Where is DeSantis During the Flood of Ft. Lauderdale

This has been going on since last night, major storm weather hovering over Ft. Lauderdale and much of South Florida, causing massive floods (via Alisha Ebrahimji, Joe Sutton, Travis Caldwell and Jennifer Gray at CNN):

Fort Lauderdale experienced the rainiest day in its history Wednesday – a 1-in-1,000-year rainfall event – sparking a flash flood emergency in Broward County that has prompted emergency rescues, forced drivers to abandon cars, shuttered schools and shut down the airport through 9 a.m. Friday. And more rain is coming down.

The region recorded widespread rainfall totals of more than a foot, while Fort Lauderdale tallied 25.91 inches in a 24-hour period, according to preliminary reports from the National Weather Service office in Miami...

While the rain Thursday won’t reach nearly the amounts that fell on Wednesday, it will be problematic and create additional flooding, the National Weather Service said. Gusty winds, small hail and even isolated tornadoes are possible.

A flash flood warning for southern Broward County, including Fort Lauderdale, Pembroke Pines and Hollywood, has been extended until 9:30 p.m., the National Weather Service said, and a severe thunderstorm warning is in effect for parts of Broward and Miami-Dade counties. The storms may bring winds of up to 60 mph and potentially small hail.

Thunderstorms are beginning to develop across southeastern Florida and will once again bring a risk of flash flooding to the region.

In the meantime, where is state Governor Ron DeSantis?

He's in freaking Ohio this Thursday (via Henry J. Gomez for NBC News):

Republicans in Ohio — a state where Donald Trump won twice by healthy margins and has enjoyed enormous political influence — greeted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis warmly here Thursday, signaling high curiosity in his potential 2024 presidential bid...

FUCK YOU, RON. Your job is down here in Florida, not on the goddamn campaign trail.

Update: It got worse. DeSantis returned Thursday night to Tallahassee... to sign a late-night bill making Florida's abortion laws so restrictive it might as well be a total ban, doing it without major media because even he realizes this would alienate millions of voters, and then slinking back to his goddamned book Presidential tour in Virginia Friday morning. The bastard is not doing his job.

trump's Gleeful Body Counting

This is how donald trump thinks he can defend his horrific performance in the White House, by downplaying the number of dead who are going to pile up because he failed to start prep work against the Coronavirus spread back when he was warned by our own people in January.

This is his sales pitch this week, trying to convince millions of Americans that "Hey It's Gonna Be Okay As Long As We Keep the Deaths To Under 200,000". I am not kidding, via Aaron Rupar at Vox:

Barely a month ago, Trump claimed the coronavirus would go away on its own. Then he said it paled in comparison to the 2009 H1N1 flu outbreak, which killed about 12,500 Americans. Now he’s saying that the estimates showing Covid-19 could kill 100,000 Americans — roughly equivalent to two Vietnam Wars or 38 September 11 attacks — actually reflect how effective he’s been.

During a news conference on Sunday, Trump said that a final US coronavirus death toll somewhere in the range of 100,000 to 200,000 people would indicate that his administration has “done a very good job.”

A VERY GOOD JOB?

Here's some perspective: When four Americans were killed in Benghazi, the Republican Party held 11 different hearings into all the crap Obama and Hillary did wrong. 200,000 Americans dying is now "a very good job."

Rupar points it out in that paragraph I quote above: The death toll for the COVID-19 outbreak is going to be costlier than most wars even IF we're good enough at containing and curing this pandemic. The number of dead Americans from this virus already surpassed today the tragedy of what happened on Sept. 11 2001. We're only beginning to comprehend just how widespread this tragedy is going to hit us.

And trump - the idiot who sat on his ass for two months doing nothing except accuse the outbreak of being a Democratic/Chinese Hoax, up until the point someone FINALLY convinced him the death toll will be in the millions by June if he remained inert - is trying to game the referees to convince them - to convince us down in the dirt fighting the pandemic and waiting for the worst - that letting 200,000 Americans die for his inaction and stupidity is "a very good job."

And during all of this, Republicans and conservative pundits, all trump's ass-kissers, were making noises about how tragic it was that up to 50,000 people die every year of normal flu - never mind the indictment of our broken health care system that underscores - and now they're turning around congratulating trump for keeping the upcoming COVID body count to just six figures.

