The quote from Philip Adams in The Australian, posted by Freda, is pretty eloquent and I agree with most of it.

I do have to take issue with one gratuitous sentence, however:

"Bush's ongoing denial of climate change was capped by Katrina, where Washington's scandalous inaction led to the ethnic cleansing of New Orleans."

The Bush administration's destructon of FEMA, turning it into a patronage mill and burying it under the new Department of Homeland Security, cuased a great deal of death and destruction here in my adopted hometown. And it's true that our population has been "cleansed" of many of the poorest of our poor citizens ~ many of the poor folks who were shipped ut of town after that first hoorendous week after the levee breaks have not been shipped back, and still can't afford to travel on their own dime. And some of the public housing complexes where they lived are being bulldozed and replaced with "mixed-income" developments (which may or may not work out as advertised).

But the ethnic composition of our population is still pretty much the same. We're still mostly black. What so many people cannot seem to understand is that there are plenty of middle-class black people, including thousands of New Orleans homeowners struggling to rebuild their properties and their lives.