Bushco's FEMA Follies

What follows in this post is not of primary importance. What is of primary importance is accessing the FEMA site and finding out how to provide aid to the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

After doing so, please learn more about what has been going on with FEMA under Bushco. To start, the administration cut $270 million in disaster relief programs in its first fiscal budget submitted on April 9, 2001 (pg. 9 of the attached .pdf document).

This link courtesy of Swing State Project (as well as this follow up link from that site also) provides further background on how FEMA dropped the ball regarding the necessary preparedness for the dreaded “Category 5” hurricane that the region had been fearing for years (though, due to an unforeseen stroke of good luck, the hurricane ended up as a “Category 3,” though I’ll admit that this is a story where it is very difficult to find good news).

Finally, this takes you to an excellent article about FEMA from the Baltimore City Paper written last September (as the article states, Bushco got moving for Florida when it was hit twice, but of course this happened during an election year – more unflattering tales of Bushco favoritism and general incompetence…maybe FEMA should be rolled under DHS, but that doesn’t mean it should lose any funding for that reason).

Update 1: Will Bunch provides more (courtesy of Editor and Publisher and The Al Franken Show blog) as well as The Wall Street Journal (not an editorial, but a news story, courtesy of The Huffington Post).

Update 2: I thought Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., courtesy of The Huffington Post, provided some interesting context also regarding Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour's successful effort to squash new regs on CO2 emissions in 2001 and the potential impact it played in creating the conditions for Katrina (yes, I believe there is something to that because, even though hurricanes have been taking place throughout the history of this planet, I think something is wrong when the water temperature in the Gulf of Mexico is 90 degrees, enabling Katrina to build up strength before it wrought its havoc).