After violent storms slammed three mid-western states and claimed 14 lives yesterday, President Obama announced he would be returning from his long-planned European trip to visit Missouri on Sunday. But that wasn’t good enough for Michael Brown, the FEMA director during Hurricane Katrina who is widely blamed for the Bush administration’s incompetent handling of the crisis that left tens of thousands of New Orleans residents stranded and helpless.

Brown, whose prior experience included working for the International Arabian Horse Association, resigned in disgrace amid a public uproar when it came to light that he had virtually no experience in disaster response — but only after President Bush famously patted him on the back in front of TV cameras, telling him, ”Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job.” At least 1,836 people died as a result of the worst natural disaster in modern American history, many because FEMA help did not come quickly enough. As the nation reeled at images of the devastation, Brown tried to blame the victims themselves “by noting that the crisis was worsened by New Orleans residents who did not comply with a mandatory evacuation order.”

Yet Brown evidently thinks he has the moral authority to condemn Obama’s handling of the tornado disaster. In an interview with Fox New’s Neil Cavuto, Brown blasted Obama for “playing ping-pong” while people died and “being more concerned with toasting the Queen” than taking care of tornado victims:

BROWN: In this situation, they’re almost tone-deaf. I mean, you stop and think about it, your press office should be recognizing that the visuals that Americans are seeing is of this devastation. Don’t put a visual of the president up playing ping-pong. It’s awful.

CAVUTO: So you don’t have a problem with the president being abroad with the Queen and the Irish prime minster just doing fun stuff?

BROWN: No, I do have a problem with that. It’s not like he’s at a G8 summit. This is not a diplomatic trip of any sort. This is just a — he went to Ireland for God’s sake to visit relatives! It’s time to come home…in this case, the perception is that the president is detached. He’s more concerned about raising a toast to the Queen. People have died.

Watch it:

Even Republicans think Brown’s characterization is way off. Missouri Rep. Billy Long (R) said, “FEMA has been great. The FEMA White House liaison called me first thing this morning and said, ‘Whatever you need, you will have.’ And the FEMA’s been here working, and we’re just gonna fight back and help these people down here in any way possible…the federal government has pledged that.”

This is not the first time Brown, who is now a highly-paid “crisis management expert” in the private sector, has had the audacity to criticize Obama for his disaster response. During the BP Gulf oil spill, Brown went on Fox to accuse the president of intentionally letting the spill get worse so he could use it as an excuse to shut down offshore drilling.

Brown has written a revisionist history about the Katrina disaster in which he chastises his former boss for (as he says in the Fox interview) “throwing him under the bus,” and blames Tom Ridge, Michael Chertoff, and pretty much everyone besides himself for the administration’s bungled response.

This week, on the eve of the five-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, a new study was released documenting the shocking psychological toll the storm had on children in the Gulf Coast. Researchers at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health found that more than 37 percent of children displaced by Katrina have been diagnosed with depression, anxiety, or behavioral and conduct disorders. These children were also five times more likely to experience emotional disturbances than kids not affected by the hurricane. “From the perspective of the Gulf’s most vulnerable children and families, the recovery from Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans has been a dismal failure,” said study researcher Dr. Irwin Redlener. Earlier studies that examined mental illness in adult survivors found very similar results: just under a third of respondents reported mental problems.

One way that many people could have received mental health care following the storm was through Medicaid. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Medicaid is the dominant source of funding for both children and adults with mental illness, comprising more than 50 percent of public mental health spending. However, the Bush administration — even after being roundly pilloried for the initial logistical response to Katrina — neutered emergency Medicaid relief for Gulf Coast residents in the months following the storm.

After Katrina, Senators from both parties wanted to enact a “Disaster Relief Medicaid” program, which would have temporarily extended Medicaid benefits to all low-income residents affected by the storm, even if they were above the minimum income requirements for enrollment. The same type of program was enacted after the September 11 terror attacks, but this time around, it met stiff resistance from the Bush administration.

The Journal of the American Medical Association outlined the battle in a 2006 article (subscription only):

[T]he pathway to assistance has proven to be bitterly contentious, reflecting a deep philosophical divide rather than party differences… The legislation met with immediate and fierce resistance on the part of the Bush Administration and its supporters, who sought to halt structural Medicaid improvements, at the very time that Congress, as part of the fiscal year 2006 budget process, was preparing to enact Medicaid spending reductions… Seeking to avert legislative establishment of a Medicaid disaster relief program, the Bush Administration devised an alternative that lacked the central elements of the Grassley-Baucus legislation. Predicated on the Health and Human Services Secretary’s powers under the demonstration provisions of the Social Security Act, the Bush Administration’s plan limited aid to 5 months, retained Medicaid’s exclusion of more than half of all poor adults (relying instead on establishing an uncompensated care fund for use by designated states, who in turn would be under no obligation to pay any specific physician or other health care provider), eliminated national coverage portability, and assumed continued financial contribution from affected states.

