Chris Boese's Weblog

William Bennett is "morally reprehensible"

When people like this speak unguardedly, showing their true beliefs, I suddenly understand why the federal government's response to the disaster in New Orleans was so insanely incompetent: it appears that such unexamined racist beliefs exist under the surface with many people, to the point that humanitarian aid to African Americans in Louisiana was deliberately withheld because of a widespread belief that "crime gangs" were in control, in spite of evidence on every channel's news program that no one was in control and people were suffering.

So in that respect, I suppose former Secretary of Education William Bennett did us a favor with his "gamble" to voice the stereotypical views so many subscribe to. It shows what many in certain parts of the political spectrum still believe, and also shows under what circumstances the use of "abortion" enters their minds: as a law enforcement tool? "Morally reprehensible" or not, we do understand the kind of hypothetical arrangements Bennett thinks about, AND what basic beliefs he holds about African Americans and crime, even if he rejects that particular abortion hypothetical.

[I should add that I find nothing wrong with entertaining ANY hypothetical or "devil's advocate"
argument as an important element of critical thinking and logical exploration. Any student I've had from the past 15+ years would tell you that "no sacred cows" is the hallmark of how I like to structure classroom debate space. I won't criticize Bennett for looking at a patently absurd idea. I'm more afraid of what happens in a free society when topics "go underground" or are off-limits. I will, however, criticize the conclusions he drew from entertaining that particular hypothetical. In an earler draft of this post, I may not have made that point as clear as I'd have liked.]

Personally, I find a person who considers African Americans intrinsically linked to the crime rate "morally reprehensible," as Bennett went on to discuss them on a radio program to make some kind of larger point. That's why his explanation that he's being "mischaracterized" begs the question to the point of ridiculousness.

Perhaps the former Education Secretary could use a class in logic, as well as basic ethics, both usually taught in first or second year Philosophy courses.

We could even start a new education program for cabinet officers and political appointees past and present, call it "No Federal Official Left Behind."

Link: Washington Post & AP: Bennett: Black Abortions Would Lower Crime.

Bennett: Black Abortions Would Lower Crime

The Associated Press Friday, September 30, 2005; 10:59 AM

WASHINGTON -- The White House on Friday criticized former Education Secretary William Bennett for remarks linking the crime rate and the abortion of black babies.

"The president believes the comments were not appropriate," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said.

Former Education Secretary William Bennett ... was answering a caller's question when he took issue with the hypothesis put forth in a recent book that one reason crime is down is that abortion is up.

"But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down," said Bennett, author of "The Book of Virtues."

He went on to call that "an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky."

[OK, he's against these extensive extrapolations. Way to take a stand, dude! But even tho he's against those things, he still had to admit his own "truth" about one particular extrapolation, that fewer African Americans would mean a lower crime rate, an unblinkingly racist stereotype that he CONTINUES to defend by not apologising.]

Responding later to criticism, Bennett said his comments had been mischaracterized and that his point was that the idea of supporting abortion to reduce crime was "morally reprehensible."

Bennett was education secretary under President Reagan and director of drug control policy when Bush's father was president.

Tales to tell around the campfire...

Found this little anecdote deep in a longer New York Observer profile piece on Nick Denton, the Gawker/Defamer blog kingdom dude. It isn't attributed to anyone in particular, so I guess it came from the head of the story's writer, Tom Scocca (imagine that!). I'd rather die a thousand deaths than be compared to Rupert Murdoch or the founder of "Taylorism," but that's just me. It's a fun little fable anyway.

Link: NYO - Off the Record.

The Gawker King

By Tom Scocca
[...]

This is the story of blogs: Once upon a time, there was the Mainstream Media. The Mainstream Media lived in a tall, impregnable castle, where it paid people to write and paid other people to edit the writing. It printed the results on paper and tossed it down from the balconies, ordering the public to buy and read it.

