The Irish Trojan Zag's Blog

Over the weekend, I imported all of my blog posts through February 11 into WordPress... a complicated and time-consuming task that took some fancy MySQL footwork, let me tell you! :) Anyway, the move to WP will allow me to get the archives up and running again, reintroduce categories on the blog, start using RSS feeds, and a whole bunch of other good stuff -- including possibly the abandonment of the accursed HaloScan, though I can't guarantee that yet.

Unfortunately, WP runs way too slow on the current server, so I'm waiting on my munificent server guru Charles to get me switched over to the new box he recently bought. Once that happens, I should be good to go fairly quickly... I think. It'll probably be a somewhat bumpy ride, but step by step, we'll finally get this blog back to its full, pre-Katrina, pre-spambot-crisis functionality again.

Oh, one thing I established in the importing process was that I should definitely be able to maintain the current permalink structure... so I finally removed the awful "Not-really-permanent permalink" text that's been uglifying my posts for months. I can now say with confidence that the permalinks really are permament. Hooray!

Anyway, while I'm waiting on the new server to really get things moving, I've made a few changes to the sidebar, implementing a couple of the suggestions from the survey. There's much more to do, but it's a start. Also, in keeping with a recent comment about my moniker "the Internet's #1 blog for Katrina-related news" -- which, in the present context, isn't really true, and I don't want to engage in false advertising -- I changed it to "the Internet's #1 blog for Hurricane Katrina landfall coverage," to make it clear I'm talking about something that already happened, not what's happening now, like the investigations and such. (I had figured the link to the Blogpulse press release made that clear, but for folks who didn't click the link, it might not have been.) Also, I wanted to heed Katrina Lewonczyk's words about not calling it "Hurricane Katrina," not just "Katrina," when possible.

I also added a little Spike Lee plug there, as you can see. :)

P.S. Oh yeah, and in response to popular demand, I've finally answered Jay Harris's question of three years ago by creating a section on humility. :)

Striking a blow for goofy-looking redheads everywhere, 19-year-old Shaun White of Carlsbad, California -- a.k.a. "the Flying Tomato" -- won gold in Torino yesterday in the snowboarding halfpipe competition.



You can see one of White's jumps here. And here you can see that he has a cute blonde girlfriend. This guy could go far! :)

At one point during the semifinals, he said he was "trippin'" over the possibility of not making the finals. Heh. After the Olympics and the urine tests are over, do you think perhaps he'll celebrate with the 420 guy? (Hat tip: Andrew Hiller.) [Heh heh... stoners. -ed.]

White's gold was a rare bright spot on what was otherwise a rough day for the American team. (And as we all know, how well the Americans do is the only thing that matters at the Olympics. :)

A leaked draft of a House report on Hurricane Katrina, due to be publicly released Wednesday, concludes: "We are left scratching our heads at the range of clumsiness and ineptitude that characterized government behavior before and after this storm. ... If this is what happens when we have advance warning, we shudder to imagine the consequences when we do not. Four and a half years after 9/11, America is still not ready for prime time."

Yup. (Hat tip: Andrew.)

More:

Unheeded warnings, poor planning and apathy in recognizing the scope of Hurricane Katrina's destruction led to the slow emergency response from the White House down to local parishes, a House investigation concludes.

The 600-page report by a special Republican-dominated House inquiry into one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history concluded the federal government's response to Katrina was marked by "fecklessness, flailing and organizational paralysis."

It said President Bush received poor and incomplete counsel about the crisis unfolding on the Gulf Coast and that late state and local evacuation orders added to the confusion at the federal level.

"Our investigation revealed that Katrina was a national failure, an abdication of the most solemn obligation to provide for the common welfare," said a summary of the scathing report obtained Sunday by The Associated Press.

"At every level -- individual, corporate, philanthropic, and governmental -- we failed to meet the challenge that was Katrina," the report concluded.

"In this cautionary tale, all the little pigs built houses of straw."

The late evacuations did more than just "add to the confusion at the federal level"; that appears to be a bit of spin by the AP, not the report's authors. The report makes clear that the latest evacuations added to the death toll:

Mandatory evacuation in the New Orleans area either came too late or were never made, leading to incomplete evacuations, deaths, horrible conditions for those awaiting evacutation.

Again: Yup.

