Hurricane Irene And The Benefits Of Big Government
Don’t expect anybody to throw a tea party, but Big Government finally got one right.
On Monday, six years to the day after Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans and obliterated the notion of a competent federal government, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Administrator Craig Fugate offered an anecdote that showed just how different things were with Hurricane Irene.
On the podium in the White House briefing room, he recalled the satellite images of Irene’s path. “Do you remember seeing the satellite, how big that storm was and how close it was to the state of Florida?” he asked. Fugate, the former emergency management chief in Florida, said that a decade or so ago, “Florida would have had to evacuate based upon this track.”
Instead, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s improved models predicted landfall in North Carolina, and, in fact, “the track was only about 10 miles off of where they actually thought it was going to come ashore.”
This was just one piece of the overall anticipation of Irene and response to the storm that has earned high marks for FEMA and NOAA. Like the killing of Osama bin Laden, it was a rare reminder that the federal government can still do great things, after all other possibilities have been exhausted.
Such successes might provide an antidote to the souring of the public’s confidence in government. By coincidence, a Gallup poll released Monday showed that only 17 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the federal government, a new low.
More likely, however, Americans won’t have long to savor this new competence in government. NOAA has already been hit with budget cuts that will diminish its ability to track storms, and FEMA, like much of the federal government, will lose about a third of its funding over the next decade if Tea Party Republicans have their way.
In the spending compromise for this year worked out between congressional Republicans and the White House, NOAA’s budget was cut by about $140 million (House Republicans had sought much larger cuts) and money for new satellites was cut by more than $500 million from President Obama’s request. NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco warned in May, “we are likely looking at a period of time a few years down the road where we will not be able to do the severe storm warnings . . . that people have come to expect today.”
Congressional Democrats and the White House were somewhat more successful this year in resisting cuts to FEMA that Republicans had proposed. But under the House Republicans’ plan to freeze discretionary spending at 2008 levels over a decade, FEMA cuts are inevitable. According to an analysis by the Center for American Progress’s Scott Lilly that takes into account inflation and population, this amounts to a 31 percent cut in real per capita spending on discretionary functions such as FEMA.
Tea Partyers who denounce Big Government seem to have an abstract notion that government spending means welfare programs and bloated bureaucracies. Almost certainly they aren’t thinking about hurricane tracking and pre-positioning of FEMA supplies. But if they succeed in paring the government, some of these Tea Partyers (particularly those on the coasts or on the tornadic plains) may be surprised to discover that they have turned a Hurricane Irene government back into a Katrina government.
The Irene government would seem to have its benefits. Before the storm struck, 18 FEMA teams deployed from Florida to Maine, repositioning as the emphasis moved to New England. Food, water, generators and tarps were in place along the storm’s path. In Vermont, when the storm forced evacuation of the state emergency operations center, the workers relocated to a FEMA facility. In North Carolina, FEMA provided in-the-dark local authorities with generator power. And everywhere, FEMA, given new authority by Congress after Katrina, didn’t have to wait for states to request help.
“We have to go fast; we have to base it upon the potential impacts,” Fugate said Monday, describing the Irene response. “That’s why we look at these forecasts we get from the hurricane center, and we make the decisions based upon what the potential impacts could be. If you wait till you know how bad it is, it becomes harder to change the outcome.”
That’s one model. The other model is to have a weak federal government, without the funds to forecast storms or to launch a robust emergency response in time to do any good.
You might call that the Tea Party model.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 29, 2011
Tea Party-Backed Rep Joe Walsh Lists No Child Support Debt On Financial Forms
Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL), a Tea-Party darling who has made a name for himself on the talk show circuit lecturing Democrats to get the nation’s finances in order, has been under fire in recent weeks over charges that he’s a deadbeat dad, owing more than $100,000 in child support.
Last Thursday, Walsh told constituents at a townhall that he plans to “privately and legally” fight his ex-wife’s claims that he owes more than $100,000 in child support, which he called “wildly inaccurate.” A recent Chicago Sun-Times article reported that his ex-wife is suing him for $117,000 in unpaid support.
