The friction between Nagin and Blanco reportedly goes back to Nagin's support for Bush's Presidential bid.
Nagin is on the record as saying that he hopes all this will get Blanco off his back so he can get something done.
He's also on the record saying that the CIA is trying to kill him.
Reading through this thread suggested a possible root cause for all this.
Corrupt state government is looking at either the end of their careers or the biggest pork barrel in history. Corrupt means ties with criminals, yes?
We have criminals delaying the relief, actually shooting at rescue boats and choppers, while the Governor first claims she has the situation totally under control, actually offended at "rumors" of chaos, then at the last minute we have a "hysterical" switch to her pleading for Federal help and complaining that it isn't coming.
The levees were "spec'ed" to Cat-3 but the funnel between Orleans and Bernard has been known for years and from all accounts the levees weren't maintained even up to Cat-3 standards.
No apparant local plan seems to have been in place either, except the one which has failed everytime it was gamed, along with the Ivan and Georges hypothetical failures too. They let the buses and the police cars and police radios sink under the water without lifting a finger to stop it.
Jackson and Gore and McCain show up, all of them after something, they are politicians afterall, and the only prize anywhere in sight is a contaminated stinking cesspool, stained with the bolld of virgins....that, and the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars it will take to rebuild it.
The media is completely over the top, literally pushing the limits of Clinton expanded credibility (who also has his nose in the arena).
Finally we have Nagin in the middle, flipping back and forth, is he shopping for the highest bid?
Nobody with a nose for cold cash can have missed the charitible bonanza that 9/11 turned out to be, and it's starting to look like the sharks are circling, scenting another cash cow.
But the cow hasn't given birth yet.
The Red Cross has collected 100 million, but these folks don't play for that kind of chump change. The insurance compaies are on the hook for $33 billion so far, but even being allowed to slide out of their responsibilities won't generate much in the way of liquid cash, the premiums have already been assimilated.
There is no prize but the players are all rolling into town and that means the prize is yet to come.
It can only come from a few places I can think of. Straight Federal feeds out of existing tax revenues, some kind of new tax, or else voluntary donations. Whatever the vultures ( and they are vultures in every sense of the word hoping to feed on the dead) smell, you can bet it starts with a "$B", not an "$M".
The thing is, the Fed is already budgetarily under the gun for the relief effort, the people are one step from arms over gasoline prtices, and a new tax or call for voluntary charity on this scale will fall onto closed ears.
Stay tuned, the pattern is beginning to emerge from the receeding clouds of the storm.
A few key pieces of the puzzle are still obscured, but it won't be long before we see it all.