Then a bunch of people—unpaid, many of them dressed in sleepwear—discovered that they could publish their own writing on the Internet, for free or close to it. Armed with their opinions and raw strength in numbers, they laid siege to the castle: amateur against professional, democracy against autocracy, new against old. The Mainstream Media retreated to an upstairs bedroom and barred the door, as the masses streamed into the throne room, waving Dan Rather’s head on a pike.

It’s a stirring story, but it doesn’t very well provide for a Rupert Murdoch of the Blogosphere—and even less so for a Frederick W. Taylor, who is the figure Mr. Denton also calls to mind. Gawker Media has 14 sites, spanning gossip, gadgets, sports, pornography and sundry other niches. What separates them from outsiders’ blogs, whatever the topic, is a unified and stripped-down industrial approach.

There is no Gawker Media newsroom. The writers are freelance contractors, paid a base rate per posting and bonuses for drawing traffic. They rise early and post throughout the day, following scheduled quotas. When they take a vacation, guest bloggers are brought in to keep the factory lines running on time.

[...]

Snopes now confirms Dog Flu = TRUE

In case you needed more confirmation. Some good diagnostic information on the site too. Here's some of it.

UPDATE 9/29/05: For better information than Snopes, see also my other two posts on this subject:

Link: Chris Boese's Weblog: Dog flu: real concern or just Internet hysteria?.

Link: Chris Boese's Weblog: Watch your dog for this scary-contagious dog flu.

Link: Snopes.com: Urban Legends Reference Pages: Critters (Dog Flu).

Dog Flu

Claim:   A virus deadly to dogs has been spreading in the canine population of the U.S. 
Status:   True.

Example:   [Collected on the Internet, 2005]

The New Canine Influenza, Greyhound Disease, Race Flu, Equine Influenza, Avian Flu

The New Canine Flu, which has killed so many greyhounds is now in the domestic dog population. There is no treatment and no vaccine. It has jumped species, (by feeding greyhounds raw horse meat, which was infected with horse influenza), (horse influenza is avian flu, which jumped species from birds (avian flu), to horses (horse influenza). The avian flu has now moved to racing greyhounds and domestic dogs and the indications are that there may be a potential problem for humans.[Snopes info is disupted, see comments below] It is deadly and it is on the loose. It may just be a matter of time. The CDC is watching the disease.

There is no central tracking agency with report and stat capability for dogs that will get the word out to all vets in the US.

http://www.recombinomics.com/News/05130505/H3N8_Domestic_Dogs_United_States.html

The domestic dog population is at present risk.

This week on my net groups I saw many anecdotal accounts of $100,000 show dogs dying while packed in ice and hooked up to IVs, with high temps. No one knows what is wrong with these dogs and the vets do not know what they are treating. I think it is Greyhound Influenza or Race Flu.

Show populations are now infected and the majority of veterinarians have never heard of the disease. Isolated individuals know this but the country as a whole does not. A few days after exposure at dog shows, dogs are traveling back to their home states and infecting the local populations. Many dogs are dying needlessly. It is not kennel cough.

The period of incubation is 2-5 days. It is airborne, can be transmitted by inanimate objects, and clothing. Virtually all exposed will contract. The morbidity is 80% with 20% being sub clinically affected and shedding the virus. The course of the disease is four weeks. There are two forms, milder and very extreme. Two weeks into the viral disease the dog looks like he is getting over the cough and then bacterial infections become an acute problem. Oft times the owner has reported the dog is well, only to find that a short time later an acute bacterial infection has taken over the dog, in a matter of hours. The owners think the disease has run its course only to learn it hasn't gotten started yet, so dogs are dying needlessly.

My vet thinks earlier rather than later treatment with broad spectrum antibiotics are the best way to treat the disease. With proper vet care perhaps there will only be a mortality of 1-5%.

The information needs to go out so that all vets will know this is not kennel cough, so they will not VAX for kennel cough while ill, and so they can monitor beyond the two week period.

It has been almost impossible for me to understand how in the last four days i have contacted state vets who have never heard of the new influenza, all the while, the people with the info on the disease, refuse to release it nationally.

The AVMA has info that will go out next month. How many will die prior to that? I have begged and cajoled them to do this, so perhaps we are making some headway, however, we need info to go out ASAP.

