I think it was really, unfortunately, underreported in the national news for various reasons.

There is this unbelievable perception out there that the cost of inaction is free.

This is an entirely insufficient situation.

The Stafford Act is entirely insufficient to respond to this disaster.

So homes will be not only--have they been not only underwater, now they're going to be underwater and people walking away and their jobs.

I did call Congressman Graves. We did get water.

If our first thought is always that America's citizens are looking for a way to beat the system, then we're never going to make any progress.

What do we tell those people? Is the Stafford Act sufficient to respond to this disaster?

I just want us to be fair and try to work in a way to just get people what we can give them right now.

I don't think that can work that way.

We're going to donate in charity and volunteer our way out of the fourth most costly disaster in the United States--flood disaster in United States history.

We have to get a supplemental done. Without a supplemental, the government will never have the ability to set up a program to match the unmet need that people are going to have.

We need to do the Comite River diversion program. We need to erase the backlog of $724 million in emergency dollars through the Department of Transportation.

But let's be clear. I don't want you to pull the Governor and his staff into this thing. This is not their decision. This decision is FEMA's decision.

I think it's ridiculous. This is why people get so frustrated and why there are T-shirts that use an alternative acronym for 'FEMA' on Bourbon Street.

It is absolutely unacceptable to think that we're going to find a way to charity ourselves out of this thing.

And, most essentially, we need that $2 billion Community Development Block Grant program so that we can try to go in and convince these people that the right thing to do is to stay in their communities.

But then we've got to make sure that our response from Washington is targeted on responding to this storm in the most effective way, learning from other mistakes.