Woody, Woody, Woody...

I'm real disappointed in you, pal... Like Paul Harvey used to say, "Now for the rest of the story..."

What happened to that $6.6B? Ya' give up?

Well, Bush used it as a slush fund to fund the Department of Homeland Security and his war in Iraq!!! That's were the dough went!!! And FEMA wasn't the only agency that was raided... Bush also moved funds out of the Army Corps of Engineers at a time when the levee system in New Orleans needed a minimum of $100M to withstand a Cat 3 hurricane. But rather than have the $100M neeeded and requested by the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA, only 20% was funded in fiscal year 2003 and even less, 17% in 2004???

Meanwhile back at FEMA, the lootin' was out-of-control for DHS and the Iraq War leavin' FEMA without the staff or resources it needed to perform at 90's capabilities...

"Eric Tolbert, a former top disaster response official in the Busdh administration, knew calamity like Hurrican Katrina would be coming sooner or later. And he also knew that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, where he worked until February, was not ready to properly respond. There were too few employees, not enough contracts in place to provide assistance, and a lack of money to do proper pre-palnning. The added burden of the war on terror, he says, diverted funds away from FEMA's core mission."

"FEMA had to compete and had to help finace the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. They were taking chunks of money out of the budget. We always referred to it as taxes."

(Source: "Anatomy of an unnatural disaster", by Michael Scherer, Solon)

And that, my fiends, is the rest of the story...

A gutted FEMA...

Bobert