Welcome to the commentary magazine daily podcast today is Thursday, August 31st, 2023.

I'm John Pudhord's the editor of commentary magazine. I want to announce a new feature that we are going to

be introducing tomorrow on the Friday podcast. We are going to have a Friday mail back the

the listener mail week and the letters that we generated and the emails that we generated asking

people to post questions to us and the like so popular and the questions were so great that we've

decided that we want to make this a weekly feature of the podcast. So please feel free to send

your questions responses queries to podcast at commentary.org and we will consider bringing it up

on Friday by we. I mean executive editor a Greenwald Hyabe. Hi, John.

Media commentary column is Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine. Hi, John.

And Christine's colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, our own director of domestic

policy studies math and continuity. Hi, Matt. Hi, John. So one issue in the world of domestic

policy studies is the political response to natural disasters and the proper role

of both the state, local and federal governments in managing handling and coping with such disasters.

We have a cascade of two in the last month. The Hurricane Adelia now apparently downgraded to

Tropical Storm Adelia in Florida and then passing through to South Carolina and of course the

horrible devastating fire in Maui that and that seems to have obliterated the town of

Lahaina. And I Christine, you as a Floridian as we often say, what if you could reflect on the

fact that the world of political disaster relating to natural disasters really started in Florida in

1992 with a response to Hurricane Andrew which arguably played some role in the decline and fall

of George H. W. Bush as it was thought that the federal government had not handled the matter

with the greatest degree of competence and then moving onward. So looking at this, first of all,

what do you hear from your sources on the ground in Florida and what do you think about this as a

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