Katrina's POLITICAL aftermath (keep the political discussions HERE)

I said it last week, but I just *loved* how he ended up on the Administration's p.r. effort for Harriet Miers -- and even made a statement about how great she was etc. -- the evening before she dropped out. So appropriate.

By Alan Levin, USA TODAYFri Nov 4, 7:49 AM ET

Flood-ravaged Louisiana can't pay the $3.7 billion that the U.S. government says is its share of hurricane relief, a spokeswoman for Gov. Kathleen Blanco said Thursday.

"You can't squeeze $3.7 billion out of this state to pay this bill. Period. That would be difficult for us on a good day," the spokeswoman, Denise Bottcher, told USA TODAY.

Staffers for the governor "about fell over" Wednesday night when they received the Federal Emergency Management Agency's estimate of the state's costs for hurricanes Katrina and Rita, said Mark Merritt, a consultant working for Blanco.

FEMA projects that it will spend a total of $41.4 billion in Louisiana, about $9,000 per resident. Federal law requires state and local governments to pay a portion of disaster relief costs. That share can be as much as 25%. The $3.7 billion estimate is roughly 9% of FEMA's projected costs in Louisiana.

The $3.7 billion represents just under half of the $8 billion the state spends per year and comes as the extensive flooding around New Orleans has severely undercut tax revenue. The state is in the midst of heavy cost-cutting to whittle down a projected $1 billion shortfall.

Congress would have to enact legislation to forgive Louisiana's debt, FEMA spokeswoman Nicol Andrews said. President Bush has waived certain state and local costs, such as debris removal, but he is bound by law to collect the $3.7 billion from Louisiana, she said.

Mississippi and Texas, also hit hard by this year's hurricanes, have not received FEMA's projected costs.

The issue of a state's obligation to pay disaster relief costs occasionally creates controversy. On rare occasions, FEMA has threatened to report local governments to the U.S. Justice Department because federal money wasn't reimbursed.

The bulk of the money Louisiana must pay will go toward paying for personal property lost in the storms. FEMA pays up to $26,200 per household for uninsured losses. Blanco's office estimates that 60,000 households in New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish alone will qualify for the payments. FEMA this week began notifying people that they will receive money.

Merritt is a former FEMA official who now works with former FEMA director James Lee Witt, an adviser to Blanco on hurricane recovery. Merritt said the scope of the disaster far exceeded anything envisioned when the relief agency was created. He called the costs "astronomically unprecedented."

Before Hurricane Katrina, the largest FEMA disaster was the Sept. 11 attacks. FEMA spent $8.8 billion for relief in New York after Sept. 11, which equaled less than $500 per resident of the metro area, Merritt said.

"A disaster of this magnitude ... has never happened on this scale in U.S. history," Merritt said.

White House Declines to Provide Storm Papers

By ERIC LIPTON
Published: January 25, 2006
WASHINGTON, Jan. 24 - The Bush administration, citing the confidentiality of executive branch communications, said Tuesday that it did not plan to turn over certain documents about Hurricane Katrina or make senior White House officials available for sworn testimony before two Congressional committees investigating the storm response.

The White House this week also formally notified Representative Richard H. Baker, Republican of Louisiana, that it would not support his legislation creating a federally financed reconstruction program for the state that would bail out homeowners and mortgage lenders. Many Louisiana officials consider the bill crucial to recovery, but administration officials said the state would have to use community development money appropriated by Congress.

The White House's stance on storm-related documents, along with slow or incomplete responses by other agencies, threatens to undermine efforts to identify what went wrong, Democrats on the committees said Tuesday.

"There has been a near total lack of cooperation that has made it impossible, in my opinion, for us to do the thorough investigation that we have a responsibility to do," Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, said at Tuesday's hearing of the Senate committee investigating the response. His spokeswoman said he would ask for a subpoena for documents and testimony if the White House did not comply.

