Pork Over People
Heard this on Rush this morning.
How can it be that you [Senator Mary Landrieu], as the senator from that state, didn't do a damn thing about it if everybody knew? Where was your daddy? Where was your little brother? Where's the legislation you introduced to Tom Daschle when he was the majority leader to get this done? Everybody says, "Yep, they'll handle a cat 3, but nothing higher, certainly not a cat 5." Where was the legislation to fix these and move them up to a cat 5? We need to investigate Louisiana, Mary Landrieu's family, and the Democratic Party down there. From the Washington Post today, here's the headline: "Money Flowed to Questionable Projects -- Louisiana leads in Army Corps spending, but millions had nothing to do with the floods. Before Hurricane Katrina breached a levee on the New Orleans Industrial Canal, the Army Corps of Engineers had already launched a $748 million construction project at that very location. But the project had nothing to do with flood control. The Corps was building a huge new lock for the canal, an effort to accommodate steadily increasing barge traffic. Except that barge traffic on the canal has been steadily decreasing. In Katrina's wake, Louisiana politicians and other critics have complained about paltry funding for the Army Corps in general and Louisiana projects in particular. But over the five years of President Bush's administration, Louisiana has received far more money for Corps civil works projects than any other state, about $1.9 billion; California was a distant second with less than $1.4 billion, even though its population is more than seven times as large. Much of that Louisiana money was spent to try to keep low-lying New Orleans dry. But hundreds of millions of dollars have gone to unrelated water projects demanded by the state's congressional delegation and approved by the Corps, often after economic analyses that turned out to be inaccurate. Despite a series of independent investigations criticizing Army Corps construction projects as wasteful pork-barrel spending, Louisiana's representatives have kept bringing home the bacon. For example, after a $194 million deepening project for the Port of Iberia flunked a Corps cost-benefit analysis, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) tucked language into an emergency Iraq spending bill ordering the agency to redo its calculations," so that the money would get spent. Can I read this to you again so you understand this? Mary Landrieu cooked the books. "After a $194 million deepening project for the Port of Iberia flunked a Corps cost-benefit analysis, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) tucked language into an emergency Iraq spending bill ordering the agency to redo its calculations." In other words: Cook the books so that the cost-benefit analysis works, because we want the money.Paul at Wizbang! also documents whacked Louisiana priorities. Here's the take away from both the Washington Post and Star Tribune articles:
Even if fully funded the day Bush took office, New Orleans would have flooded.UPDATE: Orin Kerr argues that pork wasn't the problem. He argues, irrefutably, that 4 > 3 (hurricane categories that is).
I'm no expert on the question, of course, but my sense is that the flooding resulted primarily from the combination of a) long-term government planning for only a Category 3 Hurricane hitting New Orleans and b) a Category 4 hurricane hitting New Orleans. The article notes that the Army Corps of Engineers had started to study the feasibility of upgrading the levees for a higher level of protection, but the study was obviously too late. If that's right, then the primary problem that led to the flooding would seem to be more poor long-term risk planning or just plain bad luck than pork barrel spending.