For the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, _Governing_ sent Christopher Swope to the Mississippi coast to evaluate how far the region had come in the intervening year. “His assessment”:http://governing.com/articles/9miss.htm (not very far, largely due to continuing federal incompetence) is the fairest I’ve seen, and the fairest to CNU’s role. In an “interview”:http://www.governing.com/articles/9missqa.htm he says that he was initially skeptical that the charettes (sic) were more publicity stunt (although even if they were that, taking such substantive action early on did establish the appearance of momentum) than an actual commitment, but was glad to find otherwise.

For the most thorough coverage, of course, the Biloxi “Sun-Herald”:http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/news/special_packages/renewal/ and New Orleans “Times-Picayune”:http://www.nola.com/recovery/ continue their well-deserved Pulitzer-winning coverage of how plans are proceeding.

You, too, can be insulted by North Korea’s news agency, thanks to the NK News Random Insult Generator. I got: _You politically illiterate hooligan, we will transform your country into a sea of fire!_ Sounds even better read in a “South Park” voice.

The best summation I could find of l’affaire Foley, from an anonymous poster to the St. Pete Times’ Buzz blog: “Republican Leadership appoints pedophile to lead caucus on exploited children”

Okay, Foley’s closet door has been ajar for a while, and after “Jim West”:http://www.spokesmanreview.com/jimwest we expect nothing less than weirdly inhibited pederastic cybersex from any single, male Republican elected official of a certain age. What’s shocking here is not the crime, but the coverup: the GOP leadership was confronted with this a year ago and yet believed his denials, right up until ABC News forced Foley’s hand.

In any case, the transcripts are mildly amusing, but “the video”:http://www.wonkette.com/politics/mark-foley/foley-on-abc-204362.php is hilarious.

The _Washington Monthly_ has a puff piece this month about government websites for children. For reasons that date back to a Clinton Administration memo setting guidelines for web content, most Federal agencies have a special “For Kids” section of their sites. What really caught my eye in the article, though, was Rex, a disturbingly hunky mountain lion (aren’t even big cats rather lithe creatures?) who apparently enjoys cartography and speaks on behalf of (naturally) “Homeland Security’s Ready.gov”:http://www.ready.gov/kids/family/dad.html .

Sadly, though, even Rex probably has to put up with the ridiculous farce of the TSA. From the acidly correct “Boyd Group”:http://www.aviationplanning.com/asrc1.htm airline consultancy:

The negligent people running the TSA have ignored the threat of liquid explosive detection for years. Right after 9/11, technologies were discussed that could ascertain if that bottle in the Samsonite was mouthwash, nitro, or a bottle of cheap hooch. But the TSA ignored them, because the TSA is a political bureaucracy run by incompetents who have had no anticipatory plan to counter anything.

Prime Example: Richard Reid sticks explosives in his shoe. The TSA reacts by requiring shoes to be put through a metal detector. A metal detector that can’t detect explosives. So, now we’re all going to be sitting on airplanes, with no chapstick, no make-up, no lip gloss, and no mascara. Unless the terrorist is a part-time hooker, this won’t do anything except make the coach cabin even less attractive…

The TSA’s idea of security is “target removal” – not counter-measures to protect our way of life. The idea is that if something can conceivably be used as a terrorist device, or if something might be a target, the philosophy is to simply remove it. It’s like circling the wagons tighter and tighter to make a smaller target. Not defending territory, but ceding it to terrorism.

Remember, too, that Kip Hawley, Michael Chertoff and the rest of these security cub scouts have no plan, no goals, no ideas about what to do next. So jumping into that intellectual vacuum we have the congressional likes of Reps Markey, Wyden, and Israel, et al., all of whom have their own crackpot, short-term, and generally inept ideas of how security should look… [W]hat we see today are not security measures. They are the actions of government officials who are totally clueless and essentially are having their strings pulled by events…

Instead of making us safer by crafting anticipative [sic] counter-measures to terrorism, and instead of developing programs that protect and defend our way of life, Chertoff, Hawley, and – deal with it – the entire Bush Administration have no plan except to have us run faster and faster away whenever there’s a threat.

John Allen Paulos writes for ABC News about Cheney’s “One Percent Doctrine”:

bq. A companion to the Cheney 1 percent action doctrine (if the probability is at least 1 percent, act) is the administration’s non-action doctrine (if the probability is less than 99 percent, then don’t act). This latter doctrine is generally invoked in discussions of global warming, where it seems absolute certainty is required to justify any significant action. Ideology determines which of these two inconsistent doctrines to invoke.

There was one other set of camera crews dancing around the Billionaires for Bush “this past March”:https://westnorth.com/2006/03/19/15-seconds-of-fame/ — a British crew filming, they said, for a “documentary” about the antiwar movement. However, upon further inspection, it turned out to be more like a docudrama for a project they called “DOAP.” Hmm: sure sounds like “Death of a President,”:http://www.e.bell.ca/filmfest/2006/films_schedules/films_description.asp?id=88 which has “the blogs”:http://technorati.com/search/%22death%20of%20a%20president%22 as excited as they were about “Snakes on a Plane.”