APHIS says it is not their job.

The people who are handling research on the initial outbreak in FLA., are contacting local, (FLA) BUT not national sources to disseminate information.

Below is a link to a photo album in which i placed the FLA Veterinary Alert and Advisory, which was put out by the FLA VET MED ASSOC., at the request of the State Vet. It is not on the state website.

[...]

Origins:   In 2004, a virulent form of canine influenza surfaced at greyhound racing parks in Florida. In that outbreak, it infected 24 greyhounds and killed 8 more. The contagion has since been confirmed in seven states, having killed greyhounds at tracks in Florida, Massachusetts, Arizona, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Texas and Iowa. It is highly contagious, with the uninfected picking it up from the infected via shared items or human contact (kennel workers have carried the virus home with them), in addition to dog-to-dog encounters.

The virus that has been felling greyhounds is an H3N8 flu closely related to an equine flu strain. It is not related to typical human flus or to the H5N1 avian flu that has killed about 100 people in Asia.

Dr. Ruben Donis, chief of molecular genetics for the influenza branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, confirms the flu jumped from horses to dogs, "a very rare event of considerable scientific interest" and adds "at this point, there is no reason to panic." How that jump occurred is either not known at this point or is not being commented on, so the e-mail's assertion that the eating of raw meat was to blame should be regarded as speculation rather than as fact. While there is always the possibility the virus might again jump species, this time to humans, this strain of flu has been present in horses for more than 40 years yet there are no documented cases of humans catching it. There are no known cases of canine flu infecting humans.

A vaccine for the canine flu is under development, a vaccine for the equine version already exists.

[...]

We found this good advice for vets and dog owners in our inbox one day:

PLEASE DO NOT PANIC, and do NOT assume that every cough is Canine Influenza. Kennel Cough from parainfluenza and Bordetella is more common. However, the Animal Health Diagnostic Center at Cornell is interested in receiving samples from dogs that appear to have kennel cough.

Clinical Signs: Since this is a new pathogen in dogs, there is currently no natural immunity present in the unexposed canine population. Almost all exposed dogs will become infected, and nearly 80% have clinical signs. In the mild form the dogs will have a cough that persists for 10 to 21 days. The cough may be soft and moist or dry. Many dogs will have a nasal discharge from a secondary bacterial infection and low grade fever. The nasal discharge responds to broad spectrum antibiotics.

In the severe form with pneumonia there is a high fever (104-106 F) and respiratory difficulties. X-rays may show consolidation. These dogs often have secondary bacterial infections and have responded to broad-spectrum antibiotics and supportive care including intravenous hydration.

The incubation period is two to five days and dogs may shed virus for seven to 10 days. The disease can spread rapidly throughout a boarding kennel. Dogs that are coughing SHOULD NOT BE BROUGHT TO SHOWS or Performance EVENTS.

[...]

I'm having late 1980s deja vu

What I wonder, amid all this piling on of news of newspaper and other media layoffs and cutbacks to please shareholders and quarterly reports, is where will all these laid off journos go?

See, I was at a small daily in the late 1980s when good-sized cities were going from two or more papers to one-voice monopolies, doing these odd merger relationships (I wonder if those deals aren't actually suspicious, from an anti-trust point of view) that would lead the layoffs the equivalent of one entire paper's staff. In one case I remember, the word was back then that 800 folks who were ditched from the newly-merged big daily were basically fanning out into the small state media market, giving us more competition for jobs at the small dailies and pretty much shutting down all entry-level jobs in that state for new grads for several years.

I remember how anyone who had a job back then tried to hang on to it, and on some small dailies, there were staff members who held positions for 20 years plus, which basically meant that that paper would NEVER have an opening, say on the photo staff, unless one of those guys died, and who would wish for that?

Of course, a lot of those 800 people who fanned out looking for newspaper jobs after they were laid off ended up leaving the field entirely, or going into PR. I just wanted to point out that the backlog from the higher end paper layoffs affects folks at smaller papers too, right on down the food chain.

