From Time:

Before joining FEMA, his only previous stint in emergency management, according to his bio posted on FEMA’s website, was “serving as an assistant city manager with emergency services oversight.” The White House press release from 2001 stated that Brown worked for the city of Edmond, Okla., from 1975 to 1978 “overseeing the emergency services division.” In fact, according to Claudia Deakins, head of public relations for the city of Edmond, Brown was an “assistant to the city manager” from 1977 to 1980, not a manager himself, and had no authority over other employees. “The assistant is more like an intern,” she told TIME. “Department heads did not report to him.” Brown did do a good job at his humble position, however, according to his boss. “Yes. Mike Brown worked for me. He was my administrative assistant. He was a student at Central State University,” recalls former city manager Bill Dashner. “Mike used to handle a lot of details. Every now and again I’d ask him to write me a speech. He was very loyal. He was always on time. He always had on a suit and a starched white shirt.” . . .

Brown’s lack of experience in emergency management isn’t the only apparent bit of padding on his resume, which raises questions about how rigorously the White House vetted him before putting him in charge of FEMA. Under the “honors and awards” section of his profile at FindLaw.com — which is information on the legal website provided by lawyers or their offices—he lists “Outstanding Political Science Professor, Central State University”. However, Brown “wasn’t a professor here, he was only a student here,” says Charles Johnson, News Bureau Director in the University Relations office at the University of Central Oklahoma (formerly named Central State University). “He may have been an adjunct instructor,” says Johnson, but that title is very different from that of “professor.” Carl Reherman, a former political science professor at the University through the ’70s and ’80s, says that Brown “was not on the faculty.” . . .

Under the heading of “Professional Associations and Memberships” on FindLaw, Brown states that from 1983 to the present he has been director of the Oklahoma Christian Home, a nursing home in Edmond. But an administrator with the Home told TIME that Brown is “not a person that anyone here is familiar with.” She says there was a board of directors until a couple of years ago, but she couldn’t find anyone who recalled him being on it. According to FEMA’s Andrews, Brown said “he’s never claimed to be the director of the home. He was on the board of directors, or governors of the nursing home.” However, a veteran employee at the center since 1981 says Brown “was never director here, was never on the board of directors, was never executive director. He was never here in any capacity. I never heard his name mentioned here.”

I don’t mean to pick a fight with the very smart and talented Ross Douthat, but his post on George Will this morning is absurd. Douthat writes:

George Will is an under-appreciated columnist, I think–he’s not an attack dog or a dazzling stylist, so he doesn’t have a passionate following, and he’s been so good for so long that it’s easy to forget how effectively he practices the art.

Others will have to weigh in on this, but I’ve always believed–and thought that others believed–that Will is one of America’s best writers and thinkers and THE great columnist of his generation. No one else even comes close. In fact, you might argue that Will is the last of the dinosaurs: I’m not certain that any newspaper columnist will ever again attain the level of influence and achievement which Will has.

In addition, I would guess that some very large percentage of political writers between the ages of 25 and 45 chose their profession at least in part because of Will. (This goes double for pretentious jerks who insist on using a middle initial in their byline.)

As to the matter of Will’s skill as a stylist, I’d argue that Will isn’t just a great and smart political writer. In truth, he can do just about anything. From the astonishingly light touch he uses on pieces about his son to the iron grip of heroic certainty he brings to his baseball writings, Will could have become famous as just about any kind of writer–sports, features, essays, non-fiction books. He hits to all fields with power.

“If [a prime minister] trips, he must be sustained. If he makes mistakes, they must be covered. If he sleeps he must not be wantonly disturbed. If he is no good he must be pole-axed.”
–Winston Churchill

If you have not gotten to it yet, stop now and read Paul Campos’s staggering piece on Mike Brown’s résumé. It will disgust you, but it should not shock you. Anyone who lives in Washington and bumps up against the executive branch is bound to have stories of useless idiot/hacks who get political appointee jobs they have no business doing. Every winning campaign has to reward the grunts. But still. And it’s not just Brown. Go down the mid-level appointees and you’ll find much, much worse.

But Campos’s piece reminded me of another essay, from Chris Caldwell, some years ago:

What kills the President is that every time Harken comes up, Democrats get to retell the story of how he made his money. And this, basically, is the story of the spectacular unfairness with which moneymaking opportunities are lavished on the politically connected. It is the story of a man who has been rewarded for repeated failures by having money shot at him through a fire hose. It is the story of a man who talks with a straight face about having “earned” a fortune of tens of millions of dollars, without having ever done an honest day’s work in his life.

Let’s retell that story as briefly as we can. Bush started an oil company called Arbusto in the late 1970s. He was driving it into the ground when, in 1982, he was rescued by Philip Uzielli, a Princeton crony of his dad’s troubleshooter James Baker. Uzielli invested a million dollars in Arbusto, which was then worth less than $500,000. In return, he got 10 percent interest in the company. No, that’s not a misprint. Mismatches between equity and ownership–always in Dubya’s favor–are a hallmark of our President’s financial rise.

Even after Uzielli’s turbocharging, Arbusto was going under. Before it did, it “merged” with a company called Spectrum 7, which took on Bush as head executive. As that company, too, nose-dived, Harken Energy proved unaccountably eager to “merge” with it. It offered a half-million dollars in stock and $120,000 a year to get the Vice President’s son on the board. It also “loaned” Bush hundreds of thousands of dollars below prime rate.

