Janice, Tag, and I live in Houston, which you may have read is not in such great shape. Friday night was terrifying. We lost power at around 11:30 and went to sleep. At 3:30 Saturday morning, we woke up to five smoke detectors chirping throughout our house. Thankfully, there was no fire, but there was no way to go back to sleep.
In short, the night was long, loud, and because our roof didn’t quite hold, wet.
After sitting around in oppressive heat with no air conditioning, no water pressure and little patience, we made a run for it. We were very lucky to have an air conditioned place to stay in Austin.
FEMA moved into our hometown as we moved out. Everyone hopes it performs better in Houston than it did in New Orleans.
FEMA’s miserable failure during Hurricane Katrina has been blamed by some on the fact that FEMA had been staffed with unqualified Bush Administration cronies, who were given government jobs as rewards for political support:
In presidential politics, the victor always gets the spoils, and chief among them is the vast warren of offices that make up the federal bureaucracy. Historically, the U.S. public has never paid much attention to the people the President chooses to sit behind those thousands of desks. A benign cronyism is more or less presumed, with old friends and big donors getting comfortable positions and impressive titles, and with few real consequences for the nation.
But then came Michael Brown. When President Bush’s former point man on disasters was discovered to have more expertise about the rules of Arabian horse competition than about the management of a catastrophe, it was a reminder that the competence of government officials who are not household names can have a life or death impact. The Brown debacle has raised pointed questions about whether political connections, not qualifications, have helped an unusually high number of Bush appointees land vitally important jobs in the Federal Government.
If Sarah Palin had been president as Ike came ashore, what kind of leadership might she have appointed to run FEMA? Today’s New York Times provides a glimpse:
Gov. Sarah Palin lives by the maxim that all politics is local, not to mention personal.
So when there was a vacancy at the top of the State Division of Agriculture, she appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, to the $95,000-a-year directorship. A former real estate agent, Ms. Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as a qualification for running the roughly $2 million agency.
Ms. Havemeister was one of at least five schoolmates Ms. Palin hired, often at salaries far exceeding their private sector wages.
My eight-year-old nephew loves dinosaurs. I wonder if she’d be willing to consider appointing him to head the The Office of Science and Technology Policy, which ”advises the President on the effects of science and technology on domestic and international affairs.”
Change!
