The Obama family heading back to Washington a day early from its Martha’s Vineyard vacation to avoid Irene. Speaking of presidential travel [segue alert], check it out.
The most detailed accounts yet of just went down in the Wisconsin Supreme Court “choking” incident, from the just-released police reports.
As Irene barrels up the East Coast, where are the nuclear power plants in her path? Take a look.
Google has just released a special Hurrican Irene tracking tool.
A decent chunk of the country’s population is either in the path of Irene or likely to get a lot of rain as a result of her run up the East Coast. And here at TPM, well, we’re with ya. Our offices in New York and DC are both in the storm path. And we’re going to be provided live, up to the minute coverage from now until the whole thing is over in TPMLivewire. You can read our updates to the right under our feature section or at the TPMLivewire page itself. Our New York team is going to take the lead as Irene storms through DC — assuming outages and whatnot there — and DC is going to take over as the storm bears down on New York.
We’ll be bringing you updates, revised warnings, news stories, pictures, videos, links to whoever has the best story. And we’re going to be relying on you too. First, be safe. Please don’t do anything that isn’t consistent with your first priority being the safety of you and your loved ones. But for those of you who are in the path, let us know what you see, what’s happening? If you get pictures, send them in. And we’ll keep you posted on what happens until the electricity or the connectivity goes down. And if it does, there are enough of us and we’re widely enough dispersed that members of our team should be up and adding updates through the whole thing.
Wish us luck and we wish you the same. Be safe.
For the latest updates on Hurricane Irene check our live-updating TPMLivewire.
Michele Bachmann: “I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, ‘Are you going to start listening to me here?'”
Michele Bachmann’s campaign says she was speaking “in jest” when she said that Irene and the Virginia earthquake were wake-up calls from God.
Let’s stipulate right off the bat that cable news coverage of land-falling hurricanes is an abomination that P.T. Barnum would be proud of. That’s a no-brainer. We can leave it to people like Howard Kurtz to knock that softball right out of the park.
But the cable nets don’t dictate the forecasts of the National Hurricane Center or the National Weather Service, and state and local officials don’t rely on the cable nets when making disaster preparation decisions. So the logical leap made by critics that cable TV hype leads to overreaction by local governments is both wrong and frankly dangerous. Read More