Your Government At Work

First, the ugly.  Our immigration people, who ok'd Mohamed Atta for flight lessons after he had flown an airplane into the World Trade Center and who regularly lose track of those who violate immigration law, are hot on the trail of De Smet priest, Fr. Cathal Gallagher. 

Born in Donegal, Ireland, Gallagher served 22 years in Japan before moving to Rochester, Minn., on a religious visa in 1996 to work with alcohol addiction. It was there that he met the Most Rev. Robert Carlson, then the bishop of the Sioux Falls diocese, who invited him to lead churches in eastern South Dakota.

"I thought I was going to go back to Japan ... but then I fell in love with De Smet," he said. "It's a very simple way of life, a place where people are important. I never expected to find that in the United States."

Gallagher applied for permanent residency in 2001 and was told in 2003 that his green card was on the way.

But in February 2006, a lawyer handling his application told him it was denied. Gallagher thinks it's because his work visa expired while he waited for an answer.

A technical violation of the law brings the weight of the federal government down on a man who made a good faith effort to follow that law and is clearly no threat to the public.  Meanwhile, scores of illegals who are actually dangerous pour over the border and wander the streets with the immigration service in complete ignorance. 

The good.  Apparently, FEMA is doing an excellent job responding to Midwestern floods. 

Up and down the Big Muddy, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is being commended for responding quickly and surely.

"The lessons we learned from Katrina we've taken very seriously," said Glenn Cannon, FEMA assistant administrator for disaster operations. He added: "We've changed the way we do business. We don't wait to react."

After Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in 2005, FEMA came into New Orleans late and unprepared, and soon became a symbol of government bungling. President Bush's compliment to FEMA Director Michael D. Brown—"Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job!"—became a big joke.

Now, storms and flooding in the upper Midwest have left 24 people dead, driven tens of thousands from their homes and caused billions in damage.

After the rain started falling in early June, FEMA arrived with 13 million sandbags to pile onto the levees, 200 generators, and 30 trucks to haul off debris. Across the upper Midwest, the agency has delivered nearly 3.6 million liters of water and 192,000 ready-to-eat meals. About 650 inspectors are working in Iowa, Indiana and Wisconsin alone.

Here is an all too rare story of a bureaucracy learning from its mistakes and actually serving the people better.  George Bush, who took heaps of scorn over the Katrina debacle, will surely wait in vain for any praise over the recent success of FEMA.