Why? Because FEMA gave the residents of Charleston, South Carolina a half hour to prepare to receive a planeload of refugees (the plane trip from Louisiana to South Carolina is much longer than a half hour). Busses, ambulances, medical personnel, and relief workers managed to scramble to the airport in record time.

Then, nothing happened. They contacted FEMA, to find out that the planeload had indeed arrived in Charleston…WEST VIRGINIA.

This is right up there with Chertoff commenting on how Louisiana is a city underwater.

Charleston, South Carolina has good reason to already loathe FEMA, as they were useless in 1989 for hurricane Hugo, crowding out real first-responders and then offering to mail checks in a few months or so.

So FEMA: useless yesterday, useless today, useless tomorrow. Let’s just ditch it, and give any funds left over to standardizing the National Guard so groups of states can coordinate security after a disaster and let the Red Cross and other charities handle emergency relief and evacuation. So far, they have consistently done a better job.

Radley Balko has an even more exhaustive list of government failures in the run up to hurricane Katrina.

Update 9/3/05: Today he has even more, and even more depressing, enumerations of the failure, including a link to a picture of all the school buses the city of New Orleans could have used to evacuate the Superdome on Monday or to evacuate the poor before going to the Superdome on Sunday.

I’d post all the ways that government failed New Orleans and Louisiana and Mississippi, but this post on Sploid does so quite well and points out the key insight: the consept of “Homeland Security” over “Civil Defense” has been an unmitigated failure.

Instead of trying to catch every perp who might want to bomb us, we could have prepared for city-destroying-level disasters, hardened the targets, and enabled more robust responses instead of giving privacy-destroying toys to every podunk sherrif’s department in the country who wanted to spy on and beat up blacks, gays, and pot smokers.

The only thing sploid doesn’t cover is the fact that local government in New Orleans and Louisiana could have been prioritizing levees and disaster planning even if the federal government wasn’t there with funds. They could have ignored the federal government’s failure to act in the aftermath. They could have planned for evacuuating the superdome immediately after the storm or getting supplies to it.

Sometimes, you have to steal a bus to survive. Many municipalities have these things. But this young person DID NOT HAVE ZE CORREKT PAPERS! So,

“I just took the bus and drove all the way here…seven hours straight,’ Gibson admitted. “I hadn’t ever drove a bus.”

The teen packed it full of complete strangers and drove to Houston. He beat thousands of evacuees slated to arrive there.

[…]

Authorities eventually allowed the renegade passengers inside the dome. But the 18-year-old who ensured their safety could find himself in a world of trouble for stealing the school bus.

Maybe it is America’s shame that we’ve accepted authorities who make no distinction between survival in a disaster zone and looting…and are embarrassingly upstaged by a young man with fewer degrees in public administration who nonetheless figured out that school busses work just as well as coaches, whether they’re “authorized” or not.

I agree there’s been some racism in the response to hurricane Katrina. Hell, most of New Orleans is the result of racism in its various forms. But some black Congress members got up to talk about the issue today, and one lady I saw (didn’t catch her name) went way the hell too far:

“This is America’s shame.”

No, it’s you in government’s shame. By participating, you’re a part of it, lady. This has been a government failure of massive proportions, decades in the making and made acute by current inaction. But America is not its government, and quite frankly, we responded faster than you did, lady. We were there first, and likely we’ll be there after. It’s not our shame, it’s your shame, and you should either direct your criticism at your fellow Members, or you should apologize for the continual failings of them in preventing or dealing with this crisis.

…a card-carrying member of the ACLU?

Well, after they got off their butts and finally mailed it to me, yes, I am.

I’d been threatening to for a few years. What finally caused me to pull the trigger? Well, it pisses off too many people I want to see pissed off, but Radley Balko’s post on how it would piss off Bill O’Reilly pushed me over the edge. I don’t think O’Reilly is the worst enemy of freedom in America, but he’ll do.

It’s time to be more active in fighting back against the loonies of left and right who are tripping over themselves to give up personal freedom to assuage fears that economic, spiritual, or physical harm will come to them. The ACLU does a fairly good job against the loonies of the right–and the loons are on the march. I thought we were in a war against theocracies. It’s no good becoming more of one ourselves. And I’m tired of trying to figure out whether the PATRIOT Act would have been more at home in early 1920s Russia or early 1930s Germany.

Of course, the loonies of the left are not exactly quiescent, either, so I simultaneously gave to the Institute for Justice. There’s no debate about the state of corporatism in America: it looks like 1920s Italy. There is simply no stopping any level of government from taking your property and giving it to a corporation, so long as they say they think it’ll be better somehow that way. Governments use eminent domain and licensing scams to prevent people of the wrong color from occupying primo real estate or getting into nice retail locations or competing with white businesses.

You need all of them: you need the freedom to pray or not as you like, without the government making you subsidize somebody else; you need the freedom to say what you like without being thrown in jail; you need the freedom for your case to be heard if you are; you need the freedom to own a place and not be thrown out the second a higher bidder comes along; and you need the freedom to buy a drink from whomever you please, whether it pleases a giant alcohol distributer or not.

You the freedom to be yourself; else freedom from jail doesn’t mean a lot.