Sat, 01 Oct 2005 06:21:49 GMT

Pentagon Not Reimbursing Troops Who Buy Body Armor.

Does this sound like an administration that cares about our troops?

Nearly a year after Congress demanded action, the Pentagon still hasn’t figured out a way to reimburse U.S. troops for body armor and equipment they purchased to better protect themselves while serving in Iraq.

For Marine Sgt. Todd Bowers that extra equipment — a high-tech rifle scope bought by his father for $600 and a $100 pair of goggles — turned out to be a life-or-death purchase. And he has never been reimbursed.

Bowers, who is from Arizona but going to school in Washington, D.C., was shot by a sniper during his second tour in Iraq, but the round lodged in his scope, and his goggles protected his eyes from the shrapnel that struck his face.

“We weren’t provided those going to Iraq,” he said yesterday. “But they literally saved my life.”

He and other soldiers and their parents are still spending hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars for armor they say the military won’t provide. One U.S. senator said yesterday he will try again to force the Pentagon to obey the reimbursement law it opposed from the outset and has so far not implemented.

It is a crime — literally — that the Pentagon has not reimbursed the troops for their body armor and other vital equipment. It is equally reprehensible that our troops and their families are still purchasing this equipment themselves.

We can do better than this.

[Democratic National Committee:]

Does this Administration actually care about the people who make up the military? Then why is this still happening, a year after Congress told them to do something about it?

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 18:53:40 GMT

Got some nano scratches? Restore your iPod nano to new condition with a $4 can of Brasso. So, you have a black nano and now realize that you should have purchased a case or a cover for it. But, it���s too late now… [MacDailyNews]

New uses for old technology. The pictures for this are pretty amazing.

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 10:51:56 GMT

Thus Spoke Thucydides. Pericles, in his Funeral Oration to the relatives of dead soldiers: It is not possible for people to give fair and just advice to the state, if they are not exposing their own children to the same danger when they… [Leiter Reports]

The Peloponnesian War happened over 2400 years ago but some things do not change. Unfortunately, the current leaders will not be remembered in the same light as Pericles.

Sat, 24 Sep 2005 17:05:32 GMT

Image is Everything. I don’t know what’s more stunning – that this story is true or that a White House source admitted it. [Eschaton]

HArd to believe. You have to watch out for those un-named sources. They do lie all the time. Disinformation is always a part of the plan.

Laugh. Great caption

The Seattle PI has some of the best and cattiest gossip I have seen in a local paper not in New York, LA or San Francisco.

Wed, 21 Sep 2005 01:48:41 GMT

Robert Schlesinger: Stupid Relief Tricks.

Every day seems to produce more near-unbelievable stories of bungled relief efforts for the Gulf Coast. Today’s include:

- 18 trucks loaded with ice meant for the Gulf Coast rolled into … Gloucester, Massachusetts on Monday. (They had made it as far as Alabama.)

Hundreds of truckers from Minnesota, Alabama, Georgia and even Massachusetts have been crisscrossing the country since the beginning of September, moving loads of ice from storage facility to storage facility and earning big bucks from the federal government to do little more than sit in their cabs and not unload their precious cargo. … “I guess they sent us up here because of the big ice crisis you’re having in Gloucester,” said Dan Hanson, who picked up his 44,000 pounds of ice in St. Paul, Minn., before traveling to Maxwell and spending “eight days and seven minutes” waiting.

- Meanwhile, the Brits sent a bunch of food to the region and the U.S. government reportedly plans to … burn it. (And I don’t mean overcook.)

HUNDREDS of tons of British food aid shipped to America for starving Hurricane Katrina survivors is to be burned.

US red tape is stopping it from reaching hungry evacuees.

Instead tons of the badly needed Nato ration packs, the same as those eaten by British troops in Iraq, has been condemned as unfit for human consumption.

I know MREs are bad (actually, they’re not that bad), but reallly…

[The Huffington Post | Raw Feed]

It just continues.

Sun, 18 Sep 2005 23:58:22 GMT

BREAKING: Bush’s Ratings Drop After Speech.

