President's Popularity is Sinking Like a Stone
Texas congressman Tom DeLay, arguably the most powerful man in the House of Representatives, added his voice to a string of gaffes from the Bush family and others by telling a group of evacuees in a Houston shelter that their experiences were not all that different from attending summer camp.
"Now tell me the truth boys," Mr DeLay said, "is this kind of fun?"
In New Orleans itself, and along the ravaged coastline of Mississippi and Alabama, a greatly increased presence of police, National Guard and relief workers has stabilized what, for the first few days, had appeared to be a state of near-total anarchy. Rescue workers in New Orleans said the floodwaters were now receding at a pace of several inches a day - amounting to as much as two city blocks along some of the gentler inclines.
With most of the living now evacuated, officials are focusing on the gruesome task of recovering bodies - many of them bloated, decomposed, or gnawed at by animals. The media were excluded from accompanying official search parties, and a morgue set up in the small town of St Gabriel, on the way to Baton Rouge, did not issue updated figures on its body count.
... As the country struggles with the consequences of widespread devastation and death, new stories continue to emerge about the federal government's various failures - relief supplies sent to non-existent staging posts, resources pumped into Texas and the Carolinas but not into Louisiana or Mississippi, families split up and flown to different parts of the country, in some cases without any advance knowledge of where the evacuees were being taken, and on and on.
In the middle of last week, the Federal Emergency Management Agency run by Mr Brown promised to distribute $2,000 debit cards to those left most destitute by the storm. The cards were distributed only in Texas, however, and by Friday the program had been abandoned altogether. Jane Bullock, who was the agency's chief of staff under President Clinton, told reporters she couldn't believe the agency was killing one of the few "great ideas" to have come out of the relief effort.