Three years ago today, Hurricane Katrina made landfall just east of New Orleans, Louisiana. Poorly designed and poorly maintained levees failed to keep back the storm surge and the swollen waters, and half the city, mostly the poorest neighborhoods who had been left behind by an evacuation plan that was only half ready, went under water. Almost 1,000 people died in the hurricane itself, and then dozens more died because the government, out of fear that (non-existent) gangs of armed black looters would steal the supplies and sell them on the black market, held back Red Cross disaster relief crews until the 101st Airborne could be flown back from the middle east to "pacify" a drowning American city. The events of the subsequent three years have done nothing to reassure me that the gods have forgiven us, yet, for this unexpiated act of unmitigated national cowardice.On this anniversary last year , I said that two years was not long enough to judge the reconstruction efforts a failure, and I stand by that. It's easy to underestimate how long it takes to rebuild an entire city after a disaster of this size. I predicted at the time that it could end up being a decade or more before even the majority of the reconstruction was done, no matter who the President was or what party was in power, because it just plain takes that long to get people to agree on what to build in the ruins, raise the financing for it, and then get it built. And here we are on the third anniversary, and the hardest-hit Lower Ninth Ward has barely finished clearing the rubble, with only a few scattered demonstration projects built, and that's sad, but it's still not a cause to go looking for someone to blame. Some things just take as long as they take, and there's nothing that can be done about that.But it looks like, while two years was not enough, three years may, in fact, turn out to be as much time as we had to get two important parts of it done. Or, to be precise, three years, zero months, and five days:As of when I'm embedding that image from the Weather Underground website, Hurricane Gustav is projected to make landfall five days after the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. It is currently projected to be a category 3 hurricane at the time, that is to say, on the same order of magnitude as Katrina. And it is currently projected to be most likely to make landfall roughly the same distance from New Orleans, to the west this time. Nobody with any reasonable sense of how long rebuilding takes expected the whole city to be rebuilt by now. But now it appears that we're going to find out, the hard way, whether three years was long enough to get the two most important parts of it done: the repairs and upgrades to the levees and flood walls, and the completion and updating of that long-overdue evacuation plan. And, gods help the people of New Orleans, but it looks like only one of those two things, the evacuation plan , got finished. At least this time, it looks like there will be buses and trains available to evacuate those who can't drive out. But the levees? Not so much. Back in May, President Bush vetoed the idea of freeing up more money for the levees until next summer, which, it looks like will turn out to have been too late.But even that, even if the construction currently slated to end in 2011 had been done by today, that may have turned out to be too little. The current plan, as inadequate as it is, would be to have the US Army Corps of Engineers, the government agency that supervised the construction of the original failed levees, supervise the same corrupt construction firms that built the original failed levees. In the aftermath of the storm, President Bush said that whoever got the contract would be audited within an inch of their life, because of Louisiana's long culture of corrupt government, but the money for the extra auditors was never allocated, either, so that part isn't getting done. A Dutch engineering firm, Arcadis, came in with a plan for a real, solid, reliable, Dutch-style levee system, and delivered a detailed, almost 3,000 page plan to build it. I'm reading conflicting accounts as to why, but they were told to go home; the resulting cheaper, sloppier design might not have even worked if they got it done. And one thing I'm being told by a lot of random sources is that nobody really thinks that itgoing to get done well, or maybe even ever, by the new contractors. Why? Corruption. Why finish the levee, when the longer the contract can be stretched out, the more opportunities for graft there are?So, all we can do now is wait, and hope that the parts that did get done will hold up, or the storm will weaken or somehow miss New Orleans, and we'll all find out come Tuesday. Well, no. We can do one other thing, and it's going to startle you hearing it out of my mouth: vote Republican. No, not in every election. And certainly not for President in November. Vote Republican for mayor of New Orleans. And Detroit. And St. Louis. And in every other corrupt, pestilential hell-hole of a city that's been under single-party rule for too, too long. What, the Republicans are running a nutbag flake in your city? Don't worry; you're not going to get him elected. That's not even the goal. The goal is to convince the Republicans that the current mayor is vulnerable, so they run a plausible, centrist candidate, someone who could conceivably get elected in your city, the next time. And then I want you to vote for that guy. Once. And then get him out of there, and the sooner the better, before he gets out of control like Rudy "the Nazi" Giuliani did in New York City. Because I'm not asking you to vote Republican, in any of these Democratic cesspits, because I think that the Republicans have good ideas on how to govern cities. On the contrary; let them run any of these cities for more than a couple of years and they'll utterly destroy them, especially the current crop of Republicans, all of whom are deeply wedded to voodoo economic theories like the Laffer Curve and who are turning out to be even more corrupt than the single-party-rule Democrats were.No, it's because of one and only one reason: it is awhen one party's primary election 100% reliably decides the final election results. That kind of single-party rule breeds corruption. It floats to the top those who do their best "work" in dark places, the ones with the most favors they can bestow or call in, the experts in graft and corruption. The ones who count on the fact that their intra-party opponents won't reveal their worst crimes, for fear of tarnishing the party itself. No party's primary is ever as clean, as open, or as thoroughly investigated by the press as a two-party general election. Because until corrupt scumbag party hacks like Francis Slay, Kwame Kilpatrick, and yes, absolutely Roy Nagin stop letting their friends and campaign contributors steal everything that's not nailed down, until guys who intend to turn a blind eye while their friends commit horrific crimes and maybe even do some looting of the city themselves become afraid of holding office in America for fear of exposure in the next election? We've got a lot of cities that will never recover, and New Orleans isn't even the worst of them. It's just the one that may be about about to physically drown, again.