PTS Sandy

Now that PTS (Post-Tropical Storm) Sandy has come and gone, let's see what's going on. Here in Mid Coast Maine, we came through it fairly well. Lot of power outages due to trees taking down wires, some coastal and low-lying flooding, but we were quite lucky.

Further south, both Jurassic Pork and Michael Morse seem to have come through it okay. Heading down into NYC, things aren't so good.

NBC Nightly news had a story from Staten Island, where the Borough President James Molinaro lit into the American Red Cross. Molinaro is incensed at the fact that three days after Sandy, there still has been no Red Cross presence on the Island (I am assuming there are some local volunteers there who have been trying, but I'm sure they're totally overwhelmed and shell-shocked).

Flooded subway tunnels, PATH tunnels, road tunnels, underground electrical networks, all sorts of problems in southern Manhattan (which is all built on 400 years of landfill activity).

New Jersey got hit even worse. But Governor Christie seems to have realized that we DO need a Federal government to handle disaster relief. When it was states like Florida and Texas and Montana, Christie seemed to agree with Romney about abolishing -- or at least gutting -- FEMA and leaving it to the states:



But now Christie appears to be moving toward the reality-based community:



After seeing his response to the storm, and to Romney's attempts to politicize the disaster, and Obama's attempts to mitigate the disaster, I might almost have to start respecting they guy.

Then, of course, there was Romney's campaign rally relief supply collection drive, which collected the $5000 worth of stuff his staff bought at Wally World, and the three cans of Spam donated by his followers, which the Red Cross now has to deal with, instead of sending folks to Staten Island...



And Mitt feels our pain, from when he had to clean the football field after the big game.