“As the Frankenstorm Arrives, Romney / Ryan go Silent on their Plan to Cut FEMA & Disaster Relief.”

T-minus 24 hours until Romney claims he’s always loved FEMA and government disaster relief, tells an anecdote about helping a neighbor once, and blames Obama for causing the storm by ignoring climate change.

“As the Frankenstorm Arrives, Romney / Ryan go Silent on their Plan to Cut FEMA & Disaster Relief.” Read the full story here.

“We cannot afford to do those things”

We reported earlier this evening on a video from the Republican primary debates in which Mitt Romney responds “absolutely” when asked whether FEMA funding should either no longer be guaranteed and/or the agency disbanded and left to individual states to handle FEMA’s responsibilities.

Source: Romney confirms he’ll shut down FEMA.

During a CNN debate at the height of the GOP primary, Mitt Romney was asked, in the context of the Joplin disaster and FEMA’s cash crunch, whether the agency should be shuttered so that states can individually take over responsibility for disaster response.

‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further, and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better. Instead of thinking, in the federal budget, what we should cut, we should ask the opposite question, what should we keep?’

‘Including disaster relief, though?’ debate moderator John King asked Romney.

‘We cannot — we cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids,” Romney replied. “It is simply immoral, in my view, for us to continue to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids, knowing full well that we’ll all be dead and gone before it’s paid off. It makes no sense at all.’