“Has anybody given any serious thought to that? “asked Sessions. “Seven billion dollars? The state of Alabama’s general budget is $2 billion. Seven billion is a lot of money. We have not looked at it, we have not thought about it.”

“I strongly oppose adding another debt spending bill that we haven’t carefully examined every penny of it to make sure it’s all necessary and appropriate,” Sessions continued.

They haven’t thought about it yet! Jeff Sessions has been so busy doing … stuff, that he has not yet had time to consider whether or not he thinks the government should appropriate disaster relief funds. It costs less to run Alabama than it does to clean up after a couple earthquakes and tornadoes and hurricanes spread across the entire continent! (Alabama might be running stuff on the cheap in part because it relies on the federal government to pay for things like disaster relief? Just a thought.)

This isn’t a complicated proposal for a new federal program requiring careful review. This is money that will go to an established government agency that is already doing its important and necessary work. We can argue about how we should fund FEMA in the long term, but in the short term, stuff needs to get cleaned up, right now, and FEMA needs money to do so.

Not that there is a considered ideological statement behind blocking the money. It was just blocked because the Republicans now block things. That’s what they do. Hold every bill hostage or kill it completely, let nominees twist in the wind, and take every negotiation right to the brink of full-blown catastrophe.

The debt ceiling fight, which usually involves a bit of minor grandstanding before everyone does what they always do, now ends with Standard & Poor’s declaring that our political system is too dysfunctional to deal with non-manufactured crises. Billions of dollars were lost and airport upgrade projects were stalled because Republicans decided to use the routine extension of FAA funding as an opportunity to strike a blow against organized labor. (The FAA is currently operating on short-term extension bills because no one believes Congress could pass long-term funding of the FAA.)

This is a war on the basic functionality of the federal government, not any sort of philosophical conservative attack on government overreach. Denying political “victories” to political opponents is the primary goal here, and the fact that making government dysfunctional gives heft to the argument that government can’t be trusted is really just a nice side benefit.

But Republicans are only willing to pull this because they’ve figured out that everyone just blames “Congress” for the sabotage of a specific minority of ideologues.

We can leave it to residents of Vermont to decide whether the flooding in the aftermath of Hurricane Irene qualifies as “routine” or not, but there’s also another explanation: 2011 has been a banner year for disasters, period. By mid-year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2011 was already one of the most extreme — and costly — years on record. And that was before Hurricane Irene.

From Scientific American:

Just shy of the halfway mark, 2011 has seen eight $1-billion-plus disasters, with total damages from wild weather at more than $32 billion, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Agency officials said that total could grow significantly, since they expect this year’s North Atlantic hurricane season, which began June 1, will be an active one.

And what holds for the U.S. is equally true for the globe:

From MSNBC:

Natural disasters across the globe have made 2011 the costliest on record in terms of property damage, and that’s just six months in, according to a report released Tuesday by a leading insurer that tracks disasters….

The first six months saw $265 billion in economic losses, well above the previous record of $220 billion (adjusted for inflation) set for all of 2005 (the year Hurricane Katrina struck), according to Munich Re, a multinational that insures insurance companies.

Earthquakes and tsunamis aside, Munich Re has a pretty straightforward theory to explain what’s going on:

“It can only be explained by global warming,” said Peter Hoppe, who runs the company’s Geo Risks Research/Corporate Climate Center.

If global warming explains the rising incidence of extreme weather events and correlated FEMA disaster declarations, the U.S. government is headed for more budget trouble in years ahead. House Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor made waves this week when he demanded that any government spending on disaster relief be met by offset cuts elsewhere in the federal budget. If Republicans hold to this line in the future, than the increasing costs associated with future extreme weather events will require a steadily shrinking government spending on other priorities.

No wonder the right doesn’t want to take any action to stop climate change — it’s the killer app for wiping out Medicare and other entitlements!

The shortfalls in FEMA’s disaster aid account have been obvious to lawmakers on Capitol Hill for months — and privately acknowledged to them by FEMA — but the White House has opted against asking for more money, riling many lawmakers.

