Saturday, February 13, 2010

Cleaning Up After the Storms

Didn't get it as bad up here, just a dusting -- as Farmer's predicted.

"Blizzards break mid-Atlantic records; Fun at first, snow pummels weary capital" by Nafeesa Syeed, Associated Press | February 11, 2010

WASHINGTON - Worst winter ever?

As another winter storm hit the nation’s capital yesterday, people made their way through downtown streets in whiteout conditions. Reagan National Airport in Washington had nearly 10 inches by 2 p.m., and Baltimore got nearly a foot.

As another winter storm hit the nation’s capital yesterday, people made their way through downtown streets in whiteout conditions. Reagan National Airport in Washington had nearly 10 inches by 2 p.m., and Baltimore got nearly a foot. (J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press)

I'd say pretty damn close, folks.

The second blizzard in less than a week buried the most populous stretch of the East Coast under nearly a foot of snow yesterday, breaking records for the snowiest winter and demoralizing millions of people still trying to dig out from the previous storm.

Same as the MSM coverage.

Conditions in the nation’s capital were so bad that even plows were advised to get off the roads, and forecasters were eyeing a third storm that could be brewing for next week.

Haven't we had enough? How many messages must God send to Washington?

For many families, the first storm was a fun weekend diversion. People even went skiing past Washington’s monuments. But yesterday’s blizzard quickly became a serious safety concern. Pennsylvania’s governor shut down some highways and warned that people who drove were risking their lives.

“I’ve seen enough,’’ said Bill Daly, 57, as gusts of wind and snow lashed his face in Arlington, Va., where streets were nearly empty just a few days after people had been playing in the snow.

“It’s scary and beautiful at the same time. I wanted to shovel but thought if I had a heart attack it could be a while before anybody found me in this kind of weather.’’

Old-timers talk about a storm that blew through Washington in 1922, collapsing the roof on the Knickerbocker theater and killing more than 90 people. Their great-great-grandchildren will be able to describe the back-to-back blizzards of 2010, which were not nearly as deadly but set records for the snowiest winters ever in Washington and Baltimore.

Up to 16 inches fell in parts of western Maryland. Reagan National Airport outside Washington had nearly 10 inches by 2 p.m., and Baltimore got nearly a foot. That was on top of totals up to 3 feet in some places from the weekend storm. “I have never in my lifetime seen or heard anything quite like this,’’ said D.C. Fire Chief Dennis L. Rubin, who was born and raised in the District.

The previous records for snowiest winters were 62.5 inches in Baltimore in 1995-96, 54.4 inches in Washington in 1898-99, and 65.5 inches in Philadelphia in 1995-96. As of yesterday afternoon, Baltimore had 72.3 inches, Reagan National Airport had 54.9, and Philadelphia had 70.3.

Heavy snow also fell in New York and New Jersey. Airlines canceled hundreds of flights, and New York City’s 1.1 million schoolchildren enjoyed only their third snow day in six years. The Washington area’s two airports had no flights coming or going yesterday.

The streets of downtown Philadelphia, which was close to setting its own snow record, were nearly vacant as people heeded the mayor’s advice to stay home.

Entrance ramps to closed highways were blockaded, and the Pennsylvania National Guard had Humvees stocked with food and blankets ready to help anyone who got stuck. Earlier in the day, about 25 vehicles were involved in two separate pileups on Interstate 80 in central Pennsylvania. One man was killed and 18 people were injured.

“For your safety, do not drive,’’ Governor Ed Rendell said. “You will risk your life and, potentially, the lives of others if you get stuck on highways or any road.’’

Two people were killed when their snowmobile struck a vehicle at an intersection in Lancaster, Pa.

In Virginia, where some areas had snow totals exceeding 30 inches from the two storms, winds were howling at 50 miles per hour and temperatures were plunging. Governor Bob McDonnell urged people to stay indoors.

More than 100,000 utility customers in Pennsylvania were without power. Some never got it back after the last storm.

And they have been living like that for a week in the freezing cold?

How the hell (and why) are we aiding Haiti when we can't even take care of ourselves?

In Washington, officials announced that federal agencies would stay closed for a fourth straight day. The longest weather-related government shutdown was in 1996, a week.

Hey, there is a SILVER LINING in every SNOW CLOUD!

--more--"

Oh, yeah, about that third storm coming in:

"Some stores win, some lose in storms" by Associated Press | February 11, 2010

Forecasters warned of a third wave of snow that could hit the Northeast on Monday.

Yesterday, people planning to travel or shop were stopped in their tracks. From Washington to New York City, roads, airports, and businesses were closed....

Seriously, who really gives a f*** about business right now?

Not all businesses cursed the bad weather, however. Ski resorts, liquor shops, and hardware stores counted themselves lucky as out-of-school kids hit the slopes, and the grown-ups bought shovels - and booze - as the snow piled up.

