Robert George discusses the security restrictions at the ill-conceived ‘Freedom Walk.’
Legal Problems
Another effect of the hurricane I hadn’t really thought about otherthan what they were going to do with the prisoners from New Orleans:
At Rapides Parish Detention Center 3 in Alexandria, which normally holds convicted felons, there are now 200 new inmates who arrived hot, hungry and exhausted on buses this week after being evacuated from flooded jails in New Orleans.
They have no paperwork indicating whether they are charged with having too much to drink or attempted murder. There is no judge to hear their cases, no courthouse designated to hear them in and no lawyer to represent them. If lawyers can be found, there is no mechanism for paying them. The prisoners have had no contact with their families for days and do not know whether they are alive or dead, if their homes do or do not exist.
“It’s like taking a jail and shaking it up in a fruit-basket turnover, so no one has any idea who these people are or why they’re here,” said Phyllis Mann, one of several local lawyers who were at the detention center until 11 p.m. Wednesday, trying to collect basic information on the inmates. “There is no system of any kind for taking care of these people at this point.”
Along with the destruction of homes, neighborhoods and lives, Hurricane Katrina decimated the legal system of the New Orleans region.
More than a third of the state’s lawyers have lost their offices, some for good. Most computer records will be saved. Many other records will be lost forever. Some local courthouses have been flooded, imperiling a vast universe of files, records and documents. Court proceedings from divorces to murder trials, to corporate litigation, to custody cases will be indefinitely halted and when proceedings resume lawyers will face prodigious – if not insurmountable – obstacles in finding witnesses and principals and in recovering evidence.
What a mess.
More here about the arrests of suspected looters:
More than 220 looting suspects and others accused of violence in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina have been taken to a makeshift city jail known as “Camp Greyhound,” the New Orleans bus terminal, to await transfer to out-of-town prisons.
The arrests and transfers are being monitored by the Justice Department and the Louisiana Attorney General’s Office to ensure that proper legal procedures are being followed, law-enforcement authorities said.
Another 1,000 inmates already in jail in Louisiana when Katrina hit are being moved by the U.S. Marshals Service to prisons in other states, including 460 inmates who were transported by airplane yesterday to a federal prison in Florida. Another 460 inmates will make the same trip today.
Many of the jail facilities in New Orleans were flooded after the storm.
U.S. Attorney David Dugas in Baton Rouge yesterday said a majority of those arrested were taken into custody in Jefferson Parish, where law-enforcement authorities have rounded up dozens of looters who raided houses and businesses.
Prisoners at the New Orleans bus terminal are being guarded by corrections officers from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola — one of the toughest prisons in the country. Sixteen bus stops have become hastily constructed cages of chain-link fencing and razor wire, each filled with men or women arrested on the flood-ravaged streets of New Orleans during a rampage of looting and violence that overtook the city.
While the vast majority of those being processed through the terminal are accused of looting, one of the men brought to the site was Wendell L. Bailey, charged with shooting at a rescue helicopter seeking to aid people trapped at the Superdome. Others were named on charges of attempted murder and attempted rape.
So I guess there were significant arrests made, and they have the guy accused of shooting at the rescue helicopter. This is news to me.
Your Mother Was Right
Don’t skip breakfast:
Girls who regularly ate breakfast, particularly one that includes cereal, were slimmer than those who skipped the morning meal, according to a study that tracked nearly 2,400 girls for 10 years.
Girls who ate breakfast of any type had a lower average body mass index, a common obesity gauge, than those who said they didn’t. The index was even lower for girls who said they ate cereal for breakfast, according to findings of the study conducted by the Maryland Medical Research Institute. The study received funding from the National Institutes of Health and cereal-maker General Mills.
“Not eating breakfast is the worst thing you can do, that’s really the take-home message for teenage girls,” said study author Bruce Barton, the Maryland institute’s president and CEO.
The fiber in cereal and healthier foods that normally accompany cereal, such as milk and orange juice, may account for the lower body mass index among cereal eaters, Barton said.
I guess this proves conclusively what dieticians and parents have been telling us for years.
DeLay’s PAC Indicted
Five felony indictments:
A grand jury has indicted a political action committee formed by U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and a Texas business group in connection with 2002 legislative campaign contributions.
The five felony indictments against the two groups were made public Thursday. Neither DeLay nor any individuals with the business group has been charged with any wrongdoing.
The charge against Texans for a Republican Majority alleged the committee illegally accepted a political contribution of $100,000 from the Alliance for Quality Nursing Home Care.
