Interesting Items by Alex Gimarc, Sept 2005

1. Pork. Alaska Congressman Don Young (R) took some significant heat from the bloggers last week, mostly by Michelle Malkin and Glenn Reynolds in InstaPundit, for his advocacy and support of the Highway Bill. His name came up as congressional conservatives were st arting to look for things to cut so they could fund Katrina relief. I am going to wander dangerously close to advocating “pork” for Alaska in the lines to come, so hang on. Here’s the basic problem up here: we simply don’t have enough roads in this state. I pulled some numbers from the NHTSA for comparison proposes. According to the feds, we here in Alaska have only 14,116 miles of roads. Only DC, Rhode Island Delaware and Hawaii have fewer miles of roads. The national average is just under 78,000 linear miles of road per state. Roads get you places, so a useful metric is to divide the miles of roads by the area of your state and come up with a measure of urbanization. Using this method, Alaska has just over 45 square miles of land per each linear mile of roadway. Wyoming is next at 3.5 square miles per linear mile. DC is the worst (or best for drivers) at .04 square miles per linear mile of roadway. Bottom line is that we here in Alaska need roads and bridges. So who pays for them? My preference would be for the state to pay for roads, and keep all the decision making, money and politicking in state, but the national interest for over 60 years has been for the feds to fund highways. If we now want to change the game for everyone, I will be strong advocate and supporter. Let’s st art now. Let’s even go for the Gold and repeal the Highway Bill in its entirety, repeal all gasoline taxes that feed federal highway funds, return every single penny to the states, shut down all federal highway agencies and let the employees find employment elsewhere. On the other hand, if the game doesn’t change immediately for everyone, then my fellow conservatives probably ought not to rail against federal highway dollars going into Alaska or against my congressional delegation advocating for them while their congress critters suckle the federal teat for their piece of the same budget. If federal dollars for highway projects here in Alaska are wrong and now called pork, you can then call the new Tacoma Narrows bridge pork for Washington State or any number of federally funded highway projects in other states nationwide. Push the same logic a bit more and we can st art questioning why federal dollars should be paying for levy repair in New Orleans, for after all, the flooding only affects Louisiana.

2. Bridges. Young also has taken some flack over two bridge construction projects – one in Anchorage and one in Ketchikan. The one in Anchorage is the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere.” Unfortunately for the critics who have never bothered to look at a map, as the bridge does indeed go to somewhere and here’s why. Anchorage is connected to the rest of the state by two highways – a 4-lane road to the north and a 2-lane one to the south. The southern route is regularly closed during late winter by avalanche. The northern route is a pretty good road. Anchorage also has about half the population of the entire state. The proposed bridge is a mile or two across the Knick Arm of Cook Inlet, West toward the MatSu Valley. This provides a third way out of town and a quick way to access an area for city expansion at least as large as the entire Anchorage Bowl. The feds are funding about half the cost. From my standpoint, this bridge is a very good thing, as the target area for expansion is currently about a 75-minute drive from Anchorage in good weather or during the summer. Anchorage will be looking at another bridge in the not so distant future to supplement the southern route and access the northern p art of the Kenai Peninsula so be forewarned. As I understand the Ketchikan bridge, its location is driven by the geography around Ketchikan, as the town and its airport are on two neighboring islands. Ketchikan also sits in the he art of the Tongass National Forest and even if the community wanted to move its airport to the main island, and could find sufficient flat land to build it ( Ketchikan is located on the side of a mountain), I doubt the feds and the greenies would allow it. Finally, as to who pays, I would like to remind the reader about congress mucking around and changing oil royalty deals with the state of Alaska. The initial split of oil royalties (federal excise taxes on oil) for Prudhoe Bay and the Trans Alaska Pipeline was 90% for the State and 10% for the feds. This was agreed to jointly by Congress and the State of Alaska. Over the years, as new fields have been discovered, congress unilaterally revised their end of the bargain and instituted a 50-50% split, which is where it sits today. This revenue split is also what we expect congress to demand for ANWR and the natural gas pipeline. I could make a reasonable case for keeping that money in state to build roads with, but frankly our larger problem is obstruction in federal courts by greenies. If we can keep them out of court, new roads should cost less than half what they are projected to cost and take half the time to build.

