Larry King — CNN’s usually mild-mannered and non-confrontational host — took umbrage last night when his guest, conservative radio talker Larry Elder, tried to blame Bill Clinton for 9/11. “It’s Bill’s fault? … George Bush had nothing to do with this, then?” King asked. When Elder and King’s other conservative guest — Ben Stein — persisted in blaming Clinton, King said, “It happened on the Republicans’ watch. … It didn’t happen on Clinton’s watch.” King then began to mock the conservative guests, saying, “I’m totally lost — your history’s better than mine. I’m lost. I thought it was during the Bush administration.” He concluded by directing this sarcastic comment at Elder:

KING: You know something? You’re better than me. You know when it was planned. All the guys who planned it are dead. They’re dead on a plane, you know when. You interviewed them during the flight.

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Three years ago today, Hurricane Katrina made landfall upon New Orleans. The storm was tragically followed by an abysmal disaster response from the Bush administration and ultimately took the lives of nearly a thousand of the city’s residents.

Last week, President Bush appeared in New Orleans to say that “hope is coming back” to the city, due to $126 billion in disaster aid sent to the region in the last three years. As the Progress Report notes today, there is still mountains of work to be done, including “significant debris management issues,” a clean-up fraught with environmental issues, and vacant homes.

Today, Tropical Storm Gustav “threatens to become a hurricane and poses the biggest threat to New Orleans since the killer 2005 storm,” the AP reports. In an interview with CNN yesterday, Mayor Ray Nagin expressed concern about the sturdiness of the city’s levee system:

Well we are ready to evacuate. The big question is, which shape are our levees in. For all the work that the corps of engineers has done, is it going to be sufficient enough to handle what is projected to be a category 3 that right now is poised and pointed towards New Orleans?

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In a press conference yesterday, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told residents, “Don’t try to rely upon the fact that the levees are stronger than they were in Katrina to assume that that’s going to necessarily protect you from harm.”

ThinkProgress assembled a timeline of the administration’s failure to respond to Hurricane Katrina. See the timeline here.

In an August 14 interview with Time Magazine, Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK), now Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) running mate, suggested that McCain had not shared his plan for Iraq with her. Palin, who has not been to Iraq, said she does not know “what the plan is to ever end the war.” She later said its “tough” to “talk about the plan for the war” because her son will be deployed to Iraq this September. “Let’s make sure we have a plan here,” she said. Palin then added, “respecting McCain’s position on that too though.” Listen here:

Matt Duss notes that by trying to “make news with an unknown, stunt VP pick, McCain has shortchanged the issue which he himself insists is the most important — national security.”

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