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Alaska's Mt. Redoubt Has Erupted
alaskana98 writes "Alaska's Mt. Redoubt volcano has erupted 3 times, with the first event starting at 10:38 PM Alaska standard time.
The ash cloud is estimated to be higher than 50,000 feet. So far, only light ash fall is predicted for areas north
of Anchorage."
Meanwhile, in Louisiana, Governor Bobby Jindal mutters something about all this wasteful government spending.
When Republican governor of Louisiana Bobby Jindal took to TV immediately after President Obama's address to the Joint Session of Congress last month, he whined that the government funded volcano monitoring is "wasteful spending". Of course he was lying, since he said "$140M for volcano monitoring", when that money is for USGS "facilities and equipment, including stream gages, seismic and volcano monitoring systems and national map activities", all kinds of important stuff for running and protecting our country.
Then Jindal went into some kind of weird story about his standing for sanity during Hurricane Katrina (which he was lying about, too - and it was a story about the lone Democrat getting things done, surrounded by Republicans including Jindal doing nothing but flapping their lips). Reminding us what happens when the government doesn't monitor predictable local natural disasters that kill thousands and destroy cities.
This was the official Republican response. Maybe they just want to keep secret their main competition for spewing filthy hot air that kills Americans.
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Just remember, all the debris kicked up into the atmosphere could actually cause global cooling. Reference the drop in average world temperature caused by the eruption of Mount Pinatubo awhile back.
98% of America's teens drink alcohol, smoke, and have sex. Put this in your sig if you like bagels.
Wow, you are all so witty with your Sarah Palin jokes! Those definitely didn't get old!
Yes, a document full of facts and factual stements and factual observations is delusional. That makes sense. Care to refute any of it, or just ad-hominate and suggest the guy telling the truth is a nut.
Very very MINITRU of you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Truth
Thats a sign of being a useful idiot, you know. Not looking at facts.
Not 'pork', but spending directed to specific projects, as opposed to going into the general budget of an executive branch agency, are what they mean by 'earmarks'.
I.e., for Christmas, you got a 50 gift card to Barnes and Noble. An earmark would require you to spend 10 dollars of that money on a specific book.
The real joke is that the Republicans are complaining about it. Removing earmarks would simply remove Congressional restrictions on spending...
I find it exceptionally silly they criticized his signing a bill with earmarks in it. 'Hey, you sign a bill that required you spend money in certain ways. You promised you'd only sign bills that let you spend the money however you wanted! You liar!'. Well, maybe that's exactly the way he wanted to spend the money, who knows? Or, more importantly, who cares? He could have spent that money that way anyway.
In reality, the problem with earmarks is that they are almost always outside the budget process and hence the money is added to existing funds, not set aside from money already there, and it's not accounted for in any way. Also, they're often on very stupid things, and attached to unrelated bills, which is a general problem in both houses.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
This was a point of contention that came out during the campaign. Although the official governor's office is in Juneau, a lot of state business is conducted in Anchorage (by far the largest city), and Gov. Palin spent a lot of time conducting state business from her home in Wasilla. The point of contention was that, while working from her home, she charged the state per diem for travel because she was working away from Juneau. I don't remember if she later paid it back.
Doh....I wish I hadn't posted that. I just recalled it was Jindal who trashed the volcano monitoring (though perhaps Palin jumped on the bandwagon and I never heard about it).
First of all, you can't predict earthquakes, except in the case of aftershocks. We aren't 'monitoring' earthquakes to predict them, we're simply studying them to see if we can predict them, and to predict tsunamis and volcanoes.
Secondly, tsunami predictions have saved quite a lot of lives. The last disastrous tsunami, in fact, was predicted in plenty of time to help people, except that there wasn't a unified warning system for the area and that the various countries hit are still mostly third world and had no way to notify their people.
Tsunamis in general are incredibly easy to predict. You just wait for an largeish earthquake, which can easily see on semographs, and then look for swelling of the ocean at that place. It is sheer stupidity we don't have some sort of global monitoring for them. Two hours after the quake that caused the last one, four hours before it hit anywhere, radar satellites picked the damn thing up. We could easily just tie together existing systems and have fair warning of these things.
And, of course, the monitoring of Mount Pinatubo saved 10-20 thousand lives when it erupted in 1991. In total, the entire monitoring of that volcano, in the decade the US had done it, came to about 15 million dollars. (Or about the cost of having one guy from AIG work for them that entire time.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Thanks, here's some more sense. Bush's "respect" for "states rights" saw him ignore Louisiana's request for allowing New Mexico's offered National Guard. The Posse Comitatus act protects states from a rogue governor colluding with a nearby state's invasion, requiring the Federal government to approve any accepted offer for "help" by other states sending their National Guard. Louisiana governor Blanco made the formal request the week before Katrina hit, as New Mexico governor Richardson had offered to send help. Katrina hit on Sunday, but the White House didn't even respond until the following Thursday, during which time New Orleans got whipped, then flooded, and lay drowning in the flood for several days. Though Bush didn't just "ignore" the request: he tried to force Blanco to give up control of the National Guard to Bush, by withholding permission until she agreed. Considering how many people were killed by Federal troops in New Orleans and around the Gulf Coast unnecessarily, Blanco's restraint was exactly what our system provided for when it gave the governors the power to refuse to let their guard be "nationalized".
But that's just one example, the most immediate. Everyone knows how badly Bush's FEMA failed New Orleans at every step, including to date - 3.5 years later. Most should know that Bush and his Republican Congress, including one of Louisiana's senators, defunded the Federal levees and the other emergency/relief systems everyone counted on, severely once they got the chance. Leaving Louisiana to drown, and then rot while the rest of the Gulf Coast got funded to clean up, was a Republican policy.
Texas was more "prepared" during Katrina because Bush's Republicans continued funding Texas' preparations, since Texas was a wholly owned Republican corruption operation. But I don't know how prepared Texas actually was for Katrina, since all we have is Texans' word for it - and the Republicans who ran the whole operation, their political headquarters in Texas.
BTW, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin is a Republican. Louisiana elections are nonpartisan for in-state offices. Nagin personally donates as much to Republican campaigns as to Democratic ones, but his Democratic donations are to people directly connected to Louisiana or himself personally. He donated to get Bush elected - not exactly a Democratic move. And I knew that he was Republican (he had been CEO of the local Cox cable corp) when I voted for him in 2002, when I lived there. Maybe that makes us both "nonpartisan", but there's nothing "Democratic" about Nagin, or how much I hate him.
"Big government" help is exactly what's needed in the biggest hurricanes in history. It's what was needed when Katrina hit, and in maintaining defenses. It's what was needed when Republicans instead deregulated our financial system. It's what was needed to protect us from the 9/11/2001 planebombs. Bush and his Republicans proved that "shrinking government to drown in the bathtub" just drowns Americans along with it, literally in the case of Katrina.
This whole conversation is weird. Everyone knows how badly Republicans failed Louisiana in Katrina. Jindal's own story is one of a whole bunch of Republicans failing to do anything except bureaucracy, except for the lone Democrat: Sheriff Harry Lee (who I also hated), who actually cut the BS to get people rescued. Jindal's story is a lie he made up for TV, but the facts it's loosely based on are true, and tell of universal Republican failure and a Democrat's heroic effort.
An ideal situation would be people choosing officials from the Democratic Party and at least one other party in competition to provide boring government competence, even in "exciting" events like volcanoes and hurricanes. With Republicans filling half the duopoly, we're getting nothing but neverending catastrophe.
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