Danger! Danger!

Yet again the city of New Orleans is in the news for flooding, though thankfully not nearly as big a story as that "other" thing that happened down there.

Apparently the rainfall has gotten so bad that the cities pumps to deal with the water have not been able to keep up, thus portions of the city were so badly flooded the city's Mayor Nagin (yes, he IS still mayor) had told motorists to not even bother accessing portions of the city's roads.

Making problems worse in New Orleans were catch basins clogged with debris from gutted or renovated homes. Jackson urged residents to clean out the basins to help in draining standing water from streets.

Meanwhile, officials closed a gate on the Harvey Canal in suburban Jefferson Parish where the waters threatened to top the walls. It was one of several in the area placed under new safety guidelines after Katrina's waters breached two New Orleans canals, causing catastrophic flooding.

I can't help but feel like this is yet another in a long list of signs to people to either build enormous walls around the city to protect from the ever encroaching waters, or basically just get the hell out of the area...

Don't get me wrong, New Orleans is truly an amazing city and among my favorite places to be, but the place is gonna disappear ala Atlantis very soon... May just be time to make peace with that and move on.

PS: No, I didn't fall off the face of the earth, though have been planning a possible triumphant return to my "home" in DC, so that has taken up a chunk of my time...

gore! Gore! GORE!

Paul Krugman of the New York Times has written a brilliant article about Al Gore and why the hard line right wingers, read Faux News, and the like absolutely hate Al Gore and trash him in a way that is usually reserved for Bill Clinton.

On the day after Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize, The Wall Street Journal’s editors couldn’t even bring themselves to mention Mr. Gore’s name. Instead, they devoted their editorial to a long list of people they thought deserved the prize more.

And at National Review Online, Iain Murray suggested that the prize should have been shared with “that well-known peace campaigner Osama bin Laden, who implicitly endorsed Gore’s stance.” You see, bin Laden once said something about climate change — therefore, anyone who talks about climate change is a friend of the terrorists.

This is great, cause alerting folks about a possible environmental crisis is a terrible thing to do. It's so bad that one must lump them in with Public Enemy Number One since he has the same belief about the environment. You can never congratulate a man who has done some legitimate good for the people, or at least he's attempting to do that. No, you have to bash and act like a seven year old child whose parent won't buy him a toy while they're at the grocery store.

The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the “ozone man,” but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, “the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.” And so it has proved.

But Gore hatred is more than personal. When National Review decided to name its anti-environmental blog Planet Gore, it was trying to discredit the message as well as the messenger. For the truth Mr. Gore has been telling about how human activities are changing the climate isn’t just inconvenient. For conservatives, it’s deeply threatening.

That is a big part right there, the right HATES being shown that it is wrong about any subject. All Al Gore has done since he was in the national and world spotlight is disprove many of the lies the right would have you believe. Instead of debating a man with facts and science, they ridicule his name and call him stinky and claim the man has cooties, since they is in their arsenal.

Al Gore is a difficult man to like, he can be a bit robotic, our own political version of Spock and his wife is an absolute horror. That being said, I'd still vote for him over any of the Republican candidates they currently have running. Check that, I'd still vote for him over ANY candidate running as I think he's taken the last seven years and stepped back from politics and realized what is important to him and to people. He hasn't be a part of the "Beltway" and seems to have a clearer view then he did before. Bottom line is he seems more, human.

Krugman sums it up with his very last paragraph:

Which brings us to the biggest reason the right hates Mr. Gore: in his case the smear campaign has failed. He’s taken everything they could throw at him, and emerged more respected, and more credible, than ever. And it drives them crazy.

Al Gore, officially too qualified to be president...

Its official.

The rumors had been circling for weeks if not months that it would happen, but Former President (yes I'm aware of the horrendous job the "Supremes" did, so I will refer to him as such) Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The win is also likely add further fuel to a burgeoning movement in the United States for Gore to run for president in 2008, which he has so far said he does not plan to do.

Now, this is quite a mixed blessing for a lot of different reasons... First off we are all incredibly proud of Former President Gore for continuing on this quest of his that started so long ago and finally seeing some fruits of his labor come to bloom. This is not to take anything away from this journey that he has been on most his life...

But damnit Al... You just made yourself way too damn smart for the average american to vote for you... I mean, you were already there when you ran against the idiot boy king but you still could have pulled that election off if you hadn't listened so damn much to those idiots around you. Granted, Shrum and company did wonders for Clinton when they WERE genius minds in the political spectrum, but they lost that ability soon after and just assumed they were still geniuses (which, was so pathetically false).

It is really sad, but the second Al ran for office, the right-wing political machine will go back to reminding people how little they would have to talk about with Al at the dinner table, or while watching a football game while knocking back a few "Buds" (I resisted the urge to mention that stupid event in which a bunch of glorified truck drivers keep making left hand turns all day, whats it called, NeckCar?).

I mean, we get the democracy, and the government we deserve. In a lot of ways, that is why we are demeaned so much overseas, since those idiots in power reflect extremely poorly on us (but damnit, we put them there!).

I'm still hoping for a last second Al Gore run here... If only because I don't think I can stomach the leading two options in Clinton or Obama... Edwards would be fine for me, but something about the treachery of the Democratic party in its "selection" phase (Howard Dean anyone?) tells me that anyone that gets in either Clinton or Obama's way will be dealt with with another malfunctioning Microphone...

Still Don't Believe eh?

So, you're still on the fence about "Global Warming" and its ""Hypothetical" effects on weather patterns eh?

If you are making a few million on the side from the Coal or Oil lobbies, then more power to you, but if you haven't gained one cent off that belief, then brother you have been selling yourself short.

Southern California (or as Ahnuld says "Caleefawneya"), is preparing for a winter storm!

Yes beautiful southern California, location of San Diego the most wonderful place in the world (or so I'm told), where the weather is always about 80-85 and sunny. Yes, that is the place that is preparing for a winter storm.

There may be some debate as to what is causing the global warming (not much), but we are most certainly facing some sort of global shift in weather patterns and behavior. I guess the more important question could be, do we keep debating causes, or do we make some sort of effort to curb what we believe to be causing it? Is some effort better then doing nothing?