:-)

Too bad I'm clean and sober.

Up to 16 inches fell in parts of western Maryland and Reagan National Airport in Washington had more than 9 inches by midday, making it the snowiest winter on record in D.C. That was on top of totals up to 3 feet in some places from the weekend storm....

Yet despite the large numbers of flights that have been disrupted, the timing of the storm was fortunate....

For shopping malls and department stores, the loss of revenue may be permanent....

But it was good timing, sigh.

Ben Ochstein and Julie Brown loaded up on purchases last week from Frager’s Hardware in Washington as snow began to fall in earnest. The store sold out of a shipment of over 500 shovels that day. The weather has helped some businesses, hurt others.
Ben Ochstein and Julie Brown loaded up on purchases last week from Frager’s Hardware in Washington as snow began to fall in earnest. The store sold out of a shipment of over 500 shovels that day. The weather has helped some businesses, hurt others. (Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press)

--more--"

PHILADELPHIA - Crews in Maryland worked to rescue motorists stranded on highways in snowdrifts up to 8 feet and utility workers scrambled to restore power to more than 100,000 customers a day after a powerful storm disrupted the lives of about 50 million people from the southern plains up through the East Coast.

The storm has been blamed for more than a dozen deaths, mostly in traffic accidents....

School systems in the path of the storm remained closed for a second day, including those in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., although New York City schoolchildren headed back to class after only their third snow day in six years.

I can hear the kids cheering all the way up here.

In Washington, the federal government was closed for a fourth straight day.

They can stay that way; country would be better off.

The nation’s capital joined Philadelphia and Baltimore in logging their snowiest winters in history....

Yeah, but the planet is warming.

The latest storm dumped more than 19 inches in Baltimore, 10 inches in Washington, D.C., and 16 inches in Philadelphia. About 20 inches fell in central New Jersey, and totals ranged from 10 to 16 inches around New York City....

Electric crews in New Jersey were working to restore power to more than 40,000 homes and businesses. About 70,000 utility customers in Pennsylvania were without power. Some never got it back after the last storm. More than 11,000 customers in Virginia were still in the dark.

And it is BELOW FREEZING OUTSIDE!

At least anger can keep you warm for a while!

The outages and hundreds of miles of unplowed roads have some mayors inundated with complaints....

And WELL THEY SHOULD BE after WASTING all our tax monies on WARS and cutting snow budgets because of fart mist!!!

Politicians heard similar complaints about slow or haphazard snow removal in Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and outlying areas of Maryland.

Yeah, they also do a crappy job out here every time we get pounded.

How quickly the elected officials get rid of the stuff could determine their political futures, a hard lesson learned over the years by some big-city mayors.

And we are in an ANGRY, ANTI-INCUMBENT MOOD, too!!!!

“Snow, politically, in Washington - in most places - is a very high-stake poker game,’’ said Marion Barry, a former mayor of Washington who is now a city councilman. He was heavily criticized in 1987 for vacationing in California as snowstorms paralyzed his city for five days....

They quoted that crack-smoking s***ter of a source (who is now a councilman, D.C.)?

--more--"

What never came near my newspaper:

"Shouldn't it be sunny here? South gets snowed in" by Kate Brumback and Melissa Nelson, Associated Press Writers | February 12, 2010

Grace Hamilton, left, her brother Robert Hamilton and neighbor Abigail Rivers build a New Orleans Saints snowman in the Rivers front yard in Pineville, Louisiana, Friday morning Feb. 12, 2010. Snowmen popped up all over front yards in Pineville after a recent snowfall blanketed the area. The Saints helmet that was used for the snowman is the top of a barbeque grill.-
Grace Hamilton, left, her brother Robert Hamilton and neighbor Abigail Rivers build a New Orleans Saints snowman in the Rivers front yard in Pineville, Louisiana, Friday morning Feb. 12, 2010. Snowmen popped up all over front yards in Pineville after a recent snowfall blanketed the area. The Saints helmet that was used for the snowman is the top of a barbeque grill.- (AP Photo/The Town Talk, Melinda Martinez)

I'm sorry, WHERE was that again?

That the Saint's new draft pick?

ATLANTA --Snowstruck Southerners tossed snowballs not far from the Gulf of Mexico as winter took its biggest whack at the region in decades Friday, coating areas from Texas to the Carolinas and grounding all but a few flights at the world's busiest airport.

All right, this global warming garbage has gone far enough.

The storm also put a treacherous glaze on highways ahead of the holiday weekend. A car plunged off an icy road into a pond outside Montgomery, Ala., with a woman and two children inside, witnesses and state troopers said, though it wasn't immediately clear how badly they were hurt.

It was the South's turn to cope with winter after back-to-back blizzards in the past week dumped 3 feet of snow on the Mid-Atlantic and parts of the Northeast, where pockets of residents remained without power. Federal forecasters said every state but Hawaii had snow on the ground somewhere Friday, a freakishly rare occurrence....

