The federal government is a slow, stupid, plodding bureaucracy which can't respond quickly to anything. And if you're counting on them to save you when the next hurricane hits, you may well find yourself dead. A Department of Defense official told Congress Thursday that DoD and Homeland Security need as much as a week to prepare to respond to a major disaster. And those of you living in hurricane territories will immediately recognize exactly how stupid that is.
Low morale continues to plague the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, resulting in widespread vacancies in senior-level positions all over the department as well as general understaffing. DHS will "probably" do something about it, according to its top human resources official.
New Orleans mayor C. Ray Nagin was re-elected Saturday by a vote of 52 percent to 48 percent against his challenger, Mitch Landrieu, the current lieutenant governor of Louisiana. And, Nagin said in his victory speech, for all of the "folks who went to the other side, who went to the red-light district, I forgive you."
Here are some updates to four stories previously covered at Homeland Stupidity.
New Orleans, La., mayor Ray Nagin has unveiled the city's new disaster plan. It's quite a simple plan: Run for the hills, run for your lives.
A bipartisan Senate investigation into the government's response to Hurricane Katrina has found that government failed at all levels to provide an appropriate response to one of the worst disasters in American history, and called for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to be abolished. I would be cheering, except for what they recommend to replace it.
Is there anything that moves slower than a government bureaucracy? Actually, it seems that there is: the mainstream media.
The 2006 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced Monday at Columbia University in New York City, and among the winners were the New Orleans Times-Picayune for its coverage of Hurricane Katrina and the two reporters from the New York Times who broke the story in December of President George W. Bush's terrorist surveillance program.
So much stupidity happens every day that sometimes it's hard to keep up. I frequently have more stories than time to post them. Here are a few things that happened in the last week. Some are noteworthy, some are funny, and all are just plain stupid.
Last month I let you know that the Federal Emergency Management Agency gave out far too much money in disaster assistance for Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, mainly because of people defrauding the system. Now FEMA is lowering the boom. It's sending letters to everyone who got too much money, telling them they now have to pay back the amount of assistance they were overpaid.
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