John Henke looks at reactions then, and reactions now.
Brown Out, Allen In
Brown replaced by Coast Guard honcho:
Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown is being removed from his role in managing the Bush administration’s Hurricane Katrina relief efforts and is returning to Washington.
Brown, who has been under fire for the federal government’s slow response to the storm that devastated much of the Gulf Coast region, will be replaced by Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen, who was overseeing New Orleans relief and rescue efforts.
Asked if he was being made a scapegoat for a federal relief effort that has drawn widespread and sharp criticism, Brown told The Associated Press after a long pause: ”By the press, yes. By the president, No.”
I don’t know what practical effect, if any, this will have on the relief efforts, but it will ease some of the political tensions.
*As a bizarre side note, one of my friends growing up was Thad Allen (he is now a minister somewhere), but it just feels weird hearing his name even though it has been close to 15 years. Of course, it is a different Thad Allen, but still.
Things To Say When You are Ready For Retirement
Rep. Baker of Baton Rouge is overheard telling lobbyists: “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.”
Baker explains later he didn’t intend flippancy but has long wanted to improve low-income housing.
Jackass. Pols really can not control themselves, can they?
Things To Say When You are Ready For RetirementPost + Comments (43)
More on the Katrina Fall-Out
First up, the NY Times, discussing the problems between federal and state coordination:
While combat troops can conduct relief missions without the legal authority of the Insurrection Act, Pentagon and military officials say that no active-duty forces could have been sent into the chaos of New Orleans on Wednesday or Thursday without confronting law-and-order challenges.
But just as important to the administration were worries about the message that would have been sent by a president ousting a Southern governor of another party from command of her National Guard, according to administration, Pentagon and Justice Department officials.
“Can you imagine how it would have been perceived if a president of the United States of one party had pre-emptively taken from the female governor of another party the command and control of her forces, unless the security situation made it completely clear that she was unable to effectively execute her command authority and that lawlessness was the inevitable result?” asked one senior administration official, who spoke anonymously because the talks were confidential.
Officials in Louisiana agree that the governor would not have given up control over National Guard troops in her state as would have been required to send large numbers of active-duty soldiers into the area. But they also say they were desperate and would have welcomed assistance by active-duty soldiers.
“I need everything you have got,” Ms. Blanco said she told Mr. Bush last Monday, after the storm hit.
In an interview, she acknowledged that she did not specify what sorts of soldiers. “Nobody told me that I had to request that,” Ms. Blanco said. “I thought that I had requested everything they had. We were living in a war zone by then.”
I simply find it hard to believe that these sorts of legal issues have not been resolved post 9/11. Maybe they will be now. In addition, the WaPo has another piece about the backgrounds of top FEMA officials:
Five of eight top Federal Emergency Management Agency officials came to their posts with virtually no experience in handling disasters and now lead an agency whose ranks of seasoned crisis managers have thinned dramatically since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
FEMA’s top three leaders — Director Michael D. Brown, Chief of Staff Patrick J. Rhode and Deputy Chief of Staff Brooks D. Altshuler — arrived with ties to President Bush’s 2000 campaign or to the White House advance operation, according to the agency. Two other senior operational jobs are filled by a former Republican lieutenant governor of Nebraska and a U.S. Chamber of Commerce official who was once a political operative.
Meanwhile, veterans such as U.S. hurricane specialist Eric Tolbert and World Trade Center disaster managers Laurence W. Zensinger and Bruce P. Baughman — who led FEMA’s offices of response, recovery and preparedness, respectively — have left since 2003, taking jobs as consultants or state emergency managers, according to current and former officials.
Because of the turnover, three of the five FEMA chiefs for natural-disaster-related operations and nine of 10 regional directors are working in an acting capacity, agency officials said.
Discuss.
More here from a different angle. And just bonus points for Andrew Sullivan’s brass balls for claiming Instapundit misquoted Blanco. I like Sully and have defended him in the past, but it would be a full-time job counting all the things he has just gotten wrong or quotes he has taken out of context this week .
