Ann Coulter just called out MoveOn on Hannity & Colmes:

MoveOn.com is down protesting outside the White House. How about putting together some evacuee bags? How about actually helping out? Speaking of that, I think I’d like to hear a breakdown at the end of this, how much churches are contributing versus… MoveOn.com?

Last Thursday, as tens of thousands of families found themselves newly homeless, MoveOn launched an emergency national housing drive called HurricaneHousing.org. In just one week, over 235,000 beds have been offered to Katrina victims through the site.

ThinkProgress to Ann Coulter: How about you stop embarassing yourself on live national television?

“[L]awyers close to the investigation say there are signs that the 20-month-long inquiry could be wrapped up within weeks in a final flurry of negotiations and legal maneuvering,” Reuters reports.

Speaking on the floor of the House an hour ago, Tom DeLay evaluated the response to Hurricane Katrina:

It’s easy to be a Monday morning quarterback, but you should have been in that control room where those people were making life and death decisions, people that stayed up and got no sleep and very little food for five to six days straight trying to make the right decisions to save people. What happens when we come up here? They point the finger. You didn’t make the right decision here. You didn’t take care of my aides there. You didn’t do this. You didn’t do that. The point is if you look at the big picture, it’s a phenomenal accomplishment by everybody involved. It’s unbelievable. I am constantly struck by where we are today just a little over a week from the worst catastrophe that this country has seen.

for illegally accepting corporate donations.

in some cases worse,” says former Gov. Thomas Kean (R-NJ), who chaired the 9/11 Commission. “Those are system-wide failures that can be fixed and should have been fixed right away.”

Cheney visits Mississippi:

Watch Cheney: Streaming QT

We’re sure the local wasn’t being rude — just speaking to Cheney in a language he understands.

$10 billion this quarter — the most any company has ever profited in a single quarter.

Bloomberg writes this morning that FEMA’s top-level officials are experienced in politics rather than emergency management:

The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency’s upper ranks are mostly staffed with people who share two traits: loyalty to President George W. Bush and little or no background in emergency management”¦ The lack of experience among Brown’s top lieutenants in responding to disasters was revealed by Hurricane Katrina, said Paul Light, a professor of organizational studies at New York University. It also marks a reversion to the days when the agency was treated as a “turkey farm” — a place where political operatives could get high-level jobs — after being led by professionals during the Clinton administration, he said.

What happens when you have a disaster response agency stacked with political operatives? You get politically-charged decisions about where to commit resources. In 2004, four hurricanes barreled down on the crucial swingstate of Florida in the heat of the presidential election campaign season. So the operatives at FEMA did what they knew best.

In March 2005, the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel uncovered official records that showed “Bush re-election concerns played part in FEMA aid.” The article reported that Bush campaign staffers were brought in to ensure that a “huge mess” didn’t break out in Florida from the hurricane aftermath that might damage Bush’s re-election chances. As a result, the response to the Florida hurricanes differed drastically from that of Hurricane Katrina: Read more

Some conservatives — see here, here, here, and here — are now trying to excuse the Bush administration’s faults in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina by pointing to a single phone call Bush made urging a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans. Media Matters has shown how the timing of Bush’s phone call means it had no impact on Mayor Nagin’s decision to evacuate the city.

But there’s another phone call that President Bush made that isn’t getting nearly the same attention, detailed in the Katrina timeline we published yesterday. At an event in Arizona on the morning of August 29, President Bush described a call he put in earlier that day to Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff:

I also want to talk about immigration here in this state…I spoke to Mike Chertoff today “” he’s the head of the Department of Homeland Security. I knew people would want me to discuss this issue [immigration], so we got us an airplane on “” a telephone on Air Force One, so I called him. I said, are you working with the governor? He said, you bet we are.

Keep in mind the timing of this phone call. One day prior, Bush had been briefed by the director of the National Hurricane Center, who apparently discussed “advisories that the levee could be topped” in New Orleans. That morning, Mayor Nagin reported that water was already flowing over the levees. And this was before Michael Brown sent the memo to Chertoff requesting that a major team of DHS officials be dispatched to the Gulf states.

In other words, at what may have been the very peak of the Katrina crisis, President Bush called Secretary Chertoff from Air Force One and talked about…immigration? Could that really have been all they discussed? And if they did talk about Katrina, wasn’t Bush informed that DHS had not yet dispatched any significant group of rescuers to the region?

The Gulf Coast is in critical need of reconstruction. These efforts, however, will have to compete for resources with lagging reconstruction in Iraq. Reuters reports:

Extra funding will be needed to finish key Iraqi reconstruction projects, given high unexpected outlays for security, the top official auditing $18.4 billion in U.S.-funded Iraq projects said on Wednesday…[Stuart Bowen, U.S. Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction] said it was not the right time to discuss more money to finance Iraqi reconstruction, given the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in the U.S. Gulf region, but it was clear that eventually more funding would be needed.

The money will be requested in “another supplemental.” The administration can pretend it’s able to do everything at once but money that will be spent on reconstruction in Iraq is money that could improve the lives of the people in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi. Pushing off specifying an exact figure doesn’t change anything.