A Slow Day 0
at Pine View Farm. I finally got around to fixing the fences in the Back Field. Well, actually, fixing a couple of screens on the porch, but the technology’s the same. But a couple of things struck me from my initial reading of today’s paper.
I do commend this column from today’s Philadelphia Inquirer: Trudy Rubin’s take on what Mr. Bush left out of his big speech this week.
President Bush gave an amazing speech on terrorism and Iraq on Thursday in which he left out almost everything you need to know.
The speech was aimed at reversing the slide in public support for the Iraq war. The President’s theme? Iraq is “the central front in our war on terror.”
If we retreat, Islamic militants will take over Iraq and use it as a “haven for terror” from which they will destabilize the region and the world, he said. So we must “never back down” until we achieve “complete victory” – a term whose definition wasn’t provided.
Nor did the President give you the information to judge whether we should stay in Iraq.
And more is coming to light regarding the flooding of New Orleans. It appears the the levees were not breeched from above, but gave way from below:
The system of levees and concrete walls that was supposed to protect the New Orleans area from flooding was breached in dozens of places, investigators say, a finding that indicates that the failures were far more widespread than originally thought.
Engineers probing the failures said they were increasingly convinced that floodwaters did not overtop two key flood walls that collapsed on Aug. 29 after Hurricane Katrina struck, swamping large portions of the city. Instead, evidence suggests that the flood walls were weakened by shifting soil beneath the structures, according to a team of experts from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).