3. NASA. NASA announced its plans for returning to the moon, this time in 2018. They proposed two new launch vehicles. One is a heavy lifter derived from the existing shuttle stack. The second is a derived shuttle solid rocket motor with a capsule sitting on top. The new hardware alone should cost more than the projected NASA budget for the next decade – which is a small problem. A much larger problem is that the new plan and hardware is, as aptly described by NASA Administrator Michael Griffin “Apollo on steroids.” Like Apollo, they do not intend to permanently return to the moon. And the trip to Mars becomes just another flags and footprints photo-op. The new proposal does not make use of the new and robust commercial space sector or entrepreneurial space to control costs, lead innovation or test new ideas, hardware or concepts. NASA remains the owner-operator of all spacecraft and launch vehicles. The American public will not have any ownership of the effort, nor will they enter space in any significant numbers – or any numbers at all, for that matter. In short, this proposal is a disaster for all of us who want to see large numbers of Americans get permanently off this planet within our lifetimes. How to fix the mess? It won’t be simple or easy, for NASA as it is structured today has been a jobs program for engineers, congress critters and the large aerospace firms that employ and support them for nearly a generation (30 years), and that sort of momentum is really difficult to redirect. So how would I “fix” the space program? I would follow the law – the letter, spirit and intent of various space commercialization acts passed by congress over the course of the last decade. Here’s how:

The more people we have off planet, the more options we have when the next really large natural disaster hits this planet. Once we get large numbers of people living and working in low e arth orbit – or simply visiting it on day trips, the moon is not all that far away. And once you can reliably get to the moon and stay, the near e arth asteroids / comets are not all that far away either. Asteroids and comets are really desirable, for they have high percentages of water and other ices making them up, meaning whoever visits will not necessarily have to bring all their propellant, water or air with them. Once you can live and work among the near e arth asteroids, Mars gets really close. You move outbound from e arth, making money, profits, babies and families. You make new lives – finally – in the new frontier – all funded and paid for by the marketplace. The NASA program won’t get us off planet to stay. A marketplace based effort will. Kill this turkey. Roast it and serve it for Thanksgiving.

1. Pledge. A Carter appointee sitting on the 9th Circus found that the Pledge of Allegiance was an unconstitutional violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The case was brought by our old friend Michael Newdow, the atheist lawyer from California whose challenge to the Pledge was tossed by the SCOTUS on the grounds that he did not have standing to bring the complaint a couple years ago. Newdow found a couple new friends to represent, fellow believers in his atheist religion who were shocked, simply shocked to find that the words “under God” existed in the pledge that their kids had to say at school every day. The C arter judge, Lawrence Karlton claimed to defer to precedent established in Newdow’s last foray before the 9th Circus, saying that he simply had to follow precedent established by the court. This is self-serving dishonesty at its worst, for as some have written, if Newdow didn’t have standing to bring his previous case, the opinions rendered by the court in 2002 are moot, do not exist, and must be litigated anew. It is clear that this activist judge, who also helped Newdow narrow down his case during trial so that he would be able to rule in the way he wanted, already had his mind made up before the trial began and set up the ruling. It is yet another example of judicial activism by the left at its worst. It is yet another example of the atheists using the federal courts to jam their religion down the throats of an unwilling public. The ruling also took place during the Roberts hearings before the Judiciary Committee and seemed to drain the democrats a bit while strengthening Republican backbones a bit.

