Sometimes you just can't wait until lunch

So it turns out that inspectors from the Orleans Levee Board, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development didn't just hurry through their inspections of the region's levees so they could get to lunch on time. On their last cursory inspection--the one before Katrina--they also took a mid-morning coffee break.

A spokesman for the Corps of Engineers calls what happened a "good 'lessons learned'." I call it a destruction of one of America's leading cities and the collapse of a state's economy.