Fresh Loaf

This week’s Don’t Panic explains why Cyclone Nargis has killed and will continue to kill so many Burmese.

I compare Nargis to Hurricane Katrina in the story, sticking to the geographic and meteorological similarities.

Yesterday New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist Lolis Eric Elie noted the similarity between the Burmese junta’s reaction to Nargis and the Bush Administration’s reaction to Katrina:

A snippet:

Of course our federal government neither offered nor accepted much relief for victims of the federal levee failures.

As the journal “Foreign Policy” put it, “When France and dozens of other countries pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and supplies to the relief effort, their donations should have helped ease the crisis. Instead, one year after Katrina battered the Gulf Coast, none of the money given to the federal government has made its way to evacuees.”

Read the whole column if you have two minutes.

(photo illustration by me and NASA. mostly NASA)

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From Saturday’s Washington Post. Emphasis mine:

“President Bush plans to call Chinese President Hu Jintao in coming days to seek his help pressing the Burmese government to accept more disaster assistance, U.S. officials said yesterday.”

No hurry. There are only 1.5 million lives at stake.

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Today, the AJC has an excellent story about a Fulton County man who flew to and from Europe despite being infected with a rare and exceptionally dangerous strain of tuberculosis.

Worthy of another front-page story is the fact that the man discovered an unlocked backdoor into the United States.

The infected man evaded the U.S. “no-fly” restrictions, returning to the United States by flying from Prague to Montreal on Czech Air and driving from Canada.

Did the American keepers of the “no-fly” list tell Czech Air about the man? Did they tell Czech passport-control officials? Did they tell Canadian passport officials? Did anyone even bother telling the U.S. agents on the Canadian border? Who knows?

The precise nature of the screw-up is as yet unclear, but the bottom line is this:

It’s been almost six years since 9/11 and the United States still can’t even stop an American citizen using his own passport from getting on a plane in a friendly country, or stop him at the border.

Other than admiring my shoes, what exactly is the Department of Homeland Security doing with its $40 billion annual budget?

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