In response to questions later from a reporter, the deputy White House spokesman, Trent Duffy, said the administration had declined requests to provide testimony by Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff; Mr. Card's deputy, Joe Hagin; Frances Fragos Townsend, the domestic security adviser; and her deputy, Ken Rapuano.

Mr. Duffy said the administration had also declined to provide storm-related e-mail correspondence and other communications involving White House staff members. Mr. Rapuano has given briefings to the committees, but the sessions were closed to the public and were not considered formal testimony.

"The White House and the administration are cooperating with both the House and Senate," Mr. Duffy said. "But we have also maintained the president's ability to get advice and have conversations with his top advisers that remain confidential."

Yet even Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, objected when administration officials who were not part of the president's staff said they could not testify about communications with the White House.

"I completely disagree with that practice," Ms. Collins, chairwoman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said in an interview Tuesday.

According to Mr. Lieberman, Michael D. Brown, the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, cited such a restriction on Monday, as agency lawyers had advised him not to say whether he had spoken to President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or to comment on the substance of any conversations with any other high-level White House officials.

Nevertheless, both Ms. Collins and Representative Thomas M. Davis III, a Virginia Republican who is leading the House inquiry, said that despite some frustration with the administration's response, they remained confident that the investigations would produce meaningful results.

Other members of the committees said the executive branch communications were essential because it had become apparent that one of the most significant failures was the apparent lack of complete engagement by the White House and the federal government in the days immediately before and after the storm.

"When you have a natural disaster, the president needs to be hands-on, and if anyone in his staff gets in the way, he needs to push them away," said Representative Christopher Shays, a Connecticut Republican and member of the House investigating committee. "The response was pathetic."

Even before the House and Senate investigations began, Democrats called for the appointment of an independent commission, like the one set up after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to investigate the response to the most costly natural disaster in United States history. The 9/11 Commission, after extensive negotiations, questioned Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney and received sworn testimony from Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser.

"Our fears are turning out to be accurate," Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, said Tuesday. "The Bush administration is stonewalling the Congress."

Mr. Duffy, along with officials from the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, said that although not every request had been met, the administration had provided an enormous amount of detailed information about nearly every aspect of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina.

The Department of Defense, for example, has provided 18 officials for testimony, and 57 others have been interviewed by Congressional staff members, said Maj. Paul Swiergosz, a Pentagon spokesman. It has also turned over an estimated 240,000 pages of documents.

Russ Knocke, a spokesman for the Homeland Security Department, said his agency, which oversees FEMA, had been similarly responsive, providing 60 officials as witnesses and producing 300,000 pages of documents.

But the White House and other federal agencies have been less helpful, members of the investigating committees said, particularly the Pentagon and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, who is the subject of the sole subpoena issued so far.

"We have been trying - without success - to obtain Secretary Rumsfeld's cooperation for months," Representative Charlie Melancon, Democrat of Louisiana, said in a letter to Representative Davis on Monday. "The situation is not acceptable."

Mr. Davis, in a written response to Mr. Melancon on Tuesday, said he felt that the Pentagon, after the subpoena, had largely honored the committee's requests.

The Congressional investigations began in September, shortly after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, flooding New Orleans, devastating much of the rest of the region and causing more than $100 billion in damage.

Both of the committees are rushing to try to complete their investigations - the House by Feb. 15, and the Senate by the middle of March - in part because of the approaching Atlantic hurricane season, which starts on June 1.

The separate action this week by the Bush administration to oppose an effort to create what would have been called the Louisiana Recovery Corporation evoked great disappointment among state officials.

Mr. Baker's bill would have bought out owners of ruined homes, offering them at least 60 percent of their pre-storm equity, while also giving mortgage companies 60 percent of their loans on damaged properties. The bonds needed for the project would have been paid off by selling developers federally acquired land.

"The Baker bill as a tool was very efficient in terms of helping people sell out, or clear title to the land," said Sean Reilly, a member of the Louisiana Recovery Authority. "We're going to have to go back to the drawing board and do the best with the tools we have."

