms in the 1990s shifted more than 60 percent of mothers off the welfare rolls, mostly into jobs. The changes used both "help and hassle" -- new subsidies for wages and child care coupled with stiffer demands to work as a condition of aid. So, how could we do the same for low-income men?

...Nonworking men deserve to earn more, but they also must be required to work, as they seldom are today. Formerly, they could have entered the Army, where they could be ordered to work, and military service does help some men get their lives together. Unfortunately, today's volunteer military is too selective to accept most disadvantaged applicants.

...A better idea is to use the child support system, which requires absent fathers to support their families, and the criminal justice system, which is supposed to supervise many ex-offenders on parole after they leave prison. Right now these institutions depress male work levels by locking men up, and by garnishing their wages if they do work. But they could be used to promote work. For example, men in arrears on their child support could be assigned to work programs, as could parolees with employment problems. These men -- about 1.5 million each year -- would have to show up and work regularly -- on penalty of going to jail. Both groups might also receive wage subsidies. The combination might instill more regular work habits.

I assume that a lot of these "workers" would be farmed out to contractors with the right connections, like some of the "recovery" efforts in New Orleans that used sub-minimum-wage illegal labor while charging the government top dollar. What I don't get is why not advocate the logical next step - just assign property rights for these folks and give them to Halliburton? They would teach them some humility and find the best way to profit from their labor. Everybody wins, right?

I actually took a class at NYU with this guy. I have to say it was kind of refreshing to match wits with someone who is basically intelligent but incredibly misguided. Most of the wingnuts I know are more of the classic redneck guns-and-God types, who are roughly on the same intellectual level as the Taliban and thus immune to rational argument of any sort. Mead just has a weird fetish for the power of Authority to change the poor, while decrying the "paternalism" of progressive social programs. I don't know what's more paternal than chain gangs to instill a work ethic in the poor, though. And while he says a lot about the supposed moral deficiencies about welfare mothers taking $500 checks from the government, there was not a peep about the billions more that his ideological compatriots are draining away from the public till. That's just free enterprise, right?

Bye Bye Blanco

2007-03-21T00:08:00.000-05:00

In one of her few wise decisions of late, Governor Blanco of Louisiana calls it quits.

This has certainly made the next campaign more interesting, with a possible showdown between annoying know-it-all supposed wunderkind Republican Bobby Jindal and consumate insider but elderly John Breaux (who apparently hasn't lived in the state for years). Hard to say how that plays out. The local wingnuts think Jindal is going to be their Obama for some future election. Sorry, that ain't gonna happen, as he's clearly not on the same level. What seems impressive in Louisiana, where the talent pool is shallow, isn't going to play all that well nationally. At least Breaux has some real experience and bipartisan connections, while Jindal, whose claim to fame was running the state health department at a young age in the Foster administration, hasn't really accompished anything concrete that I can see. I guess he's passed some bills in the previous Congress with the help of his Republican handlers (who saw him as useful "diversity"), but we'll see how he does now that they aren't running the show.

Kings and Accountability

2007-03-20T23:35:00.000-05:00

Looks like the Democrats, for once, have shown a little spine and rejected Bush's offer to have Gonzales and Miers come over and lie to them in person about the US Attorney dismissals. I don't know if the newfound courage will last, but I hope so.

Glenn Greenwald , who has been providing great coverage of the legal aspects of this story, has a terrific rundown of the hypocrisy of Republican commentators who bemoaned Clinton's claims of executive privilege during the blowjob scandal but are predictably flip-flopping now. There are endless examples. If the press had any balls they would be reading this stuff verbatim to Tony Snow and making him answer for it.

Hopefully Harry Ried will pursue this to its logical conclusion, and knock the stilts out from under Bush's claims to be king. Now would be the time, as the Bushies try to run out the clock while keeping this patently ridiculous "unitary executive" theory intact until the end of the term. The whole doctrine seems to rest on memos written by some idiot clerk in the Justice Department that declare the President above the law. For the good of the country it's time to bring them to heel, and this would be as good an opportunity as any. The whole scam depended on Bush's approval rating remaining high to cow the opposition. That's not a problem anymore, so it's up to the Democrats to finally show that they have the stuff for leadership.

Not that I'm holding my breath on that score. But it will be more than disappointing if the Democrats fail to hold the administration accountable for everything from flagrant lawbreaking (such as the NSA spying programs) to the politicization of the federal justice system. It will be dangerous to our freedom in the future.

