Hurricane Could Make a Mess of Republican Convention 503
Hugh Pickens writes "ABC News reports that Hurricane Isaac, currently a tropical storm brewing southeast of Puerto Rico, is on track to hit Florida the same day that Mitt Romney and 50,000 Republican delegates, journalists, protestors and guests descend on Tampa for the Republican National Convention but whether it will skim the east coast near Miami or crash head-on into Tampa, is still up in the air. The worst possible scenario is that Hurricane Isaac stays on the western track, skating over the Caribbean Sea south of Haiti, crossing the primarily flat landscape of western Cuba into the Gulf of Mexico then curving east and hitting Tampa dead-on. 'Tampa is just as vulnerable as New Orleans was in the sense that the water will funnel into the bay area and from the storm surge which will flood completely the whole entire city of Tampa,' says meteorologist Max Golembo. 'It would be a disaster in the Tampa area.' If a hurricane or tropical storm is bearing down on Tampa, the priority of law enforcement is to evacuate residents, leaving GOP officials to make the decision of when to evacuate delegates says Hillsborough County Emergency Management spokeswoman Holly Wade. 'We have to look at a lot of factors, like timing and landfall,' says Wade. 'We provide the weather information, then we take that to the host committee, which decides if the event goes on or if the event gets altered.' A Category 2 hurricane could disrupt convention activities because the Tampa Bay Times Forum, site of the festivities, is within a mandatory evacuation zone for storms of that magnitude."
Re:And if a hurricane wipes out the GOP... (Score:3, Interesting)
What a wild idea.
Please, lord, wash them all out to sea.
Love,
Re:Twisted logic (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, this could be good for the GOP since who in the hell wants to protest in the middle of a hurricane?
Re:And if a hurricane wipes out the GOP... (Score:2, Interesting)
And Joe Biden said: "You don't have to be Jewish to be a Zionist."
Which is entirely accurate. If you are one of the many evangelical Christians who actively work to support settlement building in the West Bank, then TA DAAA you are a Zionist. Now of course, the primary reason why those Christian evangelicals are helping is beause they believe they are helping to fufill the messianic prophecy of Revelations. In other words, they are actively trying to encourage the Apocolypse. But strictly speaking they are still Zionists, and passionately so.
Re:"Gat Back"? When did you start? (Score:2, Interesting)
I invite you to visit any number of message boards and count the number of death threats vs. liberals vs. death threats against conservatives and see if it supports your assumption.
I invite you to actually do that. First, I think you'll find that almost no one actually makes death threats. And a good portion of those that do are weapon-grade crazy with little to no identifiable political leaning.
For those advocating some sort of societal violence or collective punishment, though generally those fall far short of death threats, I wager they tend to be more left than right. There's been a lot of advocates for imprisonment for holding the wrong beliefs in the AGW debate, for example. OTOH, there's a lot of people unnaturally ticked off about Muslims and I've run into a couple of advocates for deliberate nuclear war and genocide. That's pretty hardcore as these things go.
Tampa Jail Reserved for Protesters? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:And if a hurricane wipes out the GOP... (Score:2, Interesting)
> But strictly speaking they are still Zionists, and passionately so.
From dictionary.com:
"Zionism
noun
a worldwide Jewish movement that resulted in the establishment and development of the state of Israel."
So no, don't see how a Christian can technically be a Zionist. But they can support them and most do. Sorta like how Lech Walesa can endorse Romney but isn't a Republican because you have to be a US registered voter for that.
Re:"Gat Back"? When did you start? (Score:3, Interesting)
Can you name the critical Obama policy bills the GOP successfully filibustered? After successfully filibustering said bills, what attempts did Obama make to lobby moderate Republicans to vote for cloture to end the filibuster OR what changes did Obama and the Democrats make to the bills to make them palatable to all parties and bi-partisan?
Harry Reid did change the generally accepted method of introducing bills for a vote practically eliminating the ability to debate and amend the bills. This action changed the Senate from a deliberative body that could compromise to one that could only vote up or down on any particular bill. What surprising result sprang up from this? Oh, yeah, the minority party had enough votes (41) to prevent cloture and, therefore, a vote on the bill.
It takes too sides to reach a compromise. Introducing bills in a manner where debate and amendments are disallowed doesn't exactly create a playing field where compromise and bi-partisanship can occur.
Tampa/GOP is ready, everyone else is screwed. (Score:2, Interesting)
I am currently working with the City of Tampa, preparing for the RNC. All I really have to say is that this exact scenario has been expected for over a year now. Tampa in late August? You can almost expect a hurricane, and the emergency management involved is highly prepared for such a situation.
