soapbox

After following the link from Nick, I stumbled upon this other story by Maureen Dowd. The passage that caught my attention?

Who on earth could have known that New Orleans’s sinking levees were at risk from a strong hurricane? Anybody who bothered to read the endless warnings over the years about the Big Easy’s uneasy fishbowl.

In June 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, fretted to The Times-Picayune in New Orleans: “It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us.”

There is some interesting reading today in the NY Times. Evidently Bush claims to have science policies, as opposed to anti-science policies like inteligent design and trying to kill stem cell research.

If you want distraction from current bad news, you can ponder the bad implications for the next 30- or 40-odd years. Sigh…

Anyway, interesting that he was generally a conservative justice – but somehow given the radical right, that doesn’t seem so bad. More on this later, like when I’ve had some sleep and haven’t spent all day in a wool suit in the sun or driving in B-town traffic.