Justin's Political Corner
Conspiracy theorist radio host Alex Jones explained to his audience today how the government could have been behind the devastating May 20 tornado in Oklahoma.
On the May 21 edition of The Alex Jones Show, a caller asked Jones whether he was planning to cover how government technology may be behind a recent spate of sinkholes. After laying out how insurance companies use weather modification to avoid having to pay ski resorts for lack of snow, Jones said that “of course there’s weather weapon stuff going on — we had floods in Texas like fifteen years ago, killed thirty-something people in one night. Turned out it was the Air Force.”
Following a long tangent, Jones returned to the caller’s subject. While he explained that “natural tornadoes” do exist and that he’s not sure if a government ”weather weapon” was involved in the Oklahoma disaster, Jones warned nonetheless that the government “can create and steer groups of tornadoes.”
According to Jones, this possibility hinges on whether people spotted helicopters and small aircraft “in and around the clouds, spraying and doing things.” He added, “if you saw that, you better bet your bottom dollar they did this, but who knows if they did. You know, that’s the thing, we don’t know.”
In April, Jones garnered attention for labeling the Boston Marathon bombings a “false flag” event staged by the U.S. government. Over the years, Jones has endorsed a wide array of paranoid conspiracies, including alleging that the U.S. government carried out or was somehow involved in the 9-11 attacks, the Oklahoma City bombing, and recent mass shootings at the Sandy Hook Elementary school and the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado.
Many heroes asserted themselves in Oklahoma yesterday, from the first responders digging through the rubble for survivors, to the teachers who shielded children from the massive tornado that touched down as the school day was ending.
While perhaps not as heralded, certainly the experts at the National Weather Service deserve some credit for saving lives as well. One of the best ways to prevent high body counts when tornadoes barrel through populated areas is to warn residents ahead of time—which is the job of the NWS. They did it well yesterday, issuing early warnings allowed countless people to seek shelter before mayhem arrived.
But the NWS has, in recent years, suffered under serious budget restraints placed on it by deficit hawks in Congress and the White House. Far from the public view, the NWS is starting to come apart at the seams—and the full effects of the sequester haven’t even been felt yet. So what if, next time, the NWS isn’t able to do its job as well?
The tornado in Oklahoma yesterday provides a good case study for both the crucial import of the NWS’s work and the very small margin for error. Tornadoes present a particular challenge because, while the conditions that create them are easily identifiable—warm, moist air from the gulf colliding with warm, dry continental air and cold, dry air from the Rockies—the tornadoes themselves are incredibly unpredictable. Scientists still are not sure why some thunderstorms produce them and others do not.
When a tornado appears, the National Weather Service sounds the alarm. In Oklahoma on Monday, the alert came sixteen minutes before the tornado actually touched the ground, which is three minutes more than the thirteen-minute average warning the NWS provides. It triggered emergency broadcast alerts throughout the region and blaring air-raid sirens that allowed hundreds of thousands of people to seek shelter.
As a tornado is forming, NWS workers are synthesizing a rapid amount of data from radar, satellites, on-the-ground meteorologists, and citizens calling in what they see. The alerts have to be accurate—and they have to be quick.
“The adrenaline is building up. You’re looking at storms that you know are just really bad,” Dan Sobien, president of the National Weather Service Employees Organization, told The Nation. “It takes a special kind of person because you have to juggle ten or fifteen balls all at the same time, and then make life-and-death decisions based on that.
The NWS deserves enormous credit here. But what if it wasn’t up to the task? That’s an increasingly real possibility. Just this month, Sobien’s group, which represents 4,000 employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (of which NWS is a part), issued a warning that the budget battles are imperiling crucial NWS functions, and creating “[r]educed efficiency and accuracy for tornado events due to reduced alertness of short staffed offices.” Hurricane monitoring and response is also endangered, along with crucial wildfire monitoring efforts and a wide array of other NWS activities.
Since taking control of the House in 2011, Republicans have targeted NOAA for severe cuts—they came out of the gate proposing a massive 28 percent cut in their first budget that year, which was moderated by the end of the process.
But the assaults on the NOAA budget continued, and the agency couldn’t escape the sequester, which will lop 8.2 percent from the NOAA budget. This lead the acting administrator to institute an across-the-board hiring freeze in March, and four days of mandatory furloughs are on the horizon. (There is already a 10 percent vacancy rate at the agency.)
