The Bush Administration is back on track. After holding in September to cook the books a little and let almost a half million displaced New Orleans residents fend for themselves or otherwise eat cake, the Beltway Bandits borrowed a total of $94.4 billion in October.

This amount brought our federal government back to a continuing average of $50 billion per month in new debt obligations for taxpayers of the United States . An average that would have put us over a $600 billion real deficit for fiscal 2005 if John Snow and Van Zeff hadn’t been so crafty by borrowing almost nothing in September, the last month of the government’s fiscal year where we ended up with only a $553.6 billion increase to the national debt.

Of the $94.4 billion increase in October, $49.3 billion came from borrowing from investors – individuals, organizations, and foreign countries willing to lend us welfare money. The balance of $45.1 billion was the result of stealing entitlement money under the pretense of “borrowing.” And none of the latter was interest simply dumped in the bogus trust funds of Social Security, the Federal Employees Retirement System, Medicare, Unemployment, or any of the other entitlement trusts with the possible exception of the Military Retirement account which would have been only about five billion in new free paper anyway.

This also means that we are about three months away from hitting the national debt limit of $8.184 trillion granted in November 2004, just a year ago. It’s the major reason Congress critters are starting to talk about “reducing the deficit.” We might as well make increasing the statutory debt limit an annual national holiday.

Of course, we still face the promises Bush made to rebuild New Orleans “better than ever” during a major speech from the high ground of Jackson square and against the backdrop of a cathedral lighted by generators he brought to the scene for a staged event in a city without electricity. I guess Air Force One can carry more dead weight than I thought.

So far, almost nothing has been done for nearly a half million displaced people and Bush, the compassionate conservative, is probably hoping for the news coverage to die down, for the homeless to find jobs and a life elsewhere, and for it all to go away – be buried and forgotten like so many other things.

Bush is now telling us that it’s up to the local city and state government’s to decide how to rebuild New Orleans even though it’s the 350 mile levee system that caused the main problem and that falls directly under the authority and competence of the federal Army Corps of Engineers. Otherwise, the damage from hurricane Katrina would have been no worse than the damage in Texas from Rita or that in Florida from Wilma.

What’s being billed as an “epic” storm of “historic proportion” was nothing more or less than a Category Three hurricane, the same storm intensity that hit Texas and the West Coast of South Florida – and New Orleans got the “soft side” with winds over a city that sits like a bowl below sea level. NOA clocked these winds at ninety-five miles per hour.

What the media has taught us is that they don’t have enough sense to come in out of the rain; that it’s possible for first responders to communicate if they have the right equipment; and that they know virtually nothing about the “storm surge” generated by the wall of a hurricane’s eye or that such surge requires a depth of water at least equal to the height of the wave being pushed ahead of the eye.

I’m still trying to figure out how storm surge could have affected New Orleans when its surrounded on three sides by shallow wetlands and bayous, a hundred and eleven miles from the mouth of the Mississippi river (nautical mile marker 97 is by Canal Street), and the eye of the hurricane came ashore on the Mississippi state side of the border. Gulfport and Biloxi were hit with a reported 22 foot storm surge from the “hard side” where houses were flattened for about a mile inland, but any storm surge generated on the softer side would have died long before reaching New Orleans or Lake Pontchartrain to the north of the city.

If it were possible for a storm surge to build out of swampland or the two foot depth of Lake Borgne , then we should have seen such a surge hit Miami when Wilma came across the Everglades .

The contrast between what happened when the levees broke and other areas can be most dramatically and clearly seen in the city of Algiers or the West Bank. Areas south of New Orleans or across the river where the levees didn’t break suffered little hurricane damage and are already back in business.

Any rebuilding is going to have to build the levee system to withstand a category five hurricane or better. The current system is much too weak and it’s pure folly to think that a hurricane can’t happen again.

Responsibility for rebuilding and maintaining the levee system falls directly on the shoulders of the Army Corps of Engineers and, therefore, the federal government. You can blame the city and state for not taxing their citizens and tourists enough to do the job themselves, but the responsibility has always been in the hands of the feds. Get busy George and stop stalling.