Link: Steve Lovelady at Columbia Journalism Review, on the Week of the Long Knives.

The Longer View

September 23, 2005

The Week of the Long Knives

Jon Friedman of Marketwatch.com wrote a column yesterday that cut right to the chase.

Friedman's first sentence: "This is a scary time to be a newspaper journalist."

No kidding.

In the wake of the media's generally outstanding performance covering the fault lines in the government's response to Hurricane Katrina, came a week of unrelentingly bad news for working journalists.

On Tuesday, the New York Times Company said it will cut 500 jobs from its payroll, including 45 in the New York Times newsroom, and another 35 in the newsroom of the Boston Globe.

On the same day, the Philadelphia Inquirer announced a buy-out intended to shrink its newsroom by 75 reporters and editors and the Philadelphia Daily News said it would cut its already-decimated newsroom staff by 25. Both are Knight Ridder newspapers. Inquirer editor Amanda Bennett told her staff she had "lost sleep" and "vomited" as she tried to deal with the news.

One former top editor at the Inquirer e-mailed another: "Pretty soon there will be nothing left."

Late Friday, the bloodbath continued, with the news that Knight Ridder, a company whose only apparent management tool is cutbacks, was eliminating another 60 jobs at the San Jose Mercury News -- 52 of them in the newsroom.

And all of that came against a backdrop of the San Francisco Chronicle's efforts to rid its payroll of 120 employees, and persistent rumors of more lay-offs and buy-outs at the Los Angeles Times, whose beleaguered editor John Carroll left in August after one too many budget battles with corporate accountants in Chicago, home to Tribune Co., the Times' parent. In addition, Newsday, also a Tribune Co. newspaper, announced 45 buyouts in its newsroom. That followed a buyout of 55 employees last December and another 25 the previous June.

[...]

For his part, Friedman has a special concern:

"If the publishers use their financial woes as an excuse to cut back on the coverage of disenfranchised people in America, it's going to be a very bad time to be poor.

"This is going to be a severe test for newspapers' commitment to serving the nation's underclass at a time when the executives would no doubt prefer to bask in the glow of the stellar reporting on Hurricane Katrina."

[...]

Dog flu: real concern or just Internet hysteria?

I don't have any answers on this, but I noticed my post linking to the NYTimes story about it is getting a lot of traffic, and when I searched out on the web, I came across some TV station sites saying it was all just bunkum, rumor and hysteria.

So I decided to check it out as much as I can, online. I mean, it isn't completely unheard of that the New York Times could have been hoodwinked, but I highly doubt it. But just to be on the safe side, I checked snopes.com, the Internet hoax debunker site. If there's a bona fide internet hoax out there, I trust Snopes to be all over it, and there's NOTHING ON SNOPES ABOUT DOG FLU BEING BS.

(Methinks some local TV stations are hard up for some sensational rumor to debunk, and found some uninformed local vets who were willing to sound off on camera.)

I was wondering if the NY Times story is getting dated as the Internet interest has taken off, so just one quick news link turned up this Reuters story from just 18 MINUTES before I made this post, and there were many more, but I grabbed this one just to be up the the minute.

It says the DOG FLU STORIES ARE REAL, but it also tempers some of the initial warnings about how serious it is. I'm not sure what that means, but it is interesting to me that all the experts quoted in these kinds of stories seemed to be focused on it hopping from dogs to people, like that's all we care about, when in actuality, some of us just sit around and worry about our dogs, OK?

I mean, look at how nuts people went over the plight of the poor pets that were forced to be left behind in Katrina, and how people who sit and worry about pets are now affecting evacuation policies for hurricanes like Rita.

(I have an acquaintance from Houston who says the evacuation traffic was way worse than it needed to be because people were hauling carloads of cats with just one or two people in the car, whole caravans of pet brigades or some such. She thought it was getting a bit excessive. Are there really that many people who have that many cats? Maybe I'm naive, but I'd hate to see those litter boxes.)

