It’s been six month since one of the most destructive natural since Hurricane Katrina hit the eastern seaboard, and while there’s been a good deal of progress on cleanup and rebuilding, there are still thousands of displaced people and closed businesses waiting for the rebuilding phase to pick up the pace:

Tens of thousands of people remain homeless. Housing, business, tourism and coastal protection all remain major issues with the summer vacation — and hurricane — seasons almost here again. …

By many measures, the recovery from Sandy, which struck Oct. 29, has been slow. From Maryland to New Hampshire, the National Hurricane Center attributes 72 deaths directly to Sandy and 87 others indirectly from causes such as hypothermia due to power outages, carbon monoxide poisoning and accidents during cleanup efforts, for a total of 159. …

Throughout the region, many businesses are still shuttered, and an already-tight rental market has become even more so because of the destruction of thousands of units and the crush of displaced storm victims looking to rent the ones that survived. …

But insurance companies have not paid out all that many homeowners expected. Municipalities are borrowing tens of millions of dollars to keep the lights on, the fire trucks running and the police stations staffed, waiting for reimbursement from the federal government for storm expenditures they had to fund out of pocket.

Via Meadia reminded us over the weekend that the situation would no doubt be an ongoing national disaster of epic and unforgivable proportions were a certain someone still in the White House — it’s really been just too kind of the media to spare us from so many of these dreadful stories of personal woe and bureaucratic inefficiency — but MSNBC did do a six-month special this morning with New Jersey Governor Christie Christie, in which he affirmed that oh, hell no does he regret his post-Sandy schmoozefest with Obama because no way, no how was any of it was about presidential politics:

Six months after superstorm Sandy ravaged New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie said he has no regrets on working with President Barack Obama on his state’s recovery–despite political blowback.

“The president has kept every promise he made,” the Republican governor said on Morning Joe Monday from Asbury Park, N.J. “Everybody knows I have about 95% level of disagreement with Barack Obama on principle and philosophy, but the fact is we have a job to do. What people expect from people they elect is to do their jobs.” …

“That’s why they hate Washington so much. They hate Washington because people don’t care, many of them, they don’t care about getting the job done,” he said. “They care about arguing with each other and being right. The president’s guilty of that, the Congress is guilty of that.”