More compassion from Bill O’Reilly for the hurricane victims…

Here is the on-screen talking points memo from tonight’s show on Fox:

Moral of the story: People were warned to get out. Those who stayed paid a price for that decision. If you rely on the government, you’re likely to be disappointed. No government can protect you or provide for you. You have to do it yourself. If a Category 5 story is headed your way, get out fast.

O’Reilly seems to have little understanding of the conditions which affected many of those individuals who did not evacuate. From the NYT:

The victims, they note, were largely black and poor, those who toiled in the background of the tourist havens, living in tumbledown neighborhoods that were long known to be vulnerable to disaster if the levees failed. Without so much as a car or bus fare to escape ahead of time, they found themselves left behind by a failure to plan for their rescue should the dreaded day ever arrive.

“A lot of the people — a lot of the people who stayed [in New Orleans] wanted to do this destruction. They figured it out. And that’s — I’m not surprised.”

helps secure more than 49,000 beds for victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Senate Finance Committee members were informed this morning that Sen. Bill Frist will move forward with a vote to permanently repeal the estate tax next week, likely on Tuesday, ThinkProgress has learned.

One stands in awe of Sen. Frist’s timing. Permanently repealing the estate tax would be a major blow to the nation’s charities. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has “found that the estate tax encourages wealthy individuals to donate considerably more to charity, since estate tax liability is reduced through donations made both during life and at death.” If there were no estate tax in 2000, for example, “charitable donations would have been between $13 billion to $25 billion lower than they actually were.”

As they did after 9/11 and during the lead-up to the Iraq war, conservatives have placed tax cuts for the most wealthy and well-off over the spirit of shared national sacrifice. What a stark contrast to the outpouring of generosity being shown by the American people in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

that “business lobbyists are maneuvering to tack on special-interest amendments” to the hurricane emergency supplemental, WSJ reports.

While President Bush has maintained that nobody could have “anticipated the breach of the levees,” more and more information is being revealed to demonstrate that the adminstration was fully aware of the catastrophic damage that could result if a hurricane were to strike the New Orleans region.

In July 2004, just over one year ago, FEMA held a five-day exercise at the State Emergency Operations Center in Baton Rouge to develop joint response plans for a catastrophic hurricane in Louisiana.

In the staged scenario developed by FEMA, a fictitious “Hurricane Pam” brought 120-mph winds and storms that “topped levees in the New Orleans area.” “More than one million residents evacuated and Hurricane Pam destroyed 500,000-600,000 buildings.”

The New Orleans Times-Picayune covered the FEMA exercise and reported that officials focused on six major issues. One of which was: “Removing floodwater from New Orleans, Metairie and other bowl-like areas where levees will capture and hold storm surge, possibly for days or weeks.” The hypothetical specifically posited the following:

The water would be high enough in parts of New Orleans to top 17-foot levees, including some along Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, Zileski said. Some of the water pushed into Lake Pontchartrain would flow through a gap in the hurricane levee in St. Charles Parish, flow across land to the Mississippi River levee and be funneled south into Jefferson and Orleans parishes.

The fact is that FEMA anticipated the effects of Hurricane Katrina over a year before it actually hit the Gulf Coast region. There should be no excuse for the Bush administration’s incompetent management of the hurricane recovery efforts to date.

Yesterday, Bush said “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.” Today, FEMA director Mike Brown was asked about that comment on ABC’s Good Morning America:

GIBSON: Mike, with all due respect to you and with all due respect to the president, I was amazed to hear him say to Diane yesterday, We didn’t know the levees were going to break. We didn’t know the dams wouldn’t hold.

We all were talking about that on Monday morning, that the levees were only built to withstand a category 3 hurricane. There’s batches of reports that say that. And you knew a 4 or 5 was coming all weekend long.

BROWN: I think we were all taken aback by the fact that the levees did break in so many places and caused such widespread devastation. And so we’re responding the best we can to help those people that are stuck in this ongoing disaster.

So the new story is: that administration knew the levees would break but didn’t think it was going to cause so much devastation. How could the administration not know that the flooding of a major city would cause massive devastation?

(The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette headline on 10/17/04: New Orleans In Danger of Drowning; Hurricane Ivan Passed It By, But a Direct Hit By Another Storm Would Swamp Its Levees and Leave Thousands Dead.)

President Bush speaking to reporters this morning:

We’ll get on top of this situation and we’re going to help the people that need help

The storm hit the Gulf Coast Monday. Why isn’t the Bush administration on top of the situation yet?