hilzoy

by hilzoy

Today’s New Orleans Times-Picayune has a story alleging that many of the reports of murder and mayhem in the Superdome and the Convention Center after Hurricane Katrina were urban myths:

“Following days of internationally reported killings, rapes and gang violence inside the Dome, the doctor from FEMA – Beron doesn’t remember his name – came prepared for a grisly scene: He brought a refrigerated 18-wheeler and three doctors to process bodies.

“I’ve got a report of 200 bodies in the Dome,” Beron recalls the doctor saying.

The real total was six, Beron said.

Of those, four died of natural causes, one overdosed and another jumped to his death in an apparent suicide, said Beron, who personally oversaw the turning over of bodies from a Dome freezer, where they lay atop melting bags of ice. State health department officials in charge of body recovery put the official death count at the Dome at 10, but Beron said the other four bodies were found in the street near the Dome, not inside it. Both sources said no one had been killed inside.

At the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, just four bodies were recovered, despites reports of corpses piled inside the building. Only one of the dead appeared to have been slain, said health and law enforcement officials. (…)

As floodwaters forced tens of thousands of evacuees into the Dome and Convention Center, news of unspeakable acts poured out of the nation’s media: evacuees firing at helicopters trying to save them; women, children and even babies raped with abandon; people killed for food and water; a 7-year-old raped and killed at the Convention Center. Police, according to their chief, Eddie Compass, found themselves in multiple shootouts inside both shelters, and were forced to race toward muzzle flashes through the dark to disarm the criminals; snipers supposedly fired at doctors and soldiers from downtown high-rises.

In interviews with Oprah Winfrey, Compass reported rapes of “babies,” and Mayor Ray Nagin spoke of “hundreds of armed gang members” killing and raping people inside the Dome. Unidentified evacuees told of children stepping over so many bodies, “we couldn’t count.”

The picture that emerged was one of the impoverished, masses of flood victims resorting to utter depravity, randomly attacking each other, as well as the police trying to protect them and the rescue workers trying to save them. Nagin told Winfrey the crowd has descended to an “almost animalistic state.”

Four weeks after the storm, few of the widely reported atrocities have been backed with evidence. The piles of bodies never materialized, and soldiers, police officers and rescue personnel on the front lines say that although anarchy reigned at times and people suffered unimaginable indignities, most of the worst crimes reported at the time never happened. (…)

Rumors of rampant violence at the Convention Center prompted Louisiana National Guard Lt. Col. Jacques Thibodeaux put together a 1,000-man force of soldiers and police in full battle gear to secure the center Sept. 2 at about noon.

It took only 20 minutes to take control, and soldiers met no resistance, Thibodeaux said. What the soldiers found – elderly people and infants near death without food, water and medicine; crowds living in filth – shocked them more than anything they’d seen in combat zones overseas. But they found no evidence, witnesses or victims of any killings, rapes or beatings, Thibodeaux said. Another commander at the scene, Lt. Col. John Edwards of the Arkansas National Guard, said the crowd welcomed the soldiers. “It reminded me of the liberation of France in World War II. There were people cheering; one boy even saluted,” he said. “We never – never once – encountered any hostility.”

One widely circulated tale, told to The Times-Picayune by a slew of evacuees and two Arkansas National Guardsmen, held that “30 or 40 bodies” were stored in a Convention Center freezer. But a formal Arkansas Guard review of the matter later found that no soldier had actually seen the corpses, and that the information came from rumors in the food line for military, police and rescue workers in front of Harrah’s New Orleans Casino, said Edwards, who conducted the review.”

So: what’s going on?

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by hilzoy

From the LATimes:

“Christine Maggiore was in prime form, engaging and articulate, when she explained to a Phoenix radio host in late March why she didn’t believe HIV caused AIDS. The HIV-positive mother of two laid out matter-of-factly why, even while pregnant, she hadn’t taken HIV medications, and why she had never tested her children for the virus.

“Our children have excellent records of health,” Maggiore said on the Air America program when asked about 7-year-old Charlie and 3-year-old Eliza Jane Scovill. “They’ve never had respiratory problems, flus, intractable colds, ear infections, nothing. So, our choices, however radical they may seem, are extremely well-founded.”

Seven weeks later, Eliza Jane was dead.

The cause, according to a Sept. 15 report by the Los Angeles County coroner, was AIDS-related pneumonia. These days, given advances in HIV care, it’s highly unusual for any young child to die of AIDS. What makes Eliza Jane’s death even more striking is that her mother is a high-profile, charismatic leader in a movement that challenges the basic medical understanding and treatment of acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

Even now, Maggiore, a 49-year-old former clothing executive from Van Nuys, stands by the views she has espoused on “The Ricki Lake Show” and ABC’s “20/20,” and in Newsweek and Mothering magazines. She and her husband, Robin Scovill, said they have concerns about the coroner’s findings and are sending the report to an outside reviewer. “I have been brought to my emotional knees, but not in regard to the science of this topic,” said Maggiore, author of an iconoclastic book about AIDS that has sold 50,000 copies. “I am a devastated, broken, grieving mother, but I am not second-guessing or questioning my understanding of the issue.””

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by hilzoy

There are lots of plans to cut pork floating around, though in all likelihood all that will be adopted are token gestures. (When NASA announced Monday that it would be spending $100 billion to send people to the moon, I said: huh? Now? I have since concluded that it was announced so that it could be cut, with great fanfare. But if we’re going to go in for gimmicks, why stop there? Why not announce that we’re going to spend $500 trillion to send people to Jupiter, and then announce that we’re going to realize huge savings by cutting that?) The best start, I think, would be to eliminate these two tax cuts, scheduled to take effect in January. 97% of these tax cuts would go to people making over $200,000 a year, and 54% to people making over a million dollars a year. The savings, over the first ten years that they will be fully in effect, would be $146 billion. This we can do. (The DLC has endorsed this.)

