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Whatever happened to that multibillion dollar bailout the airlines got?

Well fuel costs aside, most of it ended up in the pockets of the airline executives. They
never took any pay cuts that they were demanding of the Union workers. Their "Golden
Parachutes" are quite intact if not larger than ever. And has anyone ever heard of bad management?

In other words...squandered!

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Hmm... that pic describes san diego to a tee. Except the oil fields are our gasoline storage tanks. I wonder if that means the san diego city counsel is corrupt? Naw...

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The latest Gallup Poll anaysis. it's not just Katrina...

Frank Newport

20-Sep 2005 8:47 am
A real question for the Bush administration right now -- as it would be for any administration -- is priorities. It's quite possible that the Bush administration has overreacted to the bad news about Katrina, leaving it vulnerable in other areas.

It's not surprising that the Bush advisers made the decision a few days into the aftermath of Katrina to mount a full-scale response effort. The media reports of the stranded and suffering residents of New Orleans created a firestorm of displaced anger, much of it aimed directly at the administration. Slow to realize the impact of the hurricane initially, the administration responded by sending the president down to the Gulf Coast on multiple visits, culminating with the primetime televised speech to the nation last Thursday night from Jackson Square in New Orleans. In that speech, Bush in essence offered billions of federal government aid to help rebuild the ravaged Gulf Coast region.

But the more I review available polling data, the more I think the public is telling us that there are other priorities facing the nation. Responding to Katrina is not the most important problem facing the country today. Katrina and disaster relief and rebuilding efforts are mentioned by 13% of Americans when asked to name the nation's top problem in our Sept. 12-15 poll. But twice as many Americans spontaneously mention aspects of the economy as the country's biggest concern, including fuel prices, unemployment, and the deficit. Sixteen percent say Iraq is the top problem -- also more than mention Katrina.

By a 10-point margin, Americans are actually more worried that there will be too much money spent on Katrina, rather than too little. The majority of Americans believe Bush is spending so much time on Katrina for political reasons, rather than because he is genuinely concerned about the victims.

I also suggest caution in accepting the argument that the hurricane caused precipitous damage to the president's standing. Americans had significantly downgraded their assessment of Bush before Katrina. The current 40% job approval rating for Bush is the lowest of his administration, but was already reached once before in August, before Katrina. The trend line in Bush job approval does not suggest a sudden disruption in an otherwise steady or upward curve. Bush's current standing represents, instead, a continuation of the slow erosion evident all year.

Most available data reinforce the fact that Bush's handling of Katrina is not his greatest weakness at this point. In Gallup's polls, Bush does worse on his handling of Iraq, the economy, foreign affairs, and in particular, gas prices. In last week's Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, Bush received eight-point higher ratings for his handling of Katrina than his overall rating. The New York Times/CBS poll reflected a similar phenomenon.

Gallup's August measures of Americans' views of the direction of the economy were as bad as we have measured in more than two years. Now, in Gallup's first September update, these numbers are unchanged -- still bad, but no worse. The only changes are slight increases in the public's views that inflation and unemployment may go up.

Thirty-four percent of Americans are satisfied with the way things are going in the country today -- the lowest since 1995. But that's also unchanged from August, before Katrina hit.

In short, it is a mistake to assume that the public's mood, views of the economy, views of the top problems facing the country, and views of the administration have undergone profound changes as a result of Hurricane Katrina. The drift toward negativity on these measures was well underway in the late summer. The same problems that faced the nation -- and President Bush -- before the hurricane face him after the hurricane.

So what are the consequences of all of this? A disproportionate emphasis on Katrina relief runs the risk of shortchanging those issues that Americans truly put at the top of the list of the nation's priorities: the war in Iraq (with all-time low levels of support at the moment), the economy, gas prices, and healthcare costs. It is also doubtful that any Katrina-related efforts are going to in and of themselves materially affect Bush's standing in the eyes of the public.

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Back to New Orleans?
City in no shape for mayor's repopulation plan

UNION-TRIBUNE EDITORIAL

September 20, 2005

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has not chalked up many successes as of late. But yesterday he did the right thing – and the smart thing – by suspending his plan to repopulate the city.

The mayor's plan had been to bring people back to their neighborhoods to "take a peek at what they've lost and what they have left" and assess whether they want to come back to stay. Nagin had put forth a few conditions on re-entry: He had said he didn't want children to return and he wanted people who were "flexible."

As of yesterday morning, some residents of Algiers, a neighborhood across the Mississippi River from the downtown area that sustained minimal damage from Hurricane Katrina, had already begun to return home. Later this week, people were supposed to start returning to the Garden District, and then, a few days after that, the French Quarter.

Now, the mayor has suspended his plans and instructed the residents of Algiers to re-evacuate. Nagin insists he is taking this action because of the looming threat of Tropical Storm Rita, which experts say could yet gain hurricane strength and do more damage to the Gulf Coast.

That explanation works for us. But what matters most is that Nagin has come to his senses.

Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen, who is leading the federal government's hurricane response team, had said he thought the mayor's plan to repopulate was unwise given the lack of clean water and emergency services as well as other obstacles. President Bush had echoed that assessment and promised to intervene in the matter personally, if necessary.

