MY CAPTION: Cabinet meeting at which the fools nominated R. David Poulison — Mr. Duct Tape Himself (see Ed J’s diary) — to be the new FEMA director. (What’s YOUR caption?)


Also, by one of my favorite New Yorker writers, Jane Mayer, her new piece, “WIND ON CAPITOL HILL – HIGH STAKES“:

Among the blown-off rooftops, upended pine trees, and other detritus that Katrina scattered along the Gulf Coast were a good number of twisted and bashed-in slot machines. The store had hurled them ashore as it ripped casino barges from their moorings in Biloxi, Gulfport and Bay St. Louis.


Carol Browner was the head of the Environmental Protection Agency during the Clinton Administration, when many casinos in Mississippi were constructed. Last week, speaking from her office at the Washington consulting firm where she now works, she recalled the difficulties that her department experienced years ago when they tried to persuade legislators, including Mississippi Senator Trent Lott, that building on wetlands was environmentally risky. Developers, and the politicians who supported them, argued that gambling would attract commerce to the state.


The proposed casinos, Browner said, “were supposed to be in the water because the state didn’t want them on the solid land.” (To accommodate the moral qualms of conservative locals, the legislature relegated gambling to “navigable waters.”) She went on, “But they were huge, and they were right up against the shore. If you put structures this big into an estuary, you’re disrupting the aquatic life and changing the habitat and eradicating the wetlands, which has a huge effect on drainage. The wetlands act like a sponge in a storm. They’re an incredibly smart and helpful part of nature. But they have to be kept moist, like a sponge on your kitchen counter. If they’re dried out, and developed, they don’t work. The shoreline’s a very important buffer in a storm.”

Browner said that Lott was not alone among politicians in his disregard for the environment. “For fifty years,” she pointed out, “there’s been significant inattention to the environmental consequences of developing the wetlands.” But Lott was particularly single-minded in his support of casino development. “I had barely taken office,” Browner said, “when I discovered there was a ‘hold’ on a department nominee.” (Placing a hold, which is a common maneuver in the Senate, can keep a nominee’s name from moving forward to a vote.) “I didn’t have a clue who put the hold on the nominee. Then Trent Lott called me up and said that he had done it. He told me, ‘I figured I’d have a problem with the E.P.A. I don’t have one yet. But this is a warning to you.’ Then he lifted the hold. But the message was clear.

“A few years later, in 1997, Clinton nominated someone else to a job in the E.P.A. that needed Senate confirmation,” she recalled. Browner learned that a hold had been placed on this person, too. “It was a person who was perfectly qualified,” she said. “So the hold seemed odd.


“We called around to see what was the matter,” she went on. “And I found out that Lott had put a hold on this person. I then spoke with him about it, and he said, ‘It’s not about the nominee.’ He said, ‘It’s because I want you to fire another employee, because he’s standing in the way of wetlands permits needed for casinos.’ … Read all at The New Yorker. (Emphases mine.)


Jane Mayer has written brilliantly on Guantanamo, and other U.S.-run prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq.