Why does public service mean poor service?

Is anyone honestly surprised that the city of New Orleans, the state of Louisiana, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) would each successively blunder in rescuing thousands or tens of thousands of people from downtown New Orleans during a major disaster? Folks I talk to are not surprised. Racism, no. Incompetence, of course! We have come to expect that our government bureaucracies will serve us poorly, especially if they are an agency of those governments well known for corruption such as Louisiana, or for patronage such as FEMA. While no one is surprised that we often receive poor service from government agencies, a trip to France or Germany or the Netherlands or even Canada will show that this is not always the case, even for governments as haughty as France. Really the only agencies of our American government we hold in generally high esteem are our Armed Forces, and they are respected far more for their effectiveness than for their efficiency.

Returning from a business trip today at Boston’s Logan airport, I decided to take public transportation back to my office in Dedham. My decision was prompted by the new “Silver Line Service” from Logan airport to South Station. I could take a Silver Line bus directly from Logan to the commuter rail which has a stop very close to my office. My first step in this process was to inquire at a Massport information desk how to pick up the Silver Line. I walked over to the desk and stood in front of the Massport helper for several seconds. She did not acknowledge my existence but continued reading her newspaper. Finally I said “Excuse me, how do I get to the Silver Line?” Apparently irritated, she directed me to go outside terminal D, and then immediately became engrossed in her reading (the Herald, probably).

On my way outside I stopped to look at a Massport sign in the airport for guidance and discovered the sign below which showed me that the Silver Line was in service but also showed me that Massport can’t spell the word “Faneuil”. Symptomatic of Massport’s overall quality problem is the fact that their signs cannot correctly spell the name of Boston’s most famous landmark.


Massport has trouble spelling "Fanueil"

I walked outside terminal and waited for the bus which came quickly. The driver was courteous and professional and helped another passenger very considerately when he inquired about the differences between the various airport shuttle buses. Arriving at South Station I had a short wait for my train and then rode down to Dedham and in a car whose windows were so abraded and delaminated that they presented only a hint of the city beyond to the passengers (see the picture below).


Back Bay from a commuter rail window

So out of these 4 encounters with Massport and the MBTA (helpdesk, sign, bus, train), would say about 1 was high-quality and the other 3 less than satisfying. Was I surprised? Sadly, no.

Most of our government organizations are so constrained by regulation, budgetary decisions, by their own policies, by employee unions, patronage, and by unwanted interference from politicians that they have little energy left to adopt the models of continuous improvement and best practices which are the hallmark of successful organizations in any sector. This is not to denigrate the people who serve in these organizations, but rather simply to observe that we form, regulate and manage them in ways that are highly inflexible, cannot reward individual or group initiative, and do not value improvement or meaningful measures of quality.

These days the President of the United States is urging Congress to spend $200 billion to rebuild New Orleans and repair the damage caused by the recent hurricanes. I fear that all their new spending will be as effective as was the window cleaning budget for the train car I rode today.

Mea Culpa

I apologize to regular readers that I am out of town and not posting regularly. Here are a couple of reads I recommend:

First, Jeff Jacoby’s column in today’s Boston Globe is a well deserved swipe at W’s profligate spending plans. Envisioning a time traveler from the era of LBJ, Jeff writes:

"The incumbent in the White House, a Texan named Bush, burns through money even more extravagantly than the Texan named Johnson you left behind in 1964."

Hopefully not, but the resemblance is unmistakable.

Second, check out Victor Davis Hanson’s summation of academic cowardice and diversity double-standards in “Ivory Cower”. He writes:

"…our academic leadership is not talking about a more competitive curriculum, higher standards of academic accomplishment, or the critical need freely to debate important issues. Instead, it remains obsessed with a racial, ideological, and sexual spoils system called 'diversity.' Even as the airline industry was deregulated in the 1970s, and Wall Street now has come under long-overdue scrutiny, it is time for Americans, if we are to ensure our privileged future, to re-examine our era's politicized university."

