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Brown admitted that he looked at Katrina as a garden variety hurricane last Sunday while the NWS was posting about "incredible suffering" in a forecast that scared the daylights out of most people who saw it.

Brown showed up on television claiming that FEMA was taking care of the people in the Convention Center while thousands of people were shoved in like so much cordwood.

Brown claimed in subsequent interviews that they didn't "bring the right equipment" because the locals didn't tell them what to bring -- and while this points back at Nagin and Blanco, this does not exonerate Brown. His agency should know the basic equipment to bring.

Chertoff's agency is supposed to coordinate what's what in a disaster; his agency should have been in touch with locals in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama even before landfall in order to begin to marshal resources. DHS didn't.

Had this been a terrorist-driven disaster, DHS still wouldn't have been able to handle themselves.

As I said, there is plenty of blame to go around.

The locals didn't even look at their own disaster manuals and resources.

Blanco looks like she's been sitting on the couch eating cookie dough ice cream with her deer-in-headlights face. Give her a remote control and that picture would be complete.

Look--I think Chertoff did a good job for the Pubbies during the Clinton scandals.

But the DHS post was a mistake.

Chertoff told victims to go to web sites for information. It sounded great in his air-conditioned office, but it lost a little in translation to folks without electricity or cell phone access in the Gulf Coast.

I would have liked to have seen some realistic estimates of when troops would arrive in NO, when food and water would arrive in bulk, etc. as early as Tuesday afternoon. It takes time for those things to happen, but it is Chertoff's job to know how long it really takes and to communicate that reality to the media and (if any could find out) the victims.