A Republican plan, “Operation Offset”, is here (pdf); it proposes savings of about $526 billion over 10 years. As Matt Yglesias points out, the largest chunk of savings comes from Medicaid, which is to say: from denying health coverage to very poor people. Ezra Klein adds that Medicaid is hardly in a position to take these cuts, since a lot of health care for victims of Katrina is being paid for by the very program the Republicans propose to cut. Think Progress has a liberal alternative, focussing on repeal of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 1% of Americans, cutting farm subsidies, and cutting several weapons systems.

You can come up with your own plan using this budget simulator: I almost eliminated the entire federal deficit on my first try, and that despite the fact that I didn’t cut the war in Iraq. (Here’s why not.)

And then there’s Porkbusters: an attempt by bloggers to identify pork ripe for slicing. I really like the idea of this. And I really like Slarti’s having gone through the parts of the highway bill that concern Florida. I think this is great. However: there has to be some sort of quality control over the suggestions. For example: Porkbusters currently lists all spending under the Violence Against Women Act as pork. Why? The person who added it to the list explains:

“Since actual help for bona fide victims of domestic violence does not exist anywhere in these programs, why not start with one of the most damaging and money-wasting programs we have in the US? The only people this would negatively affect are those who benefit from VAWA now — the people and agencies who run these clearly inefficient and counterproductive programs.”

Ha ha ha. A joke, right? Wrong.

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by hilzoy

North Korea has agreed, in principle, to give up its nuclear program:

“The United States, North Korea and four other nations participating in nuclear negotiations in Beijing signed a draft accord in which Pyongyang promised to abandon efforts to produce nuclear weapons and re-admit international inspectors to its nuclear facilities. Foreign powers said they would provide aid, diplomatic assurances and security guarantees and consider North Korea’s demands for a light-water nuclear reactor.

The agreement is a preliminary one that would require future rounds of negotiations to flesh out, as it does not address a number of issues, like timing and implementation, that are likely to prove highly contentious. China announced that the six nations participating in the talks would reconvene in November to continue ironing out the details.”

However, North Korea has just demanded a light-water reactor in exchange for a deal.

As far as I can tell, if this agreement works out (which seems to be a big ‘if’), it would mean that after five years of stalemate, during which North Korea has acquired nuclear weapons, we are going to return to something a lot like the agreed framework. I rather liked the agreed framework, not because I thought it was a magic solution that would enforce itself, but because it was the least dreadful of a set of bad alternatives. I just wish we hadn’t taken that little detour during which North Korea became a nuclear power.

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by hilzoy

Last weekend, it seemed as though every major news organization put out a story attempting to explain what went wrong with the response to Hurricane Katrina. This weekend, the theme is the continuing screwups by FEMA. (NYT, WaPo, CNN, LATimes.) From the New York Times story:

“Nearly three weeks after Hurricane Katrina cut its devastating path, FEMA – the same federal agency that botched the rescue mission – is faltering in its effort to aid hundreds of thousands of storm victims, local officials, evacuees and top federal relief officials say. The federal aid hot line mentioned by President Bush in his address to the nation on Thursday cannot handle the flood of calls, leaving thousands of people unable to get through for help, day after day.

Federal officials are often unable to give local governments permission to proceed with fundamental tasks to get their towns running again. Most areas in the region still lack federal help centers, the one-stop shopping sites for residents in need of aid for their homes or families. Officials say that they are uncertain whether they can meet the president’s goal of providing housing for 100,000 people who are now in shelters by the middle of next month. (…)

The president of St. Tammany Parish, Kevin Davis, is praying that it does not rain in his sweltering corner of Louisiana, because three weeks after the storm severely damaged his drainage system, FEMA has yet to give him approval to even start the repairs. Up north in the poor parish of Washington, residents are sleeping in houses that were chopped in half by oak trees. The promised wave of government inspectors have not shown up to assist them.

James McGehee, the mayor of Bogalusa, a small Louisiana city near the Mississippi border, could barely contain his rage in an interview on Thursday. “Today is 18 days past the storm, and FEMA has not even put a location for people who are displaced,” he said. “They are walking around the damn streets. The system’s broke.” (…)

In Tangipahoa Parish, the parish president, Gordon Burgess, said he called FEMA officials daily to ask when they would arrive to assist residents with housing. Mr. Burgess said the federal workers say, ” ‘I’ll get to you next week,’ and then the next week and then you’d never hear from them again.”

Indeed, almost every local leader interviewed – even those sympathetic to FEMA’s plight – complained that they could not get FEMA to approve their contracts with workers, tell them when they would be opening help centers or answer basic questions. Often, they say, the FEMA worker on the ground, eager to help, has to go up the chain of command before taking action, which can take days.

“People on the ground are wonderful but the problem is getting the ‘yes,’ ” said Mr. Davis of St Tammany parish, who has a contractor ready to clean his drainage system of the same trees FEMA allowed him to take off his streets, and to repair parts of the sewage system. “I’m saying, ‘Wait a minute, you pick up debris on the road but not the drainage?’ If it rains, I’ve got real problems. I just need someone to tell me make the public bids and I could rebuild our parish in no time.””

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by hilzoy

I agree with Edward that Bush may or may not have known that the electricity that illuminated his speech was turned off after he left. More generally, though, I don’t “wonder if the blame for the President’s obvious disconnect from reality shouldn’t be placed at the feet of his handlers.” For one thing, the President is an adult, and he is perfectly capable of asking his handlers questions, or for that matter turning on the news. For another, as far as I can tell, his disconnection from reality is caused by his failure to take steps that any competent manager would take to ensure that he knew what was going on.

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