Joe Loy guestblogging, with More good news:

“CNN Saturday” reports that the can-do Corps of Engineers is hard at work restoring the NOLA levees to full-strength Category-Three-Stopper capacity.

:|

The Army Corps says (and I don’t doubt) that it lacks the resources, the authority, and the Time before next Hurricane Season, to do any Better than that.

Here’s a pertinent & enlightening piece from last Sunday’s Columbus (GA) Ledger-Enquirer. Excerpt:

…two months of hurricane season are ahead and the temporary fixes provide New Orleans with less protection than it had before Katrina. Plans for further levee restoration merely will bring New Orleans the protection that existed before Katrina, a level which most would contend came up lacking.

Getting that far will cost taxpayers $1.6 billion.

Getting farther - protecting New Orleans from another hurricane like Katrina that packs winds of up to 140 mph - is a complicated, multibillion-dollar endeavor that could last for decades. And it involves much more than enhancing the earthen, steel and concrete barriers that helped convert a marshy French settlement into a topographical bowl over the course of nearly three centuries.

Building taller levees would help. But for starters, that would require the acquisition of more land for a wider base to accommodate the levees’ height, and years to allow for building the structures in phases to allow them to naturally settle.

Some U.S. Army Corps of Engineers leaders are urging a look at tidal gates, retractable floodwalls that would emerge from the levees when a storm surge threatened. The Corps of Engineers also has pitched a plan to restore coastal Louisiana, which - with land providing a form of friction - would slow the nightmarish and powerful churn of hurricanes. The cost of that plan is estimated at nearly $2 billion.

Read the whole thing.

An earthquake of at least 7.6 magnitude struck Pakistan, north India and Afghanistan a few hours ago, hitting the long-disputed Kashmir border region and other areas of eastern Pakistan, including the capital city Islamabad, particularly hard. Initial reports suggest a major catastrophe:

Rescuers are trying to reach residents in collapsed buildings in Islamabad.

Residents in the Afghan capital, Kabul, and India’s capital, Delhi, are also reported to have felt the tremor.

Maj Gen Shaukat Sultan, Pakistan’s chief military spokesman, told the AFP news agency: “We have reports that an entire village has been wiped out in Bagh district in Kashmir.

“In Kashmir and the northern areas we are receiving reports of severe damage.”

A high death toll seems inevitable. Those poor people. :(

UPDATE: A 10-story apartment building collapsed in Islamabad, according to the New York Times, which has a photo. “Many are feared dead,” according to a BBC news alert.

Holy crap! There’s a UConn football game on national TV!

UConn vs. Syracuse is on ESPN2. The game is in East Hartford; you can see the Travelers Building in the background.

U! C! O! N! N! UConn! UConn! UConn!

UPDATE: UConn won, 26-7, but lost its starting QB to injury, probably for the rest of the season. The backup QB looked good, though!

It’s the bottom of the ninth at Fenway. The Red Sox trail, 5-3.

One of the following two things is about to happen: 1) the Red Sox lose; or 2) the Red Sox pull off another miracle comeback, and just like last year, their momentum becomes unstoppable, and they go on to beat the White Sox in five games, and probably win the world championship.

So I’m saying Chicago’s back is against the wall right now. That’s right. :)

UPDATE: It was option #1. :(

Red Sox lose. Season over.

Heh:

Following a campaign of extortion and intimidation that Sauron himself would be proud of, the Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA to those too frightened to speak their true name, has finally met their match in the form of a single mother by the name of Tanya Andersen, a name that will no doubt find its way into many a Hobbitish ballad in the not so distant future. After being confronted with the unwanted and unkind attentions of the Settlement Support Center, LLC, the Saruman to the RIAA’s Sauron, Ms. Andersen retaliated with a counterclaim based on the premise that in their overzealous attempts to blanket the downloading world in eternal darkness, they have violated multiple points of the 1970 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).

Fear, fire, foes, awake!