Anyway, I don't want to contribute to unnecessary hysteria, nor do I want to experience unnecessary hysteria, so here's some bits from the most recent update on the story I can find right now.

Link: New dog flu virus came from horses, experts say - Yahoo! News.

New dog flu virus came from horses, experts say

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent 18 minutes ago

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A new dog flu virus that has killed some racing greyhounds made an unusual jump from horses to dogs and may threaten pets but not people, experts said on Monday.

And the virus can also infect dogs without making them sick, meaning it is not as deadly as some reports have suggested, they said.

[...]

There is no evidence that it can infect people, said Dr. Ruben Donis of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who has published a report on the new virus in the journal Science.

"We must keep in mind that this H3N8 equine influenza virus has been in horses for over 40 years. In all these years we have never been able to document a single case of human infection with this virus," Donis told reporters in a telephone briefing.

"At this point there is no reason to panic," he said, adding that in lab dishes, anyway, the virus could be controlled with antiviral drugs."

Dr. Cynda Crawford of the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine first discovered the virus in greyhounds. It looked deadly at first.

"This virus can cause a respiratory disease that mimics a syndrome that we call kennel cough," Crawford told reporters.

"Kennel cough can be due to a myriad of infectious agents," she added, with a bacterial infection called Bordetella the most common cause.

MILD FORM OF DISEASE

Further checks have found the virus in dogs that were both ill and that seemed entirely healthy in Florida, New York and Massachusetts.

"Despite the rumors that are out on the Internet, this disease is not as deadly as people want to make it. Nearly all dogs are susceptible to infection ... about 80 percent of them will have a mild form of disease, characterized by cough and some nasal discharge that will resolve," she said.

It seems to have a mortality rate of between 5 and 8 percent, she said.

[...]

This was an "an unprecedented interspecies transfer," he said -- and would have implications for understanding the potential of H5N1 to begin infecting people easily.

And dogs could infect people with new viruses, too, the researchers theorized.

"Evidence of canine influenza infection in pet dogs, a primary companion animal for humans, raises the possibility that dogs may provide a new source for transmission of novel influenza A viruses to humans," they wrote in the Science report.

Crawford said pet owners did not need to be unduly concerned yet.

"I am taking my two Pekinese to be groomed next week. I will continue to board my pet greyhounds at boarding kennels when I need to," she said.

She will even let her dogs play at dog parks, but said owners should exercise common sense and keep their pets inside when they have any respiratory disease for two weeks or so, both to allow them to fully recover and to protect other dogs.

Good night, News?

Ominous foreboding, or an overdramatization. While I'm generally suspicious of hand-wringing by old-timers resisting change, there is much here to give one pause. I don't resist the price of nothing, the same price as online, but I do resist the increased dominance of the "kingdom of the suits." Those two things do not necessarily go together, nor should they.

Link: THE END OF AN ERA: GOOD NIGHT, NEWS - Yahoo! News.

THE END OF AN ERA: GOOD NIGHT, NEWS

By Richard Reeves Fri Sep 23, 8:49 PM ET

NEW YORK -- Every person in my car of the PATH train from 33rd Street in Manhattan to Hoboken, N.J., on Thursday was reading a newspaper. It could have warmed the cold heart of an old newspaperman. But none of them were reading The New York Times or Daily News or Post. Or, for that matter, the Star-Ledger, Jersey's biggest paper.

My fellow travelers, 20 of them, were reading Metro or amNew York, the free newspapers that circulate (or litter) the country's biggest metropolitan area.

[...]

It was that kind of week in my business. On Tuesday, the day of a memorial service for Peter Jennings, the late, great tyrant who not only anchored but also ran ABC News, the Times announced that it was eliminating 45 jobs in the newsroom where I happily toiled as a younger man.

The same thing was happening in Philadelphia, where the Knight-Ridder chain announced it was cutting 19 percent of the staff of the Philadelphia Daily News and 15 percent of the staff of the Philadelphia Inquirer, which was for a time one of the country's greatest daily journals. The Boston Globe, owned by The New York Times, announced a 4 percent cut. In Birmingham, Ala., the 55-year-old Post-Herald just closed its doors.

