Bush and his patronage-appointed bureaucrats at FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Administration) and the Department of Homeland Security (most of whom had no disaster management experience) knew Katrina was a Category 5 aimed at New Orleans and, though it weakened by landfall to Cat. 4, it was still a lethal storm.  Yet, the day after Katrina struck, Bush ineptly said that no one imagined that New Orleans would be flooded.  This statement revealed his ignorance of the oft-reported fact that the federally constructed and financed levees were only built to withstand a Category 3 hurricane or, if he did know, what didn't he understand about the following equation?  Levees built to withstand a Cat. 3 hurricane + a Cat. 4 or 5 hurricane = flooded New Orleans.  The apathetic, delayed, and woefully inhumane response by him and his regime's bureaucrats the first week after the storm resulted in an untold number of deaths from dehydration of poor people who could not evacuate and were stranded at the convention center and Superdome.  However, these bodies were not autopsied so how could we know that they died of dehydration?  The week that Katrina struck, I was among millions of Americans who watched spellbound, grief-stricken and outraged as the media broadcast images of thousands of people suffering and some dying - people who felt abandoned by their government.  Public opinion polls revealed that almost two-thirds of Americans think Bush did a bad or terrible job as a leader in the storm's aftermath.  A strong leader would have immediately flown to the devastated area and taken charge of rescue efforts instead of waiting until two days later to make a mere photo-op visit.  A competent leader would have ordered the military and FEMA to bring supplies of water and food to staging positions in neighboring states before Katrina struck.  A caring and compassionate leader would have ordered the military and FEMA to airlift supplies of water and food to those stranded at the convention center and Superdome the first day of the crisis, not as an afterthought 4 or 5 days later.  An effective leader would have immediately mobilized National Guard or military vehicles capable of rescuing those stranded people.

As I predicted two years ago, Bush's approval ratings have plummeted and by the time he leaves office they will probably be as pathetically low as his father's.  This is accounted for by the transit of Saturn through his first house where it remains for the next two years, a traditionally unpopular and fatiguing period when he will be faced with his failures (the quagmire in Iraq and Katrina are only the first two in a series).  Though the failures before and after Katrina's wrath are shared by local and state officials, the fact remains that only the Federal government has the resources to effectively respond to and manage a disaster of this magnitude.  I urge my readers to help the thousands displaced by Katrina to make a new start.

Birth charts of cities such as those for New Orleans, Biloxi, and Pass Christian are used in my practice as a locational astrologer to help clients relocate to a city highly compatible with their chart.  This method is the traditional approach used in locational astrology and was practiced for many centuries before "relocated" birth charts became a locational astrology tool and long before Jim Lewis invented his ingenious Astro*Carto*Grapy™ maps (also called astro-location maps).  Comparing a person's birth chart with the birth chart of a city gives the locational astrologer a much more detailed compatibility picture than an astro-location map.  This locational astrology method focuses on the individuality and uniqueness of each city compared with the complex uniqueness of an individual's chart, in contrast to an astro-location map, the interpretation of which typically applies to a number of cities along a relocation line.  Using this ancient locational astrology technique of comparing a client's chart with that of a city, the traditional locational astrologer such as myself can give clients a highly accurate prediction of how they will feel, live, love, work, play, prosper, and socialize in a city before they ever set foot there.