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“Until you have been there, you don’t realize it is the middle of a hurricane.”
— former FEMA director Mike Brown

Well… duh-uh! Perhaps that’s why FEMA should be run by people who’ve actually been there before, huh?

I can’t help but find Mike Brown’s very public defense of himself as muddled and confused as the appointment that put him in the eye of the hurricane in the first place. To claim that he resigned because he didn’t “want to be a distraction”… and then to give a series of defensive, high profile interviews flinging blame at everyone except the guy who hired him, is beyond ironic… it is absurd. The simple fact is, as FEMA director, Brown was in over his head, and he’d probably serve himself better by staying as silent and anonymous as the hundreds of corpses that drowned with him.

Surely, Brown is more than justified in claiming that he has been made a scapegoat. Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff scapegoated him. The media scapegoated him. Hell… I scapegoated him. But that’s not to say that the scapegoating wasn’t deserved, nor that it didn’t serve the useful purpose of illuminating the cronyism and incompetence endemic in the Bush administration.

And how does Brown respond to his scapegoat status? By trying to scapegoat Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and other state and local officials.

He focused much of his criticism on Governor Blanco, contrasting what he described as her confused response with far more agile mobilizations in Mississippi and Alabama, as well as in Florida during last year’s hurricanes.

But Mr. Brown’s account, in which he described making “a blur of calls” all week to Mr. Chertoff, Mr. Card and Mr. Hagin, suggested that Mr. Bush, or at least his top aides, were informed early and repeatedly by the top federal official at the scene that state and local authorities were overwhelmed and that the overall response was going badly.

Yeah, and neither Mississippi, Alabama nor Florida had their largest city totally wiped off the map, destroying much of its emergency infrastructure, and creating a half million refugees. State and local authorities were overwhelmed? No shit, Sherlock! Of course they were overwhelmed… they were wiped out by a fucking hurricane! That’s the whole reason we created FEMA in the first place… to provide a rapid and coordinated federal response to regional emergencies… a task the agency, under Brown, failed utterly.

But most absurd is Brown’s ridiculous insistence that the White House be held blameless for FEMA’s disastrous disaster response, an assertion directly contradicted by his own account of the chaos and confusion between him, Chertoff and White House staff. No doubt Brown was promoted more for his loyalty than his competence, but his unswerving defense of the incompetent who hired him suggests that his presidential sobriquet, “Brownie”, was derived more from the color of his nose than his surname. Moreover, Brown’s own bemoaning of the lack of resources at his disposal is a damning indictment not only of a failed presidency, but of a failed ideology that seeks to cut government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” Well, now we all know what Grover Nordquist’s bathtub looks like: it is New Orleans under 20 feet of water… raw sewage and bloated corpses floating through the streets.

Brown intends to clear his name, but in doing so sets forth a narrative that confirms his critics’ deepest suspicions. He was the wrong man for the wrong job, appointed for all the wrong reasons. But what offends me most by his feeble effort to defend his reputation, is that he never apologizes — not for his poor performance, for I’m sure he did his best — but for taking the job in the first place. Until you have been there, you don’t realize it is the middle of a hurricane. The American people deserved a FEMA director who had been there before, and who knew a disaster when he stood in the middle of one… not three or four days after the fact.

Michael Brown was not that man.

[Cross-posted at Daily Kos]

The League of Conserveration Voters is kicking off its grass roots campaign to reelect Sen. Maria Cantwell, tonight at 7PM at the Columbia City Theater. (More information.) Since it’s right near my neighborhood, I’m going to try to stop by for a little while, 8-year-old daughter in tow.

This is an opportunity to meet other Cantwell supporters and find out how you can get involved with LCV’s campaign to help re-elect one of our nation’s strongest environmental leaders.

From the home page of David Irons’ other official campaign website:

“For the last five years, you have been teaching me how King County government can work better. I have been listening, and now I want to take that knowledge and my 25 years of practical business experience to make it more efficient and more accountable.”

