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<div><span class="gmail_quote">On 9/3/05, <b class="gmail_sendername">Pat Kraut</b> <<a href="mailto:pkraut@moscow.com">pkraut@moscow.com</a>> wrote:</span>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">I disagree! Someone in Louisiana should have told her! Why does everyone<br>want to make the Fed responsible for everything?? When did they take over?
<br>The locals could have done whole rescue operation if they had paid<br>attention. There is a picture circulating showing the school buses all under<br>water. The mayor could have confiscated them and sent those people out of
<br>town by force. But, he keeps yelling about the feds not coming in time! He<br>is just hoping no one asks him too many questions.\</blockquote>
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<div>Pat --</div>
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<div>It is the federal government's responsibility, like it or not, to do disaster relief. You can argue about whether or not it should be their responsibility later, but the fact is, at the time of Hurricane Katrina, it was FEMA's responsibility to handle the evacuation planning and then pick up the pieces.
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<div>George W. had put a chronic fuck-up in charge of FEMA who was fired from his last job for malfeasance, dismantled their planning office as it transitioned to the Department of Homeland Security, sent the Louisiana National Guard to search for phantom WMDs in Iraq, cut all disaster mitigation funding to the /entire state/ of Louisiana, and defunded the levees. It is at his desk that the buck stops, but he and his stand-ins are doing their best to blame everybody else: the victims, the first responders, the police, the looters. Thisis a failure of management at the highest levels: food was dropped in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, within /two days/ of the tsunami. Food got to New Orleans, LA, /today/, or six days after the hurricane. We are a first-world nation. This should not be happening here.
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<div>If I had done this in my work, I would have had my ass canned, and then I would have been sued, and for God's sake, they would have been right to do it, too. This administration has abdicated any pretense of taking responsibility for its
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<div>-- ACS</div><br> </div>