WASHINGTON (AP) - Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's decision to return thousands of dollars from a top fundraiser wanted as a fugitive in California illustrates the perils of the pell-mell rush for political money - your friends can be your worst enemies.

Just ask Clinton and her rivals Barack Obama and John Edwards.

All three have experience putting out brushfires caused by former rainmakers.

Earlier this year, Clinton divested her political action committee, HillPac, of tainted contributions received from a Pakistani immigrant accused of plotting illegal donations. Obama donated to charity money he received in past campaigns from a Chicago developer caught in an Illinois corruption scandal. And just last week, the lawyer who represented assisted suicide advocate Jack Kevorkian was indicted on charges of conspiring to make more than $125,000 in illegal contributions to Edwards' 2004 presidential campaign.

The flow of federal dollars to the Gulf Coast two years after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated the region already exceeds what the U.S. spent on the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II.

President Bush and Congress have committed more than $127 billion in resources and tax relief for the region — significantly more than inflation-adjusted $107.6 billion directed to 16 countries in Europe between 1947 and 1951.

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. (AP) - With large swaths of the Gulf Coast still in ruins from Hurricane Katrina, rich federal tax breaks designed to spur rebuilding are flowing hundreds of miles inland to investors who are buying up luxury condos near the University of Alabama's football stadium.

About 10 condominium projects are going up in and around Tuscaloosa, and builders are asking up to $1 million for units with granite countertops, king-size bathtubs and 'Bama decor, including crimson couches and Bear Bryant wall art.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - Gov. Kathleen Blanco angrily criticized President Bush on Wednesday for not mentioning 2005's destructive hurricanes in his State of the Union speech, and said Louisiana is being shortchanged in federal recovery funding for political reasons.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - Government agencies paid inflated prices for goods and services in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in a system riddled with waste, three government inspectors general testified at a congressional hearing Monday.

U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., who chaired the hearing, cited the cost FEMA paid to install each mobile home: "In Oklahoma, we could build a nice little home for $70,000."

WASHINGTON (AP) - In the hectic, confused hours after Hurricane Katrina lashed the Gulf Coast, Louisiana's governor hesitantly but mistakenly assured the Bush administration that New Orleans' protective levees were intact, according to new video obtained by The Associated Press showing briefings that day with federal officials.

"We keep getting reports in some places that maybe water is coming over the levees," Gov. Kathleen Blanco said shortly after noon on Aug. 29, according to the video. "We heard a report unconfirmed, I think, we have not breached the levee. I think we have not breached the levee at this time."

The AP separately obtained video earlier from other briefings before the hurricane made landfall. That video showed U.S. officials warning that Katrina might breach levees, put lives at risk in New Orleans' Superdome and overwhelm rescuers.

"We keep getting reports in some places that maybe water is coming over the levees," Gov. Kathleen Blanco said shortly after noon on Aug. 29, according to the video. "We heard a report unconfirmed, I think, we have not breached the levee. I think we have not breached the levee at this time."

WASHINGTON (AP) - Government at all levels took only an indifferent stance toward disaster preparations after the 2001 terror attacks, leaving the Gulf Coast unnecessarily vulnerable to Hurricane Katrina, a House inquiry concludes.

Finding fault with the White House down to local officials, the House investigation determined that authorities failed to move quickly to protect people - even when faced with warnings days ahead of the storm last Aug. 29.

The final report, written by a Republican-dominated special House committee, was obtained The Associated Press on Tuesday night ahead of its scheduled release Wednesday. Parts of the report were released Sunday.

"Passivity did the most damage," concluded the 520-page report by the committee, chaired by Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., charged with investigating the sluggish response to Katrina. "The failure of initiative cost lives, prolonged suffering, and left all Americans justifiably concerned our government is no better prepared to protect its people than it was before 9/11, even if we are."

NEW ORLEANS — After 26 years on the police force — capped by four weeks in which he was the public face of local law enforcement's erratic response to Hurricane Katrina — Eddie Compass resigned Tuesday as New Orleans' police superintendent.

I'm the ultimate warrior. I'm going to be the last person to leave the battlefield. —Eddie Compass

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Police found cases of food, clothes and tools intended for hurricane victims in the backyard, shed and rooms throughout the home of a chief administrative officer of a New Orleans suburb, officials said Wednesday.

