Why does anyone think this woman has anything resembling a brain? She looks good for photoshoots, but can’t do anything else. We call her ICE Barbie or Kristi Gnome, but a gnome is smarter by far. Her response to questions is deny, defend, deflect. She dances around and never actually answers. From AlterNet:
Outrage continues to grow against U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem over her response to the deadly floods that ravaged Texas last week. According to a Friday report from The New York Times, more than two-thirds of phone calls to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) from flood victims went unanswered after Noem allowed hundreds of contractors to be laid off on July 5, just a day after the nightmare storm. According to The Times, this dramatically hampered the ability of the agency to respond to calls from survivors in the following days.
Gee, ya think? Almost no people answering the phones means almost no calls get answered. Simple statement of fact. Also, how many people needed help after the floods started to go down, and how *few* got help? It’s very telling of how she screwed up, and that’s just for a start! All the people lost, all the people still alive who lost everything, and how many people needed the help that didn’t show up for days.
tRump wants to disband FEMA. He went to see the flood damage. And it irks me to say he probably didn’t give a damn about what had happened. He went to make himself look good. There would have been a lot of outcry if he *hadn’t*. FEMA is needed! Those first responders make a difference! Yet he and Gnome don’t understand that. What is going to happen when a hurricane comes through? It’s going to be the same situation x 1,000. And FEMA won’t show up on time, if the agency still exists at all.
We need to figure out how to show him this is a bad idea. If any one of us could get to our representatives in government, and get that person to work with others to show Agent Orange how it would be so much better if he *kept* FEMA and brought it back to what it should be? Wouldn’t that be a wonderful sight to see? Well, we can dream.
Calling is one of the primary ways that flood victims apply for aid from the disaster relief agency. But Noem would wait until July 10—five days later—to renew the contracts of the people who took those phone calls. “Put yourself in the shoes of a survivor: You’ve lost everything, you’re trying to find out what’s insured and what’s not, and you’re navigating multiple aid programs,” he added. “One of the most important services in disaster recovery is being able to call someone and walk through these processes and paperwork.”
The lapse is a direct result of a policy introduced by Noem last month, which required any payments made by FEMA above $100,000 to be directly approved by her before taking effect. Noem, who has said she wants to eliminate FEMA entirely, described it as a way of limiting “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Under this policy, Noem allowed other critical parts of the flood response to wait for days as well. Earlier this week, multiple officials within FEMA told CNN that she waited more than 72 hours to authorize the deployment of search and rescue teams and aerial imaging.
Waste, fraud, and abuse, my ass. Bullsh!t. That’s this stupid broad classification to use, and it means nothing. It doesn’t mean a damn thing except as an excuse. DOGE broke a lot. She’s just following their example. There IS none of that in FEMA, fer crying out loud. They’ve been chronically UNDERfunded. Now? It’s worse. They don’t have as many people, they certainly don’t have enough supplies, and they can’t do what they were intended to do.
Following The Times’ revelations, outrage has reached a greater fever pitch. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) called it “unforgivable and unforgettable” and an “inexcusable lapse in top leadership.” “Sec. Noem shows that dismantling FEMA impacts real people in real time,” he said. “It hurts countless survivors & increases recovery costs.” /// “She broke it on purpose,” said Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) in an interview on MSNBC. “So that when it fails this summer, she can say, ‘Oh, see, we told you—FEMA doesn’t work.'” /// “It’s not really incompetence because they know what they are doing,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “They are intentionally breaking government—even the parts that help us when we are deep in crisis.”
They broke it, alright. And yes, it was on purpose. Can all the king’s horses and all the king’s men put FEMA back together again?
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Everything this woman says and does just makes me resent her even more. We get 3 1/2 more years of this, God help us.
I don’t just resent her, I detest her. So yea, 3-1/2 years good gods.