[...]

here are still great talents in television news, but the exit of Tom Brokaw of NBC, Dan Rather of CBS and Jennings from the networks is the end of an era, the end of news clout. They each had their faults, and the importance of news declined on their watches, but they believed that news was needed rather than wanted. We shall not soon see their like again.

The power and the glory now belong to the kingdom of the suits talking entertainment, profits and shareholder return. This, of course, has been coming for a long time. News on radio and television was doomed when market-friendly White Houses ended the enforcement of old-fashioned values such as "public service" and annoying ideas like the Fairness Doctrine. Fairness now is something preached more and practiced less in the process of making news more entertaining.

The free newspapers are thriving all over the country now. That is because 80 percent of newspaper revenues come from advertising. And because overall circulation is in decline, there is obvious logic in getting more readers by charging less money. The strategy ends at and has reached the lowest price, nothing.

[...]

So it goes. I'll get them all to see the new movie about Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly, "Good Night, and Good Luck" so we can talk about the way it was. But "was" is the operative word, and good luck is what we need to get the real and true information we need to remain a free people.

ACLU sues Homeland Security over Vegan Protester Surveillance

This one caught my attention because I'm still technically a resident of this county in Atlanta. Can't think of where that Honey-Baked Ham place is, tho.

Link: American Civil Liberties Union : Homeland Security Officials Wrongly Arrested Peaceful Protesters in Georgia, Charges ACLU.

Homeland Security Officials Wrongly Arrested Peaceful Protesters in Georgia, Charges ACLU

September 22, 2005

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: [email protected]

Vegans Targeted for Protesting Outside Honey Baked Ham Store

ATLANTA, GA -- The American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia today filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of two vegan protesters who were subjected to false imprisonment, false arrest and harassment by officials of the Homeland Security Division of DeKalb County and the DeKalb County Police Department.

"All across the country, the ACLU is uncovering information about Americans engaged in peaceful protest being spied on by Homeland Security, the FBI and local police," said Debbie Seagraves, Executive Director of the ACLU of Georgia. "It is deeply disturbing that the government would use resources intended to protect national security to instead spy on innocent Americans who do nothing more than express their opinions on social and political issues."

The lawsuit stems from an incident on December 20, 2003, when Caitlin Childs and Christopher Freeman were participating in a peaceful animal cruelty protest on public property outside a Honey Baked Ham store on Buford Highway in DeKalb County. After the protest, Childs and Freeman noticed that they were being observed and photographed by a man in an unmarked car. They approached the car and wrote down the make, model, color and license plate number on a piece of paper. After leaving the protest site, they noticed the unmarked car was following them so they pulled over into a parking lot.

According to the lawsuit, both a uniformed police officer and the man in the unmarked car, who was later identified as Detective D.A. Gorman of the Homeland Security Division, pulled in behind Childs and Freeman and ordered them to exit their car. Detective Gorman then demanded that Childs turn over the piece of paper on which she had copied his license tag number. Childs refused to hand the paper over to him, and was handcuffed and searched by a male officer, despite her request to be searched only by a female officer. Both Childs and Freeman were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, and police confiscated the piece of paper and Childs' house keys. Both individuals were released from custody, but neither the piece of paper nor the keys were returned to Childs.

[...]

The ACLU launched its national "Spy Files" effort last year in response to widespread complaints from students and political activists who said they were questioned by FBI agents in the months leading up to the political conventions. The FOIA requests seek two kinds of information: 1) the actual FBI files of groups and individuals targeted for speaking out or practicing their faith; and, 2) information about how the practices and funding structure of joint task forces between the FBI and local police may be encouraging rampant and unwarranted spying.

[...]

You can check out the Homeland Security surveillance photos here.

Also, more information on ACLU's FBI "Spy Files" section, look here.

Watch your dog for this scary-contagious dog flu

Hopefully a vaccine will be coming soon, but for my part, if my dog gets anything that looks like a little cough or a snotty nose, I'm getting antibiotics, because it sounds so contagious it will spread to more states very quickly. Also, it says in the article that it can look like kennel cough in its early stages. I lost one dog to pnuemonia, but it would just kill me to lose another.