Four indictments against the Texas Association of Business include charges of unlawful political advertising, unlawful contributions to a political committee and unlawful expenditures such as those to a graphics company and political candidates.
IN my eyes, that is about as unclear a report as is possible. Can a PAC be indicted? I thought you could only indict people. Who are they going to jaiul/fine if found guilty? And so on.
Woops!
And the games continue:
A new Democratic effort to whip up indignation about the Bush administration’s handling of Hurricane Katrina also tried to raise money for Democratic candidates.
Sen. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat and the head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, issued an appeal Thursday urging people to sign an online petition to fire the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency over his handling of the Katrina response.
After an inquiry from the Associated Press, the DSCC quickly pulled down the page and said they would donate to charity any money raised by the anti-FEMA petition.
When recipients clicked on a link to the petition, the top center of the screen _ above the call to “Fire the FEMA director” _ had asked for a donation to the DSCC.
Other DSCC Web pages have the same appeal for contributions, but several do not.
Since Katrina, Democrats have charged Republicans badly botched the response, and some have called for the firing of FEMA chief Michael Brown.
In recent days, Republicans hit back by accusing Democrats of trying to use the human tragedy for political gain. The letter, the GOP said Thursday, was proof.
“It’s a disgrace to exploit Hurricane Katrina to raise political funds,” said Brian Nick, spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
“They should halt this activity because it’s way over the line,” he said.
DSCC spokesman Phil Singer said: “While the content of the letter is totally valid, it should have never been linked to a Web site that asks people to contribute to political campaigns. We regret it, have removed the letter from our site and will donate any contributions raised as a result of this petition to the Red Cross.”
Is there anything politicians will not use to attempt to raise money?
Krauthammer’s View
Charles Krauthammer pens a piece that will have people talking (or, as it is here, yelling at each other incoherently):
In less enlightened times there was no catastrophe independent of human agency. When the plague or some other natural disaster struck, witches were burned, Jews were massacred and all felt better (except the witches and Jews).
A few centuries later, our progressive thinkers have progressed not an inch. No fall of a sparrow on this planet is not attributed to sin and human perfidy. The three current favorites are: (1) global warming, (2) the war in Iraq and (3) tax cuts. Katrina hits and the unholy trinity is immediately invoked to damn sinner-in-chief George W. Bush.
This kind of stupidity merits no attention whatsoever, but I’ll give it a paragraph. There is no relationship between global warming and the frequency and intensity of Atlantic hurricanes. Period. The problem with the evacuation of New Orleans is not that National Guardsmen in Iraq could not get to New Orleans but that National Guardsmen in Louisiana did not get to New Orleans. As for the Bush tax cuts, administration budget requests for New Orleans flood control during the five Bush years exceed those of the five preceding Clinton years. The notion that the allegedly missing revenue would have been spent wisely by Congress, targeted precisely to the levees of New Orleans, and that the reconstruction would have been completed in time, is a threefold fallacy. The argument ends when you realize that, as The Post noted, “the levees that failed were already completed projects.”
Read the whole thing.
Plame
I guess now is as good a time as ever to reignite the Plame debate donnybrook in the comments section:
New York Times reporter Judith Miller, locked up for refusing to reveal who told her a covert CIA operative’s name in a probe that may be nearing a conclusion, works part time at the jail laundry helping clean fellow inmates’ green jumpsuits and dirty linens.
Between shifts at the laundry, Miller works at the library on a card catalog of the jail’s books, said attorney Floyd Abrams, offering new details about Miller’s life behind bars after meeting with her on Wednesday.
Abrams, who represents The New York Times, said Miller was “safe” but that conditions in jail were “grim.”
This week Miller marked two months — 65 days as of Thursday — at the Alexandria Detention Center just outside Washington for refusing to testify to a grand jury trying to determine who in the Bush administration leaked CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.
Abrams said Miller remained “resolute” and would not reveal her confidential source to a grand jury in the case, which could shake up an administration already reeling from criticism over its response to Hurricane Katrina. The probe has ensnarled President George W. Bush’s top political adviser, Karl Rove.
But lawyers close to the investigation say there are signs that the 20-month-long inquiry could be wrapped up within weeks in a final flurry of negotiations and legal maneuvering.
Asked if talks were under way with special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, a Justice Department prosecutor, to secure Miller’s testimony and release, Abrams said: “If there are any discussions, they would be private.”
I read on usenet that Mike Brown was actually the leaker.