Visual source: Newseum
WaPo:
But as he, the Alabama governor and legislators visited Tuscaloosa, 150 miles to the northeast there was little sign of federal aid or government officials — an absence that revealed the enormity of a cleanup effort that spans eight states.
In rural DeKalb County, Ala., where 32 people were killed by the storms, Matt Bell ignored two black helicopters that flew overhead at noontime. Instead, he focused on a field of obliterated homes, scattered with pencil-size wood shards, shredded insulation, ripped paper, shoes, toys, towels — lives in a million fragments.
Bell was helping a neighbor look for documents. Asked about federal assistance, he just shrugged, as many in this county did Friday.
The national response framework was covered in
Daily Kos posts in 2007 and 2008 (see especially
The National Response Framework And You (Part I):
Note in the [ Stafford Act chart] that it's the Governor, who asks FEMA, who asks the President to declare a Federal disaster or emergency so as to free up funds and relief that through the National Response Framework can be delivered to the states. If the Governor does not or cannot ask (i.e in a catastrophic situation), things may slow down, but FEMA, through the [Federal Coordinating Official], can help smooth over that process if a FCO has been appointed. If not, other catastrophic mechanisms outside the Stafford Act may need to apply. That's a post-Katrina lesson that is clearly in need of implementation. This implies that FEMA is running the show, though, and under DHS' complex hierarchy, that is far from clear.
The federal response is intiiated by the state, and complexity and speed are inversely related. The wider the area affected, the slower the response will be (because supplies and infrastructure needs to come from farther away.) So let's talk about cutting the budget, shall we? Especially for FEMA. (see
GOP's Continuing Resolution Cuts Funding for National Weather Service, FEMA.) Brilliant idea.
EJ Dionne:
Alas, Americans don’t pay much attention to politics in Canada, our most reliable ally. That might change Monday night when returns roll in from the Canadian election. If the polls are right — and there are a lot of “ifs” — our friendly neighbor to the north is brewing a political revolution.
The big news out of Canada is that North America’s largest social democratic party — that would be Canada’s New Democratic Party, or NDP — threatens to displace the centrist Liberal Party as the country’s main opposition. Even more astonishingly, the NDP has an outside chance of winning the most seats in the election.
Charles Blow:
Donald Trump is still playing to suspicions of President Obama. And it’s no longer theoretical. It’s theological. For the detractors, truth is no longer dependent on proof because it’s rooted in faith: faith that American exceptionalism was never truly meant to cover hyphenated Americans; faith in 400 years of cemented assumptions about the character and capacity of the American Negro; and faith that if the president doesn’t hew to those assumptions then he must be alien by both birth and faith.
Colbert I King:
I’m looking at a photo with the faces of three chimpanzees imposed on the bodies of a man, woman and child. The baby chimp’s face is covered with Obama’s picture. It was e-mailed in California this month with the message: “Now you know why — no birth certificate!”
The sender was Marilyn Davenport, an elected member of the Orange County Republican Central Committee, who thought her GOP colleagues would also get a kick out of seeing the president of the United States depicted as the offspring of chimpanzees.
“I simply found it amusing regarding the character of Obama and all the questions surrounding his origins of birth,” Davenport said in a written statement. “In no way did I even consider the fact that he’s half black when I sent out the email.”
Kathleen Parker:
In a saner time, Trump would be dismissed as the carnival barker Obama implied he is. People would have recognized Trump as a self-aggrandizing megalomaniac and put a period at the end of the sentence. Not remotely would his name be followed with this phrase: “who is leading other Republican candidates in polls.”
Which, at the moment, happens to be true. Indeed, Trump is enjoying a resurgence of self-regard, awarding himself accolades for forcing Obama’s hand.
To answer my own question, I honestly don’t know what to make of Trump’s popularity nor of the continuing belief that Obama wasn’t born in the 50th state. Yet even otherwise rational people continue to carry on and react as though facts were irrelevant. Even as the president spoke at a news conference to dispel remaining suspicions, the Twitterverse confirmed that nothing had changed. The conspirators conspired; the rueful rued.
The rueful rued? It's because people like Parker insist on false equivalence like in this piece. Denounce the crazies and praise the sane, Kathleen. Yeah, it means saying nice things about Democrats and bad things about Republicans. You'll get over it. Just suck it up and do your job.
