US Politics News

Your Government Inaction

FEMA Again?!
So it seems FEMA is coming under criticism again for the California wildfire response this time. They only had 2,500 homes lost and they still can't get the job done... though it's worth noting how much better they did in Cali than in New Orleans. Gee, I wonder if race had anything to do with the wildly varying responses.

(AP) Patty Reedy is still waiting for someone at the Federal Emergency Management Agency to send her the mobile home she was promised before Christmas.

In December, agency inspectors said she wouldn't get a government house to replace the one she lost during last year's wildfires because it would be too difficult to haul the 60-foot, three-bedroom prefabricated home up a winding road to her remote mountaintop property.

Reedy isn't alone. FEMA brought dozens of mobile homes to Southern California after the fires, only to find their own guidelines prevented them from putting them on many properties in rough terrain. San Diego County officials say dozens of applicants were denied homes because their properties were inaccessible to trucks, didn't have connections into the electrical grid or were on hillsides deemed at mudslide risk.

...

Within a week, the agency had begun disbursing grants up to $28,800, short-circuiting detailed accounting requirements that slowed relief after the 2003 fires. So far, FEMA has paid more than $13.1 million to 1,973 people, mostly in San Diego County.

In 2003, the agency sent short, adaptable "travel trailers" to house people living in the mountains, but they are being avoided now amid concerns about toxic chemicals; this week the agency said it would move hurricane victims out of more than 35,000 trailers because tests indicate some of the temporary homes contain high levels of formaldehyde.

Instead, FEMA only dispatched three-bedroom modular homes to Southern California - luxurious compared to the 15-foot travel trailers, but, at 60 feet, too long to fit on many properties or be moved up steep roads full of switchbacks. They also require too much electricity to run off generators or solar panels and have to be hooked into the power grid. They have to be on flat land, away from any hills that might be at risk for mudslides.

So as it turns out, the only real issue here is that nobody wants to live in toxic trailers. FEMA is willing to pay you 30,000 to relocate, at least temporarily; they also will provide you a modular home, provided you don't have your house in some idiot remote mountaintop location.

Compare this to New Orleans, where toxic trailers is all most people ever got. Huh. Racial injustice, in America?

It cannae be!

Source: CBS News

Satellites Falling From the Sky
The Russkies are predictably unhappy about our real-world test of a satellite killing weapon.

Russia has accused the US of using a plan to shoot down a broken spy satellite as a cover for testing an anti-satellite weapon.

The US said last week that it would use a missile to destroy the satellite, to stop it from crash landing.

Officials say the satellite contains hazardous fuel which could kill humans.

But Russia's defence ministry said the US planned to test its "anti-missile defence system's capability to destroy other countries' satellites".

The Pentagon is saying they want to detonate this satellite in orbit solely out of concern for the hydrazine fuel source, which is, you know, ridiculously flammable and explosive and therefore unlikely to survive reentry, and not actually very toxic, certainly not as lethal as, say, flaming shrapnel raining down from space...

Source: BBC News

Thug
A scandal has hit the Baltimore police department as a year-old video of a cop threatening kids with beatings and death for skateboarding hits the web.

I wonder if our culture of torture and violence and rage has anything to do with this stuff... nah.

A Baltimore police officer was suspended yesterday after a YouTube video surfaced on the Internet showing him berating and manhandling a teenage skateboarder at the Inner Harbor.

On the video, the officer, Salvatore Rivieri, puts the boy in a headlock, pushes him to the ground, questions his upbringing, threatens to "smack" him and repeatedly accuses the youngster of showing disrespect because the youth refers to the officer as "man" and "dude."

At one point, Rivieri, a 17-year veteran of the force, says:

"Obviously, your parents don't put a foot in your butt quite enough, because you don't understand the meaning of respect. First of all, you better learn how to speak. I'm not 'man.' I'm not 'dude,' I am Officer Rivieri. The sooner you learn that, the longer you are going to live in this world. Because you go around doing this kind of stuff and somebody is going to kill you.

Right, right. Kill them. And who is this 'somebody', you jackbooted asshole?

Source: The Baltimore Sun

Bush Dynasty
So the Bush dynasty, it turns out, wasn't just a viper's nest of nazi sympathy and treason during World War II -- they were also slaveholders, way back when.

The skeletal facts surfaced in April 2007, when an amateur historian named Robert Hughes published his research in the Illinois Times, a small paper out of Springfield. Hughes found census records showing that during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, in Cecil County, Maryland, five households of the Walker family, the president's ancestors via his father's mother, Dorothy Walker Bush, had been slaveholding farmers. The evidence is simple but persuasive: genealogies of the Bush family match up with census data that counted farmers who used enslaved workers. With this, the president joins perhaps fifteen million living white Americans who trace their roots to the long-gone master class.

Is there a single monstrous act that hasn't in fact been committed by this family?

Source: The Root

Not to Worry
No need to fret about our government though. It's in very good hands.

Sorry. I forgot that sarcasm doesn't show in text for a second there.

Bush uses "the Google."

CNBC's Maria Bartiromo got an interview with the president, and she asked him:
“I’m curious, have you ever Googled anybody? Do you use Google?”

His answer:
“Occasionally. One of the things I’ve used on the Google is to pull up maps. It’s very interesting to see that. I forgot the name of the program, but you get the satellite and you can — like, I kind of like to look at the ranch on Google, reminds me of where I want to be sometimes. Yeah, I do it some.”

Darn, what's fun of being commander-in-chief, and having your own fleet of satellites, if you have to use Google Earth like the rest of us. Bush's response on whether he uses email was also interesting:
“I tend not to email or — not only tend not to email, I don’t email, because of the different record requests that can happen to a president. I don’t want to receive emails because, you know, there’s no telling what somebody’s email may — it would show up as, you know, a part of some kind of a story, and I wouldn’t be able to say, `Well, I didn’t read the email.’ `But I sent it to your address, how can you say you didn’t?’ So, in other words, I’m very cautious about emailing.”

What a maroon.

On the other hand, he didn't turn out to have much to fear about those emails being subpoenaed, what with the RNC taking rubber mallets to their RAID arrays, or whatever they did to conveniently lose their backups of all the days that anyone wants to look at.

Source: Attytood