It is still raining this morning in Brevard County. Man, that has got to be getting old.
At least it’s not coming down inches per hour in Melbourne any more, but I’ll bet they haven’t seen the sun in days.
Who I Wish McCain Would Pick
If he did, I’d actually vote for him, as opposed to against Obama.
Fred Thompson. He’d mop up the floor with almost anyone in a debate (particularly Obama’s rumored finalists) and he’d only have to campaign for two months. And in the unfortunate circumstance that something happened to McCain, we’d have him for a president.
I’ll Get Right On It
Florida is apparently a haven for ambulance chasers, because there are always a lot of ads on television by lawyers trolling for victims (though now that I think about it, this may have been a national one, because it was on Fox News, which I get via satellite). I just heard one for some kind of medication that said, “If you or your loved one died after taking this stuff, call us right now.”
OK, so if I died, what am I, supposed to channel John Edwards?
Not The Chicago Way
Apparently the Obama campaign forgot their new philosophy today. They brought a plastic spork to the fight, and the McCain campaign leveled a howitzer at them.
Oopsie
Some folks have been criticizing the recent Orion parachute test failure as just one more screwup at NASA that they’ve been covering up, and made a bigger deal of it than it is, but Henry Spencer has a more nuanced, and correct view:
Foul-ups in testing are not uncommon, especially when the test setup is being tried for the first time. One of the headaches of high-tech test programmes is having to debug the test arrangements before you can start debugging the things you’re trying to test.
Sometimes a malfunctioning test setup actually gives the tested system a chance to show what it can do in an unrehearsed emergency. During a test of an Apollo escape-system in the 1960s, the escape system successfully got the capsule clear of a malfunctioning test rocket.
But sometimes the test conditions are so unrealistically severe that there’s no hope of correct functioning. Unpleasant though the result often looks, this isn’t properly considered a failure of the tested system. That seems to have been what happened here.
As I’ve noted before, requirements verification is where the real cost of a development program comes from, particularly when the only useful verification method is test.
Interesting Rumor
Lieberman may switch parties at the Republican convention. If he caucuses with Republicans, that would make it tied in the Senate, which means that Dick Cheney would be the tie breaker, and the Republicans would take over, at least until January. Bye, bye, Majority (non)Leader Reid…
Buyer’s Remorse
Victor Davis Hanson previews what’s sure to burst forth among many in Denver next week:
Democrats wanted a bison and got Obambi, whose new ‘take no prisoners’ rhetoric in front of the VFW sounds like the Italian army in North Africa not the Desert Rats. Just imagine had Obama written “Dreams From My Grandmother” about a working-class white woman who moved to Hawaii sacrificing her all, stressing integration, conciliation, character, and hard work (all true), rather than future career-in-mind idealization and myth-making about a polygamist, alcoholic and absentee Marxist father? Had he done the former, he would have gotten a small advance, few sales–and now bankable proof of his character, rather than money, sales–and an embarrassing revelation of his PC credentials. Harvard Law Review is as essential to wowing a tiny irrelevant Eastern elite as it is meaningless to proving to mid-America that you can easily size up a thug like Putin, see through Euro-trash nonsense, or get some energy leverage back from the mullahs and House of Saud.
The Democrats expected an in-the-tank liberal press to publish charts and graphs of how the “progressive” FDR Obama was better for the blue-collar-worker than the Tom Dewey Republican. Instead they got the last gasp of the 1960s spoiled-brat loudmouths, ranting and frothing how an Obama could at last reify their own narcissistic, guilt-ridden pretensions. The amen-stable at Newsweek, for example, would not have been hired there as copy-editors in the 1960s. If Chris Matthews thinks his tingle up the leg giddiness helps Obama, or Sen. Obama’s race speech is the new Gettysburg Address, he doesn’t know Bakersfield or Dayton. A Keith Olbermann rant is a veritable McCain campaign ad.
Yup.
Thirty Inches Of Rain?
Wow. They’re getting a real dumping in Brevard County. We got off lucky down here. This has to be hitting KSC workers and contractors pretty hard.
I’m surprised that Lake Okeechobee is still two feet below normal today. I would have thought that an almost-hurricane sitting over the watershed for a couple days would have gotten it up a lot higher.
[Update a few minutes later]
If this thing follows the current models, and heads off across the panhandle, it will probably set a record for the percentage of a large state affected by a single storm. Literally everyone in Florida will have been hit by it to one degree or another.
There Goes One Of Hillary!’s Votes
Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones, who would have been a potential big superdelegate for Hillary! in the event of an insurrection, has reportedly died from an aneurysm. Condolences to friends and family.
There Goes One Of Hillary!’s Votes
Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones, who would have been a potential big superdelegate for Hillary! in the event of an insurrection, has reportedly died from an aneurysm. Condolences to friends and family.