Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

A disappointing body count for leftist and media

AP via CBC News:

Authorities said Friday that their first systematic sweep of the city found far fewer bodies than expected, suggesting that hurricane Katrina's death toll may not be the catastrophic 10,000 feared.

"I think there's some encouragement in what we've found in the initial sweeps that some of the catastrophic deaths that some people predicted may not have occurred," said Terry Ebbert, New Orleans' homeland security chief. Ebbert declined to give a new estimate of the dead.

Authorities shifted their attention to counting and removing the dead in a grid-by-grid search after spending days persuading and cajoling the living into leaving the shattered city because of the danger of fires and disease from the filthy, corpse-laden floodwaters.

The sweep was carried out by the Police Department, the army's 82nd Airborne Division and the National Guard, and covered every part of the city reachable by land, boat or air, Ebbert said.

"Numbers so far are relatively minor as compared to the dire projections of 10,000," Ebbert said.

The mayor appears to have no basis for his estimate. It may not be the only prediction coming out of this episode that proves unfounded and overwrought. It did feed so nicely into the media's hysteria though.