New Orleans Reconstruction:

JUST HOW on earth can Bush/Rove/Cheney (and Delay?) be left in-charge of the $200 Billion dollar reconstruction effort, given that:

• Bush has completely lost his credibility when he failed to save lives in New Orleans.
  
  
• the Bush/Cheney Administration has no credibility whatsoever in handling other people's (aka taxpayers) money: $3.3 Trillion dollar Bush-debt, and counting... really really fast.
  
  
• Carl Rove is under investigation for possible TREASONOUS acts.
  
  
• rewarding their incompetence and neglect (hopefully not intentional) with FAT CHECKS to dole out to their coffer-fillers will only encourage them to do the same in future catastrophies (God forbid).

So, I ask of the Democratic leadership (and partly the liberal blogosphere?), where is the outrage, and where is the stewardship?

• You should be all over town hammering away with these and other legitimate arguments against leaving the foxes in-charge of the henhouse.
  
  
• You should filibuster every appropriations bill that comes from the WH on this that leaves the WH running the show.
  
  
• And, you should fill-in the details in the so-called Democratic Marshall Plan that Sen. Reid and Pelosi talked about, and put out a full-fledged plan of action.
  
  
• demand, day and night, at the top of your lungs, that the reconstruction should be put in the hands of trustworthy public servants, such as Presidents Ford and Carter. They don't have to micro-manage the work, but need only oversee the big picture, and delegate the nitty-gritty to a good team of co-ordinators.
  
  

Katrina Investigation:

I have seen Sen. Reid's statement calling for a bi-partisan senate committee or a non-partisan independent commission to investigate the ineptitude, negligence, and incompetence in the handling of the catastrophy, both before and after the landfall.

In fact, we should go a step further, and demand that the committee(s) should have a simple majority of democrats. Why? Credibility.

Here, the administration is itself a subject under investigation, and in most other democratic countries, the opposition parties get to investigate the ruling side (and they tend to have an independent press too).

If the Republicans refuse, the democrats should abstain from the phony GOP-led investigations and instead create their own congressional investigative team, and hold the hearings using the investigative authority that they already possess, covering the aspects that will be sidelined by the GOP-led investigation.

Here is an alternate, perhaps promising, idea that I'd like to propose: let there be an equal number of democrats and republicans, plus one independent, the latter to serve as the chair, in each committee (senate and/or house). So, the two great Vermont independents, Sen. Jeffords in the senate and Rep. Sanders could be the independent voices regulating the two sides from exercising unreasonable partisanship! This would be the optimal solution, in my opinion.

And, finally, the democrats must demand that any investigation should be completely open to the public and the press.





WHERE IS YOUR VOICE? SPEAK UP!

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