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Maybe you're are right. I'd guess he *was* quite busy but those were probably deliberate statements.

My point is that mis-statements are a different class of error as negligence. I've seen examples of negiligence by local Govt in New Orleans and LA state govt. We've talked about waterlogged busses when their use is part of the disaster recovery, failure to order evacuations when warned by Federal officials including the President(!), lax attitude towards looting until it got out of control, poor local planning at the superdome, a LA Governor that needs a day to decide something when every minute counts, etc.

I've not seen any large examples of FEMA not doing what they are chartered to do. (Small examples will happen in *any* disaster.) That's my point.

Well, I agree that the fault lies mostly at the state and local levels, as does the responsibility for handling the situation in the first place. The federal government is not obligated to get involved at all. So keeping all that in perspective, whatever Brown might have done wrong is of a lesser level of seriousness. The only remaining issue for me is that if there's going to be federal involvement in situations like this, the federal agency handling it should have a good handle on the situation. Brown's statements, if they're accurate, would indicate a less-than-good handle on the situation that may very well have cost lives. And I'm not prepared at this point to say that they're not accurate. If they're not, I'd like to hear that from him.

There is one more thing I'd like to say in defense of Ms. Malkin: She didn't reserve all, or even the bulk, of her anger for Michael Brown. That was just one of many articles on her blog. In the most recent one (and you can click on the link at the top of the thread to see all of them), she quotes from the local New Orleans paper expressing anger at the administration in its editorial, and she responds,

"Be angry. Most of the death and mayhem was entirely preventable. That's worth a whole lot of righteous fury. But be angry at the people who failed your city. Their names are Nagin and Ebbert and Blanco, not Bush and Chertoff."