Subject: Cantor for cutting other programs to pay for emergency relief

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/29/news/la-pn-fema-budget-20110829

If your house gets shredded by a hurricane, we'll help, just don't expect Medicare to pay for next month's doctor's appointment.

That's how House Majority Leader Eric Canter (R-VA) would have it.

It sounds responsible to cut the budget elsewhere to pay for emergency disaster relief.  I mean, you would have to do so for your own household budget, wouldn't you?

Then again, all natural disasters aren't the same for all people, are they?

As Greg Palast points out:

In 1992, a big storm washed into 190 houses on West Hampton Dunes, getting many grade-B film scripts very wet.  The federal government, with your tax dollars, rebuilt every single home on the beach (average value then, $2 million each)—and even rebuilt the beach with an endless samba line of trucks filled with sand, care of the Army Corps of Engineers.

I guarantee that no matter what Eric Cantor says, when Mother Nature unleashes her wrath on the tony neighborhoods of the Hamptons or Malibu, socialism-for-the-rich will always pay the bill with no fuss about it from Republicans.  Who owns the politicians who make the budgets?  One hand washes the other. 

Here I am, Ron Paul like a hurricane!

Showing himself to be the callous azzwhole that he is, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) declared we'd be just fine without FEMA.  He brought up the terrible Galveston Hurricane of 1900, which demolished that city and killed 6,000 to 12,000 lives.  Mr. Paul nonchalantly explained the people of the city got together after the storm, rebuilt their town, built a seawall and survived.  He didn't mention the thousands of souls washed out to sea.  He didn't mention how civil authorities had to get men drunk on whiskey so they could cremate huge piles of unidentified human beings right there on the beach!  Well, they tried to anchor the bodies and sink them in the ocean, but the corpses just kept washing back up on the beach! 

Galveston did rebuild and they did it without FEMA, but Galveston was never the city it hoped to be in the 19th century.  Folks took their business where it was a bit safer...a little town called Houston. 
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