A good start.... cleaning house in DC

[tombarr]

Well now we have two recent casualties of office in the Bush administration and Republican controlled congress.

FEMA Former Director Brown

and now Tom Delay, Majority Leader in the House..

http://edition.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS...ict/index.html

so this sort of speaks to the credibility of the party in power....lack of experience and management skills for the post they were hired for as cronies of the sitting president, and lack of ethics and morality at the top of the party that preaches ethics and morality as part of their platform....

[basschick]

i sort of figure that michael brown agreed to be the scapegoat for katrina. if people pin their anger to him - as they are - and he goes away, the white house and the rest of fema will get away free because people will feel that the person they blamed is gone - or even punished.

in reality, he did an ungodly bad job - no job at all, really - but the people above him and other agencies didn't do anything either. there are plenty of people and agencies at fault here on different levels.

[desslock]

So the resignation of the New Orleans police force not news? I guess not.

I suppose their force did as good a job as anyone could expect.

Would be comfortable if you knew that the city of Los Angeles or city of San Francisco currently used an emergency earthquake disaster policy written to the exact detail and executed with the same precision as New Orleans and its officials did?

If you realized that this were so, would you look to the FEMA and people in Washington DC to fix it for you, disregarding your own mayor and elected officials?

Does your statement imply that FEMA should be given more centralized powers during any natural disaster?

As an aside, since it's pertinent to this thread, these proposals to give more powers to the President in a natural disaster are extremely bad.
Hopefully it is so half baked it will die a quick death.

Steve

[basschick]

desslock - i'm not saying that at all.

every time we have an emergency in los angeles, the feds come by and help us with it. the big quake in 1994? clinton was here in person, and put a special spin so the 10 freeway could be repaired extra fast. when we had the riots after the rodney king trial? we had not only national guard, but all sorts of military presences on roofs with rifles and driving around to slow down looting. we've had floods, major fires, and almost every time, the feds have helped with money and resources.

as far as my beefs with the feds now, they are not so much what happened during this crisis, but things that helped make the crisis worse. if the white house hadn't refused the army corps of engineers over half the money they needed, and hadn't taken so long to get around to it, that might have helped new orleans. and if the white house hadn't put fema under the homeland security, that might have helped. heck, if the national guard had been there, that might have helped.

and certainly had the white house chosen qualified people for key jobs like director of fema, that would have REALLY helped. having the two michaels publically annoucing that no water was needed when walmart tried to send some in was pretty sick. having them announce that everything was under control when everyone in literally the world knew it wasn't - words fail me, but these are NOT the people i would like in charge of emergency management or security. they were more out of touch with what was happening in those states than the average housewife in new york.

new orleans could have had a backup plan for police communication instead of leaving them with no leadership and no information. and as far as i know, at this point no state has a realistic evacuation plan - look at texas. people waiting for a hurricane, stuck in one place on the road for 14 hours. i'd rather be in my house than my car when a hurricane hits.

basically i don't think anyone but walmart really covered themselves with glory for katrina, and the sad part is everyone had plenty of notice katrina was coming.

but i don't believe that getting rid of michael brown will get rid of the problem - because there are many problems in many levels of government regarding this kind of emergency.

[Xstr8guy]

So the resignation of the New Orleans police force not news? I guess not...

The "force" didn't resign... the police chief did. And yes, it was news... every major news source (to the best of my knowledge) covered it.



Now go think of some clever ways to defend Tom Delay and Bill Frist.



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