The behaviors reported by VDH are deplorable, but he doesn’t mention that the cost to attend universities is government subsidized, and that the price charged also varies depending upon how much a university may want to attract a student (with the overriding objective being to improve the university’s rankings in metrics performed by US News and their ilk).

When home I’ll write about the brouhaha in Newton regarding the replacement of the pastor of Our Lady Help of Christians Church in Newton next.

The Amazing Robert

Did you ever wonder why US refining capacity is tight? Robert Kuttner dashes off the answer today in his Boston Globe column entitled Hurricane-omics :

"Gulf Coast and offshore refineries provide more than a quarter of America's domestic energy supplies. Oil companies, which like tight markets, have been reluctant to build additional refining capacity, something that could take years."

So THAT's it! A fondness for tight markets is why we don't have excess refining capacity.

How foolish of me to think it might be a result of the high capital cost of refining, the prospect of enduring years of bad publicity, bureaucratic and legal struggle against environmental "advocates", and higher returns from alternative investments.

I might have thought that, but I'm just a schmoe, not a trained economist like Mr. Kuttner. Thanks for the enlightment, Bob.

Thank You for Sharing...

Trends always appear first in California,
including trends in Nanny Statism.

Profiling Soles

PolySci Professor William Miles does a superb sendup of our ineffective but non-discriminatory Transportation Security Administration. The TSA meets all the metrics of our PC-driven culture by refusing to take the elementary step of profiling an airline passenger's security risk by age, gender, or national origin. They will profile your shoes, however (at least until the ACLU gets wind of this policy and begins litigation). Professor:

"that's the compromise between security and liberty to which we have been reduced. Ethnic profiling and racial profiling are out. Honed intuition and common sense are unconstitutional. At the security gate, agents of the Transportation Security Administration discriminate not a wit between American white-haired grandmothers in wheelchairs and Saudi young males on transit visas. Instead of experienced security analysts, we rely on random computer lotteries to decide who gets yanked from line for random body searches. We cannot profile people. Instead, we profile shoes."

Exactly. PC uber alles.

Read the whole thing.

Jim Carroll

About once per year Jim Carroll sheds his insufferability and writes something superb. Not by coincidence it is always a piece about something other than US politics. Jim is an Irishman who can see some shadow of himself across the terrible divide within his old country, even if he cannot see anything but evil in the political party that won the last US election. His Monday column "Irish melancholy from new and old wounds" is frank and beautiful.

Is it too much to hope that he might someday look across his own nation's political divide at some cracker conservative and write with equal empathy? I hope so. We would all be better off if he did. He writes:

"I offer these reflections from within the wrenching problem. I recognize the self-defeating melancholy as my own. The phantom pain is familiar to me, evidence that the hidden wound of history is far from healed. But all of this is simply the Irish version of human woundedness, what makes us understand Earth itself as a place of exile, the vale of tears."

Thanks, Jim. Well said. Read the whole thing.

Safe, Legal, and Rare

Sunday's Ideas section of the Boston Globe was multiply delightful and the rest of the paper as far as I can see is completely vacuous. So I’ll mention three items that made an enjoyable Sunday morning read:

First, "Happy Constitution Day!" is a piece by Dave Denison that talks about the phenomenon of a Constitution day, now a reality instituted by the undistinguished Senator Robert Byrd (the Senate's leading former Ku Klux Klansman). Sen. Byrd with respect for the constitution typical of his career, inserted a provision into an appropriations bill making September 17th a "constitution and citizenship day" and requiring that schools receiving federal funding hold some program noting the occasion. Thus schoolchildren across the country, schoolteachers, and employees in the public sector are subjected to mandatory sessions concerning the constitution on September 17th, a fact I was completely unaware of until it was pointed out to me by my wife and another teacher from a different state both of whom were grappling with this new phenomenon and Federal mandate.