This Kid is a Genius

2007-03-20T01:19:00.000-05:00

...because not only did he get the religious right to embarrass themselves, he forced newsreaders across the country to say the words "Bong Hits 4 Jesus."

Mommy and Daddy Bought Me An Apartment!

2007-03-20T01:05:00.000-05:00

I've always wondered how a lot of twenty-somethings in my neighborhood afforded to buy one-bedroom apartments with a minimum of $100K cash downpayment and $3-4K in monthly carrying costs. They're obviously not all in highly-paid finance jobs, as there are just too many of them. As I suspected, they can't afford it.

LIKE many parents, Madhu and Kishore Agrawal do whatever they can to help their children. For their 25-year-old daughter, Natasha, that help has ranged from sending her through Tufts University to watching her cat, the General, when she traveled to India to visit relatives late last year. Recently, they made the most financially demanding commitment so far: they are putting up most of the money to help her buy a two-bedroom penthouse apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for $900,000.

Must be nice. Once there's a real economic shock (not a piddling 400-point drop in the Dow, a real shock) it will be interesting to see how many parents are willing to do this.

Totalitarian Nightmares

2007-03-20T00:46:00.000-05:00

Last night I watched three episodes of '24' in a row on the DVR. Then I went to sleep and had a nightmare. I was wandering around in the dark in a neighborhood full of empty warehouses. Then my cell phone would ring and a woman would say, "hold for the vice president." Then Dick Cheney comes on the line and asks me to do something. I can't remember what. But he keeps calling back and asking if it's done yet. Scary.

Chocolate City Redux

2007-03-19T23:44:00.000-05:00

More news out of New Orleans that would be funny if wasn't so sad. Ray Nagin, Mayor of New Orleans, on who is dragging their feet on recovery efforts and why:

The slow pace of New Orleans' post-Katrina recovery is part of a plan to change the city's racial makeup, Mayor Ray Nagin told a national newspaper publishers' group last week.
According to The Washington Post, Nagin made those remarks at a dinner meeting Thursday of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, a trade group for newspapers that target black readers. He told editors and publishers that the slow recovery is part of a plan to change the racial makeup, and hence the political leadership, of the city.

"Ladies and gentlemen, what happened in New Orleans could happen anywhere," Nagin told the association. "They are studying this model of natural disasters, dispersing the community and changing the electoral process in that community."

One of several big flaws in this line of reasoning - you, Ray Nagin, are the "they" in charge of the recovery efforts. It gets better:

According to the Post, Nagin referred to Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, his opponent in last year's mayor's race, as "the golden boy," and said Landrieu's chances in the election seemed good because "they dispersed all of our people across 44 states with one-way tickets."

Nagin succeeded in his first race in no small part due to the support of the white business community, who apparently thought the manager of a heavily-regulated monopoly would make things "run like a business" (I guess they got their wish). He won the second race in part because a lot of those same people just couldn't bring themselves to support Landrieu under any circumstances.

In fairness, many of the things that would be necessary to effectively jump-start the recovery are outside of the mayor's direct control. However, where has Nagin been regarding all the well-documented problems with the Road Home program and other state and federal initiatives that should be fostering rebuilding? An effective mayor brings pressure and persuasion to bear on officials at the higher levels though aggressive lobbying on a personal basis as well as through the media if needed, and there was ample opportunity to secure national media coverage given the magnitude of the disaster. On this front, Nagin has been pretty much missing in action since the storm. For example, once the problems with Road Home became apparent (or even before that he should have been demanding updates on the progress of funding dispersals on a monthly basis), he should have demanded to set up a working group with relevant officials from other agencies to fix it. If that didn't work, he should have been camped out in front of their offices every day with a camera crews in tow. Instead, we get this pass-the-buck bullshit.

Another thing: why would "they" want to take control of New Orleans in the first place, and what other cities is this approach supposedly being tested for? Much as a I love the place, no one in their right mind would want to go through that much effort to assume responsibility for it at this point. By this kind of reasoning it would make as much sense to assume that Nagin is a cog in a vast conspiracy to take advantage of natural disasters to change the electoral process in Houston and Atlanta by sending in vast numbers of evacuees. Hmmm....that would explain a few things.

Clueless (or Misleading) As Always

2007-03-16T01:02:00.000-05:00

I had the misfortune to catch a little of the ABC coverage of the U.S. Attorney firings scandal this evening. Predictably, the story avoided the central issue - whether it's advisable to let the US Attorneys devolve into political commissars for the administration. If it can be shown that the firings were motivated by a desire to avoid further revelations from ongoing investigations (such as Carol Lam's inquiry into the web of corruption surrounding Duke Cunningham), then that's a key piece of information. Instead the focus was on whether it was within the administration's authority to replace the people in these positions, which is relevant but is not the reason for the uproar over the firings.

