I’ll leave it to you to discern the “run around” awaiting us in Dubbys speech today as illustrated in the first two articles. Rural communities are of interest to me — I belong to an energy co-op, and we don’t depend on coal. As usual, those who are the least able to cope financially are the ones who depend on the less than stellar environmental choices … third world countries aren’t in a position to do cutting edge technology, which is why we need global leadership and assistance to bring about positive changes.
The second article discusses the energy problem without taking into account the poor or the struggling, who continue to make due as best they can. Pandering to the needs and wishes of retiree’s may be the “for the moment” issue, but the retired are the last generation to have dependable retirement funds or insurance rates. Those coming along right after have a different experience of life. The last sentence in the second article tells us where we are, with no 21st century options on the table:
“I don’t think the political community wants to take out the knife and commit hara-kiri.”
The third article here is highly recommended and revealing, with gas over $3 — $4 in San Francisco — and polls reporting that the majority of us are expecting them to top $4 and stay there [which implies permission.]
I think it’s time to get a bike. Obviously, we can’t just go out with a can and tap the pipeline [although apparently they can do that in Iraq.]
Jude
Bush said ready to announce new U.S. air pollution regulations
JENNIFER LOVEN, AP
May 14, 2007
WASHINGTON — President George W. Bush responded to a Supreme Court environmental ruling by settling on regulatory changes that do not need U.S. congressional approval, the White House said Monday.
Bush is announcing the steps he is directing his administration to take in a White House appearance later Monday.
Last month, the high court rebuked his administration for its inaction on global warming. In a 5-4 decision, it declared that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases qualify as air pollutants under the Clean Air Act and thus can be regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency.
The court also said that the “laundry list” of reasons the administration has given for declining to do so are insufficient, and that the agency must regulate carbon dioxide, the leading gas linked to global warming, it finds that it endangers public health.
Democrats who took control of Congress in January from Bush’s Republican Party have been pressuring the administration to say when it will comply with the high court’s ruling and decide whether to regulate carbon dioxide, the leading gas linked to global warming.
Bush has said previously that he recognized the serious environmental problems created by such emissions and other so-called greenhouse gases. But he has urged against anything other than a voluntary approach to curbing emissions, saying regulations could undercut economic activity. The president also says he will accept no global deal on greenhouse gases without the participation of China, India and other high-polluting, developing nations.
In his State of the Union address in January, Bush set a goal of reducing gas consumption by 20 percent over 10 years. Under his plan, this would be accomplished by increasing the use of alternative fuels to 35 billion gallons (133 billion liters) by 2017 and boosting fuel efficiency standards in new vehicles.
White House press secretary Tony Snow said the president’s new announcement is “his latest effort to ensure that the nation’s taking aggressive steps to reduce gas consumption and to reduce dependence on foreign energy sources.”
“He will ask the administration to start implementing the 20-in-10 program through regulatory action,” Snow said. “At the same time, he will continue to urge Congress to pass legislation to advance the goal.”
Democrats who control Congress have been pressuring the administration to say when it will comply with the high court’s ruling and decide whether to regulate carbon dioxide, the leading gas linked to global warming. ++
Federal Loans for Coal Plants Clash With Carbon Cuts
Steven Mufson, Washington Post
Monday, May 14, 2007; Front page
A Depression-era program to bring electricity to rural areas is using taxpayer money to provide billions of dollars in low-interest loans to build coal plants even as Congress seeks ways to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
That government support is a major force behind the rush to coal plants, which spew carbon dioxide that scientists blame for global warming.
The beneficiaries of the government’s largesse — the nation’s rural electric cooperatives — plan to spend $35 billion to build conventional coal plants over the next 10 years, enough to offset all state and federal efforts to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions over that time.
The Office of Management and Budget wants to end loans for new power plants and limit loans for transmission projects in the most remote rural areas. But the powerful National Rural Electric Cooperative Association deployed 3,000 members on Capitol Hill last week to push Congress to keep the program intact, arguing that the loans for new coal plants are needed to keep electricity cheap and reliable in rural areas.
