NY Daily News: Federal bureaucracy in the way

[brooklynite]

'We will not allow bureaucracy to get in the way of saving lives," President Bush vowed, but bureaucracy has already done exactly that, and bureaucracy continues to lumber along blindly. Yesterday, for example, dozens of volunteer physicians from all over the country were cooling their heels in the Mississippi flood zone, come to donate their efforts and energies to the relief operations - and were bogged down in utterly mindless Department of Health and Human Services red tape, unable to admit desperate moms and crying babies into their mobile infirmaries.

We will not allow bureaucracy to get in the way of saving lives. If the President means that, he will give a good swift kick to his clumsy federal machine and put into place professional mechanics who know how to make the thing work. Notably asnooze throughout too many early hours of the Gulf Coast nightmare has been the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a once-robust outfit that seems to have lost its sense of mission. FEMA chief Michael Brown is a horse breeder by trade. Just a year ago, there were local and state and federal drills to develop quick-time responses to the well-anticipated doomsday New Orleans-flood scenario; specific action plans emerged from those exercises. Surely Brown was familiar with them?

We will not allow bureaucracy to get in the way of saving lives. Even as the nation with gratitude watches its troops performing heroically in what is left of New Orleans and the coast - Americans at their finest, doing the job the way America does a big job once it gets started - the question rings ever louder and more disturbingly: Why did not these troops get their orders sooner than they did?

Miscommunication, lamely explained homeland security boss Michael Chertoff. Not good enough. Somebody screwed this up. The nation wants to know who those persons are. And the nation wants those persons gone, before they can screw up anything else. Surely President Bush understands the desirability of such departures.

[evolvenow]

1. Was it a Martial Law exercise? Why were food. water. med. and communicatio

ns turned away by FEMA? whoever was responsible for NOT RESPONDING should be tried for the MURDER of all of these poor innocent people and animals.

This will be the silver bullet in the death of the UN_DEAD shadow government.

Atrocious and Horrible.


Why were a 100o people trying to help with 500 boats turned away, in the early hours, when life saving and evacuation were critical, why were they not allowed to help vctims evacuate out of a hospital? Sickening.

kick