And yet they STILL can't SMELL the FART MIST!

Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport got more than a foot of snow from Thursday into Friday....

In TEXAS?

Many places were seeing snow for the first time in a generation or longer, and some people weren't quite sure what to do....

In northern Mobile County, Ala., a few miles from Mobile Bay, the storm dumped as much as 6 inches of snow in two hours, said Jeffrey Medlin, a forecaster with the National Weather Service in Mobile....

This isn't even funny anymore!

Flurries settled on downtown Atlanta by midafternoon, almost immediately snarling the streets, and snow kept falling as dusk came....

--more--"


No, I received this instead in my Slow Saturday edition:

"Snow making presence felt in 49 states" by Associated Press | February 13, 2010

Forget red and blue - color America white. There was snow on the ground in 49 states yesterday. Hawaii was the holdout.

It was the United States of Snow, thanks to an unusual combination of weather patterns that dusted the country, including the skyscrapers of Dallas, the peach trees of Atlanta, and the Florida Panhandle, where hurricanes are more common than snowflakes.

More than two-thirds of the nation’s land mass had snow on the ground when the day dawned, and then it snowed ever so slightly in Florida to make it 49 states out of 50.

Snow paralyzed and fascinated the Deep South yesterday. Snowball fights broke out at Southern Mississippi University, snow delayed flights at the busy Atlanta airport, and Louisiana hardware stores ran out of snow supplies. Andalusia, Ala., shut down its streets because of snow.

Hey, have the fun when you can!!!

Weather geeks turned their eyes to Hawaii.

Isn't the term geek sort of an insult?

In that tropical paradise observers were looking closely at the islands’ mountain peaks to see whether they could find a trace of white to make it a rare 50-for-50 states with snow.

I usually go to here see what is happening in Hawaii -- and the rest of the world.

--more--"

Of course, the biggest pile is the government and MSM load:

"Climate fight heats up amid flurry of storms" by John M. Broder, New York Times | February 11, 2010

Oh, the chief s***-shovelers of AmeriKan MSM!


WASHINGTON - As millions of people along the East Coast hole up in their snowbound homes, the two sides in the climate change debate are seizing on the mounting drifts to bolster their arguments.

Skeptics of global warming are using the recent record-setting snows to mock those who warn of dangerous human-driven climate change. This looks more like global cooling, they taunt.

Yeah, it SURE DOES and the agenda-pushers have been HIDING the DECLINE for about ten years!

Btw, there really was NO SUMMER last year, either!

Most climate scientists respond that the ferocious storms are consistent with forecasts that a heating planet will produce more frequent and more intense weather events.

Yeah, BOIL SOME WATER and watch it turn to ICE sometime.

But some independent climate specialists say the blizzards in the Northeast no more prove that the planet is cooling than the lack of snow in Vancouver or the downpours in Southern California prove that it is warming.

As an illustration of their point of view, the family of Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma and a leading climate change skeptic in Congress, built a 6-foot-tall igloo on Capitol Hill and put a cardboard sign on top that read, “Al Gore’s New Home.’’ The extreme weather, Inhofe said by e-mail, reinforced doubts about conclusions by scientists that global warming is “unequivocal’’ and probably caused by human activity.

It not only did that, it SHREDDED the LIE like you would never have believed!

Nonsense, responded Joseph Romm, a climate change expert and former Energy Department official who writes about climate issues at the Center for American Progress. “Ideologues in the Senate keep pushing the antiscientific disinformation that big snowstorms are evidence against human-caused global warming,’’ Romm wrote yesterday.

Well, you fart-misters would know all about disinformation.

It is perhaps not coincidental that the snowstorm scuffle is playing out against a background of recent climate controversies.

In recent months, global-warming critics have assailed a 2007 report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and argued that e-mail messages and documents plucked from a server at a climate research center in Britain raise doubts about the academic integrity of some climate scientists.

Yeah, but the agenda-pushing MSM just SLIDES RIGHT BY the LIES (as if the floor was covered in s***)!!

This week, Rush Limbaugh and other conservative commentators made light of the fact that the announcement Monday of the creation of a new federal climate service had to be conducted by conference call, rather than in person at a news conference, because the federal government was shuttered by the snowstorm.

But climate scientists say no single episode of severe weather can be blamed for global climate trends, even while noting evidence that such events will probably become more frequent as global temperatures rise....

That's a great trick, talking s*** out of both sides of the mouth.

--more--"

Oh, can you tell I'm angry about the never-ending distortions, obfuscations, and lies from the agenda-pushing paper?

And I think the whale has the right idea:

Marine biologists said humpback whales are skipping warmer climates for the icy waters of Alaska.
Marine biologists said humpback whales are skipping warmer climates for the icy waters of Alaska. (David Lyon for The Boston Globe)

That's right:
GOODBYE to your CREDIBILITY, MSM!