I know at this point it's silly to expect anything reasonable from the MSM, but come on, this was an obvious one. The issues here are whether the firings were motivated by 1) a need to suppress embarrassing revelations that were likely to arise or 2) to motivate other USA's to pursue dubious cases against the opposition to influence elections. Any seventh-grade civics class student could tell you that.

New Strategies for the GWOT

2007-03-15T13:50:00.000-05:00

Gonzales gets in a little trouble, and right away we see this. If Rove were to get indicted for something they might actually go after Al Quaeda to change the subject.

Of course who am I to question Bush's Churchillian wisdom. Though I do wonder how the true believers on the right justify this to themselves - doesn't letting bin Laden and his top aides escape to Pakistan and rebuild their network with impunity for more than five years amount to "appeasement"? Damn sure does to me. Wouldn't real manly men throw down the gauntlet to that little guy Musharraf and tell him we are coming in to get them no matter what the consequences?

Of course if they had done that in the first place, the GWOT (or the Long War, the Eternal Forever War, whatever they call it these days) would have been over in the eyes of many of the right's more isolationist types. And we couldn't have that, now could we? No excuse to invade Iraq, no billions in no-bid, no-show contracts, etc.

So the next step would be pass a law expressly forbidding an attack on Iran (or anywhere else for that matter) without new Congressional authorization, then turn up the heat on Turd Blossom. We could see UBL in custody within weeks.

Housing Prices Always Go Up

2007-03-14T02:11:00.000-05:00

Bubble? What bubble? Housing valuations are based on the fundamental economic strength brought about by the wonderful Bush boom, right? Turns out that might hold about as much water as sworn Congressional testimony from Alberto Gonzales…

[NYT] Default rates are at their highest since 2002 and early 2003, when the economy was much weaker than it is today and unemployment was hovering close to 6 percent. By comparison, the unemployment rate at the end of last year was 4.5 percent and incomes were growing at a pace faster than inflation for the first time in several years.

Industry experts and officials believe the current rise in default rates is a function of looser lending practices by mortgage companies in the last few years and the end of the housing boom last year, rather than the more traditional economic weakness that drove up defaults in the past.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the NYC housing market. There is always a lot of talk about how it’s different here, there’s no bubble here, blah blah blah. An oft-cited justification for this is that in most condo and co-op buildings (particularly in Manhattan), the buyer cannot finance more than 80% of the purchase price. In more restrictive co-ops the required down payment can be 50% or more. Therefore, the reasoning goes, the problems with risky sub-prime mortgages won’t affect NYC as most buyers are not over-leveraged. This is the most reasonable of the local anti-bubble arguments - others include "but Manhattan is an island so there's no more land" [true, but this didn't prevent past housing busts] and "the city's population is increasing" [also true at the moment, but subject to change quickly if the broader economy goes sour].

The problem with the "big-downpayment" line of reasoning is that it doesn’t take into account that a lot of these people will likely lose their jobs as a result of the bubble bursting out there in flyover country. As national median incomes have remained stagnant over the last few years, most households have financed their consumption through increased debt, especially through refinancing their homes. Much of this “wealth” has been ultimately transferred to financial-services workers based in NYC. When the debt merry-go-round ends, the impact will be seen in the financial markets, as happened today. At that point $1,200/sf cookie-cutter Manhattan condos may not seem like such a good idea.

Mardi Gras

2007-02-22T16:43:00.000-05:00

Just returned from a week in New Orleans, the first time I have been home during Mardi Gras in over a decade. Usually I avoid it in favor of the much more mellow Jazz Fest, as Mardi Gras tends to draw in too many drunken rednecks from nearby states.

Despite the tone of recent media coverage, I was encouraged to some extent by what I saw. Some of the previously flooded areas, particularly adjacent to the drier parts of Uptown, have a substantial amount of construction/rehab activity taking place. Much more than I expected to find, in fact. Grantedly, I didn’t have time to wander through Gentilly or some of the harder-hit parts of town, but it seems that there will be some semblance of a city there for the foreseeable future. Each time I have visited since the storm (about every four or five months) there have been more businesses open and generally more activity, though this assessment is skewed by the fact that I spend a lot of time in Uptown, Carrollton and Mid-City, all neighborhoods where I lived at one point or another. But it is somewhat encouraging not to see signs of a growing exodus in response to the ongoing problems.

