A foggy post-rainy morning

Well, most of the rain was west of us in San Francisco, Marin, the Peninsula, but I did get to hear a few peals of thunder last night. This morning, the fog hangs thick in the air but the wind is calm, almost non existant. It's not cold or hot, just muggy. I hate muggy, but I'd hate it a lot more at 90 fuckin degrees.

I'm up early this morning because I forgot to reset my alarm. the co worker is back and for the first time in three weeks I don't have to be the first person in the door. Besides, I have an appointment to go into downtown Oakland and sacrifice my tits to a garbage compactor.

er..

I mean I have a mammogram this morning.

So, since I'm up early, I'm working on a cup of coffee and about to saunter into the shower in a somewhat leisurely fashion this morning. I'd complain that I could use the sleep, but truth is, I've been waking at 3:30am for the last two mornings and unable to go back to sleep. A personal crisis and it remains to be seen exactly how major it is. But suffice to say it has me somewhat blue and fearful for what the next few days, weeks, months may hold. Time will tell, I suppose and right now there's not much use dwelling on things but I do anyway...such is my nature.

I have the next two days off which is good. I need the break. My original plans for the two days have been augmented slightly, but it still includes lunch and coffee with the Enigmatic one, and I've some errands and tasks I've been putting off that I will probably force myself to take on and finish.

Or maybe I'll try to find some peace and sleep. Not sure.

In other news....

I see that Rita has indeed moved up to a C4 hurricane. Local papers here cover this new development with an eager eye. I guess not enough people are dying in Iraq, Britney's already had her baby, and Brad and Jen are just so NOT getting back together... so its a slow news week for them. There is also a lot of discussion locally on our own sense of preparedness or not, given the big one that is predicted in the next 30 years (and in all likely hood will probably hit on the Hayward fault, which is what I sit on).

This morning Mark Morford's column pokes some fun at disaster preparedness but with a stark and underlying seriousness about how those who need preparedness most, are the least prepared in this modern society. The poor. As is often the case, I find myself nodding and feeling text on a page resonating within me. The poor have the least options and while they do what they can, what they can do usually leaves them far more vulnerable. And people driving by in their Lexus simply roll their eyes, sigh, and say "why don't they just leave?!" They can't. get it? T h e y C a n ' t.

time for that shower.

Peace out.

The "I Can't" President

Maureen Dowd is now, as of Monday, behind the screen of the new Times Select service. I'm on a 14 day free trial. I'm undecided if I'll keep it, just for one columnist, but, I shall see.

September 21, 2005
Message: I Can't
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

The president won't be happy until he dons a yellow slicker and actually takes the place of Anderson Cooper, violently blown about by Rita as he talks into a camera lens lashed with water, hanging onto a mailbox as he's hit by a flying pig in a squall, sucked up by a waterspout in the eye of the storm over the Dry Tortugas.

Then maybe he'll go back to the White House and do his job instead of running down to the Gulf Coast for silly disaster-ops every other day.

There's nothing more pathetic than watching someone who's out of touch feign being in touch. On his fifth sodden pilgrimage of penitence to the devastation he took so long to comprehend, W. desperately tried to show concern. He said he had spent some "quality time" at a Chevron plant in Pascagoula and nattered about trash removal, infrastructure assessment teams and the "can-do spirit."

"We look forward to hearing your vision so we can more better do our job," he said at a briefing in Gulfport, Miss., urging local officials to "think bold," while they still need to think mold.

Mr. Bush should stop posing in shirtsleeves and get back to the Oval Office. He has more hacks and cronies he's trying to put into important jobs, and he needs to ride herd on that.

The announcement that a veterinarian, Norris Alderson, who has no experience on women's health issues, would head the F.D.A.'s Office of Women's Health ran into so much flak from appalled women that the F.D.A. may have already reneged on it. No morning-after pill, thanks to the antediluvian administration, but there may be hope for a morning-after horse pill.

Mr. Bush made a frownie over Brownie, but didn't learn much. He's once more trying to appoint a nothingburger to a position of real consequence in homeland security. The choice of Julie Myers, a 36-year-old lawyer with virtually no immigration, customs or law enforcement experience, to head the roiling Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency with its $4 billion budget and 22,000 staffers, has caused some alarm, according to The Washington Post.

Ms. Myers's main credentials seem to be that she worked briefly for the semidisgraced homeland security director, Michael Chertoff, when he was at the Justice Department. She just married Mr. Chertoff's chief of staff, John Wood, and she's the niece of Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

As a former associate for Ken Starr, the young woman does have impeachment experience, in case the forensic war on terrorism requires the analysis of stains on dresses.

Julie makes Brownie look like Giuliani. I'll sleep better tonight, knowing that when she gets back from her honeymoon, Julie will be patrolling the frontier.

As if the Veterinarian and the Niece were not bad enough, there was also the Accused. David Safavian, the White House procurement official involved in Katrina relief efforts, was arrested on Monday, accused by the F.B.I. of lying and obstructing a criminal investigation into the seamy case of "Casino Jack" Abramoff, the Republican operative who has broken new ground in giving lobbying a bad name. Democrats say the fact that Mr. Safavian's wife is a top lawyer for the Republican congressman who's leading the whitewash of the White House blundering on Katrina does not give them confidence.

Just as he has stonewalled other inquiries, Mr. Bush is trying to paper over his Katrina mistakes by appointing his homeland security adviser, Frances Townsend, to investigate how the feds fumbled the response.

Mr. Bush's "Who's Your Daddy?" bravura - blowing off the world on global warming and the allies on the Iraq invasion - has been slapped back by Mother Nature, which refuses to be fooled by spin.

When Donald Rumsfeld came out yesterday to castigate the gloom-and-doomers and talk about the inroads American forces had made against terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq, he could not so easily recast reality.

In Afghanistan, the U.S.'s handpicked puppet president is still battling warlords and a revivified Taliban, and the export of poppies for the heroin trade is once more thriving.

Iraq is worse, with more than 1,900 American troops killed. Five more died yesterday, as well as four security men connected to the U.S. embassy office in Mosul, all to fashion a theocratic-leaning regime aligned with Iran. In Basra, two journalists who have done work for The Times have been killed in the last two months.

The more the president echoes his dad's "Message: I care," the more the world hears "Message: I can't."

Washington DC's National Book Festival.

I used to LOVE going to this festival and watching the coverage of it on C-Span through the years when I was no longer in DC.

This year, Poet Sharon Olds declined Laura Bush's invitation to a fete at the White House were a selection of authors are highlighted and read from their works. Here, from The Nation, is the full text of Sharon Olds' regret letter to the first lady.