Howard Kurtz has the blues...

I can't say that I disagree with him:

I can't tell you how frustrated I've been feeling at all the horror stories about the bumbling government efforts to aid the victims of Katrina.

It's enough to make you shout, as Casey Stengel did at the 1962 Mets, "Can't anybody here play this game?" (I was also yelling that at the 2005 Yankees last night.)

The bureaucratic bungling here is simply beyond belief. Since the average DMV is a mess, you wonder how federal and state agencies can deal with a massive crisis. And according to recent newspaper accounts, they can't.

More than 7,000 firms have applied to the Small Business Administration for help-- only 20 have gotten loans.

FEMA was giving out those $2,000 checks for household assistance, and suddenly it wasn't.

The government sent 91,000 tons of ice cubes to cool food, medicine and sweltering storm victims at a cost of $100 million, says the NYT. And most of it was never delivered, as truck drivers kept being redirected. What a meltdown.

As of Oct. 1, more than 100,000 people were still living in makeshift housing, and another $400 in hotels costing up to $100 a night.

Lobbyists for big industries are helping write the clean-up legislation.

Oh, and did I mention there's no federal contract to pick up the dead bodies ?

Then I got to thinking: Why do government agencies have so many hoops to jump through? Usually, it's to prevent cheating. And shockingly, there's been no shortage of fraud as well.

Another NYT piece reported on a Louisiana woman who used her aunt's New Orleans address and brother's name to file a claim. Red Cross contract workers accused of cashing in on benefits for fictitious hurricane victims. Two Florida residents who asked for help for nonexistent Louisiana houses. How pathetic can you get?

I thought it was crazy when I read about (New Orleans Mayor) Ray Nagin saying he'd have to lay off 3,000 city workers. Just what a sinking economy doesn't need. Couldn't the feds just give the city a grant or loan, so those folks could keep their jobs for a few more months? But where do you draw the line? The people who worked in restaurants and dry cleaners and drugstores also lost their jobs, and in some cases their houses. There's no way to guarantee those jobs. And why should victims of Katrina and Rita get more aid than those who suffered in previous hurricanes? One answer is that previous storms didn't cause a major city's destruction, but it's awfully hard to draw such distinctions.

Whatever the government chooses to do, though, it's going to have to do a better job. This is as depressing, in its own way, as the initial botched response to Katrina.

Read the rest of his Media Notes column here.

-The Oklahoma Hippy