Donald E. Powell, the Bush administration's Gulf Coast recovery coordinator, said in a statement that the government was prepared to help victims in other ways.

"We share the common vision, the common objective of Congressman Baker, to assist uninsured homeowners outside the flood plain," Mr. Powell said.

Mr. Powell's spokeswoman, D. J. Nordquist, said the administration was open to discussion if the community development money turned out to be insufficient.

xpost

Republicans get blowjobs. Maybe they don't always humidor their conquests or inspire accusations of sexual battery or drown them in cars after a night of binge drinking, but they get head. Although maybe they have to pay for it.

As for lowering the standards, they were so low to begin with that I can no longer even fake shock. I'm kind of waiting for something more exciting, like a rape charge or a murder coming out fo this bunch. You know, something that the citizenry might actually care about. Of all the wacky, law-skirting stuff that the previous administration (not to mention the previous Democratic-led House or Senate), at least they had Bill Clinton to bring a semen stain to the front page. I'm not going to find "stonewalling" the least bit interesting until it involves Jenna Bush and the Chicken Ranch.

I'm not knocking democracy here but really, who the fuck cares what gets the citizenry excited? We were eager as hell to steal the West from Indians and Mexicans but we had to be dragged into WWI and WWII. I ain't that impressed with collective mental acuity of the American public. All throughout my adolescence they thought the Cosby Show was worth watching.

i was with you until that last sentence.

I have very low expectations because of history. That history is colorfully bipartisan without exception, and it doesn't make me jaded, it just gives me reasonable expectations. I'd love to be more optimistic about the future of this country, but have a hard time knowing where to look. Besides, I've got Entertainment Tonight on Tivo and US Magazine to read anyway.

don't change the subject - I was not a Clinton supporter. Nice attempt at misdirection there tho. you seem fond of that tactic.

I CARE ABOUT BLACK KETTLES AND POTS.

blount - I'm disagreeing with don's position that those are the only things worth being concerned about or shocked by. I thought this was fairly obvious. I'm not particularly disagreeing with his assessment of what gets the American public's attention.

Don, can we agree that Melissa Rivers should be the first American on Mars? (one way ticket, of course.)

Bush more or less apologized for the government's dismal performance. Yes, this came after he fellated Brownie, of course, but he did pretend to be contrite when pressed. Finally. Kinda rang hollow to me, too. I'm not really sure that I buy Clinton's apology much--hell, there's no way to really spin your way out of genocide in two different countries on two different continents when you're in charge. Political apologies are just that.

As for your question, Rwanda would have been a clusterfuck of the Mongolian order. Were it me, I wouldn't have sent troops in. Which make apologizing for Rwanda all the more hollow--Clinton's decision was probably the right one.

First, advance word of an upcoming Congressional report unsurprisingly trashes everyone in the general chain of command. What is perhaps a touch surprising, or at least intriguing, is that it's a GOP-controlled committee trashing certain chunks of the administration -- Chertoff, 'White House aides' -- as well as the usual on-site targets.

Meanwhile, over in NRO world Deroy Murdock, who to his credit actually has visited the city at least a couple of times since Katrina, has been posting columns every so often noting how poorly the reconstruction effort is going, and is not sparing BushCo -- in fact it seems they're now a particular target of his calmly-stated but still fierce opprobrium. This one I've linked details a plan for recovery that, because it actually involves government intervention, is being opposed by the likes of Cato and, apparently, the White House itself -- and Murdock ain't happy.

But the report says FEMA found that 900,000 of the 2.5 million applications for all forms of individual assistance were "potential duplicates."

"Even when FEMA's automated computer system picked out what might be fraudulent applications, payments sometimes were still sent, says the advance testimony of Gregory Kutz, the managing director of the GAO's forensic audits unit.

The controls were so lax that auditors were able to secure a $2,000 relief check by using "falsified identifies, bogus addresses and fabricated disaster stories," and then simply waiting for the money to arrive in the mail, says the report for the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times."