Hurricane!

Lots of questions about how the administration dealt with Hurricane Katrina.

But the story about the flight to Atlanta is another example of a pretty relaxed attitude by the people at the top of the FEMA food chain. Bush stays on his political campaigning vacation, and Chertoff flies off to Atlanta, leaving everything up to the clearly incapable Brown in New Orleans. It’s obvious from the reporting of the 2004 hurricane season that Brown was managed quite closely by the White House to prevent any embarrassments in the election run-up, so this was his first time on his own.