Also, about the president's "poor and incomplete counsel":

About 56 hours before Katrina made landfall, the National Weather Service and National Hurricane Center cited an "extremely high probability" that New Orleans would be flooded and tens of thousands of residents killed.

Given those warnings, the report notes Bush's televised statement on Sept. 1 that "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees," and concludes: "Comments such as those . . . do not appear to be consistent with the advice and counsel one would expect to have been provided by a senior disaster professional."

Indeed. Bush could have gotten better advice from this blog than he was apparently getting from his people.

To the list of ridiculous quotes from inept federal officials, I would add: "government planners did not predict such a disaster ever could occur" and "Saturday and Sunday, we thought it was a typical hurricane situation."

Anyway, I'm glad the report apparently spreads the blame around. House Democrats boycotted the investigation because they felt it would be a partisan whitewash, but, reserving final judgment until the full report is released, it appears at first blush that the Republicans have done an admirable job of criticizing the responsible parties at all levels, without fear or favor. (As well they should; oversight is their job, after all.)

The fact is, this ought not be a partisan issue at all, any more than it ought to be a racial issue. Blanco and Nagin are Democrats; Bush, Chertoff and Brown are Republicans; Nagin is black; the rest of them are white. So what? They all screwed up. Badly. Bravo to the Congressmen for bluntly saying so.

No, really! (Hat tip: A&A and about a half-dozen others via e-mail.)

P.S. I'm all for campaign-finance reform, but this is taking it a bit far. I mean, really... shooting your campaign contributors?

The Blizzard of 2006 was one for the record books:

The National Weather Service said 26.9 inches of snow had fallen in Central Park, the most since record-keeping started in 1869. The old record was 26.4 inches in December 1947.

Wind gusting as high as 60 mph blew the snow sideways and raised a risk of coastal flooding in New England. And in a rare display, lightning lit up the falling snow before dawn in the New York and Philadelphia areas, producing muffled winter thunder.

"We might not see anything like this again in our lifetime," Jason Rosenfarb said as he walked with his 5-year-old daughter Haley in Central Park. Just then Haley jumped head first into the snow and said: "Help me out. There's too much snow."

Hartford, Connecticut had 21 inches from what local CBS affiliate WFSB is calling Winter Storm Carson. (Shouldn't it be "Blizzard Carson"?)

UPDATE: "20 inches solid" in Newington, according to a commenter.

In an interesting Olympic tie-in with all this weather news, figure skater Emily Hughes, who is slated to replace the injured Michelle Kwan at the Olympics, is stranded in New York right now because of the blizzard, unable to get to her practice facility in Long Island, let alone to Torino. Hopefully she'll be able to skip town sometime in the next few days!

UPDATE 2: "AS OF 1 PM...THIS STORM IS THE SECOND GREATEST SNOW STORM ON RECORD FOR HARTFORD CONNECTICUT SINCE RECORDS BEGAN IN 1904," declares the NWS. The largest reported storm totals in Hartford County were 25 inches in Farmington and West Hartford. The highest total in Connecticut was Fairfield, with 27.8 inches.

UPDATE 3: Dr. Jeff Masters has more:

What appeared to be a rather ordinary Nor'easter on the computer model forecasts yesterday--one that I thought would turn out to be a Category 2 snowstorm on the newly-launched NESIS storm scale for Northeast U.S. snowstorms--has intensified dramatically this morning, and will probably end up ranked as a Category 4 storm on the NESIS scale. As of 7am, Central Park recorded 12 inches of new snow--before an intense mesoscale band of snow with snowfall rates of 2 to 4 inches per hour swept through the city, bringing visibility to zero at LaGuardia Airport. Eleven inches of snow fell in three hours at Central Park between 7am and 10am. This intense band of snow, called a "snowburst", is a result of very unstable air that has organized into thunderstorms. Reports of lightning and thunder have been common today all across the Northeast in association with these snowbursts.

He points to a cool radar animation. The narrow band of heaviest show "has echo intensities of 40 dBZ, which are commmon in warm-season thunderstorms, but seldom observed in winter storms."

He also explains why the coastal flooding wasn't nearly as bad as the Blizzard of 1978:

While the blizzard of 2006 is a prodigious snow-producer, its central pressure is not as low as the Blizzard of 1978, and thus its winds are much weaker. The Blizzard of 1978 had sustained winds of 65 mph, while the Blizzard of 2006 can only boast sustained 45 mph winds.

And he points to this awesome picture.

