Hey gang... don't forget to step outside and enjoy the view this Thursday Wednesday night. There's going to be a total lunar eclipse visible through most of the lower 48 (you PSTers might miss the very beginning).

Of course, to look at the cloud cover map for the US on Thursday, most of the eastern US is probably not going to see most of it. The DC area is forecast to be under about 85% cloud cover. The Big Apple should fare a little better, having only about a 35% cloud cover around 7:00pm, when the eclipse starts. Not to fret, however... total lunar eclipses are not terribly rare, occurring at least twice a year - although they're not always viewable from the US. The next total lunar eclipse viewable from the US will be in the early morning of December 21, 2010 EST.

For those of you more interested in the Big Show - a total solar eclipse... well, you've either got to do some traveling or some waiting. There will be one this August 1, but you're going to have to be in some of the northernmost places on the planet to see it - northern Canada, northern Greenland, northern Russia. The mainland US doesn't get a total solar eclipse until August 21, 2017. (The western US gets the tail end of a partial eclipse during the evening of May 19, 2012... but why settle for second best?)

The 2017 event will paint a total eclipse stripe from the northern coast of Oregon to the central coast of South Carolina during the afternoon of August 21. And this will be the last time you can see a total solar eclipse in the lower 48 until 2106. (The 2017 eclipse also the best chance anyone here has had to see a total solar eclipse since the last one that was centered here, in November 1834.)

If you want to get a sense of what the eclipse will look like, go get Stellarium. It's the ultimate sky-watchers' program, and is GPL'ed (which is to say, free). Set your observatory to Hopkinsville, KY (a town near the center of the 2017 event), go forward in time to about 1:25pm (as the clock reads, which I don't think is accounting for daylight savings), then watch the magic.

Or watch this crappy quality YouTube version. I tried a video capture from my desktop, but SnagIt (or, more likely, the MS codec) wasn't able to capture 7 frames per second of full-screen vid for a minute-plus. You're going to have to get Stellarium yourself, or do as Jambro and I are doing and planning a trip to Kentucky in nine-point-five years.

Gang, I don't know if you've been following the troubles over at the Justice Department. You should probably start tuning in. I'm sensing some Grade A dung in mid-flight for yon wind-blowing mechanism.

The Washington Post, in the wake of Comey, has this rather actively-verbed editorial today. Here are some choice snippets:

• On Bush's evasion of the question posted yesterday about Comey's testimony: No one is asking Mr. Bush to talk about classified information, and no one is discounting the terrorist threat.
• Laying it out on the table in neat, even rows: [T]he president authorized the program the Justice lawyers had refused to certify as legally permissible, and it continued for a few weeks more, according to... Comey. Under the Constitution, the president has the final authority in the executive branch to say what the law is. But as a matter of presidential practice, this is breathtaking.
• "Oh yeah‽ What are you gonna do about it?": The administration... was willing to go forward, against legal advice, with a program that the Justice Department had concluded did not "honor the civil liberties of our people." Nor is it clear that Congress was adequately informed. The president would like to make this unpleasant controversy disappear behind the national security curtain. That cannot be allowed to happen.

Wow. Man, if ever there has been a call-to-arms for the WaPo investigative teams, this is it. The hounds have been released.

So, I'm following the opening day of the Libby trial, and the comments made about same by the ever-shrinking Pro-Bush cult faction, and someone actually had the gall to say this:

I just can't grasp how someone can be tried for obstructing justice in regards to an issue that was a false premise to begin with.

I think I can help. I seem to remember it happening once in my lifetime. Let's see... checking the ol' memory banks... it's hazy but becoming clearer. Oh, right. President Clinton.

Wasn't it the argument of the right that his chief crime hadn't been the affair, but the cover-up?

Sucks when the shoe's on the other foot, doesn't it?

The guys on Mt. Rushmore are wishing they'd been given hands to cover their eyes. Seismologists in the area are speculating that recent tremors near Rushmore are signs that they're trying to free themselves from the mountain and move to Minnesota.

