Live from the Nuke Free Zone

CNN: “White House spokesman Scott McClellan lauded DeLay as a ‘good ally’ of President Bush and said of the indictment: ‘The president’s view is that we need to let the legal process work.’”
I’m pleased to see that the administration isn’t flip-flopping on their view of the legal system, but standing firmly with their position expressed […]

Well, that was anticlimactic. There is still some flooding expected, but as natural disasters go, anticlimactic is good, so I’m not complaining.
Since there will be little in the way of recovery, the main Katrina comparison Rita will afford is evacuation. We tried to evacuate a significant region of a metropolis, starting about as […]

Rita downgraded to Cat 4, projected to possibly be Cat 3 (a la Alicia) by the time it makes landfall. Turned a bit steeper north, so it will now hit east of Houston/Galveston and hopefully spare them the stronger sea-to-land winds.
There are scattered indications — anecdotal, but present — that despite advance activity, a […]

I don’t mean to make this a Texas blog, really. But the home state has been hopping recently. Rita, now a Cat 5, is forecast to have her eye make landfall within spitting distance of my parents’ house in Houston (and reader, she will be spitting).
Now, Galveston is no stranger to evacuations, having […]

In a lighter counterpoint to my last rambling on the state of Texas education, my very own school district wins a share of the Broad Prize for Urban Education, marking it as one of the top urban school districts in the country for gains in performance among its students. (Serious money attached, not just […]

I hope my fellow columnists will indulge me if my article today focuses on some interesting data from my home state of Texas.
I’m particularly looking at a poll published Sep. 10 in the Dallas Morning News, which dealt primarily with the state’s educational system. A couple of the responses jumped out at me, particularly […]

Nearly a third of the prisoners at Gitmo are on a hunger strike, and they’re being fed forcibly via nasal tubes. Quite an organized effort, probably summed up in one prisoner’s line: “Look, I’m dying a slow death in this place as it is. I don’t have any hope of fair treatment, so what […]

In eerie analogy to the invasion of Iraq after 9/11 despite its irrelevancy to the motivating incident, the Administration is now laying out a game plan for the post-Katrina presidency that ignores any inconvenient self-reflection. The strategy flogs tragedy as an excuse for forging ahead with what the organizers wanted to do anyway, but […]

Michael
Newdow is back in the news again sooner than I’d expected, having been hired by two atheist families to repeat his efforts to have the courts recognize Congress’s addition of the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance as an illegal government establishment of religion. The issue has again gone to court and there […]

“Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government, and to the extent that the federal government didn’t fully do its job right, I take responsibility,” Mr. Bush said in an appearance in the East Room with President Jalal Talabani of Iraq.
I take responsibility. Do you know how long I’ve […]