Republican and Conservative political analysis and commentary

Tropical Storm Erin* is approaching South Texas and while it's a significant weather event, another tropical system may intensify into a significant political event. It's Tropical Storm Dean. And, no, that isn't a reference to Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean.

It looks increasingly likely it will be the first major hurricane to strike the Gulf Coast since two years ago, the year of Hurricane Katrina.

The political implications of the likely Hurricane Dean are easy to see: Has government - at all levels - learned the lessons of Katrina and improved its disaster-response processes? The failure of New Orleans and Louisiana officials to implement pre-hurricane evacuation and readiness plans, combined with a weak response from the federal government, were failures writ large across the Gulf Coast (though, to be truthful, Mississippi's Republican government did a much better job pre- and post-Katrina than the Democratic regimes governing New Orleans and the Bayou State did).

Will the governmental response to Hurricane Dean be any better? 

Only time will tell.

For regular updates on the progress of now-Tropical Storm Dean, I recommend you check in regularly with blogger Brendan Loy, who blog was sounding early warnings on Katrina long before most media recognized that it could become a monster storm.

*This isn't the first tropical system named Erin to threaten the Gulf Coast. In 1995, Hurricane Erin struck Florida as a category 1 storm in July 1995, crossing the Florida peninsula from east to west at Vero Beach and entering the Gulf of Mexico, where it re-intensified and curved northward, coming ashore near Fort Walton Beach in the western Florida panhandle as a category 2 hurricane.