More Katrina Blogging

Two points about Katrina:

1. Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco certainly made some mistakes. They should have evacuated the city earlier than they did, and they should have done so using all those waterlogged buses that we've seen on the pictures. But there is no moral equivalence between their poor, and probably fatal decisions and the fact that Bush and the federal goverment, with full knowledge that people, babies, were going without water for days at a time, sat on their hands, did nothing and let them die.

2. We've heard much from conservative commentators (Google it yourself) that it is the responsibility of the local first responders to handle disaster relief. How does that square with the fact that the Bush administration has done nothing but cut the budgets of regional first response teams all over the country? It's not the conservative approach (locals handle it) that I necessarily disagree with. It's the fact that their actions totally belie their stated preferences.