From CNN:

National Hurricane Center (NHC) forecasters predicted that by Wednesday evening Rita could strengthen to a Category 4 -- the same strength as deadly Hurricane Katrina when it made landfall Aug. 29 near the Louisiana-Mississippi state line, devastating New Orleans and nearby Gulf Coast cities.

A Category 4 storm, with top sustained winds of 131 to 155 mph, can cause extreme damage, according to the Saffir-Simpson scale measuring hurricane strength. CNN meteorologist Chad Myers said Rita's winds could increase to 145 mph by landfall.

UPDATE: Did I speak too soon? Rita is now a Category 4.

The blame game gets a bad rap, but the badder rap should go to people like Louisiana Rep. William Jefferson (D. La.), who commandeered two big trucks and a helicopter to go check out his property on Friday, September 2nd, just as the relief effort was finally starting to get off the ground. According to the ABC exclusive, Jefferson requested National Guard troops to escort him on a tour of his district, then had the truck take him to his home in an unscheduled stop (Jefferson says he did not request the armed detail). According to ABC News, Jefferson went into his house for about an hour while the soldiers waited, until he came out with his laptop, a few suitcases and "a box about the size of a small refrigerator."

Jefferson says that the extraction mission only took a few minutes and that the soldiers were assisting his neighbors, anyway.

The situation was compounded though when the truck got stuck on Jefferson's lawn. They flagged down a helicopter -- in the midst of a search-and-rescue mission, already with four rescued NOLA residents on board -- which came by for about 45 minutes before continuing on its primary mission (you know, to rescue people who didn't have the army escort them home to retrieve laptops and suitcases). A second truck was dispatched to rescue the first truck. This was Friday, September 2nd.

The full ABC report is pretty scathing -- sample commentary from a homeland security expert and ABC News consultant Jerry Hauer: "Forty-five minutes can be an eternity to somebody that is drowning, to somebody that is sitting in a roof... [a helicopter] needs to be used for its primary purpose during an emergency." At the bottom, there's a nice tidbit about how prior to Katrina, Rep. Jefferson's homes in New Orleans and D.C. were raided as part of a federal investigation. Apparently they found a hunk o' cash in the freezer. Hmmm. Good thing he saved those suitcases and that refrigerator-sized box.

Nice work on ABC's part; we haven't given them a shout-out yet for their coverage (so many Anderson Cooper Google alerts, so little time) but they certainly deserve it for this one. Jake Tapper of ABC's Washington bureau broke this story with help from Sarah Rosenberg, Chris Isham and Ted Gerstein.

Technically he's being "removed from his role managing Hurricane Katrina relief efforts" but considering the dustup about his qualifications -- not to mention the flak the adminstration is getting for his, er, lack of efficacy thus far -- but yeah, he's out.

He is being replaced by Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen, his deputy in coordinating the relief efforts.

Chertoff makes it official now -- 1:45 pm. Thanks to über-source Bucky Turco for the intel.

"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

FEMA Chief relieved of Katrina duties [MSNBC]
FEMA Head May Have Lied In Bio [CBS News]
How Reliable Is Brown's Resume? [TIME]
FEMA Rap fo Kidz [FishbowlNY]

God, it is really hard to get the nation's top brass to cut short a vacation. Between Condi kicking up her Ferragamo-clad heels in NYC and Bush waiting four days to cut his Crawford time short, we'd have seen (or rather, not seen, enough) -- but where was Cheney? The Veep has been whisperingly under the radar since Katrina began, and Lloyd Grove's Lowdown knows why: Cheney was fly-fishing in Wyoming until Thursday, when he was "forced" to cut the good times short and return to D.C. (no word on what forced him: his boss, who has dispatched him to the region? Public opinion? A visit from The Ghost of Christmas Past?).

In any case, we took a look at our posts from last Thursday just to refresh on what was going on in the world. A random sampling:

• At the Superdome: "You have about four days until dysentery sets in. And it's been four days today."
  
• Fox's Steve Harrigan comparing New Orleans to a war zone: "The last time I needed water purification tablets was Afghanistan. I didn't think I'd need them in Louisiana."
  
• CNN's Jim Spellman calling New Orleans a "refugee city": "People are just baking out on these highways. There is nowhere else for them to go."
  
• A post called simply "Thousands" - as in, the death toll.
  
• Two days before, on Tuesday, the levees broke.

CNN has a poll on all things Katrina, and while at first it appears that we are a nation of pessimists ("Most Americans believe New Orleans will never recover") upon closer examination the "Most Americans" figure actually means "most of the 609 people surveyed" which to me isn't quite as compelling as, say, the popular vote (which as we all know is very decisive). However, a sliver of optimism: 63% say they think New Orleans should rebuild.

Here's the news though: "Forty-two percent of respondents characterized President Bush's response to the disaster as "bad" or "terrible," while 35 percent said it was "good" or "great." In other news, 35 percent of respondents were dropped on their heads as children.