Hmm. So, if elected, Irons wants to apply his “practical business experience” to running King County, huh? Then I guess, judging from the four years he spent as Chief Operations Officer of Brigadoon.com, Irons should have the county in bankruptcy before the end of his first term.

Even when their employees were living on tuna and rice, their creditors were cutting them off for ignoring millions in debt and their investors were fuming that they’d been swindled, the leaders of Brigadoon.com said they’d be a great success.
…
But the company discovered it could not deliver. It posted a more than $10 million operating loss while attracting millions from nearly 200 accredited investors from around the world. It hired more than 110 employees at one point and ordered expensive equipment.

See… the problem with the oft repeated admonition that government should be run more like a business… is that most businesses fail.

Anyway, I’d love to hear from any former “Brink-O-Doom” employees about the company’s “ingenious business plan” and Iron’s role in failing to execute it. Drop me an email.

Everything seems to be going just great…

Insurgents staged at least a dozen suicide bombings that ripped through Baghdad in rapid succession on Wednesday, killing almost 150 people and wounding more than 500 in a coordinated assault that left much of the capital paralyzed.

Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia claimed responsibility for the assault, which inflicted the biggest death toll in Baghdad since the American-led invasion of Iraq toppled Saddam Hussein more than two years ago.

As Dino Rossi’s patrons in the business community prepare to charge headlong into the breach in the battle against I-912, it is time to start asking “Where’s Rossi?” on this all important issue.

Sources tell me that the official no campaign, Keep Washington Rolling, has secured $2 million in commitments, mostly from the business community, and that an intensive paid media campaign should be forthcoming by the end of the month. Apparently, I-912 opponents have managed to screw their courage, boistered by recent polls that show the initiative much more vulnerable than expected. But hidden in the details of the polling data is a tidbit that nicely sums up what I-912 is really all about. Pollsters tried pushing a number of issues to sway opinion, but only one managed to substantially swing voters from one side to the other.

The conclusion is clear: if Dino Rossi publicly opposes I-912… it loses.

Of course, this makes perfect sense. John and Kirby cleverly launched I-912 at the peak of their election contest trial ratings-bump, tapping into the anger and disappointment of the hardcore Republican base. This initiative has always been more about sending a message than about rational public policy; it’s about sticking it to “Queen Christine” and the Democrats… consequences be damned. While almost-governor Rossi has never publicly endorsed the initiative, he hasn’t disabused the public of that notion either, passively allowing himself to be adopted as I-912’s martyred patron saint.

Indeed, Rossi has a record of refusing to take positions on a lot of things, a strategy that served him well during the gubernatorial campaign, allowing conservatives and moderates alike to see in him what they wanted to see. True to form, he has remained silent on the Legislature’s package of transportation improvements, the gas tax hike that would fund it… and the initiative that would repeal them both. His hope, I suppose, is that Gov. Gregoire’s administration will collapse in gridlock and voter backlash, clearing the way for a Rossi victory in 2008.

But this strategy has its risks, and it is time for his friends in the business community to clearly spell them out. Businesses overwhelming oppose I-912 because they understand how vital these transportation improvements are to the economy of the region and the state. They understand that if I-912 passes, the only alternative that could possibly enable urban voters to meet their own needs would be to devolve transportation spending to the regional level, a shortsighted and small-picture policy that would transform WA into a state of haves and have-nots, and undermine the stability on which future economic growth depends. Businesses oppose I-912 because they understand that it is recipe for gridlock, both political and actual.

Now his patrons in the business community need to make Rossi understand what they understand. And they need to make him understand that unless he supports them on this vital issue, they won’t be his patrons any longer. They need to ask him… “Where’s Rossi?”

Quite simply, if Dino Rossi wants to be governor, he needs to start displaying the kind of political leadership that is a prerequisite of higher office. Rossi needs to publicly state his position on I-912.

