Political Interest

Brownie's Incompetence, Let Us Count the Ways

Apparently, Michael Brown was incompetent he did not understand what the agency he headed was supposed to be doing.  Today the NY Times editorial board goes after all four of FEMA's disaster responsibilities;  preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation, and how Brown's agency failed at each of them.

Here is one example under the Response Category:

Despite the National Weather Service report, not to mention the Hurricane Pam simulation, it was not until the next day that federal officials in charge of response noticed that levees had been breached. Mr. Chertoff suggested on NBC that news coverage misled him. "I remember on Tuesday morning picking up newspapers, and I saw headlines, 'New Orleans Dodged the Bullet,' " he said.

When the people in charge of responding to natural disasters ignore weather service bulletins, later claiming to have relied on local newspapers to tell them whether a city is flooded, bad things are going to happen. Once again, FEMA was supposed to be coordinating, but officials apparently did not even bother figuring out what they were supposed to be coordinating the response to.

Visualize Failure

FEMA is still stumbling on housing, badly.  This from the New York Times:

After Hurricane Katrina left hundreds of thousands of people homeless, the Federal Emergency Management Agency signed contracts for more than $2 billion in temporary housing, including more than 120,000 trailers and mobile homes. But the agency has placed just 109 Louisiana families in those homes.

A month after the disaster, the federal government's temporary housing effort is stumbling.

Helpfully the TImes also has a graphic to help us visualize the failure.

Katrina Housing

It is time to stop pretending that the post-emergency part of the Katrina recovery is going much better than the immediate aftermath.  There is still absolutely no leadership in this country, the Washington Post picks up on that in an article in the area of housing.

Builders of manufactured housing say red tape has bottlenecked contract orders, which may take as long as 12 months to fill. Congress is considering a new program to offer housing vouchers to the displaced. Meanwhile, planners from Baton Rouge, La., to Washington fear there is no government-wide housing strategy, and no one is certain how many displaced families will return to the Gulf Coast.

In the confusion, White House planners are weighing in, according to agencies involved in the talks. But delays are compounding what some housing advocates call a slow-motion replay of the bureaucratic divisions that crippled the emergency response for days after Katrina hit.

Meanwhile, the NY Times is a step ahead of the Post, as usual, with its lead editorial with a solution to the housing issue from, where else, Bill Clinton:

The administration has also offered a bizarre proposal to put people in mobile homes and travel trailers, scattered like driftwood throughout the gulf states. Trailer parks may make some sense for workers at the Port of New Orleans and for the thousands of National Guard troops brought in to help with the cleanup and the rebuilding. And they may be a quick way to get poorer people out of shelters - but only for the shortest time. The Bush administration can't seriously consider putting displaced low-income people in trailer parks for any prolonged period. That would just condemn an already traumatized population to insecure hurricane ghettos - hardly the bold action to "let us rise above the legacy of inequality" that Mr. Bush promised in his speech last week.

If the president wants serious ideas that can have a quick and lasting impact, he should consider a voucher program, similar to the one President Bill Clinton put in place in Southern California in 1994 after the Northridge earthquake displaced more than 20,000 people. The government provided emergency vouchers that recipients could apply toward rent all over the state. The point was to break up pockets of poverty so the displaced weren't all funneled toward housing projects or ghettos. Instead, they could join the broader society in neighborhoods with services like schools and hospitals - and jobs.

"This Katrina situation is tailor-made for housing vouchers," said Bruce Katz, a former Clinton housing official who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "You could get a voucher in New Orleans and move to Alaska if you wanted."

That's hyperbole, but more realistic than moving all those people to refugee trailer parks, or handing them copies of "Little House on the Prairie."

Kerry: Katrina Failure Part of a Pattern

It looks like John Kerry is getting right with the Democratic activists.  According to the Washington Post, Kerry and Edwards both blasted the administration Sunday.  The important part of Kerry's speech was his effort to tie the Katrina failures to others which have gotten less universal condemnation over the last five years:

Using the nickname Bush used for Brown, Kerry said, "Brownie is to Katrina what Paul Bremer is to peace in Iraq, what George Tenet is to slam-dunk intelligence, what Paul Wolfowitz is to parades paved with flowers in Baghdad, what Dick Cheney is to visionary energy policy, what Donald Rumsfeld is to basic war planning, what Tom DeLay is to ethics and what George Bush is to 'Mission Accomplished' and 'Wanted Dead or Alive.'

According to a text of Kerry's speech made available in Washington, he said Katrina had provided an "accountability moment" for the administration.

..."This is about the broader pattern of incompetence and negligence that Katrina exposed and beyond that a truly systemic effort to distort and disable the people's government and devote it to the interests of the privileged and the powerful," he said.

Kerry also charged that the administration is pursuing politics as usual in its prescription for rebuilding. "The plan they're designing for the Gulf Coast turns the region into a vast laboratory for right-wing ideological experiments," he said, citing private school vouchers, subsidies to business and other proposals.

Whatever Kerry's political motives, and I'm not convinced he's running again, this is pretty much just what Democratic leaders should be doing, tying Katrina to the larger, and ongoing, incompetence within the Bush administration, and increasing the scrutiny of the on-going recovery efforts.

Business As Usual

Sebastian Mallaby gives reiterates the prime reason to be skeptical about the Bush administration's purported Katrina Recovery efforts and the need for Congress to impose real oversight and a special, out if the White House, authority to over see it.  The Bush administration is sick with cynicism on domestic matters and stacked with cronies in the positions they've even bothered to fill.

