Possibly the Definition of Self-Absorbed

New York Times:

Though more than 4,000 Louisiana homeowners have received rebuilding money only in the last six months, or are struggling with inadequate grants or no money at all, FEMA is intent on taking away their trailers by the end of May. The deadline, which ends temporary housing before permanent housing has replaced it, has become a stark example of recovery programs that seem almost to be working against one another.

Thousands of rental units have yet to be restored, and not a single one of 500 planned “Katrina cottages” has been completed and occupied. The Road Home program for single-family homeowners, which has cost federal taxpayers $7.9 billion, has a new contractor who is struggling to review a host of appeals, and workers who assist the homeless are finding more elderly people squatting in abandoned buildings.

Nonetheless, FEMA wants its trailers back, even though it plans to scrap or sell them for a fraction of what it paid for them.

“All I can say is that this is a temporary program, it was always intended as a temporary program, and at a certain point all temporary programs must end,” said Brent Colburn, the agency’s director of external affairs. He said there would be no extensions.

Well, that sounds organized and humane. We’re all in this together!

Last year, the Louisiana Recovery Authority was supposed to unveil a more intensive caseworker system for people in temporary housing, but it never materialized. The authority has now asked homeless service organizations like Unity of Greater New Orleans and the Capital Area Alliance for the Homeless in Baton Rouge to help find stable housing for the hotel occupants.

FEMA officials also say that residents can buy their trailers, sometimes for as little as $300. But virtually all of the residents interviewed said they had offered to do so and been told they could not.

Residents said FEMA workers had started visiting them in the past two months, advising them not to move out and saying extensions would be available to those who showed hardship or progress in rebuilding. But agency officials said that was not the case.

This sounds like a call to direct action, doesn’t it? I make a phone call, you make a phone call, we call the head of FEMA and voice our outrage. Maybe we call some senators and – what’s this, then?

FEMA Leadership

* Acting Administrator – Nancy Ward
* Acting Deputy Administrator – David Garratt
* Associate Deputy Administrator – Robert Shea
* Chief of Staff – Jason McNamara
* Law Enforcement Advisor to the Administrator – Charles F. “Rick” Dinse
* Acting Director, Center for Faith-Based & Community Initiatives – Carole Cameron
* Acting Director, Office of Policy & Program Analysis – Robert Farmer

President Obama has been in office since – lemme check that provocative t-shirt – JANUARY, tornado season is blazing away in the south and midwest, Katrina survivors are about to be tossed out of what sub-standard housing they do have and NOBODY’S IN CHARGE? How is that even possible?

Craig Fugate, FEMA Nominee, Blocked By David Vitter

This asshole is the gift that keeps on giving, isn’t he?

Fugate had sailed through his nomination hearing and Monday cleared the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee by a unanimous voice vote. Republican Sen. David Vitter said, however, that he’d blocked Fugate because of concerns he has with FEMA.

“I have a hold on the FEMA nomination because I sent a list of hurricane recovery questions and projects to FEMA, many of which have not been adequately addressed,” Vitter said in a statement. “I’m eager to get full responses and meet with the nominee immediately.”

That’s right: Louisiana’s notorious disgraced senator is blocking the confirmation of a director of FEMA to squeeze answers from the agency he doesn’t head. So we could call FEMA to demand decent treatment of our fellow citizens but we can’t be sure anyone will answer the phone, and Louisiana residents have their senator to thank for it. I bet they’re appropriately grateful. The Times:

FEMA says it has done everything it can to help those in temporary housing. But, as is so often the case when it comes to Katrina issues, the agency’s clients give a different account. Agency officials insist, for example, that they have been working “extensively” to help families in trailers and hotels find permanent solutions.

“A lot of people are involved in the process of making sure that no one falls through the cracks,” said Manuel Broussard, an agency spokesman in Louisiana. “Everyone’s been offered housing up to this point several times. And for various reasons, they have not accepted it.”

But the dozen temporary housing occupants interviewed for this story said they had received little if any attention from FEMA workers and were lucky to get a list of landlords, much less an offer of permanent housing.

Well. There is one person you can call.

