As noted here earlier, I don’t think it’s the time to point fingers at each other while there are still people to be saved inside New Orleans, although I do think the question of why troops were not used earlier to re-establish civil order is a reasonable one.
However, among the early analysis of what went wrong with the various governmental responses to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, this Washington Post article makes it clear that the Bush Administration is not going to take all the blame for various shortcomings:

Behind the scenes, a power struggle emerged, as federal officials tried to wrest authority from Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D). Shortly before midnight Friday, the Bush administration sent her a proposed legal memorandum asking her to request a federal takeover of the evacuation of New Orleans, a source within the state’s emergency operations center said Saturday.
The administration sought unified control over all local police and state National Guard units reporting to the governor. Louisiana officials rejected the request after talks throughout the night, concerned that such a move would be comparable to a federal declaration of martial law. Some officials in the state suspected a political motive behind the request. “Quite frankly, if they’d been able to pull off taking it away from the locals, they then could have blamed everything on the locals,” said the source, who does not have the authority to speak publicly.
A senior administration official said that Bush has clear legal authority to federalize National Guard units to quell civil disturbances under the Insurrection Act and will continue to try to unify the chains of command that are split among the president, the Louisiana governor and the New Orleans mayor.

As one my former professors used to remind me, “they fiddle while Rome burns and, to make matters worse, they do not realize that Rome is burning or that they are fiddling.”
Meanwhile, this City Journal article is a pretty darn astute analysis of what happened last weekend in New Orleans. Hat tip to Tom Smith over at the Right Coast for the City Journal piece.

As Americans are still attempting to absorb the shock of the largest exodus of citizens during our nation’s modern history, the Chronicle’s Steve Campbell’s great photo of the inside of Houston’s Astrodome provides the backdrop to a huge part of the Hurricane Katrina relief effort that you do not see on television — the massive effort by a network of Houston-area churches and charities to provide relief resources to the tens of thousands of Gulf Coast evacuees who are residing in hotels and homes throughout Houston and Texas.

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Six days after Hurricane Katrina hammered a main conduit of the U.S. energy and shipping industries, much of the crucial infrastructure on the energy industry in the Gulf Coast region those remains shut down. Although a full assessment of the status of the region’s infrastructure still cannot be made because of the post-storm chaos, it is becoming increasingly clear that refining and production capacity in the region will be curtailed for a prolonged period of time. Earlier posts on the developing economic effects of Katrina over the past week are here, here, here, here, here and here.
First, the impact on refining capacity. The storm shut down about two million barrels a day of crude-oil refining capacity. That translates to the loss of about one million barrels a day of gasoline production, which is about 10% of total U.S. demand. It is now apparent that at least four refineries that together generate about 5% of U.S. oil-refining capacity will be down for at least a month as those facilities are repaired. Meanwhile, damage to production capacity has also been extensive. Although production is coming back on-line slowly, it’s becoming clearer that it will take at least several weeks — and perhaps months — for production levels to return to near pre-Katrina levels.

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In the chaos of the worst natural disaster of our time, the remarkable Houston community provided extraordinary relief for tens of thousands of New Orleans area evacuees and, in so doing, provided a substantial part of the calming effect that steadied jittery economic markets still attempting to stabilize from the effects of Hurricane Katrina.
First, the economic update. As the evacuation of New Orleans picked up steam on Friday, crude-oil and gasoline futures fell sharply as the federal government and the International Energy Agency arranged to release almost 2 million of barrels of oil daily to cover shortages caused by Hurricane Katrina. The short-term supply relief drove benchmark light, sweet crude oil October futures contracts down nearly $2 to $67.57 a barrel on the Nymex Exchange. Earlier posts on the developing economic effects of Katrina over the past week are here, here, here, here and here.
In addition to the drop in crude futures, Nymex gasoline futures for October fell 22.53 cents to finish at $2.1837 a gallon and the October contracts fell another 23 cents in overnight trading to end at $2.2295 a gallon. Also, Nymex heating oil futures for October traded down 10.74 cents to $2.0911 a gallon.

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