DigitalGlobe has a fine gallery of extremely detailed Katrina satellite photos up, and Shawn points out via email that the busy folks in the Google Earth Current Events Community have already figured out how to used them in Overlays, so you can, for example, superimpose a street grid, to have a good look at what happened to your house or that favorite spot (at least, as of yesterday).

Shawn showed me some extremely useful New Orleans big picture Before and After shots. Unfortunately, the DigitalGlobe usage agreement specifically prohibits publication of altered images without their consent. So I can't show you, but if you can run Google Earth, the overlays these people have come up with should allow you to look up specific places fairly easily. Shawn writes:

DigitalGlobe put out new Sat images a couple hours ago, now a lot people people biting their fingers can look up where they want in GE and see the flooding over a lot of NOLA.

And here's the Overlay as made by GE User Equitus from this forum post: http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showthreaded.php/Cat/0/Number/92563/page/0/vc/1

Overlay http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/download.php?Number=92563

For a sense of the resolution, note that the big 17th Street levee break is clearly visible toward the bottom right of the sample DigitalGlobe image to the left.

NOTE TO THE FOLKS AT GOOGLE EARTH: Finish your Macintosh version! People need it.

MEANWHILE, the September 1st New York Times editorial begins

George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed. He then read an address of a quality more appropriate for an Arbor Day celebration: a long laundry list of pounds of ice, generators and blankets delivered to the stricken Gulf Coast. He advised the public that anybody who wanted to help should send cash, grinned, and promised that everything would work out in the end.

I confess I have been paying almost no attention to Bush's behavior at all. In his "management style," his minions will tell him when he's needed and he doesn't rise to occasions until they do. So I expected very little.

But what has happened to New Orleans seems to me to be rather like a stroke. There is a saying about strokes, TIME IS BRAIN: The longer treatment takes, the more brain damage occurs. Never mind that a "mandatory" evacuation should have provided a plan for the poor to get out, the New Orleans second-round evacuation currently in progress needed to start a lot earlier. The longer it takes, the less infrastrcture there is to do it with. The longer it takes, the more people roast, unrescued, trapped in their attics, or float away when the water gets above the roof, or try to make a break for it and drown.

BUSH UPDATE: Have received scathing reviews for his speech yesterday, Bush tries to do better on Good Morning America this morning, claiming, I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees. See Echidne for further details. I don't have the stomach for it this morning. (Via atrios.)