This is gaslighting at its most lethal, America. The Son-Of-A-Bitch is going to want a parade for his "efforts" (more like lack thereof) before the 200,000th citizen dies from COVID-19. (Failing to consider, obviously, that his parade is going to make the spread of coronavirus that much more likely)

And in the meantime, we're getting more and more reports that the support the federal government is SUPPOSED to ship out - the ventilators needed to keep victims breathing, the respirator masks needed by our doctors and nurses to avoid infections - are in shoddy condition and in some cases useless. trump's ongoing excuse is that he inherited a "broken system" (IT WAS HIS JOB TO FIX IT IF IT WERE BROKEN THE LAST THREE YEARS) and that "nobody could have foreseen this" (BITCH EVERYBODY FORESAW IT, WE HAD A SYSTEM IN PLACE UNTIL YOU KILLED IT IN 2018).

None of this was "a very good job," you self-serving Shitgibbon.

We warned everyone, back in 2016. Every single one of us who voted Hillary, who voted against this failed businessman and financial fraud, we warned you. We tried to teach you a word for the kind of incompetence and ineptitude that trump was bringing from his enterprises to our national leadership, just one word. Kakistocracy. Leadership by the worst people.

Here we are, with a coronavirus that can kill upwards to 2 million of our nation, ripping across whole families and communities, and trump's fighting over the goalposts of what's acceptable losses to our families and communities.

Listen up, trump. Even ONE death from this virus is a tragedy. As much as those who died in Benghazi, as much as those who died in every war, as much as those who died in the wake of Katrina and as much as those who died in Puerto Rico (REMEMBER THAT FUCK-UP, donnie? Puerto Rico STILL hasn't recovered from that!). It should have been treated as the tragedy and crisis it is proving to be, instead of the annoyance you're viewing it as.

Goddamn him. God help the rest of us.

The Storms of September Stay With Us

Right about now, the outer bands of Hurricane Florence are covering the coastline of North Carolina.

If there's any good news at the moment, it's that the storm weakened on approach down from a Category 4 to a Cat 2.

The rest of the situation, of course, is a disaster for the East Coast.

It's not that Florence will be a monster storm with deadly winds, deadly floods, and deadly power outages.

It's that Florence is predicted to overstay its visit. Most times, these storms move past within a day, no more than two days, and pulls itself away from its source of energy - the oceans - to where it disappears over the land.

Florence will be different. The weather models are all predicting the hurricane will get stuck hovering over the middle of North Carolina - right along the South Carolina border, soaking both states - for three straight days. It could still feed off the Atlantic coast to retain its shape and strength as a Tropical Storm, meaning high winds preventing any repair jobs to downed electrical wires... and especially meaning constant rainfall that will get measured in feet not inches.

The context is last year's Harvey: a standard hurricane that slammed into Houston TX but then stayed put for days unleashing so much rain the entire city flooded. What had happened: Both the city and the state failed to observe natural flood zones, overdeveloping neighborhoods into places that would turn into rivers and lakes. A lot of these places built into wetlands or riversides, ignoring the need for water to flow away in case of massive rains. We paved over a lot of places with concrete and asphalt, preventing the ground from absorbing rain and forcing the water to flow in ways we didn't expect.

This is a horrifying reality of the last 30 years or so where the suburban expanse of metro areas did not plan well or outright ignored warnings. Developers are gonna develop, and state legislators across the country are usually more than happy to let rich developers build fancy big neighborhoods in the most scenic of places...

New Orleans was the first big warning. With Katrina in 2005, it wasn't the hurricane itself that was the killer, it was the aftermath of aged out levees breaking and flooding half the city that no longer had wetlands or canals to manage the overflow. They built into areas they shouldn't have built.

Harvey last year was the reminder: The city failed to build highways away from flood zones, allowing roads to turn into rivers trapping residents and delaying recovery efforts.

Florida is a constant threat to collapse. We're dealing with coastal cities facing flooding issues even without hurricanes blowing in. All it will take is one powerful hurricane to wash this all into the sea...

And yet, we're still not learning. We're still at the mercy of developers who want to keep putting up condos along our beaches, shopping malls in our wetlands, and highways connecting everything without care of how roads become rivers in a hurricane.

