President George W. Bush announced today that he accepts responsibility for failures in federal response to Hurricane Katrina.

“Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government,” Bush said at a joint White House news conference with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.

“And to the extent that the federal government didn’t fully do its job right, I take responsibility. I want to know what went right and what went wrong,” said Bush.

Facing sharp criticism and the lowest approval ratings of his presidency, Bush scheduled a speech to the nation from Louisiana for Thursday evening. It will be his fourth trip to the devastated Gulf Coast since the storm struck two weeks ago.

It was the closest Bush has come to publicly faulting any federal officials involved in the hurricane response, which has been widely criticized as disjointed and slow. Some federal officials have sought to blame state and local officials for being unprepared to cope with the disaster. — Associated Press

Yeah, some admission. It’s half-assed and we all know it.

Meanwhile, Bush named David Paulison to head FEMA after the resignation of Michael Brown. You might remember Paulison as the official who told Americans to stock up on duct tape to protect against terrorist attacks against the U.S.

President Bush will address the nation Thursday night at 9pm Eastern time. I expect it will be full of bullshit. Tune in here Friday if you can’t bear to watch him babble on TV.

Before he comes on TV, I’ll tell you what went wrong. The Defense Department can’t get supplies into a disaster area in the U.S. on 24 hours notice.

FEMA can’t do much more at this point than warehouse evacuees indefinitely, which just makes their problems worse. “There are few surer ways to make people sick, hopeless, and stripped of agency than to pack them into collective camp-like conditions for an indefinite time period,” said Kerry Howley inReason magazine.

In other news, a woman was arrested in Memphis over the weekend for pretending to be a hurricane victim. Red Cross officials got suspicious when she couldn’t remember the Gulfport address she gave when she initially applied for the cash assistance.