The parade crowds were lighter than years past, but still a respectable turnout. The local media there has been hyping the increase in tourists this year, but it seemed that a lot of the crowds were local or at least from nearby parts of Louisiana. This was also true of the downtown hotel where I spent one night, which was thick with local accents.

The downtown crowds also seemed much more docile than usual, particularly for the night parades on Canal Street. This was lucky as there seemed to be a much lighter police presence than in past years, when there were clusters of cops on every corner as well as on horseback. At one point there was some sort of pickpocketing incident nearby, which resulted in the crowd apprehending a man that seemed to be the culprit (couldn’t see if this was true or not) and holding him until a cop could be found, which took a while. But other than a couple fights that resulted from the usual drunken pushing and shoving the crowds were peaceful and there was plenty of space to move around.

The point of this is that despite the admittedly high levels of violence (there were nine people shot in one day in three incidents while I was there, several of whom died), there doesn’t seem to be as much of a sense of siege as the media coverage would lead one to believe. Which is not to say that the recent spike in violent crime is not a huge problem and a threat to the city’s future – only that there seems to be some hope for the future if the powers that be can get a handle on it. Not that I’m particularly optimistic about that given the history, but it’s better than nothing.

Small Steps

2007-02-12T03:08:00.000-05:00

Well, guess I was right about the surge...

Created in November, the specialized 14-member unit, made up of local and federal officers, seeks out crime, mostly at night and usually in drug hot spots. NOPD Superintendent Warren Riley and Mayor Ray Nagin have touted the squad as a key component of the crime-fighting initiative they recently unveiled to quell surging lawlessness and an equal surge in public outrage.

In principle, this is probably a step in the right direction - the key is to force much of the street trade to keep a lower profile, which will in turn reduce the level of random violence and public perception of same. It's impossible to stamp it out, but it is possible to keep it more subdued. I don't know if 14 officers are going to be able to do that, though.

When it comes to street crime, the team's tactics fall in line with Riley's flood-the-zone philosophy. Because so much of the city's violent crime is tied to the drug trade, Riley reshaped units to aggressively target low-level, streetside drug dealers rather than their mid-level or kingpin suppliers. Riley calls it fundamental policing and says he wants drug pushers to be paranoid when they peddle their wares. The administration contends that the small-time dealers eventually will flip on their suppliers, making plea deals in order to avoid jail time. In the 14 weeks since the squad formed, it has made more than 1,000 arrests, police spokesman Sgt. Joe Narcisse said. Of those arrests, 44 were gun arrests and more than 250 were for drugs.

Keep dreamin' on that "flipping on their suppliers" thing. And hell, even with 1,000 arrests a 1% conviction rate isn't going to produce many people willing to risk getting shot in the head to rat out their higher-ups. But the basic idea is a step in the right direction. Yes, I know, there are civil liberties issues, etc. But when things have reached the point where people are talking about "misdemeanor murders" you need to get a handle on things and then work on the rest.

Time for a surge?

2007-02-08T02:12:00.000-05:00

From the Times-Pic:

New Orleans police said Wednesday that they have cleared 68 of the 162 murders that occurred in 2006, including 4 suspected killers who remain at large and 17 more police believe were murdered in retaliation.

Of the 47 cases referred to the District Attorney Eddie Jordan, prosecutors have charged defendants in 17 cases. Just two cases have been brought to trial, both domestic violence killings, one of them ending with a hung jury and the other a manslaughter conviction.

Alright, let's work through this. The headline on the story is "Fewer than half of 2006 murders solved." Even starting with the 68 out of 162 figure, that's 42%. But that includes 17 murders that were cleared based on the suspect being (conveniently) killed. So the actual clearance rate in terms of arrest or potential arrest is abour 31%. The current average clearance rate nationally for 2004 was about 63%, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, so even with the higher figure the Nola clearance rate is pretty low. On top of that only about 10% of total murder cases resulted in charges, and only one (.6%) so far has resulted in a conviction.

This year seems not to be shaping up any better.

The point of this is that without taking care of the security situation (like Baghdad), nothing else will work. There are two prerequisites for the city to have a future: adequate hurricane/flood protection and a basic sense of security. Without these nothing else will matter.

