Geraldo continues his compassionate coverage. I just watched him and a member of the National Guard carry a woman in her wheelchair down three flights of steps at a nursing home. She wouldn't go without her bible, her dressing gown and her medicine and they got those for her.

Rick Leventhal is talking about the stench in the streets. He says they are told it is mostly coming from rotting meat.

The Boston Globe reports two bars have reopened in the French Quarter - they are serving warm beer.

The public risk health is now a major concern. Many kids have viral gastroenteritis.

There may be thousands still left and authorities are going house to house to find them.

With most of New Orleans evacuated, there may be more dead bodies than living persons left behind. What will become of the dead?

Mayor C. Ray Nagin, who predicted that the death toll could reach into the thousands, said Saturday that officials were assembling refrigerated 18-wheelers that would serve as roaming morgues. Nagin said it might be impossible to find enough room to bury the bodies; they might all be cremated.

Many may never be identified. Particularly if there are no wallets or identification on them.

Those with and without cars.

[New York Times]

Frank Rich does it yet again, with concrete examples and dots a seventh-grader could connect.

From the president's administration's inattention to threats before 9/11 to his disappearing act on the day itself to the reckless blundering in the ill-planned war of choice that was 9/11's bastard offspring, Katrina is déjà vu with a vengeance.

The president's declaration that "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees" has instantly achieved the notoriety of Condoleezza Rice's "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center." The administration's complete obliviousness to the possibilities for energy failures, food and water deprivation, and civil disorder in a major city under siege needs only the Donald Rumsfeld punch line of "Stuff happens" for a coup de grâce.

Rich goes on to describe how Bush lost the battle of New Orleans - beginning with Fox News last Thursday:

The Washington Post reports on the behind-the-scenes power grab Bush tried to pull on LA. Governor Kathleen Blanco in an attempt to shift the blame for New Orleans:

Shortly before midnight Friday, the Bush administration sent her a proposed legal memorandum asking her to request a federal takeover of the evacuation of New Orleans, a source within the state's emergency operations center said Saturday.

The administration sought unified control over all local police and state National Guard units reporting to the governor. Louisiana officials rejected the request after talks throughout the night, concerned that such a move would be comparable to a federal declaration of martial law. Some officials in the state suspected a political motive behind the request. "Quite frankly, if they'd been able to pull off taking it away from the locals, they then could have blamed everything on the locals," said the source, who does not have the authority to speak publicly.

Don't miss the op-ed by New Orleans-born author Anne Rice in the Sunday New York Times, Do You Know What It Means to Lose New Orleans? She answers the question, "Why didn't they leave?"

Well, here's an answer. Thousands didn't leave New Orleans because they couldn't leave. They didn't have the money. They didn't have the vehicles. They didn't have any place to go. They are the poor, black and white, who dwell in any city in great numbers; and they did what they felt they could do - they huddled together in the strongest houses they could find. There was no way to up and leave and check into the nearest Ramada Inn.

What's more, thousands more who could have left stayed behind to help others. They went out in the helicopters and pulled the survivors off rooftops; they went through the flooded streets in their boats trying to gather those they could find. Meanwhile, city officials tried desperately to alleviate the worsening conditions in the Superdome, while makeshift shelters and hotels and hospitals struggled.

I just received an email saying permalinks are now established for the following articles:

• Troops begin combat operations in New Orleans (Army Times, 2 Sept 2005)
• Fearing riots, Guard rejects food airdrops; Officials exploring other options for delivering supplies (Stars and Stripes, 3 Sept 2005)
• Homeland Security won't let Red Cross deliver food (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 3 Sept 2005)

Name your caption.

We should never again in our lifetimes have to see pictures like this in our country.

[Source: the Guardian]

New Orleans has been left to the dead and dying.

Update: John Amato of Crooks and Liars expresses his thoughts on the devastation here at Huffington Post.

Update: Hunter at Daily Kos: Unforgivable.

The Sunday Observer:

It is clear from talking to survivors that what happened in New Orleans last week was far more extensive, bloody and terrifying than the authorities have admitted so far.

I've looked though hundreds of photo compilations and have settled on these as the best collections. They are all by news organizations, and they are decent sized and loaded on single pages so you don't have to keep clicking.

• Set One
• Set Two
• Set Three

[Via Straight Up, and don't skip this harrowing missive from Tuesday by a pathologist who was in New Orleans to attend an HIV/AIDS convention.]

Simply Chilling.

"They killed a man here last night," Steve Banka, 28, told Reuters. "A young lady was being raped and stabbed. And the sounds of her screaming got to this man and so he ran out into the street to get help from troops, to try to flag down a passing truck of them, and he jumped up on the truck's windscreen and they shot him dead."

There's more:

We found a young girl raped and killed in the bathroom," one National Guard soldier told Reuters. "Then the crowd got the man and they beat him to death."

It's official. Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco has appointed former FEMA director James Lee Witt to oversee the recovery of New Orleans. The Vice-Chairman and Senior Advisor's to Witt's firm is Gen. Wesley Clark.

Last Night in Little Rock wrote about Mr. Witt two days ago at TalkLeft, asking, Where Is James Witt When We Need Him?

FEMA is now just another bureaucratic level within the Department of Homeland Security. It has become a dinosaur stuck in the tar pits, and it is dying before our eyes.

James Lee Witt, an Arkansan, was FEMA Director under President Clinton, and he had the cojones to immediately go to the scene and take control. Clinton gave him power, and he used it for the national good. We were served well by him. In any natural disaster, he was there, he was on TV telling us what was going on, and he got things done. He did not sit on his hands in a Washington office getting information from CNN or FoxNews. James Lee Witt works in Little Rock, and I'll bet my house he's working on this disaster somehow. If he ran FEMA, the response would be markedly different, instead of the "what do I do now?" look of Michael Chertoff we see today.

I just found this in the TalkLeft archives, from September, 2004, when it looked like Hurricane Ivan was headed to New Orleans. ABC News reported that New Orleans might sink if it got hit hard:

The worst-case scenario for New Orleans a direct strike by a full-strength Hurricane Ivan could submerge much of this historic city treetop-deep in a stew of sewage, industrial chemicals and fire ants, and the inundation could last for weeks, experts say. If the storm were strong enough, Ivan could drive water over the tops of the levees that protect the city from the Mississippi River and vast Lake Pontchartrain. And with the city sitting in a saucer-shaped depression that dips as much as 9 feet below sea level, there would be nowhere for all that water to drain.

Those folks who remain, should the city flood, would be exposed to all kinds of nightmares from buildings falling apart to floating in the water having nowhere to go," Ivor van Heerden, director of Louisiana State University's Hurricane Public Health Center, said Tuesday.