Re: Massoud's latest, I admit to not being an expert in FEMA, or much of anything, truth be told. But a quick glance at the FEMA site says its charter is: "responding to, planning for, recovering from and mitigating against disasters."
Whether there should be a FEMA; whether that should be rolled up under the military; whether the post-recovery efforts are mostly or always pork is not in dispute, from me at least.
My point's entirely different. We have a government. It's big. I'd like to see it a lot smaller. But a function that helps people in disasters strikes me as benign, and possibly even necessary. Advocates for statuary to Newt are non-existent, to my knowledge, so it's a straw man, from where I sit.
The politicizing of this event in the major media, I suggest, may well have let people DIE who otherwise would not have. It led to distracting FEMA, the state and local officials, and the NGOs from the task at hand: To save lives. That's a horrific tragedy, dwarfing the tiny amount of tax dollars that FEMA employs in this effort.
You could say that if virtually everyone supports this function, it's effectively voluntary, so I'm not seeing what the stink's all about.
If that makes me a "statist," so be it.
Gotta go...I need to find some clothes to send to the Gulf Coast.
-Robert Capozzi