This is all occurring at an agency that could badly use more money, not less. The satellite equipment there is badly antiquated, and the Government Accountability Office said the “satellite gap” is one of the thirty biggest threats facing the federal government.
“Remember that bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis? The Weather Service is like that bridge a week before it collapsed,” Sobien said. “The strains are happening. I’m just seeing things just not working the way they should be.”
In fact, amidst all the turmoil yesterday, the NWS suffered some notable problems. In the evening a communications outage affected offices in Chicago; Anchorage; Binghamton, New York; and Kentucky, according to Sobien. The Nation confirmed this outage with an official at the NWS office in Chicago.
In addition, Sobien says the NWS office in Midland, Texas—the next office upstream from Oklahoma City that does upper-air surveillance of storms with weather balloons—declined to do a special weather balloon release after the storm to help monitor conditions because of budget concerns. (An official at that office said he was not aware of that particular situation.)
Those ended up being trivial outages, but next time might be different. If a disaster strikes where a NWS office is under-staffed, it’s easy to see how lives could be lost.
“The National Weather Service is an inherent government service, like the Post Office, like the FBI, you can name a dozen others. We had this debate about the National Weather Service a hundred-plus years ago, and said, yeah, this is a service we want for everyone,” Sobien said. “To be dismantling that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.”
My tweet on the NWS and NOAA underfunding by the GOP’s policies:
I believe that the GOP is to blame for the funding crises at the NWS and NOAA. #SavetheNWS #SaveNOAA #P2 #GOPFail #UniteBlue
— Justin Gibson (@JGibsonDem) May 21, 2013
The GOP-triggered budget cuts aimed at NOAA and the National Weather Service are going to harm weather forecasting. My Slogan: Save the NOAA and NWS, and vote Democratic, as the GOP will lay a bigger assault on those two fine organizations as part of their goal to privatize weather forecasting… akin to what Rick Santorum tried to do in 2005.
Massive storm hit this afternoon.
Path the tornado took.
Many homes and including two elementary schools leveled.
VERY Sad to hear.
When things get bad during the spring tornado season, what organization is at the forefront of the situation, issuing forecasts and crucial tornado warnings that even the private weather companies like AccuWeather and The Weather Channel follow religiously?
The National Weather Service. A government organization.
If the sequester hits on March 1, all 4,600 National Weather Service employees would need to be furloughed for 4 weeks to make up for the 8.2% cut:
Government managers could also face wrenching decisions on which missions and employees are most needed. For the National Weather Service to handle an 8.2 percent cut, all of its approximately 4,600 employees would have to be furloughed for four weeks, said Richard Hirn, general counsel for the National Weather Service Employees Organization. Under that scenario, Hirn saw no way for the agency to maintain around-the-clock operations at its 122 forecasting offices.“It’s just not going to work,” he said.
Heading into an active severe weather season with severely understaffed (or flat out closed) National Weather Service offices is exactly what we DON’T need. NWS offices already get stretched thin when there’s a large tornado outbreak. Cutting them down to bare bones or shutting them down altogether will mean lives lost. All those tornado warnings the much-vaunted private industry takes for granted will disappear.
Winter storm pummels central US; most snow in Wichita in a generation
(Photo: TODAY)
Lumbering coast to coast, a winter storm hammered the Great Plains on Thursday, and more than a dozen more states were forecast to be hit in coming days.
When the Senate passed the long-delayed $50.5 billion Hurricane Sandy relief package Monday, 36 Republicans voted against the bill. But of the 32 no-votes from Senators who are not brand-new members, at least 31 came from Republicans who had previously supported emergency aid efforts following disasters in their own states.
Most incredible among the no voters were Senators Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) and Pat Toomey (R-PA). Those two had not just backed disaster aid in the past — they actually sought disaster aid for their own states for relief from Hurricane Sandy. And Sen. John Boozman (R-AR) endorsed disaster relief for snow storms damages in Arkansas just four days before casting his “nay” vote.
The “hypocritical” list includes:
1. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH): Requested disaster aid after Hurricane Sandy.
