So much going on

so tired...

took and picked up J & M from work and school, respectively
spent almost 2 hours cleaning toys in hot bleach water
got father-in-law's truck out of long-term parking at airport, loaded it up at old house - haven't fully unloaded it yet.
got oil changed in car
took carload of stuff from old house to new house earlier
was going to renew tag & change address on drivers' license, but too broke - will have to wait
got to hang out with my sister-in-law and let the kids run & play in father-in-law's backyard on new swingset while waiting for step-mother-in-law to get home so I could get truck key


So many things to talk about... Delay's indictment... fire in LA... looming civil war in Iraq... Katrina cleanup & rebuilding... my original bet of 15 named storms this hurricane season has been blown away (and J thought I was nuts, ha!) - we're at 17 now; wonder how many more are coming?... Supreme Court Chief Justice sworn in... wonder who W will appoint to replace O'Connor... stupid court case in Kansas about Intelligent Design (News flash people: SCIENCE DOES NOT NEGATE GOD. SCIENCE DOES NOT DISCUSS GOD. THE CREATOR IS OUTSIDE THE PURVIEW OF SCIENCE. STOP FEELING THREATENED, AND STOP ASKING US TO TEACH ABOUT GOD IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS. Teach about God at home.)... the FBI has created a new anti-obscenity task force - I guess the country is secure and the War on Terror is over... Tallahassee is debating joining a coal-burning power plant that won't help solve the problem of the energy we need in the next 7 years, and when it does come online will only provide a small fraction of the power we need in the area, at the expense of the health of anybody nearby... J has shown me nifty cool stuff at www2.meebo.com and www.writely.com... I've not had a chance to go play any of those games, and muse, did you delete your blog?... if the US was serious about becoming energy independent they'd crank up either incentives for better gas mileage in all cars or penalties/requirements for better gas mileage... they'd grant tax breaks etc. to alternative fuel users/developers... they'd create a nationwide decent rail system and encourage decent efficient local mass transportation... and it's sad, because being energy independent is a major part of our national security... has Abramoff been arrested yet?... the Republicans are crooks... no surprise... the Democrats are crooks... well, duh, they're all politicians... we're living in a plutocracy, and if you don't know what that means, you're part of the ignorant masses that have allowed it to get this bad... of course, the founding fathers created a representative government because they knew the masses were ignorant... I feel like watching Mr. Smith Goes To Washington again... campaign finance reform is urgently needed... wonder if the Republicans will manage to kill CPB this time around... no fat left to cut in the federal budget? please!... How much of what the federal government is doing should it actually be doing? I mean, based on the Constitution... why is it that Christian Conservatives support us going to war in Iraq and want us to create a democracy over there, rather than letting a bunch of radical Islamic fundamentalists create a theocracy - but they want to create a theocracy over HERE, and it's the same God?... I want to put a bumpersticker on my car that says "God gave you a brain, USE IT"... when did it become unpatriotic to point out when somebody is full of shit?... when did logic stop functioning as usual?... if we want to cut fat in the federal budget, how about any senators/representatives/presidents/vice presidents that are millionaires forgo their paycheck?... Republicans talk about "Tax and Spend Democrats" but they've become the "Don't Tax but Spend Anyway And The Next 4 Generations Will Pay For It" party themselves... when will a third political party step up to the plate and tell it like it is? Now's a great time! Republicants are hurting, Democraps are quiet - I say the Common Sense Party has a PERFECT opening right now... dammit, will I EVER stop ripping my nails off? At this rate I'm going to look awful for Matthew & Erin's wedding - fat, face splotchy, hair limp with lots of dead ends, and stubby rough nails... *sigh*...

It's now midnight and I have to get up early. Stream of consciousness writing always felt weird to me. I think I'll try it again and see how it flows. No sign of Cyborgirl yet... and now muse is missing...

