Summing up the whole sordid mess, this article via Drudge Report on what we know went wrong and the spin that’s not getting any traction.

Ray Nagin, the mayor, ordered a “mandatory” evacuation a day late, but kept the city’s 2,000 school buses parked and locked in neat rows when there was still time to take the refugees to higher ground. The bright-yellow buses sit ruined now in four feet of dirty water. Then the governor, Kathleen Blanco, resisted early pleas to declare martial law, and her dithering opened the way for looters, rapists and killers to make New Orleans an unholy hell. Gov. Haley Barbour did not hesitate in neighboring Mississippi, and looters, rapists and killers have not turned the streets of Gulfport and Biloxi into killing fields.

Those missteps from city and state politicians have cost hundreds of lives. But I don’t know how to compare the grotesque insult of the lies spun by those Pruden calls “race hustlers,” who expect blacks to believe that George Bush in particular or whites in general are using the opportunity of this disaster in order to kill them. Do they honestly expect blacks to believe this over the evidence of their own eyes?

Black and white churches of all denominations across a wide swath of the South stretching from Texas across Arkansas and Louisiana into Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama and Georgia turned their Sunday schools into kitchens and dormitories. In Memphis, Junior Leaguers turned out for baby-sitting duty at the city’s largest, most fashionable and nearly all white Baptist church, cradling tiny black infants in compassionate arms so their mothers could finally sleep.