With an active hurricane season underway, we also hear that the Northwest Passage is offically open; the Arctic ice pack is now an island:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/08/31/eaarctic131.xml

While recent seasons have been mild in Chicago, wetter but with more moderate temps, other areas are seeing major changes.

A friend that used to live on the California coast explains that summer fog now blankets the beaches at Newport for about half the season.

Another friend in New Mexico sees steady and torrential rain, an extended monsoon unlike the typical.

I was in central Mexico, and their rain season should start in late July, but it was running strong in June.

The beach town of Bethany, Delaware (Paul O'Neill's vacation spot) had the Army engineers build a storm-protection berm so high it would protect from a 12-ft surge, or something like that. I've been going there for decades and this is the first time they acted worried---no doubt insurance is the driver.

The first definable result of climate change is insuarnce rates, it seems. But who is getting hurt? Will Jindal come out looking good, or will people remember the previous time? Gas prices seem  ready to jump, and tropical storm Hanna is building.

Geez, guys, get some new software.

Neither Bobby Jindal's exorcisms nor Focus on the Family's exhortations to pray for rain in Denver have been able to deflect Gustav. Makes one think of phrases like poetic justice (although not so just for coastal dwellers). President Bush will skip the GOP convention to look at windy scenes of police cars and school buses on the Gulf Coast.

So what is God thinking? (Is God thinking?) Surely FEMA employees and New Orleans' mayor and even Bobby Jindal are thinking about the real job, dealing with an oncoming weather event. Cheney and friends can only control reality so far; this hurricane will not evaporate in time to allow total media focus on Minneapolis/St. Paul.

It will be fun to hear the various contortions of Sarah Palin and Jindal and other overtly religious folks attempting to explain the mess down south. Likely they will concentrate on the relief efforts, where humans show their best side. Maybe that's the point---God doesn't help you, he sets you up for the fall, and invites you to learn a lesson from it.

Only the lessons FEMA learned don't particularly help the GOP, since the learning invites comparison to the earlier failure. "Heckuva job, Brownie" will be heard again, and we'll hear again about poisonous trailers and Blackwater patrols, convention centers and overloaded plumbing.

Let's help keep the subject alive, that conservatives are not interested in helping other people via sound government, and that praying ain't policy.