Blown away  by incredible stupidity                        NOBODY got this hurricane thing right

Nobody can predict hurricanes, much less stop them. But we can sure mitigate the risk and the damage they cause, in property and human terms. Unless of course you've got people in charge who are complain birdbrains. Which is what we've got. Here's a brief rundown of the stooges who insured that Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma would do as much damage as possible.

RICH SCUMBAGS GET RICHER

As is typical under the Bush administration, rich folks get to cash in on everything. Bad stuff happens, good stuff happens, doesn't matter. Rich people make money on it. So in those areas, across three states, where poor and middle class folks used to live until they got washed away, developers are pushing those people out. Rules have been put in place regarding rebuilding requirements. These rules make it virtually impossible for any of those people to afford moving back in. Expensive condos, casinos, townhomes, and giant mansions are going in where normal people used to dwell. The entire demographic is being changed. They are turning a whole region of ethnic, lower middle class neighborhoods into rich, white neighborhoods.

MORONS IN HIGH PLACES

Everybody in power hires pals and cronies. Everybody. The difference with George W. Bush is, he hires them for important jobs where they can really screw things up. So some dufus named Michael Brown was made head of FEMA. His previous job was running some Arabian horse exposition. His only emergency management experience was as some assistant to the guy running the town of Edmond, Oklahoma. It's a very small town. They never had any emergencies. So this doesn't count.

Brown says he was doing a good job. But he was sent NUMEROUS emails and messages about how ugly Hurricane Katrina was going to be, and then after the fact, he was told NUMEROUS times how bad it truly was. At one point, the only FEMA honcho who actually ventured to New Orleans to do emergency work was sitting at the Superdome, eating crap emergency meals supplied by the army, and using the hallway of the dome as a toilet. He text-messaged Brown's assistant, who bemoaned the fact that their boss Brown couldn't get a restaurant reservation in Baton Rouge.

Brown was dumb enough at one point to say that he didn't know how bad things were at the Superdome, even though the situation there had been widely covered on television for two days by then. An underling sent him a frantic message about how terrible the conditions were there, and he replied back, "Thanks for the update. Is there anything you wanted me to do or tweak?"
 

Michael Chertoff, head of Homeland Security, did the "vote of confidence" thing with Brown, then promptly yanked him off the hurricane relief effort. Shortly after that, Brown resigned. But he's still getting paid, supposedly to gather documents so they can investigate how it all got screwed up. But how long do they have to keep him on? They've renewed him at least twice. Dump his ass, and use the money to build more shelters or something.

Chertoff appointed nobody to run the situation. No point man, no nothing. He had no clue how to react. Over his head. But guys like that are paid too much money to be in that situation.
 

The idiot mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, spent a whole lotta time pointing fingers, failed to conduct his own evacuation responsibilities. He failed to use the buses available to him. He pushed to get a lot of residents back in early, then had to order them right back out again when the weather turned bad again. Oops. January 2006, Nagin confused the shit out of everybody by saying that 'New Orleans will be reborn as a chocolate city." WTF does that mean? He's a loony.

Tom Benson, owner of the New Orleans Saints, is doing everything he can to make everybody in the universe hate him. The NFL wants to keep the Saints in Louisiana. Benson has given every indication he wants to move the team permanently to San Antonio. Hey, I've been there. You can't support a pro football team there. Besides, the "San Antonio Saints" sounds about as right as the "New Orleans Hornets" or the "Utah Jazz."
 

MORE FEMA F___UPS

FEMA bought a bunch of ice to ship down to hurricane-ravaged areas. Because they don't know how to manage their way out of a paper bag, they are paying through the nose to keep all those tons of ice in freezer trucks, which they keep parking in strange places. One truck was sent to various southern states, then sent to the southeast, then to the Carolinas, then back south, then to Idaho. A lot of that ice just sits in the trucks, indefinitely, at a cost of many thousands of dollars per day, and ends up going nowhere. It would actually be far cheaper to dump the ice and order more later.

The town of Perth Amboy, New Jersey put off demolishing some older houses, and instead fixed them up with local donations, and made them available to hurricane victims free of charge. They are offering a year's free rent. They have a hundred such houses. So far only fifteen families have been relocated there. FEMA was made aware of the available housing in September 2005. As of November 2005, they had made no move to make use of the housing. They didn't have to lift a finger, except to steer people there.

