How will Bush help America prepare for a possible deadly outbreak of Avian Flu?
Letting everyone get sick, trusting the free market to cure us all
423   39.6%
Using the morgue as a photo op after his vacation is over
319   29.8%
Filling the CDC with political hacks and fixers
215   20.1%
Transfering medical research money into the Iraq war
112   10.5%

OK, but what if Bush — who was DUI at age 30 and caught on video drinking at a wedding six years after he claims he stopped cold turkey — is actually drinking again?  (Not that the Enquirer is any less riddled with inaccuracies than CNN or Fox News, or vice versa.)

If Bush is drinking, what’s the possible upside?

New poll at upper left.

Nice summary by Kos.

Serenity.

I tagged along with best friend Jane to the premiere up at Universal
last night.

You laugh, you cry, you get scared.  The whole deal.  Eat popcorn and enjoy.  It’s Joss Whedon, people.  The guy can write in three-emotion layers in the middle of chase scenes.  If he felt like it, he could make you feel ennui, schadenfreude, and hyggelig, all while something enormous blows up.

The writing is the Joss level of brilliant you’d figure,
and his direction is eye-popping and full of surprises.  There’s even some stuff I think readers of this site will particularly dig.

It’s a world.  And the world is very cool.  Most fun I’ve had at a movie this year.

With all the bad news and grumbling on this site, for once here’s a bit of good fun.

UPDATE: The answer is YES.  He just did.  See the additional update, below.

Genuinely curious now. 

As Rita takes aim on the Texas gulf coast, will Bush soon declare an emergency in Austin, hundreds of miles inland?

I’ll be watching the White House press release site to see.  I’m still trying to understand this.

Incidentally, the emergency declaration for the Florida Keys — identically worded to the pre-landfall Katrina declaration, effective August 26th — was not for Tampa or Orlando, but for the area around the actual, um, Florida Keys.  Go figure.

If you don’t know what started this whole line of thought, click here.

And for the love of god, please read the whole thing before jumping to
conclusions, sending angry letters, or pointing to August 29th
documents.  You’ll save yourself a lot of time.

Finally, although I shouldn’t have to say something so obvious: of
course I am hoping the storm will dissipate.  I wish no one ill and
take no joy in asking this.

But this is a sincere question.  Let’s watch and see how they handle
the declarations in a slightly less incomprehensible fashion this time.

UPDATE: Mere hours after I posted this, the White House declared the entire state of Texas part of the hurricane Rita emergency.  The entire state.

Amarillo, almost 600 miles inland from the impending landfall — farther inland than the southern tip of Illinois was from Katrina — has now been declared as a federal hurricane emergency.  Rural Dallam County is almost as far inland as Topeka freaking Kansas.

What the bloody hell is going on here?

This is a picture I took last year of downtown Ketchikan, Alaska:

That’s really the downtown.  You’re looking at the throbbing heart of the metropolis.

And here is a map of the $223 million "Bridge To Nowhere"
(which will probably cost over $300 million) pet project of Alaska
Republican Don Young (R-Pure Evil), overlord of the GOP transportation
committee, who insists that no, the money would not be better spent helping Hurricane Katrina victims:

Notice that the bridge is, in fact, larger than the ENTIRE TOWN.

Look at the giant city, above.  And imagine that 8000-resident
community getting something the size of a Golden Gate bridge.  Instead
of hundreds of millions of dollars going to help hurricane victims.

The ferry ride the bridge would replace, incidentally, takes exactly seven minutes.

This is the single most wasteful transportation project in American history.  No exaggeration.

And the GOP values this over the well-being of American citizens.

No exaggeration.

UPDATE: I’ve been informed by several emailers that my memory was
mistaken; the above photo is not of downtown Ketchikan but of a
thriving section sometimes more frequented by passers-by like myself.

My mistake, and I apologize.

Two emails accused me outright of lying, which is kinda funny.  Because, um, Ketchikan is so utterly memorable that no one could possibly have made this honest mistake.  Well, obviously.

Whatever.  My apologies for the confusion.  If you’d like to see downtown Ketchikan, there’s a lovely view of it here, and another one would be here (scroll down), except in this shot the town seems to be completely obscured by the cruise ships.

Yes, I chose this picture to buttress my point.  But if anyone thinks there’s any deception, by all means, Google image search "downtown Ketchikan"
and let your breath be taken by the throbbing metropolis which surely
deserves hundreds of millions of dollars to build a bridge roughly the
size of the Golden Gate.

Given that the proposed is explicitly designed to tower high
enough that the cruise ships can pass below, I think this also should
explain what I meant by the perhaps hyperbolic phrase "bigger than the
entire town."  If "big" means "up" it pretty much has to be.  And if
you look at the map, the proposed new roadway sure looks like it’s of
greater length than the town itself.  So that’s two dimensions
covered.  No, it’s not wider.  In that sense, yes.  I am humbled.

If anyone wants to push the discussion into further dimensions of
string theory, they’re welcome to do so.