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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.

Rep. Richard Baker (R-Baton Rouge, LA) was overheard telling lobbyists…

“We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.”

Hmm. Perhaps that explains President Bush’s motive for declaring a National Day of Prayer? (Watch out, Detroit!)

The AP reports that FEMA director Michael Brown is being removed from his role managing Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.

Brown is being sent back to Washington from Baton Rouge, where he was the primary official overseeing the federal government’s response to the disaster, according to two federal officials who declined to be identified before the announcement.

Hmm. So “Brownie” didn’t do that great a job after all.

King County Councilman Steve Hammond has learned an important lesson from the disastrous disaster relief effort in New Orleans. Unfortunately, it’s the wrong lesson… but you can’t fault the guy for his dedication to lifelong learning.

Yesterday Hammond introduced an ordinance that would make the investigation, arrest and prosecution of “looting and related crimes” the county’s highest law enforcement priority during natural or man-made disasters. Hmm. And I suppose once we’ve rounded up all the people grabbing Pampers and Doritos from collapsed convenience stores, then we can get around to actually… um… rescuing people. Hammond explains:

“This measure will protect King County from the kind of lawlessness that enveloped New Orleans after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and plagued the city of Seattle during the World Trade Organization protests in 1999,” said Councilman Hammond. “By making the arrest of looters and other disaster-related crimes a top priority of law enforcement during the next natural disaster or man-made conflict, we will force local emergency administrators to timely coordinate evacuation assistance with the federal government and we will protect our citizens from the dangers of anarchy.”

Uh… what the fuck is he talking about?

First of all, I’m kind of offended that Hammond would equate the worst natural disaster in US history, with WTO protests that resulted in a McDonalds and a couple of Starbucks getting their windows smashed. Second, how exactly does making looting our top priority “force” local emergency administrators to coordinate with the federal government? And third… what the fuck? If I’m trapped underneath the rubble of my collapsed house, I’d like the county’s top priority to be digging me the fuck out, not guarding the snack food aisle at the local Safeway!

In the event of a major disaster I sure as hell want the police and the national guard and other first responders in thick of it, on the streets, making their presence felt, and keeping order. But when faced with the choice of rescuing a person from a collapsed building, or rescuing a TV from the arms of a looter, I’d hope the police would follow their own moral conscience, rather than the twisted directives of Hammond’s “Wal-Mart Protection Act of 2005.”

If Hammond is looking for a public safety issue to nudge him ahead in his tough primary battle against Raymond Shaw Reagan Dunn, I’d focus on the inherent danger of relying on public officials whose resumes were built on political appointments.

Well, it took TIME Magazine to finally do the type of extensive background check that should have been done by, gee… I dunno… maybe the FBI, back when Mike Brown first came up before the Senate for confirmation as deputy director of FEMA. And surprise… they’ve found more than a few discrepancies between Brown’s resume and the real world.

Before joining FEMA, his only previous stint in emergency management, according to his bio posted on FEMA’s website , was “serving as an assistant city manager with emergency services oversight.” The White House press release from 2001 stated that Brown worked for the city of Edmond, Okla., from 1975 to 1978 “overseeing the emergency services division.” In fact, according to Claudia Deakins, head of public relations for the city of Edmond, Brown was an “assistant to the city manager” from 1977 to 1980, not a manager himself, and had no authority over other employees.

Oh… he wasn’t an “assistant city manager”, he was an “assistant to the city manager.” That was just a typo, right? But wait, it gets worse:

“The assistant is more like an intern,” she told TIME. “Department heads did not report to him.”

So he was more of an intern than an assistant…

“He was a student at Central State University,” recalls former city manager Bill Dashner.

… A college intern.

“Mike used to handle a lot of details. Every now and again I’d ask him to write me a speech. He was very loyal. He was always on time. He always had on a suit and a starched white shirt.”

And a starched white shirt. Well, I guess that’s Brown’s qualifications in a nutshell.

And the rest of Browns resume seems just as fictional. He claimed the honor of being named “Outstanding Political Science Professor” at Central State University… where he was never a member of faculty. And he claims to have been a director of the Oklahoma Christian Home since 1983… which came as a surprise to both the administration and the staff.