2. John Barrasso (R-WY), Republican Policy Committee Chair: Requested disaster aid after flooding.
3. Roy Blunt (R-MO), Republican Conference Vice Chair: Demanded the Senate be called back from recess to pass disaster aid during a drought and boasts: “When a disaster surpasses the ability of states and communities to rebuild, Senator Blunt believes the federal government should prioritize spending to help the people whose lives and livelihoods are impacted. During his time in the Senate, he has fought tirelessly to ensure that Missouri gets its fair share of those federal resources specifically dedicated to disaster recovery.”
4. John Boozman (R-AR): Requested disaster aid after snow storms in January 2013.
5. Richard Burr (R-NC): Requested disaster aid after severe storms.
6. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA): Requested disaster aid after flooding.
7. Dan Coats (R-IN): Requested disaster aid after tornadoes.
8. Tom Coburn (R-OK): Requested disaster aid after winter storms and for extreme drought.
9. Bob Corker (R-TN): Requested disaster aid after flooding and asked for supplemental emergency flood relief.
10. John Cornyn (R-TX), Republican Minority Whip: Demanded drought relief aid and requested disaster aid for wildfires.
11. Mike Crapo (R-ID): Boasted of obtaining a FEMA fire safety grant and pushed for a bill providing emergency drought relief.
12. Mike Enzi (R-WY): Requested disaster relief after flooding.
13. Lindsey Graham (R-SC): Requested disaster relief after freezing and boasted of obtaining emergency drought relief.
14. Chuck Grassley (R-IA): Requested disaster relief after severe hail storms.
15. Orrin Hatch (R-UT): Requested disaster relief after flooding.
16. James Inhofe (R-OK): Boasted of obtaining disaster relief after severe storms and drought.
17. Johnny Isakson (R-GA): Requested disaster aid after flooding.
18. Mike Johanns (R-NE): Requested disaster relief after flooding and blasted Democrats for “inaction on disaster relief” for drought and wildfires.
19. Ron Johnson (R-WI): Requested disaster relief after a blizzard.
20. Mark Kirk (R-IL): Appealed after FEMA denied assistance following severe storms and tornadoes.
21. Mike Lee (R-UT): After calling federal disaster relief unconstitutional, endorsed relief aid after flooding in Utah.
22. John McCain (R-AZ): Endorsed disaster relief after flooding.
23. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Republican Minority Leader: Requested disaster relief during a drought and after tornadoes.
24. Jerry Moran (R-KS): Requested disaster relief after tornadoes.
25. Rand Paul (R-KY): Requested disaster relief during a drought and after tornadoes.
26. Rob Portman (R-OH): Endorsed disaster relief during a drought and after storms.
27. Pat Roberts (R-KS): Boasted of obtaining disaster relief after drought and wildfires and criticized the Bush administration for inadequate emergency relief after a blizzard.
28. Marco Rubio (R-FL): Requested disaster relief after severe freezing.
29. Jeff Sessions (R-AL): Requested disaster relief after tornadoes and during a drought.
30. John Thune (R-SD), Republican Conference Chair: Requested disaster relief after flooding and snow storms.
31. Pat Toomey (R-PA): Requested disaster relief for Hurricane Sandy before it even hit landfall.Not one of the opponents has co-sponsored Sen. Harry Reid’s (D-NV) “Extreme Weather Prevention and Resilience Act” which would encourage Congress to “prepare and protect communities from extreme weather, sea-level rise, drought, flooding, wildfire, and other changing conditions exacerbated by carbon pollution” and “reducing pollution, promoting the use of clean energy sources, and improving energy efficiency.”
ThinkProgrss previously reported that at least 37 House Republicans who opposed Sandy relief had also supported disaster aid for their home states.
Vote all these morons out in 2014, 2016, or 2018!
TOKYO (Reuters) - A strong earthquake centered off the coast of northeastern Japan shook buildings as far away as Tokyo on Friday and triggered a one-meter tsunami in an area devastated by last year’s Fukushima disaster.
The quake had a preliminary magnitude of 7.3, the U.S. Geological Survey said, adding that there was no risk of a widespread tsunami. There were no immediate reports of death or injury.
The March 2011 earthquake and following tsunami killed nearly 20,000 people and triggered the world’s worst nuclear crisis in 25 years when the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant was destroyed, leaking radiation into the sea and air.
Workers at the plant were ordered to move to higher ground after Friday’s quake. Tokyo Electric Power Co, the operator of the Fukushima nuclear plant, reported no irregularities at its nuclear plants.
