Cronyism and Corruption

From the Bush speech: "It is now clear that a challenge on this scale requires greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces." Now that is some kinda spin. What we learned is that Bush appoints “loyalists” with no experience to run the most important organizations on the planet. Incompetence, lack of planning, no chain of command is what we see over and over from this Administration. It goes way beyond FEMA into every cabinet level department and everyone should be able to see that now. So now that Bush has seen what happens when you appoint a political hack to run these organizations he has picked the “pig-man”, Karl Rove, to run the largest recovery effort in this country that any of us has seen. Of course this is buried in a New York Times article, hopefully more will be written and soon. This is not an acceptable person to be in charge of this effort. From Paul Krugman in the NYT: The Heritage Foundation, which has surely been helping Karl Rove develop the administration's recovery plan, has already published a manifesto on post-Katrina policy. It calls for waivers on environmental rules, the elimination of capital gains taxes and the private ownership of public school buildings in the disaster areas. And if any of the people killed by Katrina, most of them poor, had a net worth of more than $1.5 million, Heritage wants to exempt their heirs from the estate tax. Is there any way Mr. Bush could ensure an honest recovery program? Yes - he could insulate decisions about reconstruction spending from politics by placing them in the hands of an autonomous agency headed by a political independent, or, if no such person can be found, a Democrat (as a sign of good faith). He didn't do that last night, and probably won't. There's every reason to believe the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast, like the failed reconstruction of Iraq, will be deeply marred by cronyism and corruption.