As one would expect, researchers looking into this issue have found that “having insurance was associated with continuing in mental health treatment.” The Bush administration’s cruel efforts to limit Medicaid assistance in the wake of the storm is having a lasting toll in the Gulf Coast today.

But even the optimal Medicaid Relief program, as was used after September 11, would only have been temporary, and a stronger safety net is needed for victims of this and future disasters. “Hurricane Katrina exposed a health care system incapable of withstanding the long-term impact of a major disaster,” the JAMA article says. “Through destruction and permanent displacement, Katrina illuminated the fundamental weaknesses inherent in the national approach to health care financing, as well as the extent to which these weaknesses can threaten recovery.”

In an interview last night with Newsmax, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) chided President Obama for his response to the BP oil disaster, stating that Obama “hasn’t made a good decision yet on that whole cleanup.” Claiming that Obama had “flunked” the test of presidential leadership, he saw President Bush’s handling of Hurricane Katrina as a success story:

Remember the criticism George Bush got during Katrina? They said it was a lack of leadership. Let me tell you, that leadership looks pretty good right now.

This is the first time he’s had a really tough test and he flunked. It’s not just me that is saying he’s provided no leadership.

Inhofe’s comparison does in fact echo other top conservatives leaders’ enthusiasm to call BP’s oil spill “Obama’s Katrina.” But as Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum has pointed out, “Other than proximity to the Louisiana coast, this catastrophe has nothing in common with Hurricane Katrina: That was an unstoppable natural disaster that turned into a human tragedy because of an inadequate government response. This is just an unstoppable disaster, period. It will be a human tragedy precisely because no government response is possible.” A reminder here of how Bush delayed paying any real attention to Katrina for days.

Nearly two months after oil began gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, BP’s spill continues to cause environmental and economic devastation to the region. On CNN this afternoon, Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré — who was widely praised after he stepped in to command Joint Task Force Katrina in 2005 in the wake of FEMA director Michael Brown’s disastrous failures — called for an aggressive, military-centered response to the current disaster:

HONORE: We need to act like it’s World War III. You know, when we did the world wars, everything was mobilized. Nothing was left on the table. All branches of the military should be there working for Admiral [Thad] Allen, apply manpower as well as advanced command and control to find this oil and kill it.

Q: I mean, you’re treating this like it is a battle.

HONORE: Absolutely, and to the, for the people of the Gulf, this is their life, and it would be just like an enemy force invading the Gulf, taking over our shoreline. We’ve got to treat this like a war if we gonna get the effects we want, as opposed to an environmental spill.

Watch it:

When Honoré appeared on CNN on April 29, just 9 days after the initial explosion, he said President Obama needed to declare the spill a national disaster, so that the federal government could “give Governor Jindal and the parish presidents what they need as opposed to going through this bureaucratic process and going to BP and saying, mother, may I?” The Center for American Progress has called for the federal government to take over the effort to clean up the Gulf and mobilize the resources of the Armed Forces. Leaving BP in charge, as Honore says, is “like getting mugged and having the burglar determine what your compensation is.”

– William Tomasko

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Today in the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove pens an op-ed titled: “Yes, the Gulf Spill is Obama’s Katrina.” He predictably places blame on Obama for a “lethargic,” “slow,” and “unacceptable” response to the BP oil spill. But the real significance of the op-ed is not what Rove has to say about Obama; rather, it’s that Rove is implicitly acknowledging that Bush screwed up the response to Katrina. Rove is essentially trying to make the case that Obama mismanaged a disaster almost as terribly as he and Bush did.

This is breaking news because, for years, despite all the evidence to the contrary, Rove has defended his administration’s disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina. As recently as March, Rove told ABC News:

The federal government’s responsibilities were met under Katrina which were to provide the immediate assistance, to pluck people off of the roofs.

And in his recently released memoir, Rove “staunchly defends” Bush’s handling of the disaster, and praises former FEMA administrator Michael “Heck of a job, Brownie” Brown.

It’s refreshing to see Rove finally concede his own failures, albeit in a roundabout way. After all, it was he who “was in charge” of the botched reconstruction effort. In his book, Rove touted, “I’m one of the people responsible” for the administration’s response to Katrina.

Rove’s analysis would be sharper if he noted that “Obama’s Katrina” actually highlights some very real Bush and Cheney failures. By filling the Minerals Management Service — the government agency responsible for regulating off shore oil drilling — with industry shills who took drugs and had sex with the officials they were supposed to be policing, the Bush administration dangerously eroded the regulatory regime, and missed warnings that could have helped prevent the BP disaster.