I'd say from the article below that it makes sense to keep your dog away from other dogs, if possible. I'm wondering if cold weather would make it so you don't need to worry about dogs sniffing the spots where other dogs have done their business.

The states it's currently in right now are Florida, Massachusetts, Arizona, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Texas and Iowa.

Link: A New Deadly, Contagious Dog Flu Virus Is Detected in 7 States - New York Times.

A New Deadly, Contagious Dog Flu Virus Is Detected in 7 States

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. and CARIN RUBENSTEIN Published: September 22, 2005

A new, highly contagious and sometimes deadly canine flu is spreading in kennels and at dog tracks around the country, veterinarians said yesterday.

The virus, which scientists say mutated from an influenza strain that affects horses, has killed racing greyhounds in seven states and has been found in shelters and pet shops in many places, including the New York suburbs, though the extent of its spread is unknown.

Dr. Cynda Crawford, an immunologist at the University of Florida's College of Veterinary Medicine who is studying the virus, said that it spread most easily where dogs were housed together but that it could also be passed on the street, in dog runs or even by a human transferring it from one dog to another. Kennel workers have carried the virus home with them, she said.

How many dogs die from the virus is unclear, but scientists said the fatality rate is more than 1 percent and could be as high as 10 percent among puppies and older dogs.

[...]

She added that because dogs had no natural immunity to the virus, virtually every animal exposed would be infected. About 80 percent of dogs that are infected with the virus will develop symptoms, Dr. Crawford said. She added that the symptoms were often mistaken for "kennel cough," a common canine illness that is caused by the bordetella bronchiseptica bacteria.

Both diseases can cause coughing and gagging for up to three weeks, but dogs with canine flu may spike fevers as high as 106 degrees and have runny noses. A few will develop pneumonia, and some of those cases will be fatal. Antibiotics and fluid cut the pneumonia fatality rate, Dr. Crawford said.

[...]

Dr. Donis of the disease control centers said that there was currently no vaccine for the canine flu. But he said one would be relatively easy to develop. The canine flu is less lethal than parvovirus, which typically kills puppies but can be prevented by routine vaccination.

Laboratory tests, Dr. Donis said, have shown that the new flu is susceptible to the two most common antiviral drugs, amantidine and Tamiflu, but those drugs are not licensed for use in dogs.

[...]

About 25 of the dogs were treated by an Ossining [NY] veterinarian, Glenn M. Zeitz, who said two of them had died.

"The dogs came in very sick, with high fevers and very high white blood cell counts," Dr. Zeitz said, making him suspicious that they had something worse than kennel cough.

[...]

Come Saturday Morning...

I sure do hope these people can get out in time. The hurricane is weakening some, but I wouldn't want to be anywhere near Galveston or Houston. The biggest concern has been, in the Carolinas and Florida for instance, that that the coastal areas have been overbuilt to the extent that evacuation routes can't accomodate the population density of those regions. But I never heard those kind of warnings and forebodings in regard to Texas before.

If those people don't get off the roads, this could be another humanitarian disaster on the magnitude of Katrina, and that would be simply awful.

Link: Miles of Traffic as Texans Heed Order to Leave - New York Times.

Miles of Traffic as Texans Heed Order to Leave

By RALPH BLUMENTHAL Published: September 23, 2005

HOUSTON, Sept. 22 - Heeding days of dire warnings about Hurricane Rita, as many as 2.5 million people jammed evacuation routes on Thursday, creating colossal 100-mile-long traffic jams that left many people stranded and out of gas as the huge storm bore down on the Texas coast.

Acknowledging that "being on the highway is a deathtrap," Mayor Bill White asked for military help in rushing scarce fuel to stranded drivers.

Mr. White and the top official in Harris County, Judge Robert Eckels, admitted that their plans had not anticipated the volume of traffic. They maintained that they had not urged such a widespread evacuation, although only a day earlier they invoked the specter of Hurricane Katrina, and told residents that the "time for waiting was over."

