Road Home

Today's Times Picayune gave an update on the Louisiana Road Home Program, for which Federal Government appropriated $10 billion. To date only 18 families have received any money for a total of around $650,000. Another 1,200 have received letters promising them a total of around $70 million. The program is expecting another 10,000 or so applications in the next month. I'm not a statistician, but I think it's fair to say that that isn't going to amount to much more than $1 billion. The article said another $1 billion would go to administration costs. Where is the other $8 billion going. Did those appropriating these monies know they would never have to hand over the cash, and inflated the number for PR?

The more disturbing thing about this is that the people who haven' t collected their money yet is that they are believed to be waiting to decide whether to rebuild or move away. This again comes back to the need for leadership from the City. Although the money may now be available, the chicken and egg of neighbourhood viability still dictates whether people can move on with their lives.

Policy, Strategy and Tactics

The Dunce in Chief (and today the Vice Dunce in Chief) have repeatedly accused Democrats of not having a plan for Iraq. That the Democrats don't have a plan is perhaps not surprising. They probably don't know what the policy is. Policy relates to objectives? Can anyone tell me what the objective is here today? Dastardly Dick Cheney today said we were in Iraq because it is the right thing to do!??? That doesn't seem to be a policy at all. Herein lies the problem. You can't have a plan if you don't have an objective. I guess this is why this war has been dragging on.

The Dunce in Chief was supposed to be the CEO President. You'd think in this day and age that would mean he would have read a couple of management books, or at least attended a couple of business courses in college. If he had even the most rudimentary acquaintenance with management he would know the difference between policy, strategy and tactics. Policy is the objective; strategy is the plan to achieve the objective; and tactics are the physical things we do in support of the strategy. He talks alot about strategy, but continually uses it interchangeably with tactics. Notably, he recently noted that we continually changed tactics to address changes in the strategy of the insurgency in Iraq. While that may be appropriate in some cases, it implies we actually have no strategy for victory. And the lack of a defined objective re-emphasizes that.

If the objective is to stay in Iraq because it is the right thing to do, what strategy could the generals or the Democrats put against that?