SEE WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT HERE?

West, Texas explosion aftermath

The death toll and injury count in the West, Texas fertilizer plant explosion that took place last Wednesday continues to rise, with 35-40 dead and 60 still unaccounted for. Recovering from the disaster will likely take a lot of time and resources, and President Obama has already pledged federal assistance through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other agencies.

Some Texas Congressmen have also requested aid to help the victims and the town rebuild. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) said he is “working to ensure that all available resources are marshaled to deal with the horrific loss of life and suffering that we've seen.” Rep. Bill Flores (R-TX) has said that he, plus Senators Cruz and John Cornyn (R-TX), are working with Congressional leaders to extend necessary assistance. Cornyn has also said there is funding under his subcommittee for chemical site security standards and infrastructure protection.

Yet when Northeast cities needed disaster relief in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, a storm that killed hundreds, all three Congressmen voted against the aid package:

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz lambasted the Sandy Aid package, voting against the measure in January. Cruz issued a statement explaining that he voted against the aid because it included a number of spending measures that were not related to disaster relief, including “Smithsonian repairs, upgrades to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration airplanes, and more funding for Head Start.”

After Flores voted against the Sandy aid package, he justified his vote by saying the package was “too large” and did “more than meet the immediate needs of Sandy victims.”

On top of seeking funding for West, Texas, John Cornyn has also requested drought relief and disaster aid for wildfires in the past.

Funding would have also been useful in preventing the blast in the first place. The plant has been victim of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) under-funding  as it hadn't been inspected since 1985. Yet Flores voted for the 2011 House Republican budget, which would have reduced OSHA by $99 million, and also voted to pass the Budget Control Act, which has also decreased funding for OSHA’s inspections.

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Editor-In-Chief

Roger West

IS IT POSSIBLE TO REPSOND TO QUICKLY?

Failed FEMA Director Michael Brown

Former FEMA Director Michael Brown offered criticism of President Obama’s early responses to Hurricane Sandy yesterday, including a dig at the administration’s response to last month’s attack in Libya.

Yesterday, ahead of the storm’s pummeling of the eastern seaboard, Brown gave an interview to the local alternative paper, the Denver Westword, on how he believed the Obama administration was responding to Sandy too quickly and that Obama had spoken to the press about Sandy’s potential effect too early.

Brown turned then to a reliable right-wing attack on the President’s response to the attack on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi that killed four Americans:

“One thing he’s gonna be asked is, why did he jump on [the hurricane] so quickly and go back to D.C. so quickly when in…Benghazi, he went to Las Vegas?” Brown says. “Why was this so quick?… At some point, somebody’s going to ask that question…. This is like the inverse of Benghazi.”

Conservatives have been hitting Obama for weeks on his attendance at a fundraiser in Nevada following the assault in Benghazi, claiming at alternate times that the President either cared more about politics than lives lost or that he was trying to downplay the attack’s significance. Now the critique has mutated into a belief that Obama is currently “playing President” to score points during disaster relief in the run-up to the election, in contrast to his actions in September.

Brown is not the only one making the insinuation that Obama and his administration are responding too quickly to Sandy only for political reasons. He’s joined in his accusations by such prominent right-wing commentators as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and columnist Charles Krauthammer.

However, Brown’s comments carry a special irony due to the role he played during the Hurricane Katrina debacle in 2005. As director of FEMA during the legendarily botched response, Brown, famously dubbed “Brownie” by President Bush, was in the center of criticism from both sides of the aisle that the Bush administration was too slow to respond. An internal review by the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector-General following the disaster concluded, “Much of the criticism is warranted.” Brown resigned from his position as director less than two weeks after Katrina hit.



NFTOS
Editor-In-Chief
Roger West

Maybe There Is Hope

Finally, someone from camp tea bag that get's it!

Herman Cain to house GOP: Fund FEMA now, find offsets ‘later’ — ‘stop playing with peoples’ tragedies’.

Despite making promises not to do so, House Republicans are holding disaster relief funding hostage, demanding the money be offset by spending cuts elsewhere so as to not increase the deficit, even though this has never been done in the past. House Republicans finally passed a bill to fund FEMA and the rest of the government last week, but only days after the Senate passed their own version without offsets and after House conservatives killed an earlier version with slightly fewer spending cuts.

But speaking yesterday on CNN, GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain said Congress should fund FEMA now and worry about the offsets later, drawing a sharp line against lawmakers using the funds as a “political football” while people are suffering:

CAIN: I would make sure that FEMA got the money it needed, and if I had to go find the offsets later, go find it later. Stop playing with peoples’ tragedies — these are real people we’re talking about.

HOST: So you’re saying, right now we should just fund FEMA and forget about the offsetting spending cuts, and maybe later, if we find them, then go back and get the deal done that way.

CAIN: Yes. … We’re going to have a gentleman’s agreement that we will find the offsets, rather than finding the offsets right in the middle of it and making it a political football.

See it here:

Asked about Sen. Mark Warner’s (D-VA) comments yesterday that the Tea Party faction in the House is to blame for the hold up, Cain said the conservative lawmakers need to pick their battles better. “I would not make this a battleground, Cain said. “This is one that I would basically try to, you know, fall on my sword for — go ahead and do what’s right for the people.”

Cain added that Congress “should put politics aside” and fund FEMA because “people should not have to suffer because of the political bickering.” Congress returns to work today to try again, with FEMA money running out soon and funding for the rest of the government ending Friday.


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Apples Do Not Fall Far From The Tree

As Irene Devastates, Ron Paul Says We Need To ‘Come To Our Senses’ And Abolish FEMA.

Today, nearly 2 million people are without power and nine are dead as now-Tropical Storm Irene continues to devastate the East Coast. But Republican presidential hopeful Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) still thinks that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) needs to be abolished. In a lengthy anti-FEMA screed to Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, Paul described FEMA as a drain on the economy — a “gross distortion of insurance” that only “bleeding hearts” would support — that “just bail[s] put everybody”:

WALLACE: Congressman, you would really, at this point, do away with FEMA and all the things it’s doing to help hundreds of thousands of people along the East Coast?

PAUL: (Laughs.) Have you ever read the reports that came out of New Orleans and all those wonderful things they did? Giving checks to people who didn’t even live there? Sending in hundreds of millions of dollars worth of trailers that they had to junk because they didn’t meet FEMA’s standards? No. It’s a system of bureaucratic central economic planning which is a policy which is deeply flawed. So no, you don’t get rid of something like that in one day. … I mean, this idea that government can just bail out everybody and vote for money — but I propose that we save a billion dollars from the overseas war-mongering, bring half that home and put it against the deficit, and yes, tide people over until we come to our senses and realize that FEMA’s been around since 1978. It has one of the worst reputations for a bureaucracy ever. … You can’t imagine how many calls we get because FEMA’s getting in the way and they can’t get their checks, they can’t get their bailouts. … Anybody who wants to defend this department and this agency, they have a tough argument to argue for.

Paul has long been a critic of FEMA and voted against hurricane relief funding for his home state of Texas in 2005. He previously has said that FEMA “compounds our problems” because the government shouldn’t “take care of us when we do dumb things“ — like get hit by hurricanes.  

Is it any wonder why Rand Paul son to Ron often sounds like a lunatic and very radical – apples do not fall far from the tree!


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