Rossi’s record suggests that he likely does oppose I-912. He was a strong supporter of the “nickel” package that the 2003 Legislature passed in the wake of the failed Referendum 51, and he made improving Washington’s business climate a central theme of his gubernatorial campaign. Well, the business community is speaking loud and clear — to the tune of $2 million — that the transportation package is good for business… so if Rossi is as responsible a politician as his patrons believed him to be, now is the time for him to put his mouth where their money is.

The polling data is clear: if Rossi remains silent, and I-912 passes, he will deserve both the credit and the blame. He is the state GOP’s de facto leader… and the symbolic leader of the No New Gas Tax campaign. It is thus his obligation to set the record straight, and the business community should hold him responsible should he fail to do so — for his continued silence can only be taken as evidence that he values his own political ambitions over the welfare of the people he wants to govern.

I-912 is not about gas prices or accountability or transportation priorities — it is about Dino Rossi — and the future of the transportation package it would repeal pivots solely on his candor.

And so it is time that my friends in the MSM start pushing the question: “Where’s Rossi?”

Consider this Day One of my vigil.

The 9/11 Commissioners will release a report tomorrow on emergency preparedness, and it doesn’t look so good for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Commissioner Slade Gorton told the Tacoma News Tribune that FEMA would have been better prepared to handle Hurricane Katrina had it heeded the 9/11 Commission’s advice.

“Clearly, FEMA did little if any planning for a disaster of this nature. And clearly FEMA’s response was insufficient, slow and bureaucratic,” Gorton, a former three-term U.S. Senator from Seattle, said Monday.

The Commission officially disbanded last year, but has continued to operate as the 9/11 Public Discourse Project, and plans to issue several reports over the coming weeks. Amongst the prior recommendations tomorrow’s report will detail have not been met are:

• Establish a unified incident command system.
• Provide space on the radio spectrum for emergency responders.
• Allocate homeland security money based on risk, not politics.

Gorton’s criticism of FEMA was blunt.

Gorton said there are lingering questions “about whether or not FEMA should have been buried in the Homeland Security Department.”

And he said he was relieved that Michael Brown resigned Monday as director of FEMA. Brown’s qualifications, which have been criticized as inadequate, weren’t the problem, as much as his failure to follow emergency response guidelines, said Gorton.

“He didn’t have a whole lot of qualifications in this particular field,” said Gorton, but “someone could have been a professional football player” and done a better job.

I’m not sure what Gorton has against professional football players, but you get the point. FEMA was as much of a disaster as Katrina.

[Cross-posted at Daily Kos]

The Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight, as it does every Tuesday… but don’t stop by the Montlake Alehouse, because we won’t be there. Instead, we’ll be grabbing a couple of beers with author Chris Mooney, after his appearance tonight at Town Hall.

Mooney, a staff writer for The American Prospect, will be talking about his new book, “The Republican War on Science,” as part of Foolproof’s American Voices series. Show starts at 7:30 PM, Town Hall, 8th & Seneca. Tickets are $10.00.

Afterwards, Chris will be joining us for drinks, probably at Tango, Pike & Boren, around 9:30 pm. (I’ll post an update if the location changes.) I suggest you come for the lecture, and then look for folks with a Drinking Liberally lapel button or sign.

As my regular readers know, this is subject close to my heart, so I hope to see you there.

Last week I wrote about the apparent quid pro quo between King County executive wannabe David Irons and the jail guards unions. Irons is leading an effort by Republicans on the council to extend “essential employee” status to juvenile detention officers, thus allowing them to secure more favorable contracts by invoking “interest arbitration.” In exchange, Jared Karstetter, who represents both jail guards guilds, has reportedly agreed to fund a countywide initiative in 2006 to make the auditor an elected office.

