In Anchorage, home to an estimated 285,000 people, parts of the subterranean water system still use wooden pipes, carved of white cedar and wrapped in wire, a relic of pioneer days when hollowed-out logs were the water conveyance of choice. But Alaskans, apparently, need not worry about splinters in the throat. "What we've found, kind of unbelievably, is that the wooden water mains wrapped in that wire actually perform better than ductile iron," said James Weise, who manages the state's drinking water program. "They are less susceptible to fracture due to earthquake activity, and they are more flexible." Although Mr. Weise said the Depression-era wooden mains never leak, they are gradually being replaced with ductile iron pipes. "They pull them up, and the wood looks incredibly fresh," he said. It could be another century before we know if those new pipes are as durable.

Michael M. Grynbaum

While the world was focused on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a BP refinery here released huge amounts of toxic chemicals into the air that went unnoticed by residents until many saw their children come down with respiratory problems.

For 40 days after a piece of equipment critical to the refinery's operation broke down, a total of 538,000 pounds of toxic chemicals, including the carcinogen benzene, poured out of the refinery.

Rather than taking the costly step of shutting down the refinery to make repairs, the engineers at the plant diverted gases to a smokestack and tried to burn them off, but hundreds of thousands of pounds still escaped into the air, according to state environmental officials.

Neither the state nor the oil company informed neighbors or local officials about the pollutants until two weeks after the release ended, and angry residents of Texas City have signed up in droves to join a $10 billion class-action lawsuit against BP. The state attorney general, Greg Abbott, has also sued the company, seeking fines of about $600,000.

James C. McKinley Jr.

What in the hell is wrong with a corporation that they knowingly release tons of benzene into the air and try to conceal it? I'd like to hear the glibertarian solution to this. I guess we could all just boycott BP, amirite?

John Cole

Republican pollster Dick Morris told conservative political activists that newly elected Republicans should shut down the government next year. Morris said the party must elect lawmakers who will stand up and say "No" to President Obama's requests for more government spending and predicted a repeat of how Republicans forced a shutdown under President Clinton after they won control of Congress.

"There's going to be a government shutdown, just like in '95 and '96 but we're going to win it this time and I'll be fightin' on your side," Morris said at the Americans for Prosperity Foundation Conference on Friday in Washington.

Christina Bellantoni

For a piece we're planning on running tomorrow we're looking into the coalescing plans on the right of the GOP to attempt to defund the Health Care Reform bill if the Republicans take back the House in November, which certainly has to be seen at this point as a more likely than not proposition. What caught my attention is that they seem to have a group now interested in whipping the issue pre-election.

Now, that's a dicey matter. And it's clear that the leadership types in the GOP want to harvest all the anti-HCR juice they can, win elections with it and then agree to pass a repeal law that will either die in the Senate or die on Obama's desk. But if they can whip the defunding stuff effectively, that might be trickier.

And there's another point too. Obama's veto pen can do a lot of stuff. He can veto a defunding bill too. The key though is that he's got a government to run and he needs a budget. All of which suggests that this ends up pointing in the direction of a government shutdown type standoff. So crazy as it may seem, Dick Morris (broken clock twice a day and so forth) may be on to something.

Josh Marshall

Former Sen. Alan Simpson will still lead the debt commission despite sending an e-mail in which he said Social Security is a "milk cow with 310 million tits," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday.

"Sen. Simpson sent an e-mail that he's now apologized for," Gibbs said. "We regret that he sent that e-mail. We don't condone those comments. But Sen. Simpson has and will continue to serve on the commission."

Matt Negrin

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf told Abu Dhabi's The National newspaper today that the conflict over the mosque/cultural center project controversy was "not between Muslims and non-Muslims, but between moderates of all the faith traditions and the radicals of all the faith traditions."

Josh Marshall

What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger... I sense a recursion problem here.

databyss

This was a perfect example of Christie's arrogance, dishonesty and inability to admit wrong.

