AND NOW, FOR SOME BADLY NEEDED GOOD NEWS

Katrina won't cost as much as the intial reports said. Initial reports are almost always wrong:

As lawmakers ramp up their efforts to cut spending to pay for hurricane relief and rebuilding, they are finding that the total cost promises to be less than originally feared.

The final tab is likely to be less than $150 billion, instead of an estimated $200 billion or more that was tossed about immediately after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in August, Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin said Thursday.

LA Gov. Kathleen Blanco at one point asked for $250 billion. That's just one more reason that she needs to be impeached--she now appears to have been making up that number out of thin air.

Elsewhere, the national economy lost 35,000 jobs last month. We also lost an entire city in that same period. But for the disaster of Biblical proportions, the economy would have kept growing and creating new jobs. We're still sitting at 5.1% unemployment, historically low by any standard. We'll recover from Katrina faster than any of us expected.