12:49 P.M. - BILOXI, MS (AP): President Bush has been trying to console people who lost their homes, and everything else but their lives, to Hurricane Katrina.

Visiting Biloxi, Mississippi, Bush spoke with a tearful woman who told him, "We don't have anything." They stood alongside the ruins of homes that had been reduced to pieces amid fallen trees and other debris.

He walked through the debris with the woman and a girl, his arms around their shoulders, and told them to "hang in there."

Right.

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The BBC's Matt Frei, in New Orleans, says conditions in the city's convention centre, where up to 20,000 more are stranded, are the most wretched he has seen anywhere, including crises in the Third World.

"You've got an entire nursing home evacuated five days ago - people in wheelchairs sitting there and slowly dying," he says

I just talked to my mom who was extremely offended to hear me criticizing the "relief effort" (what a joke). She thinks they're doing everything they can. I just want to shake her! I need to stop discussing anything political with my parents. I never seem to learn this lesson.

Ellen Degeneres has set up a page where you can donate to the relief fund. Warner Bros. is matching donations through the website up to $500,000.

Wouldn't it be great if we were living in a parliamentary system about now so the opposition could call for a vote of no confidence, like, now?

More BBC perspective. Which is useful to capture the racial divide between the police and the refugees:

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The Governor is attributing the worst of the violence in the city to drug addicts who have looted gun shops and are now prowling the city to get a fix any way they can.

There's a very aggressive police presence. They don't stop and talk to the refugees at all and they don't communicate with them. They just speed by in their pick up trucks and their cars pointing shotguns out of the window as they go. It's quite extraordinary behaviour. And these desperate people are waiting for evacuation. The police behaviour makes them all feel like suspects.

Every now and again a military helicopter comes in, it hovers over a car park and soldiers throw out big boxes of bottled water and food ration packs and then a great tide of young men come running in and start fighting for the food. This means that the most vulnerable people, the sick and elderly, many families don't get a shot of the food coming down. There are five corpses there, at least from what we've seen today, it could be a serious development.

eta:

I went to the superdome and there are about 15,000-20,000 people. The pace of evacuation there is unbeliveably slow. We seem to see columns of buses going in but the number of people going out does not seem to change. There are helicopters which throw food and water out and men fight over the relief aid. So the elderly and mums and pregnant women don't get anything. It's an extraordinary situation.

At either end of the centre are armed troops and police but nobody is walking up and down the crowd that are outside. They are not trying to figure out who to give water to, baby formula, or antibiotics. We discovered this morning that a number of children are starting to go down with diarrhoea which I think may be the most serious development overnight.

Elsewhere at the Convention Centre, there isn't a bus in sight. The only thing you see out of 2,000-3,000 people is police cars going through pointing shotguns. These are unbelievable conditions. Words begin to fail me.

Wouldn't it be great if we were living in a parliamentary system about now so the opposition could call for a vote of no confidence, like, now?

Seriously. I reached my Bush-hatred saturation point yesterday and I really can't hate him anymore than I already do. I just want him gone and I don't know if our country can wait until 2008.

I reached my Bush-hatred saturation point yesterday and I really can't hate him anymore than I already do.

Ditto. I was okay with the knowledge that future historians would class him among the worst presidents ever, but now I just want him zapped from orbit or somesuch.

This weekend I'm finally going to get around to assembling a Go bag.

Just when I thought it could reach the saturation point, I found a special reserve of hate:

1:25 P.M. - Pres. Bush, after touring the damage in Biloxi, MS: "I don't think anybody can be prepared for the vastness of this destruction." The President said he "completely disagreed" with those who said the war in Iraq was diverting vital, much needed resources away from the storm-ravaged area.

"We'll do both (help the Gulf Coast and those in Iraq), we've got plenty of resources to do both," Bush said.