Site traffic has exploded in the last week.  I can’t say I’m entirely
happy about it, since it’s in the wake of Katrina, and the mainstream
press is generally such a damn echo chamber that we all have to
scramble online to try to figure things out for ourselves.  Still, I’d
much rather have one-tenth the traffic and tens of thousands of my
fellow citizens still alive. 

And I never thought a sentence like that would ever exist.  Even written in dry understatement.

[Long pause, looking for words.  Finding none.  Then, at last, finding one.]

Shit.

Horrible goddam couple of weeks, eh?  And I’m just sitting on my ass in
L.A., sending money and complaining and trying to figure out what to do
next.  I can’t begin to imagine. 

Back to the subject.

This is still a boutique operation, of course, nowhere near the size of
the big blogs and not trying to be.  This is just a place where I vent,
kid around, ask questions, profess strange loves, and otherwise slap
neurons in digressive fashion.  Also, I occasionally post pictures of
unusual places, cute animals, or politicians acting like assholes.

Someday, perhaps, I will find a picture of a politician acting like an asshole with a cute animal in an interesting place.

This will be, in Bush’s phrase, the trifecta.

(Also, this will be a new twist on Clue: Tom DeLay condescending a
Bichon Frise near the Great Pyramids!  Hillary Clinton flipping off a
Chinstrap Penguin in Sumatra!  Etc.)

I digress.

We’ve had only a couple of tiny glitches on the upslope, and that’s to the credit of Colin and Islandnet.com, whom I thank profusely.

Since I make my living writing other stuff that actually pays, and that
takes time, I rarely post more than a thing or two a day.  Still, if
you’re new to the site, I hope you’ll bookmark the place and pop in
regularly, even when entire major goddam cities of people are not being
wasted due to mass incompetence.

Let us dare to dream.

The new ballad people are shouting in front of live news microphones nationwide:

C’mon, everybody…

The new ballad people are shouting in front of live news microphones nationwide:

C’mon, everybody…

What do you call an event in which participants are screened, surrounded by police, and marched on a fenced-in route, all off-limits to the media?

The Pentagon’s upcoming "Freedom Walk", of course.

That distant bang! you just heard was Irony, thumping its head against a wall in pure envy.

Picking up on a thought bouncing around back at TMW after a Chris Floyd post, I thought I’d find out for myself exactly which Louisiana parishes were and were not included in George W. Bush’s declaration of emergency effective August 26th, which you can also reach by clicking the map itself.

I checked the parish map against the White House’s own press release,
posted on their own site. 
I have tried to figure out how this is my own mistake, but I can’t find it.  And the results are frankly so bizarre I had
to make the graphic in order to properly show you.

Welcome to upside-down-land: the areas at risk for Katrina were quite remarkably the areas not included in Bush’s declaration of emergency.

What the hell?

Compare and contrast with the full and specific statewide list of parishes and the services they will receive issued after the storm hit.

Is this really what Bush authorized before the storm hit?  Are they really that incompetent?

PS: Putting to rest any nightmares, the map
doesn’t correlate in any way I can find with demographics, income,
voting patterns, campaign contributions, or the like.  If I haven’t made an
obvious mistake, I’m just hoping now that the press release simply got the list of
"emergency" and "non-emergency" parishes mixed up.

In other words, more galling incompetence in the White House, albeit trivial, is really the best-case scenario.

Otherwise, we’re looking at more galling incompetence of a frighteningly non-trivial kind.

UPDATE: I’ve received numerous emails explaining that all of the coastal
parishes were already declared disaster areas because of Tropical Storm
Cindy, which struck in June.  Checking with FEMA’s own website… nope. 
Only five coastal parishes — Jefferson, Lafourche, Plaquemines, St.
Bernard, and St. Charles — seem to be covered here, and only on a
limited basis at that.

This is explicitly confirmed by the presidential authorization of August 23, as posted on the White House website.

I’m still hoping and half-expecting to find I’ve overlooked something. 
I hope so.  Honestly.  I do not exactly enjoy this, and I hope this is
my own mistake in
some way.  But I’ve looked and looked on the White House and FEMA
websites and Googled my fingers half off, and while I do find several
parishes coming in line for
various types of aid piecemeal at various times over the last several
years, I cannot yet find anything which even comes close to accounting
for the diagram
above.  It still appears that while northern Louisiana was covered,
much of Louisiana directly in the storm’s
path was simply not covered by the president’s declaration at the time
the storm hit.

UPDATE 2: I’ve tried calling FEMA general
number repeatedly, but the phone is ringing endlessly with no answer. 
Not even a machine or voicemail.  They seem a bit overwhelmed.  I’m
reluctant to take anyone’s time there anyway right now anyway. 
Instead, I’ve sent polite emails to the public FEMA email addresses
that seems relevant, asking for a brief explanation of the above once
things have calmed down.

UPDATE 3: My inbox has received many dozens of emails from
people pointing to August 29th (post-storm) documents, which supposedly
fill in the blanks but are entirely off the point.  We’re looking for a
pre-storm explanation.  Please check your dates carefully.

UPDATE 4: I’ve updated the graphic slightly.  Since I used a map
downloaded from the Louisiana website, the parishes not covered in red
were still shown with a decorative blue-green color gradient from the
original.  I had no idea so many people would try to find significance
in those colors.  My mistake, and I apologize.

When I get a minute — and I’m still trying to finish a book on a
tightening deadline, remember — I’d like to whip up a composite map
showing Louisiana side-by-side with the pre-storm declarations for
Mississippi and Alabama, where the coastal counties were declared as
you’d expect.  This will be even stranger-looking.

Incidentally, a number of angry Bush defenders have emailed me detailed explanations of the meanings of these colors in terms of
staged relief deployment and such, when it was obvious they had absolutely no idea where they came from.  Sigh.  Not exactly reality-based.

On the other hand, I’d also like to distance myself from anyone trying
to read this as proof of anything partisan beyond possible — possible
— further evidence of incompetence.  (As if we could possibly need
more.)  I have not claimed and do not claim there is any direct
correlation between the parishes declared here and any conceivable
underlying partisan cause.

I’m not sure how I can be clearer about that.

I’m still quite open to the possibility that the mistake is mine, or
there’s a simple explanation I don’t understand, or that it was a
clerical error corrected in any case by the 29th, or what have you.  I
don’t actually have a pet theory.  I have asked a simple question and am still seeking
and awaiting a simple answer, sourced to actual official policies, an
explanatory news report, an official statement, etc.  That’s all.