Are we done talking about REPUBLICAN Senator Craig of Idaho? I hope not.

On the Ed Schultz radio show we just heard from a local practitioner in the county where REPUBLICAN Senator Craig’s conviction occurred. He had an interesting insight.

Change of pleas, as they are called here in Alaska, are accomplished by petitioning the court in Minnasota. The petition has been all over the web, so you can view it for yourself. What this local practioneer added was the fact that as you would expect there are forms for this proceedure, and normally, all that occurs is that someone writes in the defendant’s name and some other information. This petition was re-typed and changed in one material respect: it did not contain a waiver or the right to counsel.

The significance is that someone was taking great care in this matter. It is unlikely that the prosecutor re-typed the agreement, and ommitted this important waiver of rights. This suggests that the REPUBLICAN Senator was represented, and trying to downplay this fact or consciously mis-represent it.

I personally hope that it gives him grounds to withdraw his plea.

There are police records indicating that Craig called the police a week after the incident angry that he hadn’t been told anything (he also lied to one officer about being handcuffed in the incident). Two separate officers reported that Craig wanted a contact number for the prosecuting attorney for “my law firm” or for “my lawyers”.

It will likely turn out that they Asst. District Attorney handling these cases will disclose that Craig’s lawyers DID contact him.

the next catasrophic levee disaster is tee’d up for the Sacramento area. Many new housing developments could be under 20 ft. of water, or something like that.

Levee repairs there being blocked by Rep. John Doolittle….who kept insisting on building a dam at Auburn…on an active earthquake fault!

I suspect Doolittle is in with realtors who have bought up the land along the prospective waterline of the new reservoir!

Damn! Craig is toast and we’re gonna have to work really hard to get the Idaho Senate seat for LaRocco.

After what Craig did it’s amazing the Repubs would run someone named Sali.

With a few exceptions, the state of Louisiana essentially now controls the public school system in New Orleans. There is little local control. The state has subcontracted much of the work of education to willing charter schools.

Of the public schools operating at the end of the 2006-2007 academic year, charter schools were educating 57 percent of public school students.

This makes New Orleans the urban district with by far the highest proportion of publicly funded charter schools in the nation. Dayton, Ohio has the second-highest concentration of charter schools, involving 30 percent of its 17,000 students.

This experiment has resulted in a clearly defined two-tier public school system.

The top tier is made up of the best public and charter public schools, which most children cannot get into, and a number of new and promising charter public schools that are available for the industrious and determined parents of children who do not have academic or emotional disabilities.

The second tier is for the rest of the children. Their education is assigned to the RSD (some are already calling it “The Rest of the School District”).

Read the rest here:
http://schoolsmatter.blogspot……leans.html

And Jimbo, congrats on the delurk!!

Happy to be here.

I have friends who do EMT work and were in NOLA after Katrina.
They were amazed at the lack of coordination, and the cascade of failure in planning and response to Katrina.

Particularly bizarre given that the NHC did its job particularly well.

pma @ 71

New Orleans levies were never built to stand more than a Cat. 3 hurricane. Levies to withstand Cat. 5 would have to have been budgeted congressional appropriations. At what point during the last 27 years would a majority in congress been willing to place separate state interests aside to improve the New Orleans levee’s. Again, are we all set with the San Andreas or New Madrid faults?

Is it possible to build them to withstand a Cat. 5 storm?

IIRC, the Dutch thought so. Their own North Sea dikes are built to withstand a “10,000-year” storm — one so strong it can be expected only once in ten thousand years. Though with global warming, perhaps that figure has been eroded….

Been lurking for a long, long time.
Couldn’t resist a quick comment.
Katrina was ‘only’ a cat 3 when it made its second landfall at the Pearl River. It had weakened significantly prior to landfall.

It was also one of the best-forecast storms in NHC history.

( http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/ )

Love the Lake. Thanks for the dose of sanity!

That is so true. It was a very large storm but the strength was a Cat3. And it was only a flood because Bush cut the money requested for repairs due to Iraq. I’ll bet the monies for all of those stolen Iraq weapons could have made a big difference in pre-Katrina planning & upkeep. And let’s face it, when those trucks finally got into the stadium, the water was only a couple of inches deep. I’ll never forget that–when the supply trucks came across the bridge and into the stadium, there wasn’t any water. Those people were meant to die and everybody knows it. We all had front row seats to that situation.

All this discussion of earthquakes – I’ve been looking at earthquake maps for the last little while and have noticed that central and coastal Peru has been seismically very – lively – the last two weeks. Is this typical? Any implications for seismic activity further north?

Peru is part of the ‘ring of fire’, so seismic activity is not unusual. However, the 7.whatever quake a week or so ago is unusual. Quakes 7. and above are unusual anywhere, but not uncommon. The ‘ring of fire’ is basically the land masses around the Pacific Ocean rim and have a higher rate of seismic activity than other parts of the world. The higher activity in Peru now is no indication of what will happen anywhere else in the world.