Vitter, David – (R – LA) Class III
516 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING WASHINGTON DC 20510
(202) 224-4623
Web Form

"Borderline Disastrous"

That’s how MSNBC analyst and habitual Republican apologist Chuck Todd described David Vitter’s public “apology” for getting caught as a patron of prostitutes causing pain to his family — a few minutes before Chris Matthews, who can’t seem to keep his nose out of the Clintons’ underwear drawer, admitted that maybe Vitter is right and the media is at fault. I guess he wanted to leave the door open for Vitter to appear on Hardball again in the future to thump the Family Values and Sexual Restraint” tub.

Todd is correct on this one — Vitter comes across as a whiny-ass titty baby, while his wife fares much better, reminding the public that every marriage goes through rough patches, and reminding the media of the effect of this relentless circus on the couple’s children — both very legitimate points, were it not for the fact that Vitter himself has not been above using his children as political props:

It’s one thing to take your children on the campaign trail, or even to show them in a campaign ad. It’s quite another one to make them the primary focus of an ad campaign. Once you choose to put them on national television as vocal, featured campaign shills, you’ve lost the ability to shield them from political fallout. And once you position yourself as a “family values” candidate or representative, “protecting” your marriage from Teh Gayz and demanding that another philanderer resign his office, you’ve lost that ability to “protect your children.” It’s Wendy Vitter’s choice to forgive her husband and move on. But if she wants to be angry at someone for the pain all this has caused her children, she might look at the overgrown child standing next to her at this press conference yesterday, who is clearly not at all sorry for what he did, just very, very sorry he got caught.

Last Friday, E.J. Dionne called for a moratorium on outing Republican hypocrites:

For liberals, there’s something satisfying in demonstrating that the sex lives of certain right-wing moral crusaders turn out to be less than exemplary. It’s certainly an outrage when straight politicians who deplore homosexuality as an affront to the sanctity of marriage and the family take a less than sacred view of their own responsibilities.

But if we are to get out of this habit of destroying the distinctions between public and private lives, liberals need to give the conservative hypocrites a break.

We should acknowledge that the outing process is erratic and leaves many falls from grace safely shielded from public view. We should also admit that we are tougher on the moral flaws of politicians who belong to a party other than our own.

The essential point, however, is that believing in a wall between the public and the private makes you a traditionalist, not a libertine. The traditionalist embraces a strict moral code but sees it as best enforced in the personal realm. We should judge public figures by how they meet their public responsibilities, and leave it to spouses, pastors, children and friends to praise or punish their private behavior.

Dionne has a point about this focus on private behavior being a distraction from the work of the nation. And besides, philandering politicians are nothing new, and there SHOULD be a wall between the public and the private — for everyone. But that very wall is the reason why Mr. Dionne and I part company at that point. Because politicians like David Vitter, who would stick their noses into the bedrooms of other American citizens, have lost the right to have the media’s nose kept out of their own. This is a man who voted against education and contraceptives to reduce teen pregnancy. This is a man who voted yes on banning family planning funding in the U.S. and abroad. This is a man who voted to fund only those health providers that refuse to even mention abortion as an option. This is a man who voted to amend the Constitution to BAN gay marriage and who voted to ban gay adoptions in the District of Columbia. This is a man who thinks his so-called “faith” gives him the right to control the personal behavior of every American citizen, and would use the power of his office to do what he can to codify government intrusion into the private lives of Americans into law. A man who would take away my right to privacy has no privacy right of his own.

In the 1990’s, a bunch of Republicans decided to attempt to undo the result of an election by expanding an inquiry into a 25-year-old land deal into a sex scandal and impeach a president for lying about an extramarital liaison, thus trivializing the Constitutional remedy of impeachment for all eternity. Today we have Congressional Democrats, faced with a completely lawless Administration, unable to use that remedy because of that very trivialization. Yes, Mr. Dionne, there should be a wall between the public and the private. But it was so-called “family values” conservatives who tore down that wall, and no matter how much we might want to put it back up again, we can’t. Because if we do, the minute it is to the political advantage of men like David Vitter to tear it down again, they’ll do it.

“Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud, hatch out.” — Robert Graves, Claudius the God.