Yet, even if Walsh owes just $10,000 in unpaid child support, he could face the added headache of House Ethics Committee scrutiny. Walsh, who was elected in 2010 in a narrow victory over former Rep. Melissa Bean (D-IL) in the Tea Party-induced wave, does not list any child support debt on his financial disclosure form, as required for any liability worth more than $10,000.
“Rep. Walsh is required both by law and by congressional ethics rules to list debts in excess of $10,000 on his financial disclosure forms, including child support back payments,” said Public Citizen’s Craig Holman.
“Technically, he could be taken to task by the Ethics Committee or even the Justice Department for failure to file proper disclosure forms, but in all likelihood the Ethics Committee and Justice would be satisfied if Walsh were to file amended forms,” Holman explained.
But Walsh is in a bit of a bind. Filing an amended form would require him to admit to owing at least $10,000 in back child support, what would amount to an ugly political liability that could knock him out of his role as one of the top spokesmen for the Tea Party GOP freshmen class.
Some talking heads are already taking action. MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell last week said he had banned Walsh from his show until the Republican pays the child support he owes his wife and children. He also played a video of Walsh saying, “I won’t place one more dollar of debt on the backs of my kids” before noting that Walsh allegedly owes those kids $117,347 in child support, the Huffington Post reported.
Walsh’s ex-wife, Laura Walsh, says he failed to provide full child support for roughly five years from 2005 to 2010, from 2008 to 2010, the time of his election, she said he paid no support. After he was elected to Congress, which pays a salary of $174,000 a year, Walsh resumed full payments for their three children.
Laura Walsh’s suit also accuses Walsh and a girlfriend of taking international vacations while Walsh said he was too poor to pay child support.
Laura Walsh filed for divorce in December 2002 after 15 years of marriage. According to her suit, Walsh was $1,000 a month short of his commitment for 28 months during November 2005 to March 2008. Walsh allegedly paid nothing from 2008 until resuming in late 2010. She has asked the court to garnish his wages.
Susan Crabtree, Talking Points Memo, August 9, 2011
From Crazy To Insane: Conservatives Still Want More In Debt Ceiling Deal
Over on the progressive side of politics, they’re nursing their wounds and drowning their sorrows as details of the deal to increase the debt ceiling emerge. They feel like they lost to a Republican party that dug in and used the debt ceiling to achieve their goal of dramatically shrinking government spending and solving the deficit problem without raising a single penny in new revenue.
So they might be surprised to know that conservatives don’t think they won, either. The right, despite apparently negotiating Obama into a corner that pits him against large parts of his base, still isn’t satisfied.
“While this deal is moving in the right direction rhetorically thanks to pressure from conservatives, it still falls well short of the standards we have consistently laid out,” wrote the Heritage Action’s Michael Needham.
The group, a sister organization to the Heritage Foundation, says the upfront cuts included in the reported deal are “insufficient” and the super committee in charge of creating the next round of deficit reduction is a bad idea as reported.
“This deal highlights how dysfunctional Washington has become and we will continue to oppose it as insufficient to the task at hand,” Needham wrote.
On TV Sunday morning, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said he expected a large number of conservatives to share Heritage’s view.
“It’s a $3 trillion package that will allow $7 trillion to be added to the debt in the next decade,” Graham said, dismissively. “So how much celebrating are you going to do?”
Graham said he expected around half of the House GOP caucus to vote against the deal. It doesn’t have his vote yet, either.
One of the patron saints of those hardcore conservative Republicans in the House, blogger Erick Erickson, is also underwhelmed by the deal (it’s not the first time.)
Despite the fact that progressives and Democrats are publicly lamenting the reported deal as indicative of the effect of rhetoric like Erickson’s has had on Washington, Erickson sounds as if he feels as betrayed as some on the left.
“What we know about the pending deal is that the Democrats and Republicans are agreeing to a Deficit Commission,” Erickson wrote Sunday. “Despite the media spin — and the spin of some Republican sycophants — the deficit commission, which will be a super committee of the Congress, will have the power to come up with new tax revenue.”
By: Evan McMorris-Santero, Talking Points Memo, July 31, 2011
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