2. New Orleans. President Bush was busy setting up the rebuilding effort in New Orleans last week. If all goes well for the big spenders, this may be the largest single expenditure of federal dollars in response to a natural disaster in history. Not unexpectedly, politicians nationwide are positioning themselves in order to get the credit for spending the money. Bush proposed turning the entire area into an enterprise zone, where federal rules and regulations are loosened. He proposed education vouchers for all students of those displaced from the area. The proposals include making federal land available to the displaced so they might homestead, along with new homes and mortgages. Unfortunately the proposals also include a boatload of new federal spending for rebuilding the infrastructure destroyed by the storm. Congressional Republicans will have to hold the line on new spending, continue to cut taxes, roll back regulations, and take this opportunity to unravel the cesspool created by corrupt democrats in New Orleans and the surrounding parishes over the last 150 years. We will hope they are up to the task. We will have to provide a backbone injection. Look At this as an opportunity to excel. Limbaugh proposed a series of budget cuts that would fund the rebuilding of the Gulf region. These include delaying or canceling the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit for at least a year; cleaning out all the pork from the Highway Bill; and gutting the $190 billion Farm Bill. He proposed taking federal ANWR royalties and using them to fund reconstruction. The dems are terrified that we will have an on-site display of conservatism working to rebuild and uplift individuals rather than groups. The latest on what happened in New Orleans with the money the Corps of Engineers was supposed to spend on levies and flood control was also most interesting. Most of this comes out of Tony Snow’s radio program later in the week. Turns out that the locals diverted a lot of federal flood control money to a bunch of non-flood control projects. They used federal dollars to string fiber optics along the levies to wire the casinos. They used federal dollars to deepen existing ports – which is a very nice way to launder money, as nobody usually successfully inspects the new depths of the ports on muddy areas. The construction of the new section of levies was apparently structurally defective, for they collapsed under only 12’ storm surges, which they should have been designed to take. More corruption will be uncovered in New Orleans as the weeks and months go by. Congressional democrats best pray to whatever God(s) they pray to that they do not get their wish for an investigative commission into the disaster.

3. Political Fallout. Wesley Pruden last week in the Washington Times wrote a blistering column about the political corruption in New Orleans over the years. Pruden believes that local democrat anger against the feds in general and Bush in p articular have a lot more to do with loss of their political ATM machine – the poor section of New Orleans – than the damage caused by the storm. The poor section of New Orleans was the foundation of a long-term democrat machine that elected democrat mayors, Senator Mary Landrieu (D, LA), daughter of “Moon” Landrieu, and Governor Blanco. The democrats were able to get the black voters to the polls when and where they wanted them to go to the polls, and get their people elected, all the while railing against conservatives in general and Republicans in particular. Now that those people have dispersed nationwide, with over half vowing not to return, their electoral base in New Orleans has been eliminated, dispersed to better lives in better cities. ABC had their cameras set up near the Astrodome Thursday night following President Bush’s speech. They intended to get lots of video of people blaming Bush for the hurricane and government’s reaction to it. They didn’t get what they wanted, for every single one interviewed thought Bush was doing a good job responding to the disaster, and every single one blasted away at the stunning incompetence of Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin – much to the chagrin of the ABC reporters. Contrast this incompetence with the very competent approach to recovery by Governor Barbour (MS) and Governor Bush (FL) this year and last year.

4. Not There. Limbaugh Friday did a wonderful rant about who was not on the ground in the Gulf assisting in the cleanup. I will expand on his list a bit. Who is on the ground, on the front lines, helping people out of this disaster? We have the military, the National Guard, the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and thousands of churches leading the response. They are joined by major corporations like WalM art and Sam’s Club. Completely absent are the People for the American Way, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the National Organization for Women, the Atheists, all the environmental organizations, the gay rights organizations, Planned Parenthood, NARAL, the anti-war left, the trial lawyers, etc. The political left, outside the civil rights crowd which are stirring up trouble, simply are not present where there is trouble and our neighbors need help. Why should anyone listen to them at all?

5. Race. James Taranto on OpinionJournal.com did a series of articles about race and politics in America. He posted some stunning polling results on the deep divide between the perceptions of black and non-black Americans. One poll found that over 80% of blacks believe that race had something to do with the response to Katrina. On the other hand, over 90% of non-blacks believe that race has absolutely nothing to do with the response. This deep divide demonstrates quite nicely the demographic problem of the race-baiting democrats and the civil rights crowd. Taranto goes on to note that the blacks have managed to allow themselves to become extreme outliers among the body politic, and because they are so far outside the mainstream, it becomes increasing difficult for both the civil rights crowd and the democrats to play the race card successfully. When you accuse someone of racism, you instantly get all the blacks within earshot on board, but because they lie so far outside the political mainstream, the civil rights crowd and race-baiting democrats are increasingly unable to pick up any moderate non-blacks, and you need a substantial number of non-blacks to make the charge stick. Playing the race card in political wars is not working any more, becoming the modern-day version of a boy crying wolf – and it is bloody well long past time for this to happen.

