Current Affairs

by Charles

Agence France Presse reports on a little espionage, most likely by the Chinese military:

A systematic effort by hackers to penetrate US government and industry computer networks stems most likely from the Chinese military, the head of a leading security institute said. The attacks have been traced to the Chinese province of Guangdong, and the techniques used make it appear unlikely to come from any other source than the military, said Alan Paller, the director of the SANS Institute, an education and research organization focusing on cybersecurity.

"These attacks come from someone with intense discipline. No other organization could do this if they were not a military organization," Paller said in a conference call to announced a new cybersecurity education program.

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by Charles

One word.  Productivity.  According to Reuters:

Non-farm business productivity rose a hefty 4.7% in the third quarter, fastest pace in two years and stronger than first reported, according to a government report Tuesday that could ease inflation worries.

This is on top of 3.2% and 2.1% increases in the first and second quarters, respectively.  More surprising is that this is happening in an economy that added 1,840,000 jobs in 2005.  Why is productivity growth important?  From the same article:

Productivity is a key factor that determines whether living standards are improving. Productivity gains allow companies to pay workers more from their increased production without having to increase the price of products they sell, which would fuel inflation.

It keeps inflation down and raises wages, GDP and living standards.  Brad DeLong has been observing this economic indicator for years (his March 2002 analysis is an example), and he has an interesting table that tracks productivity growth in four-year intervals, every first quarter of every presidential years since 1960 (via Arnold Kling).

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by hilzoy

Peter Gosselin had a very good story on reconstruction in New Orleans in yesterday’s LATimes. In it, he makes two different points, both of which are very important.

The first is that despite President Bush’s promises, the federal government has really failed to deliver a lot of badly needed assistance:

“But in recent weeks, a new reality has settled in as the agencies that were stepping up to help guide the city’s comeback have stepped back down again.

FEMA said it would stop covering the hotel costs of more than 50,000 households at the beginning of December — later extended until Jan. 7 — even while acknowledging that many, especially in New Orleans, would have trouble finding alternative accommodations.

Despite repeated pleas, the corps and the White House refused to promise any strengthening of the levees beyond what was underway. Investigators, meanwhile, concluded that several of the protective walls that failed did not meet corps-approved standards, a discovery that raised doubts about the safety of the entire levee system.

Emergency spending slowed sharply. The national flood insurance program temporarily suspended claims payments for Katrina, and program officials hinted broadly that they would tighten eligibility requirements to get coverage for the next storm.

Even the tiny agency charged with gauging the elevation of America’s ground added an unexpected hurdle. It quietly announced that New Orleans and environs had sunk more than anticipated, forcing it to replace all of its measuring sticks. The result is that New Orleanians will have to build higher to escape future floods.

With so many new strikes against it, the city’s recovery, already grindingly slow, has ground still slower. Three months after the storm, Entergy New Orleans, the bankrupt utility that serves the city, said that 55,000 of its 190,000 customers had resumed electrical service. Municipal officials estimate that less than one-third of the population has returned to live.

To an extent almost inconceivable a few months ago, the only real actors in the rebuilding drama at the moment are the city’s homeowners and business owners. To be sure, Washington is offering many relief payments, tax breaks and FEMA trailers. The city is speeding the approval of building permits. But for the rest, individual New Orleanians are struggling to come back largely under their own power, using mostly their own resources and negotiating their return substantially on their own terms.”

This is unconscionable all by itself. But it’s a lot worse given the second point: that rebuilding New Orleans is, in large part, the sort of collective action problem in which the government can play an absolutely crucial role. And its failure to step up to the plate means that it is not doing what only it can do to help solve that problem.

“”There is no market solution to New Orleans,” said Thomas C. Schelling of the University of Maryland, who won this year’s Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his analysis of the complicated bargaining behavior that underpins everything from simple sales to nuclear confrontations.

“It essentially is a problem of coordinating expectations,” Schelling said of the task that Vignaud and her neighbors must grapple with. “If we all expect each other to come back, we will. If we don’t, we won’t.

“But achieving this coordination in the circumstances of New Orleans,” he said, “seems impossible.””

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by hilzoy

The fact that Samuel Alito was a member of the Concerned Alumni of Princeton, and cited that fact on his 1985 job application, has been in the news recently; and it occurred to me that since I was a Princeton undergraduate (class of ’81) while CAP was active, I might be able to provide some useful background on this one.

