Posts from — September 2008

Position: 34.3 N 93.9 W [10 PM CDT 0300 UTC].
Movement: North-Northeast [025°] near 24 mph.
Maximum sustained winds: 40 mph [65 kph].
Wind Gusts: 50 mph.
Tropical Storm Wind Radius: 105 miles [165 km].
Minimum central pressure: 982 mb ↑.

It is 100 miles West-Southwest of Little Rock, Arkansas.

Downgraded to a Tropical Storm at 1PM.

Landfall was 2:10 AM CDT [0710 UTC] as a Category 2 hurricane with 110 mph [175 kph] winds at Galveston, Texas.

Here’s the link for NOAA’s latest satellite images.

Unless there is some radical new development this is my final post on Ike. It is on the verge of being a tropical depression, and being absorbed into an approaching front.

Even though it is 200 miles away Mark Schleifstein of The Times-Picayune reports on the flooding in eastern Louisiana: Hurricane Ike surge breaches, overtops some levees, floods homes, roadways across state.

Ike doesn’t have the high winds of a Category 5, but it is coming at the coast like a D11 Cat pushing the Gulf of Mexico in front of it.

This is not good. CNN writes that 37,000 may need to be rescued after Hurricane Ike

The Coast Guard said in a news release it received a distress call around 4 a.m. from the Antalina, a Cypriot-flagged freighter. It said the vessel had “lost main propulsion 90 miles southeast of Galveston” and was unable to steer.

Coast Guard Capt. Bill Diehl said the freighter had been “in the direct line of the path of the storm and lost its engines.”
…

The Coast Guard also worked to airlift people and their pets from their cars and homes on the Bolivar Peninsula, a narrow stretch of land that separates the Gulf of Mexico from Galveston Bay, as the wind and rain from Hurricane Ike slapped the Texas coast.

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Position: 28.7 N 94.5 W. [11 PM CDT 0400 UTC]
Movement: Northwest [315°] near 12 mph.
Maximum sustained winds: 110 mph [175 kph].
Wind Gusts: 130 mph.
Hurricane Wind Radius: 120 miles [195 km].
Tropical Storm Wind Radius: 275 miles [445 km].
Minimum central pressure: 952 mb ↓.

It is 45 miles South-Southeast of Galveston, Texas with sustained hurricane force winds coming ashore.

Music break: Galveston, Glen Campbell with the Jimmy Webb song.

Here’s the link for NOAA’s latest satellite images.

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Watching The World

When is the hurricane season over?

[Editor: This is an oldie because the ferals are hiding and the insiders are freaking out from the weather. They sense that something is wrong, and hide.

Friday Ark

The Rita evacuation was a disaster in its own right, but Texas learned the lessons and has been conducting a generally orderly withdrawal from the coast.

CNN has two reports on the efforts. The first was on the southern counties, Texans flee 7 coastal counties ahead of Ike, and later on the area around Houston, Galveston, part of Houston evacuated ahead of Ike.

They have altered their plans based on the hurricane altering its course.

Later they will be criticized for evacuating people who didn’t need to evacuate, which is ignorant. No one needs to hang around to watch a hurricane come ashore. If you want to know what its like, the short description is a 48-hour root canal.

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Even though Ike was 355 miles South-Southwest of us at 10 AM CDT, it has definitely been affecting our weather since since yesterday afternoon.

Today we have:

• Small Craft Warning in effect
• Coastal Flood Warning in effect
• High Surf Warning in effect
• Wind Advisory in effect

and sustained 20 mph winds out of the East, with higher gusts.

CNN has video from Pensacola Beach showing the reason for the High Surf Warning.  US98 on our local barrier island is again under water as is another road along the beach in Destin.  Roads near the northern coast of the Gulf are being flooded, and in some cases cut by the surge and the waves.

Everyone along the Gulf Coast from the Florida Panhandle over to Mexico is being impacted by Ike. It is a huge storm, even larger than Katrina, and the waves and surge are going to cause most of the damage.

Position: 26.3 N 90.4 W. [10 PM CDT 0300 UTC]
Movement: West-Northwest [290°] near 12 mph.
Maximum sustained winds: 100 mph [160 kph].
Wind Gusts: 120 mph.
Hurricane Wind Radius: 115 miles [185 km].
Tropical Storm Wind Radius: 265 miles [425 km].
Minimum central pressure: 956 mb ↑.

It is 445 miles East-Southeast of Corpus Christi and 340 miles Southeast of Galveston, Texas.

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Due to the probable proximity of Hurricane Ike at landfall, Steve Bates of Yellow Doggerel Democrat [as well as Stella and the cats] are looking for somewhere else to ride out the storm.

If that happens he will probably do any posting on the YDD Annex rather than his regular site.

September 11^th, 2001

On September 11^th, 2001 approximately 3,000 people died and the individual most responsible is still at large – why?

In the intervening seven years we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars, trampled on people’s rights, created huge new government bureaucracies, and can’t respond as well as the third world to a natural disaster.

Richard Clarke: “Your government failed you. Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And I failed you. We tried hard. But that doesn’t matter, because we failed. And for that failure, I would ask, once all the facts are out, for your understanding and for your forgiveness.“

The state of Texas is taking this storm very seriously, as they should. It is being reported that Evacuations Begin As Ike Heads For Texas, and they obviously took notes during Rita and are avoiding most of the problems. The most vulnerable and most difficult to move group are going out first and they are staging buses for the people who do not have their own transportation.

When I say that the report on MSNBC that Ike postpones Arkansas-Texas game is an indication of how serious this is being taking, many may scoff, but this is a major event in Texas and it would generate a lot of traffic in and around Austin. Many people from Arkansas would normally drive to this event, as well as people from all over Texas. This is a very responsible decision by those involved. Austin may not get as much from Ike as the coast, but there is no need to have tens of thousands of extra people on the roads and in motels while people are fleeing a hurricane.

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When in doubt about tax matters, consult the IRS, which tells us that “The Working Families Tax Relief Act of 2004 set a uniform definition of a qualifying child, beginning for Tax Year 2005”.

Residence — has the same principal residence as the taxpayer for more than half the tax year. Exceptions apply, in certain cases, for children of divorced or separated parents, kidnapped children, temporary absences, and for children who were born or died during the year.

Registering to vote can affect tax status.

I told you that there were substantial reasons not to like Palin, and Paul Krugman scores a direct hit: she’s a cat phobic.

Also at Crooks and Liars: Obama Reverses Positions on 527s.

While it is nice the Democrats have accepted the real world, waiting this long means that the outside organizations have no time to raise the money to be really effective. They have spent months casting aside natural allies and cutting off the sources of funding, and now they have the funds and can’t help because of the finance laws.