I've managed not to go postal

but I'm running low on emotional endurance. Part of it is the physical tiredness; it makes my available emotional energy lower than standard anyway - but the rest is emotional fallout.

I really appreciate all the work that Kaye & Joan put into cleaning out our old place and setting up the garage sale. However, I think I now know where Megan gets her "let's throw everything away!" impulses. It amazes me, because Kaye told me how glad she was that I rescued the first baby blanket that she made for her first grandchild, when Megan threw it out on the street... here's some of the things I found in the trash:

more than $80 worth of cut, polished, loose opals
our wedding certificate
my bankruptcy paperwork
some divorce paperwork
random pieces of childrens toys (large lego pieces, little people, a miniature toy tea set, etc.)
5-10 books, notebooks, 3 ring binders, legal pads, etc.
several pairs of jeans, some t-shirts, a bunch of my underwear, the tops of two of my pajama sets, a silk dressing gown...
the leather lederhosen Justin wore as a child that we're passing on to Christian
aforementioned Capital Children's Chorus tape
the red & white knit footie outfit from Germany that J wore as an infant that we're passing on
one of my silver eeyore earrings (I hope the other one is in the house somewhere... *sigh*)
some diary pages
some photographs
lots of plug covers and other random items

Okay, so YOU tell ME - wouldn't you be pissed? Out of a pile of garbage bigger than our Ford Explorer, there were maybe THREE BAGS that did NOT have something in it that I wanted to keep.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do when I see Kaye tomorrow when I drop off Moira at school. I didn't say anything this morning, because I could understand how a folded up marriage certificate and a cassette tape could get thrown out in a mad rush... but the sheer number of things thrown away has just blown my mind. I'm afraid if I try to get into a conversation with her I'll just totally lose it and say something like "what the hell?! Thanks for all your incredibly hard work, but F*&#!!! ALL I asked of you was that you ASK ME FIRST. How would you like it if I went through YOUR stuff and started throwing away stuff??!!" AAAAAARRRRRGH

Okay, gotta go pick up J from work - we're going to Patrick's house for dinner & the Scorcese special about Bob Dylan. WOOHOO!

OMG

I'm thirty, I have two kids, a wonderful partner, and we're homeowners.

When the hell did I grow up? Unreal.

I survived the whirlwind garage sale yesterday. Got rid of a bunch of stuff - what didn't sell got immediately carted off to Goodwill. I managed not to kill anybody, altho I'm still really freakin pissed about a few things. The only bad thing about having people "help" you with a moving/garage sale is when they get it into their heads that THEY'RE allowed to decide what gets sold or thrown away. This resulted in me finding my marriage certificate, some photographs, and a recording of Capital Children's Chorus (that J & I were in together as children) - amongst other things - in the trash. I'm hoping that I didn't lose anything precious in the stuff carted to Goodwill. *sigh*

Save the aardvarks!

Okay, this is driving me crazy. Somebody wanna go here and tell me what the heck is going on?

I'm going to go back and attempt not to die. Wish me luck!

I need five of me

I
am
going
to
fucking
lose
it
any
minute
now



The cluster of ant bites I just got isn't improving my mood at all.

It still hasn't sunk in yet...

We're homeowners. If I want to paint the front door purple, I can. If I want to rip out the carpet and put down tile, I can. I can plant anything I want to in the front and back yard. I'm so excited, it's a good thing I'm so #*&$ exhausted or I wouldn't be able to sleep.

Joan has been having a blast picking out colors and painting - I have yet to be able to help paint, unfortunately. I've still got to clean up the old house, finish moving, get ready for the garage sale, and go up to Havana to get the last of the things from there that I want before it's sold.

There aren't enough hours in the day. Anybody want to come play with my kid(s) while I work?

amazing, astonishing, awe-inspiring, awesome, exciting, hair-raising, heart-stirring, impressive, magnificent, moving, overwhelming, spine-tingling...

WE'RE HOMEOWNERS!!!!