Seriously, though... here's the thing you need to ask anyone who supports what South Dakota has done - banning abortion outright - based on the claim that it should be up to the states whether or not abortion should be illegal: "Then you agree that there should not be a Constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage or defining marriage as something exclusively between a man and a woman, right?"

It's two sides of the same coin. If you're going to argue from a states' rights perspective for one moral prohibition, you are bound by logic to argue all moral prohibitions, including those you may disagree with, from a states' rights perspective. If you pick and choose which states' rights you wish to embolden and which you don't - remember, speaking strictly about moral prohibitions here - you invalidate your whole argument, essentially saying that states are responsible to decide moral issues if and when the federal government decides those issues contrary to your belief system. And in those circumstances, we have moved outside the realm of the republic which was designed for us in the 18th century.

So, they're revealing the folks (eight of them) who won the PowerBall lottery, and one of them is named Chastity.

It seems to me to be bad form, at the very least, to name your child after anything having to do with sexual habits. It's bad enough that we have celebs naming their children "Audio Science" or "Apple". We're not far from "Fellatio Smith". You know, because it sounds Italian.

Here's a handy-dandy checklist of things that the President will surely touch on in the address to Congress tonight. It's distilled and adapted from Arianna Huffington's post here. I'll come back afterwards armed with quotes where this actually happened.

1. Iraqi elections are bringing peace to the Middle East (or its corrolary, Democracy is making the world safer); Check. 9:17 PM. Still going on this point at 9:29.
2. The Patriot Act needs to be approved into perpetuity; Check. 9:34 PM. Just didn't say "in perpetuity". But you know he was thinking it.
3. There's nothing about the economy that's going wrong, and; Check. 9:38 PM. Trotting out the numbers for his smoky reflections of dogs and ponies.
4. The tax cuts from 2001 need to be made permanent; Check. 9:41 PM. Nailed this one exactly.
5. Alito is a good choice for the Supreme Court; Check. 9:56 PM.
6. The unwarranted NSA wiretaps were "necessary" and "legal"; Check. 9:35 PM. Falsehoods abound. I'm gonna have to look at the transcript to pull all the individual strands of bullshit apart.
7. Alternative fuels are still a priority in the energy policy. Check. 9:49 PM. Advanced Energy Initiative.

I can safely guess that he probably won't talk about upholding the Fourth Amendment, the First Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment, or Article II. Just a hunch.

9:00 PM: Might liveblog this a bit. This is a pic I just took (yes, I know my camera sucks) right outside my house. The lit up Capitol is there in the background. No, really. I can see that shit from my house.

9:01 PM: Christ. A huge cheer just went up when they introduced the justices of the SC.

9:12 PM: Where's Tom Delay? Odd that he wasn't seen leading the Prez in on his triumphal entry.

9:14 PM: He dared bring up civility?!? What umnitigated gall.

9:15 PM: This isolationist bit seems to point toward intervention in Iran. Oh boy.

9:16 PM: Only took 4 minutes to bring up 9/11.

9:18 PM: Seems like what he just said about radical, fundamentalist Islam could also be said of their similar ilk in the Christian faith.

9:19 PM: Only the terrorists have adopted the weapon of fear? Me thinks not.

9:26 PM: Missed the past seven minutes, but he's still talking about the military. By the by, there are plenty of examples of veterans of the current Iraqi conflict who disagree. Their service is equally as heroic, but I don't see them in the chamber.

9:31 PM: On Iran now. Sounds like he's dropping the gauntlet. Translation: "We'll be at war in six months."

9:37 PM: Really pounding away on the anti-isolation thing. Is this really what the debate has been about? Isolationism?

9:39 PM: Here comes the economic policy stuff. It's titled, "How I Will Outspend All Liberals From the Past 40 Years."

9:41 PM: I wonder what he considers "nonessential priorities" as he's talking about programs he's going to cut.

9:43 PM: What?!? Didn't the Supreme Court rule the Line-Item Veto an unconstitutional breach of the separation of powers? Is this a thinly-veiled play to put even more power in the hands of his own Imperial Presidency.

