Saturday, July 21, 2007

FEMA Failures Meet Democratic Oversight

"We have lost a great deal through our dealings with FEMA," said Paul Stewart, a former Army officer living in a trailer with his wife in Mississippi, "not the least of which is our faith in government."
When a retired military officer has lost faith in Bush’s government, that is a bell weather indicator of what many of us predicted since that horrendous day back in December 2000.

You remember that day in December in which the United States Supreme Court legally stopped the vote counting in a U.S. election. The self-proclaimed greatest democracy on the planet no longer believed that counting the votes counted in determining an election outcome. The case was Bush v. Gore, and a New York Times editorial last August summarized it succinctly.
The Supreme Court’s highly partisan resolution of the 2000 election was a severe blow to American democracy . . ..
And what we’ve learned since that day is just how true it is when we say that elections have consequences. Here we are with another set of scandals that negatively impact American lives directly in a real and palpable manner. One scandal centers on millions of dollars of ice for hurricane survivors melting in the sun. The other on FEMA deliberately weighing the cost of lawsuits against testing for the adverse health effects of its formaldehyde-filled trailers. Read more . . .

Update (John Leek): Paul Stewart is now running for Southern District Transportation Commissioner. He may just get my vote. :)

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