As I sit here, in OUR VERY OWN HOUSE, on a wireless network (yes, J works fast) I have yet to wrap my head around it totally.

I'm going to go take measurements of everything so we can get all geeky with SketchUp later. :D

Happy Birthday, BB King!

He's EIGHTY today. Wow. And still touring! I hope I've got that kind of energy when I'm 80.

Five hours. And then we'll be homeowners.

We're looking forward to having Thanksgiving dinner at our house this year. Everybody can come to us for a change!

interesting!

Some random things that may or may not be of interest to anybody.

Your Personality Profile

You are dependable, popular, and observant. Deep and thoughtful, you are prone to moodiness. In fact, your emotions tend to influence everything you do. You are unique, creative, and expressive. You don't mind waving your freak flag every once and a while. And lucky for you, most people find your weird ways charming!

The World's Shortest Personality Test

J's was creepily accurate too.

THIS is AWESOME. Anybody wanna come play a game with J & I?

Your Hidden Talent

You have the power to persuade and influence others. You're the type of person who can turn a whole room around. The potential for great leadership is there, as long as you don't abuse it. Always remember, you have a lot more power over people than you might think!

What's Your Hidden Talent?

Your Birthdate: August 15

With a birthday on the 15th of any month, you are apt to have really strong attachments to home, family and domestic scene. The 1 and 5 equaling 6, provide the sort of energy that makes you an excellent parent or teacher. You are very responsible and capable. This is an attractive and an attracting influence. You like harmony in your environment and strive to maintain it. You tend to learn by observation rather than study and research. You may like to cook, but you probably don't follow recipes. This number shows artistic leanings and would certainly support an talents that may be otherwise in your makeup. You're a very generous and giving person, but perhaps a bit stubborn in ways.

What Does Your Birth Date Mean?

Okay, am going to stop doing silly blogthings.

I keep forgetting to mention

How utterly neato I think my hubby is. Aside from all the wonderful things he does, he reads random Wikipedia entries. He frequently shares the weirder and/or more interesting ones with me. For example, we were reading about grues last night.

What is it with us going to bed and feeling more tired when we get up than we did when we laid down?

Closing at 4pm tomorrow - hard to believe, you know? I can't wait to hook up with Joan for the garage sale of the century! And then decorating... I've coined a new home decorating style: "Tornado Victorian" - eclectic, cluttered, messy, but comfy.

Oy! Gotta look up our utility account #!

Well POO

Frankspace is no more! :( And just when I was getting to know him, too. Maybe cyborgirl or clichemonster will know how to get in touch with him - I wanna have him over for dinner or something! So Frank, if you're reading this, email me!

heeheehee

How do you titillate an ocelot?


You oscillate his titalot!


heeheeheeheeheehee

I wish we had more statesmen like Jimmy Carter...

Arctic Folly
By Jimmy Carter

Tuesday, September 13, 2005; Page A27 Washington Post

Congress is about to make one of those big decisions that marks an era. Unless wiser heads prevail, it may do it badly -- making the wrong decision in the wrong way and about the wrong place. At stake is America's greatest wildlife sanctuary, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. To dissuade Congress from this environmental tragedy, Americans must rally, and quickly.

Congress had its Pyrrhic energy victory this summer, with a new energy policy that ignores much-needed conservation measures and gives the oil industry large new tax breaks regardless of where it drills and pumps. Surely Congress has done more than enough to increase the profits of the oil industry.

Yet now, in a separate decision, the White House and Big Oil are pressuring Congress to allow drilling rigs to rip into the ecological heart of America's preeminent wildlife sanctuary. We must not confuse this with Prudhoe Bay, which lies west of the Arctic refuge and is already an industrial landscape resembling Houston more than Yellowstone.