9:44 PM: Ah, yes... he pulled out the "put aside partisan politics" canard. I'd almost forgotten to expect that one.

9:49 PM: Just went 6 for 7 in my checklist. Hot damn. [PS: My attention is starting to fade.]

9:53 PM: This is my own little pet issue, but why is there only such a damned focus on math and science in education. These are not the only things to life.

9:54 PM: Did he just try to take credit for the welfare reduction? And I need to pull out that graph from Atlantic about abortion and teen pregnancy rates... I think they've actually gone up during his administration.

9:55 PM: Ooohhh, goody. He's talking about the Culture War! This is going to be AWESOME.

9:56 PM: Seven for seven, bitches! I'm going to apply for positions over at Roll Call tomorrow.

9:58 PM: Creating human-animal hybrids? Is this really happening? Because I wanna see that freakshow!

9:58 PM: Oh, be still my heart. Trust in public officials. Hey King George XLIII, how 'bout letting folks see those pics of you and Jack? Or letting photogs you're not personally paying into White House events. What have you got to hide? Hmm? HMMM???

10:00 PM: Can't say the dude doesn't have balls. He actually brought up New Orleans. Can't say that many people associate him and that city in a positive way.

10:02 PM: There's that weird phrase again, a "Period of Consequence." I don't know why, but it makes me nervous. In sort of a DoubleSpeak kind of way.

10:03 PM: Mercifully short. But yes, God (or whomever) Bless America.

10:07 PM: Dammit! I went 7 for 7 on my checklist and liveblogged the whole damn speech, and not a one of you saw it.

I wrestled yesterday with the idea of posting about the 20th anniversary of the Challenger disaster. I ultimately decided against it because I figured that no one really shares stories about Challenger anymore. Challenger was the Flashbulb Moment for folks of our age group, but has since been overshadowed by another moment. But I read a fairly moving retrospective online today that led me to change my mind. Not about telling the Flashbulb story... most of us have the similar stories: I was at home, it was a snow day, I was watching The Price is Right, CBS broke in, and that was that.

I was just moved by this story at MSNBC, one of the reporters who was on the scene and covered the story extensively back in the day. It dispels a few myths that we'd (or at least I had) come to believe over the past two decades. But more than that, it's just an effective remembrance.

Huh.

No words for this one. You're just going to have to watch it. There's a bit o' language for you sensitive types. So turn your speakers down for the love o' Pete.

Huh.

Republicans: It's getting to the point where you would be ill-advised to continue ignoring the 60% of the country who do not support this president any longer.

Democrats: This is not a good thing. Do you not remember how awful 1998 was? It was not a good thing for the country then, and would not be now either.

#1 Who knew: SU went and got cool.

I wonder if they'll be offering this as a correspondence course in the near future.

#2: Happy 300th Birthday to Benjamin Franklin. You were prescient enough to warn us about the problems a lack of civility would leave us with. Too bad no one in power actually read your warnings. Ah, civil discourse, we hardly knew thee. You magnificient bastard.

#3: G4TV became my new favorite station today. I tuned in around 8:00 this morning, looking to catch a little of Washington Journal. But the cable's been screwed up of late, and C-SPAN's currently unwatchable. So I start tooling down the dial and I stumble across Kaiju Big Battel. If you don't know what Kaiju Big Battel is, then I am a better person for prompting you with this link: Become a better person. Think Japanese B-monster flicks meets American pro wrestling circa 1987.

Following a Fighto!, G4 went directly into an episode of Beast Wars. Without commercials (a few words occassionally for other shows on G4, but no real ads). Fuck'n great. TV made for me. You know, since I seem incapable of watching four hours of 24 in two days, and have thus relegated myself to either a season of going, "now who's that guy again," or ultimately giving up by saying, "well, no, this show really isn't plausible."