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by hilzoy

On October 4, President Bush said this at a press conference:

“The policy decisions for a President in dealing with an avian flu outbreak are difficult. One example: If we had an outbreak somewhere in the United States, do we not then quarantine that part of the country, and how do you then enforce a quarantine? When — it’s one thing to shut down airplanes; it’s another thing to prevent people from coming in to get exposed to the avian flu. And who best to be able to effect a quarantine? One option is the use of a military that’s able to plan and move. And so that’s why I put it on the table. I think it’s an important debate for Congress to have.”

When he made that remark, I thought: the idea of using quarantines in the face of the threat of disease is exactly the sort of idea that might occur to some people for bad reasons, and perhaps be opposed by others for equally bad reasons, especially in the face of an emerging infectious disease. Just think back to the early 1980s, when AIDS first hit the news: there were all sorts of calls for quarantines; kids with AIDS were prevented from going to school or, in one case, allowed to sit in a glass box in the classroom; and so on and so forth. This was a completely inappropriate reaction to AIDS: for reasons that will become clear later, AIDS is a terrible candidate for quarantine. Nonetheless, they were very common then (and some people still advocate them to this day.)

It seemed to me that it would be a very good idea to write something about quarantines and the circumstances in which they can and should be used, so that as many people as possible outside fields like public health will already have thought about them before the need arises and emotions get heated. That way, there will be more people scattered about the general populace who can assess calls for quarantines if avian flu or some other new and dangerous infectious disease hits. And the more such people there are, the less likely we will be to do something stupid.

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by Charles

With riots in France (mostly by Muslims) in their eleventh day twelfth night, more than several have wondered who is to blame.  Obviously, the rioters themselves are responsible for breaking the law.  But what about the many rioters protesters who didn’t and don’t?  The deaths of two teenagers aren’t the only reason for this now-daily event, especially now that it’s taken on a weird kind of momentum of its own.  Other reasons cited have been Islamist dogma, Euro multiculturalism, poor assimilation, feckless law enforcement, bad architecture, and welfare state living conditions.  It’s surely a combination of the above, but Shannon Love writes persuasively that the French welfare state is the root cause:

The short answer is that human beings are not cows. Cows are quite content if their material needs are met but people have hopes, dreams and aspirations. It is precisely these psychological benefits that the welfare state ultimately cannot provide. People are rioting not because they are deprived of material benefits but because they are wholly dependent on the whims of others for the benefits they do receive. They have no status and no control. It is these social, psychological and spiritual deprivations that they are ultimately striking out against.

Advocates of the welfare state are driven by an overwhelming need to provide economic security and stability. Unfortunately, they will not acknowledge the inherent inverse relationship between security and stability on one hand and economic growth, mobility and creativity on the other. Anything done to increase pay, benefits and job security for people who have jobs now makes it more difficult for people without jobs to get them. Over the course of decades, this situation creates enormous structural unemployment. High unemployment drives the expansion of the welfare state further, increasing taxes, which slows the economy which drives higher unemployment and the feedback loop is closed. By creating a stagnant economic system focused on the security and well being of those that have, it chokes off any hope for those that have not. The welfare state grants security today by sacrificing tomorrow. Sacrificing tomorrow kills hope and that is what ultimately leads to rioting.

(Updates below the fold)

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by hilzoy

Kevin Drum just wrote a post on the Bush administration’s idea for health care reform: Health Savings Accounts. I wanted to expand on what he said, since HSAs are a Very Bad Idea, and it’s worth knowing why.

The basic idea behind health savings accounts is simple. You get a health insurance policy that is, ideally, cheaper, but has a much higher deductible. In Kevin’s example, the deductible is $2,000; he suggests that such a policy would be $2,000 cheaper, but that’s wrong. CNN reports:

“According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, premiums for an employer-sponsored family plan averaged $9,068 in 2003, with workers kicking in $2,412. The premiums on a high-deductible plan will run you 20 to 40 percent less, estimates Herschman.”

If you have such a policy, you or your employer can deposit money in a tax-sheltered account. The idea is that this account will cover some or all of the health care costs you run up before you hit the deductible. Since you will have to pay for the first few thousand dollars of your health care costs, the proponents of HSAs argue, you will be motivated to be a good consumer, and use no more health care than you need. In this way, health care spending will be driven down.

Sounds good, right? A nice, market-oriented solution to a serious problem. (And the idea that liberals are hostile to market-oriented solutions, in general, hasn’t been true for at least fifteen years.) However, this is just one more illustration of Hilzoy’s First Rule of Policy Wonkery: Never, ever rely on slogans instead of looking at the details*.

