Thanks, Dubya. Thanks. A Lot. Love, N.O.

Well, my goodness gracious. What have we here? It seems as if the Worst. President. Ever. couldn't be bothered to fund the Army Corps of Engineers in the New Orleans district. According to this article,

In fiscal year 2006, the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is bracing for a record $71.2 million reduction in federal funding.

It would be the largest single-year funding loss ever for the New Orleans district, Corps officials said.

I've been here over 30 years and I've never seen this level of reduction, said Al Naomi, project manager for the New Orleans district. I think part of the problem is it's not so much the reduction, it's the drastic reduction in one fiscal year. It's the immediacy of the reduction that I think is the hardest thing to adapt to.

There is an economic ripple effect, too. The cuts mean major hurricane and flood protection projects will not be awarded to local engineering firms. Also, a study to determine ways to protect the region from a Category 5 hurricane has been shelved for now.

Read it and weep. I mean, for reals. Read it. And weep.

There could be no better example of the idiocy, the avarice and callousness of the cumulative effects of all of the Worst. President. Ever.'s policies - insane tax cuts, coupled with the stinking black hole of Iraq that's taken away the National Guard (who would have been on hand to help with the disaster) and sucking out the money (six billion dollars a month) that hasn't been given away in tax breaks for zillionaires and corporations; the elimination of the estate tax, and not least, the Bankruptcy Bill, which (among other travesties) will take away the ability of a bankruptcy judge to use his or her own discretion to give a person declaring bankruptcy any kind of a break on repayment depending on individual circumstance, even though corporations get those breaks. And thanks to stubbornly ignoring the reality of global warming, we only have more of the same in store ahead.

I just look at the TV and cry. New Orleans may gone forever. But Dubya spent one minute and twenty five seconds of a forty-minute advertisement - uh, I mean speech - making an offhand reference to the disaster and telling people to call the Red Cross, and the rest of that time he was promoting the Iraq sinkhole and comparing himself to FDR.

The only way you can make a comparison between the Worst. President. Ever. and FDR is that they were both afflicted with paralysis - FDR had paralyzed legs and Bush has paralyzed decency, morals and intelligence.

And here's an article from 2001 in Popular Mechanics predicting this.