1. Flood Control. Interesting how the work has finally turned two weeks after Katrina slammed into the Gulf coast. The very same greens who instantly dragged out their soapboxes the day of the hurricane and blamed the storm on global warming and Bush's refusal to sign Kyoto, now turn out to be complicit in leaving the entire New Orleans - Lake Pontch artrain area defenseless against a Cat 5 storm. They have been working a lot of years - over a generation - to save and protect the wetlands around the New Orleans - Baton Rouge area from development. The technique has been the typical green technique - file a lawsuit against every single thing that the Corps of Engineers comes up with over the last generation, tie it up in court, keep demanding more extensive and magic Environmental Impact Statements, and when the Corps finally produced one, take them right back to court and demand more paper. Over the years, they got enough courts to agree with them that the Corps finally gave up on several important flood control projects. The most important one was an LBJ-era project that would have built a couple massive flood control gates to protect the city in the event that a hurricane pushed a storm surge into Lake Pontch artrain and flood New Orleans from the north (which was one of the mechanisms that flooded New Orleans three weeks ago). The project was finally killed in 1977 following a series of greenie lawsuits. The lead organization behind the lawsuits was an outfit entitled Save Our Wetlands, which was a combination of a bunch of environmental organizations in the area. They also successfully fought off a levy improvement project in the early 1990s around New Orleans itself, all of which ended up leaving the city defenseless against the storm. Who will hold these people to account? Who will sue them for laying the groundwork to trash Lake Pontch artrain when the now-toxic water in New Orleans is pumped back into it?

2. Blame. And if the greens want to play “Place the blame”, I have an opening bid for them. It is time to st art asking as a nation if we can afford the public costs of modern environmentalism. Can we afford any longer the loss of life, property, liberty, and lifestyle that these clowns - who do their damage via lawsuit and the courts? The trial lawyers go after every single business that makes a mistake with lusty vengeance. Yet they leave the greens alone and never hold them accountable in court for the outcome of their actions, their beliefs, and their obstructionism. Who among the greens bear the burden of their mistakes? The greens have had themselves quite a little run over the last generation. You can st art with the bogus, junk-science based ban on DDT, just at the point where Malaria was wiped out worldwide. Today, there are over a million deaths a year directly attributable to Malaria worldwide. Yet nobody holds the greens accountable. They have successfully blocked flood control construction for over a generation, all in an effort to "save our wetlands." Well the wetlands of Lake Pontch artrain are saved, saved to receive the toxic mix of gasoline, fuel oil, chemicals, human sewage, and effluent mixed into the flood waters that are now being returned to the lake. In this way, the greens are directly responsible for getting this stuff dumped back into the lake, nicely trashing the environment. The only thing that keeps them from stopping it this time around is that all their local courthouses are under water. The total cost in recovery form the hurricane and flooding may be well in excess of $100 billion in New Orleans alone. Who will hold the greens accountable? The greens were complicit in shutting down logging throughout the Western US in National Forests. One of the excuses to shut down logging was intentionally miscounted populations of Spotted Owls. The result? We had several of the worst forest fire season in generations in the West. Millions of acres burned. Thousands of homes were burned. Untold millions of tons of p articulates, soot, ash, and other toxic gasses were injected directly into the troposphere - all without benefit of a single environmental impact statement. Today, the greens are complicit with crating our current shortage of oil and refining capacity. It has been over a qu arter century since we here in the US have built a new refinery. Why? Because they made the paperwork simply too deep to wade through to find a profit. And when the paperwork occasionally became workable, environmentalist lawyers took the oil companies to court to stop whatever they planned. Now we have a hurricane that has shut down a qu arter of our national refining capacity, the price of gasoline spikes, and the greens, their sycophants in the democrat p arty and among the media have the temerity to blame the oil companies for the problem. Solution here? More capacity - both for refining and production. It is bloody well time to hold the greens, their deep-pocket foundations, their sycophants, cheerleaders and supporters for the results of their policy actions.

