The Blue State

Photo: 2006 All-Star Political Lineup

What are the odds of finding a photo of Michael Brown, George W. Bush and Mark Foley -- all in a row?  Well, Wonkette did.

If swing voters are looking for a reason to vote blue less than five weeks from now, this is it.

Chertoff not off easy after all

There is a bill before Congress that would dispose of FEMA and create an entirely new cabinet level agency for disaster planning and management.  While that might be a step in the right direction, the sheer incompetence and lack of organization during hurricane Katrina went beyond FEMA.  FEMA is currently under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security.  But of course, with Michael Brown as the scapegoat for the Administration's disorganization last fall, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff seems to have survived without a political scratch.

Maybe not after all.  A report just released this morning by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) charges the Department of Homeland Security with potential credit card fraud.  The Wednesday edition of the New York Times has the details:

Flat-bottomed rescue boats at double the retail price, $68,500 worthof unused dog booties, hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth ofcomputers that somehow disappeared and a $227 beer brewing kit.    

Theseare just a few of the questionable purchases that Congressionalauditors have found by digging through half a year of credit cardrecords from the Homeland Security Department, including records for the months immediately after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita last year.

Theaudit, by the Government Accountability Office, which is due to bereleased Wednesday, concluded that the credit card misuse couldprobably have been avoided had the department completed a long-plannedrulebook for its more than 9,000 employees who spent $420 million lastyear using government-issued credit cards.

Instead, “due to alack of leadership” at the department, the draft manual has never beenfinished, creating accounting weaknesses that “leave D.H.S. highlyvulnerable to fraudulent, improper and abusive activity,” the auditsays.

The result is that in the five months examined, theinvestigators found that 45 percent of purchases did not haveappropriate preauthorization by supervisors and that 63 percent did notinclude documentation stating whether the goods or services had beenreceived.

But that's only the half of it.  A number of DHS employees might soon be charged with theft:

More than 100 laptop computers and a dozen boats also bought byHomeland Security Department employees following the storm are missing,the investigators found.

Just wondering, how do you lose a boat?

And according to the Austin-American Statesman, the GAO also reported that the DHS spent taxpayer money buying iPods.  The Hartford Courant says there were 54 iPods bought, totaling $7,000.

Back in 1980, the Reagan Revolution was based on the premise that government should be thought of as the problem, not the solution.  Three Republican administrations later, that ideology has lived up to its rhetoric.  Government has been made the problem.  And now the Republicans think the answer is to cut government even more.  So how do you like that ideology?

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Other blogs writing about this issue: Democratic Underground, Copeland Institute for Lower Learning, Rebuilding a City,  Kenneth in the (212), Hasta Los Gatos Quieren Zapatos.

Thursday Editorial: The buck stops with incompetent micro-managers, not FEMA employees

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill want the agency of FEMA to be eliminated because it represents a "symbol of a bumbling bureaucracy," said a Senate panel today.

Conservative Democratic Senator from Connecticut Joseph Lieberman provided what many progressives would consider a once in a lifetime criticism of the Administration:

"For Hurricane Katrina, the president failed to provide criticalleadership when it was most needed, and that contributed to a grosslyineffective federal response."

But if that is true, why is the agency itself at fault?  If the President, Michael Chertoff, Michael Brown and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin fumbled the response, why should the burden fall on all of FEMA?  Most Americans agree that the poor response was a result of the incompetent individuals at the top, not the hard-working relief workers at FEMA that weren't given the resources to do their job.  That is like not giving our military soldiers body armor and deflecting blame away from the people at the very top.

If anything, the poor hurricane Katrina response actually proves that giving your bureaucracy proper resources, as opposed to relying on a bunch of micro-managers that don't know what they are doing, is the most effective system to get the job done.  Remember that FEMA was under the umbrella of Michael Chertoff's Department of Homeland Security.  Had FEMA been its own agency and able to directly lobby Congress for money without the oversight of Chertoff's abroad-first budgetary mentality, then maybe the rescue effort would have been more organized. 

The whole notion that dissolving FEMA is the answer to the problem is preposterous, at best.  Why should a small handful of inept, egotistical micro-managers get the pleasure of knowing that their actions caused Congress to bring down an entire agency and temporarily cost thousands of government workers their jobs?  The buck should never stop with the workers, because they don't make the bureaucratic decisions that impact millions of Americans.  But the buck should stop with the President, and result in the firing of Michael Chertoff.

Brownie being hired to do consulting work on something he knows little about

After his embarrassing experience as head of FEMA, Michael Brown (a.k.a. "Brownie") is looking for a new job.  He may have found one at St. Bernard Parish of Louisiana.  As the web site "Editor and Publisher" explains, this is where it gets very ironic:

"The consulting firm formed by Brown after losing hisjob at FEMA, has been approached by St. Bernard Parish to helpbusinesses and communities negotiate the maze of federal bureaucracy."

What?  Negotiating through "the maze of federal bureaucracy" was exactly Brownie's problem.  Of course he wanted more funding for the levees before the storm hit.  Just about no one is questioning his alertness.  But was he successful in getting the bureaucracy (specifically DHS) to act before it was too late?  I don't think so.  St. Bernard Parish of Louisiana hired the wrong guy for the job. 

If they really want a guy that understands the bureaucracy, then they ought to hire Jack Abramoff.  He obviously knows a lot about how things work in Washington.  Then again, he'd have to do his consulting work from a jail cell.