UPDATE: Don’t miss Kevin Drum’s chronology of FEMA as it relates to flood control projects (or, alternatively, take a peak below the fold here).
Someone emails Josh Marshall a question a bunch of people have been raising in comments and email. The emergency preparedness for a medium scale biological or chemical attack, or the "dirty bomb" scenario, would be exactly identical to the kind of preparedness you’d have for a natural disaster of this type. Sure, some of the complications would be different in the various situations, but the basic needs – mass evacuation, temporary shelter, the provision of safe food and water, medical care – would be the same.
Haven’t they done fucking anything in 4 years?
[And] The head of FEMA was previously an estate planning lawyer.Jeebus.
MSNBC just cut to a press conference with Michael Chertoff. Chertoff, in the midst of the worst disaster in modern US history–forget the qualifier "natural"–was talking about a pilot program to train DC rail commuters in emergency response.
They fucking do not get it. They don’t even care. These people, from the president on down, are simply pissed off they have to deal with a disaster they can’t make political hay out of.
MSNBC cut away as soon as they realized the Secretary of Fatherland Security was talking about something other than the catastrophe he’s supposed to be in charge of. They should have stayed with him.
UPDATE: he was announcing that "September is National Preparedness Month." A canned photo op. The mind reels.
AP:
At least seven bodies were scattered outside, and hungry, desperate people who were tired of waiting broke through the steel doors to a food service entrance and began pushing out pallets of water and juice and whatever else they could find.
An old man in a chaise lounge lay dead in a grassy median as hungry babies wailed around him. Around the corner, an elderly woman lay dead in her wheelchair, covered up by a blanket, and another body lay beside her wrapped in a sheet.
"I don’t treat my dog like that,” 47-year-old Daniel Edwards said as he pointed at the woman in the wheelchair. "I buried my dog.” He added: "You can do everything for other countries but you can’t do nothing for your own people. You can go overseas with the military but you can’t get them down here.”
We’re naming it Lake George, ’cause it’s his frickin fault. Have you seen all that data about the levee projects’ funding being cut over the past three years by the Prez, and the funding transferred to Iraq? The levee, as designed, might not have held back the surge from a direct Class 5 hit, but it certainly would not have crumbled on Monday night from saturation and scour erosion following a glancing blow from a Class 3. The failure was in a spot that had just been rebuilt, not yet compacted, not planted, and not armed (hardened with rock/concrete). The project should have been done two years ago, but the federal gov’t diverted 80% of the funding to Iraq. Other areas had settled by a few feet from their design specs, and the money to repair them was diverted to Iraq.
The NO paper raised hell about this time and again, to no avail. And who will take the blame for it? The Army Corps, because they’re good soldiers and will never contradict the C in C. But Corps has had massive budget cuts across all departments (including wetland regulatory) since Bush took office, and now we’ve reaped what was sown. It really pisses me off to see the Corps get used by the Administration to shield Bush — they do great work when they’re funded. This was senseless, useless death caused not by nature but by budget decisions.
Buloxi survivor, via Crooks and Liars:
"President Bush shouldn’t be the president no more."
And finally, the Rude Pundit on the "Empty Vessel President" (read the whole thing):
For there he was, our goddamned President, standing there in the picturesque Rose Garden, surrounded, like Al Capone with his capos, by his cabinet, as if to say, "Don’t worry – you won’t have to rely on me." Having been pried away from his "working vacation" like a meth addict from an iodine factory, Bush appeared irritated that he had to talk to us last night. He smirked, he gave a campaign-like laundry list of shit heading to New Orleans and elsewhere, he told us what we already fuckin’ knew from CNNMSNBCFox: that Hurricane Katrina was major, that his "folks" around him were ready to do their jobs, but, hell, at least he didn’t mention how jim-fuckin-dandy Iraq is.
As always, though, Bush made it all about him and his own defense of his own stupidity: "Right now the days seem awfully dark for those affected — I understand that," he said. On ABC’s Good Morning, Diane Sawyer, Bush said, "I fully understand people wanting things to have happened yesterday…I understand the anxiety of people on the ground."
***
Bush’s approach to the incredible madness and degradation and loss of life is the fucked up response of the righteous, the Mother Theresa approach, if you will: suffering is good because it makes you stronger. How can one believe that if it comes from someone who has never paused in the all-encompassing luxury of his life except to heave his drunken guts into toilets that’ll be cleaned by servants.
Yesterday he deigned to ascend above the earth to view the devastation below. And looking down, he saw it was bad. He called it by its name, "devastation," and, in fact, could come up with no other words for, lo, his vocabulary was limited.
From Kevin Drum:
Read it and weep:
January 2001: Bush appoints Joe Allbaugh, a crony from Texas, as head of FEMA. Allbaugh has no previous experience in disaster management.
April 2001: Budget Director Mitch Daniels announces the Bush administration’s goal of privatizing much of FEMA’s work. In May, Allbaugh confirms that FEMA will be downsized: "Many are concerned that federal disaster assistance may have evolved into both an oversized entitlement program…." he said. "Expectations of when the federal government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level."
2001: FEMA designates a major hurricane hitting New Orleans as one of the three "likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing this country."
December 2002: After less than two years at FEMA, Allbaugh announces he is leaving to start up a consulting firm that advises companies seeking to do business in Iraq. He is succeeded by his deputy, Michael Brown, who, like Allbaugh, has no previous experience in disaster management.
March 2003: FEMA is downgraded from a cabinet level position and folded into the Department of Homeland Security. Its mission is refocused on fighting acts of terrorism.
2003: Under its new organization chart within DHS, FEMA’s preparation and planning functions are reassigned to a new Office of Preparedness and Response. FEMA will henceforth focus only on response and recovery.
Summer 2004: FEMA denies Louisiana’s pre-disaster mitigation funding requests. Says Jefferson Parish flood zone manager Tom Rodrigue: "You would think we would get maximum consideration….This is what the grant program called for. We were more than qualified for it."
June 2004: The Army Corps of Engineers budget for levee construction in New Orleans is slashed. Jefferson Parish emergency management chiefs Walter Maestri comments: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay."
June 2005: Funding for the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is cut by a record $71.2 million. One of the hardest-hit areas is the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, which was created after the May 1995 flood to improve drainage in Jefferson, Orleans and St. Tammany parishes.
August 2005: While New Orleans is undergoing a slow motion catastrophe, Bush mugs for the cameras, cuts a cake for John McCain, plays the guitar for Mark Wills, delivers an address about V-J day, and continues with his vacation. When he finally gets around to acknowledging the scope of the unfolding disaster, he delivers only a photo op on Air Force One and a flat, defensive, laundry list speech in the Rose Garden.