With increasing gasoline prices bringing economic hardship and concern to many Americans, we must not be misled by oil lobbyists who are trying to convince us that our energy security is singularly dependent on sacrificing the Arctic refuge. They promote the false premise that development will touch just a few thousand acres when, in fact, it would introduce roads and pipelines spider-webbing across hundreds of thousands of acres on the fragile coastal plain.

We cannot drill our way to energy security or lower gasoline prices as long as our nation sits on just 3 percent of world oil reserves yet accounts for 25 percent of all oil consumption. An obvious answer is to increase the fuel efficiency of motor vehicles, at least to the level we set more than a quarter-century ago.

Instead, the administration recently proposed a tiny increase in gas mileage for SUVs, minivans and pickups. Not effective until the 2011 models, this would save about one month's current consumption of fuel over the next 20 years -- far less than will be saved in just one state by a new California law. The new ruling offers automobile makers an opportunity to avoid the reductions by modifying the size of various models as they persist in manufacturing gas guzzlers. It is not a coincidence that Moody's has just downgraded the debt of General Motors and Ford to junk status, while makers of efficient vehicles prosper.

I have been to the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to study the wilderness wildlife. Far from being the frozen "desert" some suggest, this is a rich, Serengeti-like haven of life: nursery for caribou, polar bears, walruses and millions of shorebirds and waterfowl that migrate annually to the Lower 48. To sit, as Rosalynn and I did, watching a herd of musk oxen circle-up to defend their young and then to find yourself literally in the midst of thousands of caribou streaming by is to touch in a fundamental way God's glorious ark of teeming wildlife.

We Americans use a lot of energy, and millions of us want to do so in a more efficient way that also allows us to cherish our disappearing wilderness heritage. In the Arctic refuge we cannot have it both ways. In the next few months Americans could lose this special and amazing place through a backdoor legislative maneuver.

Each fall Congress endeavors to combine budgetary directives covering the nation's $2.5 trillion dollar annual budget in a single "reconciliation" decision. In a tricky ploy to avoid full debate, drilling advocates have buried their despoil-the-Arctic goal in this mammoth measure. So, conservation-minded Americans must ask our elected representatives to vote down any final budget reconciliation bill that would allow the sacrifice of our Arctic sanctuary.

Now is the time to speak up for the ecological integrity of this unsurpassed 18-million-acre wilderness. Many Americans will be in Washington on Sept. 20 for the Arctic Refuge Action Day rally on the Mall and to contact congressional representatives personally.

If we are not wise enough to protect the Arctic refuge, future generations will condemn us for needlessly sacrificing the wilderness of their world to feed our profligate, short-term and shortsighted energy habit. The pathway to a better, more sustainable energy future does not wind through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Former President Carter is the founder of the Carter Center in Atlanta.

I sit here...

entering grades into the gradebook program for mom.

These kids suck.

We close on Friday.

Dad was having trouble breathing today. Hope it's not something serious.

I need to clone myself. Soooooooo much to do.

going home. yay

HOLY FUCKING SHIT

Powell is running!

I guess his wife changed her mind...

Interesting

I feel like I've set down a large, heavy burden. I don't necessarily feel lighter, or relieved, but I do feel a sense of closure. Not sure why. Perhaps I've finally come to the emotional realization (my emotional realizations frequently come slower than my intellectual ones) that she was just a stupid kid. It wasn't personal, there was no deep meaning behind any of it - it's just one of those crappy things that happens in a world that doesn't have a discernable plan. I no longer wonder why people that are friends with her are still friends with her - their choice, and it doesn't affect me one way or the other. I don't hang out with them anyway. It doesn't mean I want to spend time with her or anything, but I think I'm finally not actively angry anymore.

That's good - 'cause goodness knows I have enough other things to spend mental energy on.

We're moving! We just bought a house! WOOHOO!!!

Now if I could just shake this cold/fever. Ugh.

First cold of the school year...

Ah, the joys of virus swapping. Could be worse, tho. Just got out of a nice long hot shower, got both kids asleep (they're tired and sick too, C got up to 102.3 today...) Woohoo! We have Alka-Seltzer plus Cold.