This just in from Rasmussen Reports:

Thirty-five percent (35%) of Americans now say that President Bush has done a good or excellent job responding to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. That’s down from 39% before his speech from New Orleans.

The latest Rasmussen Reports survey shows that 41% give the President poor marks for handling the crisis, that’s up from 37% before the speech.

A disappointing debut for Compassionate Conservatism v2.0.

[Think Progress]

Not a good sign.

Sun, 18 Sep 2005 05:56:04 GMT

Forensic TV shows “help criminals escape police”. LONDON (Reuters) – Television shows like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, depicting forensic scientists at work, are helping criminals avoid identification, New Scientist magazine said on Wednesday. [Reuters: Science]

I love this. As if the criminals could not figure out what forensic labs are doing unless they saw it on TV. And so, if CSI was not on, the criminals would never have figured out:

Burglars were wearing gloves during break-ins and rapists were using condoms to avoid leaving DNA evidence.Car thieves had even taken to leaving cigarette butts from bins in stolen cars to muddy the forensic trail.

Gloves and condoms. Yep, they got all those ideas from TV shows. Right! TV gets blamed for some stupid things but this is a pretty lightweight article.

Sat, 17 Sep 2005 00:42:45 GMT

Permission Slip. Photograph purportedly shows note scrawled by President Bush requesting a bathroom break during a U.N. meeting. [New Urban Legends]

Similar leadership that was shown the last week of his vacation.

Sat, 17 Sep 2005 00:40:46 GMT

Why Is Michael Chertoff Still Employed?. From Scrivenings: Scrivenings: FEMA Official Says Brown and Chertoff Ignored Warnings : Anyone who’s been sympathetic with attempts to deflect criticism onto state and local officials should go listen to this story from Morning Edition that was playing as I drove in to school this morning. Leo Bosner, the official at FEMA in charge of the unit that alerts officials of impending crises and manages the response says that he sent a very strongly-worded report (I remember a phrase very similar to: “has the potential to be the greatest disaster FEMA has ever had to respond to”) to Mike Brown… [Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal]

Well, the only way Chertoff will leave is if he resigns himself. Bush still had confidence in Brownie , even after he resigned. Bush does not fire people as long as they continue to display unremitting loyalty.

While the levees broke…

Last Monday, when Katrina was hitting New Orleans, Bush was giving a speech in Arizona. He did mention the hurricane.

I know my fellow citizens here in Arizona and across the country are saying our prayers for those affected by the — Hurricane Katrina. Our Gulf Coast is getting hit and hit hard. I want the folks there on the Gulf Coast to know that the federal government is prepared to help you when the storm passes. I want to thank the governors of the affected regions for mobilizing assets prior to the arrival of the storm to help citizens avoid this devastating storm.

I urge the citizens there in the region to continue to listen to the local authorities. Don’t abandon your shelters until you’re given clearance by the local authorities. Take precautions because this is a dangerous storm. When the storm passes, the federal government has got assets and resources that we’ll be deploying to help you. In the meantime, America will pray — pray for the health and safety of all our citizens.

That is all he would say about the hurricane while he then moved onto immigration reform and Medicare. But there was an interesting thing he did mention:

I also want to talk about immigration here in this state. I understand the issue well. I was the governor of a border state; I was the governor of the state of Texas. I know what it means to have a long border with Mexico. And I understand the solemn obligation of the state government and the federal government to enforce our border. I did so when I was governor, and I’ll work with your governor and governors along the border to do so as the President of the United States. We have an obligation to enforce the borders. (Applause.)

I understand it’s putting a strain on your resources. We know that. I don’t know if you know this or not, but hundreds of thousands of people have been detained, trying to illegally cross into Arizona. In other words, what I’m telling you is, there’s a lot of people working hard to get the job done, but there is more we can do.

I spoke to Mike Chertoff today — he’s the head of the Department of Homeland Security. I knew people would want me to discuss this issue, so we got us an airplane on — a telephone on Air Force One, so I called him. I said, are you working with the governor? He said, you bet we are. That’s the most effective way to do things, is to work with the state and local authorities. There are more resources that will be available, we’ll have more folks on the border; there will be more detention space to make sure that those who are stopped trying to illegally enter our country are able to be detained.