Environmentalists have also targeted the program. They say it removes any pressure for the rural co-ops to promote energy efficiency or aggressively tap renewable resources. Rural co-ops rely on coal for 80 percent of their electricity, compared with 50 percent for the rest of the country, and electricity demand at rural co-ops is growing at twice the national rate.
The money comes from the Agriculture Department’s Rural Utilities Service, an outgrowth of the Rural Electrification Administration created in 1935 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to bring electricity to farms. More than 70 years later, the goal of providing electricity to rural areas has long been accomplished, but the federal government is still making the subsidized loans.
Rural-utility cooperatives are owned by their customers; they are nonprofit organizations. There are more than 800 co-ops that distribute electricity and more than 50 that own power-generating plants.
James R. Newby, assistant administrator of the Rural Utilities Service, estimates that federal loan rates are 2 to 2.25 percentage points lower than the rates for commercial loans. Some budget experts say the favorable federal loans have reduced the cost of new power generation by 15 percent.
But many of the utility co-ops that are considered rural provide electricity to expanding suburbs, such as the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area, the Atlanta area and parts of Northern Virginia. Others are expanding to meet growing commercial, residential and tourism demands. And some are facing demands from the growing number of ethanol plants, blunting the climate-related benefits of producing ethanol.
“Rather than declare the mission accomplished and disband the expensive subsidy program, Congress continued it and allowed it to become even more generous,” a 2004 Heritage Foundation report said.
Ronald D. Utt, co-author of the report and a former official at the OMB, calls the program a “remnant of the New Deal.” “Poverty is no longer a characteristic of the agricultural community as it was during the Depression . . . and as areas have grown, the basic clientele are well-to-do people who have nothing to do with agriculture,” Utt said. Many of the areas served by co-ops are densely populated and do not need help, critics say.
James J. Jura, chief executive of Associated Electric Cooperative, a co-op that has both government and commercial loans, said much of his region’s growth comes from retirement and recreational developments near lakes around Branson in southwest Missouri. The town’s Web site boasts of a 17-story luxury condominium complex, a new shopping mall, 17,000 hotel rooms and dozens of theaters. “No, this isn’t Manhattan or Las Vegas; it’s Branson, Missouri,” the site says.
Glenn English, chief executive of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, said rural areas still need help to meet growing power demands at reasonable costs and that burning coal makes sense. He said per capita income of co-op members and consumers is 15 percent below the national average.
The key to the longevity of the Agriculture Department’s programs for rural utilities has been the co-ops’ powerful political voice. More than 30,000 members gave an average of $41 last year to the co-op association for political contributions. Given their geographic scope, the co-ops can mobilize letter-writing campaigns across a vast number of states and congressional districts.
Rural utilities often assume broader roles in local economies. One co-op, English said, reopened a gas station that went out of business. Another, he said, bought and kept open a beloved Dairy Queen.
“Sometimes they can take over functions even local government can’t,” said English, a former Democratic congressman. And that, he said, can help keep people from moving away from places like his home town of Cordell, Okla., where the population, now about 3,000, peaked in the late 1920s.
Although presidents over the years have tried to curtail the rural-electricity lending program, it has survived, proving one of the basic laws of legislative thermodynamics: Creating a government program is easier than killing one.
This year is no exception. In his fiscal 2008 budget, President Bush asked Congress to tighten lending rules for rural co-ops. Reps. Allen Boyd (D-Fla.) and Frank D. Lucas (R-Okla.) are gathering signatures for a letter asking that the low-cost government loans be continued.
English chalks it up to “political gamesmanship.” “Congress knows that the president expects them to restore that money so that it doesn’t look like he’s the big spender,” he said. “So Congress will tweak it and get it back to where the president wanted it in the first place.”