Of course, the real purpose of this initiative is to try to embarrass KC Executive Ron Sims, by keeping the controversy surrounding Dino Rossi’s discredited election contest in front of the public for as long as possible. That’s why GOP Councilwoman Jane Hague is in such a rush to gather signatures during the final weeks before the November election. Putting aside for a moment the laughable notion that electing an auditor somehow takes the politics out of elections, the timing of this initiative is naked political opportunism… exactly the type of opportunism Karstetter is known for.

Karstetter is also one of Irons’ most loyal financial patrons, contributing more to his campaigns than to any other candidate over the past few years. And today’s PDC filings shows even more largesse, with an additional $675 from the Juvenile Detention Officers Guild. That brings the total Karstetter-controlled contributions to $2700 in this election alone… only Casino Carribbean of Yakima has given more.

Sure… this is the kind of behind the scenes political deal making that goes on all the time… but it belies the Irons-as-reformer bullshit that he’s tried to push as the central theme of his campaign. In fact, Irons is both a beneficiary and a seasoned practitioner of political cronyism, and in the unlikely event he wins office he’ll have plenty of debts to repay to the jail guards, the gambling industry, the BIAW folks and other special interests looking to feed at the public trough.

There’s a reason why Irons’ official website, (un)Sound Politics, spends so much time and effort trashing Ron Sims, but can’t seem to find any positive words for Irons himself. There aren’t any.

I get a lot of requests to trade links, most of which I ignore, but if you really want to catch my attention, here are a few tips. First, write really great stuff. Consistently. Maybe I’m weird, but I like great stuff. Second, nag me incessantly. I simply don’t have time to visit all of my favorite blogs on a daily basis, so don’t assume I’ve seen your latest post. If it’s something you think I’d be interested in, drop me an email and let me know. And third, drop by Drinking Liberally and buy me a beer. I’ll feel a little guilty and indebted, and might think kindly of you the next time I update my blogroll. (But no promises.)

And then there’s brown-nosing. For example, take Darryl at Hominid Views, one of the recent additions to my blogroll. He writes great stuff, emails me frequently to tell me about the great stuff he’s written, and regularly shows up at Drinking Liberally to buy me a beer. What a guy. And then he goes out and earns extra brownie points today with an excellent bit of brown-nosing: “Goldy topples Brown!”

Keep up the great work Darryl. (And keep pouring those beers.)

Now that Mike Brown has resigned from FEMA, it is time to build public pressure on the Bush administration to appoint the one man with the knowledge and experience to fix the mess Brown left behind… former Clinton administration FEMA chief, James Lee Witt.

This is the only way to instantly restore faith in FEMA, both in the eyes of the American public and in those of FEMA’s own demoralized staff. Witt is the only man for the job, and if Bush cares more about public safety than about petty partisan politics, this would prove it.

Of course, we all sense that President Bush simply doesn’t believe in FEMA’s primary mission, and thus such an appointment — politically savvy as it might be — would be highly unlikely. Which is all the more reason to keep up the pressure, because it both helps expose the real world consequences of the Republican’s failed ideology, and shows that in additon to blistering criticism, we have concrete, positive proposals to address this crisis.

So that’s why I just sent the following email to the White House:

Dear President Bush,

As has been evidenced in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, experienced leadership is crucial to mounting an effective and timely federal response to man-made and natural disasters. That is why I urge you to immediately appoint James Lee Witt as the new director of FEMA.

Only Mr. Witt possesses the credibility, leadership and knowledge to rebuild FEMA… as he has once before. By appointing our nation’s most experienced and respected emergency manager to manage the federal response to national and regional emergencies, you can instantly restore faith in FEMA, both in the eyes of the American people, and in those of the agency’s own demoralized staff. And by reappointing a man who ably served under your predecessor, you will display exactly the kind of nonpartisan decision-making the public demands during times of crisis.

The nation needs Mr. Witt, and I urge a quick and decisive appointment.

Sincerely,

David Goldstein

Let’s keep the pressure up.

