FEMA

Friday

Cockburn

Texas’s Hail Mary pep talk

Fumbled… As Texas digs out from last weekend’s catastrophic flooding, the state’s leaders are using the only metaphor its residents understand – football – to try and shift blame. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a great protector of the Republican establishment, said at a Tuesday press conference, “Every football team makes mistakes. The losing teams are the ones that try to point out who is to blame. The championship teams are the ones that say ‘Don’t worry about it, man. We got this. We’re going to make sure that we go score again and then we’re going to win this game.’” But the “losing team,” in this case, appears to be the Republican-run Kerr County, which did not have a proper flood warning system in place.

Football

Monday

Amber Duke

North Carolinians forced to bury dead in their yards

The official death toll from Hurricane Helene rose yesterday to 227 across six states, with about half of the victims being in North Carolina. But sources on the ground in North Carolina tell The Spectator that the true scope of the death and devastation wrought by the storm is not even close to being understood. In addition, the rescue and recovery efforts have been largely undertaken by private citizens, as the state and federal responses have been hamstrung by incompetent public officials.   “It’s so much worse than they’re saying,” said one individual who was in Asheville when Helene hit. “I think there’s a massive cover-up.

Monday

The Spectator

House GOP declares border bill ‘DEAD on arrival’

After a long wait, the text of the bipartisan Senate bill for Ukraine and border funding was finally released on Sunday night. The massive piece of legislation clocks in at 370 pages and, in addition to the border policy changes previously reported on here, sends an additional $60 billion to Ukraine, tightens asylum standards, prohibits removal of unaccompanied minors, authorizes $1.4 billion in FEMA funding for resources for migrants settling in the US and gives President Biden the authority to overturn any emergency authorization at the border. The House GOP’s verdict is in: Speaker Johnson asserted that the legislation is “dead on arrival” in his chamber.  “I’ve seen enough.