Given that, other than children’s programs, there are very few films that actually fit in this category, you have to wonder what these officials are taking in their tea.

The Soviets use to do things like this. Some senior apparatchik would get it in his head that something was “evil”, and the state would ban it. Communist officials have a lot in common with Fred Phelps and the Religious Reich.

Proving that he is as out of touch on this, as everything else – Jeff Miller [R FL-1]:

“The role that we think the Department of Defense can play is certainly in staging, distribution, and coordination. I do not think at all that the military needs to come in and take over the state’s function of the local government’s function.”

Miller says one problem in Louisiana after Katrina was the governor and mayor wanted to control the National Guard, but then didn’t know what to do with them.

No, actually, the problem was that 40% of the Louisiana Guard was in Iraq with 100% of the equipment that was needed to respond. As their communications gear, generators, water trucks, and the vehicles modified to operate in swamps were in an Iraqi desert, the Louisiana Guard wasn’t able to operate effectively.

They want to shift more responsibility to the Pentagon. They say there was a lack of coordination of the military effort. What they fail to mention is that the only thing that had to be done to release the military that was ready to go to work was for the Shrubbery to have picked up a telephone and given the word to the commander of the Northern Command who was sitting by the phone waiting.

The USS Bataan followed the storm to New Orleans. The Navy had forces staged at Pensacola. The Air Force had people and supplies staged at Hurlburt Field. The Army had people ready to rush in. They were all ready, and some “bent” the rules to help, but they needed a Presidential order to go to work.

The coordination problem for the military in the case of Katrina was that no one told the Shrubbery that he had to make a phone call while on vacation.

When they talked about the lack of coordination before 9/11 they skipped over the fact that coordination was the job of the President’s National Security Council. When Ms. Rice failed to do her job the system failed.

They keep creating new bureaucracies to do the jobs that the White House has always done in the past. There are more people doing less in this White House than ever before and the Federal bureaucracy keeps growing.

Adding another layer of management never has, and never will improve communications.

™ ^{[Kevin Drum]}

Lap Fungus

Zzzzzzzz….

[Editor: It’s a tough life putting up with Ringo, so Dot is taking a break.]

Friday Ark