The delicious irony of this is noted by Roger Pilon of the Cato Institute who is quoted in the story saying "he [Byrd] is using the education bill to require educational institutions across the country to teach students lessons about the constitution. The irony is that the education bill itself is unconstitutional". Inclined to agree with Mr. Pilon, nonetheless I find a day redeemed by a teacher in Millbury who has been teaching the constitution already for 19 years and observes the day by having students read the entire document. How much more a learning experience to read the source document itself which can be done in a few minutes! How terribly sad that so few students, despite years in school, have actually done this.

My second delight was an article by Geoffrey Wheatcroft entitled "About-face" which noted the huge shifts during the last 40-50 years toward support of Israel in the United States and the opposite shift during the same period on the part of Europe, especially France and Germany. Older folks can remember that the fighter jets which won the Six-Day War for Israel came from France, and not only because of French willingness to do non-judgmental business in arms, but also because of the French state’s support for Israel. Wheatcroft is wise to point out this change, and does so very well.

Third, and winning the prize on Sunday once again is Joan Vennochi who in a column entitled "Pro-choice, out of touch" frets about the increasing irrelevancy of abortion rights lobbies such as NARAL and Planned Parenthood, who have not substantially changed their pro-abortion rhetoric since the 1970s while political realities have changed considerably since then.

Citing Senator Clinton's remarks on abortion last January, Joan notes that "it can strike a record of sensibility with Americans who want abortion to be safe and legal, but agree that fewer abortions are a good thing." Joan asks her fellow travelers on the left "how about reason and logic, the opposite of hysteria?"

The formulation "safe, legal, and rare" is likely to be the next slogan of the pro- abortion left. The let me offer then some reason and logic of my own regarding the slogan, hopefully also the opposite of hysteria.

"Safe, legal, and rare" sandwiches the legality of the act in between two other proposed properties that virtually no one will disagree with. Certainly no rational person would wish a medical procedure to be unsafe. Also a vast majority of Americans wish that abortions were far rarer than one million per year or so that occur in our country. The real question on the table is if it is a social good that abortion be rare, how should the law be structured to make this come about?

The heart of the question, though, is if it is good that abortion be rare, why is it good? The pro- abortion left has admitted at least in the last 10 years or so that it does not view abortion itself as desirable, but only as a procedure that should remain a legal option under virtually all circumstances.

So if it isn't desirable, why not? Do we have obligations as well as rights to the new life that we create? And if we do, should these obligations also be reflected in our law? Does our sexual nature impose a set of rights and obligations on our behaviors which may create life? Certainly so, I'm afraid, but certain as well that a broad consensus on these topics is difficult to reach, contentious in being formed, and likely to be uncomfortable for minority opinions such as those far to the left of the electorate that chose Bush over Kerry. This is exactly why the question of abortion law should be part of the legislative agenda rather than a 30-year legislative dance around tight constraints imposed by the judiciary.

Joan frets that "access to abortion can end up being an accident of geography". So it was before a Roe v. Wade, and so it remains today to some degree in spite of Roe. The disenfranchisement of voters on this issue continues to wear at our political fabric, and continues to damage to the Democratic Party as I have written here citing the far more eloquent Benjamin Wittes who notes the same point.

Arafat's Legacy

Arafat's utterly corrupt Palestinian Authority has become a failed state even before achieving statehood.

Israel pulled its troops out of Gaza on Monday and handed over its former settlements to the Palestinians. Palestinian security forces stood virtually powerless while gunmen and ordinary Gazans stormed the evacuated enclaves, smashing synagogues and looting. In another sign of a loss of control, Palestinian police stood by as about 50 gunmen from Hamas and the Palestinian Resistance Committees punched a new hole in a border wall between Gaza and Egypt yesterday, and hundreds of civilians streamed across, defying efforts by officials to plug gaps, witnesses said.

The incident came hours after the Palestinian Authority pledged to take steps to shut the Gaza frontier. Acknowledging that light arms had been smuggled into Gaza, it said the border would be shut today.

Back To Reality

That this little Photoshop gem is circulating on right-wing email lists says something about W's troubles in our local Gulf.

What do you mean we don't get it?

