FEMA waste dwarfs even world’s largest cruise liner

Published 5:22 pm Monday, June 19, 2006

By Staff
I'll probably never sail on one (though industry traffic is up 47 percent in five years to 10.1 million North Americans), but I reserve the same fascination for cruise ships that I have for islands, from Mackinac to “Survivor.”
So when the biggest cruise ship ever built, twice as wide as the Titanic's 92 feet, leaves Miami for the Caribbean, I have a hard time averting my longing gaze.
Royal Caribbean cruise line christened its 1,112-foot white whale “Freedom of the Seas.”
It cost $800 million to build this 160,000-ton behemoth (that's as much as 12,500 elephants), a city at sea that can accommodate 4,375 passengers.
Its height, 208 feet tall, is equal to two Statues of Liberty laid end to end.
Rooms range from a paltry $1,900 to $22,000 a week.
This is a ship that costs a cool million a day to operate - and not just because it consumes 78,000 pounds of ice every 24 hours.
Plus, there's upkeep, from 750,000 lightbulbs to 4,700 works of art.
The largest suite sleeps 14 people and boasts five big-screen TVs, a private whirlpool and a wet bar.
A 40-foot-long water park surf simulator is an onboard first.
Stores, including Ben and Jerry's ice cream, line the promenade.
With 10 restaurants, 16 bars, miniature golf, a 43-foot climbing wall, an indoor rink with real ice, a theater with three 747s worth of seating, a 9,700-square-foot fitness center with a pro-size boxing ring and a basketball court, who would go ashore?
Sometimes you can't. For example, the ship is too large to dock in St. Thomas because the Caribbean island's harbor is too small.
Another slight disappointment: To make the whirlpool safer, designers scrapped early plans for an all-glass bottom with a view of the ocean 112 feet below.
Royal Caribbean is going 40 percent bigger in 2009 when it launches the $1.1 billion Genesis.
Sure, that sounds like a lot, but read on.
That's less than what FEMA wasted bungling hurricane response last summer.
Heckuva job, Brownie: FEMA was scammed an estimated $1.4 billion in assistance to bogus Hurricane Katrina and Rita victims. Taxpayers paid for season football tickets, a tropical vacation and a divorce lawyer, congressional investigators found.
Prison inmates, a “victim” who used a New Orleans cemetery for a home address and someone who spent 70 days at a Hawaiian hotel bellied up to the tax-dollar trough and gorged themselves.
Federal investigators even informed Congress that one man apparently relied on FEMA assistance for a sex-change operation.
Yet the complacent electorate will reward Congress with new terms at higher pay even as the mind-boggling Senate expends energy on yet another flag-burning amendment.
Congressional pay raises, of course, are as certain as death and taxes: House lawmakers got another $3,300 June 13 to boost their salaries to $168,500. The 2-percent cost-of-living raise will be the seventh straight for members of the House and Senate. It is awarded automatically unless lawmakers vote to block it.
The first-place, 43-24 Tigers June 15 matched their win total for 2003, when Detroit lost an American League-record 119 times.
Tiger Stadium will be torn down to make room for homes and stores, but the field will be retained as a park and ball diamond, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick said June 15. I'm glad I took Jordan to see the next-to-last game there in 1999 against the Kansas City Royals.
Bill McGraw, whom I had dinner with once, writes in the Free Press, “Wild trees are growing out of cement cracks in the box seats.”
In other Detroit news, 22 years after the Book-Cadillac Hotel closed, a $176 million rehabilitation deal is reported to be close that would make its reopening possible in three years.
A Cleveland developer will do the project. John F. Kennedy spoke there. Babe Ruth, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Joe DiMaggio, Lou Gehrig, Ted Williams and Katharine Hepburn stayed there.
The hotel opened in 1924 and closed in 1984.
The city came close to knocking it down in the 1990s.
Stevie Wonder will sing at Ford Field as part of next year's 40-day observance of Detroit's 1967 riots, The Detroit News reported June 16.
I happened to be in the Motor City that Sunday to see the baseball game with Mickey Mantle's Yankees. I remember my grandpa, my dad and I discussing the smoke curling up beyond the ballpark wall.
Go figure: Time came up with $4 million for photos of the baby of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt while letting go Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporters Donald Barlett and James Steele in a cost-cutting move?
It's more than gas (although hedge fund manager T. Boone Pickens predicts we'll see $80 oil for a 42-gallon barrel by the end of the year): Inflation spread in May. Consumer prices rose another 0.4 percent following a 0.6-percent April increase, pushing up costs faster than pay, the government reported June 14. Prices rose for clothing, medical care, used cars, food, housing and education.
Prices for only a few items went the other way, such as cigarettes and computers.
For the first five months of 2006, the consumer price index jumped 5.2 percent, compared to 3.4 percent in 2005. Wages not only fell 0.7 percent in May, they saw their biggest decline since September.
Stephen Col-bear will be all over this: An elusive brown bear is blamed for killing livestock in southern Germany.
It's the first bear seen in Germany since 1835.
Wedding proposal of the week: You might not want to pop a marriage question in your birthday suit. It could get you shot. The Ann Arbor News carried an account of a suitor trying to persuade his hesitant girlfriend to tie the knot by running naked through his neighborhood June 14 to make the point that risk-taking is important. Hiding from a couple he encountered during his impulsive streak, the man noticed the bushes rustling and bare feet beneath, so drew a .40-caliber handgun, gave chase and fired.
Anniversary: Paul McCartney, 64.
Quips, quotes and qulunkers: “In the past few days, I've gained a new perspective on life. By the grace of God, I'm fortunate to be alive … (and if I ever ride a motorcycle again) it certainly will be with a helmet.”