KATRINATOWN UPDATE….In the LA Times this morning, Peter Gosselin and Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar report that Newt Gingrich ? the closest thing the Republican party has to a serious policy wonk these days ? is pretty unhappy over the idea of building gigantic trailer parks for Hurricane Katrina evacuees:
“The idea that ? in a community where we could place people in the private housing market to reintegrate them into society ? we would put them in [trailer] ghettos with no jobs, no community, no future, strikes me as extraordinarily bad public policy, and violates every conservative principle that I’m aware of,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican.
“If they do it,” Gingrich said of administration officials, “they will look back on it six months from now as the greatest disaster of this administration.”
I’m not so sure about that. After all, there’s stiff competition in the “greatest disaster of this administration” race: just for starters, there’s Tora Bora, disbanding the Iraqi army, and decimating FEMA in the first place. And don’t forget Abu Ghraib and the torture memo fiasco.
In any case, the whole Katrinatown concept isn’t going very well anyway, as the Washington Post reports today. Perhaps Congress will do its job this time and pass the Section 8 voucher plan that nearly everyone except George Bush seems to think is superior. This is definitely an administration that has shown it needs a bit of oversight.
