Wednesday marked the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. The storm devastated the city of New Orleans, along with many other places on the Gulf Coast. John Edwards used New Orleans to launch his 2008 presidential campaign, while fellow Democratic hopefuls Sen. Chris Dodd and Gov. Bill Richardson criticized the Bush administration's response to Katrina during the South Carolina debate. President Bush spoke in New Orleans on Wednesday and sounded encouraging, but the situation seems anything but. Much of the city is still devastated, and tax breaks tied to Katrina are helping investors develop luxury football condos near the University of Alabama. Bob and Susannah discuss Katrina in the latest "Running Gags"!

Merci to my muse for the idea...

That was fast. President Bush is responding quickly to the Interstate bridge disaster in Minneapolis:

"We in the federal government must respond, and respond robustly, to help the people there not only recover, but to make sure that lifeline of activity, that bridge, gets rebuilt as quickly as possible," Bush said in the Rose Garden following a Cabinet meeting.

...


Bush sent Federal Highway Administrator J. Richard Capka and Transportation Secretary Mary Peters to Minneapolis, where she announced a $5 million grant to help pay for rerouting traffic patterns around the disaster.

Bush made morning phone calls to Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak to offer his support and acknowledge the economic cost of losing a main transportation artery.

Tony Snow also addressed the report this morning by the Star-Tribune that the bridge was rated as "structurally deficient" in 2005 and appeared to categorize that as a state responsibility. I don't know if that was offered freely or in response to a direct question which matters if he was intending to spin the blame game. I hope he wasn't, it's far too early for that.

Bush is sending all appropriate agencies and the above noted starting $5 million grant. I think it's quite apparent that the administration has learned from the Katrina disaster that they can't simply trust the agencies to do their jobs without serious messaging and advocacy from the top. Which shouldn't be true, but it is.

I got this statement from the Web site of the National Guard. It says:

Nearly everyone has seen or heard of Guard units responding to battle fires or helping communities deal with floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, snowstorms or other emergency situations. In times of civil unrest, the citizens of a state can rest assured that the Guard will be ready to respond, if needed.

Unfortunately Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius found out that it isn't always so when she asked the National Guard for help in recovering and rebuilding Greensburg. Greensburg is the city in Kansas which was struck by the tornado over the weekend. In an interview she says that 40 percent of all National Guard troops are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And not only are the troops gone but so is the equipment, according to Sebelius. So recovery efforts are slowed down due to the lack of emergency vehicles the National Guard would normally have available.

It 's almost like she foresaw the trouble ahead back in December. Back then she requested from the Pentagon to get the equipment back that the Kansas National Guard left in Iraq. Or maybe Kathleen Sebelius is just the type of governor who really is in tune with her state and the issues concerning it. In January 2007 Lieutenant General H Steven Blum recalled Sebelius asking for engineer equipment from the National Guard for snow removal since 600,000 Kansans were without power due to the blizzards. Blum, the chief of the National Guard, called for a "new strategy" to equip the National Guard back at home, according to an article published in April by the Christian Science Monitor.

I personally find it very sad that our National Guard troops are not able to respond sufficiently or fast enough to national disasters because they are used in Iraq. I think the National Guard should be primarily used by the state government and not the federal government as we need our troops as much here as they are needed over there. We ought to be ready for disaster and not scraping together leftovers. The situation in Kansas also shows that we are not ready for another 9/11 and we can't be counting on the government to protect us in case another Hurricane Katrina hits.

... from New Orleans. Eight murders over the weekend and Mayor Ray Nagin has asked Governor Blanco of Louisiana to keep the LA National Guard on the streets of New Orleans through the summer. They are desperately needed.

New Orleans has watched violent crime escalate in the wake of Hurricane Katrina although the latest Census Bureau estimate said the city had slightly less than half the people it did before the storm. A study by Tulane University demographer Mark VanLandingham put New Orleans' per capita murder rate at 96 per 100,000 people last year - the highest in the nation.

"With all the efforts being made by the city and the feds, you have not seen a down turn," said criminologist Peter Scharf. "Nothing has had any impact. In fact, things are getting measurably worse."

The crime in New Orleans was bad before, of course. But it's reaching new levels of insanity. This elevated crime-wave is absolutely threatening to smother any chance at a real recovery for New Orleans.

My country -- land of liberty, land of freedom, land where we are free to speak, assemble, and petition our government -- has definitely changed. Censorship is rampant, newspapers sit on stories about domestic spying at the White House's request, schools censor students often, reporters serve get paid as mouth pieces for the White House (WH), and the WH spokesperson lies pretty much constantly (remember Scotty saying Rove and Libby had nothing to do with outing Plame?)

