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I know I said there wasn't much to add to the national brouhaha over Katrina ... but that was before I listened to NPR this morning.

As evidenced by last night's address to the nation, President Bush is scrambling to repair his battered reputation. A couple of days ago he said he takes responsibility for the failures of the federal government in responding to Katrina. ("I take responsibility" -- the first time we've ever heard THAT phrase uttered by anyone in this administration.) Then last night, he proposed a federal recovery effort with a price tag that would have made FDR blanch. (Never mind how we're going to pay for these recovery efforts, now that his tax cuts and his never-ending war have left us in debt up to our collective tuchus.)

But his public relations footwork notwithstanding, Ol' Dubya is going to have to tap dance a little faster -- because we're learning that the federal response to Hurricane Katrina was even more sluggish than we initially thought.

On Sept. 4, DHS secretary Michael Chertoff went on "Meet the Press" and told Tim Russert, "It was on Tuesday that the levee -- may have been overnight Monday to Tuesday -- that the levee started to break. And it was midday Tuesday that I became aware of the fact that there was no possibility of plugging the gap and that essentially the lake was going to start to drain into the city. I think that second catastrophe really caught everybody by surprise.

Later that same day, National Hurricane Center director Max Mayfield told The Times-Picayune that Chertoff was, in essence, full of crap. In the days leading up to the disaster, Mayfield had warned DHS secretary Michael Chertoff and then-FEMA director Michael Brown that there was a strong chance Katrina would cause New Orleans' levees to fail. "We were briefing them way before landfall," he said. "It’s not like this was a surprise. We had in the advisories that the levee could be topped."

Chertoff also told Russert that DHS had "actually prestaged a tremendous number of supplies, meals, shelter, water" -- and that the biggest problem in the aftermath of the hurricane was the lack of access to flooded New Orleans.

The fact of the matter is, there's only really one way to deal with that issue, and that is to get people out first. Once that bowl breaks and that soup bowl fills with water, it is unquestionably the case, as we saw vividly demonstrated, that it's going to be almost impossible to get people out. So there is really only one way to deal with it, and that is to evacuate people in advance. Michael Brown got on TV in Saturday and he said to people in New Orleans, "Take this seriously. There is a storm coming." On Friday there was discussion about the fact that even though this storm could fall anywhere along the Gulf, people had to be carefully monitoring it.

But now Leo Bosner, an emergency management specialist at FEMA, has blown the lid off of the claim that DHS and FEMA did everything possible to avoid the Katrina debacle.

In daily e-mails -- known as National Situation Updates -- sent to Chertoff, Brown and others in the days before Katrina made landfall in the Gulf Coast, Bosner warned of its growing strength -- and of the particular danger the hurricane posed to New Orleans, much of which lies below sea level.

But Bosner says FEMA failed to organize the massive mobilization of National Guard troops and evacuation buses needed for a quick and effective relief response when Katrina struck. He says he and his colleagues at FEMA's D.C. headquarters were shocked by the lack of response.

"We could see all this going downhill," Bosner said, "but there was nothing we could do."

Listen to the full story on NPR's Web site. If your blood isn't boiling by the end of it, well, you're probably Dick Cheney.

I haven't blogged yet about Katrina - partly because I've been glued to the television, partly because I don't really know what I can add to the discussion. Am I aggrieved by what's happened? Lord, yes. I never dreamed I would see images of hungry, homeless people lined up on sidewalks waiting for (belated) aid to come, while dead bodies lie where they've fallen in the streets, right here in my own country. I'm by turns heartbroken, appalled, depressed, and infuriated by our descent into what sometimes looks like a parody of Third World squalor.

But what can I say about these horrors that hasn't been said? Sure, I could excoriate the federal government for its feeble, half-assed, too-damn-little-too-damn-late response ... but plenty of people have done that (here, here, and here), and with an eloquence that seems to elude me at the moment. I could call for FEMA director Michael Brown's head on a pike ... but my hard-charging senator, Barbara Mikulski, has already beaten me to the punch. And I suppose I could add my own observations about how Katrina ripped through the thin veneer of this nation's tolerance for people who are poor, black, or both, thus exposing our innate racism and classism ... but there's not much room left on that particular bandwagon, populated as it is by everyone from Ted Kennedy to Kanye West.

Truth is, nothing I say here can ease the crushing losses suffered by the citizens of New Orleans, Gulfport, Biloxi, Slidell, and the now nonexistent Waveland, Miss.

So, like most everyone else, I make my donation to the Red Cross. I listen to the calls for assistance and for investigations into FEMA mismanagement as I box up clothes and household items to send to people who've lost - it defies imagining - everything. I thank whatever higher power may be lurking out there for the abundant good fortune in my life, and I stop bitching about the comparatively minor annoyances. And I rededicate myself to campaigning and voting for candidates at every level who put justice and compassion ahead of profits.

It doesn't seem like much ... but right now, it's the best I've got.

We have all been hearing about the great number of tragedies going on in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Unfortunately, on-going tragedies like rape and domestic violence do not take a break during natural disasters, and, in fact, can be made worse in some situations. But the natural disaster may make it harder to help those victims. Due to the hurricane, a number of DV shelters and