LONDON: Yeah, I believe him because here in Texas they have truly been good to us.

REYNOLDS: Did you get a sense of hope that you could return to your home one day in New Orleans?

LONDON: Yes, I did. I did.

REYNOLDS: Did you harbor any anger toward the president because of the slow federal response?

LONDON: No. None whatsoever, because I feel like our city and our state government should have been there before the federal government was called in. They should have been on their jobs.

REYNOLDS: And they weren't?

LONDON: No. No, no, no. Lord, they wasn't. I mean, they had RTA buses, Greyhound buses, school buses, that was just sitting there going underwater when they could have been evacuating people.

MARY: I'm going to tell you the truth. I had the opportunity to get out, but I didn't believe it. So I stayed there ‘til it was too late.

LONDON: It was not the hurricane itself. It was the floodgates. When they opened the floodgates, that's where all the water came.

REYNOLDS: Do you blame anybody for this?

LONDON: Oh, yes. I mean they've been allocating federal funds to fix the levee system, and it never got done. I fault the mayor of our city personally. I really do.

Mr. Brown, then director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said he told the officials in Washington that the Louisiana governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, and her staff were proving incapable of organizing a coherent state effort and that his field officers in the city were reporting an "out of control" situation.

I really need to call for the military. I should have started that in the first call.

As a former Air Force logistics officer, let me clarify the following for the idiots in the Left Wing Media:

1. Things can get destroyed far more swiftly than they can get fixed.
2. The United States military can wipe out the Taliban and the Iraqi Republican Guard far more swiftly than they can bring 3 million Swanson dinners to an underwater city through an area the size of Great Britain which has no power, no working ports or airports, and a devastated and impassable road network.
3. You cannot speed recovery and relief efforts up by prepositioning assets since the assets are endangered by the very storm which destroyed the region.
4. We do not yet have teleporter nor replicator technology like you saw on "Star Trek" in college between hookah hits and waiting to pick up your worthless communications degree while the grownups actually engaged in the recovery effort today were studying engineering.
5. Getting people out of the stricken areas is the most pressing concern, since we cannot get enough supplies into it to safely sustain them.
6. Getting the airport, bridges, and roads repaired is the next priority, since the supplies and people needed to fix levees, drain the city, and repair the infrastructure cannot be transported via aircraft. You need to truck them in.
7. Once the infrastructure is repaired, it is vital to get the ports in working order. Equipment and supplies can only be moved into the area in large quantities by sea.
8. Only then can recovery efforts begin in earnest.
9. The above will take weeks and months, not days or hours.
10. No amount of yelling, crying, and mustering of moral indignation will change any of the facts above. Facts are facts. Opinion is cheap.
11. You could do more help actually keeping your damned satellite trucks out of the way of the folks doing the real work.
12. If you must vent your indignation, how about targeting the Louisiana officials who did absolutely nothing to protect their constituents? At least you can help ensure the populace doesn't elect these clowns again.

"Mayor Nagin has blamed everyone else except himself," said the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, founder and president of the Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny.

"The mayor failed in his duty to evacuate and protect the people of New Orleans. ... The truth is, black people died not because of President Bush or racism, they died because of their unhealthy dependence on the government and the incompetence of Mayor Ray Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco," he said.

hollie_is_right

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. The Corps also spends tens of millions of dollars a year dredging little-used waterways such as the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, the Atchafalaya River and the Red River -- now known as the J. Bennett Johnston Waterway, in honor of the project's congressional godfather -- for barge traffic that is less than forecast.

The Industrial Canal lock is one of the agency's most controversial projects, sued by residents of a New Orleans low-income black neighborhood and cited by an alliance of environmentalists and taxpayer advocates as the fifth-worst current Corps boondoggle. In 1998, the Corps justified its plan to build a new lock -- rather than fix the old lock for a tiny fraction of the cost -- by predicting huge increases in use by barges traveling between the Port of New Orleans and the Mississippi River.

In fact, barge traffic on the canal had been plummeting since 1994, but the Corps left that data out of its study. And barges have continued to avoid the canal since the study was finished, even though they are visiting the port in increased numbers.

Pam Dashiell, president of the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association, remembers holding a protest against the lock four years ago -- right where the levee broke Aug. 30. Now she's holed up with her family in a St. Louis hotel, and her neighborhood is underwater. "Our politicians never cared half as much about protecting us as they cared about pork," Dashiell said.