According to an online chat with ESPN College Gameday analyst Kirk Herbstreit that was sent out by the USC Midwest Alumni Club and forwarded to me by Adrienne, Gameday is coming to South Bend next weekend:

Nick (South Bend): With two weeks to prepare do the Irish have a good shot at knocking off the Trojans? Also, please tell me Gameday is coming here for that game.

Kirk Herbstreit: From what I understand gameday will be in South Bend next weekend and I cannot wait to see my Irish ballclub in person. I put the keys into tha bandwagon weeks ago and cant wait to see Brady Quinn and company go up against Matt Leinart and Reggie Bush. Im going to go on record and say that Gameday will be the most hyped-up show that I’ve experienced in the 10 years I’ve been on the show. I cant wait to get to South Bend for that one. And you nailed it, Charlie Weis with two weeks to prepare for USC. Interesting, very interesting.

I figured Gameday would probably come. Barring a Trojan loss to hapless, 1-3 Arizona tomorrow, it’ll be the undefeated, #1 Trojans vs. the one-loss, probably #10 or #11 Irish. (They’re #12 right now, but somebody’s gotta lose between #5 Georgia and #8 Tennessee… and you never know when there might be an upset of another Top 11 team.) Add to that the rivalry angle, the Charlie Weis angle, etc., and there’s really nothing else on the Oct. 15 schedule that holds a candle to it.

But, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First things first: BEAT!! THE WILDCATS!!

Mickey Kaus is loving my L.A. Times-bashing. Heh. His “budget cuts” kicker is great.

source file

The White House denied today that President Bush claimed divine inspiration for his foreign-policy decisions during a meeting with Palestinian leaders in 2003. “That’s absurd. He’s never made such comments,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.

Although I am not usually inclined to accord Scott McClellan’s statements a presumption of truthfulness, in this particular case I believe him. This “God told me to invade Iraq” story has been floating around for more than a year, ever since Ha’aretz reported on the alleged comments. It re-emerged yesterday as a major news story, apparently because the same allegation is featured in an upcoming BBC documentary. But the actual source of story remains the same: a handful, if that, of Palestinian leaders, claiming that Bush said these things.

This has always struck me as absurd, for several reasons. First of all, it’s just too good to be true — it fits in so well with Bush-haters’ preconceptions that, much like Paul Wolfowitz’s “admission” that the Iraq war was all about oil, it’s the sort of thing that is bound to seep into the press without adequate checks for accuracy. But more importantly, supposing that Bush really does feel he’s on a mission from God… why would he tell it to Mahmoud Abbas? If, say, Karl Rove had a falling-out with the president, and subsequently came out and said, “Bush told me he’s on a mission from God,” that’d be one thing. But when a foreign leader with whom we have distinctly complicated relations, a leader who has all sorts of transparent ulterior motives for making the staunchly pro-Israel president of the United States look bad, comes out and claims that Bush told him something like this, without any evidence to back up the story except the testimony of his cronies, and without any plausible reason to believe Bush would say something like that to such a person, it smacks of pure fantasy.

I doubt the president thinks he’s on a “mission from God.” That said, if someone can show me convincing evidence to the contrary, I’m willing to be swayed. But unverifiable claims by people to whom it would be irrational for Bush to tell this information — but who could be rationally expected to lie in this manner, for political gain — do not qualify as convincing evidence. Nor do generalized statements of faith taken out of context by those who do not understand or trust religious people generally. Sorry, but I ain’t buying it.

Charles Krauthammer on Harriet Miers:

We’ve had quite enough dynastic politics over the past decades. (Considering the trouble I have had with Benjamin and William Henry Harrison, I pity the schoolchildren of the future who will have to remember who was who in the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton presidential alternations from 1989 to 2017.) But nominating a constitutional tabula rasa to sit on what is America’s constitutional court is an exercise of regal authority with the arbitrariness of a king giving his favorite general a particularly plush dukedom. The only advance we’ve made since then is that Supreme Court dukedoms are not hereditary.

Ouch.

He adds, “It will be argued that this criticism is elitist. But this is not about the Ivy League. The issue is not the venue of Miers’s constitutional scholarship, experience and engagement. The issue is their nonexistence.”

