Weather can wipe out cities forever. It's what happened to America's first city, after all, as a visit to Chaco Canyon northeast of Gallup, N.M., attests. At the start of the 13th century, it got hotter in that part of the world, and by the 1230s, the Anasazi up and moved on. As the world now knows, weather need not have done to New Orleans. There are decades' worth of memos from engineers and contractors setting forth budgets for what it would take to build up those levees to withstand a Force 4 or 5 hurricane. The sum most recently nixed by Bush's Office of Management of Budget -- $3 billion or so is far less than what the Pentagon simply mislays every year, even before it's gone to the trouble of converting the appropriated cash into cruise missiles or boots.

New Orleans has bounced back before. Though after the Civil War, the city never really returned to its former glory. According to Lyle Saxon's "Fabulous New Orleans," the last great social season came in 1859 with the largest receipts of produce, the heaviest and most profitable trade the city had ever done. The total river trade that year was valued at $289,565,000.

Today marks four years that George W. Bush has been a complete flop as a “War President,” the worst Commander in Chief in US History.

On September 11, 2001, Bush’s incompetence -- at very least -- allowed Osama bin Laden’s attacks on America to happen. Imagine the howl from the bloviating right wing if those disasters had happened on Bill Clinton or Al Gore or John Kerry’s watch.

Since then, Bush’s four-year mismanagement of military operations has been every bit as incompetent, dishonorable and gratuitously destructive as his performance in New Orleans. One can only shudder at what comes next.

At a speech just before Katrina, Bush had the astonishing gall to compare his war leadership to that of Franklin Roosevelt. In fact, if Bush had been in office instead of Roosevelt in 1941, we’d all be speaking German and Japanese.

Lets do the math: On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, killing nearly as many Americans as bin Laden killed on 9/11/01. The Pacific fleet was crippled, and Japan appeared as unbeatable in Asia as did the Nazis in Europe.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-Ill.), 1980 independent presidential candidate John Anderson (who now heads Fairvote), Melanie Campbell of the Coalition for Black Civic Participation, and other leaders in the movement for election reform will speak at."A Call to Protect and Democratize U.S. Elections: A Panel Presentation on the challenges to American elections."

"The numerous allegations of manipulation in the 2000 and 2004 elections and the change of personnel on the U.S. Supreme Court have raised questions about the future of American democracy," said Dean Myerson, executive director of the Green Institute. "The September 16 panel will feature political and activist leaders with a lot to say about barriers to voting, problems with computer voting machines, and challenges posed by our at-large, winner-take-all election system."

The event will take place at the National Press Club on Friday, September 16, 1-4 p.m., and is sponsored by the Green Institute, the Liberty Tree Foundation for the Democratic Revolution, and Fairvote.

Also on the panel will be 2004 Green Party presidential candidate David

Cindy Sheehan has been subjected to an unwarranted backlash by right-wing pundits because of her antiwar protests and some explosive statements she made about President Bush. Perhaps Sheehan, while mourning the death of her son, Casey, a U.S. soldier who died in the Iraq war, lashed out at the president, and decided to take her antiwar message to Crawford, Texas, after doing some fact checking on her emotional state. If so, these are likely some of the circumstances that drove her:

While searching the 600 or so sites identified by United States intelligence and Iraqi officials as places where the country's biological weapons may have been hidden, which was President Bush’s rationale for starting the war, to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, not a single speck of anthrax or other WMD has been uncovered since the war started more than two years ago.