Straining to meet President Bush's mid-October deadline to clear out shelters, the federal government has moved hundreds of thousands of evacuees from Hurricane Katrina into hotel rooms at a cost of about $11 million a night, a strategy local officials and some members of Congress criticize as incoherent and wasteful.

The number of people in hotels has grown by 60 percent in the past two weeks as some shelters closed, reaching nearly 600,000 as of Tuesday. Even so, relief officials say they cannot meet the deadline, as more than 22,000 people were still in shelters in 14 states on Wednesday.

from huffington post

Is it a waste of money to do whatever needs to be done to help katrina victims? HELL NO.

The point here is because FEMA and the federal government lack the leadership and competency to help these people they are having to throw them in hotels and spend a hell of a lot of money for a worse outcome then if they were prepared and able to deal with this situation.

When you strip down essential aspects of the government and put cronies in positions of authority, you can't just fix everything real fast when those services are needed.

Once again the America Tax Payers are going to pay for the misadventures of politicians. Just like my joke about me using my electric stove to heat my house. Because of our governments unpreparedness this catastrophe will cost us many times what it would have and probably turn out worse for it. In my example had I just bought heating oil, it would have cost less and I would have been warmer. Had I pre-bought oil it would have cost even less.

Even the “honest” Libertarians and Conservatives who really want to get rid of all government, and not just the parts they don’t like, will fail. But their "experiments" will cost us horribly. This is why these Republican “conservatives” are actually Radicals ideologues. A real conservative would never take a chance with people's safely by dismantling an emergency response program. A Real Conservative always wants to do things the way they have always been done, only agreeing to a change after careful consideration then only to least change absolutely necessary.

To give the Republicans and anti-government "conservatives" some credit this hotel thing is a compromise. If they had their way those people would be left to "sink or swim" to pull themselves up by their own water moccasins.