Paying Attention

Are you paying attention?

• Bush: 'We're Still Paying Attention'

  NEW ORLEANS -- Two years after Hurricane Katrina left New Orleans 80 percent underwater and claimed 1,600 lives across the Gulf Coast, President George W. Bush said the recovery is still a priority.
  
  The president and first lady Laura Bush are in New Orleans to mark the anniversary. At a New Orleans charter school, Bush said that things are getting better in the city, day by day.
  
  "I hope people know we're still paying attention. We understand," Bush said.
  
  At a wreath-laying ceremony elsewhere in the city, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin lamented the fact that more recovery aid hadn't reached residents since the storm, and the man who directed the National Guard in the storm's aftermath warned residents to be ready to adapt to a tough lifestyle.
  
  "You will never build the levee big enough to keep the water out of this city," Lt. Gen. Russel Honore said.




• Meanwhile:

  President Bush plans to ask Congress next month for up to $50 billion in additional funding for the war in Iraq, a White House official said yesterday, a move that appears to reflect increasing administration confidence that it can fend off congressional calls for a rapid drawdown of U.S. forces.
  
  The request -- which would come on top of about $460 billion in the fiscal 2008 defense budget and $147 billion in a pending supplemental bill to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq -- is expected to be announced after congressional hearings scheduled for mid-September featuring the two top U.S. officials in Iraq. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker will assess the state of the war and the effect of the new strategy the U.S. military has pursued this year.

Of course the Times-Picayune and the Yuppie Left would tell you that we don't deserve federal relief funds because we hang pictures of Huey Long on the walls of our restaurants. That money will be spent much more responsibly by the adults running things in Iraq.