FOLLOWING UP MY EARLIER POST, WALT MOSSBERG has a review of emergency gadgets in the WSJ today. (Free link).

I’M SUPPOSED TO BE ON PUBLIC RADIO’S MARKETPLACE program between 6 & 6:30 Eastern, talking about PorkBusters. Listen live at the link.

AUSTIN BAY has more on oil shale.

A HURRICANE RITA ROUNDUP with some interesting photographs.

TIM NOAH VS. LINDSEY GRAHAM: Eugene Volokh referees.

THE MORE YOU TIGHTEN YOUR GRIP, the more readers will slip through your fingers.

PORK UPDATE:

Today Alabama Senator Richard Shelby (Republican) said he would be willing to give up some of his allocated Federal monies for pork projects in his state to help fund recovery efforts from Hurricane Katrina. Which raises the question whether California Congressman Adam Schiff (Democrat-29th District) would be willing to shift funds as well?

Nancy Pelosi is!

House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco said Tuesday she was willing to return to the federal Treasury $70 million designated for San Francisco projects in the new highway and transportation bill and use the money to help pay for Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts.

But Tom Delay (same story) isn’t:

Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, said that while he would consider cutting all other domestic discretionary spending to raise the tens of billions of dollars needed for Katrina relief, it was a bad idea to take money from transportation projects.

His suburban Houston district is slated to get $64.4 million under the bill, and DeLay has said that he brought home an additional $50 million for freeway projects in the metropolitan area. He also helped secure $324 million in funding credits for Houston’s light rail construction.

Neither is Alaska Rep. Don “bridge to nowhere” Young:

“Kiss my ear!” Rep. Don Young, an Alaska Republican, told a Fairbanks newspaper reporter when asked whether he would return the $223 million he “earmarked” for a bridge so that residents of Ketchikan won’t have to pay $6 to ride a ferry to get to the airport. Young is chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

You can’t make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear, I guess.

But Rep. Mike Pence is looking like the hero of this story so far:

Indiana Congressman Mike Pence is leading a call for cuts in the federal budget that would match the spending for hurricane relief. “Operation Offset” is the name of the effort.

The details were made public on Capitol Hill Wednesday morning. The 23 pages of proposed cuts in the federal budget come from 110 members of Congress who belong to the Conservative Republican Study Committee chaired by Mike Pence.

Bring it on! But if people aren’t willing to support cuts in their own districts, they’re not going to be taken seriously.

UPDATE: Pelosi backpedals:

But by the afternoon she had backtracked, saying she wouldn’t give up all of the $128.6 million going to her district. She said the $58.8 million slated to retrofit the Golden Gate Bridge to protect it from earthquakes is a safety issue too important to forgo.

That might be a fair cop, actually, though it looks bad. Still, her colleagues need to be stepping up. And perhaps she can find some other pork to take its place, if she looks hard . . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: John McCain wants to ditch the hugely expensive prescription drug benefit: “‘We’ve got to go back and look at the Medicare prescription drug bill. It was supposed to cost $400 billion. It’s now up to $700 billion.’ McCain added, ‘It was a bad idea to start with.'” Follow the link for an alternative proposal.

MORE: Hmm. Nancy Pelosi may not have backpedaled at all, despite what the story says above. Reader Jeff Barron emails:

I’m absolutely not a fan of Nancy Pelosi, but I think you inadvertantly do her an injustice with your “Pelosi backpedals” update. The original cite says that Pelosi will give back $70 million. The update (which states that she’s “backpedal[ing]”) says that Pelosi won’t give back $58.8m of the $128.6m going to her district, because its directed to GG safety retrofitting. (As you suggest, sounds fair.) 128.6 m. – 58.8 m. = about 70 m.

Yeah, looking at both the stories that makes sense to me. Either I’m missing something, or the charge of backtracking in the second article is wrong.

RECORD REENLISTMENTS from Idaho National Guardsmen in Iraq. Clayton Cramer sarcastically notes that “things must be bad in Iraq!”

It is interesting that the troops seem consistently more positive than the press.

SOME PROGRESS ON OIL:

Eight U.S. companies have filed applications with the federal government to lease land in Colorado for oil-shale development, a sign that oil producers again are ready to gamble some 23 years after the last boom went bust.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the arm of the Interior Department that manages federal lands, has received 10 drilling applications, including three from Shell and one each from Exxon Mobil and Chevron. The companies want to develop technologies to extract oil from shale on 160-acre federal tracts in Rio Blanco County in northwestern Colorado.

The government said it will tread carefully, since it doesn’t want to repeat the oil shale boom-and-bust cycles of the 1970s and 1980s that almost devastated the Western Slope’s economy.

But with crude oil above $66 a barrel at the close of trading Tuesday, oil shale is a promising alternative to crude. The Green River shale deposits in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming are estimated to contain 1.5 trillion to 1.8 trillion barrels of oil, and while not all of it can be recovered, half that amount is nearly triple the proven oil reserves of Saudi Arabia.

Long term strategic plan for the United States: Get the price of oil up high enough that oil shale competes with Middle East oil. Then put Middle East oil producers out of business, or just let them run out of oil. Oil-funded islamoterror then goes out of business, too, and the Middle East goes back to being an unimportant backwater.

I’LL ALWAYS REMEMBER a place called hope.

LT SMASH has thoughts on Katrina, Rita, and the punditocracy.

T.S. ELIOT WROTE that there’s no greater treason, than to do the right thing for the wrong reason. In fact, however, that’s often the best we can hope for, which is why I’m still glad that Harvard will be allowing military recruiters on campus, even if it is because of the Solomon Amendment and not some native patriotic impulse.

