Kit Stolz

Cutting government in a time of “natural” disasters

Krugman has some words for it (Sandy vs. Katrina):

Consider, in particular, the history of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Under President George H. W. Bush, FEMA became a dumping ground for unqualified political hacks. Faced with a major test in the form of Hurricane Andrew in 1992, the agency failed completely.

Then Bill Clinton came in, put FEMA under professional management, and saw the agency’s reputation restored.

Given this experience, you might have expected George W. Bush to preserve Mr. Clinton’s gains. But no: he appointed his campaign manager, Joe Allbaugh, to head the agency, and Mr. Allbaugh immediately signaled his intention both to devolve disaster relief to the state and local level and to downgrade the whole effort, declaring, “Expectations of when the federal government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level.” After Mr. Allbaugh left for the private sector, he was replaced with Michael “heckuva job” Brown, and the rest is history.

Like Mr. Clinton, President Obama restored FEMA’s professionalism, effectiveness, and reputation. But would Mitt Romney destroy the agency again? Yes, he would. As everyone now knows — despite the Romney campaign’s efforts to Etch A Sketch the issue away — during the primary Mr. Romney used language almost identical to Mr. Allbaugh’s, declaring that disaster relief should be turned back to the states and to the private sector.

The best line on this, I have to admit, comes from Stephen Colbert: “Who better to respond to what’s going on inside its own borders than the state whose infrastructure has just been swept out to sea?”

Ted Rall has a drawing:

Rall's viewpoint arguably is less political and richer in environmental detail, but also more difficult to contextualize and/or verify.

Humiliation planned for losing candidate: Romney set

The most astonishing book of the year to date around here is critic Wayne Koestenbaum's Humiliation, from 2011, a pained confessional essay about being brought low, about being crushed, about what the pain of embarrassment, shame, and mortification brings to a sufferer.

Tomorrow the media pillory that Koestenbaum describes so well will begin (it's already started, in fact, even before the race is run). But it's not all bad, Koestenbaum argues!

Here's the critic/poet on the deeper meaning, and worth, of humiiation:

I believe, with Jean Genet, and Jesus Christ, and Oscar Wilde, and a few other martyrs and mysters and troublemakers, that humiliation is a kiln through which the human soul passes, and where it receives burnishing, glazing, and consolidating. Humiliation cooks the spirit to a fine finish. (About the experience of servitude, the great Robert Walser wrote, in his 1907 novel The Tanners, "Strange, too, that you might nonetheless experience this state of affairs as a sort of refuge, a home.") Neither Walser nor I consider humiliation pleasant. But if it didn't contain a silver lining, I wouldn't be examining this dismal category of experience. If humilitation didn't hvae the the potential (sometimes, in certain circumstances) to transfigure the person over whom it casts a noxious cloud, then I'd drop the subject and write about something genuinely redemptive, like white wine. [in the chapter called "Five O'Clock Shadow, a reference to Nixon]

Nixon was the President most humiliated in our lifetimes until Bill Clinton came along, but Clinton,as Koestenbaum hinted, has been burnished by his trial by his passage through the kiln of media fire.

The American public never exactly apologized to Clinton for its orgy of shaming during the ill-fated and seemingly endless impeachment debacle, but it's surely not a stretch to say that Clinton's huge popularity today is in part a recognition on the part of the public that they/we/us went too far in blaming/shaming/humiliating the man.

Koestenbaum writes:

When Bill Clinton's extramarital escapades hit the press, I quaked with vicarious shame and outrage that a mere blow job should rock the nation and that this forgivable president and his wife and daughter and Monica Lewinsky and everyone who knew and loved Monica Lewinsky hsould need to suffer in public and be seen by hypocritical viewers and pundits and senators as humiliated beasts…If this book has an ulterior aim, however disreputable, here it is: I want to stand up for those who are publicly shamed for [non-exploitative] sexual conduct.

The pillory will be virtual, but the pain will be real for Obama or Romney. If the incumbent President loses, for the rest of his life he will be derided, mocked, and scorned for losing an election he should have won. If, more likely, the challenge Romney loses, he will be torn down, sneered at, shunned. It will be his fate, just as in Greek tragedies it was the fate of Cassandra to prophesize murder of her family, and not to be heard by them, or anyone.