Officials also made matters worse for themselves by announcing at one point that they would use inbound lanes on one highway to ease the outbound crush, only to abort the plan later, saying it was impractical.

[...]

In Baton Rouge, La., Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco called for the evacuation of a nearly half a million people in the southwest portion of her state.

"Head north, head north," she said. "You cannot go east, you cannot go west, head north. If you know the local roads that go north, take those."

Noting the difficulty medical examiners have had in identifying the dead from Hurricane Katrina, Ms. Blanco offered morbid advice to those who refuse to evacuate. "Perhaps they should write their Social Security numbers on their arms in indelible ink," she said.

The Houston area's two major air gateways, Hobby Airport and Bush Intercontinental, suffered major delays when more than 150 screeners from the Transportation Security Administration, facing their own evacuation concerns, did not show up for work. The agency later rushed in replacements, a spokeswoman said, but passengers, already burdening the system with extra luggage for their trips to safety, waited for hours to go through security.

After crawling only 10 or 20 miles in nine hours, some drivers turned around to take their chances at home rather than risk being caught in the open when the hurricane struck.

[...]

"The question is how many people will be gravely ill and die sitting on the side of the freeway," said State Representative Garnet Coleman, Democrat of Houston. "Dying not from the storm, but from the evacuation."

Mr. Coleman's family had tried to leave the city Thursday at his urging - he is traveling on the West Coast - but they gave up after 12 hours of stalled traffic, without even passing the city's outer ring highway.

"If you can't move outside the city of Houston in 12 hours, then nobody else is getting out," Mr. Coleman said. "This is it. Because even if you tried to leave now, you would not move fast enough to get out of harm's way in advance of the storm."

The situation raised serious worries about how the city would handle something like a terrorist attack, he said.

[...]

While the storm is expected to hit the shore with as much strength as Hurricane Katrina did, forecasters added an additional concern Thursday, saying it was likely to stall inland for several days and disgorge enormous amounts of rain.

Hurricane Katrina, while similar in intensity and size, did not cause inland flooding after hitting the Gulf Coast because it was swept out of the South by the jet stream, said Timothy J. Schott, a National Weather Service meteorologist.

But the jet stream, a high-altitude, east-flowing river of air, has shifted to near the Great Lakes, Mr. Schott said, and so cannot be relied on to "scoop out" the swirling, Georgia-size mass of moisture and rain clouds that will be left behind this weekend as Hurricane Rita moves over East Texas, Oklahoma and parts of Arkansas.

[...]

Frank E. Gutierrez, the emergency management coordinator for Harris County, said that models for an emergency evacuation envisioned 800,000 to 1.2 million people but that "well over 2.5 million" hit the road to flee Hurricane Rita.

[...]

In the meantime, he said, the city intended to send out vans and buses filled with water to take to the stranded people, and to evacuate some on the buses, as needed. To that end, Judge Eckels put out a call for volunteers to help load these vans and buses with water, and said that their help was needed immediately.

Mayor White deflected questions from reporters asking him to assess who was to blame for what happened Thursday, specifically the lack of gasoline where needed.

"This is not the time to look at who should have done what on the emergency," the mayor said. "This is not the time we're going to get into who should've done what."

[...]

Follow up on major newspaper layoffs...

NBC is getting hit too. This is off TVNewser today.

Link: mediabistro: TVNewser.

Zucker Tells NBC Newsers: "There Will Likely Be Layoffs"

Only on TVNewser: Jeff Zucker and Steve Capus spoke to NBC News employees at 30 Rock today. Zucker addressed NBC's budget crunch, and said the "rebuilding" in prirmetime is causing the company to pinch the bottom line in other divisions.

"I'm not going to BS you -- there will likely be layoffs," Zucker said, according to an insider. "Hopefully most will be voluntary, but some people may have to be let go."

Of course, employees are dismayed by the news. As they juggle several huge news stories, they face layoffs and cutbacks in every corner of the division.

[...]