Below The Beltway

Interesting news in today’s Washington Post in the form of this poll of people evacuated from New Orleans
Fewer than half of all New Orleans evacuees living in emergency shelters here said they will move back home, while two-thirds of those who want to relocate planned to settle permanently in the Houston area, according to a [...]

Over at Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds points to this section of President Bush’s speech last night and raises valid concerns:

Yet the system at every level of government, was not well coordinated and was overwhelmed in the first few days. It is now clear that a challenge on this scale requires greater federal authority and a broader [...]

My buddy Raymond at Rogue Sun 2.0 has collected this list of dumb quotes from politicians in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. A few examples:
?Considering the dire circumstances that we have in New Orleans, virtually a city that has been destroyed, things are going relatively well.? -FEMA Director Michael Brown, Sept. 1, 2005 (Source)
?You simply [...]

Over at Rogue Sun 2.0, my buddy Raymond has this to say about President Bush’s appointment of a career firefighter as the new head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency:
Mr. President, you want to do the right thing? Get this guy approved or confirmed or whatever. Then shovel all the political bullshit out of his [...]

Well, I guess its a start:

“President Bush on Tuesday acknowledged ’serious problems’ in the government’s response to emergencies, and accepted responsibility for the federal government’s failures in responding to the disaster.‘Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government and to the extent the federal government didn’t fully do its job [...]