Flood money: FEMA, Katrina, and fraud.

"IN ISOLATED instances, debit cards were used for adult entertainment, to purchase weapons, and for purchases at a massage parlor that had been previously raided by local police for prostitution."

That's a sample of how the decidedly disorganized Federal Emergency Management Agency has been spending between $600 million and $1.4 billion of your taxes. After looking into how FEMA has been overseeing its responsibility to provide emergency relief to Hurricane Katrina survivors, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that I6 percent of the agency's relief payments may have been erroneous--paid out to people with dummy residences, false Social Security numbers, or combinations of the two. One undercover GAO inspector scored a cool $2,358 check with a bogus address.

"This is an assault on the American taxpayer," said House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas), who helped arrange that assault by voting for the 2005 Flexibility Act, which sped up the payment of relief checks to real and unreal Katrina victims. But if the widespread fraud was easy to predict, nobody could have foreseen the creativity of the fraudsters. Among the items purchased around the country with FEMA debit cards: a Caribbean vacation, bottles of Dom Perignon champagne, Girls Gone Wild videos, season tickets to New Orleans Saints games, and the services of a divorce lawyer in Houston. The GAO testified that one man used FEMA assistance money for a sex change operation. It did not say whether he applied for more assistance under his new, female identity.