Katrina

I haven't written anything about Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans and the way it is heartbreaking and infuriating and horrific all at the same time, because, well... what can you say? The Wall Street Journal has a regularly updated Crisis Tracker that's useful for keeping up to date with what's going on, and boing boing has had some incredibly sad and incredibly moving first-person accounts over the last few days. The transcript of a Meet the Press interview with Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard (scroll down past the boundless incompetence of the secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff) made me angry all over again, with his simple but tragic stories - "We have been abandoned by our own country". But the most moving site I've seen so far is this photoset on flickr, mainly of refugees who have arrived in Houston. This photo in particular is incredible.

There were a couple of good opinion pieces in The Australian this morning, talking about the Bush administration's response, or complete lack thereof, to the disaster, and what the long-term effects will be. As one of the writers so wittily put it, Katrina could be Bush's Monica - the thing that brings about the downfall of a Presidency. The reaction of Bush and the federal government has been bizarre at best, and utterly inappropriate and deadly at worst. As was pointed out in The Australian this disaster should have the effect, if nothing else, of pointing out to Americans that there is something irrevocably wrong with their government, and that it needs to be fixed in some fundamental way. The tragedy is, of course, that tens of thousands of people had to die before this realisation hit.