As we wait for the ominous hurricane Irene to come ashore (a truly frightening prospect for people almost across the entire East Coast) we’re biding our time over at Twitter trying to work up a treatment for a screenplay with the newly-discovered all diamond planet and Newt Gingrich.

So far I think the best entry we have is from @szorowitz who proposes …

@joshtpm Diamond planet threatens Earth market. Africa sends astronaut (call him Omaba) to destroy planet. US drafts Newt to stop him 1/2

@joshtpm Newt wins battle, claims planet for US, marries Diamond Planet Queen after fiance back on Earth succumbs to planted Ebola virus 2/2

That’s a pretty good plot treatment piled into two tweets. Have to imagine Willis or Affleck get cast in some role. But maybe it lags a little toward the end. Anyway, you got any good ideas? Join us here. And let us know your idea.

Late Update: @mseyfang dubs inhabitants “Blingons”.

Take away the far-right Republican field he’s most often compared to and Jon Huntsman hardly looks like a moderate.

Pandora in the second quarter streamed 1.8 million hours of music and had revenue of $67 million but still hasn’t turned a profit.

Chuck Norris, action hero and international arms treaty expert. OK, not so much on that second one.

I’d urge you to read our piece on the protests over a U.S. pipeline to transport the product of Canada oil sands to the Gulf coast in conjunction with Kevin Drum’s piece on our oil-constrained future.

Kevin’s piece is on the economic effects of maxing out worldwide oil production. Our piece is implicitly about the environmental effects. As demand for oil exceeds supply, the quest for more sources of oil becomes more expensive and more environmentally damaging. It’s all related.

You may have noticed we’ve been beefing up the TPM Livewire with a lot more iterative minute-to-minute coverage of late. We’ve got some exciting plans for it that we’ll share with you in the near future, so stay tuned.

But in the meantime, we’ll be covering all the Hurricane Irene news there throughout the weekend. So check it out.

Also, we welcome your reports, video, and photos from wherever you are within the cone of uncertainty. Just be safe.

New report shows who has donated millions to Islamophobic groups since 2001.

My kids are experiencing their first earthquake and first hurricane in the same week. My son thinks it might signal the end of the world, which would be “Awesome!” He’s 8.

While the Virginia quake doesn’t really qualify as a disaster, it did get me to thinking about one-two-punch disasters. Let’s exclude volcano-earthquake and earthquake-tsunami combos because they arise from the same underlying processes and event.

The best example of an apocalyptic combination of natural disasters that I can recall in modern times is one that never quite seemed to get the attention it deserved then and is often forgotten now, 20 years later: the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines at the same time as a powerful Pacific typhoon was sweeping ashore. Read More

NYC to end mass transit service at noon Saturday for duration of Irene.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has issued mandatory evacuation orders for low-lying areas of the city by 5 p.m. Saturday.