"Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment." ~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

A year after triumphantly declaring that work in the Gulf Coast region would be "one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen," after promising that "Americans will look back at the response to Hurricane Katrina and say that our country grew not only in prosperity, but also in character and justice," George Bush had the audacity to return to New Orleans.

Unbelievable.

Bush wore the same blue photo-op shirt of a year ago, with sleeves rolled up to show he meant business. With his trademark nod and wink, he said he accepted full responsibility for the government's breakdown in responding to the devastation -- a breakdown which cost many additional lives. After adding that he'd learned his lesson, Bush then launched into his incoherent, all-too-familiar babble that help is on the way.

Former FEMA Administrator Michael Brown, being interviewed on MSNBC's Hardball, was asked by host Norah O'Donnell about his interview with Playboy Magazine in which he admitted that it was a 'mistake' for him to 'play along with the White House message during Katrina' saying that it was a 'lie'.

"What was the lie?" O'Donnell asked. Brown replied, "The lie was that we were working as a team and that everything was working smoothly. And how we could go out, and I beat myself up almost daily for allowing this to have happened, to sit there and go on television and talk about how things are working well, when you know they are not behind the scenes, is just wrong." Asked if "someone in the White House was telling you to lie," Brown said, "Well, yes. They give you the talking points."

Note: Check the comments for a photoessay comparison, and a commentary on Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind".

"The measure of a man is the way he bears up under misfortune." -- Plutarch

What is the measure of a man, a political party, an ideology or an Administration? Is the collective whole of one's lifetime achievements enough, or would a subset of the timeline through which a lifetime passes provide an adequate sampling so as to derive a concept of what one might expect in the future?  If our answer to this question is the latter, then the second term of George W. Bush, along with the GOP-controlled Congress and Justice Department, has presented us with the opportunity to see up close and personal several key examples embodied in the form of two cities located nearly half a world from each other: New Orleans & Fallujah.

What we behold isn't pretty.

As some of you may know, Lucy Lawless was in the middle of filming Vampire Bats!, a CBS movie, when Hurricane Katrina was barreling towards New Orleans. She was one of thousands who were in the massive traffic jam exiting the city for the safety of Baton Rouge and elsewhere. In the short time she was in New Orleans, she fell in love with the area and its inhabitants, and the tragedy of Katrina struck a chord in her - so many of her friends were and are affected by it. On November 23 & 24, she went to NO for fundraisers, one of which was the New Orleans Louisiana Sheriff's 31st Annual Thanksgiving Day Celebration at the New Orleans House of Blues, the other a fundraiser in Jefferson Parish. Rest assured, Katrina's victims are never far from Lucy's thoughts, and she continues to do what she can to keep awareness of their plight alive.

Her website has her message for and about New Orleans, and further down the page, photos (and embedded video) of her November trip to the city for Thanksgiving.