And in today's Boston Globe Ollie writes:

It is fine to wish John Kerry had won last year's election and could have made the choice Bush made. It is fine to note that Roberts shows more head than heart. But a strong evidentiary peg on which to hang a ''no' vote has not been found as yet."

This conclusion would come as a surprise to reader/believers of the Boston Globe. I bet our Ted will somehow find the courage to vote no.

Oliphant Comes Out With It

Arrogant self-righteousness is disgusting. It is disgusting to hear a thoughtless conservative moron like Pat Robertson casually discuss "taking out” a foreign head of government. It is equally disgusting to read the views of a thoughtlessly reactive liberal who (when he for once clearly states his beliefs) says that opponents to liberalism are simply racists.

In commenting on the ascendancy of John Roberts in today's Globe Oliphant writes:

Roberts will have no trouble passing the [Brown vs. Board of Education] litmus test. But his passing of it will mask the long record of his fealty to the true purpose of conservatism in civil rights for well over a generation -- the blocking of remedies to achieve broad desegregation and promote genuine integration and equal opportunity. His paper trail shows consistent fealty to the sideshows over affirmative action, ''quotas," and other manifestations of the effort to restrict civil rights gains as threats to white people (emphasis mine).

There you have it. Conservatives are simply racists at their core and must be because we will not genuflect to these universal “remedies” for our social maladies.

My initial reaction was to suggest that Mr. Oliphant stuff his “remedies” where the sun doesn’t shine. Perhaps he might instead have the courage and consistency to advocate them as legislation in our democracy instead of relying on elite opinion, the mainstream media's overwhelming liberalism, and an out-of-touch judiciary branch. In my view, and that of much of the electorate, one effective “remedy” to our present social ills is the ascendancy of more judges like John Roberts.

Morrissey Boulevard Mindreading

The Globe's editorial today entitled "Reading Roberts's mind" has this telling little quote:

"The Senate's challenge is to discern who Roberts would be if he were serving the national interest: "

Liberal undergarments are showing here. The judiciary does not "serve the national interest", as somehow opposed to the service of our elected representatives. Rather, they must balance the founding documents of our law and legal precedent against the current body of law. If the electorate judges that they do this job poorly, it is the right of the electorate both to amend our constitution and through our elected representatives to appoint future judicial nominees who will do better.

A correspondent who pointed out this editorial sends the Globe this letter no doubt bound for the bit bucket which I will gladly publish:

Dear Editor:

“Reading Roberts’s mind” is irrelevant; reading the actual words of the Constitution of the United States, as severally amended, especially from the context in which those words were originally intended, is all that matters. I’m sure that John Roberts is a nice man, but our system of government does not, thank goodness, rely on the wit, wisdom, and musings of John Roberts, or Ruth Ginzburg, or Antonin Scalia, for that matter. The law is not what they want it to be, what they imagine would make for a better, more loving and caring world. The law is what the founders and the amenders wrote, and the law is what we want, as expressed through our duly elected federal and state officials. You say “America cannot tolerate a justice who drags the country backward. . .,” meaning, I suppose, a justice who disagrees with the Globe’s editorial policy. “Cannot tolerate?” I thought toleration was liberalism’s vaunted hallmark? We conservatives hold our noses and reluctantly tolerate Justices Souter, Breyer, and Ginzburg, because they were professionally qualified when nominated by the President. Are liberals only happy when they’re winning a battle in the culture war, and want to pout and take home the marbles if it looks as if they might be out of step on this one? You say “the law cannot be welded to the times of Jefferson and Washington. . .;” so the law should be welded to the times of Madonna and gangsta rappers? “The Supreme Court. . .can be an education in the virtues of prudence and flexibility …[as exemplified by] Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter.” Ah yes, the always present leftist condescension, ‘when you wise up, you will be as smart and virtuous as us.’ Why can the Supreme Court not be a place to grow in the virtues of perseverance in the truth, and courage to express that truth in the face of cultural pressure? If John Roberts is the person I believe him to be, reading his mind would be the same as reading the Constitution.