First, under the Bush administration proposals, employer contributions to HSAs are optional. That means that the account you supposedly get to use to pay your medical bills below the deductible might not exist. You could put the money you save into it, but as noted above, those savings will not cover the whole difference in the deductible. If they don’t, you’ll just pay more.

Second, HSAs will not, in fact, lower health care spending overall. The best study on the issue concludes that “health spending would change by +1% to -2%.” One reason, as Kevin notes, is this:

“the vast bulk of healthcare dollars are spent on people who are extremely sick and quickly blow past even a large deductible anyway. Since HSAs don’t affect that spending at all, it means that, at best, their effect on the total cost of healthcare is probably pretty negligible.”

It’s worth being clear about this. To that end, I have created my first ever chart using Excel (I am so proud), from data found here (see Exhibit 1.11):

[UPDATE: OK, I blew my chart. Darn. Along the y axis, it should say: percent of health care spending. The idea being that the 1% of the population who spend most on health care account for 22.3% of all health care spending, and so on.]

The top 50% of health care spenders will probably breeze right by their deductible, and will thus be completely impervious to HSAs’ incentives to save money. Any health care savings will have to be gained from the bottom 50% (or from people who will be in the top 50% but don’t yet realize it.) But the bottom 50% accounts for only 3.4% of health care spending. This means that this proposal leaves the overwhelming majority of health care spending absolutely untouched.

More problems below the fold.

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by hilzoy

Here’s the sort of story that makes me love the Washington Post, and all other newspapers that have staffs large enough that they can cover interesting topics in obscure places. It’s on gay rights activists in Namibia:

“As a boy of 14, Petrus Gurirab worried that he was gay. Seeking advice from a trustworthy adult, he went to see a teacher who had treated him kindly.

“I have feelings for other boys,” Gurirab recalled telling her. “Like love feelings.” There was a long silence.

“My advice is that it’s not African” to be gay, the teacher replied, using a slur for the term. “Ignore those feelings and try girls.”

She also apparently gossiped with colleagues. Other teachers started teasing Gurirab, asking him why he didn’t play soccer and why he spent so much time around his mother. Then one morning, he said, the gym teacher invited him into his office, locked the door and forced him onto the desk for sex.

“Let’s see how good you are at it,” the teacher said, according to Gurirab, now 25, who recounted the story through tears. The ordeal left his legs and arms with red bruises. The next day, distraught and confused, he had sex with a female classmate.”

I’m sure she had a marvelous time. Back to the story:

“”I wanted to change so badly and not be gay . . . but I couldn’t,” he said. “I knew I liked men. I decided I would kill myself. . . . I was so desperate I called a lifeline in London. They saved my life.”

Un-African. Un-Christian. Anti-family. Witchcraft.

In many African countries, being gay is considered all of those things. It is also illegal in most of them, so taboo that a conviction for homosexual acts may bring more jail time than rape or murder. Only in South Africa is being gay widely accepted and protected by law. From Uganda, where homosexuality is punishable by life imprisonment, to Sierra Leone, where a lesbian activist was raped and stabbed to death at her desk last year, homophobia has long trapped gays in a dangerous, closeted life. With no places to meet openly, no groups to join, it seems sometimes that gay men and lesbians in Africa don’t exist at all.

But in Namibia, a growing national debate about homosexuality has followed a period of harsh condemnation, and gay rights groups now operate openly in the capital, Windhoek. One of them is the Rainbow Project, where Gurirab works as a suicide prevention counselor. The organization has interviewed gay Africans from across the continent, and its leaders say they believe the time is right to challenge prejudices and start a wider discussion on what being gay really means. “The only answer is education,” said Linda Baumann, 21, who grew up in a tribal community and was expelled from it when she revealed she was a lesbian. She now lives in Windhoek and hosts a radio program about gay issues. “We have to have courage and stick up for ourselves.””

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by hilzoy

I never did write more about bird flu. (Short version: the person in charge of the federal response is unqualified; despite the fact that the GAO has been urging (pdf) the government to finish its response plan since 2000, it still isn’t finished; and the NYT, which has seen a copy of the latest version of the plan, reports that it “shows that the United States is woefully unprepared for what could become the worst disaster in the nation’s history”, as well as failing to address such crucial questions as who would be in charge. Great.)

