Hey Bush, thanks for the DEAD BODIES!

The cost of the illegal IRAQ war hits home after Hurricane Katrina

What's happening in the city of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is both depressing and heart-breaking. The Mayor said that the city is 80% underwater and its getting worse because of broken levees.

In this new article from pnionline.com, they drop more bad news, this is how the story goes (and how the Bush Crime Family is to blame... again!):

When flooding [in New Orleans] in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.

Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Army Corps of Engineers never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain.

In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed...

The $750 million Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection project is another major Corps project, which remains about 20% incomplete due to lack of funds... That project consists of building up levees and protection for pumping stations on the east bank of the Mississippi River in Orleans, St. Bernard, St. Charles and Jefferson parishes.

The Lake Pontchartrain project is slated to receive $3.9 million in the president's 2005 budget... [but] about $20 million is needed.

That June, with the 2004 hurricane season starting, the Corps ... begged for $2 million for urgent work that Washington was now unable to pay for. From the June 18, 2004 Times-Picayune:

"The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don'’t get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can'’t stay ahead of the settlement," he said. "The problem that we have isn'’t that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can'’t raise them."

The levee board noted in October 2004 that the feds were also now NOT paying for a hoped-for $15 million project to better shore up the banks of Lake Pontchartrain.

The 2004 hurricane season ... was the worst in decades. In spite of that, the federal government came back this spring with the steepest reduction in hurricane- and flood-control funding for New Orleans in history.

To wrap things up, Bush lied us into an illegal war, the fucking war cost an arm and a leg, as a result New Orlean's Hurricane and Flooding emergency projects took deep cuts in federal funding, Katrina came thru and ruined everything, the levees couldnt handle the flooding, now thousands are dead or homeless, and Bush was out playing Golf in California while this was happening.

Had we NOT gone to war maybe New Orleans would have been in better shape to withstand this Hurricane. Thanks to the Bush Crime Family we will never know. We smell lower approval ratings and impeachment in the air!