Glenn Beck on target, FEMA no sacred cow

Call me crazy, but I listen to Glenn Beck more than occasionally and, right about now, he's looking pretty smart.

Anybody in the Northeast Corridor who has heeded Beck is sitting pretty good. And if they've truly listened, they are passing out food and water to their neighbors.

For those of you who don't know, Beck has been preaching personal disaster preparedness for years. One of his advertisers is Food Insurance.

But Beck uses Food Insurance as more than an advertiser. The commercials launch him to advise his listeners to prepare for disasters with a long-lasting supply of food and water even if they don't buy from Food Insurance.

Beck suggests families should stock a one-year supply or at least one week. And then he says families who do should be prepared to feed their neighbors when a disaster like Hurricane Sandy happens.

Beck's premise is that no matter how good federal disaster assistance is, it's never good enough. That's proving out again in New York as it did in New Orleans with Katrina.

If you're paying attention, you've seen video of New Yorkers begging - crying - for help. One woman's plea to President Barack Obama was: "We're dying."

They probably are. People can take hunger, thirst and freezing temperatures for only so long. In recent days they were looking for food in dumpsters and mounds of debris, and they discovered some of the mounds included dead humans.

To the New Yorkers who did not heed the storm warnings and move to safer ground you could say: "You asked for it."

But we're all like that.

Washingtonians are notorious for believing the entire state is safe ground. Until an occasional earthquake or volcano eruption. Or a destructive wind storm, or the occasional brutal winter.

One of the final arguments between Obama and Mitt Romney in the presidential campaign that ends today is about the Federal Emergency Management Agency. I'm with Romney. It needs to be examined, and it certainly should get no additional funding until after that examination.

It was popular to blame George Bush for the aftermath of Katrina, but that was no more his fault than Sandy is Obama's fault. The problem, as Beck explains over and over, is the inefficiency and inabilities of FEMA.

FEMA started as a good idea under Jimmy Carter. Now it's one more bloated federal bureaucracy. It needs a personnel overhaul, especially at the top, where supposedly the thinking is done.

If any thinking has been done since Katrina, it's been faulty, at best. Somebody should have thought to have the Army, the National Guard or an organized private industry effort ready to move in with temporary shelters, heat, food and water immediately after Sandy.

Reporters have proven it was doable. They've been all over the stricken ground.

FEMA is not a sacred cow. It needs to be fixed.

And people need to stop laughing when Glenn Beck preaches common sense such as personal preparedness.