Much like the California bridge threat in November 2001, NYC officials acted alone, not at the federal government’s suggestion, in publicly disclosing the alleged subway threat, according to President Bush.

Even with the threat sounding less “credible” by the hour, things are tense in New York:

Authorities briefly closed part of Penn Station on Friday and commuters headed to work under the watchful eyes of police after a newly disclosed terror threat against the New York subway system.

A discarded soda bottle filled with an unidentified green liquid was found at the station during morning rush hour, Amtrak officials said. The substance did not pose a threat to passengers and was removed for testing.

I really hope it wasn’t a Mountain Dew bottle…

UPDATE: It was a “prank,” apparently.

Wow, these poll numbers do not make Harriet Miers especially good. (Hat tip: Kaus.)

According to Deadspin, Nick Lachey has left Jessica Simpson for… Matt Leinart? Heh. (Hat tip: Boi From Troy.)

UPDATE: Fellow ‘SC grad and SI on Campus writer Arash Markazi says this is bunkum:

I sat down with [Lachey and Leinart] for the cover story [Tuesday] and thought a couple of rumors that came out the next day were a bit premature, if not completely false.

First, Us Weekly reported that Lachey and his wife Jessica Simpson had split up saying the two had been separated for some time. Lachey, still wearing his wedding ring, not only told me that things were fine between the two of them, but that he was missing Game 1 of the ALDS between the Angels and Yankees to be with her. So you have to take him at his word, at least for now. And I would put very little stock into the rumor that Lachey and Leinart are about to move in together, unless Leinart’s planning to move to Calabasas or Lachey is planning to leave Jessica and move into a downtown apartment. Both are about as likely to happen as Lachey playing tailback at USC, which he said was the position he tried out for when he walked on to the team in 1993, John Robinson’s first year back as USC’s coach. “I quit after a week,” said Lachey, who had never played organized football before. “There were five guys who had no business being out there and I was one of them.”

Arash also has a funny commentary on the return of the National Hockey League: “Was anyone else surprised to find the NHL season had already begun? Seeing hockey highlights on TV again for the first time in more than a year is kind of like seeing an old classmate you were never really friends with at a party. You know, the one who somehow remembers your name but all you can say is “Hey … you.” It’s not like you don’t want to see them, it’s just that you don’t really care one way or the other. If they’re at the party, fine, if not, no biggie. That’s the way I feel about hockey.”

President Bush said yesterday that ten Al Qaeda plots, including three on U.S. soil, have been foiled in the last four years:

The United States and its allies have thwarted at least 10 serious al Qaeda terrorist plots since Sept. 11, 2001, including never-before-disclosed plans to use hijacked commercial airliners to attack the East and West coasts in 2002 and 2003, President Bush and his aides said yesterday.

The reported plots aimed to strike a wide variety of targets, including the Library Tower in Los Angeles, ships in international waters and a tourist site overseas, the White House said last night. Three of the 10 were directed at U.S. soil, officials said.

Holy cow! Supposedly, the skyscraper — L.A.’s tallest building, which has since been renamed the US Bank Tower — was targeted for an attack in “mid-2002.”

Me and Becky in L.A., with the Library Tower in the background, in May 2003.

Well, I always did feel a little nervous when I was in the area around the Library Tower downtown. With good reason, it turns out!

However, the L.A. Times takes a skeptical tone:

The White House later issued a list of the foiled plots, citing potential Sept. 11-style airliner attacks on the East Coast and West Coast, a plot to blow up apartment buildings and surveillance of gas stations, bridges and tourist sites nationwide. However, several senior law enforcement officials interviewed later questioned whether many of the incidents on the list constituted an imminent threat to public safety and said authorities have not disrupted any operational terrorist plot within the United States since the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

It’s good that the Times isn’t accepting the government’s claims at face-value. But it’s downright bizarre that the Times — this is the Los Angeles Times, remember — does not mention the Library Tower at all in its article! Not even a passing reference! Why, it’s “almost as if the LAT’s mid-level editors feared that doing anything readers might be too interested in would be a sign of unsophisticated tabloidish irresponsibility!” (Quote from Mickey Kaus; scroll about halfway down the page to the heading “Sunday, September 11, 2005.”)