• First he screws up by scrapping a deal his own Commissioner of Education negotiated in good faith with the teachers' union, and has the whole thing re-written.
• When it comes out that the new version had basic comprehension errors, he blamed "one clerk" and the culture in Washington for not telling Christie about the error.
• Then video comes out that demonstrates the folks down in DC did tell the NJ folks about the error, and Christie is proven a liar. (He was previously convicted for the same offense, as well).
• So after being proven an incompetent and a liar, Christie fires Bret Shundler who had negotiated an application that would have won the $400 million for NJ students

Blue Jersey was just about the only outlet that had this guy pegged while others were writing hagiography and comparing him to Spider Man. Occasionally there was a blip of criticism, but not very often.

Maybe now the media can wake up and tell the truth about the lying, incompetent Chris Christie.

huntsu

Afghan President Hamid Karzai's chief of staff said Saturday that he is not sure the government is "on a path to success" in securing the country against the Taliban and that it could fail altogether if the United States does not significantly alter its strategy in fighting the nine-year-old war. …

While stressing that the Karzai government is committed to a significant NATO troop presence, Daudzai called on the international forces to stop invasive night raids on residents' homes and to distance their soldiers from "the daily life of the people," a sharp divergence from Gen. David H. Petraeus's strategy of having soldiers embedded in communities. The coalition policies have undermined Karzai's authority and Afghan sovereignty, Daudzai said, and led to "blame games" between the two sides. …

"I said, 'General Petraeus, winning the hearts and minds of the Afghans is not the job of a soldier. That's the job of an Afghan,' " Daudzai said.

David Nakamura and Joshua Partlow

As I have been saying, US contractor companies are contributing to the "corruption" situation in Afghanistan. They are enabling theft of public money, money borrowed, money taxed from the American people.

Nevertheless, that is not the main message in what the Afghans are trying to tell us.

COIN is a disaster That is the message. A foreign army, no matter how benevolent in intention, can not fundamentally change the character of a foreign people unless that army intends to stay in the homeland of that people for a very long time. We are talking about generations, not a decade. We are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars. we are talking about a willingness to bleed there indefinitely and a willingness to make the objects of our benevolent intentions bleed as well.

"That is the job of an Afghan," Daudzai said. He could not be more correct.

Obama/Petraeus are going down and COIN is taking them down.

Pat Lang

At some point during the awful days of Hurricane Katrina, I received an email from my friend Harry Shearer, the actor, satirist, and musician. The national media are getting the story wrong, he angrily declared: What's happened in New Orleans is not a natural disaster; it's a catastrophic failure of government. This was a case of profound negligence--poorly designed and shoddily built levees had collapsed. He was anxious to spread the word: Don't blame the category-five storm. Blame those who constructed the inadequate levees.

Now, on the fifth anniversary of Katrina, Shearer is releasing a feature-length documentary he's produced, written, and directed--called The Big Uneasy--in which he nails the case: The flooding of New Orleans was due not to Mother Nature but to the US Army Corps of Engineers. …

At the start of the film, Shearer presents a parade of pundits and politicians referring to the tragedy of New Orleans as a "natural disaster." But he then introduces Ivor van Heerden, who at the time was the deputy director of the Louisiana State University's hurricane center, and Robert Bea, an engineering professor at UC-Berkeley. The two describe their efforts to examine what had led to the flooding of New Orleans. They don't mince words, as they explain how the Army Corps of Engineers, which built and maintained New Orleans' crucial flood-control system, had constructed levees that were structurally unsound and on nonsecure soil. The water surge from the hurricane did not flow over--"overtop," in engineering parlance--the levees. Instead, it eroded the base of the levee walls--which had not been set deep enough--and the levees collapsed. (Bea demonstrates his method of tasting soil to see if it's the right spot to place a levee.)

Van Heerden explains that what the engineers discovered undermined the Corps self-exculpating claim that the sheer amount of water was no match for the levees. He notes the surge didn't reach the top. "It must have been a structural issue, an engineering design issue," he says. Bea adds that he, van Heerden, and other investigators came across the "kind of mistakes...you learn about in second-year engineering." (The film also details how the Corps' construction of the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet canal, which was completed in the 1960s, helped set the stage for the disastrous flood.)

David Corn

I'm FINALLY allowed to announce it, @artosis and I will be casting SC2 for the GSL on GomTV in 1 week! SPREAD THE WORD!