Medal of Freedom Material

2007-02-07T02:27:00.000-05:00

If you're white and grew up in the South in the 70s and 80s, and I imagine a lot of other places as well, you heard a lot of griping about Cadillac-driving welfare recipients. To this day it's possible to have dinner-party arguments with distant relatives who are utterly convinced that the budget for cash-welfare programs still far exceeds "defense" spending. So I guess the biggest mistake that the Great Society programs made was actually not doling the cash out in bales of hundreds from the backs of trucks, no questions asked:

The Bush administration went on a $5bn spending spree in Iraq in 2004 just six weeks before returning control of the government to Iraqis, according to a Democratic lawmaker investigating the payments.
Huge sums were doled out, sometimes in dollar bills from the back of pick-up trucks, it was alleged.
One official from the provisional authority described an environment awash with $100 bills, said a memo released by Mr Waxman’s office.
“One contractor received a $2m payment in a duffel bag stuffed with shrink-wrapped bundles of currency.” In some cases, cash was stored in unguarded sacks in Iraqi ministry offices.

Sure would have saved on all those administrative costs. Apparently according to Bremer the office that was responsible for this consisted of something like four people. Taking delivery of literal planeloads of cash. Brilliant.

Promises and Priorities

2007-02-02T13:25:00.000-05:00

Consider this from the NYT:

The Bush administration will ask for another $100 billion for military and diplomatic operations in Iraq and Afghanistan this year and seek $145 billion for 2008, a senior administration official said Friday.
The requests Monday, to accompany President Bush's budget for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, would bring the total appropriations for 2007 to about $170 billion, with a slight decline the following year.

And then this:

President Bush is expected to shift $1.3 billion away from raising and armoring levees, installing floodgates and building permanent pumping in Southeast Louisiana in order to plug long-anticipated financial shortfalls in other hurricane-protection projects, a move Sen. David Vitter describes as a retreat from the president's commitment to protect the whole New Orleans area.

The estimates I've seen for the amount needed to build an adequate levee system for New Orleans vary between about $13 and $20 billion. In other words, permanently ensuring the viability of a major American city would require about 12% of what it's costing to prop up a potentially hostile Shiite puppet government in Iraq for a single year.

An Urgent Matter of National Security

2007-02-02T11:16:00.000-05:00

They're reading all of our mail. They're tapping all of our phone calls. But they can't have one guy monitor the Cartoon Network? All of this could have been avoided. I suppose someone in the NYPD watches Aqua Teen Hungerforce so we luckily we didn't have to shut the city down.

911 Is A Joke After All, Apparently

2007-02-02T02:08:00.000-05:00

A couple of nights ago I was sitting at the computer at about 3 am, when I hear a bit of yelling outside my window. This is not that unusual, even for a Tuesday, as my block often gets drunk people coming from the clubs to the west of here looking for their cars late at night. Occasionally they get into arguments or break off their relationships and such, which since my apartment faces the street I have to listen to. The night before there was a crying girl sobbing "I love you! But I love you!" into her cell phone for several minutes. If I did this in front of their houses I'm willing to bet they would come out fuming in righteous indignation and chase me away with a baseball bat, but I guess they feel the rules are different here. But hey, at least this place is rent-stabilized.

In any case, I paid it little mind at first. Then it seemed to escalate, with more people screaming at each other, male and female. Through the window I could see part of the scene, with two cars at the light at the end of the block, seemingly two groups of three or four facing off. They start trading punches, then one guy runs to his trunk and comes out with a tire iron. Couldn't see where he went but a girl starts screaming at someone to stop while the others grab for other objects from the nearby trash pile on the street - beer bottles and whatnot.

So being the good citizen that I am, and remembering how they are still picking on Kitty Genovese's neighbors some forty years later, I dutifully call 911. I get some static and then a click. Try again, same result. I can see other people in the buildings around me looking out their windows, so I give up on the theory that someone else must be calling. Finally after another minute or so the melee breaks up, and both groups tear off in their cars (but not before the tire-iron guy methodically smashed most of the windows in the other car).

About twenty minutes later a police car cruises up, the cops look around for a second, then they drive away.

Make It Run Like A Business?

2007-02-02T01:17:00.000-05:00

So you're the mayor of a major American city. You've played a key role in the most inept disaster response effort in history, half the population is most likely gone for good, the city is in the grips of a major crime wave, and local services are barely functioning.

What to do? Give your cron...I mean your aides a raise.

On top of doubling or tripling their salaries since you took office.

The boost in pay for top administrators at City Hall dates to Nagin's first months in office, although more raises have followed.

