The people being "turned away" from the Astrodome are being sent to other shelters.

Aside from that, here is something that justifies plenty of anger. Various official and journalistic reportshave been warning of the possibilty of just such a catastrophe (Category 5 storm, broken levees) over the past ten years or more. Apparently it was very difficult to get much preventive action out of the city, state, or federal governments for the usual reason that people don't like like to apportion many millions of dollars to protect against something that may never happen.

Levee improvements finally got underway at a leisurely pace. Some or all of the federal funding was eventually cut, whether by Congress or President Bush I don't know. This is scandalous, to put it mildly, and we can expect to hear much more about it in the months to come.

A Corps of Engineer officer who worked on the project said on CNN last night that even had federal funding not been cut, the project began so recently and was moving so slowly that there was no way that the levees could have been strengthened in time.

The bottom line in all of this is that government officials were warned long ago by scientists and engineers but took little interest in the warnings.

Since all citizens were obviously at risk, this stupidity was clearly not racially motivated. It was motivated, at least in part, by the kind of optimism that says "It can't happen to us."