“Despite the fact that the need … is well known,” Reps. Robert Aderholt, R-Ala., and David Price, D-N.C., wrote the administration last month, “it unfortunately appears that no action is being taken by the administration.” The lawmakers chair the panel responsible for FEMA’s budget.

FEMA now admits the disaster aid shortfall could approach $5 billion for the upcoming budget year, and that’s before accounting for Irene.

As a result, funds to help states and local governments rebuild from this year’s tornadoes, as well as past disasters like hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the massive Tennessee floods of last spring, have been frozen. Instead, FEMA is only paying for the “immediate needs” of disaster-stricken communities, which include debris removal, food, water and emergency shelter.

“Going into September being the peak part of hurricane season, and with Irene, we didn’t want to get to the point where we would not have the funds to continue to support the previous impacted survivors as well as respond to the next disaster,” FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate told reporters at the White House on Monday.

Republicans controlling the House and the Democratic-controlled Senate may be headed toward a battle over whether to cut spending elsewhere in the budget to pay for tornado and hurricane aid.

A top leader in the tea party-driven House says that chamber will find those offsetting spending cuts. The Senate, however, is likely to take advantage of a little-noticed provision in the recently passed debt limit and budget deal that permits Congress to pass several billion dollars in additional FEMA disaster aid without budget cuts elsewhere.

“We will find the money if there is a need for additional money,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., told Fox News on Monday. “But those monies are not unlimited, and we have said we have to offset that.”

But Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who presided over a recent hearing on disaster costs, says the number and cost of disasters have grown dramatically over the past few years.

“If (Cantor) believes that we can nip and tuck at the rest of the federal budget and somehow take care of disasters, he’s totally out of touch with reality,” the No. 2 Senate Democrat said Tuesday.

Earlier this year, the administration requested $1.8 billion for FEMA’s disaster relief fund, despite pent-up demands for much more. Appropriations for last year totaled four times that amount.

FEMA estimates that the request still left the disaster fund short by $2 billion to $4.8 billion for the upcoming fiscal year. Those are figures the agency provided to Congress this spring — before Irene or the tornadoes that destroyed huge swaths of Joplin, Mo., or beat up the South.

With recovery operations from Irene still in the early stages, FEMA spokesman Rachel Racusen said it is too early to know whether that projected shortfall has increased or by how much.

“It’s just too soon to know what any uninsured losses will be,” Racusen said.

“Even though the president himself said that we are going to do everything we can to help these communities rebuild, the rhetoric has not matched reality, and the Disaster Relief Fund is running out of money,” Aderholt said.

The likely vehicle for replenishing the disaster account is the homeland security spending bill for the budget year beginning Oct. 1. The House passed the measure in early June, but the Senate has yet to act.

A House-Senate collision over disaster aid would risk further delays in replenishing dangerously low FEMA disaster accounts.

“It’s too early to tell what the damage assessment will be and what next steps may need to be taken,” said Meg Reilly, a spokeswoman for the White House budget office.

It’s hardly the first time that longer-term rebuilding projects like schools and sewer systems have been frozen out to make sure there’s money to provide disaster victims with immediate help with food, water and shelter. But it’s frustrating to communities like Nashville, Tenn., which is rebuilding from last year’s historic floods.

The Obama White House is just the latest administration to lowball disaster relief requests. Over the past two decades, Congress has approved $130 billion for FEMA’s disaster account. But the bulk of that money, $110 billion, has been provided as emergency funding in addition to the annual budget.

Associated Press writer Alicia Caldwell contributed to this story.

“We’re in the news business,” Scarborough said wryly. “We deal in doom.”

This becomes vividly clear during the run-up to big storms — especially storms that threaten to make landfall in New York City, North America’s media center. The motto of all news, TV news especially, is “The worse the better.” Informative, detached, rational coverage is a snooze-fest and a ratings bust. Weather porn is ratings gold.

Plus, as news stories go, storms are in a special class, with unique potential for exploitation.

