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Maybe this is something that the Louisiana voters can ask their delegation about: Army's engineers spent millions on Louisiana projects labeled as pork. Before Hurricane Katrina breached a levee on the New Orleans Industrial Canal, the Army Corps of Engineers...

It's the fourth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Other, better bloggers are marking the occasion, so you don't need me to do it for you. And do you want to know something? I'm letting the whole commemoration pass. Frankly,...

I'm tremendously touched by the donations I've received so far for our local Sheriff's Relief Fund, a venture that aims to get a truckload of supplies delivered to Mississippi for distribution to local law enforcement/fire/EMT folks. (Click the link for...

This is shaping up to be a great college football season. Notre Dame takes out Michigan. Iowa State up-ends Iowa for the Cy-Hawk Trophy. Next up: Horns and Ohio State. If things keep playing out this way, I'll be back...

Labor Day weekend is always a busy one for me. Saturday was my birthday, so I usually take an extra day off and make it a four day bonanza of non-work. So needless to say, I'm not going to spend...

A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State

H/T to a former Navy shipmate for this article e-mailed to me. He offered it without comment, and if you check it out, you'll see that it speaks for itself. (by the way, he's in the Houston area, a lot closer to the action than the Chief is up in South Dakota.)

If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.

Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists?myself included?did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.

But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.

The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.

The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over four days last week. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.

I'm going to write a personal check for $55 tomorrow, the amount I've received via PayPal for the Sheriff's Relief Fund. I'm also thinking about just matching whatever all of you have donated for my own personal contribution. That should...

Chad Schult, the Clear Cut Kidder, is having trouble defining incompetence in regard to Katrina. So this photo should be worth a thousand words: This is what happened to the people of New Orleans who elected an incompetent Democrat as...

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