FEMA Director flunked a back ground test miserably
Socrates
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Michael Brown lied on his resume about being a professor in a college in Oklahoma. They checked and the school has no records or recollection of him!He also said he was a director of a retirement home somewhere, they've never heard of him either. Unbelievable!!!! http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1103003,00.html 
~Crates
~Crates
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Joe Allbaugh, Disaster Pimp
"I don't buy the 'revolving door' argument," said Bush's former FEMA chief.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2005, at 3:22 PM PT
"Disaster-relief contracts going once ... "
Writing in the Sept. 1 Washington Post, Dan Balz noted that in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Joe Allbaugh, the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), was in Louisiana "helping coordinate the private-sector response to the storm." Readers who don't know much about how Washington works probably took this to mean that an admirably selfless Allbaugh was giving generously of his time to help speed the rescue effort. There may, in fact, have been some of that. But Allbaugh is no mere dabbler in "the private-sector response" to government needs. He's a lobbyist and a consultant who's been cashing in on his close ties to President Bush since 2003. Allbaugh, in addition to being Bush's first FEMA chief (Allbaugh's college roommate Michael Brown succeeded him), was Bush's chief of staff when he was governor of Texas and campaign manager to Bush during the 2000 election. Now Allbaugh is the man to see if you want a contract in Iraq, or a piece of the action on homeland security, or, apparently, a shot at rebuilding New Orleans. "I don't buy the 'revolving door' argument," Allbaugh told the National Journal last year. "This is America. We all have a right to make a living."
As a former administration official, Allbaugh must follow certain rules meant to inhibit influence-peddling. These have never been terribly onerous, and the Bush administration last year made them less so. Federal law prohibits former government officials from ever attempting to influence the government on any matter in which they were directly involved while working for the government; it requires them to wait two years before they attempt to influence the government on any matter that was pending up to a year before their departure from government; and it requires senior personnel like Allbaugh to wait one year before they attempt to influence their former agency. No sweat! Allbaugh has been out of the government for two and a half years, and back when the one- and two-year restrictions still applied, the client always had the option to contact even FEMA through Allbaugh's wife and lobbying partner Diane. Diane Allbaugh had the entrepreneurial vision to set up a lobbying business in Washington shortly before her husband's boss was elected president???if you want to get technical, appointed president by the Rehnquist court???in 2000.
What, precisely, is the "private-sector response" that Allbaugh has been "coordinating" in New Orleans? Nobody seems to know. (Allbaugh hasn't returned my phone call yet, but I expect he will; he's famously accessible to reporters, which may help explain why his influence-peddling operation has received so little scrutiny.) Looking over the Allbaugh family client list, likely suspects include Kellog, Brown and Root (subsidiary to Halliburton), for whom both Allbaughs are lobbying to "[e]ducate the congressional and executive branch on defense, disaster relief [italics mine], and homeland security issues." KBR has already been hired to help repair three Navy facilities damaged by Hurricane Katrina, under a contract that predates its relationship with Allbaugh. Shaw Group International is similarly employing Allbaugh to "educate" the government on disaster relief???we should start calling the former FEMA chief "professor"!???and therefore seems another likely beneficiary of Allbaugh's mission to Louisiana. But that's just guesswork. No doubt Allbaugh is scaring up new clients even as I write.
In his early days as FEMA administrator, Allbaugh worried that the agency's mission had "evolved into ??? an oversized entitlement program." Now it's Allbaugh himself who's suckling from FEMA's teat. Not to worry, though: It's all in the name of stimulating the private sector. And also???I almost forgot???rebuilding New Orleans.
Advance Men in Charge
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Published: September 9, 2005
The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced this week that it didn't want the news media taking photographs of the dead in New Orleans. A FEMA spokeswoman talked unconvincingly about the dignity of the dead. But the bizarre demand, a creepy echo of the ban on news media coverage of the coffins returning from Iraq, is simply the latest spasm of a gutted federal agency.
It's not really all that surprising that the officials who run FEMA are stressing that all-important emergency response function: the public relations campaign. As it turns out, that's all they really have experience at doing.
Michael Brown was made the director after he was asked to resign from the International Arabian Horse Association, and the other top officials at FEMA don't exactly have impressive r??sum??s in emergency management either. The Chicago Tribune reported on Wednesday that neither the acting deputy director, Patrick Rhode, nor the acting deputy chief of staff, Brooks Altshuler, came to FEMA with any previous experience in disaster management. Ditto for Scott Morris, the third in command until May.
Mr. Altshuler and Mr. Rhode had worked in the White House's Office of National Advance Operations. Those are the people who decide where the president will stand on stage and which loyal supporters will be permitted into the audience - and how many firefighters will be diverted from rescue duty to surround the president as he patrols the New Orleans airport trying to look busy. Mr. Morris was a press handler with the Bush presidential campaign. Previously, he worked for the company that produced Bush campaign commercials.
So when Mr. Brown finally got around to asking Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff for extra people for Katrina, it wasn't much of a departure for Mr. Brown to say that one of the things he wanted them to do was to "convey a positive image of disaster operations to government officials, community organizations and the general public." We'd like them to stay focused on conveying food, water and medical help to victims.
Political patronage has always been a hallmark of Washington life. But President Bill Clinton appointed political pals at FEMA who actually knew something about disaster management. The former FEMA director James Lee Witt, whose tenure is widely considered a major success, was a friend of Mr. Clinton's when he took office in 1993, but he had run the Arkansas Office of Emergency Services. His top staff came from regional FEMA offices.
Surely there are loyal Republicans among the 50 directors of state emergency services. But President Bush chose to make FEMA a dumping ground for unqualified cronies - a sure sign that he wanted to hasten the degradation of an agency that conservative Republicans have long considered an evil of big government. Katrina has proved that federal disaster help is vital, and that Mr. Brown and his team of advance men can't do the job. What America needs are federal disaster relief people who actually know something about disaster relief.
Get the fuccckkkk outta herrr!
WTF!
~Crates
Right up there with Ronald McDonald!
evil clowns
paging vitamin or p**l for an explanation
I was wondering where Vitamin has been...
Egypt
Oh word