The death toll in New Orleans isn't in yet, but the Mayor expects it to be in the thousands. This wasn't from sotrm surge. It was from failure of key levees.
Why did they fail? A large reason has to be that the Corps of Engineers budget for flood control work in Southeast LA has been cut sharply since 2003. See Editor and Publisher.
So why did the Corps of Engineers budget get cut? Simple. Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy, paying for Bush's purposless war in Iraq, and Republican graft to their political supporters, such as the contract to audit the IRS that Randy "Duke" Cunningham got the IRS to give his supporter and on which the IRS lost $2.3 million.
Meanwhile, back in Crawford our illustrious leader demonstrates again that he doesn't give a rats ass about the suffering of others and doesn't need to take any action other then continue with his preplanned photo-ops. Same as the Tsunami, but this time the dead and suffering people are Americans rather than Indonesians half the world away. Here is an editorial in the New Hampshire Union-Leader, a newspaper who has supported Bush normally.
Has anyone mentioned that the Bush administration has taken the disaster planning mission from FEMA but not bothered to create the new agency that is supposed to do the job? See Destroying FEMA in the Washington Post.
I guess everyone living on the Gulf Coast or the Atlantic Coast should each take care of his own hurricane preparations and recovery, and not be dependent on the government even for planning. Katrina has been an unavoidable disaster of great magnitude. The failed preparations, planning and reactions of the Federal Government under Bush are going a long way towards compounding that disaster.
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