President Bush was back in New Orleans yesterday, getting his picture taken with disadvantaged black people. It was his eleventh photo-op trip to the Gulf Coast since Katrina.

Bush stopped at a modest bungalow restored by volunteers, situated on a Ninth Ward street still littered with debris and overgrown with weeds. White government trailers that are the main housing for the displaced sat in many front yards. …

… From Williams’ home, Bush’s motorcade took him to a nearby large vacant lot where Habitat for Humanity is building 81 new homes for New Orleans musicians.

Bush, clad in casual blue pants and checked shirt, donned work gloves and a tool pouch as he wandered around the construction site chatting with workers. The president, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin helped raise roof frames onto one house.

Let me get this straight — the politicians want people to know that they’re working hard to restore New Orleans, so they get themselves photographed alongside volunteers? Is that ’cause the government ain’t doin’ shit? So what do we need the politicians for, exactly?

Meanwhile, the Senate spent seven months investigating FEMA’s response to Hurricane Katrina and came to the brilliant conclusion that the agency should be scrapped. Sort of. Johanna Neuman writes for the Los Angeles Times,

Just weeks before the 2006 hurricane season officially begins June 1, a Senate committee on Thursday called for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to be dismantled and reconstituted as a new, stronger agency within Homeland Security.

Many House members, meanwhile, are pushing to restore FEMA to its pre-2003 status as an independent agency, this time with Cabinet rank and additional funding muscle.

So the Senate and the House disagree, and naturally the White House is resisting any big changes at all.

And as President Bush made his 11th visit to the Gulf Coast since the storm hit Aug. 29, the White House urged a strengthening — but no reshuffling — of current operations.

“Now is not the time to really look at moving organizational boxes,” said Frances F. Townsend, the president’s domestic security advisor, who traveled with Bush to Louisiana and Mississippi on Thursday.

I can’t find an exact quote, but yesterday the MSNBC news team shoved a microphone at Bush’s face and asked for his reaction to the Senate’s FEMA suggestion. He said something to the effect that the White House was conducting its own FEMA investigation, and he thought the answer to the problem was making FEMA work better.

Translation: The Bush Administration hasn’t done a dadblamed thing to see to it federal agencies are better prepared for hurricane season than they were last year.

I wish someone would have pressed him to explain what he has done, personally, to improve the problems in our disaster preparedness response. Has he considered any options for reorganizing FEMA and Homeland Security? Did he demand progress reports from FEMA managers showing what measures they are taking to straighten up their act? Has he rattled any cages? Kicked any butts, other than Michael Brown’s? In fact, other than replacing Brown, has any tangible action been taken by the White House at all lo these many months?

Expect the White House to stonewall whatever reform the House and Senate eventually agree on. Any major overhaul of FEMA would be an admission that the original White House organization chart for FEMA was flawed, a mistake. And you know how it is … Bushies don’t make mistakes.

Joe Lieberman was one of the senators behind the proposal to overhaul FEMA but keep it within Homeland Security (he had a lot to do with the original Homeland Security Department proposal, so I guess Holy Joe can’t admit mistakes, either). Bill Walsh of the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports that Lieberman complained of White House stonewalling of the investigation —

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., accused the White House on Thursday of not only failing to cooperate with the Senate’s Hurricane Katrina investigation, but of telling key federal agencies not to turn over documents that he said could have shed light on the botched federal response to the nation’s worst natural disaster. …

… in a 43-page addendum to the committee’s report, Lieberman described a cat-and-mouse game between committee members and White House lawyers over setting up interviews and getting critical documents.

“In too many instances, we faced agencies and departments that saw our efforts as a nuisance — and their response as up to their discretion,” Lieberman wrote. “And the worst offender was the entity that should have stood above the fray and worked hardest with the committee to uncover the government’s failings in Katrina: the White House.”

The White House responded, in effect, that they cooperated a whole bunch and Joe Lieberman is a poopyhead.

Back to the Senate — what the newspapers are calling the Lieberman-Collins proposal calls for FEMA to be dismantled and replaced by a new agency, to be called the National Preparedness and Response Authority. NPRA would communicate directly with the President during a crisis — it’s implied that Michael Brown couldn’t do that because he had to go through NHS director Chertoff — and any big cuts to the budget or staff would have to be approved by Congress. The NPRA would remain under the Department of National Security umbrella, however.

Back to Johanna Neuman —

Many in the House, including Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), chairman of the House Select Committee on Katrina that issued its report in February, favor making FEMA a separate agency, with Cabinet rank. …

… In the Senate, many Democrats — including Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey and Daniel K. Akaka of Hawaii, who were on the panel that issued the report Thursday — also want FEMA to stand alone, disagreeing with the Collins-Lieberman approach of taking it apart and putting it back together within Homeland Security.

“Unless FEMA has a direct line to the president, the people of Hawaii and the nation are at risk,” Akaka said in a statement. “FEMA must be restored as an independent agency.”

Just to make it all more fun, some Republican congressional leaders, such as Frist in the Senate and Hastert in the House, are making noises that they plan to stick with what the White House wants, whatever that is.

Conclusion: Nothing’s going to happen with FEMA this year, unless a major hurricane hits Virginia and wipes out the DHS headquarters.

Paul Krugman is not hopeful, either. He writes that the Lieberman-Collins proposal would change the agency’s name but not get to the root of what’s wrong with it.

The U.S. government is being stalked by an invisible bandit, the Crony Fairy, who visits key agencies by dead of night, snatches away qualified people and replaces them with unqualified political appointees. There’s no way to catch or stop the Crony Fairy, so our only hope is to change the agencies’ names. That way she might get confused, and leave our government able to function. …

… The [Senate] report points out that the Federal Emergency Management Agency “had been operating at a more than 15 percent staff-vacancy rate for over a year before Katrina struck” — that means many of the people who knew what they were doing had left. And it adds that “FEMA’s senior political appointees … had little or no prior relevant emergency-management experience.”

But the report says nothing about what caused the qualified people to leave and who appointed unqualified people to take their place. There’s no hint that, say, President Bush might have had any role. So those political appointees must have been installed by the Crony Fairy.

Heh.

The Senate proposal calls for the new agency to be staffed by professionals with experience in crisis management. “I guess it’s impossible to select qualified people to run FEMA,” writes Krugman. “If you try, the Crony Fairy will spirit them away and replace them with Michael Brown. But she might not know her way to N.P.R.A.”

Krugman gives us a history of FEMA —

In the early 1990’s, FEMA’s reputation was as bad as it is today. It was a dumping ground for political cronies, headed by a man whose only apparent qualification for the job was that he was a close friend of the first President Bush’s chief of staff. FEMA’s response to Hurricane Andrew in 1992 perfectly foreshadowed Katrina: the agency took three days to arrive on the scene, and when it did, it proved utterly incompetent.

Many people thought that FEMA was a lost cause. But Bill Clinton proved them wrong. He appointed qualified people to lead the agency and gave them leeway to hire other qualified people, and within a year FEMA’s morale and performance had soared. For the rest of the Clinton years, FEMA was among the most highly regarded agencies in the federal government.

What happened to that reputation? The answer, of course, is that the second President Bush returned to his father’s practices. Once again, FEMA became a dumping ground for cronies, and many of the good people who had come in during the Clinton years left. It took only a few years to transform one of the best agencies in the U.S. government into what Senator Susan Collins calls “a shambles and beyond repair.”

In other words, the Crony Fairy is named George W. Bush.