by Last Night in Little Rock

CNN just reported on air that tonight's speech in NOLA by the President would be a "defining moment" for his presidency. Wrong.

His defining moment, to me, was when he stupidly said "nobody thought the levee would break" when the NOLA doomsday scenario was on everybody's mind who ever had a sentient thought about the fact a hurricane could destroy NOLA. Key words: "sentient thought."

by TChris

As this report notes, John Roberts answered few substantive questions during his confirmation hearings. This is standard practice in post-Bork hearings, and Roberts, who has coached other judicial candidates in the art of the non-answer, was careful to say nothing that could stir controversy.

"We're rolling the dice with you, judge," Biden said, "because you won't share your views with us. You've told me nothing in this Kabuki dance. The public has a right to know what you think."

"You've being less forthcoming with this Committee than any nominee who has ever come before us," said New York Democratic Senator Charles Schumer. "This process is getting more and more absurd," he added.

When he did venture an opinion, Judge Roberts tried to satisfy everyone (or, at least, to offend no one). As Emily Bazelon observes, Judge Roberts opined that justices who voted to replace Plessy (separate but equal is consistent with equal protection) with Brown (racial segregation violates equal protection) were not overreaching activists (placating the left) but were actually giving effect to the original intent of the Fourteenth Amendment (placating the right).

by TChris

TalkLeft reported here the death of 13-year-old Travis Parker at a Georgia-run “therapeutic” wilderness camp. Camp counselors held Parker down for more than an hour while ignoring his repeated requests for his asthma inhaler. Since that report, six camp counselors have been charged with Parker’s murder.

Sam Shoemaker, the man responsible for training the counselors, claimed that face-down restraint has been used at Appalachian Wilderness Camp for 17 years. It was reported today that the state fired Shoemaker for failing to cooperate with its investigation when he refused to take a polygraph examination concerning camp practices.

Outrage of the day: a 73-year old woman has been kept in jail on a $50,000 bond in New Orleans for looting $63.00 in sausages. To top it off, she says she's innocent.

Merlene Maten undoubtedly stands out in the prison where she has been held since Hurricane Katrina. The 73-year-old church deaconess, never before in trouble with the law, now sleeps among hardened criminals. Her bail is a stiff $50,000. Her offense? Police say the grandmother from New Orleans took $63.50 in goods from a looted deli the day after Katrina struck.

Family and eyewitnesses have a different story. They say Maten is an innocent woman who had gone to her car to get some sausage to eat but was wrongly handcuffed by tired, frustrated officers who couldn't catch younger looters at a nearby store. Not even the deli owner wants her charged.

Read the whole thing, this is just crazy. She's now being held in the state prison.

by TChris

Congress passed a resolution yesterday honoring the 50th anniversary of Rosa Parks' refusal to sit at the back of the bus.

This is the text of the resolution (H. Con. Res. 208):

If I lived in Massachussetts, I'd be very alarmed about this:

Governor Mitt Romney raised the prospect of wiretapping mosques and conducting surveillance of foreign students in Massachusetts, as he issued a broad call yesterday for the federal government to devote far more money and attention to domestic intelligence gathering.

In remarks that caused alarm among civil libertarians and advocates for immigrants rights, Romney said in a speech to the Heritage Foundation ... ''How many individuals are coming to our state and going to those institutions who have come from terrorist-sponsored states?" he said, referring to foreign students who attend universities in Massachusetts. ''Do we know where they are? Are we tracking them?"

How did this guy get elected? First he wants to reinstate the death penalty with a law he claims is fail-safe, when no such law is possible, and now this. A giant raspberry to Gov. Romney.

Here are some arguments against legislation to increase criminal penalties for hate crimes at the federal level--they come from an article I wrote in 2000, (from the last paragraph, I assume it was sometime after the murder of Matthew Shephard):

• The federal judiciary released a statement recently expressing constitutional and practical concerns about hate crime laws. The underlying criminal activity of a hate crime, such as robbery, assault, or murder, traditionally falls under state jurisdiction. The concern is that by passing federal hate crime laws, there will be a mass federalization of crime which should and could be adequately handled at the state level instead of overburdening our already overwhelmed federal courts.

• There is no evidence to suggest that hate crime laws will have a deterrent effect upon hate crimes.

• In many cases, it is very difficult to prove a hateful motivation for the criminal act. The decision to charge a hate crime as such should not be left to law enforcement. The F.B.I., for example, includes gestures and other body language in its hate crime statistics. Prosecutions to date in some cases have been based upon bigoted statements made several years before the act in question.

by TChris

The commander of the Army Corps of Engineers acknowledged today that the Corps followed its usual procedures when it prepositioned resources in the New Orleans area before Hurricane Katrina, knowing that those procedures would be inadequate to protect against a category 4 or 5 storm. Lt. Gen. Carl Strock admitted that the Corps should have prepositioned more helicopters and sandbags.

As his poll numbers continue to plummet, President Bush will acknowledge today that poverty and inequality are long-standing problems in the country he governs. Unfortunately, he isn't likely to admit that he exacerbated the problem by insisting on tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the wealthiest members of society.

I'll be offline most of the day, if you'd like to take over, be my guest.

A new CBS-New York Times poll finds that Americans prefer rebuilding New Orleans to social security changes or tax cuts.

Almost two-thirds, 63 percent, said rebuilding the city devastated by Hurricane Katrina is more important to them than changing Social Security, and almost three-fourths, 73 percent, said rebuilding the flooded city is more important to them than cutting taxes, according to a CBS-New York Times poll released Wednesday.

A large majority of Americans, 73 percent, said they think their taxes will increase as a result of Katrina. More than half of those polled said they were willing to pay more taxes to help with Katrina recovery, job training and housing for victims.

Bush's second term as President has focused on tax cuts and social security changes. This poll is a resounding defeat for his policies and, in my opinion, his presidency.

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by TChris

Mike Brown predictably blames Gov. Blanco and not President Bush for the way things went “to hell in a handbasket” in Louisiana. But Brownie revealed in an interview that he spent the week calling the president’s top aides to report that “local authorities were overwhelmed and that the overall response was going badly.” His account confirms an obvious conclusion: the president should have set aside his guitar and tackled the problem at its inception.

This isn’t a tune the White House wants to play.

A senior administration official said Wednesday night that White House officials recalled the conversations with Mr. Brown but did not believe they had the urgency or desperation he described in the interview.

Brownie’s attempt to play the blame game is contradicted by Louisiana officials:

Proving again that sex offenders, however minor, are the new pariahs in our society, the House of Representatives today passed a bill that would outlaw misdemeanor sex offenders of minors from possessing, buying or selling firearms.

What is the connection? Violent sex offenders don't get misdemeanor convictions. This is as bad as the law it was patterned after, the Violence Against Women act, which prohibits misdemeanor domestic violence offenders from possessing a weapon. Both laws are attempts by Congress to mass-federalize state and local crime, and another step towards rendering the Second Amendment a nullity.

Update: It gets worse: