Archives for September 2005

“An unmitigated, total fucking disaster.” That’s not a quote from Mike Brown, but rather, a quote describing him. And most disturbingly, it’s not even a reference to his dismal performance as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). This blunt critique was emailed to me from a regular reader who was apparently attracted to HorsesAss.org by her passion for politics and her love of Arabian horses.

I think I’ve told you that I’m into Arab horses. Well, for 3 years Michael Brown was hired and then fired by our IAHA, the International Arabian Horse Assoc. He was an unmitigated, total fucking disaster. I was shocked as hell when captain clueless put him in charge of FEMA a couple of years ago. He or the WH lied on the WH presser announcing him to FEMA. IAHA was never connected to the Olympic Comm, only the half Arab registry then and the governing body to the state and local Arabian horse clubs. He ruined IAHA financially so badly that we had to change the name and combine it with the Purebred registry.

I am telling you this after watching the fucking shipwreck in the Gulf. His incompetence is KILLING people.

Yes, that’s right… the man responsible for directing federal relief operations in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, sharpened his emergency management skills as the “Judges and Stewards Commissioner” for the International Arabian Horses Association… a position from which he was forced to resign in the face of mounting litigation and financial disarray.

And what of that misleading White House press release?

From 1991 to 2001, Brown was the Commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association, an international subsidiary of the national governing organization of the U.S. Olympic Committee.

I can’t even begin to fact check the dates or IAHA’s alleged relationship to the US Olympic Committee, because of course, the IAHA doesn’t exist anymore, so there’s nothing to Google. But it begs the question… how the hell did his prior job experience prepare Brown to head FEMA?

Well, judging by his agency’s performance over the past few days… it didn’t.

[Cross-posted at Daily Kos]

UPDATE:
Kos himself just picked up the story, and it’s sitting on his home page for his half million plus readers to see. This is a great example of how a comment or email from a single reader on a local blog can work its way up the blogosphere and eventually move headlines. Power to the people!

If Raymond Shaw Reagan Dunn is the “rising star” of the KC GOP, their horizon looks awfully dim… as does Shaw Dunn in his 2-minute stint on the Seattle Channel’s 2005 Primary Election Video Voter’s Guide.

Shaw’s Dunn’s clip starts at about minute 37:40, and includes this curiously worded statement about the extremes he’s willing to go to reform King County government:

I was involved in the investigation and prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui, also known as the 20th hijacker on September 11th… it was a hard working group, dedicated to a single purpose, and its the kind of effort we need to help reform and fix King County government.

Um… I assume Shaw Dunn meant to refer to the prosecutors, not the hijackers as a model for reforming King County government, but that’s not the way it came out on the video. (Though I suppose he has more than a few constituents who wouldn’t mind seeing a jetliner slam into the Ron Sims’ office at the King County Courthouse.)

But that wasn’t his worse flub. Thirty seconds later Shaw Dunn stumbles over a classic bit of speechifying that makes George Walker Bush sound like William Jennings Bryan:

Everywhere you look there is waste. It drives up our property values and makes our taxes more congested.

I couldn’t agree more. That is, if I could understand what the fuck he was trying to say.

Of course, Shaw Dunn is still a political novice, so misstatements like these are to be expected. But my understanding is that each candidate got four takes… and if this is the best of the four then he’s in need of some serious media training. Either that, or his lack of preparation (I mean really… how hard is it to memorize a two minute statement?) suggests he really doesn’t have his heart in this race. And why should he? With a powerful mamma like Eleanor Prentice Shaw Jennifer Dunn, King County Council must seem like an awfully low place to start his political career.

Or end it.

I’m feeling ornery this morning, so as long as I’m pointing fingers at our incompetent president, I thought I’d level some well-deserved criticism at us voters as well. An article in today’s Seattle P-I reports on a draft letter from the state Transportation Performance Audit Board criticizing the monorail authority, and suggesting that it was the wrong body to be doing transportation planning in the first place.

The letter recommends that the city immediately begin looking at whether monorail is the best technology for serving the West Seattle and Ballard corridors to and through downtown. The city is preparing a Seattle Transit Plan, and the audit board said that is the ideal vehicle for the city to ask how best to serve the two corridors.

After an investigation, the audit board “found no evidence” that non-monorail alternatives were ever considered by the Monorail Board or any other group.

“The review of viable alternatives is an integral part of transportation planning which was bypassed by legislation and at the polls in favor of a (m)onorail technology choice,” the draft letter says. “The lack of alternatives analysis then is being compounded by inadequate reviews now.”

The letter emphasized that the two corridors “suffer from congestion, which deserves relief.” But, the audit board said transportation planning to create “a coherent, integrated transportation system” should be done by the mayor and City Council within the city’s planning framework, not by “an independent, singly tasked authority.”