A longtime FEMA veteran admitted, late September 2005, that the senior leadership of FEMA is stacked with political appointees with NO BACKGROUND IN EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT. Every political boss gives jobs to hacks and cronies, but what makes the Bush administration stand out in this regard is the handing out of iimportant, visible jobs, with impact on domestic and international policy, to campaign workers and other idiot buddies. And if they're not complete novices, they're greedy scumbags rife with conflict of interest. Check it out.
 

FEMA ordered all sorts of ice to truck down to New Orleans. Because of massive disorganization, they've wasted MILLIONS sending ice trucks from state to state to state, never unloading. At one point, they blamed the confusion on having ordered too much ice. Then they shipped a bunch of it to IDAHO (huh?) and ordered MORE ICE.
 

GEORGE W. BUSH, the highest ranking blockhead in this whole mess
 

Bush very kindly said he sympathized with the residents of New Orleans, since he remembered going down there to "party." Christ.
 

February 2006: We find out, through Congressional hearings, that Bush was getting crappy info early on, and then later, when he got very accurate info, he discounted it.

Bush didn't bother catching any of the coverage for the first couple of days. He's never been big on watching the news or reading newspapers. He relies on underlings to filter the news for him, which is why he never devotes sufficient attention to anything. He never has any clue as to what's going on.

How bad is this situation, with Bush being out of touch? His cronies actually prepared a DVD for him, days later, with snippets of news coverage from the various stations, so he could suddenly get smarter about the biggest crisis in the country. The emperor has no attention span.

Bush had a guy with no emergency management experience at all running FEMA. He has crony-itis.
 

BUSH gave a lovely speech on TV in which he said the federal government would pick up the bulk of the costs of rebuilding New Orleans, without addressing some major questions:

• Does it make sense to just rebuild?
• How about raising taxes to start paying for this and all his other expenses, or at least stop pushing for more permanent tax cuts that are raising the deficit?
• How about cutting costs, starting with the massive, bloated highway spending bill he threatened to veto, then signed anyway after it got BIGGER, and then he had the nerve to call it "fiscally responsible?"

He quickly ruled out any tax hikes to pay for all this. The deficit, already projected to be much higher than the administration was saying it would be, will now fly intot he stratosphere, while Bush's rich buddies, including the oil companies, continue getting richer and richer. Various oil companies, including Shell, BP, Conoco-Phiilips, and Exxon-Mobil, announced immediately after Hurricane Wilma finished up in Florida that they had record quarters. Gas prices are through the roof, supposedly because the oil companies have lost capacity and THEIR costs are through the roof. But that's just bullshit. They are GOUGING the crap out of EVERYBODY. And Bush, who is in the pocket of Big Oil along with Cheney, will do nothing about it.

Of course, as of December, three months after the hurricane, the levees have been partially plugged up, but there is absolutely no plan or commitment to fix them permanently, and no decision if this is even desirable. And many of the hardest-hit neighborhoods face no guarantee at all that anything will be done. They will most likely still be in ruin this time next year.

DUMMY RESIDENTS AND TOURISTS

After Hurricane Wilma, even Jeb Bush admitted that some of the residents of his balmy state are indeed balmy. As he puts it, "It's not that hard to stock up on 72 hours worth of food." Some of these whiny twits didn't bother (with more than a week's notice and all the examples in the world from the previous hurricanes) SHOPPING. They waited until Hurricane Wilma hit, knocked out the electricity, caused a gas shortage, and closed all the stores. Then they stand in long lines and bitch.

In New Orleans, the high water wiped out everything everybody had, so it makes sense that they ended up in bad shape. And indeed, a lot of them were not in a position to evacuate. But the Floridians had no excuse.

Also on the whiny side were American tourists in Mexico. Again, plenty of notice. Everybody knew there was a good chance Hurricane Wilma was going to nail Mexico. And so it did. Then they complained that the American government didn't swoop in with a bunch of cargo planes to pluck them out.

Also, I'm a big believer in the notion of shooting looters. Sure, in some situations, people were taking food for their families. But plenty of others were stealing upscale clothing, electronics, liquor, and guns. This has nothing to do with black or white. It has to do with thugs and lowlives.

A full year after Hurrican Katrina, there are still idiots demanding a different evacuation process for folks with pets. Sure, plenty of animals got stranded or left behind in the chaos, but if these people get their own personal evac bus for the next hurricane, plenty of desperate scumbags will steal other people's pets just to get a seat. Sorry, but if you have a pet, then suck it up, or eat it before you head for higher ground.