Haste makes waste, so a certain amount of mismanagement and abuse was to be expected when the government rushed relief after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. But nothing like this — up to $2 billion in scams, waste and bureaucratic bungles, The New York Times calculated. That’s nearly 11 percent of the $19 billion spent by the Federal Emergency Management Agency as of mid-June.
Examples cited by the Times include $10 million in rental and disaster-relief assistance to about 1,100 prison inmates, and renovations for a shelter at a former Alabama Army base that cost about $416,000 per evacuee.
Said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, chairwoman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee: “The blatant fraud, the audacity of the schemes, the scale of the waste — it is just breathtaking.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Josh Marshall of the blog Talking Points Memo Memo agrees that Democrats have not been able to effectively counter the “cut and run” refrain of the GOP — a point Rhonda made in an earlier post. Here’s his advice to Senate Democrats:
“The president wants to stay in Iraq for at least three more years. It’s not that he won’t set a date to withdraw. He doesn’t even have a plan that gets to the point where the U.S. could end the occupation. In practice he wants to stay in Iraq forever. What Republicans are voting for is More of the Same, More of the Same failed policy.
“Democrats need to hammer this point again and again and not get tripped up in the president’s bully-boy rhetoric. The president has no plan. He wants to stay in Iraq forever. He says for at least three more years. All the Republicans agree they want more of the same.”
Posted by Melissa Cooley
The Arkansas Supreme Court ruled unanimously Thursday that the state’s child welfare board cannot bar gays from becoming foster parents. As the court noted, there is no link between a parent’s sexual orientation and a child’s well-being, so “the driving force behind adoption of the regulations was not to promote the health, safety and welfare of foster children but rather based upon the board’s views of morality and its bias against homosexuals.”
Fortunately, a push last year in Kansas to prohibit gays from adopting foster children went nowhere in the Legislature. Kansas needs all the caring adoptive parents it can get.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
