Jeb Bush Gets it Right

As Governor of Florida, I imagine Jeb has quite a bit of experience with natural disaster preparedness and response. Today he has a opinion piece in the Washington Post calling on the Federal government to slow down its rapid movement towards a complete federalization of the response effort.

I think he makes some very valid points, and does so without saying things like "the Federal government is evil and will take your property," which is always refreshing coming from a Republican of Jeb's stature. Not that his opinion is without fault. By placing reconstruction into the hands of local officials and politicians, you give decision making authority to those with personal ties to one area or another. Will the governor, a Democrat I believe, be more inclined to direct funds towards Democratic areas of the state? I don't know the actual answer to that question, but I know that my political science degree says yes, so long as they can do it without anyone noticing.

A federal response is certainly subject to the same patronage problems, but if you appoint someone to run the operation from, say, Oregon... with little or no ties to the region, then perhaps they will be able to make more even-handed decisions. But will that person lack the necessary experience and familiarity to really know what is required?

As usual, I come down believing there is a valuable partnership to be established between the state and federal entities. If the state manages the work and sets the priorities, while the feds watch to make sure it's all done on the up-and-up, then I think the situation will be handled better than if it were left to just one group. Of course, such an outcome is predicated on Congress not doing something which that same political science degree says is rather unlikely.

Setting the Records Straight

I recently received contact regarding Judith Miller, recently released political reporter for the New York Times. According to CNN, Judith was able to disclose her confidential source after receiving a voice confirmation from the source himself, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Let me be perfectly clear on this point, Lewis "Scooter" Libby stole my Washington D.C. nickname.

I have a standing policy to never make press comments off the record, so this Scooter impostor is clearly not me, nor do I endorse his actions of holding reporters to outrageous confidentiality demands. While I believe strongly in the rights of people lower down the food chain to speak in confidence to reporters, I do not believe senior staff and elected officials should have such privileges. You got something to say that the public should know about, and credibility to say it, then get out there and tell people.

If Mr. Libby is reading, please make it clear in the future that your nickname refers to you and not me whenever dealing with the press. Thanks.

Sitting on the Board

This afternoon I achieved a goal I long promised myself I would never achieve. That sentence deserves an explanation, because it is rare that we seek to avoid goal achievement. Here at the UW we have two student governments, the GPSS for graduate students (of which I am an officer) and the ASUW for the undergraduates. During my time as an undergrad at the UW, I served in a variety of rolls in the ASUW, most prominently as the ASUW Student Senate Chair. The ASUW Student Senate is a broadbased group of student leaders who establish student opinion. The group stands in stark contrast to the ASUW Board of Directors, a small group of students who has often sought to replace the Senate's deliberative opinion with its own. Given this animosity, I have always made it a point to avoid seeking a Board position, going to Board meetings, or generally liking the institution.

So how strange it was for me to be sitting, and voting, at the Board of Directors. Thanks to a long standing relationship between GPSS and ASUW, GPSS has a voting position which is traditionally filled by the Secretary. Unfortunately, the Secretary, who could not make this first meeting, sent me as a proxy.

And there I sat, for two or so hours, voting and debating issues in this entity which I had despised for all these years. Granted, the people serving on this year's Board are of the highest caliber, and I would count almost all as friend, but that doesn't change the nature of the institution. I still think the very formulation of the group lends itself to self-aggrandizement and narrow thinking. Yes, it is tempered by the personalities of the Board Members themselves; and, this Board will clearly be more Senate friendly than in the past. All that under consideration, I'm quite happy with my decision to never persue the post, and am equally glad that I'm not the GPSS Secretary.

Government Waste FEMA Style

I've written before about government waste in the Department of Homeland Security, and just recently I've been thinking about the high likelihood of waste with the reconstruction effort in Katrina-effected areas of the Gulf Coast. Turns out my fears were right on the money.

The Washington Post reports that FEMA contracted with Carnival to have three full service ships available as temporary housing for evacuees at a tune of $236 Million for six months. The best part of the whole article is a statement from Sen. Coburn and Sen. Obama, reproduced here for your enjoyment.

To critics, the price is exorbitant. If the ships were at capacity, with 7,116 evacuees, for six months, the price per evacuee would total $1,275 a week, according to calculations by aides to Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.). A seven-day western Caribbean cruise out of Galveston can be had for $599 a person -- and that would include entertainment and the cost of actually making the ship move.

"When the federal government would actually save millions of dollars by forgoing the status quo and actually sending evacuees on a luxurious six-month cruise it is time to rethink how we are conducting oversight. A short-term temporary solution has turned into a long-term, grossly overpriced sweetheart deal for a cruise line," said Coburn and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) in a joint statement yesterday calling for a chief financial officer to oversee Katrina spending.

My question to the Senators, will having a single chief financial officer actually prevent this sort of abuse? Seems we have a single chief-executive officer, and he routinely fails to prevent abuse.

