Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"The administration is recycling all their failed policies and shipping them to Louisiana. After four years of ideological excess, these Washington Republicans have a bad hangover -- and they can't think of anything to offer the Gulf Coast but the hair of the dog that bit them." -- John Kerry, regarding hurricane Katrina, 2005-09-19

"'In the context of the election, I simply said he should have waited,' Brown said. 'The storm was still forming, people were debating whether it was going to be as bad as expected, or not, and I noted that the president should have let the governors and mayors deal with the storm until it got closer to hitting the coastal areas along the Washington, D.C.-New York City corridor.'" -- Michael Brown, FEMA director under George W. Bush during Hurricane Katrina, amplifying his 2012-10-29 criticism of President Obama for reacting too quickly to hurricane Sandy, as quoted by Bobby Cervantes on Politico 2012-10-31

"It's better to be fast than to be late." -- current FEMA director Craig Fugate (ibid.)

"Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that's the right direction. And if you can go even further, and send it back to the private sector, that's even better. Instead of thinking, in the federal budget, what we should cut, we should ask the opposite question, what should we keep?" -- presidential candidate Mitt Romney, speaking about FEMA in June 2012 ( source (one of many))

"Right -- we should make disaster relief the sole responsibility of the states. Who better to respond to what's going on inside its own borders, than the state whose infrastructure has just been swept out to sea? [...] It's bad, don't get me wrong, it's bad, but let's not freak out over hurricane Sandy and think we need the feds. The response should simply be handled by whatever individual state is the entire eastern seaboard." -- Stephen Colbert, on the Comedy Central television program The Colbert Report, 2012-10-31, reacting to the preceding Romney quotation