Replies

This is the most specific to what you want. I've seen better articles pertaining to casinos but didn't save them.
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1476988/posts

#7 on this thread is interesting, although it doesn't deal with where the money spent.
http://freerepublic.com/focus/news/1478664/posts?page=1

CLAIM: Bush cut funding for Army Core of Engineers and that’s why the levee’s failed.

Dozens of Democrats and media types have made this claim. A Washington Post’s headline today reads “Critics Say Bush Undercut New Orleans Flood Control.” Read a bit further, however, and you note that even these Democratic critics all admit that even at the highest level of funding, NONE of these projects would have been completed in time to have helped. And none of them would have upgraded the levees to withstand a Cat 4-5 hurricane. As one commentator put it, a more accurate headline would have been “No Government Plan Would Have Prevented Flood, Democrats Still Blame Bush.” In other words, this is another flat out lie, given widespread distribution by the media.

It is also perhaps inconvenient to point out that major flood control projects that could have been completed by now were in fact cut—by the Clinton administration. From the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 1995 (isn’t the Internet fun?): “The Clinton administration is holding back a Corps of Engineers report recommending that the $120 million project proceed. …Without the improvements - a flood gate in the Harvey Canal and raised levees along the Intracoastal Waterway - a tidal surge produced by a hurricane ‘could result in the catastrophic loss of life and property damage,’ corps officials reported.” Not that the Bush administration stepped in to do more since, but given the time these projects take – one item of ACOE funding that the Bush Administration cut was for a study about upgrading the levees, and the study wouldn’t have been completed until, I believe, 2008. (As a side note, the Internet also lets us discover that the New York Times, now on its Olympian high horse condemning the irresponsibility of the Bush administration’s funding cuts for the ACOE, in fact, last April bitterly condemned the very same legislation as an expensive boondoggle. The paper thundered that “the bill would shovel $17 billion at the Army Corps of Engineers for flood control and other water-related projects — this at a time when President Bush is asking for major cuts in Medicaid and other important domestic programs.” Ah well, no one ever expects to hold them accountable for anything.)

The city of New Orleans over the years has managed to find hundreds of millions of dollars for other projects, from building the convention center and a variety of other typical municipal pork projects, millions of which seem to have disappeared into the maw of perhaps the most corrupt local government in the country, but they found nothing to fund their own flood control. Couldn’t pass a bond measure to upgrade their decrepit sewers and pumping system, though.