Gustav (edited)

I've had to edit this entry because the images I'd originally linked are being updated by the source at Weather Underground. The course plot and the satellite composite image will change as the storm evolves. I'll leave the linked images up for the time being.


Their prediction is that Gustav will hit Louisiana Monday, but mercifully will have lost some of his power by that time. Weather Underground currently shows Gustav to be a category four storm with winds above 131 MPH. They show him growing to a category five tomorrow -- a monster with sustained winds above 156 MPH. But the expectation is that the storm will not be that strong when it hits the coast Monday.

NOAA offers this chart:



Pray for my home state.

Palin

Before pretty Sarah there was Michael.

At last! Magnet paintings!

The car art/art car magnet paintings are in.

So far participants include: Ted, Josie, Susan, Donna, Kevin and Ann, Shannon, Treacia, Christy, Carolyn, Vaughn, Claire, Richard, Holly, Bev, Howard, Barbara, Thom, Jill and Stan, Chris, Sherelyn, Kevin and Laura, Paula, Joe, Sal, and Pati.

Some participants live in New York. Some live in California. Others are in Indiana, Kansas, New Jersey, and various places around Texas. Texans participating live in Marfa, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, Houston, and Commerce.

I began distributing them locally late this afternoon, and I bought almost all the mailing tubes in town. The more far-flung participants will get theirs next week.

At 20 inches tall, the magnet paintings are too big for some vehicles' doors. Some local recipients have found they have to put them on the hood. That seems to work quite well, except for one Chrysler product which apparently has a plastic hood.

Participants can put the magnet paintings on their cars whenever they want, but the official opening of the show will be Saturday, Sept. 13. That is the opening day of the fall gallery season in my part of Texas.

There are about eight magnet paintings remaining. If anybody wants one you can contact me through my Web site: michaelodom.net

David Brooks is stupid

David Brooks' column in the New York Times constitutes a rear-guard action against his worst nightmare. Ride that horsey, David! Ride!

Why must the Times cut a paycheck to someone so unutterably incompetent? Is whatever Maureen Dowd has succumbed to proved contagious? Brooks' "analysis" is contemptibly facile and without any conceivable merit. He's such an idiot he thinks it's about STYLE! Style is precisely the problem. Or rather concerns about style are the problem. Style is so 90's Bubba-Joe. We be doin' substance now.

Want to talk about elitism? Try this shit: "And today we Democrats meet in Denver, a suburb of Boulder, a city whose motto is, “A Taxi? You Must be Dreaming.”" Uh, Dave? Some of us live out here where elitist taxis don't come around. You some kinda elitist easterner or somethin'? We DRIVE where we gotta go 'round these parts.

And for all his kickass New York City erudition, Brooks can't tell the difference between a column and a pilaster. You wanna try some real elitism someday, Davey boy? I'll be there with my game on. We'll do the elitism throwdown. If I win, I get to ride you like a taxi all over Cow Hill, Texas. You win, you pick.

And here's a fine culmination of a lousy column:

No, this country cannot afford to elect John Bushmccain. Under Republican rule, locusts have stripped the land, adults wear crocs in public and M&M’s have lost their flavor. We must instead ride to the uplands of hope!

For as Barack Obama suggested Thursday night, wherever there is a president who needs to tap our natural-gas reserves, I’ll be there. Wherever there is a need for a capital-gains readjustment for targeted small businesses, I’ll be there. Wherever there is a president committed to direct diplomacy with nuclear proliferators, I’ll be there, too! God bless the Democrats, and God Bless America!

This is not about candy, dumbass. We're not pretending. It is about very real events that have transpired during your boy's administration. You know. Stupid war. Economic crisis. Botched New Orleans recovery. That sort of thing. Shit that actually MATTERS to people.

And, speaking as one with a stock portfolio, I must say that your capital gains bullshit displays not a single clue about tax policy, and perilous little about what most investors need and want to see implemented.

