Unfortunately, no. By the time history renders it’s verdict, they will be long gone, which is one of the reasons that they could care less about the effects of their attacks. Their escape is already well in place.

The implication of these tweets and blog posts was that Republicans had made budget cuts that would seemingly have an impact on our ability to monitor and respond to earthquakes.

I disagree. The implication is that if Eric Cantor had gotten his way those cuts would have impacted our ability to monitor and respond to earthquakes, which is true.

Likewise, many Republicans want to dismantle the Social Security and Medicare programs. They pay a price for that, even though their attempts to date have failed.

There’s a big nuclear plant outside of San Diego – you know, that tip of California that is the most likely to snap off the mainland when the Big One hits? Excellent planning. I don’t have a person or ideology to blame for that, but the idea of it haunts me.

It seems like the USGS reporting system was all over this, they had seismic data up within a minute flat, and disaster communications were quick and clean. If the tools to actually communicate the disaster are still funded and in place (if I am reading your post right), then we seem to be at a place where everything worked as planned.

A more interesting observation would be to overlay the East Coast’s seismic activity records for the past century over a map of active seismic recording stations that are hooked up to the USGS disaster system. Then you could see if there were actual gaps instead of mythical ones.