The pillory has already been erected, and Romney already has been splattered by commentators on the right such as Daniel Larison…although in a recent post Larison let up a little bit, in order to put the blame on George W. Bush:

The Bush administration truly was one of the three or four worst
presidential administrations of the last sixty years, and Bush’s party
still hasn’t come to grips with what that means for how the rest of the
country sees them. In the wake of such a huge failure, it would be
almost inexplicable that the public could entrust the Presidency to that
same party after just four years. Assuming that Romney loses next week,
the puzzle won’t be why he lost, but why he was ever within striking
distance in the first place.

Karl Rove and other mainstream right-wingers put the blame on Hurricane Sandy, perhaps to avoid being blamed for choosing a candidate as obviously two-faced as Romney:

“Obama has temporarily been a bipartisan figure this week. He has been the comforter-in-chief and that helps,” Rove said.

On the other side of the coin, our national Humiliator-in-Chief, Rush Limbaugh, has put the blame on Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, for being insufficiently partisan, and calling him "fat and a fool."

Is it possible to dislike a politician and not want to see him viciously attacked? Maybe not. Which maybe means that those of us who suffer must learn to love our humiliiations, if we hope to survive them.

Will Ventura County’s Prez-picking streak continue?

Ventura County is one of just eight counties around the country that has picked every winner of the Presidential contest since Warren Harding successfully (with one exception — l976). Timm Herdt, the reigning political writer in this parts, hints that the streak may continue:

In early 2008, Democrats overtook Republicans to gain a plurality
among registered voters in Ventura County. That fall, Obama carried the
county by 12 percentage points.

"A lot of younger people started becoming more politically active,
and that certainly started swinging things toward the Democratic Party,"
said former Supervisor Susan Lacey of Ventura.

The local races look close, but a substantial lead among party registration (about 44% Democratic to about 30 Republican, with about 20% Independent) gives the Prez a leg up.

Here's the history:

Because county voters are substantially more Democratic than in past decades, due in large part to an influx of Latinos, the county will likely vote for Obama, probably at a higher rate than the nation.

The dying of the light (of summer)…

…is a beautiful thing in the Eastern Sierra.

From reporter Mark Grossi's photostream.

Climate change is like leprosy to the GOP: Untouchable

When Timothy Egan is good, he is great:

Climate change is to the Republican base what leprosy once was to healthy humans — untouchable and unmentionable. Their party is financed by people whose fortunes are dependent upon denying that humans have caused the earth’s weather patterns to change for the worse.

From, of course, The New York Times.

Egan is one of our most passionate advocates for climate sanity, and also the author of a book about the biggest of forest fires before global warming, The Big Burn, an absolutely enthralling account of the enormous fires that swept through three million acres in three states in 1910, killing dozens, a disaster that led to the creation of the Forest Service.0 .

Nation suddenly realizes global warming is just going to be a thing that happens from now on

NEW YORK—Following Hurricane Sandy’s destructive tear through the Northeast this week, the nation’s 300 million citizens looked upon the trail of devastation and fully realized, for the first time, that this is just going to be something that happens from now on.

From The Onion, of course. My fav part is the concluding quote:

“Right now, Americans all across the country are watching the aftermath of this storm and at long last recognizing that this is what life is like now,” said Dr. Richard Morales, a climatologist at the University of Pennsylvania. “Admittedly, it could take a little while for some to fully acknowledge it, but at the end of the day, people will be much happier once they accept that they and their loved ones will likely suffer the consequences of an even stronger, more deadly hurricane at some point very soon. It’s going to happen.”

“I went through something very similar a few years ago when I finally came to terms with the fact that no one would ever listen to anything I said about global warming,” Morales added. “And that it is entirely too late to do anything about it.”

It's true we can't prevent global warming from continuing to happen. But we can make a huge difference — if we take action. From National Geographic:

Even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases (GHGs) today, the Earth would still warm by another degree Fahrenheit or so. But what we do from today forward makes a big difference. Depending on our choices, scientists predict that the Earth could eventually warm by as little as 2.5 degrees or as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit.