Drat - spoke too soon. C kinda woke up; let's see if he'll go back down quietly.

Mamaw is okay - J was right, she was irritated at everybody making a fuss over her. (I personally think Papaw was perfectly justified in being worried; I'd have taken her to the ER too.) They think she might have a blood clot in her lungs - we'll see what the tests show. Keep your fingers crossed and your prayers handy, y'all.

It appears Mr. Cox (of well drilling fame) has screwed us over. The well IS collapsed, evidently, and after replacing wiring and a pump for almost $1300, he's not returning our calls. *sigh* Having now talked to the prospective buyers, however, I like them - we'll probably end up reducing the price to compensate, if we can't get the well working.

Went and looked at the WDO repairs & new roof on our house (our house... wow, that's kinda mind-boggling to write) yesterday - I think there are a few things left to do, but so far it looks great. I've been having fun mentally decorating and furnishing the house when I have down time - something that I usually have because I'm putting off doing something. J found a GORGEOUS platform bed online for not much money that we might eventually get.

Weirdness abounds. My aunt Pat, whom I'm not sure I've ever met (maybe as a baby) and I are talking on IM (I went thru a burst of attempting to reconnect with family many months ago, and actually CALLED them in California - we've chatted occasionally since) - evidently my cousin Cheryl is on her way back home (things didn't work out for her here in Florida) and is going to call me tomorrow maybe. She's evidently in the area. I've nto seen her since she was 15 and I was 8 or 9, I think... she was a very troubled youth, and unfortunately for her, I don't think her adult life has been much less rocky. It'll be interesting to see/talk with her now.

I must be sick - I actually read through my entire online comic list just now. And my daily reading list (friends & family blogs, Felber, etc...)

A coherent thought on the New Orleans mess - there is plenty of blame to go around. From the top of the federal government down to the city leaders themselves, there are mistakes and oversights galore to bemoan. What this disaster shows me, however, is that it is not possible for the two different kinds of US citizens to co-exist in the same country. Those citizens who feel that government really should only be used for defense and a few other minor interstate legal areas, and those who believe in a bigger government that helps the poor, etc.

I used to label myself a libertarian. Some days lately I feel like a socialist. I can see both sides, honestly - I just don't see a resolution. Any ideas?

It's midnight and I'm falling asleep. I'm going to hope the rest tonight will mean I feel muuuuuuch better in the morning.

***SWOON***

Wow.

I'm going to be sore tomorrow.

But it was soooooooo worth it!

I swear, this should be a weekly thing for everybody... the entire world would feel so much better!

In the same vein...

Wednesday, August 31 2005 @ 11:21 AM PDT

When the levee breaks
by William Bunch

"It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

-- Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 8, 2004.


This picture is an aerial view of New Orleans today, more than 14 months later. Even though Hurricane Katrina has moved well north of the city and the sun is out, the waters continue to rise in New Orleans as we write this. That's because Lake Pontchartrain continues to pour through a two-block-long break in the main levee, near the city's 17th Street Canal. With much of the Crescent City some 10 feet below sea level, the rising tide may not stop until until it's level with the massive lake.

There have been numerous reports of bodies floating in the poorest neighborhoods of this poverty-plagued city, but the truth is that the death toll may not be known for days, because the conditions continue to frustrate rescue efforts.

New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.

Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.

Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. 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. (Much of the research here is from Nexis, which is why some articles aren't linked.)

In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to this Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness:

The $750 million Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection project is another major Corps project, which remains about 20% incomplete due to lack of funds, said Al Naomi, project manager. That project consists of building up levees and protection for pumping stations on the east bank of the Mississippi River in Orleans, St. Bernard, St. Charles and Jefferson parishes.

The Lake Pontchartrain project is slated to receive $3.9 million in the president's 2005 budget. Naomi said about $20 million is needed.

