It's pretty sad when the guy who's supposed to take charge is looking around for someone else to lead when the chips are down. The fact this guy was reelected doesn't speak well of the NO voter.

Reelecting Nagin is a large part of the reason, in my opinion, that NO hasn't gotten anymore funds out of Congress. Kinda hard to go back and argue with the constituents in Peoria that their tax dollars should go towards rebuilding a "chocolate city."

I thought the last two lines of the column were far worthier of Quote Of The Day status:

"In the 2000 campaign season, running in a desultory fashion for the New York Senate seat, Rudy Giuliani waged a brief half-hearted campaign just long enough to leave the Republican Party with noone to run against Hillary except a candidate who wasn't up to the job. Has he managed to do the same this time round?"

It's true. I had been saying that McCain is this year's Bob Dole, but he's really this year's Rick Lazio.

yeah, washington was so interested in NO before Nagin that it built and maintained the levees around the city so that it would withstand hurricane winds...oh...wait.

You're joking, right Dawn? I mean, seriously, it would take intense, willful ignorance to ignore the body of evidence showing it was LA government that allowed LA contractors to use substandard materials when they built the levees.

Moreover, when the levees were built, they factored in the miles of marshes around NO as a mitigating factor. So, don't go blaming Washington when the marshes eroded and no one in LA asked for additional reinforcement.

Finally, Washington shouldn't be in the business of protecting every city from foreseeable natural disasters. You don't want to learn to swim the hard way, make sure your local government has a plan to get you out of the city built in an unfilled bowl or agitate to make sure your local government actually does something about, you know, things which could be lethal. Oh, wait, that's right, this is the same local government that had cops shoplifting, left buses to be submerged, and whose mayor was chilling at a high end hotel while his constituents were drowning. My bad.

Sorry, but you want to try and say the bad folks in Washington let those poor NO people down you need to sell that bridge to someone else. Washington allocated what was an appropriate amount of money to NO prior to the disaster. The fact that it was misspent and misallocated is a cautionary tale on all Federal funding without supervision. That Nagin was reelected proves that no one in NO learned the intended lesson.

Then why is the Army Corps of Engineers only rebuilding the levees to 1950 standards?

Because Congress won't fund them to be rebuilt any further...which leads back to my original point of no Congressman's going to get themselves unelected to save an apparent city of fools.

Now, why you would want to live in a city that's below sea level and surrounded by water in the first place is a mystery to me, but I have a healthy respect for Mother Nature.

My science and geography teachers liked to mention New Orleans being largely below sea level, with a lot of people being buried above ground, asking "What's going to happen if there's a big flood?" And that was junior high school, perhaps even earlier.

But, New Orleans came down to people wanting to live where they wanted, expecting others to foot the bill if anything happened.