None of that went over well with Nagin, who has shown that he is better at hamming it up in front of the cameras and handing out insults than at handling a crisis. After Allen went public with his concerns, Nagin wondered aloud if the vice admiral was "the new crowned federal mayor of New Orleans."

Oh, brother. Now hardly seems like the time for a shoving match over bureaucratic turf – especially in New Orleans. Still, you have to appreciate the irony. This is the same Mayor Nagin who was, just a few weeks ago, demanding that the feds evacuate the city. And now he's in a hurry to bring people back in. One minute, Nagin can't wait to step aside and insist that responding to Hurricane Katrina is chiefly the responsibility of the federal government. The next, he wants to step in and supersede federal authority by forcing his plans to repopulate. He can't have it both ways.

We're glad the re-entry plans have been suspended for the time being. Now let's hope that "suspended" turns into "aborted."

Nagin wanted the feds to take over. They have. Now the mayor should pipe down, stay out of the way, and let them do their job.

Here's a tale of two pieces of pork

PAUL C. CAMPOS
SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE

September 21, 2005

This is the story of two pieces of pork. The first is a sausage that Merlene Maten, a 73-year-old grandmother and church deaconess, is accused of stealing from a deli in a New Orleans suburb the day after Katrina struck.

Maten, who has a long history of community service and no criminal record, had checked her ailing 80-year-old husband into a hotel after obeying orders to evacuate the city. Her family says she had just gotten the disputed sausage out of a cooler in the couple's car when she was arrested by frustrated police officers, after they were unable to catch the much younger and speedier people who were actually robbing the deli.

Nevertheless Maten was thrown into a state prison far from her home, surrounded by hardened criminals. Her family couldn't come up with the $50,000 bond the presiding judge had set: a sum 100 times greater than the heaviest fine she could be assessed if she were to be convicted.

Maten spent 17 days and nights in prison, until her case created enough of an outcry that another judge released her without bail. She still faces a hearing in October on charges of looting, although her family says that several eyewitnesses will testify she was never inside the looted store.

The second piece of pork is in the process of being looted from the U.S. treasury. It's a $231 million slice of taxpayer money, which is going to be used to build Ketchikan, Alaska's infamous Bridge to Nowhere – a structure that will be nearly as long as the Golden Gate Bridge, and several hundred times less busy.

Ketchikan is a small town (pop. 8,000), with a tiny airport that handles seven commercial flights a day. The airport is on an island that's now reached by a seven-minute ferry ride. Ketchikan is also in the district of Don Young, the chairman of the House Transportation Committee, which this summer spit out a $285 billion highway bill, packed with more than 6,000 "earmarked projects," some of which are just as outrageous as building a $300 million suspension bridge that will be used by a couple of hundred people daily (if users of the bridge were charged fees that covered its cost, they would have to pay more than $100 a trip. The ferry ride costs $6).

The difference between looting and ordinary theft is that looting happens when social norms break down, and large numbers of people lose whatever combination of fear and shame keeps them from simply grabbing whatever they can get their hands on. The difference between the typical looter and Don Young is that most looters don't boast about their exploits to the press. Young announced that the highway bill was "stuffed like a turkey" with special projects for his district. He's so proud of his highway robbery that he named the bill after his wife.

It's too easy to dismiss things like the highway bill – which the conservative Heritage Foundation estimates contains at least $25 billion in pure pork – as politics as usual. It's quite true that federal legislation has always featured a good deal of pork-barrel spending, and that New Orleans has always suffered from a good deal of theft.

But what we're seeing now is a loss of all shame and fear. Just as the looters in New Orleans knew there was nothing to stop them from stealing anything that wasn't nailed down, Congress knows that President Bush won't veto any raid on the federal treasury, no matter how irresponsible or corrupt. The end result is that Don Young will be rewarded with re-election for looting billions of taxpayer dollars, while Merlene Maten will be lucky to get an apology from the New Orleans police.

Campos, a nationally syndicated columnist, is a law professor at the University of Colorado.

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TouchŽz!

There's plenty of incompetance to go around.

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Bait and switch
North Korea tries nuclear extortion, again

UNION-TRIBUNE EDITORIAL

September 23, 2005

The euphoria over North Korea's supposed renunciation of its nuclear weapons program lasted exactly one day. Twenty-four hours after agreeing to a draft statement to abandon "all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs," North Korea reneged on the agreement it had just signed in the six-party talks in Beijing.

There was no deal, said a declaration from Pyongyang, unless the United States first provided North Korea a light-water nuclear reactor for energy production. Never mind that the question of donated nuclear reactors for purportedly peaceful purposes had been explicitly deferred in the draft agreement for future discussion at an undefined "appropriate time" – namely, after North Korea had verifiably dismantled its nuclear weapons program and any nuclear weapons it possesses.

Welcome to the Orwellian world of negotiating with the Stalinist hermit kingdom.

