Just a quick joke sort of post. All day long I've been seeing this guy everytime I open a new internet window, because Yahoo! is my home page. I kept seeing him over and over and it's gotten to the point where I'm asking readers to take their best guess at why this guy is there, and what he's so happy about. This is an advertisement to get a domain through Yahoo!, but how does some random guy relate to domains? Setting that aside, is this guy really just that excited about the prospect of obtaining a domain?

Please leave your guesses in comments section.

 

***UPDATE: I'm an idiot. I just now noticed my typo in the headline. It read "March for Life Meets March For Death....". Obviously that should have been (and is now) "Walk for Life Meets March For Death", since "Walk for Life" is the actual name... Don't know if I was tired or rushing or something but I made it "March For Life" and I wanted to clear that up.
-Randy

I linked to this in an update to my post about media bias as it pertains to abortion issue terminology, but I decided it deserved it's own post. I'll try to keep from rambling here, and just let the pictures speak for themselves, but Michelle Malkin is linking to a great photo essay by "zombie" of a Walk for Life march and the counter-demonstration (March for Death?) that were held in San Francisco this past Saturday. Go see the looniest the left has to offer.

Reverse Vampyr is blogging this, as is as Right Spin. Right Spin also dug up some Pro-Life bible verses for anyone who thinks the Bible is silent on the issue.

In related news, The Political Teen has video up of James Carville saying that he believes Alito was nominated to overturn Roe vs. Wade.

More:
The Political Teen, Verum Serum, Independent Conservative, Imago Dei, California Conservative, Clarity and Resolve, Right Wing Nation, Darleen's Place

 

The headline from the AP picked up on the wires today was: Documents Show Govt Forewarned on Katrina. The article attempts to make the case that the media has from day one, "The Feds dropped the ball!" Well first of all, I don't think we need to rehash Mayor Nagin ignoring their own evacuation plans which called for using school buses to evacuate people, or Governor Blanco blaming FEMA while she blocked the Red Cross from entering the city, or any of the other things we now know, that place almost all of the blame on state and local officials. Setting that aside, sure the Feds might have been able to move quicker, but again, that wasn't the main problem... It's also not new news.

The AP here tries to create some new news story by saying these newly released documents show that "the government" screwed up, even though the "Hurricane Pam" exercise gave them "forewarning". It basically tries to blame the government for knowing that water would "surge" over the levees in any storm greater than a category 3. What the article doesn't focus on, and only partly mentions, is the most important part of the story: Katrina was only a category 3 at landfall, and in New Orleans specifically it was only between a category 1 or 2. Beyond that, water never "surged" over the levees. The levees broke as a result of design and/or construction flaws.

excerpt from the AP article in question

Pam, a "tabletop" exercise that began in July 2004, focused on a mock Category 3 hurricane that produced more than 20 inches of rain and 14 tornadoes. It found, among other things, that floodwaters would surge over New Orleans levees, creating "a catastrophic mass casualty/mass evacuation" and leaving drainage pumps crippled for up to six months.

Katrina was a Category 4 storm when it slammed into the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, though some weather experts downgraded it to Category 3 or even Category 2 by the time it reached New Orleans.

So they sort of mention the downgrade (although many experts feel it's even lower), but they don't acknowledge that the levees broke and weren't surged over by water, an extremely important fact.

More:

An Aug. 28 report by the department's National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center concluded that a Category 4 or 5 hurricane would cause severe damage in the city, including power outages and a direct economic hit of up to $10 billion for the first week.

"Overall, the impacts described herein are conservative," stated the report, which was sent to Homeland Security's office for infrastructure protection.

"Any storm rated Category 4 or greater ... will likely lead to severe flooding and/or levee breaching, leaving the New Orleans metro area submerged for weeks or months," said the report.

The documents are the latest indication that the federal government knew beforehand of the catastrophic damage that a storm of Katrina's magnitude could cause. The Bush administration has been lambasted for its lackluster response to Katrina and its aftermath, including criticism that the government should have known a hurricane of that strength posed a danger to the area's levees and was unprepared to cope with it.

They ramble on about category 4 and 5 storms (irrelevant to Katrina), and talk about what the "government knew beforehand" (again, irrelevant when talking about categories 4 and 5), even using the line: "including criticism that the government should have known a hurricane of that strength posed a danger to the area's levees and was unprepared to cope with it." Again, AP, we aren't talking about a category 4 or 5 storm... so what you're doing is no better than lying.

Basically it's a weird form of a strawman (for lack of a better term) that the AP creates here. They make a case/argument about how the government knew what would happen in the event of a category 4 or 5, and then bring in criticisms of the government's handling of it, all the while turning a blind eye to the fact that what hit New Orleans was category 1 to 2 strength. Thanks for playing AP.

This from the Washington Post, Dec. 22, 2005:

The National Hurricane Center released a summary report on Katrina this week that downgraded the storm's intensity at landfall in Louisiana on Aug. 29 from Category 4 to Category 3. The winds in New Orleans, which lay to the west of the storm's center, were probably even weaker than that, at Category 1 or 2 speeds, the report said.

and

"This is a further indictment of the levee system," Ivor Van Heerden, an LSU professor and leader of a team of Louisiana investigators probing the cause of the levee breaches. "It indicates that most of the flooding of downtown New Orleans was a consequence of man's folly."

Other engineering experts agree: Considering Katrina's weakened state at the time it reached New Orleans, the failure of the city's 17th Street and London Avenue canal floodwalls can be explained only as a failure of design or construction, said Robert Bea, a civil engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

"The water level in the canals wasn't that high when the floodwalls breached," said Bea, a member of an investigating team funded by the National Science Foundation. "We had a premature failure of the defense system."

An even earlier Washington Post article, October 24, 2006:

Today, exactly eight weeks after the storm, all three breaches are looking less like acts of God and more like failures of engineering that could have been anticipated and very likely prevented.

Hey AP! Why do I have to do this research? Heck, it wasn't even research, just the facts as we know them. I only did the research to support my statements if any libs choose to challenge them. Why is it that the AP, arguably the biggest news organization on the planet, can't find these facts before writing an article!? Why do bloggers have to do this?

For the record, President Bush declared the emergency on Friday afternoon, August 26, 2005.. The storm struck almost 3 full days later, on Monday morning. Everyone can argue about FEMA's response all day long. I don't think FEMA were heros, but they've certainly had almost the entire blame placed on them by almost all of the media, when the facts are that state and local officials really dropped the relief ball. Red Cross please Governor Blanco. Buses, buses, and more buses Nagin... remember the plan?

Louisiana disaster plan, pg 13, para 5 , dated 01/00

'The primary means of hurricane evacuation will be personal vehicles. School and municipal buses, government-owned vehicles and vehicles provided by volunteer agencies may be used to provide transportation for individuals who lack transportation and require assistance in evacuating'...

(see Rightwing Nuthouses's Katrina Response Timeline for other information. Great resource)

And again, these are AP stories on the wires so they're getting picked up everywhere. So the influence of this misleading story is far reaching. Just to give you an idea of how far this story is spreading, a couple sample searches: Yahoo! News - Katrina forewarned, Yahoo! News - Katrina Warnings, Yahoo! News - Katrina warned.