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By Jon Wiener
$14.94
By Dave Eggers
$25.00
$35
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By Joe Conason — When the superstorm destroyed swaths of the Northeast, darkened our largest city and plunged a huge section of the nation into crisis, the anti-government ideology of the tea party Republicans—and its panderers like Mitt Romney—was exposed for what it is.
Posted on Nov 2, 2012
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A look at the day’s political happenings, including Mike Huckabee’s scary new political ad and Chris Christie’s Halloween announcement.
Posted on Oct 31, 2012
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A look at the day’s political happenings, including Mitt Romney’s latest campaign deception and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie offering praise for President Obama.
Posted on Oct 30, 2012
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White House/Pete Souza
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By Richard Reeves — Republicans are ending this campaign where they began four years ago, questioning the legitimacy of an elected black president with an odd (to us) name.
Posted on Oct 30, 2012
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NASA
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By Eugene Robinson — Back when he was being “severely conservative,” Mitt Romney suggested that responsibility for disaster relief should be taken from the big, bad federal government and given to the states, or perhaps even privatized. Hurricane Sandy would like to know if he’d care to reconsider.
Posted on Oct 29, 2012
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A look at the day’s political happenings, including the SCOTUS health care decision countdown and Sen. Rand Paul wading into the personhood debate.
Posted on Jun 27, 2012
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Flickr / cliff1066™ (CC-BY)
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Senate leaders struck a compromise late Monday on the issue of disaster relief funding that is likely to avert a federal government shutdown, the third such threat this year. (more)
Posted on Sep 27, 2011
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Flickr / U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service - Northeast Region (CC-BY)
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Members of the House passed a disaster aid spending bill early Friday morning, then went home for a weeklong recess. Hours later, the Senate rejected the bill, making the possibility of a government shutdown Oct. 1 a real possibility.
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AP / J. Scott Applewhite
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The House of Representatives narrowly rejected a short-term government funding bill Wednesday evening that would require cuts to government programs to pay for assistance in the wake of Hurricane Irene and other disasters this year. (more)
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calebjc (CC-BY-SA)
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By Richard Reeves — Are we a nation of brothers who come to the aid of each other? Or are we just a crowd of folks out for ourselves? Why have a country if we don’t use it to help each other?
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FEMA News Photos / G. Mathieson
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The No. 2 GOP leader in the House says additional funds for FEMA will have to be matched by budget cuts, and we know from past experience what that means: less funding for programs that assist the poor and elderly without a hope of raising taxes. Michael “Heckuva Job” Brown thinks it’s a good idea. (more)
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Flickr / gemapublicaffairs (CC-BY)
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The Federal Emergency Management Agency has halted rebuilding projects dating to Hurricane Katrina and has opted to pay for only the “immediate needs” of disaster-torn communities as funding for the agency dries up.
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Flickr / kallao
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With Hurricane Irene fixing to beat up much of the American Mid-Atlantic, now may be a good time to examine the legacy of Hurricane Katrina and U.S. “government bungling” for many of the still-stunned inhabitants of New Orleans. (more)
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AP / NOAA
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Nature is giving jittery East Coast residents no rest after Tuesday’s 5.9 magnitude earthquake. Hurricane Irene, a Category 3 storm carrying winds of up to 115 miles per hour, is making its way toward the Eastern Seaboard after giving the Bahamas a whipping. (more)
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Flickr / JU5T1N Some rights reserved
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Thousands of Americans devastated by natural disasters in the last few years are being asked to return a total of more than $22 million in federal relief money accidentally given to them by FEMA. (more)
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Wikimedia Commons
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As Labor Day weekend draws near, for Americans on the East Coast so does a Category 4 hurricane by the folksy name of Earl. Good people of North Carolina, you’re on notice.
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Flickr / The Doodler
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By Eugene Robinson — FEMA is selling more than 100,000 contaminated trailers and mobile homes that are toxic enough to make people very sick.
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Still image from the Make It Right project's Web site.
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Does Brad Pitt’s housing development project in New Orleans’ Katrina-ravished Ninth Ward represent a much-needed boost to the neighborhood, no matter from whence it came? Or do his efforts amount to yet another example of a Hollywood do-gooder’s personal crusade ... (continued)
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Wikimedia Commons/FEMA
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Over four years after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, a federal judge has ruled in favor of four plaintiffs from the vicinity of the city’s Ninth Ward, finding that the Army Corps of Engineers was responsible for some of the damage incurred by the storm and awarding each plaintiff over $700,000.