A Return to Normalcy

Tonight marks the last day of summer, sort of. Technically school started on Monday, and I did in fact go to class. But intermixed with class were a wide variety of summer GPSS tasks as well as finalizing certain budget issues with the Office of the Vice President for Student Affairs (he gave us $5000, $2100 less than I asked for, but $1700 more than he gave us last year). Thankfully that all comes to an end today.

As an added bonus, the secretive GPSS Judicial Committee released its opinion regarding some volunteer appointment issues that brought the ire of someone not selected. It was a rather arduous and thorough process; but, in the end, they ruled that I had done nothing wrong. Woohoo! I didn't think I had done anything wrong in the first place, or at least, things that I had inadvertently done wrong I had done my best to rectify as soon as I learned about it. This just confirms it.

Tomorrow I return to my Power90 routine, which has been on something of an irregular pattern ever since my grandmother fell ill. I've been working out during that time, but not with the religious dedication of the summer (although my roommate has kept with it). Now that school will act as the dominate scheduling factor, I will begin to arrange workouts to fit accordingly. I'm through roughly half of the program, so after a week of getting back into the swing of things I'll punch it up a notch by starting the Session 3-4 videos.

In the next few days I'm scheduling a haircut with a more up scale place than my usual Hairmaster gig. I'm looking forward to seeing what they can do with my forsaken head of hair.

Defining Religion for the First Amendment

This quarter I'm enrolled in Freedom of Expression, which focuses on all aspects of the 1st Amendment. It's a really interesting part of the Bill of Rights, both in its historical intricacies and how the law coming out of the First Amendent looks. In the interest of posterity, here is the language in question:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

And with those 45 little words comes American's basic right of expression, thought, and belief. Today's class, while a little on the pedantic side, was interesting thanks to a thoughtful homework assignment: What is "religion"? I limited myself to religion in the First Amendment sense, but the question remains largely the same. Suffice to say, the question is not easy to answer.

Most of class was spent broadening the definition first offered by students... does a religion really need to be organized, must the beliefs be shared, what is a belief? Which were all very interesting questions and lead to an increasingly broader definition. I took a very different tact when trying to answer the question: come up with a definition that includes an accepted religion group like the Catholic Church but excludes an accepted political group like NARAL. Turns out this is not such an easy task.

I eventually developed the following answer.

Religion for purposes of the First Amendment refers to beliefs which cannot necessarily be explained through rational thinking, are held by a large group, and deal with certain non-secular issues. Religious exercise must be confined to those exercises which do not infringe upon the rights of others.

I like the answer, but it really doesn't exclude NARAL as much as I'd hoped. I did get a good definition of non-secular from class: "spirituality and/or creation not grounded in observable fact." But the answer still seems to broad to be workable.

Clearly this class is going to give me a few things to think about.

Geek Parties... Now with Money

For a long time my friends and I have hosted parties. We're not the most social people, but we've had a few go'rounds that have been worthy of note. The Iron Chef Challenge on the premier of Iron Chef American springs to mind. But those parties lacked something that is relevantly new to our lives: excess funds.

Last night we celebrated Brett's 24th birthday, and instead of struggling with my limited English vocabulary in a vain attempt to explain what money can buy you, let me just show you a picture.

First, you will note the blender. That is the greatest blender to ever crush ice. I purchased it as part of my, "Oh God, I'm Lonely, so I'll Buy Stuff" phase of my breakup with Lindsay. I stand by it as one of the best purchases from that period. Yeah, it was little spendy (okay, a lot spendy) but wields such explosive vortex action I might be tempted to compare it to certain vaccum's claim of gravometric proportions.

Next to the blender is a rather large bottle of tequila--moderately priced tequila. Mexican served as the party's central theme... but only to the extent that we ate nachos and I made more blended margaritas in one night than I have consumed in my lifetime up to that point. Back to the bottle... you will note that it is mostly empty. It started full that evening and only seven people attended (with two attendees hardly drinking). That left a rather substantial portion to the rest of us. Sure, the margaritas were a good method, but they lacked sufficient throughput to ensure we polished off the bottle. This is where Trivial Persuit comes in.

Trivial Persuit, you ask? Sure, you read the title of the post, right? Win yourself a pie piece, you and your partner both take a shot. Easy as... pie, I guess. But no, not really. I'm pretty good at Trivial Persuit, and when I get on a roll, I tend to be unstoppable. My team suffered some bad setbacks at the start (Mars/Moon... Keneset/Synagogue...), but in a period of less than an hour we obtained five pie pieces, and the five corresponding shots, all on top of the blended fruit margaritas I was pumping out. I was pretty gone by the time the evening wrapped up.

Much to my surprise, I suffered no ill effects in the morning and was able to make it to the hospital to see my grandmother. Who, by the way, is doing much better and may very well be discharged by the end of the week.