No shit, Sherlock. But while it’s become fashionable these days to slam the monorail and the board that’s trying to build it, I think it’s time voters started blaming themselves. The monorail wasn’t imposed on the city by some secret cabal of arrogant, out-of-touch politicos… four times the monorail went up for a vote before the citizens of Seattle, and four times it passed. Along with I-695 before it, and I-912 this November, the monorail is yet another example of why transportation planning via public plebiscite is a sure-fire recipe for boondoggles and/or gridlock.

The initiative and referenda process is simply a stupid and fickle way to build a coherent transportation infrastructure in a region as large and complex as the 21st Century Puget Sound. This type of critical planning needs to be done by experts, not by professional loudmouths like Tim Eyman or John Carlson or Kirby Wilbur, and the angry voters who rally to their cry to “send another message.”

Send a message?! To whom?

If you ask me, it’s us voters who are arrogant and out-of-touch.

Col. Terry Ebbert, director of homeland security for New Orleans, reports that the waters have apparently stopped rising in the streets of the Crescent City… but not due to some amazing feat by the Army Corps of Engineers. No, the credit goes to gravity. Lake Pontchartrain has finished draining itself into the city streets, to the point where the water is now level on both sides of the broken levees. The lake and the city have become one.

Thousands may lie dead in the nearly deserted city, their bodies floating in the streets or trapped in their attics where they drowned in the slowly rising flood waters. Hundreds of thousands are homeless, and estimates of damage now top $25 billion. And as a NY Times editorial scathingly points out, our president once again appears clueless in the face of crisis.

George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed. He then read an address of a quality more appropriate for an Arbor Day celebration: a long laundry list of pounds of ice, generators and blankets delivered to the stricken Gulf Coast. He advised the public that anybody who wanted to help should send cash, grinned, and promised that everything would work out in the end.

We will, of course, endure, and the city of New Orleans must come back. But looking at the pictures on television yesterday of a place abandoned to the forces of flood, fire and looting, it was hard not to wonder exactly how that is going to come to pass. Right now, hundreds of thousands of American refugees need our national concern and care. Thousands of people still need to be rescued from imminent peril. Public health threats must be controlled in New Orleans and throughout southern Mississippi. Drivers must be given confidence that gasoline will be available, and profiteering must be brought under control at a moment when television has been showing long lines at some pumps and spot prices approaching $4 a gallon have been reported.

Sacrifices may be necessary to make sure that all these things happen in an orderly, efficient way. But this administration has never been one to counsel sacrifice. And nothing about the president’s demeanor yesterday – which seemed casual to the point of carelessness – suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis.

While our attention must now be on the Gulf Coast’s most immediate needs, the nation will soon ask why New Orleans’s levees remained so inadequate. Publications from the local newspaper to National Geographic have fulminated about the bad state of flood protection in this beloved city, which is below sea level. Why were developers permitted to destroy wetlands and barrier islands that could have held back the hurricane’s surge? Why was Congress, before it wandered off to vacation, engaged in slashing the budget for correcting some of the gaping holes in the area’s flood protection?

It would be some comfort to think that, as Mr. Bush cheerily announced, America “will be a stronger place” for enduring this crisis. Complacency will no longer suffice, especially if experts are right in warning that global warming may increase the intensity of future hurricanes. But since this administration won’t acknowledge that global warming exists, the chances of leadership seem minimal.

For the past couple days I’ve tried to avoid politicizing this terrible, human tragedy… a fit of self-restraint I now deeply regret. If progressives should have learned anything from the aftermath of 9/11, it is that rallying around this president at a time of crisis only leads to further tragedy somewhere down the road. This is an administration whose arrogance is only matched by its incompetence and stupidity, and while Bush cannot be blamed for Hurricane Katrina itself, the lack of preparation for this inevitable disaster, and the slow response in its wake, is absolutely inexcusable.

As Philadelphia Daily News writer Will Bunch notes in an article that has been making the rounds of the internet, the Bush administration had nearly cut off desperately needed federal funds from New Orleans’ flood control projects… some of which would had been targeted directly at the 17th Street Canal, the site of the main levee breech. But even if the flooding couldn’t have been avoided, surely some of the chaos and loss of life could have. With 40% of its forces deployed overseas, the Louisiana National Guard lacks the manpower to conduct rescue operations and impose order on the flooded streets. And while forecasters knew days in advance that one of the strongest storms of the century was headed straight towards vulnerable areas of the Gulf coast… our military did nothing to prepare for rescue and relief.

If there is any bright spot in this whole debacle, it is that perhaps the people of Iraq will come to realize that our failure to rebuild their water, electricity and other essential infrastructure, or to ensure security, is not due simply to some malicious disregard for their welfare and safety. Apparently, we really are this incompetent.

A track record that doesn’t bode well for the people of New Orleans.