I said "oh sh!t" and dashed home.  

turns out I had parts (very large TREE sized parts) of three different trees down in my yard and on my house.  good news is no permanent damage to the house.  knocked out the power.  finally got that back at about 8 last night.

So how does the very strange Arianna Huffington sum it up?
"Bill Clinton upstages Hillary."

If African-Americans had been singled out, or Jews had been singled out -- it would be all over the media.

MoveOn.org recently announced it would place ads to pressure centrist Democrats on health care reform but yesterday, President Obama told Senate Democrats that he wanted "left-wing groups" to back off. "In this context about the less productive tone of the debate in Washington, he said he didn't like to see `left wing groups attack fellow Democrats,'" a While House official said.

via ThinkProgress.

I wonder if he ever considers that the "less productive tone" has anything to do with his lackluster leadership and the less-than-satisfactory-and-fractured effort by the committees, who are ignoring the voices of the people?

This is the man who is leading the Democratic party?  Do they let Republicans do that now?

Well, he appointed a pro-life DINO as head of the DNC and he still gets branded as a feminist by NOW and Ms. Magazine. It's bizarro world.

Texas, a model of wind power's potential, now is a model of wind power's pitfalls too.

Minders of the Lone Star State's electricity grid had to cut power to some offices and factories Wednesday evening when the wind dropped--and with it, electricity produced from the state's many wind farms. The green juice slowed from 1,700 megawatts to the trickle of 300 megawatts.

Of course, they mistakenly write:

He talked to us -- and about us -- more, and more explicitly, than any nominee before him. And not just when he had to. Not just at Human Rights Campaign dinners. At black churches, in his stump speech, on the night he was elected: He said the word that every major candidate before him had found every excuse not to say. He named us. He said gay.

These latest allegations aside, that this company STILL has government contracts is disgusting.    

Here's what you need to know about the true Scotch egg: it is a British traditional food, which has no noble antecedents. Or to put it another way, it may once have been a glorious thing, but nobody of my generation in Britain is aware of such a  thing. It is a nightmarish food item, the stuff of cheap family weddings, where the irascible scary uncle gets drunk and tries to score with the bridesmaids. The buffet at that sort of wedding would always include a platter of Scotch eggs, which would leave as nasty a taste in the mouth as the party. Think dry, cold, coagulated, cheap quality sausage meat - minced pig eyelids, ground down ears and knee caps; the cheapest of the cheap - with a crust of bright orange breadcrumbs on the outside, and inside an egg boiled to such a degree that if lobbed in a crowded public space it would be regarded as a dangerous weapon. Put said item in deep fat fryer and leave to DIE. Scotch eggs are what you eat at three o'clock in the morning when you pull into a service station off the motorway and are too hungry to make a proper judgment. They are what you eat in British pubs - not the nice oldie worldy, prettified ones; the nasty, sticky floored ones, where the curtains small of nicotine and the air is heavy with the taint of regret and disappointment - when you have drunk ten pints of lager the colour and flavour of something that came out the wrong end of a cat. They are the food of desperation. At Critics' Table I asked Art Smith if he'd ever gone 10 pints in a British pub. He looked at me as if I'd asked him for the late Queen Mother's bra size, poor love.

An Iranian lawmaker and member of parliament's National Security Committee rejected the suggestion the Americans were tourists and said authorities were investigating whether to charge them with espionage.

"Surely we can say that they came as spies," said Mohammad Karim Abedi, a hard-line lawmaker, speaking on Iran's state-run Al-Alam TV. "The concerned authorities will decide whether they were spies or not. If it is proven that they were spies, the necessary legal procedures will be sought against them."

"The U.S. forces are trying to leave some security elements behind, after leaving Iraq," Abedi added. "It's unacceptable to penetrate Iran's borders this way. ... We condemn this."

Link

Last year, lawmakers excoriated the CEOs of the Big Three automakers for traveling to Washington, D.C., by private jet to attend a hearing about a possible bailout of their companies.

But apparently Congress is not philosophically averse to private air travel: At the end of July, the House approved nearly $200 million for the Air Force to buy three elite Gulfstream jets for ferrying top government officials and Members of Congress.

The Air Force had asked for one Gulfstream 550 jet (price tag: about $65 million) as part of an ongoing upgrade of its passenger air service.

But the House Appropriations Committee, at its own initiative, added to the 2010 Defense appropriations bill another $132 million for two more airplanes and specified that they be assigned to the D.C.-area units that carry Members of Congress, military brass and top government officials.

Because the Appropriations Committee viewed the additional aircraft as an expansion of an existing Defense Department program, it did not treat the money for two more planes as an earmark, and the legislation does not disclose which Member had requested the additional money.

An Appropriations Committee staffer said the military was already planning to replace its passenger fleet, and the committee "looked at the request and decided they should speed up the replacement."

These women were killed because they were women. They were singled out for an act of explosive rage against women as a sex.

How do you know that? Maybe they just happened to be there. Maybe he thought women would be easier to kill. That's the problem with these hate crime laws. Look at all the time spent here wondering why it wasn't classed as a hate crime, all the victimhood-status trumping, all the speculation about who gets victimized more and why and what it all means.

His vaunted "we're all gonna sit down at a big table," approach has been a complete bust. Are his advisors telling him that? Or is he just pathologically stubborn?

I don't know, I just have this incredibly ominous feeling about the next two elections. When even the Obama-Worshipping site, HuffPo," is loaded with comments about "unrequited love" you have to be scared. Former candle-carrying sycophants are now hedging their comments with, "I'm gonna wait a little bit longer," and "if he doesn't come across with a strong public option..........."

I was born ready.