A veteran employee at the center since 1981 says Brown “was never director here, was never on the board of directors, was never executive director. He was never here in any capacity. I never heard his name mentioned here.”

My god… why would you even make up something as trivial as this? It’s almost like he’s lying for sport. And of course, don’t you think the fact that there is no board of directors at the nursing home should have been a big tip off.. had the FBI actually performed a fucking background check?

This is no longer simply about Brown’s incompetence… it’s about the incompetence and indifference of a president who hired a political hack with a trumped up resume to lead our nation’s disaster relief efforts.

FEMA director Mike Brown was originally brought into the agency as its general counsel, under the auspices of his old college roommate (and Bush fixer) Joe Allbaugh. By now we all know that Brown is an emergency manager who knows nothing about managing emergencies, and a former horse association commissioner who knew nothing about horses… but apparently, he was also a general counsel who was hardly even a real lawyer.

In a devastating expose published today in The New Republic, University of Colorodo-Boulder law professor Paul Campos determines to answer the question “of exactly what, given Brown’s real biography, he is qualified to do.” The answer, not surprisingly, is very little.

To understand the Mike Brown saga, one has to know something about the intricacies of the legal profession, beginning with the status of the law school he attended. Brown’s biography on FEMA’s website reports that he’s a graduate of the Oklahoma City University School of Law. This is not, to put it charitably, a well-known institution. For example, I’ve been a law professor for the past 15 years and have never heard of it. Of more relevance is the fact that, until 2003, the school was not even a member of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS)–the organization that, along with the American Bar Association, accredits the nation’s law schools. Most prospective law students won’t even consider applying to a non-AALS law school unless they have no other option, because many employers have a policy of not considering graduates of non-AALS institutions. So it’s fair to say that Brown embarked on his prospective legal career from the bottom of the profession’s hierarchy.

According to Campos, Brown received his J.D. in 1981, and spent the next couple years representing the interests of a “prominent local family” in Enid, Oklahoma, followed by an 18-month stint at a local law firm (that no longer exists.) But it appears that by 1987 he had already more or less abandoned his legal career. From 1991 to 2001 he served as commissioner of judges and stewards for the International Arabian Horse Association, a full-time position from which he resigned under pressure.

What, then, are we to make of the claim in Brown’s FEMA biography that, prior to joining the Agency, he had spent most of his professional career practicing law in Colorado? Normally, an attorney practicing law in a state for ten years would have left a record of his experience in public documents. But just about the only evidence of Brown’s Colorado legal career is the Web page he submitted to Findlaw.com, an Internet site for people seeking legal representation. There, he lists himself as a member of the “International Arabian Horse Association Legal Dept.” and claims to be competent to practice law across a dizzying spectrum of specialties–estate planning, family law, employment law for both plaintiffs and defendants, real-estate law, sports law, labor law, and legislative practice. With all this expertise, it’s all the more striking that one can’t find any other evidence of Brown’s legal career in Colorado.

Campos further deconstructs Brown’s FEMA bio, in which he impressively claims to have served as “a bar examiner on ethics and professional responsibility for the Oklahoma Supreme Court and as a hearing examiner for the Colorado Supreme Court.” Campos’ translation?

In Oklahoma, he graded answers to bar exam questions, and, in Colorado, he volunteered to serve on the local attorney disciplinary board.

Ouch.

Campos’ summation is equally devastating, and a pointed critique of the Bush administration.

When Brown left the iaha four years ago, he was, among other things, a failed former lawyer–a man with a 20-year-old degree from a semi-accredited law school who hadn’t attempted to practice law in a serious way in nearly 15 years and who had just been forced out of his job in the wake of charges of impropriety. At this point in his life, returning to his long-abandoned legal career would have been very difficult in the competitive Colorado legal market. Yet, within months of leaving the IAHA , he was handed one of the top legal positions in the entire federal government: general counsel for a major federal agency. A year later, he was made its number-two official, and, a year after that, Bush appointed him director of FEMA .

It’s bad enough when attorneys are named to government jobs for which their careers, no matter how distinguished, don’t qualify them. But Brown wasn’t a distinguished lawyer: He was hardly a lawyer at all. When he left the IAHA , he was a 47-year-old with a very thin resum

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