The real disaster will be in the outskirts of Tampa, not as much prepared as the city center. Tampa has not had a direct hit in a very long time, and our electrical infrastructure will be destroyed in some areas (think Charlie, Frances, Gene). Usually yearly storms will take out the weak trees, but our lack of a big storm in decades will cause much more damage to the Tampa area than it would to Miami or West Palm for example.
Best thing for the convention (Score:0, Interesting)
Re:And if a hurricane wipes out the GOP... (Score:4, Interesting)
We could get into an interesting argument on why the evangelical movement pushes for constitutional amendments for a untraditional lifestyle choices like being gay, but not for other things in the two spots the Bible mentions homosexuality, like wool blends, not eating shellfish, etc.
We could have an even more interesting argument about why the importance of being non-materialist and helping the poor is called socialism instead of the fulfillment of the morality found in the Bible. Where is the constitutional amendment demanding that we help the poor?
But I think you'd rather type a series of exclamations and question marks.
I don't wish for anyone to die horribly in a storm, which is why I said nothing of the sort. I said it would be ironic if the storm hit Tampa for reasons that should be self-evident.
As far as Billy Graham goes, on the scale of evangelical leaders he's not the worst.
But he's also remained curiously silent while his son goes on rants claiming that the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the government, or that "[Barack Obama's] problem is that he was born a Muslim, his father was a Muslim."
Re:And if a hurricane wipes out the GOP... (Score:4, Interesting)
Slashdot has an intellectual lean, not a right or left leaning. I would guess that the majority of people here, by a large margin, are social liberals, fiscal conservatives, and against government intervention in their daily lives.
If it wasn't for the bible thumpers, they would be Republicans. If it wasn't for the fiscally ignorant, they would be Democrats. If it wasn't for the distrust of government, they might even be politicians.
But, the lack or rational debate is a function of unbudging dogma. The republicans became "The Party of NO" in the 90's, and really haven't gone anywhere since.
Re:And if a hurricane wipes out the GOP... (Score:2, Interesting)
"You"? I'm libertarian (small "l"). Same sex marriage isn't a constitutional right, it's defined status. Do we deny the constitutional rights of siblings by not allowing them to marry? No, because the traditional definition of marriage has always excluded siblings. It also excludes same-sex marriage. Now if you want to change that definition, I really don't care on this issue, go ahead. It doesn't affect my marriage. But that definition is made by the states, not by the federal government.
This isn't an issue of constitutional rights, so the federal government has no business in the issue except to the extent of defining how states will treat the legal acts of each other in this regard.
This isn't about corporation in general. This is about leftists using their corporate influence in the media to promote Democrat candidates. They were slow to back down because they wanted their attack on Bush to succeed. By their own admission they wanted to influence the election.
Birtherism is interesting. It would have helped if Obama had not been so secretive about his past, as he still is. While it's obvious he was born in Hawaii, I still think he's hiding something. I agree with the deal: He releases his college records, Romney releases the tax returns. But that will never happen.
Both sides get away with a lot, and that's my point. But since the press is generally left leaning, the left gets away with more in that arena. Here's Biden, the Vice President, running around talking about "they'll put y'all in chains", horrible race pandering with a fake accent, swept under the rug. Meanwhile some idiot obscure congressman talking about rape is the double New York Times headline. Democrat Mel Carnahan actually used to do blackface acts, and somehow that didn't matter. To a press constantly lambasting Republicans for their corporate ties, it seems no big deal that Chris Dodd is now the head of the MPAA. It didn't matter that Ted Kennedy halted the construction of clean-energy windmills because they would interfere with his view from his multi-million dollar estate.
There are only a couple major news outlets willing to go after the administration for the Fast & Furious scandal, the rest happy to repeat the lie that this tactic started under Bush, so it was his fault. Your Democrat Attorney General lies multiple times in front of Congress over this issue, no big deal according to the press. And now Obama, who criticized the Bush administration over impeding investigations by invoking executive privilege, himself invokes executive privilege to keep Congress from seeing Fast & Furious documents. Actually it has gotten so hypocritical and ridiculous that even Jon Stewart had to make fun of that.
The sheer audacity of Democrats amazes me. In an unprecedented move, they blocked Miguel Estrada from being nominated to the DC circuit, where he was obviously being groomed for the Supreme Court. The reason? Leaked in memos, they didn't want the Republicans getting the first Hispanic on the Supreme Court. They screamed for a special prosecutor over the Plame leaks in the Bush administration, but block the appointment of one in the recent Obama administration leaks of classified information about the Bin Laden killing.
All of this, yet you seem to think Republicans are the bad-guy hypocrites, the Democrats the innocent victims. I'm sure you can come up with more bad things the Republicans did, and I can too. But that's the point -- they both do it.