"The longer we wait without funding, the more we sink," he said. "I've got at least six levee construction contracts that need to be done to raise the levee protection back to where it should be (because of settling). Right now I owe my contractors about $5 million. And we're going to have to pay them interest."

That June, with the 2004 hurricane seasion starting, the Corps' Naomi went before a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for urgent work that Washington was now unable to pay for. From the June 18, 2004 Times-Picayune:

"The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don’t get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can’t stay ahead of the settlement," he said. "The problem that we have isn’t that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can’t raise them."

The panel authorized that money, and on July 1, 2004, it had to pony up another $250,000 when it learned that stretches of the levee in Metairie had sunk by four feet. The agency had to pay for the work with higher property taxes. The levee board noted in October 2004 that the feds were also now not paying for a hoped-for $15 million project to better shore up the banks of Lake Pontchartrain.

The 2004 hurricane season, as you probably recall, was the worst in decades. In spite of that, the federal government came back this spring with the steepest reduction in hurricane- and flood-control funding for New Orleans in history. Because of the proposed cuts, the Corps office there imposed a hiring freeze. Officials said that money targeted for the SELA project -- $10.4 million, down from $36.5 million -- was not enough to start any new jobs. According to New Orleans CityBusiness this June 5:

The district has identified $35 million in projects to build and improve levees, floodwalls and pumping stations in St. Bernard, Orleans, Jefferson and St. Charles parishes. Those projects are included in a Corps line item called Lake Pontchartrain, where funding is scheduled to be cut from $5.7 million this year to $2.9 million in 2006. Naomi said it's enough to pay salaries but little else.

"We'll do some design work. We'll design the contracts and get them ready to go if we get the money. But we don't have the money to put the work in the field, and that's the problem," Naomi said.

There was, at the same time, a growing recognition that more research was needed to see what New Orleans must do to protect itself from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. But once again, the money was not there. As the Times-Picayune reported last Sept. 22:

That second study would take about four years to complete and would cost about $4 million, said Army Corps of Engineers project manager Al Naomi. About $300,000 in federal money was proposed for the 2005 fiscal-year budget, and the state had agreed to match that amount.

But the cost of the Iraq war forced the Bush administration to order the New Orleans district office not to begin any new studies, and the 2005 budget no longer includes the needed money, he said.

The Senate was seeking to restore some of the SELA funding cuts for 2006. But now it's too late. One project that a contractor had been racing to finish this summer was a bridge and levee job right at the 17th Street Canal, site of the main breach. The levee failure appears to be causing a human tragedy of epic proportions:

"We probably have 80 percent of our city under water; with some sections of our city the water is as deep as 20 feet. Both airports are underwater," Mayor Ray Nagin told a radio interviewer.

Washington knew that this day could come at any time, and it knew the things that needed to be done to protect the citizens of New Orleans. But in the tradition of the riverboat gambler, the Bush administration decided to roll the dice on its fool's errand in Iraq, and on a tax cut that mainly benefitted the rich.

And now Bush has lost that gamble, big time. We hope that Congress will investigate what went wrong here.

The president told us that we needed to fight in Iraq to save lives here at home, and yet -- after moving billions of domestic dollars to the Persian Gulf -- there are bodies floating through the streets of Louisiana. What does George W. Bush have to say for himself now?

Read this and tell me it doesn't PISS YOU OFF TOO

August 31, 2005

"No One Can Say they Didn't See it Coming"
By Sidney Blumenthal

In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war.


Biblical in its uncontrolled rage and scope, Hurricane Katrina has left millions of Americans to scavenge for food and shelter and hundreds to thousands reportedly dead. With its main levee broken, the evacuated city of New Orleans has become part of the Gulf of Mexico. But the damage wrought by the hurricane may not entirely be the result of an act of nature.

