Alaska's Mt. Redoubt Has Erupted 327
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
Meanwhile, in Louisiana, Governor Bobby Jindal mutters something about all this wasteful government spending.
The Devil Comes for Republicans (Score:4, Interesting)
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" [sciam.com]. 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 [talkingpointsmemo.com], 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.
Re:How much CO2 would this dump into the atmospher (Score:3, Interesting)
Sarah Palin Jokes, How Original! (Score:1, Interesting)
Wow, you are all so witty with your Sarah Palin jokes! Those definitely didn't get old!
Re:The Devil Comes for Republicans (Score:4, Interesting)
It's spending money, right?
To pay people's wages? That sounds exactly like stimulus.
To buy equipment? That sounds exactly like stimulus too.
Sure less multiplier effects than say building roads and bridges to connect industries to transport hubs/people, but you can't say it "does nothing to STIMULATE the economy", since clearly it does.
Of course stimulating the economy by borrowing/printing money is retarded anyway, but that's beside the point.
Re:YEP (Score:0, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org]
Thats a sign of being a useful idiot, you know. Not looking at facts.
Re:The Devil Comes for Republicans (Score:2, Interesting)
$140,000,000/yr will provide 2800 people with $50,000/yr jobs that actually build something, fix something, or make life easier for someone else
Except with that math, how would the raw materials be paid for? Facilities? Tools? You can't just make jobs out of thin air. There needs to be work for them to do.
Um... OK. How about we take the money that was to be spent on steam gauges and what-not and spend it on concrete, lumber and rebar? How about we invest it on green energy, nuclear plants or research into how to turn a volcano into a power station? My point was that there are a million different ways to spend this money that would really qualify as stimulus and do more to benefit the average unemployed auto/construction/technical worker than monitoring volcanoes.
Re:The Devil Comes for Republicans (Score:5, Interesting)
So you are okay with Bobby Jindal having no morals and lying as long as everyone else is lying? Two or three wrongs make a right? Or are you suggesting that every time you note someone is lying you have to find someone on the other side that lied in the last ten years (on matters that are irrelevant to the current discussion) to be "fair"?
Bullshit. Katrina wiped a ton of Americans out because the government didn't monitor the situation. Jindal says we should not monitor volcanoes. He lied about his experience. Why do you insist on changing the subject? Because you are a partisan hack yourself.
Re:Pork (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:It's not Russia, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What I want to know... (Score:3, Interesting)
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).
Re:The Devil Comes for Republicans tsarkon (Score:4, Interesting)
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.)
Re:Be nice to DOC RUBY!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:The Devil Comes for Republicans (Score:3, Interesting)
Monitoring volcanoes does nothing to STIMULATE the economy.
You're entitled to your own opinion, but not your own set of facts. Monitoring makes jobs and buys equipment (creating more jobs). That's stimulus, straight up. That it might not be your favored form of stimulus, but that does nothing whatsoever to change the fact that it is stimulus.
And seriously, what kind of moron is going to oppose disaster preparedness after Katrina? Pinching pennies on preparedness is a penny wise, pound asinine decision. Save a few million on dike repair, loose a few hundred billion when a hurricane wipes out a major city. Hmmm, that's a tough one.
I can't seem to find your posts of outrage when Hillary Clinton claimed she was shot at in Bosnia
Did you look? And even if he didn't, on what planet does that change the fact that Jindal was full of it?
Barack Obama's claims that he had no ties to William Ayers or Tony Rezko, or his ignorance of the blatant racism of his pastor for 20 years.
Wow, why didn't you mention how Bill Clinton was responsible for Waco and Ruby Ridge, how he killed Vince Foster, how Gary Condit killed Chandra Levy, how Obama is really a Muslim not born in the U.S., or how FEMA is starting concentration camps for conservatives. If you're going to blather pathetic Republican lies, why not go all out?
Seeing that you've become a hateful, partisan hack disappointments me.
Pot. Kettle. Black.