A commonly cited goal is to stabilize GHG concentrations around 450-550 parts per million (ppm), or about twice pre-industrial levels. This is the point at which many believe the most damaging impacts of climate change can be avoided. Current concentrations are about 380 ppm, which means there isn't much time to lose. According to the IPCC, we'd have to reduce GHG emissions by 50% to 80% of what they're on track to be in the next century to reach this level.

For the sake of our children and grandchildren, we really can't give up on the climate.

“Lying is what makes you sound like a conservative”

From Rick Perlstein's dark journey into the mind of Mitt Romney:

It’s time, in other words, to consider whether Romney’s fluidity with the truth is, in fact, a feature and not a bug: a constituent part of his appeal to conservatives. The point here is not just that he lies when he says conservative things, even if he believes something different in his heart of hearts—but that lying is what makes you sound the way a conservative is supposed to sound, in pretty much the same way that curlicuing all around the note makes you sound like a contestant on American Idol is supposed to sound.

Genuinely frightening, if you believe in democracy.

From The Baffler.

Denier at Watts Up with That: Sandy not really a hurricane

At climate change denier central, Watts Up with That, Willis Eschenbach wrote on Monday:

I had said a couple of days ago, when Sandy was a hurricane, that it would not be a hurricane when it hit the coast. How did that go?

Well, as of the time that this location and projection of the path was done, the NDBC has shown all the nearest stations. Not one of the actual observations is showing sustained winds over 50 knots, and that’s a long ways from the 72 63 knots that marks a hurricane.

Please note that the big damage from such storms is the flooding, so I
am not minimizing the likely extent of the damage. It will be
widespread. However … not a hurricane.

Has anyone in the rather chequered history of blogging ever been as completely, ridiculously, absurdly, preposterously monstrously wrong?

[animation/video of Hurricane Sandy from NOAA]

http://www.facebook.com/v/423101797756742

“Every hurricane is a fluke” — Atmospheric scientist

"Every hurricane is a fluke, to some degree," said Adam Sobel, an atmospheric scientists at Columbia in New York, in a fascinating discussion around the question: Is New York becoming a hotspot for tropical cyclones?

Short answer (from Will Oremus) is: No.

Here, via Wikipedia Commons, is an image of hurricane tracks in the Atlantic, 1851-2005.

How did the experts track hurricanes from 150 years ago? Ask the smarties at the National Hurricane Center to find out.

Refiners push up gas prices in CA today: L.A. Times

A sharp letter to the editor this past weekend alerted me to a startlingly good Los Angeles Times story I had missed on California's high gas prices, complete with a graph that almost tells the story itself.

Here's the letter, from Jim Cody of North Hollywood:

The graph that accompanied this article, which shows how crude oil
prices, taxes, refiners and station owners have influenced the price of
gas recently, proves that practically all of the recent run-up in California gasoline prices is going to the refinery owners: Chevron, Tesoro, BP, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil
and four others. Chevron, BP, Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips are, along
with Shell, the five largest oil companies in the world, and in 2011
they made record profits of $137 billion.

Since only one segment of the
gasoline supply chain is profiting from this price run-up, it is hard
to believe that this segment is not also solely responsible. The oil
companies say they are not actively colluding to set prices; since they
aren't, they have apparently developed some other price-gouging method
that is just as effective and just as destructive to the economy.

Every
time an oil severance tax has come up for consideration in California,
the oil companies have warned that that would raise gas prices. Turns
out that gas prices are going to go up anyway, but at the oil companies'
convenience. At least if we pass an oil severance tax, we will get
something out of it, just like the socialist states of Alaska, Texas and
Oklahoma.

Here's the story, with a partially anecdotal opening:

"You can't believe how customers talk to me," said [gas station owner] Arya, who was born
in India but has lived in the U.S. for almost 40 years. "They say, 'You
foreigner, you're gouging.'"

While Arya was losing money, the
state's oil refiners were raking it in. For the week that ended Oct. 8,
when the average price for a gallon of gasoline in California hit a
record high of $4.67, the portion of the retail price going to refiners,
or margin, jumped to $1.22 a gallon. That was up 75% from the previous
week. And it was nearly triple the average margin of 42 cents a gallon
this year, according to California Energy Commission data.

And here's the exemplary charticle, mentioned in the letter above.

Note that air pollution regulation did help create the "gasoline island" that these oil refiners now exploit.