Plamegate Demoted to “Dwarf Scandal”

Unlike Pluto, which deserves respect, Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame’s allegations against the administration have been reduced to the status of a fart in a windstorm.

Now that the left-wing WAPO has dismissed the outing of Valerie Plame’s “secret identity” by the Administration, we can gloat that our previous article, Truth in Aerial Advertising, is apropos to this latest revelation. Here’s the graphic we used in that article:

Of course, these Wilson people will continue to demonstrate their undying bias by taking their suit to its ultimate demise. They will continue to drag it through the muck trying to achieve some sort of moral victory, but will eventually succumb to its own infection. I can just hear Joe Wilson as he says (like Cartman would say) “Screw you guys, I’m going home!

West Coast Tropical Storms

Is Southern California about to get a rare weather event? Some meteorologists think that Hurricane John, currently rampaging through Cabo San Lucas, may go as far north as Los Angeles.

From Wikipedia:

1939 Long Beach Tropical Storm

The 1939 Long Beach Tropical Storm, once a hurricane, was the only Eastern Pacific tropical storm to hit California in known history. The only other tropical cyclone to directly affect California is the 1858 San Diego Hurricane.

Storm History

On September 15, a tropical depression formed off the coast of Panama. It quickly strengthened into a hurricane. It tracked northward, instead of the usual westward movement of a typical Eastern Pacific hurricane. The hurricane likely was strong, as it needed to maintain its winds to a northerly latitude. The hurricane’s minimum measured pressure of 28.67 in Hg occurred on September 22. An upper level trough turned it to the northeast, where it weakened due to the cool waters.

Shortly before making landfall on September 25, it weakened to a tropical storm. The storm still managed to hit Long Beach, California as a 50 mph tropical storm, making it the only tropical cyclone in recorded history to hit the state of California. The storm quickly weakened over land, and likely dissipated within a day or two.

My Mom was a 19-year-old newlywed living in Long Beach at the time. She used to tell me about the great hurricane of ’39 and embellish her recount with tales of power blackouts with shutters and screen doors blown off of her house.

Wake Island No More?

UPDATE: Coast Guard Flyover Photos

A reef, a blue lagoon and a coral atoll just barely out of the water — Wake Island may have been completely swept away by Super Typhoon Ioke.

Wake Island — Google Earth Image

From Voice of America

Super Typhoon Ioke has made a direct hit on Wake Island, pounding the tiny U.S. Pacific territory with catastrophic winds of up to 300 kilometers an hour.

Ioke is the strongest central Pacific typhoon in at least 12 years. Forecasters expect the “monster” storm to submerge Wake Island and destroy everything on it that is not made of concrete.

Wake is home to a U.S. Air Force base and a scientific outpost, roughly midway between Hawaii and Japan.

The eye of the typhoon skirted the north edge of the coral atoll Thursday. The U.S. Air Force had already evacuated all of the island’s 188 residents to Hawaii, 3,700 kilometers across the Pacific.

The residents – Air Force personnel and American and Thai contractors – left Monday aboard two U.S. C-17 Globemaster planes. It was the first time the territory was evacuated in nearly 30 years.

More about Wake Island’s history in pictures from Fox News.

A Sudden Ocean Heat Loss

We are in the midst of global warming and yet the ocean temperatures are cooling? Is this correct? New data in a soon-to-be-published paper indicate the opposite of what might be expected during a period of increasing Earth surface temperatures: the top 2500 feet of the ocean lost a tremendous amount of heat between from 2003 through 2005—about 20% of all the heat gained in the last half-century. Considering the thermal inertia the oceans must have, this is astonishing! (Image: Global Ocean Surface Temperatures – courtesy NASA)

A good article on this topic may be found at World Climate Report: A Sea Change in Global Warming?

The sudden cooling may be related to Earth’s Ocean Conveyor Belt, the phenomenon popularized by the movie “The Day After Tomorrow.” Nobody really knows though.

Just when the global warming alarmists are making their case against evil mankind warming the Earth, this has to happen – tsk, tsk.

2996 Makes the Goal

Our friend D.C. Roe deserves some real credit for this:

On August 28, 11:19 PM EDT the 2,996th name was assigned

Howard (Barry) Kirschbaum, age 53, a resident of New York, N.Y., will be honored by El Rider at the blog Flying Debris.

There will be more to come. But every name will be honored. It took exactly 90 days, and more hours than I’d care to count–and not just from me.

But for tonight I’ll take this victory and sleep well.