Most catastrophic events strike unexpectedly and get reported on after-the-fact, when afflicted citizens and government workers are literally picking up pieces and news organizations are mainly concerned with finding out precisely what happened. Storms are all about what might happen — a narrative of dread that unfolds over a period of days. It’s a perfect setup that lets TV news organizations ratchet up the freak-out factor incrementally, and position their teams where they think the most spectacular and terrifying images might be.

Thus the array of news teams stationed at Long Beach, N.Y., Saturday night and Sunday morning, treating minor damage at a seawall and moderate street flooding as if they were harbingers of a tsunami — and the countless, mandatory live shots of reporters in rain slickers and hip waders positioned all over the Atlantic coast, hollering into cameras, their feeds cutting in and out until anchors gave up and moved on to another wind-battered live shot. (Fox News Channel’s coverage Sunday morning was the worst, with frequent, awkward drop-outs. That roaring you heard wasn’t Irene’s winds, it was anchor Shepard Smith’s blood pressure rising.)

Viewers and TV news columnists have been mocking this cliché for decades now, labeling it irresponsible and dumb. Really, what’s sillier than a TV news reporter who has no defensible reason for being outside during a hurricane warning viewers that there is no defensible reason for being outside during a hurricane? But nothing changes, because dread-inducing storm coverage is a profit-maker, and the formula always works.

News directors aren’t just aware that the shrieking-into-the-wet-lens routine can lead to comedy or tragedy; even the more outwardly sober ones are secretly praying for such moments because they’re considered “great TV” — wild incidents that viewers can laugh about on Facebook and revisit on YouTube. (Hurricane Irene coverage produced at least two of those moments: the guy showing his wang in the background of a Virginia Beach, Va., live shot, and the Washington, D.C., reporter getting covered in raw sewage that he mistakenly thought was “sea foam.”)

Even when TV news organizations can plausibly claim to be doing everything according to the unwritten Good Media Citizen Handbook — constantly repeating safety tips and evacuation schedules, referring viewers to the websites of the National Weather Service and the Hurricane Center, and so forth — the overall tenor of the coverage still edges toward fear-mongering and surreal slapstick.

The Weather Channel, which prides itself on being a somewhat rational, science-centered, responsible organization, goes nuts during storm season, and lets correspondents and anchors lard their on-air copy with menacing hype words; Jim Cantore used the phrase “impending doom” on air, and Carl Parker warned of a “slow-motion disaster.” Some of the language made it sound as if the storm were a living entity that had a personal grudge against the East Coast. On Saturday evening, when there were already inklings that this would not be another Katrina, I heard a local ABC anchor say, “Hurricane Irene still has New York in its sights,” as if it were a genocidal tripod from “War of the Worlds.”

And on Sunday morning, when Irene had been downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm, you could see some anchors and correspondents struggling for ways to make things sound as bad as possible. I saw an ABC reporter stationed in Belmar, N.J., ask a resident if he thought this storm was as destructive as Tropical Storm Danielle back in 1992. The man replied somewhat vaguely that yeah, it might be as bad, maybe; driving away, the correspondent made it sound as though the man’s answer had been an unequivocal yes.

Different reporters might have different, very subjective reactions to the weather based on where they’re stationed and how experienced they are; one person’s storm of the century could be another person’s “meh.” My friend Danny Bowes, a Brooklynite who stayed put during the storm and watched a lot of the coverage, observed, “It’s interesting how CNN and MSNBC have very different views of Hurricane Irene in New York City. MSNBC’s guy on Coney Island says he’s never seen anything like this, and picks up a piece of [flotsam] floating down the sidewalk to show how fierce the winds are. CNN’s woman on the scene, however, notes that the rains are vertical and ‘not the kind one would associate with heavy winds.’”

Newspapers and Internet-only news organizations are guilty of hype, too, but TV news is a different animal, and its excesses are of a different order of magnitude. TV news is not supposed to be processed in bits and pieces. It’s designed to keep you mesmerized for hours with an endless series of voluptuously frightening images and worst-case scenarios. It’s Cassandra in a box.