It’s important for the people of this state to understand your voices are being here in Washington. D.C. And this Senator and this Congressman are working closely with the administration to make sure we got the resources necessary to do our responsibility, which is enforce this border. And we’ll do so. And we’ll do so. (Applause.)

So, while Katrina was hitting the Mississippi Gulf Coast, resulting in the greatest natural catastrophe our nation has experienced, the President called the head of Homeland Security, the man in charge of what was going on there, and asked him if he was talking to the governor of Arizona about illegal aliens?

I wonder if there was any discussion of Katrina at all during that phone call. Perhaps the reason FEMA and DHS were distracted last Monday was because they were worrying about the Arizona border rather than New Orleans.

I really loved that Bush had to explain who Chertoff was, not knowing that because of the then ongoing event, Chertoff would become a household name in a matter of hours.

Tue, 06 Sep 2005 15:59:54 GMT

Switching to Mac after 15 years of Windows, security expert says he’s ‘too stupid to use Macs’. After three months, SearchSecurity.com’s Winn Schwartau admits there’s still much to learn about his newly adopted Apple Mac OS X operating system… [MacDailyNews]

Welcome

From The Sideshow

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

A riff on Arthus C. Clarke (A sufficiently advanced tehnology is indistinquishable from magic) and Hanlon’s Razor (Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.) or polean (Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence. )

Sun, 04 Sep 2005 23:00:44 GMT

I just read this comment at: Think Progress

Okay, a couple of things. I just watched the video where Nagin calls for mandatory evacuation (It’s at CNN). Not only does he state that both he and the Governor have declared states of emergencies, he states that everyone needs to leave and asks churches, etc. to help. he also states that city buses will transport people from 10 specific points in town to refuges of last resort, such as the Superdome, if they could not leave.

He WAS using buses to move people. So why not evacuate from the city? It turns out that there had been a major evacuation from NO with Hurricane Georges. Read about it hear:
http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/wetlands/hurricane3.html

The money quotes:

And that taught everybody a troubling lesson. Joe Suhayda, the scientist with the big stick, drives me through the city to explain.

“Well, Hurricane Georges was one for which the track had the potential of flooding the city. So the people were given a mandatory order to evacuate the city,” says Suhayda.

And government officials had made elaborate plans so the population could evacuate smoothly. We keep passing blue street signs marked Hurricane Evacuation Route. The government had organized fleets of busses, to rescue tens-of-thousands of people who didn’t have cars. At the last minute, Hurricane Georges faded to a weaker storm and it veered away, which was lucky. Because the evacuation was a fiasco.

“And what happened to the people that did evacuate is that they got into massive traffic jams and many of them spent the worst part of the hurricane either on the highway�stopped� or had pulled off to the side of the road,” remembers Suhayda.

Now supposing the hurricane had really walloped New Orleans? Here are all of these thousands and thousands of people in their cars trapped on the side of the road. What would happen to them?

“Many of our evacuation routes are subject to flooding,” says Suhayda. “And they would be washed away, and there would be really no way for help�that is the emergency services people�to get to them to help them.”

They had tried using fleets of buses before to move people and it had actually had things worse. What would we be saying today if he had sent busloads out over the I-10 bridge going east when it collapsed and drowned them? Given the info they had, they may actually have made pretty reasonable decisions. Seeing the catastrophe evacuation had been before, who would not be leery to try it again, especially if you had no car.

All these guys who say he should have bused them out. First, how do you find people? WHo are the drivers? And, where do you go? Based on previous experience, the highways could be death traps. If any of them had been stuck on buses, they would have died on the bridges leaving town going east that collapsed.

Why did he not declare an evacuation earlier? Well, it had been done in July when Dennis was a Cat 5 storm over Cuba. aaron Broussard, the president of Jefferson parish, who broke down on national TV today, ordered an evaucation 2 days before Dennis made landfall. And he was roundly criticized by every politician and the press for doing so. Why get involved in that again by calling it earlier?