Reuters (via CNN) is reporting that on Saturday night Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi said, "I am the Jesus Christ of politics," to a crowd at a political dinner. Previously Berlusconi has compared himself to Napoleon, so this is just sort of a step up in his delusions of grandeur. (Next he'll be saying he's George Bush or something.)

Many Italian politicians were not impressed:

Giuseppe Giulietti, a leftist parliamentarian, joked that he was sure that "God the Father and the rest of Jesus' family did not take this very well."

I would imagine not.

Posted by Brian (Briandot)

If you didn't watch last night's Gonzaga-Stanford game on ESPN, you missed more than just a hard-fought college basketball game. You missed a fantastic highlight-reel clip -- and no, I'm not talking about player-of-the-year candidate Adam Morrison. Nothing he did was as spectacular as this:



Heh.

P.S. Does anyone know the name of this song?



I want to download it, but I don't know what to look for, and Googling "Whoa oh oh oh oh" doesn't seem likely to be terribly helpful. :)

Michelle Kwan, beset by injury, has pulled out of the Olympics.

P.S. Fellow NDLS 2L Alex Ho, himself a figure skater, offers a recap of Day 1 of the Olympic skating competition.

The Blizzard of 2006 is underway. 12-18 inches of snow are possible all along the Northeast corridor, including the Greater Hartford area. You can watch the white stuff pile up on the CT DOT webcams.

UPDATE: Here's a webcam view of an NYC street corner near Times Square, covered in snow at the moment. More snowy New York City webcam views here. Here's a view from CCSU's campus, right near my hometown. And here's a view of Hartford. WeatherBug has more webcam views from Connecticut, and also from Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New York.

UPDATE 2: Here are some Flickr photos.

P.S. No blizzard here in South Bend, but it is snowing lightly, as you can see for yourself on my webcam page.

Following up on my earlier post about the many Gulf Coast who are still officially listed as "missing," MSNBC reports:

Nearly six months after Hurricane Katrina, more than 1,300 bodies have been found, but the real death toll is clearly higher. How much higher, no one can say with any certainty.

Hundreds of people are still unaccounted for, and some of them -- again, no one is sure how many -- were probably washed into the Gulf of Mexico, drowned when their fishing boats sank, swept into Lake Pontchartrain or alligator-infested swamps, or buried under crushed homes, said Dr. Louis Cataldie, Louisiana medical examiner.

Cataldie noted that coffins, disgorged from the earth by the floodwaters, have been found great distances from their graveyards, and "if we have coffins that have washed 30 miles away, I can assure you there are people who have."

"The likelihood is there are people we will not find," he said. ...

The remains of 1,079 people have been recovered in Louisiana; an additional 231 were found in Mississippi. But Louisiana officials have information on roughly 300 people whose loved ones are desperately searching for them...

"I have people trying to close estates. I have lawyers calling me. I have people calling me, saying, 'Do you have my momma?'" Cataldie said.

The list of those reported missing to the Find Family National Call Center, run by state and federal officials in Baton Rouge, has about 2,300 people on it. Some have already been found but have not been taken off the list because family members have not notified authorities. Others are on the lam, wanted for a crime or child support payments.

But it is the others who have not been seen or heard from by family members that Cataldie worries he will never have answers for.

As I mentioned before, this is similar to what happened after 9/11, both in terms of the bloated missing-persons list and the fact that some bodies will never be found. But this situation is probably somewhat worse, in terms of the ability to eventually identify all the victims accurately, because of the vastness of the area and the larger number of poor people affected. There is simply going to be less of a "human paper trail," if you were, than there was with the vast majority of 9/11 victims.

#5 Gonzaga is trailing unranked Stanford, 43-38 at halftime, largely because the Zags couldn't hit the broad side of a barn for much of the half, while the Cardinal have been shooting the lights out. At halftime, Stanford is shooting 58.6% while Gonzaga has managed to pull its percentage up to 41.2%. Hopefully those numbers will equalize a bit in the second half. The game is on Gonzaga's home floor, where the Zags have won a nation's-best 35 straight.

P.S. In a related story:

Fans of No. 5 Gonzaga have been asked to stop yelling "Brokeback Mountain" at opposing players.

Heh.

Also in the Pacific Northwest today, USC lost to Wazzu to end all that bubble talk, and Washington beat UCLA.

