I also think the contrast is funny, between Bush’s seemingly limitless power and right to exercise it in terms of phone tapping, military deploying etc etc and the fact that Nagin and Blanco are supposed to completely flummox the entire Federal disaster relief operation and presidential power.

i’ve been making this point for a while now, and no bush supporter has even tried to address this fundamental contradiction. i wonder why…

Thank God is wasn’t a heatwave and over 15,000 died like in Europe

For those that are interested:

Some six-months after the 2003 heatwave, French researchers noticed an unusual downturn in the deathrate for the period immediately following the heatwave. They concluded that although heat was the proximate cause of death in many of the 15,000 cases cited above, the affected individuals were only marginally hanging onto life otherwise. All things being equal, the deathrate for the six-month period beginning with the first such deaths was neither higher nor lower than average…it was just unusually concentrated during the heatwave. Most of those old people were nearly dead anyway. While this hardly excuses the sometimes-poor treatment of elderly people–especially in cities–it does illustrate how the consequences of the 2003 European summer are NOT comparable to those experienced post-Katarina by Gulf Coast residents.

(I’m sorry I don’t have a link to the article that explains this…)

I also think the contrast is funny, between Bush’s seemingly limitless power and right to exercise it in terms of phone tapping, military deploying etc etc and the fact that Nagin and Blanco are supposed to completely flummox the entire Federal disaster relief operation and presidential power. The issue of responsibility, and many conservatives like to say, is key. In this case, allocating enough money (and not cutting it for gods sake) is the first responsibility, and overseeing it effectively is the second.

On that, you’re right, The Economist isn’t necessarily liberal.

Anyone can screw up. But you made it even more absurd by unnecessarily sticking in that “necessarily”.

It’s not liberal, period. Why was that so hard to say?