You are doing a heck of a job, Pauliboy.

A fish rots from the head down, and even the maggots won't touch this one.

And their standards are pretty much identical to those of insurance companies, and of companies found liable for injuries due to defective products, namely to stall until the pesky claimant dies. This saves money for the company, and the Bush administration acknowledges no greater good than that.

Wow, talk about adding insult to injury. Or adding injury to insult to injury.

Maybe the people forced to live in tents after Hurricane Katrina while FEMA trailers sat unused in Arkansas will count their [mixed] blessings. http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/12/13/katrina.trailers/index.html

Meanwhile, apparently some of those infamous unused FEMA trailers were to be sent to needy American Indian reservations. http://www.wwltv.com/topstories/stories/wwl062307khtrailersindians.8de0e51.html Hope this plan is now shelved. Haven't we d-cked over the American Indian enough?

The rest is just a colossal waste of time.

for each and every government agency's systematic ineptitude and incompetence in the meanest and vilest way that harms the people it is charged to serve is exposed.

Bush has very intentionally and systematically populated agencies with partisan hacks who speak oaths of loyalty to Bush, and who carry out his charge to do the will of Bush. There is no question that federal government agencies, processes and services no longer serve the public, but solely serve Bush and his cronys.

Impeachment is the sole means by which to stop this, by which to obtain the information needed to determine who has been harmed, to what degree and in what ways, and finally, to excise these Bush loyalists and traitors from throughout government at every level.

The burden of bringing impeachment lies with Nancy Pelosi. A heavy burden, but an obligation by her oath to support and to defend the Constitution. The people demand no less.

Time is of the essence. People are dying needlessly here and around the globe for Bush's hubris and Constitutional egregiousness.

I think this phrase should be the theme in 2008 which describes the universal incompetence of the past six years. Commercials should punctuate each item with a hearty "Heckuva Job, _______________!" Bush & Co. have to be made the sole owners of all these debacles.

FEMA isn't in the business of building trailers, but they did most likely award the trailer contract to the lowest bidder as that's how most gov't contracts work. To maximize their profits, the trailer builders probably used utra-low quality materials full of a substance more akin to morgues for embalming purposes than for living quarters.

Having said that, the obfuscation here IS what FEMA systematically owns as a standard operating procedure. For these glaring quotes and facts to come out in a public hearing are all well and good, but they do little if anything to serve justice to those who had to and continue to endure their toxic environments.

Will HeckuvaPaulison show a shred of accountability for this? What about those witty attorneys who advised against air quality tests? Chances are, we're going to hear in a few days or even a week about how this is all the fault of the people who live(ed) in these trailers and that this is nothing more than a publicity stunt designed to make the BUSH Administration look bad. If the 9/11 widows can be made out to be attention grubbing whores, then these trailer dwellers must be shown for who they really are, right???

I'm a government lawyer, and I can't imagine giving advice like this. I'm wondering if there's a broader context we don't know about. If my clients came to me and said, "We want to conduct tests on FEMA trailers," I would certainly have asked them some hard questions, like, "Do we have someone on staff who is qualified to conduct these tests? Are there standards for these tests? Is there more than one type of test? If so, why are you choosing Test A over Test B? Do we have appropriated funds that can pay for these tests?" (see, you can't pay for things with funds that were allocated by Congress to another purpose, so if FEMA isn't normally in the business of testing products for formaldehyde, this could be a problem). Also, if a private contractor provided or constructed the trailers, I might have counseled my clients to review the contract to see if it is the contractor's responsibility to conduct the tests. But I wouldn't have just said, "Leave this alone, or else it will become your issue." I would have helped them figure out whose "issue" it is. After all, a good bureaucrat never just ignores what lands on his or her desk; his goal is to get it onto someone else's desk. I truly don't know of any government attorneys who would just advocate doing nothing on an issue of public safety. Maybe I just work with better attorneys, I don't know.

Perhaps THESE government lawyers went to that law school so well known for high legal standards from their graduates: Regent University School of Law. I hear the executive branch thinks quite highly of them.

The bigger question here is why are products being legally manufactured in the United States that place humans in such close, closed contact with toxic substances? Where is the Consumer Product Safety Commission? What about the people that buy these trailers for vacation purposes? Are they just not exposed long enough to care?

This issue certainly needs to be figured out and resolved, but let's not miss the forest plainly before us.

"FEMA isn't in the business of building trailer"? If anyone honestly believes that the Consumer Protection Agency, populated by Bushies and most likely by lobbyists who used to diver GOP attention from product dangers, is going to help in this or any other instance of product liability, I have some "traveler trailers once used in a topical climate" fr sale.

There are a couple of points to be made here for real. First, this is criminal negligence. Congress ought not to be investigating. The FBI should be investigating. People need to go to jail for endangering the health and well-being of American citizens on American soil. It's just that simple. It is very obvious that FEMA knew of the problem and took steps - steps proposed by lawyers - to hide the dangers. If any lawyers would like to weigh, I would love to hear some opinions./ At the very least, it seems like a conspiracy but we all know it was more than that.

That brings me to my second point. This would be a much bigger deal if it were done in any other area of the country and against any other race of American citizens. Poor black folks in New Orleans? What's a little nausea, vomitting, premature birth, and nose bleeds? They should be happy they even have a roof over their heads, right? FEMA employees, even their scum-sucking lawyers, take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution. They don't take an oath to protect the Agency they work for, the president who appointed them or the incompetent asshole who heads their department.

In the entire tragedy of post-Katrina New Orleans, the video of an elderly black man being shoved aboard an Air Force plane like he was cargo was the most tragic and most illustrative. A reporter at the tail gate of the plane asked the confused looking man where he was going and the man looked into the camera and said "I don't know." n that ten seconds I knew that a government would never do that to white Americans. No one would ever tell a white American to get on a plane without knowing where they were going.

The Administration is being run as a criminal enterprise. The only surprise is that Tony Soprano and Michael Corleone aren't cabinet officers.