CallMeTasteless

One in five prisoners who are assaulted are raped on their first day in prison. Let me repeat that. One in five assaulted are raped on their very first day of incarceration. And that doesn't even begin to tell the whole story of prison rape. For example, contrary to popular myth, more prisoners reported sexual assaults involving prison staff (2.8 percent) than other inmates (2.1 percent). And women are more likely to be victimized than men.

Theses are only some of the findings of a newly released study by the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reports that 88,500 adults held in U.S. prisons and jails are sexually abused each year. Meanwhile, Attorney General Eric Holder has already missed a deadline of June, 2010 to institute reforms mandated by a bipartisan commission created by the passage of the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act (signed by George W. Bush), reforms that could help prevent these nearly 88,500 individual tragedies from continuing unabated.

As Lovisa Stannow, Executive Director of Just Detention International put it, "Every day that the Attorney General doesn't finalize the national standards is another day of anguish among prisoner rape survivors, of preventable safety breaches in prisons and jails, and of significant spending of taxpayers' money on medical treatment, investigations, and litigation that could have been avoided."

Cliff Schecter

Gov. Christie fired NJ Education Commissioner Brett Schundler this morning.

This should not stop the Assembly's investigation of this matter, nor the Senate's investigation. Both houses of the NJ legislature are planning hearings about how NJ's $400 million dollar application for federal Race to the Top funding could have been submitted with missing information.

Those investigations, and both hearings, should go forward. And Bret Schundler should still be called to testify. Everybody with relevant information should be. We still need to get to the bottom of how decisions are being made for the resources devoted to New Jersey's school children.

Rosi Efthim

the firing has been arranged at Schundler's request in such a manner so that Schundler -- a former leading figure of the state GOP's right wing -- will be able to collect unemployment benefits.

The key detail is that Schundler preferred to be fired, rather than submit his resignation. "I asked if they would mind writing a termination letter, instead of a resignation letter, because I do have a mortgage to pay, and I do have a daughter who's just started college," Schundler said, the Star-Ledger reports. "And I, frankly, will need the unemployment insurance benefits until I find another job. ... And they said fine. They said sure."

Eric Kleefeld

Simpson's crime is not sexism, it is his assault on the concept of social security. Social security recipients are not sucking on the government tit, as they paid into the account their entire lives. It was a contract- you pay in, when you are older and in need, we pay out. The real crime with social security is that millions have paid in, and then those receipts were used to fund tax cuts, wars, tax breaks to oil companies, and on and on and on.

That's why Simpson should be fired. Not because he is sexist, but because he doesn't even understand the problem with social security. Hell, that is why the entire commission should be disbanded.

John Cole

Fire departments around the nation are cutting jobs, closing firehouses and increasingly resorting to "rolling brownouts" in which they shut different fire companies on different days as the economic downturn forces many cities and towns to make deep cuts that are slowing their responses to fires and other emergencies.

Philadelphia began rolling brownouts this month, joining cities from Baltimore to Sacramento that now shut some units every day. San Jose, Calif., laid off 49 firefighters last month. And Lawrence, Mass., north of Boston, has laid off firefighters and shut down half of its six firehouses, forcing the city to rely on help from neighboring departments each time a fire goes to a second alarm.

Michael Cooper

We're the greatest nation in the history of the universe but some things are just too expensive.

Atrios

I bet most of them are just union members sucking at the government teat.

John Cole

Biden himself always saw the Recovery Act as a test -- not only of the new Administration but of federal spending itself. He knew high-profile screwups could be fatal, stoking antigovernment anger about bureaucrats and two-car funerals. So he spends hours checking in, buttering up and banging heads to keep the stimulus on track, harassing Cabinet secretaries, governors and mayors about unspent broadband funds, weatherization delays and fishy projects. He has blocked some 260 skate parks, picnic tables and highway beautifications that flunked his what-would-your-mom-think test. "Imagine they could have proved we wasted a billion dollars," Biden says. "Gone, man. Gone!"