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White House / Eric Draper
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How would the president rate the government’s response to Hurricane Gustav? In a word: “Excellent.” Eager to escape the shadow of Katrina, which has come to symbolize the incompetence of his administration, Hurricane George made landfall in Louisiana Wednesday for some hands-on disaster relief.
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As it turned out, New Orleans dodged the full brunt of Hurricane Gustav, which had substantially weakened by the time it reached the Louisiana shoreline on Monday, but Hurricane Hanna still looms as a potential threat to the nation’s East Coast.
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AP photo / Haraz N. Ghanbari
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Hurricane Gustav has given the Republicans the excuse they needed to keep the unpopular president out of his party’s big party. John McCain will be spared another awkward embrace while George W. Bush is off in Texas pestering survivors.
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The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has taken some well-deserved heat for its ersatz “press conference” held in response to October’s California wildfires, but, as it happens, FEMA wasn’t the first to stage such a smoke-and-mirrors act.
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By Marie Cocco — Though time will certainly tell, the Bush administration so far has not yet surpassed that of Richard Nixon’s in its contempt for a free press and its unrelenting war on the truth.
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FEMA has admitted that it was probably a mistake to hold a press conference without members of the press. On Tuesday the agency, perhaps trying to get a jump on the kind of negative publicity it received after Hurricane Katrina, stuffed a press briefing with its own employees, who lobbed softballs such as “Are you happy with FEMA’s response so far?”
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altamodernista.wordpress.com
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Michael D. Brown’s got cojones—either that, or a distressing lack of self-awareness on some fundamental level. The former FEMA director, roundly roasted for his too-little-too-late leadership style during Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath, is now aiming to bring his disaster management skills to California’s fire-ravaged regions.
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news.bbc.co.uk
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The president has at last landed in the Golden State to see for himself the fires that have caused over a billion dollars in damage and forced hundreds of thousands of people from their homes. With uncomfortable parallels to Katrina already in place, we can’t say we’re all that excited about his arrival here.
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By Andy Borowitz — The satirist reports that, desperate to protect their endangered fortunes, thousands of the nation’s leading hedge-fund managers converged on Washington today in “The Million Mercedes March.”
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From murkyview.com
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He’s done it again: After signing into law a bill that would mandate minimum requirements for the new FEMA director, Bush added a “signing statement” that declared those requirements null and invalid. (more…)
Update: ThinkProgress has the statement
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pbs.org
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A year after the levees broke, Bush has again acknowledged his government’s failure to protect and rescue the citizens of New Orleans, promising “the federal government will learn the lessons of Katrina.” Although the president pledged $110 billion for reconstruction, one of Louisiana’s senators has criticized the slow progress of rebuilding: “Countless neighborhoods appear as if the hurricanes were just yesterday, and they serve as harsh reminders of how our nation was so unprepared.”
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By Andy Borowitz — Satirist Andy Borowitz reports that our emergency preparedness experts have the bird flu situation under control. Mostly, they’re counting on a natural disaster to wipe out the bird population.
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AP
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Confidential video footage obtained by the Associated Press proves that federal officials warned Bush that Hurricane Katrina could breach levees and cause a tidal wave of disaster.
Watch the video
Ex-FEMA chief Michael “Heckuva Job” Brown says Bush was overconfident about FEMA’s response to Katrina
FireDogLake: In an attempt to spin the story and make Bush seem in charge, the White House leaked Newsweek transcripts from FEMA conference calls during and after Katrina
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AP
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Michael “Heckuva Job” Brown departs from the shameful “we didn’t know” defense regarding the breach of the levees, saying: “For them to claim that we didn’t have awareness of it is just baloney.” story
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Marty Bahamonde / FEMA via The New York Times
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Remember when Bush said that he hadn’t heard about the devastating levee failure in New Orleans until the day after the hurricane hit? Well, now it turns out that former FEMA Director Michael “Heckuva Job” Brown had told the White House about the breach the night before. | story
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The Government Accountability Office slams Bush and the Homeland Security chief for inaction and incompetence when the hurricane struck. | story or go straight to the GAO report
Posted on Feb 1, 2006
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Former FEMA head Mike Brown stayed on full salary as a consultant in the wake of his disastrous disaster leadership. But now that he’s cashed his checks, he won’t cooperate in the Senate investigation. | story
Perhaps he’s too busy mucking out Arabian horse stalls....
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Terracide and the Terrarists: Destroying the Planet for Record Profits
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