Sincerely,

Fr. Joseph M. Hennessey
Pastor
Saint Joseph Parish
272 Main Street Kingston MA 02364

Remembering "the most ethical administration"

One item that seems to have been almost overlooked in the Boston Globe and elsewhere deserves a little contemplation. Last Friday the Globe and the Washington Post reported the sentencing of the former national security adviser to the President of the United States, Sandy Berger. Berger was fined $50,000 given two years probation and had his security clearance removed for three years after he admitted destroying classified documents related to the Clinton administration's evaluation of the threat of Al Qaeda.

The Globe:

"The sentencing capped a bizarre sequence of events in which Berger admitted to sneaking classified documents out of the National Archives in his suit, later destroying some of them in his office and then lying about it.

Berger's lawyer, Lanny Breuer, said his client will not appeal the sentence.

The Bush administration disclosed the investigation in July 2004, just days before the Sept. 11 Commission issued its final report.

Democrats claimed the White House was using Berger to deflect attention from the harsh findings, with their potential for damaging President Bush's reelection prospects.

Initially saying his actions were an ''honest mistake,' Berger later pleaded guilty in April to a misdemeanor of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material, which contained information relating to terror threats in the United States during the 2000 millennium celebration."

The Post:

"He admitted to stuffing copies of documents in his coat jacket as he left the National Archives and then destroying some at his office and pretending he had never possessed them. Berger had been reviewing the records about the Clinton administration's response to reports of terrorist threats in 2000 as he was preparing to respond to questions from the commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks."

At the loud insistence of Democratic members of Congress Berger and others were given access to these documents in the national archives so that they would have clear recollection of their actions and could testify faithfully to this important commission. Berger used the opportunity to remove documents in his suit (reportedly he stuffed a few in his socks as well), take the documents to his office and his home, destroy some of them and then deny it. Apologists for Berger point out that "no documents were lost” in that there were existing copies of all the documents destroyed. A half-truth. In fact the documents that were destroyed had unique handwritten notes in the margins that because of Mr. Berger's nefarious work will be lost forever to historians. Thanks, Sandy. A grateful nation will remember your work always.

The judge in this case upped the fined to $50,000 from $10,000 feeling that the deal Berger had cut with the federal prosecutors was too lenient. Agreed.

Such is the legacy of an administration that boldly promised in its early days to be "the most ethical administration in history of the republic". One could find no better definition of hubris than that statement. It may exemplify hypocrisy as well. The present administration by contrast modestly promised to "improve the tone in Washington".

Whatever difficulties conservatives have with the Bush administration, it is useful to think back on the outrageous claims of virtue which daily emanated from the Clinton White House, from Clinton himself, and also from “the most moral person” that Clinton knew, who now serves as the junior senator from the state of New York.

I would say the tone has indeed improved.

Well done, Boston Globe!

Today’s Boston Globe has a wonderful graphic right on page 1. It shows the flooded areas of New Orleans on a New Orleans map, and then superimposes the image of the flooded area on a Boston map of the same scale. It is eloquent beyond words. Edward Tufte would be pleased with this. Superb work by David Butler and the Globe graphic staff. This picture is worth more than all the words that have appeared thus far about Katrina and New Orleans.


Helping us to envision the flood


One could say that resorting to such a “gimmick” to illustrate the scale of the disaster in New Orleans points out Bostonian parochialism and lack of understanding about things beyond our beltway. True enough. But there is certainly more to be said for putting the scale of the loss into an image that we can imagine. This graphic deserves a Pulitzer.

Damned If You Do...

The BBC this morning found fresh fault with the relief efforts in New Orleans. It seems the benighted US Army Corp of Engineers is trying to pump water out of the flooded city -- heedless of the threat this represents to local wildlife:

"But the BBC's James Coomarasamy, in New Orleans, says there are contrasting fears.

A senior public health researcher at Louisiana State University has warned that dumping water full of chemicals and human waste could have damaging effects on the environment, our correspondent says.

It is thought that the water could kill fish and poison nearby wetlands."

Yet another shocking example of Bush's moral depravity!