Among those asking for federal loans:
- The Seminole Electric Cooperative in Tampa is planning a $1.8 billion, 750-megawatt coal plant that would boost the utility’s generating capacity by 60 percent. The co-op applied for a $1.4 billion loan. If approved, the interest rate for the heavily indebted co-op, which Standard & Poor’s says has less than a month’s worth of cash, would be as low as the rates for the most rock-solid corporate bonds.
- A group of rural cooperatives plans to build two, 700-megawatt plants in western Kansas.
- The East Kentucky Power Cooperative — which is fighting the Justice Department over alleged violations of the Clean Air Act — has received approval for Rural Utilities Service loans to pay for new coal-fired capacity.
English acknowledged that global warming has shifted the debate. But, he said, any climate change legislation should show leniency toward the rural co-ops. “Rural electric generating cooperatives . . . are in economic situations that make it very hard for them to invest in cutting-edge technologies,” he wrote in a letter to the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
English is quick to point out that taxable utilities get tax breaks to encourage wind farms or more-efficient coal plants, and that municipal utilities can sell tax-exempt bonds to raise money cheaply. English wants Congress to give the nonprofit, tax-exempt rural utilities similar incentives, such as no-interest loans.
In March, 10,000 rural-utility executives and spouses attended their annual meeting in Las Vegas. Guests included former CIA director R. James Woolsey Jr., former NFL coach Mike Ditka and singer Charlie Daniels.
English rallied the association’s members to fight proposed laws on climate change that might hurt the rural co-ops. Such proposals would mean higher electricity rates, he said, and that would anger voters.
“So are we supposed to tell members of Congress that you’ve got to be willing to sacrifice your seat for the sake of energy efficiency?” he said. “I don’t think the political community wants to take out the knife and commit hara-kiri.” ++
S/W FI “Freedom” Index Hits 51-Year Low
Chris Kelly, HuffPo
05.11.2007
You would think, when the new S/W FI numbers come out, and they’re as bad as this, that the mainstream media would hold someone responsible. But, so far, nothing.
Maybe it’s because the average person doesn’t understand the S/W FI. Or doesn’t think it effects them. But whose fault is that?
Whenever gas prices hit what sounds like a new record — this week it was $3.05 — journalists seem to be contractually obligated to point out that it isn’t really as bad as you think.
They can cite some time or other when it was worse, either in the 70s, by adjusting the number for inflation, or the 1700s, because internal combustion hadn’t been invented yet, and the only way to travel using gasoline was to set fire to your horse.
(I’m not clear on how that’s supposed to make you feel better about being gouged. Maybe gas cost more one weekend in 1973, but Mary Tyler Moore was on TV. That was a funny show. You could stay home and watch that.)
(Also, it’s kind of a cheat to factor in inflation when comparing gas prices, since gas prices are one of the factors that drive inflation. When the price of gas goes up, the price of everything goes up, which means, comparatively, gas stays the same. It just costs more.)
(It’s a little like saying my pants fit me just as well as they did when I was eight, because every time I gained weight I bought bigger pants.)
This is why economists calculate the true cost of gasoline using S/W FI. By this measure, gas prices are more than twice what they were in the early 70s, and almost three times higher than they were in the late 60s. In fact, they’re at their highest levels since the Federal government started collecting the relevant data.
The S/W FI is generated by measuring the consumer-cost of a gallon of gasoline against the hourly minimum wage, multiplying that by the fuel efficiency of the average car (expressed as a constant) and expressing the result in miles.
For example, in 1956, when the minimum wage was a dollar, gas cost thirty cents a gallon, which made the S/W FI 66.6 miles. A worker making minimum wage for an hour could relax by driving in circles for sixty-six miles. Which was what you did in 1956.
In 1968, the minimum wage was $1.60 and gas cost thirty-four cents. Which meant an hour’s work purchased 94 miles of tooling around.
When Bush took office, the minimum wage was $5.15 and gas cost $1.56. So the S/W FI was 66 miles. Roughly the same as in 1956, which was also where he promised to return America culturally, intellectually, and in terms of race relations.
This week, gas costs $3.05 and the minimum wage is $5.15. The S/W FI is 33.6 miles. Half of what it was at the end of the Clinton years. A third of what it was thirty years ago.