Flight 93 Memorial
Via Malkin, here is the proposed Flight 93 Memorial:
For obvious reasons, this has sparked an immediate controversy, and Malkin has the link round-up. I am a little nonplussed, and really don’t know what to think- was this just an accident, and oversight, a lack of awareness of the importance of the crescent as a symbol?
Bryan Preston’s reaction will probably be more typical:
“What next–a holocaust memorial in the shape of a swastika?”
Your thoughts?
Legal Problems
Another effect of the hurricane I hadn’t really thought about otherthan what they were going to do with the prisoners from New Orleans:
At Rapides Parish Detention Center 3 in Alexandria, which normally holds convicted felons, there are now 200 new inmates who arrived hot, hungry and exhausted on buses this week after being evacuated from flooded jails in New Orleans.
They have no paperwork indicating whether they are charged with having too much to drink or attempted murder. There is no judge to hear their cases, no courthouse designated to hear them in and no lawyer to represent them. If lawyers can be found, there is no mechanism for paying them. The prisoners have had no contact with their families for days and do not know whether they are alive or dead, if their homes do or do not exist.
“It’s like taking a jail and shaking it up in a fruit-basket turnover, so no one has any idea who these people are or why they’re here,” said Phyllis Mann, one of several local lawyers who were at the detention center until 11 p.m. Wednesday, trying to collect basic information on the inmates. “There is no system of any kind for taking care of these people at this point.”
Along with the destruction of homes, neighborhoods and lives, Hurricane Katrina decimated the legal system of the New Orleans region.
More than a third of the state’s lawyers have lost their offices, some for good. Most computer records will be saved. Many other records will be lost forever. Some local courthouses have been flooded, imperiling a vast universe of files, records and documents. Court proceedings from divorces to murder trials, to corporate litigation, to custody cases will be indefinitely halted and when proceedings resume lawyers will face prodigious – if not insurmountable – obstacles in finding witnesses and principals and in recovering evidence.
What a mess.
More here about the arrests of suspected looters:
More than 220 looting suspects and others accused of violence in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina have been taken to a makeshift city jail known as “Camp Greyhound,” the New Orleans bus terminal, to await transfer to out-of-town prisons.
The arrests and transfers are being monitored by the Justice Department and the Louisiana Attorney General’s Office to ensure that proper legal procedures are being followed, law-enforcement authorities said.
Another 1,000 inmates already in jail in Louisiana when Katrina hit are being moved by the U.S. Marshals Service to prisons in other states, including 460 inmates who were transported by airplane yesterday to a federal prison in Florida. Another 460 inmates will make the same trip today.
Many of the jail facilities in New Orleans were flooded after the storm.
U.S. Attorney David Dugas in Baton Rouge yesterday said a majority of those arrested were taken into custody in Jefferson Parish, where law-enforcement authorities have rounded up dozens of looters who raided houses and businesses.
Prisoners at the New Orleans bus terminal are being guarded by corrections officers from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola — one of the toughest prisons in the country. Sixteen bus stops have become hastily constructed cages of chain-link fencing and razor wire, each filled with men or women arrested on the flood-ravaged streets of New Orleans during a rampage of looting and violence that overtook the city.
While the vast majority of those being processed through the terminal are accused of looting, one of the men brought to the site was Wendell L. Bailey, charged with shooting at a rescue helicopter seeking to aid people trapped at the Superdome. Others were named on charges of attempted murder and attempted rape.
So I guess there were significant arrests made, and they have the guy accused of shooting at the rescue helicopter. This is news to me.
DeLay’s PAC Indicted
Five felony indictments:
A grand jury has indicted a political action committee formed by U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and a Texas business group in connection with 2002 legislative campaign contributions.
The five felony indictments against the two groups were made public Thursday. Neither DeLay nor any individuals with the business group has been charged with any wrongdoing.
The charge against Texans for a Republican Majority alleged the committee illegally accepted a political contribution of $100,000 from the Alliance for Quality Nursing Home Care.
Four indictments against the Texas Association of Business include charges of unlawful political advertising, unlawful contributions to a political committee and unlawful expenditures such as those to a graphics company and political candidates.
IN my eyes, that is about as unclear a report as is possible. Can a PAC be indicted? I thought you could only indict people. Who are they going to jaiul/fine if found guilty? And so on.