If Bush used this moment as he used the aftermath of Sept. 11, some of this spending could be forgiven. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon exposed the nation's complacency about terrorism; Bush stepped forward and changed that. In a similar way, Hurricane Katrina exposed the complacency of our business-as-usual attitude toward domestic government. Bush has barely noticed.

The complacency begins with the appalling state of federal staffing. It's not just that the hapless former boss of the Federal Emergency Management Agency knew more about horses than floods. It's that the government agencies that must now manage relief are missing senior officials, either because their confirmations have been held up in the Senate or because the administration has yet to appoint anyone. As The Post reported last week, seven of the top positions at the Department of Housing and Urban Development stand vacant. Perhaps it's no surprise that the administration has cooked up its crazy shantytown proposal.

This staffing crisis is well known; two months before the 2001 attacks, about half of the national security positions stood empty. But Katrina creates an opportunity to tackle the problem. The federal government needs to be returned to an earlier era, when more executive-branch positions went to career civil servants who didn't need to be confirmed and didn't owe their jobs to college roommates. Bush hasn't even raised this issue.

Bush Exposed

Frank Rich lays into President Bush today with a gloves off column which echos EJ Dionne's End of the Bush Era piece in the Washington Post a few days ago.  According to Rich, Katrina has finally exposed Bush as the fraud he's always been:

The worst storm in our history proved perfect for exposing this president because in one big blast it illuminated all his failings: the rampant cronyism, the empty sloganeering of "compassionate conservatism," the lack of concern for the "underprivileged" his mother condescended to at the Astrodome, the reckless lack of planning for all government operations except tax cuts, the use of spin and photo-ops to camouflage failure and to substitute for action.

Tail Spin

Dan FroomKin gets it:

All you really need to know about the White House's post-Katrina strategy -- and Bush's carefully choreographed address on national television tonight -- is this little tidbit from the ninth paragraph of Elisabeth Bumiller and Richard W. Stevenson's story in the New York Times this morning:

"Republicans said Karl Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff and Mr. Bush's chief political adviser, was in charge of the reconstruction effort."

These people get it:

A day late and a dollar short," said 18-year-old Wayne State University student Rachel Aviles in Detroit. "I think he's more responding to the negative media than responding to fix the problem."

Jason Sawyer, 30, added his sarcasm as he watched at the Eastlake Zoo tavern in Seattle. When the president offered toll-free help numbers, Sawyer responded: "Oh yeah, pick up that cell phone that doesn't work and call FEMA."

In Rochester, N.Y., students gathered around a television in a residence hall at the University of Rochester. Nat Powell, 21, wasn't confident the money to rebuild New Orleans will be well spent.

"It's going to be geared toward rebuilding the city _ it's not going to be geared toward building up the population, and that I think is the main problem," he said. "The poor are going to stay poor unless the problem of poverty is actually addressed."

Bush, of course, doesn't get it.  Despite their heroic efforts to bring generators in for dramatic lighting last night. A clear majority of Americans are on to him now, I doubt even Rove can spin him out of this one.

Bush Admin already Wasting Reconstruction Money

Go with a proven program administered by experts or no bid contracts to your crony's clients.  Which one do you think the Bush administration chose?

Kevin Drum has the Katrina housing story here.

Can't Buy Love?

It looks like Bush and the GOP leaders of congress are betting that the Beatles were wrong.  Bush is set to ask congress for $200 billion dollars in order to buy his and their lost popularity before the midterm elections, according to the Washington Post.

Bush and Republican congressional leaders, ...are calculating that the U.S. economy can safely absorb a sharp spike in spending and budget deficits, and that the only way to regain public confidence after the stumbling early response to the disaster is to spend whatever it takes to rebuild the region and help Katrina's victims get back on their feet.

...Since Katrina struck, Congress has already spent $62.3 billion, dwarfing the inflation-adjusted $17.8 billion that Congress spent on hurricanes Andrew, Iniki and Omar, which struck in 1992, and the $15.2 billion emergency appropriation for the Northridge, Calif., earthquake of 1994. The entire Persian Gulf War of 1991 cost less than $83 billion in today's dollars.

The libertarian Cato Institute warned yesterday of a looming "budget disaster." In meetings with GOP congressional leaders and White House aides, some Republican lawmakers have expressed alarm about the growing price tag and concern that vast sums could be wasted without proper oversight.

The Democrats need to find some GOP allies who take their fiscal responsibility with a hint of seriousness, if there are any left, and impose some serious oversight on this money.  Otherwise it will be wasted by this administration on boondoggles and cronyism, just like in Iraq.

Nasty, Brutish and, mercifully, Short

EJ Dione declares the End of the Bush Era here in the Washington Post:

The Bush Era is over. The sooner politicians in both parties realize that, the better for them -- and the country.

Recent months, and especially the past two weeks, have brought home to a steadily growing majority of Americans the truth that President Bush's government doesn't work. His policies are failing, his approach to leadership is detached and self-indulgent, his way of politics has produced a divided, angry and dysfunctional public square. We dare not go on like this.

Dionne goes on to hope that Bush, and I'd add the Republicans in congress, will recognize a need for a change in action and start working in a conciliatory way.  But, there is little chance of that from the Bush/Rove political operation and even less from Tom Delay. 

The only thing that will bring these guys to heel is a Democratic victory in 2006 mid-terms, until they're dealt a meaningful defeat don't expect anymore than a tactical retreat from their style and substance over the last four years.