Tonight, I want to write about an important background issue: public health spending. Via Effect Measure, here’s an article in Government Health IT:

“As state and local health departments gear up to battle a possible avian flu outbreak, they face a sharp cut in funding from the Department of Health and Human Services. However, the loss could be fixed through funds intended to cover the costs of controlling a pandemic, added as an amendment to the 2006 Defense Department Appropriations bill.

“Critical funding is shrinking just as public health agencies are being required to expand their work in pandemic influenza preparation and response,” said Dr. Rex Archer, health director of Kansas City, Mo., and president of the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO).

The Bush administration, in its proposed 2006 HHS budget, slashed funding for public health preparedness by $129 million — from $926 million in 2005 to $797 million. The House version of the 2006 HHS bill appropriates $853 million while the Senate bill sticks with the$797 million requested by the administration.

Donna Brown, government affairs counsel at NACCHO, said those state and local preparedness funds provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), an HHS agency, are used for a wide range of activities by local health departments, including information technology and disease surveillance systems.

“We need robust electronic information systems to detect disease outbreaks,” Brown said, including surveillance systems that can alert local public health officials to potential flu symptoms. Those would be critical to helping combat a pandemic.

Congress should not be cutting preparedness funds as “we face a potential health emergency,” Brown said. He believes Congress should reverse any cuts proposed by the administration. The Senate and House HHS bills are still in conference and need to be passed by Nov. 15, when a continuing resolution to fund government operations in fiscal 2006 expires.”

Well, no, of course it shouldn’t. But, also of course, it is.

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Well the argument has now surpassed farce and entered a realm so surreal we’ll need poets to make sense of it all for us. In a nation built on two important premises—1) that all people are created equal and 2) that all people share the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—it’s now become acceptable to say that our government (one of, for, and by these same equal people) should give advance warning of a terrorist strike to our wealthy citizens before our other citizens. Wealth is now openly discussed as a justifiable criteria for putting citizens at head of the queue for the lifeboats. Wealth alone.

This my friends is FUBAR.

Media Matters reprints the text of a program by right-wing radio host Neal Boortz. Here is the bulk of it:

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by Edward

UPDATE: As readers Mason and Kyle Hasselbacher gently pointed out in the comments, this proposed legislation has been dropped. I’ll leave my rant up all the same…feel free to wander off topic if you like though.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Like the Alabama Republican State Representative who wanted to ban all books from public schools that were either written by gay authors or featured gay characters, this latest proposal by Indiana Republicans will most likely be dismissed as the sort of thing the GOP doesn’t really stand for by some, I know. And I’m sure that’s fair. It’s just that there seems to be an alarming number of like-minded GOPers getting elected these days.

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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 Charles

With all of the budgetary numbers flying around in the wake of Katrina, I did a little number crunching myself, but rather than just see the short term, I looked back the last twenty five years in five-year increments and then looked forward to 2010 (full disclosure:  I’m a CPA by training, not an economist).  Given the longer perspective, there are both encouraging and excouraging aspects to our fiscal future.  First, the spreadsheet, using CBO historical and projected figures:

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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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So I’ve been over at RedState having the same tired argument I’ve been having for years now about how insulting it is as a gay American to be told we’re not being treated like a second-class citizen with regards to the marriage issue because our right to marry is intact. We just have to marry someone of the opposite sex.

I understand that most folks who are on the fence tend to withdraw from the argument, back into a more conservative stance, if the rhetoric gets too heated (that’s natural, I realize), but I’ve got to get this out of my system once and for all.

Again, the argument forwarded by those opposed to gay marriage when the subject turns to rights is that the state is not denying gay Americans any rights, because we’re just as entitled to marry someone of the opposite sex as the next American is.

To support this claim, however, they must then explain why it is that intimacy is not a requirement for a marriage to be considered "valid" in this country. In other words, marriages of convenience are legal, and if a gay American wants the benefits of marriage, no one will stop them from getting married (even to a stranger, even someone they have no intention of consummating the relationship with, or even living with) in order to secure those benefits.

This implies that the state places no value on the emotional commitment of the couple to each other, at least not enough to legislate against loveless marriage between strangers. And since that is legal, so the arguments go, gays are not being discriminated against.

There’s a small problem with that, however, in that the state does in at least one instance make it crystal clear that loveless marriage between strangers is not equal to marriage between a committed couple. That instance is when one of the spouses is not a citizen. In those instances, the couple must prove to the government that theirs is a "real" marriage, that they entered into marriage in "good faith":

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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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