More DHS Follies With Mike (“City Of Louisiana”) Chertoff

(As always, I apologize for that truly disturbing pic.)

This ABC News story tells us that...

Texas officials accused the Federal Emergency Management Agency of slow response and insensitivity on Monday, saying the agency has failed to provide timely help to town officials and Hurricane Ike victims who need temporary housing and money.

"It's a tragedy, what's going on down there," Jack Colley, the state's director of emergency management, told the Senate Transportation and Homeland Security Committee during a hearing on hurricane recovery.

Colley suggested that FEMA should be removed from the federal Department of Homeland Security and placed under presidential oversight.

The next preznit is going to have an epochal mess to clean up from His Fraudulency, and the economic crisis and the wars will take precedence, but I think fixing FEMA for good should be somewhere on the list of priorities, and removing it from under DHS should be part of that (maybe a cabinet level position for now; just a thought).

And I neglected to mention this little item that “flew under the radar” a few days ago…

The Bush administration has informed Congress that it is bypassing a law intended to forbid political interference with reports to lawmakers by the Department of Homeland Security.

The August 2007 law requires the agency’s chief privacy officer to report each year about Homeland Security activities that affect privacy, and requires that the reports be submitted directly to Congress “without any prior comment or amendment” by superiors at the department or the White House.

But newly disclosed documents show that the Justice Department issued a legal opinion last January questioning the basis for that restriction, and that Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, later advised Congress that the administration would not “apply this provision strictly” because it infringed on the president’s powers.

…

“This is a dictatorial, after-the-fact pronouncement by him in line with a lot of other cherry-picking he’s done on the signing statements,” (Sen. Arlen) Specter said in a telephone interview. He added, “To put it differently, I don’t like it worth a damn.”

Aw, shut up and take your medicine like a good little Repug, Arlen (file this under “The Mayberry Machiavellis strike again”).

83 days to go, my fellow prisoners…