Category: Hurricane Sandy

Looks like there won't be a plague after all:

In fact, the flood may end up as a net positive, as far as we people are concerned. "Flooding often displaces rats but also drowns young rats in their burrows and can reduce the rat population," [NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene official Sam] Miller says. As for the rats that did escape an untimely, watery death, Miller insists that "no research has demonstrated an increased health risk from flushed rats from underground."

But:

If the flooding happened after dominant rats took to the surface and drove the weaklings underground to die, New York’s rat population may have just gotten stronger.

Happy Halloween.

Part of Jonathan Maimon's dispatch from a still-dark lower Manhattan:

I did not witness a single Red Cross Truck or FEMA Vehicle or in lower Manhattan. Recall the assistance these agencies provided after 9/11 – this is NOT HAPPENING. There are bound to be hundreds of elderly people, rich and poor, who live on the upper floors of buildings with elevators that are now disabled. IF POWER IS NOT RESTORED, THIS WILL MOVE FROM BEING AN ECONOMIC DISASTER TO A HUMANITARIAN DISASTER.

David Freedlander checked in with NYC food distributors last night.

(Photo: People crowd into a Chase Bank ATM kiosk to charge phones and laptops at 40th Street and 3rd Avenue, one block north of where power has gone out, on October 31, 2012 in New York City. 'This is the modern campfire,' one man said. By Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

Hey guys! A volunteer just opened one of these cans for me… THERE’S FOOD INSIDE THESE CANS! Hahahaha! How long have they had this?

— Mitt Romney’s Cans (@MittRomneyCans) October 31, 2012

McKay Coppins pulls back the curtain of yesterday’s non-campaign campaign event in Kettering, Ohio:

[T]he last-minute nature of the call for donations left some in the campaign concerned that they would end up with an empty truck. So the night before the event, campaign aides went to a local Wal-Mart and spent $5,000 on granola bars, canned food, and diapers to put on display while they waited for donations to come in, according to one staffer. (The campaign confirmed that it “did donate supplies to the relief effort,” but would not specify how much it spent.)

And then there’s this:

As supporters lined up to greet the candidate, a young volunteer in a Romney/Ryan T-shirt stood near the tables, his hands cupped around his mouth, shouting, “You need a donation to get in line!” Empty-handed supporters pled for entrance, with one woman asking, “What if we dropped off our donations up front?” The volunteer gestured toward a pile of groceries conveniently stacked near the candidate. “Just grab something,” he said. Two teenage boys retrieved a jar of peanut butter each, and got in line. When it was their turn, they handed their “donations” to Romney. He took them, smiled, and offered an earnest “Thank you.”

(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

The hurricane has screwed up email service to the Dish account (andrew@thedailybeast.com), so we haven't been receiving most of the emails sent by Dish readers this week.  If you sent us an email since Monday night, please resend it using the following makeshift address: andrew@dishemail.com. 

On a personal level, my wonderful introduction to New York City continues. We've had no power since Sunday night, and no idea when that might end. Even charged cell-phones south of 29th Street get no service at all (which is a tiny deterioration from AT&T's usual service). There is no hot water. Even better, the front door to our building works on an electric FOB system, which, of course, has failed. So for a while, only one of us could leave the building at any one time. This made life a little difficult. Eventually we found a master key, which allowed me to escape today to get some work done.

I'm blogging today from a midtown Starbucks, where every available electrical outlet is being used by displaced downtowners. The atmosphere around me is probably like rush-hour in Calcutta. I want to thank my colleagues, all of whom have electric power, for doing such an amazing job yesterday and today. And my love to New York City, which has instantly plunged me from the developed world into a pitch black and increasingly cold Halloween. I keep saying to myself: It Gets Better.

Well, it cannot get any worse, can it? Can it?

Is @comfortablysmug the biggest Internet troll of all time? — Amy Z. Quinn (@AmyZQuinn) October 30, 2012

Jeff John Roberts looks into the potential illegality of spreading false information on Twitter:

[T]he government already regulates rumors related to the SEC and the stock market, and courts say they will draw a line at protecting speech that gives rise to “imminent lawless action.” Should there be limits on social network speech in emergencies too? At GigaOM, we’re fond of highlighting Twitter’s role as a source of freedom and public media tool. For now, my instinct is to leave Twitter alone. But future emergencies may test that position.

Shashank “@comfortablysmug” Tripathi has since apologized and resigned from the campaign of a New York congressional candidate. But at least one NYC official is trying to get him prosecuted. Laura Miller zooms out:

[Perhaps] what Shashank Tripathi and other fake-news purveyors intended to do [was simply] to issue dispatches no one was supposed to believe in the first place. But one rushed or irony-impaired retweeter is all it takes to seize on a bogus photo or news item and credulously pass it on. The context gets lost, and each retweeter presumes that the message comes with the considered endorsement of the person they got it from. At the same time, real people go on posting real dispatches (written and photographic) from places where real disaster has struck, dispatches we’d never get from the professional media.

The result is a crazy quilt of the true, the manipulated truth, the false, the truthy (false things that feel true), the flagrantly false (fakes so fake they shed meaningful light on the other fakes) and dozens of permutations in between.

Suzy Khimm examines the cuts to FEMA in Obama's budget proposal:

Overall, Obama’s budget would reduce FEMA funding by $453 million — a 3 percent cut from 2012 that would bring the agency’s total funding down to $13.5 billion, according to FEMA’s budget estimates ….  That said, FEMA is still protected from new funding cuts that other agencies now face. Under an agreement from last year’s debt-ceiling deal, FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund is exempt from the Budget Control Act’s spending caps. And FEMA is also able to carry over unspent money from one year to the next, which boosted its disaster relief coffers from $7.1 billion to $7.8 billion this year.

Naturally, the Romney-Ryan ticket has declined to clarify specific cuts. But Henry Blodget examines Romney's previous comments on the issue:

Romney wanted to cut "disaster relief." Not FEMA. Not other government spending to pay for disaster relief. Just disaster relief. (And, by the way, for those who think what Romney meant was that he wants states and local governments to handle disaster relief, Hurricane Sandy is a perfect example of why this approach is ludicrous and inefficient when dealing with disasters that cross state and local lines. Can you imagine if all the governors of all the states affected by Sandy had to agree with each other and coordinate before they did anything to help each other? The federal government has a place in our society. And disaster relief is part of that place.)

Josh Barro's view:

[A] downward shift of fiscal responsibilities is a key component of Romney's policy agenda, most notably in Medicaid, which he would convert into a slow-growing block grant. Over time, states would be forced to pick up an increasing share of the program's costs. That is a very bad idea: State governments are in a much weaker position to shoulder rising health-care costs than the federal government is. They are also not as well-positioned to pay for disaster relief, an expense which comes in infrequent and quasi-random bursts. But these are the sorts of changes you might make if you were trying to meet an arbitrary cap on federal spending.