DISASTER PREPAREDNESS: So people want me to follow up on my earlier disaster-preparedness posts with lots of recommendations, but I don’t have anything all that new. But for those interested, here’s a pretty comprehensive list of stuff by Sarah Mankowski.

There’s more to preparation than buying stuff, though, and you might want to acquire some training via the Red Cross, FEMA, or the Citizens’ Corps. And this PDF booklet from the LAFD, though focusing on earthquakes, has a lot of useful knowledge.

It’s useful to have the right stuff handy, but you also need the right knowledge, and mindset. That doesn’t come from a catalog.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: I think the idea is developing more and more momentum. Here’s a Wall Street Journal editorial:

The idea of a pork-for-reconstruction swap had already been denounced as “moronic” by a spokesman for Don Young of Alaska, Chairman of the House Transportation Committee and proud father of the now-infamous $223 million “bridge to nowhere” near Ketchikan. Since then the White House and Congressional Republican leadership have been acting as if the cost of Katrina relief should have no impact on the course of an administration that has presided over the fastest growth in discretionary spending since Lyndon Johnson.

But thankfully, a grassroots Internet campaign and a handful of House GOP conservatives have refused to give up on the idea that spending cuts should be found to defray the estimated $200 billion federal price tag for hurricane relief. In the Senate, John McCain is proposing a similar pork-for-Katrina swap.

The Internet campaign picks up on the idea of revisiting the earmarks in the Highway Bill. A Web site called Porkbusters (www.truthlaidbear.com/porkbusters.php) helpfully lists these projects by state and directs readers to the appropriate Representatives and Senators to ask what they would cut. Around the country a flood of letters to local newspapers has echoed the theme.

And if revisiting the Highway Bill is too much to ask, how about a one-year moratorium on all non-defense earmarks for fiscal 2006? Rep. Ron Lewis (R., Kentucky) proposes just that in a “Dear Colleague” letter dated Monday. Other suggestions include across-the-board spending cuts at federal agencies of 2.5 cents on the dollar and delaying the introduction of the Medicare drug benefit by a year. We should be hearing more today when members of the House Republican Study Committee — led by consistent spending hawks such as Mike Pence, Jeb Hensarling and Jeff Flake — announce “Operation Offset” and a list of specific options to find savings in the budget.

The campaign also got another mention in the Washington Post, courtesy of Howard Kurtz. And Mark Tapscott continues to round up other reactions.

And Leslie Paige of Citizens Against Government Waste wants some help from the blogosphere:

CCAGW is considering bringing in grassroots folks from districts all over the country who have publicly decried or offered to reject their own pork-barrel projects in order for those dollars to be redirected to Katrina Relief.

We’ve pointed her to some folks, but if you’re interested send me an email with “CAGW” in the subject line and I’ll forward it on.

No word, so far, from my congressman, Jimmy Duncan.

TRADING TASTES: My brother’s new book is out. Congratulations, bro!

JOHN TIERNEY ON DISASTER RELIEF:

I don’t think Washington needs any more czars. But if President Bush feels compelled to put someone in charge of rebuilding the Gulf Coast, let me suggest a name: Lee Scott.

Scott is the chief executive of Wal-Mart, one of the few institutions to improve its image here after Katrina sent a 15-foot wave across the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. If you mention the Red Cross or FEMA to people in Slidell, you hear rants about help that didn’t arrive and phone lines that are always busy. If you mention state or national politicians, you hear obscenities.

But if you visit the Wal-Mart and the Sam’s Club stores here, you hear shoppers who have been without power for weeks marveling that there are still generators in stock (and priced at $304.04). You hear about the trucks that rolled in right after the hurricane and the stuff the stores gave away: chain saws and boots for rescue workers, sheets and clothes for shelters, water and ice for the public.

“This was the only place we could find water those first days,” said Rashan Smith, who was shopping with her three children at Wal-Mart on Saturday. “I still haven’t managed to get through to FEMA. It’s hard to say, but you get more justice at Wal-Mart.”

That’s the same assessment you hear from public officials in Louisiana, and there’s even been talk of letting Wal-Mart take over FEMA’s job. The company already has its own emergency operations center, where dozens of people began preparing for the hurricane the week before it hit by moving supplies and trucks into position.

Of course, not all for-profit institutions are that giving: I would have linked this yesterday at its New York Times home, but since TimesSelect forbids that, I’m linking it at the Tallahasseee Democrat today. Read the whole thing.

GLOBAL WARMING ON MARS: “New impact craters formed since the 1970s suggest changes to age-estimating models. And for three Mars summers in a row, deposits of frozen carbon dioxide near Mars’ south pole have shrunk from the previous year’s size, suggesting a climate change in progress.”

If only we had ratified Kyoto.

NASA’S RETURN TO THE MOON PLAN: I take a skeptical line, and suggest an alternative, in today’s TechCentralStation column.

UPDATE: Related thoughts from Dave Price.

SOME THOUGHTS ON HURRICANE RITA, over at GlennReynolds.com.

UPDATE: Ack, MSNBC’s permalinks are buggered. Go here or just scroll up from the link above.

MORE ON BIRD FLU: Not terribly encouraging.

POTS, KETTLES, AND HURRICANE HYPE.

“STUCK ON STUPID:” a new catch phrase has been born.

UPDATE: Video here. I wonder who the reporter was?

But I think I know why Dan Rather is crying.

PORKBUSTERS: Here’s the background.

I’m on Hugh Hewitt now talking about it.

DEREK LOWE looks at some promising developments in longevity research.

SHRINKAGE at The New York Times.

UPDATE: Is it because people don’t want to pay retail?