One must set the proper priorities
As everyone who hasn't been living in a cave these last two weeks knows, the Gulf Coast was hit by a hurricane on the 29th of August. A lot of attention has been paid to the criminally pathetic response from the federal government (star billing has to go to the B*sh junta cronies who were given patronage jobs running FEMA, but the Coward in Chief gets a honorable mention for conspiracy, neglect, and blowing off the Gulf Coast because he thought fundraisers were more important than seeing if a bunch of states which voted for the Evil Party were in trouble) to the flooding and subsequent human catastrophe in New Orleans, but not quite so much attention has been paid to the shamefully callous reaction to disaster elsewhere on the Gulf Coast.
The Hattiesburg, MS newspaper has a cheerful little story about the federal reaction to the hurricane. After Katrina walked ashore and ploughed north through Mississippi, it left a lot of power lines down, tangled, or otherwise out of commission. So the power companies immediately started trying to get power back. In the town of Collins, just north of Hattiesburg, there are a couple of substations that serve Colonial Pipeline's pipeline from Texas to the Northeast. They don't have power. But many power lines are down and things like hospitals and municipal water supplies don't have power either.
What does the B*sh junta do?
Why, they'd do what you'd expect. To hell with the hospitals and water supplies, we must get the oil pipeline back into service. So, even though Dr. Evil was still trout-fishing in Wyoming or wherever the fuck he was, he was able to contact Washington and have his office call the South Mississippi Electric Power Association and demand that they get the goddamned pumping stations online before anything else.
"I reluctantly agreed to pull half our transmission line crews off other projects and made getting the transmission lines to the Collins substations a priority," Compton said. "Our people were told to work until it was done."
One must have their priorities, after all. If you put the hospitals and water supplies back online, sure, people might not get sick and die, but then you'd cut into the profits of an oil company, and that is just not acceptable in a "grown-up" administration.
(via Dan Froomkin at the Washington Post)