Category Archives: natural disaster
Republican Leaders
Republican leaders told President Trump they had a plan to get things done in Congress. They didn’t. And the swamp remains.
So Trump made a deal with Chuck Schumer to raise the debt ceiling and free up billions for hurricane victims. Now he’s looking at Schumer for more deals.
Republican Leaders
Here’s what Rich Lowry has to say about that:
The idea that Trump, who has been too inept to help his own party in Congress, will team up with perhaps the most deviously shrewd Democrat in the country and come out on top is difficult to credit. Schumer will milk Trump for whatever he can get — every tactical advantage, every bit of new spending — so long as he doesn’t give away anything important and doesn’t materially boost Trump’s political standing.
National Review’s Jonathan Tobin thinks the Republican party means nothing to Trump. Maybe for good reason:
Trump is unbound by any loyalty to the party that nominated him or to men such as House speaker Paul Ryan and Senator Mitch McConnell. To the contrary, he regards them as foes in a cold war against a political establishment he neither likes nor trusts.
Shoe Storm
So far there haven’t been any ” heck of a job, Brownie” moments in the Trump administration’s response to Hurricane Harvey. In fact he’s gotten good marks.
Shoe Storm
So some critics have raised a shoe storm about Melania’s footwear. As she boarded Air Force One, headed for Texas, she was spotted wearing extremely high heels. Seemed reasonable to me. I would have worn floodwater pants. Anyway, by the time she landed in the disaster area she was wearing white sneakers
Cajun Navy
The Atlantic has a nice story about the “Cajun Navy.” It’s made up of private citizens with boats who rescue Hurricane Harvey victims:
Clyde Cain, who runs a Cajun Navy Facebook page told USA Today last year, “The reality of the Cajun Navy is everybody out here with a boat that isn’t devastated gets out and helps others.”
Showing Up In Louisiana
According to CBS News, thirteen people have died and 30,000 have been rescued from homes and cars due to flooding in Louisiana.
President Obama doesn’t want to get in the way of the relief effort so he’s staying put on the golf course at Martha’s Vineyard. Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards obliged by asking him not to come.
But the Baton Rouge Advocate doesn’t see it that way. The paper invited the president to come on down. A lead editorial was titled Vacation or not, a hurting Louisiana needs you now, President Obama:
Sometimes, presidential visits can get in the way of emergency response, doing more harm than good. But we don’t see that as a factor now that flood waters are subsiding, even if at an agonizing pace. It’s past time for the president to pay a personal visit, showing his solidarity with suffering Americans.
The press and politicians weren’t so cautious either when President Bush did a Katrina flyover in 2005. The Washington Examiner quotes Senator Barack Obama on the 2008 campaign trail:
“We can talk about what happened for two days in 2005 and we should. We can talk about levees that couldn’t hold, a FEMA that seemed not just incompetent but paralyzed and powerless, about a president who only saw the people from the window of an airplane instead of down here on the ground.”
Speaking of the campaign trail, Hillary can’t very well make a Louisiana appearance if Obama says he’d be in the way. So she’s visiting Martha’s Vineyard too.
80% of Success is Showing Up
All that island hopping left a flood victim vacuum. Donald Trump wasted no time filling it. Trump and Mike Pence were soon photographed helping unload a relief truck for the flood victims. And they didn’t seem to be in the way.
Now Obama says he’ll show up Tuesday.
Tapped Out In Flint
Flint Michigan has third world tap water.
In a cost cutting move the City stopped buying water from Detroit and began building a pipeline to Lake Huron. Detroit cut Flint off before the pipeline was complete. The city began drawing water from the Flint River. People complained that the water was foul and smelly. The water department insisted it was safe.
The Flint water was so corrosive the auto industry stopped using it. The corrosion damaged pipes and caused lead levels to rise to five times acceptable levels.
Now it’s a huge infrastructure problem with no fix in sight. The entire population depends on bottled water passed out at fire stations.
The EPA didn’t acknowledge the water crisis in Flint until President Obama announced emergency federal help last week.
EPA also dragged its feet on its release of 3 million gallons of water from the Gold King Mine into the Animas River in Colorado last summer.