3. Lawyers. The current head of FEMA was recalled from duty last week. He was heading up the feds' response to Katrina, and ended up being the fall guy. If you watched the guy on TV over the course of the last couple weeks, it is clear that he was more than a little bit out of his element. The guy was originally hired as a lawyer, someone who is paid to determine what you can and cannot do. He worked his way up the bureaucratic food chain over a period of many years, and ended up being the next in line when an opening to head up FEMA under the Bush administration presented itself. We may have learned a bit about the type of people who are needed to lead disaster relief / disaster recovery operations - and lawyers aren't trained to do so. I believe that we need military people in charge, or at least military-trained people in charge - people who can clearly define a mission and get it done rather than people that look at what is written, determine what is permissible, and write a brief to convince a judge. Mr. Brown took the fall, and it wasn't his fault. He was the wrong man for the wrong job. We will hope the Navy Rear Admiral just appointed can do a bit better over the next several months.

4. Red Crescent. The architect in charge of designing the Flight 93 Memorial in Pennsylvania announced his design last week. Rather than being a memorial to the brave men and women that kept that jet from crashing into the White House of the Capitol Dome, the dhimmi architect set up the whole thing as a memorial to Islam itself. The great outline of the memorial is trees planted in the shape of a red crescent. To Islam, the crescent is used much like the cross is used by Christianity. Imagine the reaction by the PC crowd had the architect come up with a field of white Crosses inscribed with the names of the dead. Yet they defend the actions of this educated fool by blasting away at the "Philistines" on the right have the gall to question the propriety of building a memorial shaped like an Islamic holy symbol. The story was initially broken by the blogs, with Michelle Malkin leading the way. The US Parks Service is in charge of selection of the memorial. Make your opinion known to them and your congress-critters as soon as you can.

5. Bodies. CNN took the federal emergency management folks to court in an effort to force them to allow CNN to film and air the dead bodies after Katrina. Apparently the leftists at CNN believe that airing hours upon hours of dead people following the disaster will sufficiently inflame Americans so they won't vote Republican next year. By weeks' end, the feds rolled and announced they would allow CNN to film as much as they wanted. Nice to see that CNN is finally interested in reminding us of the dead. Perhaps now that we are four years deep into WWIII, they will st art airing film taken during the aftermath of the attacks of 9-11. Perhaps they will st art showing the film of people leaping to their death out of the World Trade Center as it burned. Perhaps they will st art showing film of the dead being taken out f the WTC collapse site, out of the Pentagon, and out of the Flight 93 crash site in Pennsylvania. Don't wait up for that film, though, as the media has decided that we must never, ever be reminded of the barbarity, treachery and fundamental evil of our Islamist enemies. Why, we may end up being sufficiently incited to decide as a nation to wipe them off the face of the earth.

