It's a very typical Republican response to almost anything.

1. This is the way we used to do things and it worked just fine.

2. The evil federal government has screwed it up by doing something different. They had no good reason for doing it.

There is never any question of whether or not anything happened that made the federal response seem like a good idea to people. There is never any question as to whether or not things have changed in some way to make the old approach unworkable. It's just worship of the past and an inability to comprehend that seemingly unrelated factors can mean that the way things used to work just can't be applied now. 

I'm reminded ofan article published in the American Spectator about 1999's Hurricane Floyd:

In an unusual act that may now become standard operating procedure, President Clinton pre-emptively declared federal emergencies in several states even before the hurricane touched the continental U.S.--and, according to a FEMA employee, "before the governors asked for assistance. This isn't permitted by the law, but when was the last time Clinton obeyed the law?" With FEMA's encouragement, Southern states issued mandatory evacuation orders to nearly three million residents of coastal areas.

Of course, the author thought that when Clinton made everybody evacuate, it was a dreadful mistake.

I have to question whether the Texa platform is describing the way things used to be. It is probably a fantasy version of the way they think things used to be. Below is an article describing the federal response to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. That was 99 years ago. Do you notice a difference is response times? Have we gone forward or backward?

I'm not advocating we use the 1906 model -the active military simply deciding what needs to be done in an emergency,  eploying, and taking charge, is not usually a good idea (though I would take it in a minute over the 2005 model). But notice the generosity -the post office decided to mail unstamped envolopes from earthquake victims to facilitate communications. Now aid seems to be very grudging and an organized, despicable, politically motivated race and class based blame the victim approach was adopted even while people were still dying. Now the Bush administration is handing out reconstruction money like penny candy with no oversight, while waving prevailing wage rules for contractors. Some workers will get huge salaries, others will get almost nothing. Efficiency is now a code word for rent-seeking,scames, and patronage.

As long the Texa Republicans and I am getting historical, regardless of the many admirable Jeffersonnian characteristics of grass roots community bottom-up organization, it is also vulnurable to capture by local bosses and unchecked authority of local majorities who can be very ruthless. The warnings of Hamilton and Madison regarding the problems with little republics come to mind. Whenever the Republicans talk about local control, it seems to be that the latter problems come to the fore. Why is that?


<span>(http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/08/opinion/08winchester.html)</span&gt

The error made here is, I think, that of "either-or." New Orleans plainly would have done better had it a meaningful local civil defense program complete with block captains and drills. But such a program surely would not have saved the city -- it took Chinooks from ACoE to fix the breaks, Naval SAR to rescue people off rooftops and Coast Guard boats to get people out of houses (though many private volunteers also played critical roles), and, had they done their job properly, FEMA to coordinate and manage the inflow of relief.

Now is a good time to discuss the merits of at-risk cities setting up community-based emergency response plans. But it is not now, nor was it in 2000, sensible to suggest that the government has no or a lesser role in disaster relief. I don't know anyone in state and local government who would say otherwise.

   Civilian defense at the local level in no way abdicates the responsibility of government at large. To paraphrase the Churchill quote which is making the rounds one of the primary functions of government is to protect the people. As simple as that. Period. Local initiatives are fine but betray the problems of the modern era with a general loss of a sense of civic duty. I fear we are far too selfish at nation for such things anymore.

Yes Rudy gives good face.

He doesn't "break down" on National TV and use "profanity"..so polished..so white...so Northern....After all, these po cuntrified Louisiana black folk can't govern themselves...If only we'd given em another hundred years of "tutelage" before enfiranchising them and - horrors - making mayors out of them.

I'm goinng to play devil's advocate here. I like Watchful Babbler's comment on civil defense and FEMA not beng mutually exclusive. I'll even take it a step further and suggest that the current situation sort of proves the point of the FEMA-bashers.
To wit: even if a federal reponse is not forthcoming due to the scale of the disaster, incompetence at the top, or any other reason, at least there are people on the ground (for the most volunteer or semi-volunteer organization) in the local community capable of providing relief and assistance, up to and including restoration of law and order.

