Elaine Meinel Supkis
Right after tornadoes kill two dozen people and flatten whole neighborhoods, a FEMA top press secretary is arrested for trying to seduce a young "Bambi" online who was really an FBI agent. Talk about dumb! FEMA still has no leader and no one wants the job. Surprised?
The deputy press secretary for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was arrested Tuesday for using the Internet to seduce what he thought was a teenage girl, authorities said.Brian J. Doyle, 55, was arrested at his residence in Maryland on charges of use of a computer to seduce a child and transmission of harmful material to a minor. The charges were issued out of Polk County, Fla.
Doyle, of Silver Spring, Md., had a sexually explicit conversation with what he believed was a 14-year-old girl whose profile he saw on the Internet on March 14, the Polk County Sheriff's Office said in a statement.
The girl was an undercover Polk County Sheriff's Computer Crimes detective, the sheriff's office said.
Too bad bin Laden doesn't surf the net looking for little girls! Then we would be able to snag him! On the other hand, attacking America is simplicity itself. FEMA is a corrupt wasteland. The GOP has used it to farm out their more odious family members, the ones like Neil Bush who can't get a real job. Like the press secretary of NASA who was a wastrel Young Republican drop-out, the Bush administration thinks these organizations are simply family attics for those members of an antic disposition, as Hamlet's uncle would say.
A mayoral election is less than three weeks away, and the sympathy of elected officials for the irritations of voters in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is boundless.Lee Celano for The New York Times
Work on this FEMA trailer park rising in the Algiers area of New Orleans has been stopped, officials say.
As a result, there will be no trailer park in Lakewood Estates, a collection of solid, spacious homes behind a high locked gate in the Algiers section.Last weekend, angry residents of the neighborhood took to the street to protest a trailer park being built on their doorstep by the Federal Emergency Management Agency for 34 single women and their children who were left homeless by the hurricane. FEMA, their signs proclaimed, was "raping" their neighborhood.
Construction was already well along — some 20-odd trailers are already in place on the dusty lot — but fortunately for the residents of Lakewood Estates, campaign season is also well along.
The knee-jerk reaction to hurricanes leads to wasting millions and millions of dollars on ridiculous enterprises. New Orleans is, as far as the lowlands are concerned, uninhabitable. At slightly higher ground, putting in flimsy trailers is a dumb idea. Hurricane season is right around the corner. These structures can't even take middling thunderstorms and the tornadoes that killed so many people just this week are proof that the very worst thing one can live in out in these places is a trailer. Instead of housing Americans in safe structures, we put up trailer parks all over the place. Just yesterday, in California, a levee broke and trailer parks were flooded, luckily, no one died there but why do we put trailers where there are floods? I grew up seeing this. Flood plain=trailer park.
The political confusion surrounding FEMA and our response to ever-rising disasters must be addressed. Throwing ever larger fistfuls of Chinese yuan at them isn't going to make America stronger or better. Either we grow up and have realistic conversations about populations and Mother Nature who is obviously on a rather big rampage right now, or we will continue to waste time, money and lives, blundering about, blindly.
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