Here’s why it feels like you don’t have any money, even though talk radio says you do: Because you don’t.
Why don’t more people report on the S/W FI? Because I just made it up this morning.
But it’s still at least as valid as that newspaper ad from the Petroleum Institute with the cut-up dollar, showing that they don’t make much money, after the money they pay themselves.
And it’s at least as relevant as when Rush Limbaugh says liberals ignore the great news about the economy, like when Standard & Poor’s is up.
I think the S/W FI — or Springsteen/Wilson Freedom Index — is a pretty good measure of quality of life. Which is why I named it after Bruce Springsteen and Brian Wilson. In America, your freedom can be measured by how much leisure (driving around) you earn from how much labor (working a crappy job).
If you don’t believe me, ask every rock song ever written.
–
The Springsteen/Wilson Index
Minimum Wage (in miles)
2007 33.6 miles
2004 53.6 miles
2000 66 miles
1996 69.2 miles
1992 71.4 miles
1988 69.6 miles
1984 51.6 miles
1980 50.8 miles
1976 77.8 miles
1972 88.8 miles
1968 94 miles
1964 83.2 miles
1960 64.4 miles
1956 66.6 miles
Sources: Energy Information Administration / US Department of Labor
Your mileage may vary. ++
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
May 14th, 2007
The government can run, but it can’t hide on the National Guard question — the military and governors have yelped about the flagging numbers of National Guardsmen that respond to emergencies in this country, and complained about the equipment that has gone to Iraq, probably in some junk pile as the wars insatiable appetite gobbles up machinery. And where’s the funding to replace it? You can say the Dubby hasn’t accomplished much in a positive way during his tenure, but you have to give him kudos for making HUGE progress in the “government drowned in a bathtub” projection. We’re going to see the fruits of that success in the coming months.
It’s a beautiful day in the Pea Patch today, coming after a long string of not-so-good ones. Kinda reminds me how Spring USED to be. I’ll drink in this day, but I’m not counting on an uninterrupted season of them, like I used to … I’ve seen the changes, I know they’re here. We’re poised on hurricane season, we have fires going in many places, the tornado’s aren’t done even though they started several months early. I’m enjoying the day mindful that a couple of hundred miles north, any number of homes are underwater due to levee failures and flooding of the Missouri river. There will be more weather emergencies — who will deal with them?
There was a day, not so long ago, when the military was available to assist with matters at home. No longer, what with Dubbys wars, but we could relax with the notion that we could count on the Guard, which is in the tradition of a citizens militia. That has been used as if it were a professional military arm for years now, lives disrupted and families separated. The Pubs argue that we have enough numbers here in the states and the Blue shouldn’t get so hysterical. But we watched Katrina, day by day, and know their assurances mean squat.
Yeah, that Dubby is a real Cabal success story — he never asked us to sacrifice for the wars, he just told us to shut up and shop while he filled the bathtub he planned to drown us in.
The Guard — the reads. In the last article, Louisiana Gov. Blanco illustrates the problem for those who think “it’ll all work out.”
Jude
Retired general says Iraq strain on National Guard will harm U.S. communities
AP
May 12, 2007
WASHINGTON — The National Guard isn’t as strong as it should be because of the war in Iraq and American communities will suffer as a result, retired Air Force Gen. Melvyn Montano said Saturday.
Delivering the Democrats’ weekly radio address, Montano said the strain means it will take longer for Greensburg, Kan., to recover from a devastating tornado that leveled the town a week ago.
“Crucial equipment used by the Guard for disaster relief is now in Iraq instead of standing ready to respond to crises here at home,” said Montano, who was once adjutant general of the New Mexico National Guard.
“When the tornado struck Kansas last week, the Guard had half the number of Humvees and large trucks they usually would have at their disposal,” Montano said. “The recovery process now will take longer.”