It appears that the poor planning was compounded by officials at all levels of government simply being overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster. Interviews with Nagin and Blanco show this. On the other hand, a small civil defense militia made up of neighborhood volunteers trying maintaining a few square blocks is a much more manageable task than one federal agency trying to rescue an entire city.

This isn't to say FEMA ought to play no role. But it makes sense to place strength to strength, and use FEMA to do the big ticket items like sealing the seawall breach and draining the water. To use a crude analogy, a bottom up appraoch; as opposed to have FEMA trying to do everything from delivering food to replanning the watershed. Using local organizations to manage those problems which it is capable of managing isn't just ideology, on some level its just good sense.

Noel Erinjeri

Sheesh ..post my comments before I posted the NyT oped I was commenting on..


Two disasters close to home....number 3  - grew up in South LA, college days  in NOLA..
number 2 on the DHS "Risk Assessement" where I live now..duck,  cover, and pray that America dumps the predatory conservatives out with the toxic gumbo of New Orleans.


Wouldn't it be  great to have a government that took US seriously again!
 
Simon Winchester: After the Flood - A  Look at the Disaster Response, SF Earthquake 1906
<h2 class="blogtitle"></h2&gt<h2 class="posttitle"><span class="source">Source:</span&gt NYT (9-8-05)
[Simon Winchester is the author of the forthcoming book "A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906."]

Simon Winchester is the author of the forthcoming book "A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906."]

THE last time a great American city was destroyed by a violent caprice of nature, the response was shockingly different from what we have seen in New Orleans. In tone and tempo, residents, government institutions and the nation as a whole responded to the earthquake that brought San Francisco to its knees a century ago in a manner that was well-nigh impeccable, something from which the country was long able to derive a considerable measure of pride.
...

A stentorian Army general named Frederick Funston realized he was on his own - his superior officer was at a daughter's wedding in Chicago - and sent orders to the Presidio military base. Within two hours scores of soldiers were marching in to the city, platoons wheeling around the fires, each man with bayonet fixed and 20 rounds of ball issued; they presented themselves to Mayor Eugene Schmitz by 7:45 a.m. - just 153 minutes after the shaking began.

The mayor, a former violinist who had previously been little more than a puppet of the city's political machine, ordered the troops to shoot any looters, demanded military dynamite and sappers to clear firebreaks, and requisitioned boats to the Oakland telegraph office to put the word out over the wires: "San Francisco is in ruins," the cables read. "Our city needs help."

America read those wires and dropped everything. The first relief train, from Los Angeles, steamed into the Berkeley marshalling yards by 11 o'clock that night. The Navy and the Revenue Cutter Service, like the Army not waiting for orders from back East, ran fire boats and rescue ferries. The powder companies worked overtime to make explosives to blast wreckage.

Washington learned of the calamity in the raw and unscripted form of Morse Code messages, with no need for the interpolations of anchormen or pollsters. Congress met in emergency session and quickly passed legislation to pay all imaginable bills. By 4:00 a.m. on April 19, William Taft, President Theodore Roosevelt's secretary of war, ordered rescue trains to begin pounding toward the Rockies; one of them, assembled in Virginia, was the longest hospital train ever assembled....

[

JMACSF:

How to regain sense of community? Who are us?

For the past 20+ years we have heard from the right-wing media, pundits and politicos that we are 'individuals' that should neither trust the beast (government) nor feed that beast. We have also been told that we must labor for the corporations, as good citizens should do.

They have effectively tied two messages together. Distrust government (us) and trust the corporate (only a few of us).

Until we can re-instill the true sense of patriotism (a government of the people, by the people and for the people - all the people) this divide and conquer strategy the conservatives play will keep us from ever returning to that true sense of 'us'.

Additionally, the traditional conservatives have been joined in the divide and conquer game by the social-conservatives. They want their unique, and quite honestly evil, brand of 'religious zealotness' to be the law of the land for all Americans - further dividing the 'us'.

Progressives have alot of work today to reestablish 'us'.