The quake measured a “lower 5” in Miyagi prefecture on Japan’s scale of one to seven, meaning there might be some damage to roads and houses that are less quake resistant.
The scale measures the amount of shaking and in that sense gives a better idea of possible damage than the magnitude. The quake registered a 4 in Tokyo.
The one-meter tsunami hit at Ishinomaki, in Miyagi, at the center of the devastation from the March 2011 disaster. All Miyagi trains halted operations and Sendai airport, which was flooded by the tsunami last year, closed its runway.
Narita airport outside Tokyo was back in action after a brief closure for safety checks.
Last year’s quake, which measured 9.0, triggered fuel-rod meltdowns at Fukushima, causing radiation leakage, contamination of food and water and mass evacuations. Much of the area is still deserted.
h/t: Yahoo! News
Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani isn’t exactly famous for his tact, but he kicked his penchant for overstatement into overdrive this Sunday, twice falsely claiming that the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) response to Hurricane Sandy was worse than its botched response to Hurricane Katrina under President George W. Bush.
Speaking at a Romney campaign office in Florida,Giuliani said “[Obama] right now is doing a terrible job of disaster relief in my city, but no one is talking about it…People don’t have water, they don’t have food, electricity and his FEMA is no where to be found. This is a worse response than Katrina.” He also levelled the charge during a Fox News appearance, telling host Neil Cavuto that the notion FEMA was doing a good job was a “joke:”
I think maybe because there’s an election going on, people don’t want to say that, but I think FEMA has dropped the ball, certainly as big they did with Katrina, maybe bigger because they had more warning here and the situation isn’t as big as Katrina.
Giuliani’s view is at odds with the assessment of virtually every other observer of the agency’s performance during the two storms. While the Bush Administration’s famously incompetent response to Katrina delayed the provision of critical federal aid by days and poorly distributed it, FEMA had 1,500 well-organized workers on the ground the day after Sandy hit, which former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security and FEMA critic Paul Rosenzweig called “a massive and admirable [sic] effort.”
Several prominent members of Giuliani’s own party share Lieberman’s assessment. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, one of the leaders faced with most difficult post-Sandy reconstruction,said “The federal government’s response has been great…The President has been outstanding in this and so have the folks at FEMA.” Ed Gillespie, a senior adviser to Mitt Romney’s Presidential campaign, said Governor Romney had no quarrel with President Obama’s handling of the situation. Gillespie added that “from what we’ve heard from the governors, they’re working well with FEMA” and that “there’s a good working relationship between the state and the federal government.”
With Election Day just one week away, state officials along the eastern seaboard are assessing the devastation done by Hurricane Sandy, which swept through the Northeast corridor and hit New Jersey and New York hardest.
For the second day, early voting was canceled in Maryland, while some in-person absentee voting locations in northern Virginia were closed, and early voting was suspended in six counties in West Virginia, a state hit by high winds and heavy snow.
But the looming challenge was for counties in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut where the storm surge flooded schools and other locations designated as voting sites next Tuesday. Election officials in coastal counties were struggling to assess whether power outages might force changes in some of next Tuesday’s polling locations.
The potential for disruptions to voting on Nov. 6 could depress voter turnout in storm-affected areas of New York and New Jersey, for example, but President Barack Obama is still likely to carry those two states with no difficulty.
In Nassau County, N.Y., where the south shore was inundated by the storm surge and where there are more than 900,000 registered voters, towns such as Oceanside and Long Beach are now under a foot or more of water.
Nassau County Board of Elections Commissioner William Biamonte said Tuesday that he and other officials were still trying to reach the emergency contact people at each of the polling locations in the flooded areas, but they’d been unsuccessful, as cell phone service was out in parts of the county.
Before the storm hit, officials mapped polling locations in what FEMA designates as Category 1 storm areas: 68 of Nassau County’s 400 polling locations are in that flood-prone zone.
“The real issue is power,” Biamonte said. “If we still have massive power outages a week from today, there are few options.”
One of them: when voters come to a polling location, they would be asked to fill out the ballot used in the county’s optical scan machines and instead of scanning them at the polling location (which is the normal procedure), those ballots could be taken to the county board’s office and scanned there. This option, he said, would delay the tallying of results by a day.
