Bigger military role in disasters?

I don't agree with this; even for the sake of increasing federal response. It is better to restore the original intent of FEMA, as reformed by Clinton, as an independent institution capable of calling other agencies into service, and as an institution where political cronies cannot be appointed as heads. Indeed, it should be as independent as the National Science Foundation, if not more. I remember President Bush recently trying to appoint a person more favorable to his view to rewrite everything that talk about the relationship between oil-burning, global warming, and climate change, but that didn't go over well, fortunately.

Moreover, the attempted change to the role of the military is frightening to me. It smells of military takeover. Pretty soon, a military action to cut down on any sort of insurrection could be justified to maintain a common and unjust peace.

With a man like Albert Gonzales rewriting laws exempting detainees from Geneva Convention so that they can be tortured and interrogated, any person appointed to head a new role for the military could justify saying that any protest against the federal government is treason and therefore exempted from due process.

I may be seeing too much, but the problem is not to be solved by the military's interference in domestic affairs; it is to be solved by limiting the cumbersome bureaucracy, by eliminating the confusion in the line of authority, and by appointing qualified disaster experts (as Clinton did) that have the authority to improve the government at every level.