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

New Orlean's perfect storm

Victor Davis Hanson:

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First, we pressed nature one too many times. America forgot there are very few cities on Earth below sea level. And New Orleans is positioned on a gale-prone coast, aside the delta of one of the largest rivers in the world, and at the mercy of a huge lake damned right above the city. That New Orleans heretofore had not experienced ruin in the manner of a swampy Venice or Naples beneath Mount Vesuvius was the real miracle.
But besides topographical peril, New Orleans suffers from an ossified Louisianan political culture that has not evolved very much from the crass demagoguery of Huey Long of the 1930s.
The party machine's reason for being is to provide exemptions for the very wealthy and subsidies for the dependent poor. We saw the dividends of this old "every man a king" politics in the scapegoating by paralyzed public officials.
The clueless mayor of New Orleans, who initially hesitated over federal requests to evacuate the entire city, was reduced to expletive-filled rants as hundreds of empty public buses sat idle. The teary governor of Louisiana whined mostly about the federal government. Meanwhile Sen. Mary Landrieu railed at the president: "I might likely have to punch him -- literally."
This sad trio proved how fortunate New York was to have a Rudy Giuliani on September 11, or Los Angeles a Richard Riordan in a time of earthquake.
Although millions of others in nearby ravaged Mississippi rebounded without much violence, many in a densely populated, unassimilated and poor urban African-American population -- one largely ignored by whites and manipulated by racial demagogues -- chose to stay or were left behind in a submerged New Orleans.
Yet the stranded somehow assumed government services could provide instant succor at Ground Zero of a biblical catastrophe. When such agencies could not, looters stole appliances (despite having no electricity). With little food, some filched liquor. In the midst of water everywhere, arsonists managed to ignite a mall. With roads impassable, others still roamed the city to rape women and shoot at police.
In response, Jesse Jackson jetted in not to organize self-help brigades but only to inflame the situation by calling the mayhem "the hull of a slave ship." Civil Rights activist Randall Robinson, without any evidence, immediately alleged -- and later retracted -- charges of cannibalism: "[B]lack hurricane victims in New Orleans have begun eating corpses to survive."

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(The) abject calamity over New Orleans -- (brought) "men's characters to a level with their fortunes."