Biamonte said he expects voter turnout of about 670,000 in the county next Tuesday but is concerned that about 300,000 of those voters, who vote only in presidential elections, will be unfamiliar with the optical scan machines the county has adopted since 2008. That unfamiliarity might add another element of confusion on Election Day.
But “come hell or high water – which is what we just had – were going to be voting next week,” Biamonte said.
As in New York, and in New Jersey too, power outages, massive flooding, and impassable streets are making it difficult for officials along the coast to assess polling locations.
h/t: NBCPolitics.com
After major disasters struck the U.S. last year, Mitt Romney suggested closing FEMA, the emergency response agency, so that states could have greater control over disaster relief. “And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better,” Romney said during a GOP presidential debate in June 2011.
Those words came back to haunt him, though, as Hurricane Sandy slammed the East Coast and left at least $20 billion in damage in its wake. At first, the Romney campaign vaguelystood by Romney’s plan to get rid of FEMA and put states in charge of disaster relief. And one GOP strategist defended Romney’s idea to dismantle FEMA. But as Politico notes, the Republican presidential candidate’s campaign now insists that Romney would keep FEMA in place:
“Gov. Romney believes that states should be in charge of emergency management in responding to storms and other natural disasters in their jurisdictions,” Romney spokesman Ryan Williams said in a statement. “As the first responders, states are in the best position to aid affected individuals and communities, and to direct resources and assistance to where they are needed most. This includes help from the federal government and FEMA.”
A campaign official added that Romney would not abolish FEMA.
Basically, this is exactly how the system works now. But federal emergency response could be hampered by the GOP ticket’s budget proposals, which stipulate that the government should only disburse disaster relief funding if Congress agreed to offsetting budget cuts elsewhere.
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (AP) — Forecasters in Miami say the center of former Hurricane Sandy has made landfall along the New Jersey coast near Atlantic City.
The National Hurricane Center says the storm packing torrential rains and wind roared ashore about 8 p.m. EDT Monday.
h/t: AP.org
Hurricane Sandy projected to make landfall along southern New Jersey coast by early evening
Hurricane Sandy is expected to make landfall along or just south of the southern New Jersey coast by early evening, according to the latest advisory from the National Weather Service.
As of 2 p.m. ET, Sandy is located about 110 miles southeast of Atlantic City, New Jersey, and about 175 miles south-southeast of New York City. Maximum sustained winds from Hurricane Sandy remain near 90 mph with higher gusts. More on BreakingNews.com: http://www.breakingnews.com/topic/sandy
Photo: One of three major approaches to Atlantic City, New Jersey, is covered with water. (Tom Mihalek / Reuters)
Right-wing media, led by the Drudge Report, are pushing a conspiracy theory that the Labor Department will use Hurricane Sandy to delay releasing October jobs data until after the election. This scaremongering is a continuation of the right-wing conspiracy theory that the government is manipulating economic data to help re-elect President Obama.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics is scheduled to release October jobs data, including the official unemployment rate, on Friday — days before the presidential election. But Labor Department officials have reportedly said that it will be difficult for economists to access the employment data, which can only be accessed on site, as long as the federal government is shut down due to the storm.
An October 29 Wall Street Journal blog post quoted a spokesman for the Bureau of Labor Statistics saying that the bureau would assess the situation after the storm passes and notify the public if it needed to change its release schedule.
In a subsequent statement released on Monday, the Labor Department said, “The employees at the Bureau of Labor Statistics are working hard to ensure the timely release of employment data on Friday, November 2. It is our intention that Friday will be business as usual regarding the October Employment Situation Report.”
Drudge called the possible delay a “mystery,” while Fox Nation deemed it “outrageous”.
And, as reported by The Hill, there is no mystery surrounding a possible delay: it’s a simple fact that BLS analysts cannot access the data as long as the federal government is shut down.
Contrary to the conspiracy theories surrounding a possible delay, there is nothing unprecedented about weather emergencies delaying the monthly jobs report. In January, 1996, The New York Times reported that “a paralyzing blizzard” caused the Labor Department to delay release of the monthly jobs report by a week.
Nor is the Labor Department alone in facing possible delays due to Hurricane Sandy. According to The Wall Street Journal, major companies have said the storm will force them to delay quarterly earnings reports.