Here’s the tricky part, though: Because hurricanes always cause deaths, injuries and massive property damage, media organizations can defend themselves by saying it’s better to make things sound worse than they are, because if you give people false hope or encourage complacency, the outcome could be far worse. Parse their word choice or criticize their decisions on what to show and how to frame it, as I’m doing here, and you’re written off as just another whiner in the peanut gallery. As I write this, many on the Atlantic coast are still stranded far from their homes, or assessing damage that could take months to repair. And some are making funeral plans.

(“At least 19 people were killed in various storm-related accidents from Florida to Connecticut, and the death toll was expected to rise,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “In Harrisburg, Pa., a man sleeping outside with a group of friends died when a tree fell on his tent, police said. And up to four million power customers, fairly evenly scattered along the hurricane’s path, still had no electricity on Sunday afternoon. Across the length of the hurricane’s path, hundreds if not thousands of roads remained closed. In New York, authorities reopened tunnels and bridges but the city’s public transportation system remained shut down.”)

“Consider if there are five competing hurricane forecasters, four suggesting evacuation while the fifth says ‘stay put,’ and the fifth one is wrong,” wrote Patrick Michaels of Forbes. “Surely most people would choose to stay, with disastrous results.” After Hurricane Isabel in 2003, a local news director groused to me, “Well, what would you have us do? Tell people to just go on about their business because everything is probably gonna be fine?”

That’s a “When did you stop beating your wife?” type of question, granted. But it does complicate this little screed, and I confess that I still don’t quite know how to answer it — except to note that 1) the language and imagery of hype doesn’t really add anything useful to storm coverage, and 2) recent technology offers new ways to get news without having to watch weather porn.

Frankly, if I wasn’t required to watch TV storm coverage as part of my job, I probably wouldn’t have turned it on at all, except to check in on the local cable news outlet New York 1, which offered mostly hysteria-free news tailored to people in my area.

I tracked the storm’s progress on the National Hurricane Center’s website. I found recommended “go-bag” contents, evacuation orders, mass transit shutdown reports, hurricane survival checklists and other pertinent information online hours before Irene made landfall in North Carolina. And I was able to fine-tune the information Friday and Saturday by checking Facebook and Twitter, where I learned that you should not light candles during storms (in the event of a busted gas line) and that if I still needed batteries, water or other supplies, some of the smaller shops in my neighborhood still had them.

This skein of dry facts and fellowship might have sustained me, at least until the electricity and phone lines went out.

As my friend Patrick observed, “Anticipating weather outcomes is not a useful pursuit for talking heads.” 

Many of the worst effects arose from rains that fell inland, not the highly anticipated storm surge along the coasts. Residents of Pennsylvania and New Jersey nervously watched waters rise as hours’ worth of rain funneled into rivers and creeks. Normally narrow ribbons of water turned into raging torrents in Vermont and upstate New York late Sunday, tumbling with tree limbs, cars and parts of bridges.

“This is not over,” President Barack Obama said from the Rose Garden.

Hundreds of Vermonters were told to leave their homes after Irene dumped several inches of rain on the landlocked state. Video posted on Facebook showed a 141-year-old covered bridge in Rockingham swept away by the roiling, muddy Williams River. In another video, an empty car somersaulted down a river in Bennington.

“It’s pretty fierce. I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Michelle Guevin, who spoke from a Brattleboro restaurant after leaving her home in nearby Newfane. She said the fast-moving Rock River was washing out the road to her house.

Green Mountain Power decided against flooding Montpelier, the capital, to save the earthen Marshfield Dam, about 20 miles up the Winooski River to the northeast. Water levels had stabilized Monday morning but engineers were continuing to monitor the situation, said spokeswoman Dorothy Schnure.

Residents of 350 households were asked to leave as a precaution.

Nearly 5 million homes and businesses lost power at some point during the storm. Lights started to come back on for many on Sunday, though it was expected to take days for electricity to be fully restored.

Only about 50,000 power customers in New York City went dark, but people there had something else to worry about: getting to work Monday.