A year ago the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken. After a flood killed six people in 1995, Congress created the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, in which the Corps of Engineers strengthened and renovated levees and pumping stations. In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York City. But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent. Additional cuts at the beginning of this year (for a total reduction in funding of 44.2 percent since 2001) forced the New Orleans district of the Corps to impose a hiring freeze. The Senate had debated adding funds for fixing New Orleans' levees, but it was too late.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which before the hurricane published a series on the federal funding problem, and whose presses are now underwater, reported online: "No one can say they didn't see it coming ... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation."

The Bush administration's policy of turning over wetlands to developers almost certainly also contributed to the heightened level of the storm surge. In 1990, a federal task force began restoring lost wetlands surrounding New Orleans. Every two miles of wetland between the Crescent City and the Gulf reduces a surge by half a foot. Bush had promised "no net loss" of wetlands, a policy launched by his father's administration and bolstered by President Clinton. But he reversed his approach in 2003, unleashing the developers. The Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency then announced they could no longer protect wetlands unless they were somehow related to interstate commerce.

In response to this potential crisis, four leading environmental groups conducted a joint expert study, concluding in 2004 that without wetlands protection New Orleans could be devastated by an ordinary, much less a Category 4 or 5, hurricane. "There's no way to describe how mindless a policy that is when it comes to wetlands protection," said one of the report's authors. The chairman of the White House's Council on Environmental Quality dismissed the study as "highly questionable," and boasted, "Everybody loves what we're doing."

"My administration's climate change policy will be science based," President Bush declared in June 2001. But in 2002, when the Environmental Protection Agency submitted a study on global warming to the United Nations reflecting its expert research, Bush derided it as "a report put out by a bureaucracy," and excised the climate change assessment from the agency's annual report. The next year, when the EPA issued its first comprehensive "Report on the Environment," stating, "Climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment," the White House simply demanded removal of the line and all similar conclusions. At the G-8 meeting in Scotland this year, Bush successfully stymied any common action on global warming. Scientists, meanwhile, have continued to accumulate impressive data on the rising temperature of the oceans, which has produced more severe hurricanes.

In February 2004, 60 of the nation's leading scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, warned in a statement, "Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policymaking": "Successful application of science has played a large part in the policies that have made the United States of America the world's most powerful nation and its citizens increasingly prosperous and healthy ... Indeed, this principle has long been adhered to by presidents and administrations of both parties in forming and implementing policies. The administration of George W. Bush has, however, disregarded this principle ... The distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends must cease." Bush completely ignored this statement.

In the two weeks preceding the storm in the Gulf, the trumping of science by ideology and expertise by special interests accelerated. The Federal Drug Administration announced that it was postponing sale of the morning-after contraceptive pill, despite overwhelming scientific evidence of its safety and its approval by the FDA's scientific advisory board. The United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa accused the Bush administration of responsibility for a condom shortage in Uganda -- the result of the administration's evangelical Christian agenda of "abstinence." When the chief of the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the Justice Department was ordered by the White House to delete its study that African-Americans and other minorities are subject to racial profiling in police traffic stops and he refused to buckle under, he was forced out of his job. When the Army Corps of Engineers' chief contracting oversight analyst objected to a $7 billion no-bid contract awarded for work in Iraq to Halliburton (the firm at which Vice President Cheney was formerly CEO), she was demoted despite her superior professional ratings. At the National Park Service, a former Cheney aide, a political appointee lacking professional background, drew up a plan to overturn past environmental practices and prohibit any mention of evolution while allowing sale of religious materials through the Park Service.

On the day the levees burst in New Orleans, Bush delivered a speech in Colorado comparing the Iraq war to World War II and himself to Franklin D. Roosevelt: "And he knew that the best way to bring peace and stability to the region was by bringing freedom to Japan." Bush had boarded his very own "Streetcar Named Desire."

Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior advisor to President Clinton and the author of "The Clinton Wars," is writing a column for Salon and the Guardian of London.