Katrina Konnections
Just a couple items that came to my attention early this morning.
If, while watching this past week's situation in and around New Orleans, you were wondering in part about the current head of FEMA...
Mike Brown came aboard FEMA in 2001, when invited by his college roommate (Joseph Allbaugh, who was then head of FEMA) to come work there. What had Brown been doing before that? For 11 years he was commissioner of judges and stewards for the International Arabian Horse Association, a breeders' and horse-show organization based in Colorado. In the end, he was asked to resign following several lawsuits over alleged supervision failures. Since Allbaugh had not just brought Brown into the agency, but made him a deputy director, when Allbaugh left FEMA in 2003 to work for Bush's presidential campaign Brown was in position to move into the the top spot.
A minor note concerning one, small aspect of the clean-up: Owing to a contract - awarded as a competitive bid in 2004, I must add - Haliburton will be in charge of repairs and power restoration at Naval bases in the region. If the bidding was open and they won it fair and square, well, fine, that's the way the process is supposed to work. I do wonder if we'll ever see a cost accounting of the work performed, though.
Back to the tragedy itself, I was going to include a few items individually but then I saw that Mark Gibson did much of the collection early this morning.
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