Montano echoed Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, a Democrat, who clashed with the Bush administration this week. “I don’t think there is any question if you are missing trucks, Humvees and helicopters that the response (to the tornado) is going to be slower,” she said Monday. “The real victims here will be the residents of Greensburg, because the recovery will be at a slower pace.”
Sebelius later said the Guard was adequately equipped to handle the disaster, though possible flooding in another part of the state would have forced her to make hard choices about where to send aid. ++
Governors say war has gutted Guard
States fear lack of disaster response
Kirsten Scharnberg, Chicago Tribune
May 13, 2007
As wildfires, floods and tornadoes batter the nation, the readiness of the National Guard to deal with those disasters, as well as potential terrorist assaults, is so depleted by deployments to foreign wars and equipment shortfalls that Congress is considering moves to curtail the president’s powers over the Guard and require the Defense Department to analyze how prepared the country is for domestic emergencies.
The debate over the state of the National Guard has been intensifying for several years, but a powerful tornado in Kansas early this month has spun the topic back into the spotlight.
When the small farming community of Greensburg was effectively wiped off the map, leaving 11 people in the area dead and miles of rubble to be searched and cleared, Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius was direct in her explanation for why the response had not been faster: The policies of the federal government, she said, had left the Kansas National Guard understaffed and underequipped.
Her comments infuriated the Bush administration, which countered that the vast majority of her state’s Guard members were available to be called up and that she would be provided any equipment she lacked as soon as she requested it.
The bitter exchange represented a familiar debate to governors across the U.S., many of whom have long feared and predicted that a catastrophic event could find their National Guard units woefully hard-pressed to react to mass casualties or chaos after four years of war in Iraq.
Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire watched the events unfold in Kansas, remembering her own worries from 2006.
At the beginning of last summer’s wildfire season, she was attending a meeting with other governors from the Northwest. She had a big problem, Gregoire told them. Parts of her state were a tinderbox because of drought. Key segments of Washington’s National Guard had deployed to Iraq. And the units that were left—the ones that would be called up to respond in the event of fast-spreading fires—were facing such severe equipment shortages that they sometimes struggled even to adequately train for disasters, let alone respond to them.
“I soon discovered that virtually all of the other governors were in the same position,” Gregoire recalled.
Not long after that meeting, all 50 U.S. governors—the commanders in chief of their states’ National Guards—signed a letter to President Bush imploring him to immediately begin reoutfitting their depleted National Guards. But little changed, and the Guard now has only 56 percent of its required equipment, the lowest level in nearly six years, according to the Government Accountability Office.
The tug of war between the president and the governors over the National Guard seems to heat up every time there is a national emergency. But how much of the rhetoric is simply the finger-pointing and power-jockeying of politics and how much is a frank assessment of how prepared the Guard would be in the event of a catastrophic domestic emergency, be it a natural disaster such as Hurricane Katrina or a terrorist assault on the scale of the Sept. 11 attacks?
“The problem with the National Guard is not being exaggerated or overstated,” said Loren Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute, a Virginia-based national security think tank. “It is very real, and it is a very big deal.”
Feds: States can share
The administration has said that while the problem is a concern, it believes states can overcome any issues by sharing among themselves during disasters. In addition, Defense Secretary Robert Gates last week said that the administration is asking Congress for $22 billion for the Army National Guard over the next five years, which would take Guard equipment levels up to 76 percent. Still, the GAO recently determined that “this equipment may be deployed to meet overseas demands.”
Warning signs have been emerging for years relating to readiness of the National Guard, the oldest component of the nation’s military force. The Guard was begun as a force of “citizen soldiers” to ensure their protection in their new land. Later the Constitution ensured that the Guard would be a dual federal-state force by giving the federal government the responsibility of funding, arming and organizing the Guard while mandating that the appointment of officers and routine training fall under the responsibility of each state, with the governor the commander in chief except during the rare instances when the Guard is “federalized,” traditionally in times of war.