[Cross-posted at Daily Kos]

Embattled FEMA director Mike Brown has resigned.

“I’m turning in my resignation today,” Brown said. “I think it’s in the best interest of the agency and the best interest of the president to do that and get the media focused on the good things that are going on, instead of me.”

During his tenure, Brown developed a reputation for focusing more on the appearance that FEMA was providing relief, than on actually providing it. This apparently remained his focus until the very end.

A few months back I was on the Kirby Wilbur Show talking about Initiative 912, and Kirby got a little peeved when I brought up the safety issue, inferring that I was accusing I-912 supporters of being “killers”. In fact, I was implying that our roads are killers, and that the transportation bill I-912 wants to kill would fix some of our most dangerous intersections, interchanges and stretches of highway.

This point was tragically driven home on Friday, by a three car accident on I-5 near the Highway 534 overpass, that killed two people, including a 10-year-old boy. The accident occurred when two southbound cars collided, forcing Susan McGaughran’s GMC Yukon to carom across the grass median and into the northbound lanes, where it was struck by the Ng family’s Toyota Avalon. McGaughran and 10-year-old Alexander Ng were killed in the wreck; Alexander’s father, mother, and six-year-old brother remain hospitalized.

But as the Skagit Valley Herald reported on Sunday, this accident could have been prevented.

Following the crash, state transportation officials were already preparing to make improvements to the stretch of I-5 where the crash occurred.

Stan Suchan, a spokesman for the state Department of Transportation, said the department plans to install a cable barrier this fall between the north and southbound lanes on the stretch, just south of Mount Vernon.

The $30 million project will be paid for out of the 3-cent gas tax increase, Suchan said. The barriers also are slated to be installed on several other sections of Washington roadways, all of which were selected based on crash data.

It is the only project that state transportation officials haven’t put on hold because of Initiative 912, which is a movement to repeal the increase, Suchan said.

The cables barrier would absorb the force of a crash and prevent vehicles from crossing into oncoming traffic during a collision, Suchan said. Ideally, after striking a cable barrier, a car would stop in the grass median and not ricochet into traffic. “Our goal is to protect driver as much as we can,” Suchan said.

The projects in the transportation bill that I-912 would kill were prioritized by safety, and the cable barrier along this stretch of I-5 is just one of hundreds of similar safety improvement projects scattered throughout the state. If we repeal the gas tax, and these projects are delayed or canceled, people will die. The crash data tells us that, and this tragic accident bears out the data’s predictions. That is a fact.

I-912’s backers claim that the transportation bill doesn’t do enough to solve congestion… that is doesn’t pour enough new concrete. But I believe that if most voters understood what the gas tax increase actually pays for, they’d agree that it’s the transportation package that has its priorities straight, not Kirby and John and the rest of the message senders, who ask voters to sacrifice desperately needed maintenance and improvements for the sake of sticking it to Gov. Gregoire and the Democrat controlled Legislature.

The former-residents of New Orleans — now refugees from our nation’s worst man-made disaster — have learned the cost in lives and dollars of failing to adequately invest in public infrastructure; surely, had the levees been higher and stronger, the surrounding wetlands restored, and the barrier islands rebuilt, then the cataclysmic flooding could have been avoided. If we choose to ignore this lesson, perhaps the Big One won’t strike… perhaps the 520 bridge won’t sink into the lake, nor the Alaska Way Viaduct topple over onto the waterfront and its aging seawall, causing hundreds of deaths and tens of billions of dollars in damage.

But even if Seattle “dodges the bullet” — as New Orleans briefly thought it had before the floodwaters rose — hundreds of our fellow citizens will not be so lucky, daily falling victim to dangerous roadways that could have… should have been fixed before they tragically claimed more lives, like those of Susan McGaughran and ten-year-old Alexander Ng.