The United States and Japan promptly, and rightly, rejected North Korea's post-agreement demand as unacceptable and a violation of the draft agreement. Whether North Korea's latest attempt at extortion proves a deal breaker or just another diplomatic detour should be apparent in November when negotiations to implement the draft agreement are scheduled between the six parties – North Korea, South Korea, the United States, Japan, Russia and China.

North Korea's bad faith, of course, comes as no surprise. In 1994, the North Koreans signed an agreement with the Clinton administration to abstain from nuclear weapons in exchange for energy assistance to their bankrupt economy. Yet, we now know, they continued covert programs to reprocess plutonium and enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. Later, North Korea made its perfidy public by expelling inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and, this year, declaring that it had built an unspecified number of nuclear bombs.

Clearly, North Korea and its bizarre dictator, Kim Jong-Il, are not to be trusted. That is why the November implementation negotiations are crucial. No agreement with North Korea is worth anything without ironclad verification procedures. This would require continually intrusive inspections by the IAEA, shutdown of North Korea's Yongbong nuclear research facility, a confirmed end to all plutonium reprocessing and uranium enrichment plus verifiable dismantling of any nuclear weapons.

Whether Kim Jong-Il's regime would ever permit such verification measures remains a very open question.

The United States and its partners in the six-party talks are offering North Korea a comprehensive settlement. In exchange for giving up its nuclear-weapons program, North Korea would get increased economic aid and trade, security guarantees from the United States and, in effect, an end to North Korea's isolation from the rest of the world.

We will soon see whether the brutally totalitarian regime in Pyongyang, dedicated above all to its own survival, is prepared to become something other than a dangerous pariah.

Illegal workers eying the Gulf Coast

MARCELA SANCHEZ
THE WASHINGTON POST

September 24, 2005

When President Bush pledged last week that the Gulf Coast would become "one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen," he suggested that an unprecedented investment of billions of federal dollars would transform the region not only physically, but socially. Bush said that "as many jobs as possible should go to the men and women who live in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama." Indeed, rebuilding the region – its levees, roads, energy grids, homes – is to become the work of those affected by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.

So far, however, the government has acted in ways that would seem to encourage a different segment of the U.S. population to do this work. On Sept. 8, Bush issued an executive order lifting the Davis-Bacon Act mandating that construction workers on federal contracts be paid at least the average wage in the region. The decision was followed days later by a Homeland Security Department announcement that it will not apply sanctions toward employers who hire people unable to provide proper documentation.

And this could turn Katrina's aftermath into an immigration issue. In recent years, the U.S. construction industry has become a magnet for Latino immigrants, much more than for any other racial or ethnic group in this country. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, foreign-born Latino workers accounted for 40 percent of the total growth of employment in the construction trades last year. Before Katrina, Hispanics represented only 2 percent of the labor force in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi but held 5 percent of construction jobs, according to the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute.

What's more, according to Pew, of the total Hispanic immigrants working in construction last year, nearly two-thirds were "unauthorized." Labor specialists argue that these "unauthorized" – undocumented or illegal – immigrants are the very ones willing to work for less than prevailing wages and worse than average conditions, particularly if they are not asked for documentation. The suspension of Davis-Bacon rules and proper documentation requirements have been justified by the government as ways to lower federal costs, accelerate reconstruction and facilitate the hiring of Katrina victims who lost everything including their documents.

Yet, Latino and immigrant advocacy groups say the word is out and immigrants are on the move. There is a lot of work to be had on the Gulf Coast. Spanish-language media and blogs report that U.S. cleaning companies are quickly hiring Latinos, no questions asked.

Some members of Congress promise to make the recovery effort an opportunity to implement ideas such as education vouchers and tax incentives for business investment. Bush himself has called for the creation of a "Gulf Opportunity Zone" within which the government would provide incentives for entrepreneurs to create jobs and opportunity to "break the cycle of poverty."

Interestingly, no one has mentioned the disaster as an opportunity to address illegal immigration. Ever since 2001, Bush has been talking on and off about the need for a temporary worker program to provide legal means to "match willing workers with willing employers." For various reasons, his proposal to do that has not moved forward. And some in Congress have argued that Katrina will further postpone it.

The more cynical in this country are convinced that the lack of action on immigration so far is easily explained: rich and powerful employers benefit from the status quo. The government's actions after Katrina seem to further this view.

Katrina exposed how federal, state and local authorities can be overwhelmed by natural disasters. Immigration is not all that different. For years, policy-makers at all levels have been struggling with the social consequences of hundreds of thousands of undocumented men and women living in fear of the authorities and turning to government only as a last resort. Border states in particular have felt so overwhelmed that recently the governors of Arizona and New Mexico declared states of emergency along their borders with Mexico.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, Katrina wiped out more than 400,000 jobs. Jared Bernstein, a senior economist at EPI, calculated that the reconstruction price tag of $200 billion plus would create between 400,000 and 500,000 jobs.

Some may think that Katrina victims will fill the vacancies. But it may not be that simple. Immigrants, many of them illegal, are also likely to play a large role in the efforts to rebuild. These illegal workers, in turn, are likely to place extra burdens on state and local authorities and perhaps exacerbate poverty in this already depressed region.