ONE MORE TIME-- HOW MUCH RESPONSIBILITY DOES BUSH-STYLE REPUBLICANISM BEAR FOR THE CATASTROPHE IN CALIFORNIA THIS WEEK?

Driving home from a long overdue dash to accomplish a boatload of chores-- everything from buying a new spare tire and a new printer/fax and getting a visa for India to stocking up on antioxident-rich fresh berries for my morning shakes-- I heard an extraordinary interview on the radio. It was with a former Southern California fire chief. I've been looking everywhere online for a transcript but, with no recollection of his name, have had no luck. Basically he explained how badly government, primarily Republican-led government, has let us down. He also pointed out that when San Diego County voters were asked to approve taxes to build new fire prevention infrastructure, they ran in the other direction.

A friend of mine in San Diego just sent me an AP story about another Southern California fire chief, Chip Prather of Orange County.

Unable to slow, much less stop, many of the wildfires that have charred Southern California, some local officials lashed out Tuesday at what they described as state authorities who offered inadequate help and seemed unprepared for a foreseeable disaster.

Most blistering in his critique was the head of Orange County's fire authority, who said a quick deployment of aircraft could have corralled the massive blaze his crews were fighting near heavily populated Irvine.

"It is an absolute fact, had we had more air resources we would have been able to control this fire," Chief Chip Prather told reporters.

His remarks came shortly before Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger praised the rapid deployment of fire crews and equipment across a region where 16 wind-stoked fires were scattered over an area larger than some states. The blazes destroyed nearly 1,300 homes and forced the largest mass evacuation in California history.

Prather said that a dozen firefighters' lives were threatened at one point because too few crews were on the ground. It was not an isolated problem, he suggested, saying the bigger issue was the lack of an overarching scheme to attack several large fires at once.

"What we need to have is a national strategy and a state strategy," he said.

He sounds very much like the fire chief I heard on the radio. They're both victims-- we are all victims-- or the Grover Norquist philosophy of drowning government in a bathtub, the paramount domestic policy of the Bush Regime. The radio guy talked a lot about the blue ribbon panel outgoing Governor Davis and incoming Governor Schwarzenegger put together after the 2003 wildfires that destroyed thousands of homes and killed 2 dozen people. The panel made dozens of recommendations-- man of which Schwarzenegger ignored, much to the detriment of the families losing their homes this week.

Tomorrow's NY Times brings the California debate national. "Questions were being raised about how the fight against the fires had been coordinated, how resources had been deployed and whether Southern California had become smarter after the 2003 fires that ripped the region and its psyche..."

Some fire chiefs and elected officials said that they were angry with the state government for not adopting recommendations made by a blue-ribbon panel after the fires in 2003, in particular those that called for more firefighting equipment.

“There were a lot of calls for equipment and resources,” said Assemblyman Todd Spitzer, who represents a district in Orange County. “When you have a finite amount of resources, you have to prioritize life and property first, and so we didn’t get water dropping until we started to lose structures.”

The fires of October 2007 have sharpened questions about the costs of protecting the increasing numbers of people who live in remote and highly flammable areas, reawakened old jealousies that simmer across Southern California and forced new examination of the tension between the need for local emergency services and the willingness to pay for them.

San Diego County, the largest county in California without a fire department, relies on a hodgepodge of local departments that are almost all serving areas where populations are growing faster than their tax bases, and which are often low on money among a constituency that is generally allergic to taxes.

Norquist, Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, the whole Republican Party have taught these people very well how unnecessary governement, and the hated taxes that make government effective, are. I hope you read how Ken dealt with this same topic this afternoon. If you haven't had a chance to get to it yet, I strongly recommend that you do. Ken is brief and to the point and ends with two damning paragraphs that bear repeating:

I don't even recall which of the Bush-regime-inspired catastrophes Paul Krugman was commenting on last week on Countdown when Keith Olbermann pressed him for some glimmering of why, and he noted that the right-wing loonies--uh, my phrase, not his--just go crazy over any suggestion that people have any responsibility to help one another. It just drives them nuts. And no one has argued more persuasively than Krugman that one of the central missions of this administration has been to prove that government is truly incompetent to deal with problems, even (or especially) problems that have been attacked with success in the past by honest and competent government officials. (Remember the Clinton-era FEMA that was widely admired for its commitment to emergency preparedness?)

Couple this fundamental underlying psychosis with that other great philosophical underpinning of modern "conservative" government--that government exists for the purpose of helping its friends, cronies, and cash contributors steal every dollar that isn't nailed down--and you've got, well, the same old same old.

UPDATE: HOLD THE PRESSES... IT'S NOT BUSH'S FAULT

Fox News has made up a story that bin-Laden set the fires. There you go; we should have known.