Is that a 10 ton school bus dropping down on us?

AP is reporting that an unsteerable, twenty thousand pound, school bus-sized former spy satellite is due to drop somewhere on the earth as early as the end of February.  In classic bushspeak, a former Laura B press secretary now working for the National Insecurity Council had these reassuring words:

Appropriate government agencies are monitoring the situation ...

Does anyone still believe the Bush Administration when they make statements like this?  Here's more:

We are looking at potential options to mitigate any possible damage this satellite may cause.

Exsqueeze me?  A fiery wreck of space junk could be dropping 100 pound chunks literally anywhere within a latitudinal window on the earth and their plan is "Let's make sure we know what we're gonna do if this thing takes out some buildings and people and stuff?"  

Here is the story of another uncontrolled satellite re-entry, 3.5 ton, replete with unsettling words like could and should and sketchy and "it is believed."  This satellite could have landed anywhere in a wide swath of latitude from Florida to Australia and was calculated to stretch over a 625 mile path.  The pieces of that particular satellite are supposed to have dropped in on Egypt, but I couldn't find much about actual impacts.  It was unclear on the search engine of record if all the debris had all burned up on re-entry or some hit the ground.
 
Shouldn't we expect more from our government than reassuring words that the appropriate people are looking into this?  Especially this government?  Shouldn't we expect, after years and years of Skylabs and Mirs dropping from the sky onto unpredictable portions of the earth, that ways have been found to neutralize these threats?  Will it take someone being killed by a chunk of space junk before governments take this quite small, but never the less deadly, threat seriously?
 
Why don't we use some of this space warfare technology that we keep throwing money at to blast the satellite into little pieces before re-entry -- little pieces that could burn up in the atmosphere?  Hell, there may be technical reasons why that won't work, but why don't we have leaders who lead on issues like this one and do more than just reassure us that they're looking into it?  

I realize that this small danger is nothing like the danger from threats like global warming, but Skylab dropped in on us 29 years ago.  True leadership would have solved this seemingly simple problem years ago.  True leadership is in short supply today.  How the hell are we gonna reverse climate change if we can't even do this simple thing?

Sometimes, it's hard to be optimistic.