Eric Lipton (Extracted from "$11 million a day spent on hotels for storm relief", New York Times, 13 October 2005)

"Straining to meet President Bush's mid-October deadline to clear out shelters, the federal government has moved hundreds of thousands of evacuees from Hurricane Katrina into hotel rooms at a cost of about $11 million a night, a strategy local officials and some members of Congress criticize as incoherent and wasteful."

[Ed President Bush has a great many serious problems on his plate right now. An increasing budget deficit; a wobbly dollar (that could crash and bring about a world recession); the loss of America's scientific edge to China; a costly, illegal war in Iraq (which has driven millions in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Iraq backwards into Medieval religious fervour); the choice of women friends for responsible positions way above their experience; a refusal to spend more than five minutes in any sort of extended discussion with other world leaders; a simple matter of neglect of the levees of New Orleans in order to save a few dollars; the ending of a consumer boom that has been fuelled by ever-cheaper energy in the last 200 years -- until recently. Some deserved; only the last is undeserved and shared with other developed countries. Any one of these could now bring down someone who has been one of the most intellectually and culturally pathetic leaders in recorded world history.]