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

This Rita report is from my sister who made a weekend trip from Lafayette, La.

A long day. The sugar cane harvest is underway and it will be meagre. Some are just cutting, burning off and replanting. The cane in the fields is yellow...from the salt water in the surge and in the rain of Rita. This was all the way from New Iberia to Franklin to Morgan City to Houma.

After lunch we drove down to Dulac which is 15 miles south of Houma. Dulac is about 200 miles to the east of where Rita made landfall. Rita 's storm surge was not kind to Dulac. There were shrimp boats and skiffs in every state of disrepair in the bayou...some bow deep in the water, some lying on their sides in the water, some sunk in the water and some lying on the bank... And at the end of almost every driveway there was a pile of debris including appliances, furniture, insulation, roofing, paneling, etc. Some houses looked like they must have been gutted...there was so much piled up outside of them. Others were just empty of people and debris...maybe they haven't come back to start the cleaning up yet. The yards were dry cracked mud...like an elephant's hide...this was on both sides of the road, not just bayou side. Several houses were built on pillars, high enough to park their cars underneath. Some of these raised houses had insulation and debris hanging from underneath where the floor is/was....so the water was very high in certain spots. There was a baseball field that had the metal backspot in the midst of a sea of dry cracked mud. Utility trucks from Florida, Georgia and Texas were working in Dulac to restore electricity and telephone lines...and it has been five(?) weeks since Rita. People were working on their homes and boats. I watched a man install a new front door as his wife stood by supervising. There was work being done to the exterior and interior of a school. Dulac and Grand Caillou and Bobbtown are busy repairing and rebuilding while the most of the country doesn't even know they exist.

One of the things that makes this country great is what is accomplished by people who ask nothing of the government. You see them in this report and the story below about people in small comunities in East Texas. It is the people who see something that needs to be done and do it rather than waiting for help who pull themselves up from despair.