On Sun, 18 Sep 2005 07:58:35 GMT, "Gideon" wrote:

I have NOT been able to use Google and locate any
newsgroup quotes of yours criticizing Clinton and "his" FEMA
for this major **** up.

Gideon

What was that about maturity and language.....

"During the 1990s, FEMA was routinely praised as one of the
best-functioning federal agencies. Its response to the Midwestern
floods of 1993, the Northridge earthquake of 1994, and 1995's Oklahoma
City terrorist attack are considered models of emergency response. By
contrast, its performance during Katrina is almost universally
acknowledged to have been abysmally poor. At first, FEMA's
post-Katrina failure appears baffling: What happened to the once-great
FEMA? But George Haddow, who served as the deputy chief of staff at
FEMA under James Lee Witt, Bill Clinton's FEMA director, thinks that
FEMA's current flaws are all too understandable - and are a direct
consequence of the Bush administration's decision to pull the federal
government out of the natural disaster-relief business and turn over
more power to state and local officials."


"And balance, Haddow agrees, is what's needed. "You gotta do both,"
he says. "You've got to fight terrorism." But you've got to respond to
hurricanes and earthquakes, too. And when Bush declared a state of
emergency in Louisiana on the Saturday before Katrina struck the Gulf,
he made a promise to residents that he would respond, Haddow says.
"People died because they couldn't get it right," he says. "People
died because they didn't deliver on their promise."



Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets. To plant a pine, one need only own a shovel.
-- Aldo Leopold