Re:Congress: STFU. (Score 2, Informative)

A few notes... New Orleans is one of the first and largest port cities in America. The French put it there due to its convenient location between the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Ponchitrain and the Mississippi river. Moving any of those large bodies of water is fairly difficult so the original economic reasoning still stands. New Orleans is also the largest inlet for the importation of natural gas which is widely used to generate electricity (ie. for people in places like Arizona) and that's another multi-billion dollar industry. Speaking of multi-billion dollar industries... one of the main reasons that Katrina was so destructive is because changes to the Mississippi delta for things like natural gas service channels and deep shoal shipping have caused massive areas of the Lousiana swamps to die out and arode. Who cares right? Well, when the swamp dies off it takes huge stands of trees with it and those present a huge physical break that slows down a storm heading inland. Think of a hurricane as a giant bowling ball and imagine the difference between rolling it down a bowling alley or across a thick lawn. Kill off the swamps and you have a nice smooth alley heading right up into New Orleans. So before you go blaming the victim you might want to think about what things like shipping channels and energy imports have done to a community like New Orleans. Since places like Arizona would probably never support a massive inland population without energy to run air-conditioners and well pumps you could have some degree of culpability in the situation. Oh, and don't call us if you find yourself in the middle of a 100-year level drought don't come crying to us... its your stupid fault for living in the desert... dumb ass.