Anyway… all this came out as a result of Bush’s big terrorism speech yesterday. Excerpt:

The images and experience of September the 11th are unique for Americans. Yet the evil of that morning has reappeared on other days, in other places — in Mombasa, and Casablanca, and Riyadh, and Jakarta, and Istanbul, and Madrid, and Beslan, and Taba, and Netanya, and Baghdad, and elsewhere. In the past few months, we’ve seen a new terror offensive with attacks on London, and Sharm el-Sheikh, and a deadly bombing in Bali once again. All these separate images of destruction and suffering that we see on the news can seem like random and isolated acts of madness; innocent men and women and children have died simply because they boarded the wrong train, or worked in the wrong building, or checked into the wrong hotel. Yet while the killers choose their victims indiscriminately, their attacks serve a clear and focused ideology, a set of beliefs and goals that are evil, but not insane.

Some call this evil Islamic radicalism; others, militant Jihadism; still others, Islamo-fascism. Whatever it’s called, this ideology is very different from the religion of Islam. This form of radicalism exploits Islam to serve a violent, political vision: the establishment, by terrorism and subversion and insurgency, of a totalitarian empire that denies all political and religious freedom. These extremists distort the idea of jihad into a call for terrorist murder against Christians and Jews and Hindus — and also against Muslims from other traditions, who they regard as heretics. …

[T]he militants believe that controlling one country will rally the Muslim masses, enabling them to overthrow all moderate governments in the region, and establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia. With greater economic and military and political power, the terrorists would be able to advance their stated agenda: to develop weapons of mass destruction, to destroy Israel, to intimidate Europe, to assault the American people, and to blackmail our government into isolation.

Some might be tempted to dismiss these goals as fanatical or extreme. Well, they are fanatical and extreme — and they should not be dismissed. Our enemy is utterly committed. As Zarqawi has vowed, “We will either achieve victory over the human race or we will pass to the eternal life.” And the civilized world knows very well that other fanatics in history, from Hitler to Stalin to Pol Pot, consumed whole nations in war and genocide before leaving the stage of history. Evil men, obsessed with ambition and unburdened by conscience, must be taken very seriously — and we must stop them before their crimes can multiply. …

Some have also argued that extremism has been strengthened by the actions of our coalition in Iraq, claiming that our presence in that country has somehow caused or triggered the rage of radicals. I would remind them that we were not in Iraq on September the 11th, 2001 — and al Qaeda attacked us anyway. The hatred of the radicals existed before Iraq was an issue, and it will exist after Iraq is no longer an excuse. The government of Russia did not support Operation Iraqi Freedom, and yet the militants killed more than 180 Russian schoolchildren in Beslan.

Over the years these extremists have used a litany of excuses for violence — the Israeli presence on the West Bank, or the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, or the defeat of the Taliban, or the Crusades of a thousand years ago. In fact, we’re not facing a set of grievances that can be soothed and addressed. We’re facing a radical ideology with inalterable objectives: to enslave whole nations and intimidate the world. No act of ours invited the rage of the killers — and no concession, bribe, or act of appeasement would change or limit their plans for murder. …

When 25 Iraqi children are killed in a bombing, or Iraqi teachers are executed at their school, or hospital workers are killed caring for the wounded, this is murder, pure and simple — the total rejection of justice and honor and morality and religion. These militants are not just the enemies of America, or the enemies of Iraq, they are the enemies of Islam and the enemies of humanity.

Those who fail to grasp the enormity of the struggle against Islamo-fascism, and those who falsely paint it as a struggle against Islam, would do well to heed Bush’s words.

P.S. I just noticed the date on this post. Today, October 7, is the fourth anniversary of our first bombing raids in Afghanistan.

P.P.S. L.A. Observed points out that the Library Tower threat is actually not new news. I didn’t realize that.

