Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Billmon Peers Into His Crystal Ball

Posted on September 3, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

Billmon has seen the future and it’s not pretty:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Two key U.S. senators said on Friday they will launch a bipartisan coverup of what they described as an “immense, but probably unavoidable failure” of the government response to Hurricane Katrina.

Sen.
Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who heads the Senate Governmental
Affairs Committee, and Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the panel’s othertop-ranking Republican, said they hope to shift as much blame as
possible to lower-ranking officials and career federal employees —
ideally at an obscure government agency that few Americans have ever
heard of.

There’s more…

Posted in Politics: US | 2 Comments

You Couldn’t Make This Up

Posted on September 3, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

From the Boston Globe, via TPM, Bush Approach to Quality Disaster Management:

The federal official in charge of the bungled New Orleans rescue was fired from his last private-sector job overseeing horse shows.

Seems he has a track record of exactly the kind of failure we’re seeing here,

Brown was forced out of the position after a spate of lawsuits over alleged supervision failures.

Posted in Unspeakably Awful (Katrina) | 1 Comment

Public Health Consequences of Katrina

Posted on September 3, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

Via Dave Farber's mailing list, an interesting and sobering analysis of Hurricane Katrina's public health consequences.

Posted in Science/Medicine | 1 Comment

Pigs Are Flying, People Are Dying

Posted on September 3, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

Hell on earth? Yes, and hell freezing over too: FOX News — Fox news forsooth — is reporting that it is inexplicable that the relief is not provided to victims of the flood SIX DAYS after the disaster struck. See the video. Who would have imagined Geraldo Rivera would be shouting the truth at America? And Shepard Smith reporting that people are locked into the Superdome where they are starving and dying. Of course the anchors tried to obfuscate….

Posted in Unspeakably Awful (Katrina) | 3 Comments

Interview With Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans

Posted on September 2, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

Harrowing audio (.mp3) of the WWL radio interview with Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans. Not for the faint of heart, nor those who swoon at “bad” language.

Posted in Unspeakably Awful (Katrina) | 63 Comments

Worse Than A Crime

Posted on September 2, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

“Worse than a crime—a blunder” describes so many of the major decisions of this administration. It's odd, however, to see popping up on a mailing list of law professors the query as to whether the current failure to plan for or to provide disaster relief might be grounds for impeachment.

Personally, I think mere incompetence, even gross incompetence, is not a “high crime and misdemeanor” as the Constitution understands the term, so were I in office I would not vote to impeach for that. Furthermore, I have some trouble seeing what impeachment would accomplish given that the person who'd take over is probably making many of the key decisions now anyway.

On the other hand, lying to the people to take us to war…

Posted in Politics: US | 7 Comments