So far, despite furor over cash it supposedly funneled to contraception (deleted from the bill) and phantom congressional districts (simply typos), the earmark-free Recovery Act has produced surprisingly few scandals. Prosecutors are investigating a few fraud allegations, and critics have found some goofy expenditures, like $51,500 for water-safety-mascot costumes or a $50,000 arts grant to a kinky-film house. But those are minor warts, given that unprecedented scrutiny. Biden knows it's early -- "I ain't saying mission accomplished!" -- but he calls waste and fraud "the dogs that haven't barked."

Michael Grunwald

As they say, successful airplane landings don't make the news. But given the scope of the stimulus, this is a pretty remarkable bureaucratic achievement. According to Recovery.gov, the stimulus included $275 billion of contracts, grants, and loans (the rest was tax cuts and entitlements). If you can pass out over a quarter of a trillion dollars without any major examples of what we in Washington call "Waste, Fraud, and Abuse," you've really done something.

Paul Waldman

The Obama administration has urged the Supreme Court to toss out an appeals court decision that would allow lawsuits against major emitters for their contributions to global warming, stunning environmentalists who see the case as a powerful prod on climate change.

In the case, AEP v. Connecticut, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with a coalition of states, environmental groups and New York City. The decision, handed down last year, said they could proceed with a lawsuit that seeks to force several of the nation's largest coal-fired utilities to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. …

Because the White House supports legislation to limit greenhouse gas emissions, many attorneys expected the Obama administration to avoid criticizing a ruling that could become so disruptive that it would force Congress to take action. Jonathan Zasloff, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a recent blog post that the White House would undermine its goals by siding with utilities. …

Though the Supreme Court agrees to hear less than 1 percent of all petitions for review, a brief from the solicitor general tends to grab justices' attention. The court could decide as soon as this fall whether to review the case.

Gabriel Nelson

The aide to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan at the center of a politically sensitive corruption investigation is being paid by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to Afghan and American officials.

Mohammed Zia Salehi, the chief of administration for the National Security Council, appears to have been on the payroll for many years, according to officials in Kabul and Washington. It is unclear exactly what Mr. Salehi does in exchange for his money, whether providing information to the spy agency, advancing American views inside the presidential palace, or both.

Mr. Salehi's relationship with the C.I.A. underscores deep contradictions at the heart of the Obama administration's policy in Afghanistan, with American officials simultaneously demanding that Mr. Karzai root out the corruption that pervades his government while sometimes subsidizing the very people suspected of perpetrating it.

Dexter Filkins and Mark Mazzetti

So, lemme get this, you'll pardon the expression, straight. Being on the official payroll of an agency of a foreign government doesn't count as corruption? I mean, we deported that sexy Russian chick for being in the employ of the FSB, and her job as a Russian spy apparently consisted of what your jobs and my job as American citizens consist of: updating our Facebook status and reading blogs, occasionally ALT+TABbing back to Outlook when the boss walks by. I mean, Mohammed Zia Salehi is bought by the CIA, and the Times writes a story speculating that he might be corrupt. How do you say oy in Pashtun?

I do enjoy that reporters Filkins and Mazzetti accept and amplify the idea that we are subsidizing people who may be corrupt. Because it could certainly never be the case that the US might be corrupting people via subsidy. And isn't subsidy just the most hilarious word in this context. Homework assignment: go back through the last two years of the Times and replace every description of the the Pakistani ISI "backing" or "supporting" or "funding" the Taliban/Afghan insurgency/al Qaeda with "subsidizing." Oh, LuLz, look, they are just like the USDA. OF TERROR!

IOZ

Law enforcement sources say that Enright was carrying a personal diary with him during the attack, though the exact nature of its contents are a source of dispute. One police source described them to the New York Daily News as "filled with pages of 'pretty strong anti-Muslim comments.'" That source added that the diary "equated Muslims with 'killers, ungrateful for the help they were being offered, filthy murderers without a conscience.'" Another law enforcement source disputed that characterization, suggesting instead to the AP that they were mere journals of Enright's time in Afghanistan -- and that they were found with an empty bottle of Scotch.

Enright's reference to a "checkpoint" likely stems from his trip to Afghanistan earlier this year. Friends say Enright definitely changed after getting back from the region, where he was shooting a documentary on a high school friend.