After all, what is the Constitution? Is it just a piece of paper? Does a signing statement negate the obligation to follow the law of the land? Where is the checks and balance which is the foundation of our system of government? The Democrats have started to expose the lies but now we have the White House refusing to get at the truth by not only claiming aides should not testify but acknowledging they never had an internal investigation about the CIA leak.

It's one thing after another with these guys. There's no end: the most mismanaged, inept, corrupt, no-bid war; the failures toward our troops; Walter Reed; the VA hospitals; troops on food stamps; denied phone calls to the Katrina response (Bush flew to San Diego for a fund-raiser remember). It's all just been one long national nightmare. The sum of his tenure is that we are far less free. Sometimes it feels if it weren't for the Internet there would be just the government's lies. It doesn't matter if you are left or right on the political spectrum. We've all been lied to, our democracy is under full fledged attack (by the attorney general and his boss) and if we question our government, the vice president stands up, sneers, and calls us traitors. Enough is enough.

If the Democrats and the news media would stop attempting to "Get Bush" for a moment, they could really accomplish something good soon, in a bipartisan fashion. We've sent tens of billions of taxpayer dollars down to New Orleans, and are set to send literally hundreds of billions more (contrary to the slanderous protestations of Mayor Ray Nagin), and it appears as if it's going to be for naught -- unless we get our act together soon.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune has a story on a new report just out that, for the first time, really looks at the history and methods of the Army Corps of Engineers attempts, federally and Congressionally mandated, to secure New Orleans against flooding. And it's not pretty.

Decades of incompetence and neglect by the Army Corps of Engineers allowed Hurricane Katrina's storm surge to devastate New Orleans, according to a long-awaited report being released today, the state's only official investigation into the causes of the disaster.

In a sweeping indictment of corps stewardship, the report alleges that agency supervisors ignored increases in the threat level for their project, knowingly built levees and floodwalls lower than congressionally mandated, failed to detect or ignored glaring errors during the review process, underestimated the impact of the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet on the city's defenses, and failed to properly maintain the system.

This probably won't get the attention it deserves because it flies in the face of the Democrats' attempt to say that Bush caused Katrina all by himself. The report clearly shows that the problems that resulted in Katrina started way back in the 60s. It is yet another example of a government bureaucracy, by its inherent adversity to change, blowing it big time. The Corps was rigidly adhering to standards that were set in 1959 -- never once changing them when the situation evolved, even when mandated to by Congress in the 60s and 70s, let alone during contemporary times.

The scariest thing (and the biggest wake-up call)? That the rigid bureaucratic adherence to standards and methods long obsolete are continuing to this day, even as the region is being rebuilt. The report on which this story is based is here. The Executive Summary (recommended but pdf) is here.

Louisiana Governor Katherine Kathleen Blanco is set to announce that she will not run for a second term.

The interesting thing is that LA had an election right after Katrina hit, she would have won in a landslide because the media was too busy slamming President Bush and FEMA and defending Blanco that the horrific mistakes she made were totally glossed over.

The failure of her and Ray Nagin to act when a) they had ample warning and b) a hurricane of this magnitude was predicted for decades shows how incredibly inept she was in handling the situation.

Now that the citizens of Louisiana have had a year and a half to ponder her performance, they've decided that she is not who they want leading them. They saw that she shifted the blame to everyone but her self, while the evidence has shown that her failures were among the most egregious.

Note (2/21/07 2115): I mistakenly titled this as "Katherine" when her name is Kathleen. My apologies to the forced out outgoing Governor for the error.

The debate on Al Gore and global warming is heating up ... and so is the Earth! Bob and Susannah deal with some "Inconvenient Truth"s on the latest edition of "Running Gags"!

Democrats plans for keeping the senate in 2008 look pretty good, but if they want to expand their majority, they definitely need to pay attention to a few seats in particular.

Louisiana's Mary Landrieu, for instance, barely squeaked by in 2002. Her margin of victory was 42,000 votes. Remember that number.

Then, of course, Hurricane Katrina hit. A new survey of current New Orleanians indicates a third of them think they might be leaving in the next couple of years. New Orleans as a population center has already been cut in half, from 450,000 people down to somewhere near 200,000. If those voters go 80% Democrat, which they do, that's 160,000 votes for Landrieu to find somewhere else.

The thing that must be keeping Mary Landrieu awake at night, is how she is going to win with about 200,000 Democrat voters. In 2004 David Vitter became the first GOP senator in LA since the 1860's, indicating that LA was turning red. And that was before Katrina hit.

Regardless of whether it makes sense to locate half a million people below sea level on a hurricane coast, the Democrats are more concerned about rebuilding their political power base in Louisiana, and want federal funds to do so.

Remember that the next time you hear about how compassionate the Democrats are.