September is usually the worst month for hurricanes: while June-November is the schedule, September is where all the conditions for Atlantic-based storms are just right to cause these types of nerve-wracking nightmares. This is fast becoming a month of dread for the East Coast anymore.

Well, when the levee breaks...

P.S. and things might be tolerable if we had a government that knew what it was doing when handling these crises. But it's clear from trump's mismanagement of Puerto Rico relief - DEAR GOD what the HELL happened here? - that we're in for Katrina-style disasters for now.

In Defiance of Gravity, the Shore of the Cosmic Ocean Calls To Us: A Remembrance of The Challenger

Just been reminded this morning that today is the 30th anniversary of the Challenger disaster.

I was at Tarpon Springs High at the time. This was 1986, decades before smartphones or even flip cell phones. Beepers were a luxury. Any connection to the outside world was through radio or television, and we didn't have cable in the schools so it was all wobbly antenna with bad reception.

I think they had a television going in the school library when it happened. Most of us were in class though, and we heard about it when the principal got on the speakers to announce the bad news.

Even with Tarpon Springs on the Gulf Coast, on some mornings when NASA was doing their launches from the Cape over on the Atlantic Coast, we could see on clear mornings the distant fire of the engines and the smoky contrails of a space shuttle launch. There was at least one launch like that I watched as we drove up Alt. US 19 towards Klosterman one morning, it was a beautiful sight.

The launch that morning for the Challenger didn't happen that early, so that was one I missed.

It was horrifying, what had happened. I saw the replays afterward on that television in the library.

And yet, we strove on. There had been another shuttle disaster years later - February 2003, the Columbia exploded on re-entry - yet we keep going into space, we keep finding other ways and make other plans.

All the dangers and risks of space travel, all the expense, is worth something. As much as the challenge itself as the means of expanding our knowledge of science, and improving our ability to survive in the harshest of environments to ensure the survival of our world.

As Kennedy once spoke in 1962 to argue for increasing funding to NASA:

We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win...

And as Carl Sagan often reminded us:

The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore, we've learned most of what we know. Recently, we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return, and we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself...

The Floods Of Colorado

This was something that hit Disaster stages days ago.  Colorado got hit with a weather system of massive rainfall, combined with previous years of drought (killing off trees to adsorb the water, loosening ground that turned into mud) turning northern parts of the state into a massive and deadly flood zone.  Aging and un-repaired dams broke and added to the chaos.

The news channels seem to be ignoring it.  CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC don't have it anywhere near their main stories slot.  Fox Not-News is focusing on the GOP plan to defund Obamacare.

It doesn't help that there's been a major shooting again, leaving victims in its wake that we need to remember.  Nor that Syria and Iran are dominating the international focus.  It's really not helping that the government is facing another shutdown vote by the House GOP.

But in the meantime Colorado is getting hit with a major crisis.  Please try to pay attention.

Also, if anyone can help a Coloradan out...

I Read The News Today, Oh Boy: March 2011 Edition

There's just been so many things going on that it's hard to get an essay-length discussion going on any of them:

1) In the foreign news: there's the earthquake in Japan.  The earthquake alone proved survivable - all those regulations for construction pay off - but nothing seemed to prepare people for the tsunami that followed.  What's worse, the tsunami caused damage at two different nuclear reactors (reactors have to be near water sources for coolant), one of which had a hydrogen gas explosion... which kinda leaves one with the feeling of OH F----CCCCCCKKKKKKKKK!

2) In the Middle East: most of the peoples' uprisings have led to what is happening now in Libya.  Because Qaddafi was not the kind of dictator to run for it when the going got good, it basically exploded into a civil war... which is going badly for the rebel forces that had existed for some time there because of two things.  The rebels were never that well-organized and the pro-Qaddafi forces have airplanes as an advantage.  The push to enforce a No-Fly zone as a way for the Western and Arab League nations to level the playing field against a hated dictator (without the loss of our own forces in the deal) has been debated but not resolved.  Because enforcing the No-Fly requires risk, and the Western powers that would have to pay that risk are still a bit squeamish about it.  No one is going to actually do it until a nation (uh, France?  England?) ups and volunteers their own air force to do the job. (Guess what, everyone's waiting on the U.S. to do it... again...)


