Katrina

As he so often does on a wide variety of current events, Billmon puts the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in tragic perspective. I recommend that you follow the link and read the entire article. Here are a few excerpts:

As a living, functioning city, then, New Orleans has ceased to exist. Even if it can eventually be resuscitated, the patient's long-term prognosis is grim. Just as yesterday was a catastrophe in slow motion, the future of the Crescent City is likely to be a slow, lingering death by drowning: the environmental equivalent of pulmonary edema. In that sense, New Orleans is the canary -- peacock might be the more appropriate bird -- in the mine of global climate change. If melting ice caps continue to push sea levels rapidly higher, its death may also await many of the world's other low-lying cities...

Now that the worst has happened, many pundits, particularly on the left, are pointing to the budget cuts that have hamstrung the Army Corps of Engineers in its endless battle of New Orleans:

The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.

If Shrub really thinks that doing something about climate change would wreck the economy, he should spend some of his unused vacation time thinking about what just happened to New Orleans.

[Whiskey Bar: When the Levee Breaks]