Anger

Yesterday, a guy named John Goodman, who is not the man who played Roseanne Barr's husband on TV, but who is president of something called the National Center for Policy Analysis, told the Dallas Morning News that health insurance is not a problem in America. His remarks were reported as part of a story on the fact that there are more uninsured people in Texas than in any other state in this imperfect union. Almost one in four Texans do not have health insurance, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Goodman, who is not really a good man, "reasoned" that since everybody who needs medical attention must by law be served at a hospital emergency room, everybody really does, in fact, have guaranteed health care. The problem of uninsured Americans, Goodman says, can easily be fixed when the Census Bureau is instructed not to count them anymore.

John Goodman, who is not married to Roseanne Barr and who never played the part on TV, does in fact play the part of an adviser to John McCain. But not on TV. His work is done in real life. But no matter. The article reports that he helped design the McCain health care policy. A MAN WHO CONSTRUCTED THE REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE'S HEALTH CARE PROPOSAL BELIEVES RENAMING SHIT REMOVES THE NATION'S PROBLEM WITH THE UNINSURED. You might have noticed that this makes me angry. And the bastard was smug about it: "Voila! Problem solved!" It is as though his name made him good. Or got him credit for acting in a slew of films and a comedy series on TV. Or even made him a man.

Fucking Orwellian! The persistent, deliberate destruction of meaning by right-wing plutocrats is a disgrace. And it has real life consequences for one person in four in Texas. For too long, slope-headed, useless crap like this has passed as policy analysis in our country. It's on a par with "heck of a job, Brownie," "Mission Accomplished," and all the rest of the renaming and repackaging and rearranging provided us by what used to be called conservatives, but now might properly be called hubcaps or staplers or sheetrock. I know! Let's call them peyote! They want us to hallucinate.

It is not just stupid. It is evil. Calling ketchup a vegetable during the Reagan years has come back to bite everybody in the ass.

Meanwhile, America spends more per capita on health care than any nation on earth. But our average life expectancy ranks about 33rd worldwide. How come the market hasn't rectified this disparity? Could it be that the market model isn't appropriate to decisions about life and death? How much is your life worth to you?

Meanwhile, up in Denver some guy with a funny name rocked the house with real-world (and decidedly meaningful) language about the difference between what is and what out to be. And he offered nothing about pretending. Even conservative old Andrew Sullivan was impressed. It is not merely one pissed-off guy down here in Texas who yearns for a meaningful political discourse.

The Weight

Barry Ritholtz has a gem of a blog about financial stuff here. Monday, he linked to a cogent video about our major mortgage corporations Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which together hold about $15 trillion in mortgages and mortgage-backed securities. Fifteen thousand thousand thousand thousand dollars, that is. We're up to parsec numbers, folks. And the US gubment has had to announce recently they'll step in to make them solvent. This effectively adds the weight of their mortgage debt to the already astronomical obligations our country has amassed during the Bush years.

Guess who is going to pay that debt? Cindy McCain won't even be able to make an interest payment.

Under the current administration, gubmental oversight of the wheeling dealings at our two biggest gubment-sponsored enterprises (GSE's) has been completely absent. One assumes it has to do with some sort of laissez faire ideology, though a more cynical observer might be tempted to infer that gubment by anti-gubment millionaires leads to bad gubment. Them as want no control of financial activity is most likely to put folks without a clue in charge of the regulation process because they be ideologically indisposed to do the job to begin with. Carmen and the Devil really were walkin' side-by-side.

And ......... they put the load right on me. On you, too.

Hitting for power

Michelle Obama's speech tonight was fine! Took it all the way downtown. Personal, particularized, connected with general principles in smart and elegant ways. And eager! Almost unable to hold herself back in her delivery. Straining against standard oratorical pacing because of her enthusiasm.

Old Ted Kennedy put a runner on base -- I loved the part about honoring our servicemen and women enough not to waste their courage for a mistake. With her exhortation that America not give in to fear, but embrace hope instead, Michelle drove them both home.