Ryan J. Reilly

The skies over the nation's capital are crowded with presidential aircraft, military flyovers and the Delta shuttle, but this month a strange new bird was briefly among them: a United States Navy drone that wandered into the restricted airspace around Washington before operators could stop it.

Navy spokesmen could not say Wednesday if anyone on the ground was alarmed by the drone -- officially an MQ-8B Fire Scout Vertical Takeoff and Landing unmanned aerial vehicle -- which looks like a small windowless helicopter and was flying at 2,000 feet. The Navy did say that the drone got within 40 miles of Washington before operators were able to re-establish communication and guide it back to its base in southern Maryland.

Still, the Aug. 2 incident resulted in the grounding of all six of the Navy's Fire Scouts as well as an inquiry into what went wrong. The Navy is calling the problem a "software issue" that foiled the drone's operators.

Elisabeth Bumiller

The United States government needs to take steps to preserve its top AAA-rating, a Standard & Poor's Ratings (S&P) official told Dow Jones newswire in an interview published on Thursday.

The measures taken in response to recommendations President Barack Obama's commission on fiscal responsibility would be crucial in the view S&P takes on the U.S. credit rating, he said.

"It is very important for the credit standing of the United States that the Congress considers very carefully what the fiscal commission proposes," John Chambers, chairman of S&P's sovereign rating committee, was quoted as saying.

Reuters

The ratings agencies were one of the key culprits in the financial crisis and now they are lecturing (and enabling) politicians about the Catfood Commission. That's rich!

Sean Paul Kelley

To me, when I say the free market, I think of people being able to freely and openly share their wares, to purchase what they want and need, and with some degree of happiness on both the buyer and seller's end.

It seems to me, though, that the folks who most discuss the free market and are the biggest free market advocates just don't see things that way. They sort of view things much like the "pain caucus," who seem to be unable of thinking a policy is acceptable unless a majority of the nation eats shit in the name of patriotism and fiscal responsibility. Instead of viewing the "free market" as I have described it, their vision of the free market is an economy in which those with power are able to freely fuck over everyone else. The free market needs energy, so those of you living in towns with your water polluted by mine runoff can fuck off and die, because any government intervention messes up the "free market." The market demands oil, so Allah forbid we get in the way of oil spills that might ruin the Gulf forever- witness the freakout over a mild cessation in deep sea drilling by "free market" advocates. The free market advocates that there be Randian geniuses who vacation at the Hamptons after fleecing people who tried to do the right thing investing.

In short, it has become obvious to me (belatedly), that when a lot of free market advocates talk about the free market, what they mean is the right to fuck people over with no recourse. Hey- you should have invested better! Hey- you should have known those Iowa eggs were shit! It seems as if in their minds (and I'm thinking of total shitheads like Welch, Gillespie, and McMegan), there simply can not be a free market unless someone is getting screwed, which is completely contrary to my understanding of the "free market." In my understanding of the free market, things are a win/win scenario, not a tilted table with a win/lose situation where the winner is predetermined by influence and power and connections and societal standing.

It's just crazy and a really warped way of thinking, and it turns everything on its head. Maybe this is why there is such a resurgence in buy local- you deal with your producers, and know what you are getting. I dunno.

John Cole

A team at Purdue University needed to generate a string of random numbers, a surprisingly tricky task that is complicated by the fact that whatever method you use to generate the numbers will have some influence on them. Physics professor Ephraim Fischbach decided to use the decay of radioactive isotopes as a source of randomness. Although the overall decay is a known constant, the individual atoms would decay in unpredictable ways, providing a random pattern.

That's when they discovered something strange. The data produced gave random numbers for the individual atoms, yes, but the overall decay wasn't constant, flying in the face of the accepted rules of chemistry. Intrigued, they checked out long range observations of silicon-32 and radium-226 decay, both of which showed a slight but definite variation over time. Intriguingly, the decay seemed to vary with the seasons, with the rate a little faster in the winter and a little slower in the summer.