In late 2005, a GAO report found that almost every state’s National Guard had just a fraction of the equipment it was supposed to have. Another GAO report issued just months ago took the criticism further. “The high use of the National Guard for federal overseas missions has reduced equipment available for its state-led domestic missions,” it concluded. The top commander of the National Guard, Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, testified to Congress last month that the continuous use of its forces for overseas missions has “resulted in a decline of readiness for units here at home.”
Missing equipment—much of which has been shipped to Iraq or destroyed there—is a large part of the problem. Certain states are worse off: Arizona has just 34 percent of its allotted equipment; New Jersey and Idaho 42 percent; and Louisiana, ground zero for the worst natural disaster in modern memory, remains at less than 50 percent.
Connecticut Gov. M. Jodi Rell, a Republican, wrote in March to the House Armed Services Committee that her state’s National Guard was missing the kinds of vehicles it would need to dig out from a late-spring northeaster or to evacuate residents in the wake of a flood. The California National Guard, routinely called up in the event of earthquakes and any subsequent looting, is missing 700 Humvees, and it has only half the high-water vehicles it should and less than a third of its required stockpile of machine guns.
In Illinois, the GAO estimates that the Guard has just 45 percent of its authorized equipment on hand and that it is particularly short of trucks, earthmovers and other equipment critical to emergency response.
“That’s under half of what we need to dam the Mississippi if it overflows,” Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), a Democratic presidential candidate, wrote Bush last week.
Readiness questions
As troubling as the equipment shortfalls may be, that is only part of the worry among governors, the GAO and the Commission on the National Guard and Reserves, a federally appointed group of former generals and other military experts. All are critical of the fact that the Pentagon does not routinely measure the equipment readiness of non-deployed National Guard forces for domestic missions. There is now a push that this information be collected and reported to Congress.
The other hot-button issue between the governors and the president regarding the National Guard involves the Insurrection Act, the law that governs when the National Guard can be “federalized” for domestic law enforcement without the consent of a governor. A 2006 revision to the act expanded the president’s power to assume control of the Guard during domestic events, something that governors say threatens to derail state disaster planning and response. Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Kit Bond (R-Mo.), co-chairmen of the Senate National Guard Caucus, have introduced a bill to repeal the changes.
One of the healthy byproducts of the fight between the president and governors over the National Guard is that states have learned to work closely with one another. After Katrina, Guard leaders and state officials developed the Emergency Management Assistance Compact, an agreement that if one state is in short supply of people or gear when disaster strikes, it can borrow from other states.
Yet borrowing from neighbors is not always feasible, as Gregoire found out at that meeting between governors last year. A map drawn up by the GAO illustrates that there are many neighboring states with such severe equipment shortages they might have trouble borrowing from one another. North Carolina, for example, has only about 39 percent of its equipment while South Carolina sits at about 49 percent.
“You want to tap into the resources of the closest available state,” said Lt. Col. Denis Riel, spokesman for the Rhode Island National Guard, “because time translates to lives in disaster scenarios.”
Some states satisfied
There are a few spots for optimism.
The Tennessee National Guard, the only armored Guard unit in the nation, has received about $170 million in replacement equipment and is currently better prepared than most states to respond to a disaster, a spokesman announced recently. Rhode Island, which just completed the largest hurricane drill in the nation, concluded that its National Guard’s response indicated that it was adequately equipped and trained to respond to such an event, despite the fact that much of its key engineering heavy equipment is in Iraq.
Officials in Florida, which is predicted to have a busy hurricane season this year, say they are prepared for whatever storms come, despite having just about half of the Guard’s allotted equipment.
“I feel very good that way,” Gov. Charlie Crist said.
It seems everyone fears the same thing: the kind of massive disaster that might cross state boundaries and demand a full-scale emergency response that would dwarf what was required this month in Kansas.
“This isn’t just a week when a little town in Kansas was torn apart,” said Thompson, the military analyst. “It is also a week when there were wildfires across Georgia and Florida, a week when the Missouri River flooded. We have natural disasters every week in this country, and that’s why the National Guard needs to be ready to respond every week. It’s not.” ++
White House rebuts Guard shortage claim
JENNIFER LOVEN, AP
Tue May 8
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration and Kansas’ governor started Tuesday pointing fingers at each other over the response to last week’s devastating tornado. By lunchtime, both sides had backed down.
