Blanco: State of Union speech shows hurricanes ‘yesterday’s news’

NEW ORLEANS – Gov. Kathleen Blanco angrily criticized President Bush on Wednesday for leaving any mention of the hurricanes that lashed Louisiana in 2005 out of his State of the Union speech, and said the state is being shortchanged in federal recovery funding for political reasons.
“I guess the pain of the hurricane is yesterday’s news in Washington” Blanco said during a news conference called to outline the ways in which her administration says Louisiana has been treated unfairly.
The news conference marked a new round of political finger-pointing that began last week when Bush’s former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency accused some in the White House of playing politics in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which hit Aug. 29, 2005.
Mike Brown, during a speech in New York, said he had recommended to President Bush that all 90,000 square miles along the Gulf Coast affected by Katrina be placed under federal control, but he said some White House officials didn’t want to federalize Mississippi because a Republican, Haley Barbour, is governor there.