At first, the researchers tried to rationalize the seasonal fluctuations as the result of instrument error, perhaps caused by changing heat and humidity. But that idea fell apart when nuclear engineer Jere Jenkins noticed the decay rate of the short-lived isotope manganese-54 dropped slightly during a solar flare. In fact, the decrease began a good 36 hours before the flare occurred.

Alasdair Wilkins

Am I wrong in thinking that Pakistan has minimal US or world concern? As opposed to like...New Orleans or even Haiti? http://huff.to/aQ0UoD

SageFrancisSFR

It's not clear how broadly the order was communicated. Some officers who heard it say they refused to carry it out. Others say they understood it as a fundamental change in the standards on deadly force, which allow police to fire only to protect themselves or others from what appears to be an imminent physical threat.

The accounts of orders to "shoot looters," "take back the city," or "do what you have to do" are fragmentary. It remains unclear who originated them or whether they were heard by any of the officers involved in shooting 11 civilians in the days after Katrina. Thus far, no officers implicated in shootings have used the order as an explanation for their actions. Only one of the people shot by police - Henry Glover - was allegedly stealing goods at the time he was shot.

Still, current and former officers said the police orders - taken together with tough talk from top public officials broadcast over the airwaves -- contributed to an atmosphere of confusion about how much force could be used to combat looting.

Sabrina Shankman, Tom Jennings, Brendan McCarthy, Laura Maggi, A.C. Thompson

During the Katrina disaster, victims were perceived as criminal vermin by media, law enforcement, and the military. It was never quite clear how starving people would get very far swimming down the road with big screen TVs, but for a time that concern was seen as more important than people simply trying to eat or drink fresh water.

Atrios

His email is peppered with exclamation points and condescension. At one point he urged Carson to read a certain graph, "which I hope you are able to discern if you are any good at reading graphs."

Simpson concludes by implying that leading a major organization dedicated to the interests of middle-aged and elderly women is not "honest work."

"If you have some better suggestions about how to stabilize Social Security instead of just babbling into the vapors, let me know," he writes. "And yes, I've made some plenty smart cracks about people on Social Security who milk it to the last degree. You know 'em too. It's the same with any system in America. We've reached a point now where it's like a milk cow with 310 million tits! Call when you get honest work!"

Ryan Grim

I can appreciate the White House's difficulties when shaping the deficit commission's membership. The goal was to find credible, knowledgeable, sincere officials -- "elder statesman" types, I suppose -- who'd be willing to work in good faith on a bipartisan compromise. It was deemed important for President Obama to choose two co-chairs, one from each party, and all things being equal, Simpson probably seemed like a reasonable choice.

It's unfortunate, but the "bench" of serious Republicans available for a role like this one is depressingly thin.

Six months later, though, it seems increasingly clear that Simpson lacks the judgment and temperament for the job.

Steve Benen

Analysts at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore Labs have run the numbers on the US energy use in 2009, and come up with similar results to those obtained when examining the country's carbon emissions: energy use is dropping at a pace that is faster than would be expected based on the slowing economy alone. Even better, the growth in renewable energy, coupled with increased use of natural gas, is displacing significant amounts of coal. …

According to the Livermore analysts, both economics and higher-efficiency appliances and vehicles helped push down the energy use last year, dropping consumption from 2008's 99 Quads. Coal and petroleum use both declined significantly (coal was down by 10 percent), with more efficient vehicles accounting for much of the latter. Lowered electricity use accounted for much of coal's drop, as did displacement by natural gas. But total natural gas use also dropped, at least in part because solar, hydro, and geothermal power all increased slightly, and wind power increased significantly. It's now at 0.7 Quads, and on pace to clear a full Quad within the next couple of years.

John Timmer

I think a key to AI is the need for several representations of the knowledge, such that when the system is stuck (using one representation) it can jump to use another. When David Marr at MIT moved into computer vision, he generated a lot of excitement, but he hit up against the problem of knowledge representation; he had no good representations for knowledge in his vision systems.

Marvin Minsky

A recurring theme in my blog is my belief that we must become renaissance men -- a unison of *nix hackers, vision scientists, cognitive scientists, philosophers, athletes, machine learning scientists, skilled orators, and much more -- if we are to have any hope of chiseling away at the problem of computational intelligence.

Tomasz Malisiewicz