3) Here at home: the Republican-held state governments are still screwing us over.  Going after the unions won't fix state deficits.  Cutting our schools' funding won't help families.  And gaining the power to take control of city governments you "claim" as "bankrupt" just so you can have privatized forces seize the towns and remove legally elected officials doesn't help the economy, it only destroys our rights as voters and citizens.

4) And the Republicans' budget plans at the federal level?  A new study released today from Moody's - not the most reliable source ever since their ratings scandals from a few years back, but trusted when it comes to gauging honest-to-God economic impacts - reveals that the GOP plan of spending cuts would cost this nation about 700,000 jobs.  They are the third professional or "qualified" source - including Goldman Sachs (not a librul institution), and the GAO - that has determined the GOP plan as a "job-killer".

Considering our unemployment woes are at CRISIS level in this country - in both depth of unemployment and its' prolonged negative impact - the last thing we need are MORE UNEMPLOYED.  Remember how the Republicans campaigned that they were gonna create jobs?!  THEY LIED.

5) Also, sports.  The NFL players and owners failed to agree on a CBA, so they went into Decertified Union/Lockout mode.  Thing is, because of the Lockout the owners can't hire "replacement" players, so both sides have incentive to get a deal done.  Let's just hope the third party in all this - the FANS - don't get screwed with higher ticket prices.

6) Oh, and Breitbart and his protegee O'Keefe are total jerks.  How bad are they?  GLENN BECK's people are calling bullsh-t on O'Keefe's "expose" on NPR.  When the batsh-t crazy guy is calling you out for lying... and proving it... you have got serious issues.

Breitbart Delendus Est.

Haiti

This hasn't been a very good week for the nation of Haiti.

Then again, it hasn't really been a very good century or two for them either.

Link here to charities providing aid and supplies.  Some of the phone lines allow you to send a Text request, it will bill you $10 or so depending on the charity straight to your phone bill, which people are finding easy to implement.

My knowledge of Haiti comes from my job and my studies in History.  My first full-time employment was at North Regional BCC Library where I was assigned collection development duties in the History/Travel section.  The library was joint-use with the community college and the students had a World History program that had them do term papers on a specific country.  Given the large expat population from the Caribbean, we had a huge demand on Jamaica and Haiti.  Maddeningly, there weren't a lot of books on Jamaica available for purchase at the time, but Haiti... ah, Haiti had hundreds, and I was able to broaden the collection on that topic.

Haiti's history has been, and is now, very messy and pretty heartbreaking.  The island and its population never really seem to get a fair shake once the Europeans show up.  Even when the slave population rose up in response to the American and French Revolutions, the European powers still attempted invasions and attempts to recapture the island.  By 1825, the French were able to force a treaty on Haiti that granted Haiti its independence but forced reparation payments that were so severe the country wasn't able to pay them off until somewhere in the 20th century.  Because of that, Haiti remained impoverished, and the nation began a long, painful cycle of coups that kept their government destabilized.  And because Haiti was so unstable, foreign nations - Britain, Spain, France again, Germany at a later point, and the United States - kept interfering, ostensibly to fix the government but - accidentally or intentionally - perpetuating the cycle of coups and adding to the amount of foreign debt to Haiti's bill.

After the U.S. occupation of 1915-34, Haiti had finally achieved some stability at great cost, and still a huge debt that siphoned funds to foreign creditors at the expense of improving the nation's economy.  The occupation also created a border dispute with the Dominican Republic that led that led to genocide and a violent discriminatory policy against Haitians.

And then in 1957, the Duvalier family took over.  Because of the ongoing Cold War and the rise of Communist Cuba that kept the United States wavering between concern and inaction for Haiti, and shady business interests that fed off the corruption, the likes of Papa Doc and Baby Doc were able to build their cults of personality and maintain their death squads and their insane destruction of their own nation.  By 1986, Baby Doc was driven out, but the damage done.  Subsequent attempts to rebuild led to more coups, more government instability, more American intervention that really hadn't ended yet.  And now, with the massive earthquake disaster this week, more instability... more suffering.

The people of Haiti have really suffered.  All of history... living as slaves... fighting for freedom... caught under waves of military takeovers and oppression... fiscally drained economies from corruption and foreign debt... natural disasters on a near-annual basis - all those hurricanes, never a chance to rebuild properly, and now this earthquake, ye Gods...

The people of Haiti need our help.