Late night television viewers are still shaking their heads over ABC Nightline’s Ted Koppel‘s interview last night of Mike Brown, embattled director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Here is a partial transcript of the interview, a portion of which went like this:

Koppel: You have chaos and anarchy breaking out in a number of different places in New Orleans, it would seem the first thing is to get good solid combat troops like the 82nd airborne or 101st in there. These are guys who are ready to move immediately. Instead you send National Guardsmen and it’s taking time. You don’t have time.
Brown: [T]here will soon be 30,000 armed National Guard troops in there to restore order, to take control of the facilities and allow us to do our job.
Koppel: Mr. Brown, you know, forgive me . . . But here we are, essentially five days after the storm hit, and you are talking about what’s going to happen in the next couple of days.

It didn’t get any better for Mr. Brown. Read the entire piece here.
Update: Stephen Bainbridge is asking the same question as Mr. Koppel.

My sense is that this is not the time to be blathering about who to blame for what has happened in New Orleans and the governmental response to it. The logistical complications alone of obtaining and organizing the resources necessary to evacuate hundreds of thousands of people under flooded and destroyed conditions are not understood by many of the folks who are criticizing those who are attempting to coordinate that task. So, I prefer to focus on that effort and the heroes who are arising amid the squalor.
One of those is Dr. Steve Phillip, who wrote the following email this past Tuesday afternoon from downtown New Orleans:

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As state and federal officials grappled with the massive human toll that Hurricane Katrina exacted on the Gulf Coast region, further assessment of the damage is indicating that the storm has wreaked havoc to key business properties along the Gulf Coast.
In positive developments, crude-oil prices eased early Friday morning in electronic trading and gasoline futures fell for the first time this week as several energy facilities on the Gulf Coast started up again for the first time. The front-month October contract on the Nymex Exchange fell 42 cents to $69.05 a barrel after rising 53 cents during trading on Thursday. However, crude oil contracts for November through February — traditionally high-demand months because of heating oil demand — were all trading above $70 a barrel amid worries that the storm had wiped out key refining capacity.

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