Yesterday, congressional defenders of the Corps said they hoped the fallout from Hurricane Katrina would pave the way for billions of dollars of additional spending on water projects. Steve Ellis, a Corps critic with Taxpayers for Common Sense, called their push "the legislative equivalent of looting."

But overall, the Bush administration's funding requests for the key New Orleans flood-control projects for the past five years were slightly higher than the Clinton administration's for its past five years. Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, the chief of the Corps, has said that in any event, more money would not have prevented the drowning of the city, since its levees were designed to protect against a Category 3 storm, and the levees that failed were already completed projects. Strock has also said that the marsh-restoration project would not have done much to diminish Katrina's storm surge, which passed east of the coastal wetlands.

"The project manager for the Great Pyramids probably put in a request for 100 million shekels and only got 50 million," said John Paul Woodley Jr., the Bush administration official overseeing the Corps. "Flood protection is always a work in progress; on any given day, if you ask whether any community has all the protection it needs, the answer is almost always: Maybe, but maybe not."

Louisiana not only leads the nation in overall Corps funding, it places second in new construction -- just behind Florida, home of an $8 billion project to restore the Everglades.

Overall, Army Corps funding has remained relatively constant for decades, despite the "Program Growth Initiative" launched by agency generals in 1999 without telling their civilian bosses in the Clinton administration. The Bush administration has proposed cuts in the Corps budget, and has tried to shift the agency's emphasis from new construction to overdue maintenance. But most of those proposals have died quietly on Capitol Hill, and the administration has not fought too hard to revive them.

Nagin also remained defiant, rebuffing recent criticism from federal authorities and media representatives who have tried to shift the blame for the slow response for support to the local and state levels.

"I welcome that," he said. "I welcome the criticism. My question to them is, 'Where were you? Where the hell were you?'"

A year ago, as Hurricane Ivan approached, New Orleans ordered an evacuation but did not use city or school buses to help people evacuate. As a result many of the poorest citizens were unable to evacuate. Fortunately, the hurricane changed course and did not hit New Orleans, but both Gov. Blanco and Mayor Nagin acknowledged the need for a better evacuation plan. Again, they did not take corrective actions. In 1998, during a threat by Hurricane George, 14,000 people were sent to the Superdome and theft and vandalism were rampant due to inadequate security. Again, these problems were not corrected.

You get my point. The levee board appears to be doing everything but devoting its time to the maintenance of the levees in recent years—and the city is now paying the price.

The state Homeland Security Department had requested--and continues to request--that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Sunday the federal government is in control of hurricane-ravaged New Orleans after days in which authorities failed to reach stranded refugees and evacuate the city.

Behind the scenes, a power struggle emerged, as federal officials tried to wrest authority from Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D). Shortly before midnight Friday, the Bush administration sent her a proposed legal memorandum asking her to request a federal takeover of the evacuation of New Orleans, a source within the state's emergency operations center said Saturday.

The administration sought unified control over all local police and state National Guard units reporting to the governor. Louisiana officials rejected the request after talks throughout the night, concerned that such a move would be comparable to a federal declaration of martial law. Some officials in the state suspected a political motive behind the request. "Quite frankly, if they'd been able to pull off taking it away from the locals, they then could have blamed everything on the locals," said the source, who does not have the authority to speak publicly.

Police shot eight people carrying guns on a New Orleans bridge Sunday, killing five or six, a deputy chief said. A spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers said the victims were contractors on their way to repair a canal.

Reduces the backlog of ongoing construction projects and completes those projects in the budget sooner than possible under current spending trends, primarily by not starting new projects—the budget completes 30 projects in 2003, or 15 percent of the projects in the budget.

In recent years, the Congress has authorized and appropriated funds for the Corps to undertake an increasing number of projects that fall outside the scope of its historic missions, such as building sewage treatment plants, revitalizing local waterfronts, and maintaining waterways primarily for local recreation. Whatever the merit of these projects, they should be carried out by others.

Unfortunately, as the accompanying chart shows, this backlog of ongoing construction projects has increased in recent years, as the Congress has added funds to start more new projects than can be afforded. The 2003 Budget proposes to reverse this trend.

Closure of the last two gaps should be completed by September 2005. Overall project completion is scheduled for 2015.