Dumb De Dumb Dumb

Flooding the Zone

The New York Times investigation of the 800,000 documents that Congressional investigators sifted through to determine who bungled what in response to Hurricane Katrina contains this choice quote:

Representative Thomas M. Davis, Republican of Virginia and chairman of the special House committee investigating the hurricane response, said the only level of government that performed well was the National Weather Service, which correctly predicted the force of the storm. But no one heeded the message, he said.

"The president is still at his ranch, the vice president is still fly-fishing in Wyoming, the president's chief of staff is in Maine," Mr. Davis said. "In retrospect, don't you think it would have been better to pull together? They should have had better leadership. It is disengagement."

Stasi Styling

Now, I don't want to say I actually foreshadowed what is now being revealed about the domestic surveillance stuff (see These Boots are Made for Goosesteppin' below) but the Christian Science Monitor has some mighty inneresting stuff today:

The US government is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity.
The system - parts of which are operational, parts of which are still under development - is already credited with helping to foil some plots. It is the federal government's latest attempt to use broad data-collection and powerful analysis in the fight against terrorism. But by delving deeply into the digital minutiae of American life, the program is also raising concerns that the government is intruding too deeply into citizens' privacy.

Read it all