If the public understands exactly what the gas tax pays for, and how the transportation package was expressly prioritized to save lives, then I believe that I-912 will fail. In his column today, the P-I’s Joel Connelly points out that passage is no sure bet, but seems to pin his hope for defeat on business and civic leaders educating the public. But if the public is truly to be educated during the eight short weeks before the election, then the media must do its job too. Levi Pulkkinen and Marta Murvosh of the the Skagit Valley Herald should be commended for doing the kind of journalism often missing from some of our more prestigious newspapers… for digging into the details and reporting Friday’s fatal accident not just as a human tragedy, but as the predictable consequence of how we choose to spend our transportation dollars.

With big oil pumping out record profits, and gasoline prices over $3.00, I ask you: is Alexander Ng’s life — or that of hundreds of others who will die in similar accidents — worth 9 cents a gallon? That is the question that should be facing voters this November, if only they understand what is truly at stake.

Kirby and John want to use I-912 to “send a message”… but repealing the transportation package will also, inevitably cost lives. And I believe, if people vote their conscience, I-912 will fail.

I think the blog Clark County Politics deserves a little bump in its traffic as a reward for yesterday’s post, “Region 10 FEMA Director, John Pennington

I got scooped!

John Pennington, the official in charge of federal disaster response in the Northwest, was a four-term Republican state representative who ran a mom-and-pop coffee company in Cowlitz County when then-Congresswoman Jennifer Dunn helped him get his federal post.

Before he was appointed regional director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Pennington got a degree from a correspondence school that government investigators later described as a “diploma mill.”

I’d been working on a piece on Pennington, but awoke this morning to find the Seattle Times had beat me to the punch. Nobody like’s being scooped, but the Times did a much more thorough reporting job than I ever could have done (they are, after all, real journalists), and it is comforting to know that the MSM is finally looking into these things.

What’s not so comforting is that the man overseeing the federal government’s disaster response in Washington, Oregon, Alaska and Idaho — about one-third of the nation’s land mass — had no emergency management experience prior to assuming his $138,000 a year post at the head of FEMA’s Region X office.

Sure, Pennington had been a four-term state representative, and a rising star in the Republican party, before resigning due to health reasons. But his prior disaster experience consisted of successfully pushing legislation to suspend sales taxes on rebuilding damaged buildings after floods struck his southwest Washington district. And as the Times reports, his academic resume is even shakier than that of his boss at FEMA, Michael Brown.

Just before his appointment, Pennington received a bachelor’s degree in business administration from California Coast University in Santa Ana, Calif., which at the time was an unaccredited correspondence school.

The school is now accredited.

In testimony before Congress last year, investigators for the General Accounting Office identified California Coast as a diploma mill. […] GAO special agent Paul DeSaulniers told The Seattle Times this week that his investigation showed that California Coast University sold degrees for a flat fee.

So how exactly did Pennington get this plum appointment to head a regional FEMA office? None other than the state’s most prominent political fixer, former US Rep. Eleanor Prentice Shaw Jennifer Dunn.

Former GOP Rep. Dunn, who was Bush’s 2000 campaign chairwoman in Washington, recalled that she called Pennington and asked him to fill out an application for the FEMA job. She was responsible for screening and making recommendations on all regional political appointments.

Dunn, who said she was unaware that Pennington’s degree was obtained through correspondence courses, said she was “relieved” when he finally agreed to take the job. Pennington was selected from three finalists recommended by Dunn’s office.

That’s right, the only qualification needed was Shaw’s Dunn’s recommendation, and only those recommended by Shaw Dunn were considered for the job. And so a man with no emergency management experience, and a college degree from a mail order diploma mill, was deemed the person best qualified to manage emergencies in the Northwest region. As Shaw Dunn put it: “He was a natural.”

Makes you wonder about some of Shaw’s Dunn’s other, more recent appointments. (Her son Raymond Reagan comes to mind.)

[Cross-posted to Daily Kos]

Here’s your weekly sandbox. Go shit in it.