Updating the NYC subway threat: According to the New York Times, “One official said the information suggested an attack could happen as early as [Friday]; another pointed to the middle of the month.” (Yom Kippur is next Wednesday and Thursday, Oct. 12-13. Just throwing it out there.)

Meanwhile, the feds are pointing to the “false alarm” button:

While not dismissing it, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security described it as “specific yet noncredible,” and an antiterrorism official stressed that the details could not be verified.

Umm… okay, can someone explain to me how the word “noncredible” qualifies as “not dismissing it”? Later in the article, the same spokesman is quoted as saying, “The intelligence community has concluded that this information is of doubtful credibility.” So yeah, I’m going to say he’s pretty much “dismissing it.”

Anyway… in the comments on my earlier post, my dad reports that my mom safely rode the subway to Canal Street earlier tonight. “Let no Terrorist think that Leanna Loomer is going to Let them Win,” he added. Heh.

On a different but related note, another commenter on that same NYC discussion linked to this post by wacko right-wing blogger Atlas Shrugs detailing far-right website WorldNetDaily creator Joseph Farah’s July warning about a possible “American Hiroshima” in October or early November — with October 29 (the day before my 24th birthday) being perhaps the most likely date, and the likely targets being New York, Washington D.C., Miami, Houston, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Chicago. I say “different but related” because of this comment by Atlas:

My take on these global al qaeda “brushfire” bombings (i.e. this weekend’s bombing in Bali, [the July bombing in] London, [the March 2004 bombing in] Madrid etc)? I believe it is a deliberate strategy to disarm us, trick us if you will…….to deceive us into thinking this is their modus operandi……bomb subways, buildings, discos…….wherein we prepare for one thing, when if fact they have quite another attack in mind.

An interesting theory, and it would cast this whole New York threat business in quite a different light. And hey, just because they’re right-wing nutjobs doesn’t mean they’re necessarily wrong! :) However, it seems to me that if Al Qaeda’s already got the suitcase nukes in this country, as Farah suggests, then such “strategy” isn’t really necessary. We ain’t going to be able to stop them, if that’s the case, so why bother trying to distract us with head-fakes? Just blow the damn things up already. Which is precisely why I think Farah is very probably wrong: if Al Qaeda had had nukes in this country since July, we wouldn’t be sitting here having this conversation right now.

Joseph Cannon, an anti-Bush liberal (and the only non-right-winger I could find who is even paying attention to Farah), agrees that Atlas and Farah are probably wrong:

I’m skeptical. Very skeptical.

As long-time readers know, I believe that a mini-nuke attack is likely. (Of course, I hope history will prove me wrong.) That’s one reason we should note of any new scraps of information concerning this possibility.

But this particular tale has the odor of what my ladyfriend likes to call “bunky-doody.”

Indeed. Still, combined with warnings about the EMP threat (also coming from the ever-optimistic Mr. Farah), even the whiff of a possibility of an “American Hiroshima” later this month is enough to make me think perhaps I’ll speed up my personal disaster preparations by actually putting together a disaster kit. Can’t hurt, right? Hmm… a project for this weekend, in between catch-up reading and Moot Court writing, perhaps?

Fellow supporters of gay rights will, I suspect, be quite familiar with this symbol:

It’s the symbol of the Human Rights Campaign, a prominent gay-rights advocacy organization. It’s an equal sign, signifying equality for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people. Even if you’re not familiar with HRC, you’ve probably seen it on bumper stickers and such.

Well anyway, I don’t know if there’s a pro-gay-rights mole working for Notre Dame, or if the folks at the ND bookstore are just clueless, but check out the design of the new bookstore giftcard:

LOL! The Notre Dame bookstore supports gay equality! WOOHOO!!! :)

P.S. And the motto on the gift card rack is “Give the gift of choice.” OH, THE HUMANITY!!! Pro-gay and pro-choice?!? We’re losing our Catholic identity!!! Notre Dame is becoming Georgetown!!! ;)

This is obviously Monk Malloy’s doing… I’m sure Father Jenkins will fix it straight away… ;)