Subj : Um...no comment?
To   : Frank Reid
From : Daemon
Date : Sun Sep 04 2005 19:48:00

  Re: Um...no comment?
  By: Frank Reid to Daemon on Sun Sep 04 2005 10:51 a
m

 > Like most know-it-alls, you ultimately resort to qualifying the content and
 > context of your original assertions and, where that holds no water, to insul

  (snipping more sanctimonious garbage)

 > Anyway, let's remember the rules... I'm here for my own diversion.  I turned
 > you on, and now I will turn you off.

  In other words, Frank here jumped in to be a judgemental sycophant, and found
it harder to do than he thought it would be.

  Shame.  Because here, today, is a beautiful irony, right in the top of Yahoo
News' coverage of the disaster.

  http://tinyurl.com/cfrem

The title:  "Despite Warnings, Washington Failed to Fund Levee Projects"

A few excerpts:
  "As recently as 3 months ago, the alarms were sounding - and being brushed
aside."


  It goes on to say how in May of this year, warnings were issued saying 2
major pumping stations were at risk of being knocked out (which happened)
and that levees had settled, necessitating their raising, according to a
comprehensive flood-control study that went unheeded by the administration in
2001.  (8 of them are now completely underwater because of catastrophic
failure.)

  Why?



  "Since Bush took office in 2001, local experts and Landrieu (Senator, LA)
have asked for just short of $500 million.  Altogether, Bush in his yearly
budgets asked for $166 million, and Congress approved about $250 million."

  "...in September of 2004, Landrieu said she was tired of hearing there was no
money to do more work on levees.

  'We're told, can't do it this year.  Don't have enough money.  It's not a
high enough priority,' she said in a Senate speech.  'Well, I know when it's
going to be a high enough priority.'

  She then told of a New Orleans emergency worker who had collected several
thousand body bags in the vent of a major flood.  'Let's hope that never
happens', she said."

  Guess what?  It did.  Now, we're spending just INITIALLY $10.5 billion
dollars rather than the relatively meager hundreds of million that were
requested in the first place but wasn't a high enough priority in the face of
homeland security and Iraq to bother with.




  "The Army Corps of Engineers did spend $430 million to renovate pumping
stations and shore up levees.  But experts said the project fell behind
schedule after funding was reduced in 2003 and 2004."  

  (So much for Frank's assertion that no work was being done in the last 20
years or even his back-pedal position that it had effectively ended with the
Omnibus budget in 2001.)



 

  See, surely there's enough blame to spread around Washington in general for
long-term UNDER-funding, but since Bush took office in 2001, the Corps in
general has been TARGETTED for under-funding, and particularly so once the
costs of Iraq started going through the roof in 2003 and 2004.    

  "...requests by the Corps for flood control money were especially vulnerable
to budget cutting.  'A lot of people just look at it as pork,'" said an
anonymous senior staffer with the Senate Appropiations Committee.

  "The Bush administration's former budget director, Mitch Daniels, was known
as an aggressive advocate for Corps reform who cast a skeptical eye on its
budget requests."

  Because Bush's administration, despite a slew of warnings from fresh and
comprehensive studies, thought it knew better than the people actually charged
with the task of knowing the facts.  As usual.  The guy's all about knowing
everything better than everyone else on the planet which gave us the Iraq War.

  Just like Frank, here, who apparently basses his sense of intellectual
superiority entirely on his religious beliefs, to which he has a marked
tendency to fall back to when all else fails to make a point for him.

  So now that GWB has neglected the work that people-in-the-know were screaming
needed to be done for the last few years (and as recently as a few months
ago) to prevent things from happening that DID in fact come to pass from not
being addressed, there's also the collateral problem of not having any
resources at hand to deal with the consequences of that stupid position because
of ANOTHER stupid decision that compounded the problem to begin with.  

  Which is why even Newt Gingrich is criticizing the country's ability to
respond to the disaster, though Frank here still can't make himself see any
kind of accountability at all because he's too busy polishing his halo ad
trying to look superior to people who DO see accountability.


       [daemon]                 
       In the shuffling madness...      




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