Via Ellroon, Gawker has a picture of Rush Limbaugh’s Tucson billboard.

It’s OK though, because there were T-shirts available at the memorial service …

The ABC is reporting on the aftermath: Residents heartbroken by flood devastation

The Brisbane River has now fallen to just over 3 metres and will continue dropping overnight, as residents return home to face the destruction and pick up the pieces.

The flood, which has claimed 15 lives so far, hit a lower-than-expected peak of 4.46 metres on Friday morning, inundating more than 20,000 homes and businesses across the Queensland capital.

Sixty-one people are still missing, with police holding “grave fears” for 12 people who disappeared when homes were destroyed by a wall of water in the Lockyer Valley west of Brisbane late on Monday.

The systemic rains that have plagued Queensland have moved to the south: Tasmania braces for flash flooding, and are part of a larger problem of flooding on both sides of the central latitudes affected by the La Niña off the coast of Peru: Floods leave a million Sri Lankans homeless, and Brazil mudslides kill more than 350.

The superwarm sea surface temperatures are putting massive amounts of water vapor in the atmosphere and it is returning to earth in these flooding rains.

If you would like to help, this is as good a place as any to start: Queensland Premier’s Flood Relief Appeal

The CBC reports censoring the past: “The 1980s song Money for Nothing by the British rock band Dire Straits has been deemed unacceptable for play on Canadian radio.”

The original studio version, which many think is titled “I want my MTV” because of the background vocal by Sting, does, indeed, use the word “faggot” in an offensive manner, which makes more sense if you see the video that goes with it, as the video is also stereotyping the working class.

I would note that Mark Knopfler still performs the song, and he doesn’t use the “f” word in recent performances. The original is a bit of history that help to boost the music video [and MTV] as a separate genre until it exploded when Michael Jackson hit the scene.

In the early hours of January 13th, 1969 I was forced to accept something that I had known for a while, but had pushed to the back of my mind: I was mortal and was going to die.

This was the first of several incidents when my chance of survival was a good deal less than 1 in 2. This wasn’t the scariest, but it was the first, and following on the heels of the terrible events of 1968, it had the biggest impact.

In the end the only “death” was an airplane, Rivet Ball, the Air Force’s only RC-135S. The military version of the Boeing 707, the fuselage broke in half, like an eggshell, on impact. A very talented pilot, John Achor, the aircraft commander, was responsible for that miracle.

== More on the Shemya mission