When Nagin took office in 2002, he made increasing executive salaries a top priority, saying it would attract employees of higher caliber -- and potentially woo "stars" from the private sector. He talked expansively of using the headhunting Web site Monster.com to recruit nationally.
As it turned out, nearly all of Nagin's original hires were local, though he did manage to lure some staffers from jobs in the private sector. But in subsequent years, he has been more apt to promote from within the ranks...

In fairness a lot of the increases were pre-catastrophe, but these folks are still raking in the cash, despite the way things are running.

Since Nagin's prior job was running the local Cox Cable franchise, we heard lots of the usual claptrap about "making government run like the private sector." Guess we saw how that turned out. I could never figure out why the hell anyone would want their city government to run like the cable company anyway.

New Orleans Recovery Plan Released

2007-02-01T16:32:00.000-05:00

After months of meetings, the Unified New Orleans Plan's Citywide Strategic Recovery and Rebuilding Plan is out. Having briefly looked it over I have to say it's pretty underwhelming in terms of content - lots of boilerplate language that you usually find in government planning reports about community input, etc. Though to be fair they did seem to have gone to some length to involve the many people who can not as yet return to the city by having meetings in Houston, Atlanta, and other places with many evacuees. The plan doesn't seem to have gotten much national media attention, which I suppose is not surprising given its generality.

The key problem seems to be that it hits the obvious important points - build better levees, raise the houses, fix the infrastructure - but it doesn't present a workable financial plan to do that, only a laundry list of federal and state programs which might serve as funding sources. I suppose that they hope this will serve the basis for a lobbying effort, but that should already have been well under way as it is no secret that the most basic requirements to making the city viable are building adequate levees and addressing other flood-protection measures. It's been more than a year and a half since the storm, it seems like there should be more substance to the planning efforts than this.

The report seems fairly weak on a lot of the thornier questions, such as how to provide services to the whole city footprint if it has half its previous population scattered among what will either be abandoned houses or vacant lots. The "Neighborhood Cluster Program", which seems to be a plan to provide financial incentives to get the remaining homeowners to move closer together in vulnerable areas, looks like it would be difficult to implement in practice. If large numbers of residents refuse (which is likely), the city will still be forced to attempt to provide services to widely scattered houses. Given that local services functioned pretty poorly to begin with (I know this firsthand as I grew up in New Orleans and still visit frequently), this could be a recipe for more of the kind of chaos that seems to have taken root there recently.

I plan to read the report in more detail and then post some more commentary on the specifics, these were just my first impressions.

Bringin' It Down Range

2007-01-31T03:12:00.000-05:00

It’s for moments like this that I started a blog (emphasis mine):

Some military officers have argued that dropping bombs in dense Baghdad neighborhoods would be counterproductive, and Petraeus has warned commanders against operations that might alienate the local population.

Chandler said the Air Force would do as it was asked. But he and other Air Force officials argue that smaller bombs and precision guidance systems can minimize civilian casualties and play a vital role in fighting the insurgency.

"I wouldn't automatically write off air power in an urban environment for fear of collateral damage," Chandler said. "We have the capability with precision targeting and the new weapons to operate in an urban environment."

L.A. Times, “Air Force's role in Iraq could grow,” 9:45 PM PST, January 30 2007

Alright, this is what “dense Baghdad neighborhoods” look like:

Now picture dropping a fucking 250-pound bomb from an airplane into the middle of that. Precision-guided or not, when the building next door to you completely blows up and takes half of yours with it, and you become one of those minimized civilian casualties, I’m thinking that your friends and relatives are not going to take too kindly to this. Not exactly a winning strategy for a foreign occupier, no? But that impact footage from the plane is going to look damn cool, and we’ve got to justify that $105.9 billion FY07 Air Force budget somehow.

Oh wait, that’s actually explicit in the article:

Chandler said it was not clear if the new demands would require more planes. But a Pentagon official predicted the increase in ground forces was likely to increase the demand for air support, straining the Air Force budget.

I’m guessing the “new weapon” referred to is the GBU-39B, Small Diameter Bomb, “an extended range all-weather, day or night 250-pound class, guided munition”. You can learn all about it here. And it only costs $40K a pop, not much more than a spankin’ new Chevy Tahoe. Boo-yah!

Capt. Meghan Stanley, one of the 494th EFS aircrew members, looks forward to seeing how months of training will pay off.

"Being that it is the Air Force's newest weapon, I'm proud to be a part of the team that is the first to bring it down range," said the weapons system officer.

“Down range” being…apartment buildings full of people who may or may not be hostile. Wait, I mean, insurgents!