Comrade Jindal now demanding MORE fed disaster aid than states normally get

We know what you are, Comrade Jindal, we're simply haggling over the price.

We wrote above about "conservative" Governor Bobby Jindal of the People's Republic of Louisiana complaining that he wanted the Obama administration to give him more federal disaster aid than he was already getting.

We noted that it was, well, odd that proud red-stater Jindal, who famously turned down stimulus funds for unemployed Louisianans and for a high-speed rail, is now such a fan of all that tainted socialist "welfare" from Washington.

But now we learn that Jinda is even a bigger hypocrite than we thought.

You see, Comrade Jindal is now demanding more from the federal teet than states normally get during these "disasters."

He wants the federal government to reimburse him for state money spent on preparing for the hurricane.  That's not something FEMA normally covers because, you know, this is America, not the Soviet Union, and states like Louisiana, and governors like Jindal, are supposed to prepare for things like bad storms on their own.

Oh but it gets even better: Jindal had no such complaint when the shrub didn't offer to pay state preparations for a hurricane in 2008.  So either Jindal is playing politics with his state's impending hurricane, or he blew off the welfare of his own state in 2008 so as not to embarrass a repugican pretender.

Which one is it, tovarisch?

From Brian Beutler:

Asked today to respond to Jindal’s push for further assistance, FEMA administrator Craig Fugate explained, “primary responsibility for evacuations really [falls to] state and local governments and when it’s extraordinary the federal government can support that with financial assistance. What the President said yesterday was if you have a request for specific federal assistance, we’re ready to provide that life safety issues. We’re not going to hold anything up. But we’ll look at the impacts and determine, does this really exceed the state’s capability that require federal tax dollars to support that response and particularly if they start having damages. So, early on the request was direct federal assistance. If the financial impacts are greater than the state of Louisiana can manage, we assess that and we’ll make recommendations again looking at what the governor has requested.”

That’s the same approach the shrub cabal took when Gustav was bearing down on Louisiana in 2008.

According to the Louisiana Times-Picayune, “Though Jindal called on the federal government to shoulder the full cost of the federal, state and local efforts, he did not publicly make the same criticisms when former pretender the shrub issued a similar declaration that included a cost ceiling as Hurricane Gustav approached the state…though as the storm was trailing off, the state and the shrub cabal fought over exactly who would pay for what portion of the federal response.”