1. Katrina. Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida Gulf coast Monday. The storm was a Category 5 just before it hit, and was downgraded to a Cat. 4 as it hit. It pushed a storm surge estimated by some LSU scientists to be 25-29’ high in front of it. Contrast this with the highest storm surge ever measured in the US during Camille at 22’. The storm surge lawnmowed Gulfport, Biloxi, Pascagoula, the southern Louisiana coast and destroyed everything sitting next to the Gulf. This was one of the most powerful storms to hit the US in history, with the storm surge higher than that pushed by Camille in 1969. Some bu8ildings that survived Camille did not survive Katrina. The storm also beat up New Orleans with Cat. 4 winds, waves and storm surge. The city which was 80% evacuated, survived the storm mostly intact. It did not survive the aftermath, when levies weakened by the pounding of wind, rain and waves broke and flooded the city, impacting perhaps another qu arter of a million people. As of this writing, the search and rescue effort has mostly stopped and is now stating to be a recovery effort. It will take years to rebuild the Gulf Coast, drain New Orleans, and move the evacuees back to new homes. Millions of people have lost everything and will have to st art over. There has been a massive outpouring of compassion and assistance from state and local governments, the churches, and individuals nationwide. Evacuees are being moved, housed, and treated and taken into private homes. Unfortunately, the media has chosen only to report the actions of governments. The back to back disasters overwhelmed state and local politicians in Louisiana, who managed to completely screw up their disaster management plans – mostly by refusing to execute them. It turns out that the Mayor of New Orleans, who is a product of the long-time, leftist, race-baiting political machine in New Orleans, was not up to the task at hand. He was no Rudy Giuliani. The democrat governor of Louisiana was also over her head, and foot-dragged her official response to the incoming storm. Reports over the weekend noted that President Bush implored both of them to order New Orleans evacuated, a decision that was delayed until the last possible minute. Both politicians immediately st arted blaming the feds in general and President Bush in p articular for the lack of response. The nearly qu arter million that were left behind were mostly poor, in the projects, and in desperate need for assistance. It did not help matters when New Orleans law enforcement cleared the local jails before they were engulfed with the rising water. The criminals immediately went back home, st arted looting stores, homes and businesses, bringing mayhem to that p art of town. The armed gangs took over some of the streets of New Orleans for a few days. The Mayor also decided to use the Superdome as a safe house before the hurricane hit. There were over 25,000 people inside and weathered the storm. Unfortunately law and order inside also broke down and the gangs, looters, thugs and criminals managed to quickly turn it into a charnel house. As of this writing, there may be over a million homeless along the Gulf coast and inland, with hundreds dead so far. We will keep them in our prayers. Keep the charity and assistance organizations in yours.

2. Carping. It only took the leftists a day or so to st art blaming every single p art of this disaster and the response to it on the feds and President Bush. Greens hit the ground running, and blamed the hurricane itself on Bush’s failure to sign the Kyoto Treaty. They went on to say the reason that the water in the Gulf of Mexico was above 90 degrees (not uncommon this time of the year, by the way) was because of Bush, global warming and failure to sign Kyoto. Next up to bat were the race-baiting leftists, who made the preposterous claim that the reason only the poor and needy were left in New Orleans was because somebody chose to save the rich, middle class whites first. The media did not report on the hundreds of school and city busses sitting, covered in water in their yards. Videos during the week of looting showed mostly black looters and gang bangers. Military response was not instantaneous, and the anti-war left spoke up and claimed the reason the Guard was not called up was because they were all over in Iraq. However, call-ups for the Guard in other states st arted taking place the day after the storm hit. It took the Louisiana Governor a couple days later to call up her Guard. Media then claimed that the reason the levies failed was due to budget cuts to pay for the war in Iraq. It mattered little to them that the Corps of Engineers, who builds and maintains the levy system, had just completed work on the section that failed. It was the latest and greatest section, nicely designed and constructed to withstand a Cat. 3 storm. As the week wore on, and it became clear that the local and state governments had broken down completely; the media gleefully ran film of the New Orleans mayor cursing up a storm, blaming everything on President Bush and the feds. The Governor was not a lot better, and she was closely followed by Mary Landrieu (D, LA). The military response was timely, mostly held back by the sheer size of the flooded area. They also had 1.4 million displaced people to deal with, with about a fifth of that left in the city of New Orleans. As of this writing, leftists have spent an awful lot of time and effort carping, complaining, whining, and demanding all manner of things. They have done precious little rolling up their sleeves and getting to work on saving the homeless, comforting the sick and infirm, and restoring order to the projects.