The metropolitan area’s transit system, shut down because of weather for the first time in its history, was taking many hours to get back on line. Limited bus service began Sunday and New York subway service was partially restored at 6 a.m. Monday.

Commuter rail service to Long Island and New Jersey was being partially restored, but the Metro-North Railroad to Westchester County and Connecticut was suspended because of flooding and mudslides.

Riders were warned to expect long lines and long waits, but early commuters reported empty subways and quick rides.

Mentor Vargas, 54, said he made his 40-minute trip on the J train without incident. “It seems people aren’t going to work today,” he said on his way to work at a repair company in Queens.

Airports in New York and around the Northeast were reopening to a backlog of hundreds of thousands of passengers whose flights were canceled over the weekend.

Some of New York’s yellow cabs were up to their wheel wells in water, and water rushed over a marina near the New York Mercantile Exchange, where gold and oil are traded. But the New York flooding was not extensive from Irene, whose eye passed over Coney Island and Central Park.

The New York Stock Exchange said it would be open for business on Monday, and the Sept. 11 memorial at the World Trade Center site didn’t lose a single tree.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended his decision to order 370,000 residents to evacuate their homes in low-lying areas, saying it was impossible to know just how powerful the storm would be. “We were just unwilling to risk the life of a single New Yorker,” he said.

Irene had at one time been a major hurricane, with winds higher than 110 mph as it headed toward the U.S. It was a tropical storm with 65 mph winds by the time it hit New York. It lost the characteristics of a tropical storm and had slowed to 50 mph by the time it reached Canada.

Chris Fogarty, director of the Canadian Hurricane Centre, warned of flooding and wind damage in eastern Canada and said the heaviest rainfall was expected in Quebec, where about 250,000 homes were without power.

At least 24 people died in the U.S., most of them when trees crashed through roofs or onto cars. One Vermont woman was swept away and feared drowned in the Deerfield River.

Officials worked to repair hundreds of damaged roads, and power companies picked through uprooted trees and reconnected lines.

One private estimate put damage along the coast at $7 billion, far from any record for a natural disaster.

Twenty homes on Long Island Sound in Connecticut were destroyed by churning surf. The torrential rain chased hundreds of people in upstate New York from their homes and closed 137 miles of the state’s main highway.

Authorities in and around Easton, Pa., kept a close eye on the rising Delaware River. The National Weather Service forecast the river to crest there at more than 27 feet, about 5 feet above flood stage.

In the South, authorities still were not sure how much damage had been done but expressed relief that it wasn’t worse.

“Thank God it weakened a little bit,” said Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, who toured a hard-hit Richmond neighborhood where large, old-growth trees uprooted and crushed houses and automobiles.

In Norfolk, Va., where storm surges got within inches of breaking a record, most of the water had receded by Sunday. There was isolated flooding and downed trees, but nowhere near the damage officials predicted.

“We can’t believe a hurricane came through here,” city spokeswoman Lori Crouch said.

In North Carolina, where six people were killed, the infrastructure losses included the only road to the seven villages on Hatteras Island.

“Overall, the destruction is not as severe as I was worried it might be, but there is still lots and lots of destruction and people’s lives are turned upside down,” Gov. Beverly Perdue said in Kill Devil Hills.

In an early estimate, consulting firm Kinetic Analysis Corp. figured total losses from the storm at $7 billion, with insured losses of $2 billion to $3 billion. The storm will take a bite out of Labor Day tourist business from the Outer Banks to the Jersey Shore to Cape Cod.

Irene was the first hurricane to make landfall in the continental United States since 2008, and came almost six years to the day after Katrina ravaged New Orleans on Aug. 29, 2005.

Gram reported from Montpelier. Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Beth Fouhy, Samantha Bomkamp, Verena Dobnik, Jonathan Fahey, Tom Hays, Colleen Long and Larry Neumeister in New York; Brock Vergakis in Virginia Beach, Va.; Marc Levy in Chester, Pa. and Jeff McMillan in Philadelphia; and Seth Borenstein and Christopher S. Rugaber in Washington.