Poll: Most Americans believe New Orleans will never recover [CNN]

The destruction and tragedy of Katrina has of course inspired writers to remember New Orleans, a unique American city with, yes, a unique American nightlife (I did wonder how Joe Francis had taken the news). But is it just me, or is it a bit unseemly just yet to wax so effusively about the lost earthly delights of the city? While I of course appreciate the sentiments behind any heartfelt lament, I also feel it's a little early to hear about how Rick Bragg mistily remembers getting laid in the quarter or Howell Raines will miss getting an eyeful in exchange for some beads - especially when rendered so purply:

Oh, wondrous city of music that floats from the horn and poems drowned in drink! Oh, cheesy clip-clop metropolis of phony coach-and-fours hauling drunken Dodge salesmen, of gaunt-eyed transvestite hookers, of Baptist girls suddenly inspired to show their breasts on Chartres Street in return for a string of beads flung from the balcony of the Soniat House — will we lose even these dubious glories of the only American city that's never been psychoanalyzed?

Ditto his pal Rick Bragg. Yes, Rick, we know you're from the South. You're the folksy chronicler and they're your quirky, charming kin. We get it. But was Friday, September 2nd when the National Guard had barely touched down really the right time to celebrate New Orleans as place "that can make you laugh at coffins and believe in magic?" Ugh. Bragg serves up a typically richly-detailed and self-consciously literary piece, which would have been an enjoyable read at any other time but seems inappropriate now; it's hard to celebrate how "in the poorest cemeteries the poorest men and women build tin-foil monuments to lost children in a potter's field," and, amid pictures of people dehydrating to death in the Superdome and Convention Center, hard to celebrate the heat "because that is what the devil sends." Anne Rice's piece was moving for the simplicity of how she let the city speak for itself; Bragg's is distracting and a bit unsettling because it forces the reader to pay attention to him. But still, Rick, we're glad to hear you scored with that sophomore.

(NB this is not at all meant to detract from the sincerity of either, nor their memories.)

Here is a randomly-selected collection of noteworthy items from the recent coverage of Hurricane Katrina:

It's true. Who's surprised?

UPDATE: My mom, actually. She said, "What? Not Scalia?" which I confess I'd forgotten about entirely. Interesting.

Not surprisingly, the weekend Op-Ed pages were dominated by Katrina and equally unsurprisingly, so too has been MEL. Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich swapped the top spot yesterday in the late afternoon but otherwise these five have been the must-reads of the day.

MoDO: "Who are we if we can't take care of our own?"
MoDo, of course, comes out swinging at Dubya and his absentee band of cronies, blasting FEMA's Mike Brown as a "blithering idiot" (and she invokes his training - head of the International Arabian Horse Association - though does not mention that he was reportedly forced to resign from same for sheer incompetence). She also manages to make the other musical reference that has echoed with the sudden national prominence of levees, and yet it doesn't ring too cute. How can it, really, given the subject matter. There's no triumph in being proved right though, not in this column: "But it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode."

David Brooks seems wearied from the brutal realities we've seen recently -- horrors of 9-11, Iraq and now Katrina, plus the many crises of confidence this country's seen -- in business, in the press, in a truth-telling government, even in the quintessentially American national pastime of baseball. He, too, makes a musical reference (Stones, "Shattered". Mick has become the bard of the Op-Ed page). But he sees this as a bursting point; something's gotta give. See MoDo, above.

Paul Krugman calls for accountability. The rest of his columns shows how no one has gotten it. What he has to say, too, comes down to a chilling lack of empathy: "Our current leaders just aren't serious about some of the essential functions of government. They like waging war, but they don't like providing security, rescuing those in need or spending on preventive measures. And they never, ever ask for shared sacrifice." Or offer it.

Anne Rice crops up here, but is neither vampiric nor purple in the prose that made me throw down her book a few pages in. Instead, it's as a daughter of New Orleans, born and bred. Her elegy for New Orleans past and fierce confidence in the New Orleans present is both moving and evocative, just in its simple rendition of fact and history. Like the Slate architecture essay, it really conjures up a sense of the city's character and presence. Let's hope she's right about its ability to come back.

Finally, Frank Rich. My friend forwarded it to me, writing simply: "This says it all." It is a stinging indictment of Bush, the kind that would have made hard-core liberals utterly gleeful before last week. Not now. Now it's just alternatively depressing and frightening for what wasn't prevented and what might not now be: "Most of all, we're going to have to face the reality that with this disaster, the administration has again increased our vulnerability to the terrorists we were supposed to be fighting after 9/11." Not the conclusion I wanted the read, but of course the one I was bracing for. If you only read one op-ed on Katina, read this one.

Frank Rich: Falluja Floods the Superdome
Maureen Dowd: United States of Shame
David Brooks: The Bursting Point
Anne Rice: Do You Know What It Means to Lose New Orleans?
Paul Krugman: A Can't-Do Government

UPDATE: Bob Herbert's "A Failure of Leadership" has since snuck in there at #3.

NB: My first instinct for this headline was 'The NYT: Flooding The Zone' - I don't know about you but I have caught myself making water analogies over the past week and had never really realized how often they came up. Things like this, of course, make you notice.