3. Why it Happened. The bottom line of this disaster is that when you build a city on the banks of a large river that is prone to flooding, it will occasionally get flooded. When that same city also sits very near the shore of the Gulf of Mexico, it will occasionally get hit by a hurricane. When you build your levy system to only withstand a Category 3 storm, and get hit by a Cat 4+, you will be very, very lucky to survive. When you refuse to execute your disaster plan, like the City of New Orleans chose not to do, you will take a big disaster and turn it into a really, really big one. When you refuse to learn the lessons you should have learned a year ago when Ivan took aim at New Orleans for a bit, you will get a false sense of security and repeat your mistakes. When you have trained your poor to be needy and dependent, they will continue to be needy and dependent when it is time for them to move very quickly to save themselves. When you empty the jails back into the community, the criminals will return to their homes and their vocational calling with new skills learned while in prison. When you decide not to use the Superdome in 2004 as a last resort for those that won’t or can’t evacuate, and do nothing to improve it as a shelter, you will end up with the same sort of problem a year later. When the cops are called up to meet a disaster and over a qu arter of them don’t respond, you won’t keep law and order very long. The structure and surrounding geology of New Orleans is also an issue here. The town was built over 300 years ago on a muddy river delta. Over the years, it has endured several floods and sunk into the mud, as the mud was compacted and not renewed by Mississippi floods. A city near and above sea level when it was built is now 20’ below sea level in places. It was only a matter of time before the ocean returned to claim its own. The other thing that happens in southern Louisiana is that the Mississippi River built that delta over the years when it flooded. The US government decided based on floods in the 1920s and prior years to control the Mississippi with a series of levies and flood control structures. This funneled the new mud out into the Gulf, and did not rebuild the land of southern Louisiana. As a result, that p art of the state is returning to the ocean as the mud compresses and washes out into the Gulf.

4. Energy. Katrina also hit one of the prime oil producing and distributing centers of the nation, with the Gulf Coast area being prime for collecting offshore platform oil, refining it, and distributing it to the rest of the South and the Mid-Atlantic States. Six major refineries were shut down by the storm. Two major pipelines were shut down. Most of the offshore platforms in the Gulf were shut down and evacuated. This constitutes nearly a qu arter of our daily oil and gasoline supply, which jacked up the price of oil nearly instantly last Monday. There were gasoline shortages and near panic in Georgia during the week with prices spiking up to $6/gallon. Congressional action was disgusting and predictable, led by Bill Nelson (D, FL) who darkly warned that the price spike would lead the Bush administration to open offshore drilling off Florida. Nelson, demonstrating he comes from the Robert Mugabe School of Economics also demanded price controls for gasoline for the duration of the crisis. If you want shortages, I can’t think of any better way than to inflict price controls on something – a lesson that the state of Hawaii is gong to learn very quickly and very, very painfully. The oil companies announced that they were rest arting two of the largest refineries and the two supply pipelines over the weekend. They also believe that they have lost only 54 offshore platforms and seem quite happy that is an acceptably low number. The big deal in this storm was the shutdown of the large refineries. Once again, our refining capacity is a problem. Solution to all of this? More refineries. It may be time for every single locale to consider encouraging an oil company to construct a small to medium sized refinery near it, and st art distributing the production of gasoline, home heating oil, propane, etc. The more refineries you have, the more excess capacity you have nationwide. The closer the refined product is to your users, the more robust your response to the next natural disaster. I would be remiss if I did not once again take the opportunity to note that $70/bbl oil is a real good advertisement for drilling ANWR.

5. Fetal Pain. A couple weeks ago, the media floated a study done in California about fetal pain during abortions. The investigators decided that because of brain development, a baby in the womb couldn’t feel anything until the 28th week of a pregnancy, well into the seventh month. They used the results to argue against new requirements that women be notified about the effects of an abortion on a baby, happily concluding that the little one can’t feel a thing. Interesting concept, that. This comes from the same sort of leftists that want sport fishing shut down because hooks hurt the fish’s mouths. The study was trumpeted by Science Magazine and the NYT. Fortunately, there was a little more to the story. It turns out that the study was concocted by the abortion community as a vehicle to cover its collective back side during upcoming legislative battles. The primary investigator turned out to be the administrator of an aborto-center at a San Francisco hospital. The second investigator worked for a while with NARAL. Nothing like yet another cooked study to bolster the position of the aborto-industry. Michelle Malkin, Hannity and others in the alternative media were superb in blowing this little feint by the abortion industry out of the water.

"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
- Samuel Adams, speech at the Philadelphia State House, August 1, 1776.

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by Alex Gimarc Mon., Sept 26, 2005