Weeks after his father was elected president, Bush got involved in the purchase of the Texas Rangers. He would eventually sell his Harken shares to cover the loan that allowed him to help buy the team. He put up under 2 percent of the purchase price ($606,000 out of $46 million), but the deal called for him to be given almost 12 percent of the stock, once the other partners cleared their initial investments. Generous of them! In 1998 Bush sold his stake in the team–pumped up by a $135-million publicly-financed-but-privately-owned stadium, bestowed as a gift from the taxpayers of Arlington, TX–for $15 million.

It’s all of a piece.

While we’re at it, don’t forget to bookmark Rick Moran’s incredible and damning Katrina timeline.

Update, 3:44 a.m.: But let’s not heap all of the blame on the feds. This terrifying post, if true, suggests that the locals have been even worse than the Bush administration.

The Wershovenist Pig has the goods on why Citi Trends is a good investment.

The Law Jedi has found a chilling article from an old National Geographic. (I can’t tell what the date on the article is.) Excerpts:

As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however—the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look for any excuse to throw a party.

The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top of the massive berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level—more than eight feet below in places—so the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it.

Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.

When did this calamity happen? It hasn’t—yet.

Like the 9/11 hijackings, it demonstrates that the past was foreseeable and makes you wonder why someone wasn’t preparing for the eventuality.

Last night’s Agassi-Blake match was one of the five or six best matches I’ve seen in the last several years. James Blake played the finest tennis of his career. He came out firing and for two and a half sets played with confidence and ran down every ball sent his way. And for those first two and a half sets, Andre Agassi looked, if not old, then at least diminished. He was a step slow, he couldn’t power the ball past Blake, he double-faulted away the first set–he even had trouble picking up Blake’s first serve.

But it takes three sets to win.

In many ways, last night was a metaphor for Agassi’s entire career. He was favored, but he started out slow, fell behind, and was left for dead. But he kept fighting. Not screaming, not yelling, not brooding–just punching away. Every point, every shot.

Agassi has as much God-given physical talent as anyone who’s ever played the game, yet he isn’t a fluid, effortless player. He’s a grinder. It never looks easy for him and that’s because, for some reason or another, it never has been easy for him. But he keeps on swinging. If you watch Agassi move between points and games, he’s always the same: head down, shoulders squared, with that funny, compact power-walk. He motors around the court between points, walking so fast that you think he might break into a run at any minute. It doesn’t matter if he’s winning or losing, his gait is always the same and it screams: Okay, next point, let’s get on with it.

So last night, when it seemed that he was going to be blown off the court, Agassi did what he always does: He slugged it out. No self-pity, no arguing. He just kept firing, hoping that Blake might flag. And when it finally happened, when Blake suddenly realized where he was and his first serve deserted him, Agassi was still in it. He never checks out early.

To his eternal credit, Blake did not pull a Jana Novatna. He quavered, but by the fifth set had found himself again and he acquitted himself courageously. As the years pass him by, he’ll be proud to have been part of this match.

After the match, Agassi had this to say:

I question myself every day. That’s what I still find motivating about this. I don’t have the answers, I don’t pretend that I do just because I won the match. Just keep fighting and maybe something good happens.

It’s true about sports; it’s true about life. And it’s a lesson that we all need to learn from time to time.

Do not miss Mike Goldfarb’s outstanding article on the Navy’s new class of destroyers, the DD(X). It’s an amazing story and if you’re a military gadget buff, it’s pure candy. Highlights:

. . . f the Navy sticks to its schedule, by 2012 two DD(X) ships will be operational, each armed with a battery of two 155mm (6.1-inch) Advanced Gun Systems with a range of no less than 68 miles.

THE PRIMARY REQUIREMENT for the DD(X) program is to “carry the war to the enemy through offensive operations and destroy enemy targets ashore with precision strike and volume fires.” Despite the impressive range of the Advanced Gun System, to achieve this requirement DD(X) will operate far closer to shore than its predecessors. In order to “dominate the littoral,” the ship has been constructed with a number of features which will offer a tremendous improvement in survivability, the first among which is stealth.

DD(X) is designed to be the quietest surface ship in the fleet. The ship will be quieter even than the Los Angeles class submarines. More remarkable, however, is the ship’s unique design, which will greatly enhance its ability to remain invisible to electronic surveillance. To reduce the ship’s radar signature, the ship’s designers have eliminated right angles from the deck. In addition, the ship’s superstructure is built out of a composite material of wood and plastic–the effect of which is both to absorb radar and lessen the overall weight of the ship (leaving room for future, weight-intensive improvements).

Perhaps the most visibly striking feature of the DD(X) is its wave-piercing, tumblehome hull form. The tumblehome hull has a twofold effect. By having the hull slope inward from the waterline, the hull’s exposure to waves is reduced, which in turn reduces the rocking motion of the ship, making it less easily detected by enemy radar. In addition, the tumblehome hull will make the DD(X) far more survivable than its predecessors in the event of an underwater explosion from a torpedo or mine.

There’s also a rail gun in development for the DD(X) which would have a range of 267 nautical miles. Oh, and it’ll make 30 kts.