Six months after 95 mph winds from Katrina knocked down the levees that were supposed to withstand winds of 115 to 134 mph, President Bush, the same man that promised to rebuild New Orleans “bigger and better than ever” in “the greatest reconstruction effort the world has ever seen,” has just announced that he intends to ask Congress for another $4 billion to compensate people for the homes they lost.

It should be remembered that this is the same man who ran up the national debt another $238 billion in the first three months of the new fiscal year that began October 1, 2005 and is now waiting for Congress to approve another extension of the nation’s debt limit so we can continue borrowing from China, Japan, and other countries still willing to loan us money.

It should also be remembered that these levees or dykes were designed, built, and managed by the federal government’s Army Corps of Engineers and the responsibility for their rebuilding falls directly on the shoulders of that federal entity. There’s no one else to do it, especially since the State of Louisiana and the City of New Orleans have lost most of their tax base now spread across the nation. You might blame them for not imposing a “levee tax” in the past, but you certainly cannot expect it from them now.

Initially, President Bush took the position of waiting to see what solution or rebuilding plan the “locals” came up with. However, when the Commission to Rebuild New Orleans decided that it would take reconstructing the levees to withstand a Category 5 hurricane and an estimated $22 billion cost to do this in order to bring back former residents and investors, the idea of taking their advice seems to have been buried. We are now in the position of bringing the levees back to the condition they were in before Katrina with possibly some reinforcement and the closure of the Industrial Canal .

In the interim, Bush appointed his Texas family banker, Donald E. Powell, coordinator for Gulf Coast Rebuilding and paid a presidential visit to the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) headquarters in South Florida . NOAA is the only source of accurate hurricane information and the only people who fly into hurricanes to report conditions.

The fly-on-the-wall says that NOAA was reminded of where its funding comes from, we will no longer hear anything about the maximum sustained winds over New Orleans during Katrina being 95 mph (barely a Category 2), and the hurricane experts were pressed hard to come up with an estimate of the probability of such a storm happening again.

In other words, Bush is willing to gamble that New Orleans will not be hit by another Category 3 hurricane in the near future, especially one that presents its “soft side” to New Orleans with counterclockwise winds from the North over Lake Pontchartrain producing waves to pound the levees – all this, even though two Category 3 hurricanes caused the city to flood twice last season.

By now, people should realize that we had three Category 3 hurricanes in the Gulf Coast last season and the damage done to New Orleans would not have been any different than the damage done to Texas or South Florida ’s Gulf Coast if it hadn’t been for the levees giving way.

Has the media shown anything other than the traffic jams when Rita hit the Galveston-Houston, Port Arthur area of Texas ? Have you seen anything of the aftermath or even how the man made breakwater stood up? Have you seen follow-up on anything the media made such a fuss over before the hurricane hit? Have they ever gone back to interview someone after they made such a production about his staying?

And where are the reports from South Florida ? If hurricane Wilma was the same size as Katrina, where are the damage reports of her coming ashore around the Naples and Marco Island areas of Florida ?

Surely, we ought to be able to draw comparisons by now wouldn’t you think? Some of those news nitwits that were standing on the beach before the hurricane must be capable of bringing us some news of the aftermath from these other Category 3 hurricanes.

C’mon folks, the answer is obvious. Faulty levees caused the damage in New Orleans . Faulty levees caused almost a half million people to be forcibly evacuated and spread across the country. And it’s the federal government’s faulty levees that we are today not doing much of anything to correct while the media concentrates on the human suffering. Even the Army Corps says that the interlocking sheet pile would have to be driven 55 to 60 feet deep to properly reinforce the 17th Street Canal. And that still would not bring them to Category 5 hurricane protection.

The situation is even worse than the Southeastern Louisiana Flood Control (SELA) project both Bush and Clinton stalled for years. A sensible project that would have set up a series of pipes to return some of the Mississippi River’s nutrients to the wetlands that developers have blocked off in their greed and form a natural barrier to storms.

To top it all off, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) spent millions to order trailers that have yet to be delivered. Now, they’re saying that it’s against the law for FEMA to place these in a flood zone. Duh, are they just finding out that New Orleans is a city below sea level?

If Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton were still alive, they’d be composing dirge music for the former City of Soul .