Elsewhere, Iowa won at Indiana, Minnesota upset Michigan State, UConn crushed Seton Hall and Duke beat Maryland.

UPDATE: The Zags come back, and the streak is alive! Gonzaga 80, Stanford 76.

I think it would actually be more newsworthy if Iran's president made a speech without saying something outrageous.

(Disclaimer: this post has nothing to do with Harry Potter, but that would make a decent book title, no? Anyway, it was better than calling another post "Cartoongate update.")

InstaPundit's Glenn Reynolds will be on CNN sometime after 7:00 PM tonight, explaining to the network that "you guys blew it" in covering Cartoongate. "I got less charitable from there," he says.

Incidentally, it looks like some of the anti-cartoon forces are now declaring jihad against Valentine's Day. (But perhaps their real target is the birthday of a well-known Irish pirate who occasionally lets his beard grow long enough that he bears a passing resemblance to Saddam Hussein?)

Speaking of Cartoongate, this post is pretty damn amusing, if you can handle the vulgarity. And this one is amusing without vulgarity:

Green Bay, WI - Like a pot of bratwurst left unattended at a Lambeau Field pregame party, simmering tensions in the strife-torn Midwest boiled over once again today as rioting mobs of green-and-gold clad youth and plump farm wives rampaged through Wisconsin Denny’s and IHOPs, burning Texas toast and demanding apologies and extra half-and-half.

The spark igniting the latest tailgate hibachi of unrest: a Texas newsletter's publication of caricatures of legendary Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi.

Protestors demonstrated against the images throughout the Badger State yesterday, with violent egging and cow-tipping incidents reported in Oconomowac, Pewaukee, Sheboygan, Ozaukee, Antigo, Oshkosh, Waubeno, Wauwautosa, Waunewoc, Wyocena, Waubeka, and Washawonamowackapeepee.

Heh.

In a lot of the contentious debates related to the war on terror -- wiretapping, torture, indefinite detentions, etc. -- the conservative rebuttal to all those annoying nitpicky civil libertarian arguments can be summed up in three words: "But they're terrorists."

What's more, an awful lot of administration policy in recent years has been premised on just two words: "Trust us."

Which is why all principled conservatives -- and, for that matter, all Americans -- should be profoundly disturbed by reports like this, which, if true, undercuts all five of those words:

A high percentage, perhaps the majority, of the 500-odd men now held at Guantanamo were not captured on any battlefield, let alone on "the battlefield in Afghanistan" (as Bush asserted) while "trying to kill American forces" (as McClellan claimed).

Fewer than 20 percent of the Guantanamo detainees, the best available evidence suggests, have ever been Qaeda members.

Many scores, and perhaps hundreds, of the detainees were not even Taliban foot soldiers, let alone Qaeda terrorists. They were innocent, wrongly seized noncombatants with no intention of joining the Qaeda campaign to murder Americans.

The majority were not captured by U.S. forces but rather handed over by reward-seeking Pakistanis and Afghan warlords and by villagers of highly doubtful reliability.

Andrew Sullivan is on the case, as is the hardly liberal InstaPundit. (The latter says, "Given all the inaccurate reports we've heard about that facility, I think I'll wait for confirmation on this, but it's something that ought to be looked into." Fair enough, so long as "confirmation" doesn't mean government confirmation, which doubtless will not be forthcoming. Further journalistic investigation will hopefully be able to provide adequate confirmation, one way or the other.)

It is rarely, if ever, a good idea to premise an otherwise objectionable policy on the idea that it will only affect "bad guys." This report, if true, is a classic demonstration of why this is so. Life isn't neat and tidy, especially not during wartime. So it would be unreasonable to expect that we're only going to get "bad guys," let alone only the really bad guys. That's why we need oversight, accountability and transparency -- because mistakes are inevitable, and our very core ideals require that we correct those mistakes when they happen. Pretending that there won't be mistakes, and therefore we don't need corrective procedures, is sheer folly.

Another core ideal: our leaders shouldn't lie to the public about matters of national security. Period. At the risk of sounding like one of the Kos Kidz, such behavior is borderline treasonous. If there's something our leaders can't tell us because it's classified or whatnot, they can say that. But for them to tell us that "these guys are all terrorists yanked off the battlefield" when that's blatantly untrue is completely unjustifiable.

Ann Coulter, in a stunning development, said something stupid and racist today. At least one conservative blogger is not happy.