Davos Newbies

Kevin Drum posts a devastating chronology of the Bush administration’s treatment of the likelihood of catastrophic flood damage in New Orleans. Read the whole, depressing timeline. His conclusion:

Actions have consequences. No one could predict that a hurricane the size of Katrina would hit this year, but the slow federal response when it did happen was no accident. It was the result of four years of deliberate Republican policy and budget choices that favor ideology and partisan loyalty at the expense of operational competence. It’s the Bush administration in a nutshell.

I heard an interview on NPR yesterday with a Dutch civil engineering expert (the Netherlands is a a country that is largely below sea level). He noted that the flood defences around New Orleans were designed to protect against a once in a century event. The Netherlands, after tragic floods that killed 1,800 people in 1953, designed their defences to protect against a once in 10,000 years event. It cost a lot more, but compared to the cost of failure he said it was “peanuts”.

Howell Raines: “Oh, wondrous city of music that floats from the horn and poems drowned in drink! Oh, cheesy clip-clop metropolis of phony coach-and-fours hauling the drunken Dodge salesmen of Centralia, Illinois, of shaky-handed failed watercolourists hanging unloved pictures on the wrought-iron fence at Jackson Square, of gaunt-eyed superannuated transvestite hookers, of Baptist girls suddenly inspired to show their tits on Chartres Street in return for a string of beads flung by a drunken college boy on the balcony of his daddy’s $1,500 suite at the Soniat House – must we lose even these dubious glories of the only American city that’s never been psychoanalysed?”