A recent Pew Center poll done just as _An Inconvenient Truth_ was opening nationally finds, not surprisingly, that Americans don’t care about global warming. Or does it?

bq. “41% say global warming is a very serious problem, 33% see it as somewhat serious and roughly a quarter (24%) think it is either not too serious or not a problem at all.”

That puts global warming 19th among 20 issues ranked. However, a very strong partisan pattern emerges here: although it’s dead last among Republicans, it ranks 14th for both Democrats and independents, above such “hot button” issues as government surveillance, flag burning, abortion, the inheritance tax, and gay marriage, and about the same as the budget deficit and immigration.

However, there’s still hope: the better informed people are about global warming, the more likely they are to take it seriously. (Perhaps that’s tautological, but I sure hope not.)

bq. But across party lines, those who say human activity such as the burning of fossil fuels has driven global warming rate the issue as far more serious. Fully 71% of Democrats who say human activity has caused temperatures to rise rate it as a very serious problem, along with 54% of Republicans who hold the same belief… [Overall,]fully two-thirds of those who say human activity has made the earth hotter rate it as a very serious problem, compared with just 31% who see the earth warming but attribute it to natural patterns in the earth’s environment.

What’s more, those “on our side” believe that we can do something about it:

bq. Fully 80% of those who attribute climate change to human activity say the effects can be reduced, compared with just 48% of those who say rising temperatures are a natural pattern in the earth’s environment.

The public also strongly disapproves of how Bush is handling global warming, giving him a 26% approval rating on the subject — below his 32-33% approval rating on immigration, the economy, and the environment as a whole. In fact, the 26% approval rating neatly matches his approval rating on energy policy (which could easily be tied to global warming) and the 30% of Americans who either don’t believe in global warming or don’t know about it.

(Edit: this is post # “888”:http://www.feng-shui-architects.com/articles-fengshuinumerology.htm. Doesn’t make me feel any wealthier.)

Surprisingly, the front page headlines in San Antonio last week included a $6 billion school tax-swap deal (“latest news collected by TexasISD.com”:http://www.texasisd.com/cat_index_11.shtml ) that’s rapidly moving through the state legislature with the governor’s backing. The plan would cut school property taxes by a promised one-third by raising business income and cigarette taxes and using part of the state’s $8 billion surplus. (I don’t know how much of that surplus is recurring revenue, or how the state is doing so well in the first place.) Texas, like Illinois, has traditionally paid for schools mostly with local property taxes rather than statewide taxes, but unlike Illinois has no state personal income tax whatsoever.

Of course, the activist judges at the Texas Supreme Court provided an impetus and deadline (1 June) for reform with _Neeley, et al. v. West Orange-Cove Consolidated Independent School District, et al._, just as judges have instigated most statewide school funding reform efforts that shift away from property taxes. Yet if Texas can do it…

A letter I wrote at Salon.com responding to “Garrison Keillor’s latest column”:http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/04/05/keillor/index.html (“The people who are getting reamed by this administration are people under 30, and they are, like, OK with that… Flowers will bloom in whatever wreckage we make. Take the day off, dear reader, and ignore the world and let the president play his fiddle. If that be ignorance, make the most of it.”) received an Editor’s Choice star:

bq. Well, I suppose that no one under 30 (at least among fellow commenters) has a sense of humor, or has experienced the rebirth of a Midwestern spring the likes of what I see outside. Even the sullen office drones streaming onto the sidewalks have a sense of purpose and camaraderie in their strides, a vast change from the downward shuffles and anxious sighs of last month’s parting blizzards.

bq. I’ve tried several times to politically mobilize other young people in my trendy city neighborhood. People here have a vague and frightfully cynical notion of politics, but alarmingly few are invested in it or even believe that anything could change. Our generation has been raised on a steady diet of distrust or even disbelief in government, society, and community, in any form of collective action, and after all that it’s tough not to retreat into a hedonistic, individualist shell. The countless, 24/7 distraction available makes it even simpler to not reach out.

bq. In any case, this column falls along the lines of Keillor’s “We’re All Republicans Now” songs. Those as thoroughly dispossesed of political power as we Democrats might find it temporarily uplifting to turn the tables and laugh at the ridiculousness of it all, to find new inspiration for why we fight, and to learn new ways to connect with one another.

So it might not be the best source, but Levitt & Dubner (in their latest Times Magazine piece) cite a poll saying that Americans just might understand Holmes’ notion that “taxes are the price we pay for civilization”:

bq. In an independent poll conducted last year for the I.R.S. Oversight Board, 96 percent of the respondents agreed with the statement “It is every American’s civic duty to pay their fair share of taxes,” while 93 percent agreed that everyone “who cheats on their taxes should be held accountable.”