Posted on 11/01/2012 6:57:53 PM PDT by markomalley
Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky held firm on his stance Thursday that local government provides better service when disaster strikes than the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
This summer, the Republican senator made headlines when he held up a bill re-authorizing the National Flood Insurance Program by attaching a non-related "personhood" amendment that called for defining life as beginning at conception.
Asked why he worked to stall the flood bill, Paul said the government was spending too much money it didn't have.
"I have always maintained that FEMA should exist on money that comes in as revenue, but not on borrowed money," the fiscal conservative said Thursday on CNN's "Erin Burnett OutFront."
Paul, a longtime critic of the agency, argued the U.S. should instead fund FEMA with the money it sends overseas in foreign aid. He also argued that local communities - as well as private groups such as the Salvation Army and the Red Cross - do a better job than federal agencies in the immediate aftermath of large-scale emergencies.
The Republican senator shared a story about the local response in cities devastated by tornadoes earlier this year in Kentucky, saying "the churches stepped up."
"Two thousand responders a day were being fed by churches, and the people were being put up in houses," he said. "So I don't think this is entirely a government response. I think it's important to really laud the private folks, as well as the churches who step up."
(Excerpt) Read more at politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com ...
Ron Paul wins the Captain Obvious trophy this week.
And then some.
I said something similar yesterday. FEMA will spend two weeks pushing paper from one desk to another and finally some reluctant beaurocrat will be sent out into the streets with the attitude “why do I have to do the dirty work”?
In the mean time the private sector will keep the people from starving and provide them with water.
Paul should know, after watching what didn’t happen to help the victims of historical flooding in Tennessee. FEMA didn’t do squat.
This is quickly becoming Obama’s disaster baby and he owns it... Obama’s Katrina II.
He swooped in and Christie made sure Obama owned the recovery work.
I don’t think this is going to have the desired effect Obama and co where thinking it would.
Beck’s Mercury one disaster relief fund is probably a good way to help.
http://fundly.com/mercury-one-disaster-relief-fund
Sorry mods for the double post...
My husband was in a restaurant in a city where a FEMA conference was held and over heard some of the FEMA management conversations. Basically boiled down to laughing about getting “Obama money,” i.e. taking the American tax payers for a ride and living the high life on their dime. He was thoroughly disgusted by the conversation he heard. I’m a HAM, a CAP member, and did FEMA’s online courses. From what I learned, there is no way I’ll work with them. I’ll help at the state and local level, but not with that Gibsmethat, corrupt outfit.
I think that should be Senator Obvious ;-)
It’s a government agency. will health care be any different? When everyone has health care, no one will have it.
FEMA was never intended to handle disasters like this or Katrina. People have been very cleverly sucked in to thinking this by the very name of the agency “Federal Emergency Management Agency.”
The “Emergency” that FEMA was supposed to manage at the time of it’s creation was that of a first strike by the USSR on the US. When I held a DOD clearance and worked for a defense contractor, the FEMA contracts were among some of the spookiest stuff we worked on. Very hush-hush, usually you had to have a TS or EBI clearance to work on those projects. They contracted for things like what is basically a shipping container with a NBC air filtration system, self-contained power, food, etc for two men to man a comm station from 0.5 to 250 MHz also contained in the container, with antennas that would be set up quickly on the outside.
The idea was that the two men in the container could set up comm links for the US government and keep doing it for two weeks until relieved. The container was light enough (without the men) to be airlifted by a Chinook chopper to whereever the DOD/FEMA wanted it.
Then there were the mobile comm vehicles. Even more lavishly outfitted, these were GM SUV’s outfitted to handle end-of-the-world scenarios to survey and report back to the national command authority.
Suffice to say, managing a meals-on-wheels setup for flood victims was not anywhere in their mission statement back then. Flood relief is probably is still seen as a distraction and a bother inside the agency today.
Yeah, thanks Rand Paul. Point out the obvious, so some opportunistic Dems can come along to use it as a pretext and say, “Rand Paul is right, FEMA is inefficient! Therefore, we must throw more money at it.”
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