And the counting begins

It’s gotten better.

Or at least that is what New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin told the nation on Tuesday, a week after all hell broke loose along a 30-mile stretch of the Mississippi coast. “I’ve gone from anger to despair to seeing us turn the corner,” he said on NBC’s “Today.”

But as with everything else about Hurricane Katrina, around Nagin’s corner is even more blues — bodies.

And lots of them. Nagin said he wouldn’t be surprised if as many as 10,000 people in New Orleans alone were found under the muck and mire now being cleared in part by the 82nd Airborne Division. As of Tuesday, only 234 bodies had been identified. Two of them were New Orleans police officers. They committed suicide.

If pictures of the living were already prompting national debate on words like “refugees” and “poverty,” no telling what pictures of the dead will do.

It’s already caused a little stir in the tiny town of St. Gabriel, Louisiana, the tiny town near New Orleans where a makeshift morgue was constructed next to City Hall. The makeshift morgue was only the latest indignity many town residents have endured over the years. Also near the town are two prisons and a former facility that houses leprosy patients.

“Put it this way,” Fenolia Green, 88, told the Associated Press. “Would they put it in a rich (area)? They always dump on the poor.”

And therein lies the real debate. The poor were always among us, but not like those surviving the floods. And the federal government failed them at their time of greatest need.

No one is happy. Even President George Bush is calling for congressional hearings to determine blame in the poor federal response to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.

“What I intend to do is lead an investigation to find out what went right and what went wrong,” Bush said. “We still live in an unsettled world. We want to make sure we can respond properly if there is a WMD (weapons of mass destruction) attack or another major storm.”

But critics are already lining up against Bush. To them, nothing went right, particularly his dismantling of the Federal Emergency Management Agency

“Government at all levels failed,” Sen. Susan Collins. R-Maine, said during a conference to announce the launch of hearings by the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee. “It is difficult to understand the lack of preparedness and ineffective initial response to a disaster that had been predicted for years and for which specific, dire warnings had been given for days.”

Of course, the loudest critics live in New Orleans. “We’re angry Mr. President, and we’ll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry,” read an open letter to President Bush in the Times-Picayune, Louisiana’s largest newspaper. “Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were not. That’s to the government’s shame…No expense should have been spared. No excuses should have been voiced.”

As it is now, it’ll take at least three weeks to remove water and another few weeks to clear the debris. It could take as many as eight weeks to restore electricity. The good news is that billions of dollars are flowing in to start the reconstruction projects.

In the meanwhile, thousands of displaced Americans are heading across the country, including as many as 2,500 to Massachusetts.

“We’re just holding our breath and we’re prepared,” Gov. Mitt Romney told reporters. “At this stage, flexibility is our watch word.”

The State House is expected to appropriate at least $265 million in state funds to help those efforts at Otis Air National Guard base on Cape Cod.

Also involved in the state’s efforts is the city of Boston and the Black Ministerial Alliance. Gilbert Thompson, BMA president, accompanied Gov. Romney during a press conference. “We recognize as communities of faith that people, as the governor said, have lost everything, but they have not lost their faith,” Thompson said.

Faith is about all that many have left. But from where Nagin was sitting on Tuesday, things had gotten better: Engineers had fixed the levee.

(Compiled from wire and news services)