With President Bush set to travel to now-razed Greensburg, Kan., on Wednesday to view the destruction wrought by Friday’s 205 mph twister, Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius said she planned to talk with him about her contention that National Guard deployments to Iraq hampered the disaster response.
Sebelius said that with other states facing similar limitations, “stuff that we would have borrowed is gone.”
In an approach reminiscent of the blame game played by the White House with another Democratic governor, Kathleen Blanco of Louisiana, after the federal government’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina, Snow at first said the fault for any slow response would be Sebelius’. He said she should have followed procedure by finding gaps and then asking the federal government to fill them — but didn’t.
Snow said no one had asked for heavy equipment. “As far as we know, the only thing the governor has requested are FM radios,” the spokesman said.
At Snow’s second, midday briefing with reporters, he offered that it turned out that the state had requested several items that the federal government supplied — those radios, and also a mobile command center and a mobile office building, an urban search and rescue team and coordination on extra Black Hawk helicopters.
About the same time, Sebelius was doing her own backpedal from across the country.
“We are doing absolutely fine right now,” Corcoran said. “What the governor is talking about is down the road.”
Sebelius has long spoken out about the fallout from sending National Guard units and equipment overseas. She says the war in Iraq is damaging domestic disaster readiness, because needed manpower is drained from states and the Pentagon is not replacing equipment at a fast enough rate.
Snow said the president recognizes there is a need to relieve pressure on the National Guard, and that it is one of the main reasons Bush has called for expanding the overall size of the military. But he also said that, regardless, there still are sizable numbers of personnel and equipment around the country ready to respond to disasters. ++
Associated Press writer John Milburn contributed to this story.
Democratic Caucus’s Senate Journal
May 11, 2007
[no link available]
The Iraq Accountability Project: A Wrap-Up of This Week’s Senate Oversight on Iraq
Wednesday, May 9th
Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense
Secretary Gates reported that the National Guard has only 56 percent of its equipment, leaving Guard equipment stock at its lowest percentage since at least 2001.
SEN. LEAHY: Now, over the next five years, the Army and the National Guard agree the Guard faces a $24 billion in National Guard equipment. I’ve got the long list that they put out. There are no funds, no funds in here to meet the shortfall. That seems like a kind of a hole that you could drive a Humvee through — well, if they had the Humvees. We’re working hard to include $1 billion to help with the Guard’s backlog, the $24 billion backlog. We’ve put $1 billion in the budget that the president has vetoed. Senator Bond and I have worked on that. We’ll continue to. They seem — these backlogs seem to be unprecedented in the modern era of the National Guard. Will you agree with that?
SEC. GATES: I don’t have a lot of historical knowledge on this, Senator Leahy. But my impression is that the percentage of equipment on hand, which is about 56 percent — the norm that is expected for the Guard is about 70 percent equipment on hand. So they are — across the country, have that shortfall, and I think that that is the lowest percentage, that 56 percent is certainly the lowest percentage since, I think, at least 2001.
In some states, equipment shortfalls are far below the average 56 percent.
SEN. MIKULSKI: …when General Blum was here, he told us the state of the National Guard as he saw it. At that hearing, he told me that Maryland was 35 percent ready. And I’m going to come to the money issue for a minute. That put me on the edge of my chair.
Because Maryland is in the national capital region. We’re in a hurricane zone, and so on. I went to our National Guard and also to Governor O’Malley and our lieutenant governor, who happens to be an Iraq war veteran and a colonel in the Army Reserve. Briefly, the results came back and they were quite alarming. What we were told was that the Maryland National Guard faces serious equipment shortfalls, and that in the event of a natural disaster or an attack in the national capital region, they did not feel that they would have the operational capability to respond the way they would, that what they give the bosses is the best-case scenario. I could go through this — 14 percent helicopters, 36 percent of what we need for Humvees, only 32 percent of what we need for generators, only 58 percent of what we need for communication equipment. This is quite serious.
++
Fed Up in Louisiana
Jonathan Capehart, Washington Post
Saturday 12 May 2007
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) went off. Not in a girls fighting, “Hold my earrings!” kind of way. But in a blunt manner befitting a chief executive who endured the worst natural and engineering disaster in U.S. history, who continues to battle Washington for federal assistance, and who is not running for reelection.
We met in Blanco’s imposing office on the fourth floor of the state Capitol in Baton Rouge on Wednesday. After watching her testify pleasantly before state legislative committees on behalf of her insurance reform package and for an expansion of Louisiana’s Child Health Plus program, I was floored by her “bring it on” forthrightness as she talked about her dealings with Washington after Hurricane Katrina.
“I feel like in the last 3 1/2 years I have put in eight years’ worth of work,” Blanco said with an exasperated laugh. Her performance during Katrina was roundly criticized and her approval ratings in Louisiana, which rival those of President Bush nationally, never recovered. Rep. Bobby Jindal, a Louisiana Republican who wants to replace Blanco, had a 24-point lead over her in a January poll. Blanco denies that her weak standing played a role in her March announcement that she would not seek a second term.
When I asked the governor if she were as baffled as I by the level of resistance in Congress and in the White House to helping Louisiana with post-Hurricane Katrina recovery (the continuing refusal to waive the onerous 10 percent match required by the Federal Emergency Management Agency comes to mind), Blanco let ‘er rip.
“It’s all political,” she began. “You know, this country’s run on politics. But when a disaster comes that is not what you expect, you expect a human reaction, not a political reaction. And I will tell you, there’s a void,” Blanco drawled, “a total void of human response. And it’s extremely discouraging as an American citizen. It makes me angry and extremely disappointed.”
That’s not to say the Bush administration hasn’t ponied up for the Pelican State. So far, $42 billion, not including flood insurance payments, has flowed to Louisiana. Blanco acknowledged this, and then added, “But I would just have to say it’s not good enough.”
The experience of securing that funding and trying to get access to it has not been pleasant. “I absolutely hated the idea of having to go to Washington, D.C., to deal with the last Congress, because their attitude was brutal,” she said. “The old Congress made us feel like we were pretty stupid for standing in the way of the hurricane and that we were asking for far too much assistance.
“They ignored the fact that it wasn’t the hurricane, per se, that caused our damage,” Blanco explained in a forceful, yet measured, tone. “It was the failure, an engineering failure, of the federal levees that caused our enormous grief. If we had not had levee failures, people would have walked home, and today we would not even be sitting here talking about it.” She did say the new Congress was “definitely more interested in trying to help us.”
Blanco would not take the bait and say that New Orleans and Louisiana as a whole have been abandoned by Washington, but she was not shy about denouncing the bureaucratic roadblocks and the duplicative and sometimes contradictory rules and regulations of the Department of Housing and Urban Development and FEMA for spending the money allocated, that have slowed the pace of recovery. “It feels like the federal government is choking us to death,” Blanco said. “And they will not; they are totally resistant to releasing the bonds that hold us. It’s like living in a torture chamber.”
And what about Louisiana’s history of corruption? Might that not have played a role in the bad attitudes on Capitol Hill? “In my book, that’s the biggest crock of excuses that I’ve ever heard,” Blanco thundered. “Louisiana has had its own negative experiences, but we don’t hold the corner on corruption.” She went on to say, “We’ve not been accused of wasting a single nickel. We have extraordinary review practices embedded in everything that we do. And now we’re being accused of being overly attentive to fraud avoidance and holding back the recovery.”
Blanco had a message for the hundreds of members of Congress who have come through Louisiana since Katrina. “They have seen with their own eyes,” she said. “They need to look in their own hearts to decide what they would want to happen in their own states if something of this magnitude did as much damage. Where would their people be?” ++
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
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May 14th, 2007