#4: I ♥ Atlantic Monthly. They're celebrating their sesquicentennial this year, and in celebration are re-publishing excerpts of articles that have appeared in the magazine over its history. In the current issue, there's a fantastic article from September 1891 by Woodrow Wilson (yeah, the president... he was lowly college professor when he wrote for the Atlantic) about, essentially, pursuing your own genius. I'll provide a link to the article, but you need to be a subscriber to the magazine to read the whole thing. (See update below.) The best part, though, is Wilson's closing paragraph:

The ability to see for one's self is attainable, not by mixing with crowds and ascertaining how they look at things, but by a certain aloofness and self-containment. The solitariness of some genius is not accidental; it is characteristic and essential. To the constructive imagination there are some immortal feats which are possible only in seclusion. The man must heed first and most of all the suggestions of his own spirit; and the world can be seen from windows overlooking the street better than from the street itself.

He's talking specifically about how what we contemporaneously consider good books in the here & now become immortal works remembered through the ages. But taken more generally, I find it to be an encouragement to that inner genius we all possess - in some of us (ahem), it manifests itself in what folks today might call geekdom. I think, especially as we - and I'm talking chiefly of the GenXers among us - went through our latter high school and early collegiate careers, we fought to try to find that balance, finding an appropriate voice for that genius. And Wilson's point was precisely this: fuck appropriate.
Seriously, this article should be required reading for all high school junior english students. At least, that's when I could have benefitted from it the most.

UPDATE (8:44 AM, 18.jan): As a reader points out in comments, dopes like me can pay for the subscription, but you can read it for free. Atlantic is posting the excerpts from their celebration online at this page. The link to the Wilson article can be found here. So go, read!

It's shit like this that restores my oft-waning faith in humanity.

White House denies spying without Warrant

This strike has been enthralling news. It would be only marginally less so if I weren't going to be up there in a matter of days.

Whenever there's breaking news, I go into this absorb-everything mode, and my computer reflects that. I decided to take a screenshot of what my workspace looks like right now.

If you ask nicely, I'll identify what's what on the screen if you're interested.

They did it. The transit workers in NYC pulled the trigger. There's no mass transit in New York City.

This town, as Wonkette will attest, has been seized by the ridiculously cute addition at the National Zoo: Tai Shan.

It's stoopid how adorable he is.

What's funny to me is how absolutely bonkers some folks have gone over this panda. I think we're all wanting to soak up as much time with it as we can, in whatever visceral way we can (PandaCam? Really?) because when he turns two, the 'Stick gets shipped back to China. Wonkette has her frequent Butterstick updates, which are probably fueling the frenzy as much as reporting on it. DCeiver's got his own particular brand of How-Fucking-Cute-Is-He-ism going on, interspersed amongst the exhaustive Lost reviews. But what I'm really enjoying, as reported in the Express today, are the advent of the rival Butterstick blogs. That is, blogs purporting to be written by the 'Stick.

They have a vast polarity difference between them. One, the newcomer, has 'Stick as a warm, meandering soul slowly discovering the little pleasures of life as a panda.

The other portrays Bandit (because "Butterstick" is verboten) as kind of a badass wannabe.

Each has taken notice of the other. It's now kind of in that awkward moment when two dogs you were hoping would walk around and ignore each other actually lock eyes, and it's only a matter of moments before the growling begins and all hell breaks loose.

At least, that's what I'm hoping for.

(Start @ 3:22 am edt) I want to tip my hat right now to the coverage provided by KPLC in Lake Charles this morning. The folks there moved out of their studios earlier today and went to their shelter-in-place location, the 5th floor of a hospital there (Krista St. Patrick? corner of South Ryan and Foster Street), and have been sitting around a tiny table in a hallway doing their damnedest to continue to provide local information.

The coverage, which I've been watching courtesy of this feed (it works in Windows Media Player in Windows, I don't know about other platforms), has been by far the most intense of the night.

As I'm writing this, they're sitting at their makeshift studio listening to people in the background watching the roof, since another building in this hospital complex has just gone through a partial collapse of some sort. No, check that... a conference room down the hall has just lost its part of the roof. No, just a window in that conference room blew out. The fog of war...

The whole thing is so raw, and so effective and so low-tech, compared to what else is on. CNN and Fox News have their glitz and glamour and their star personnel on the scene and their fancy-schmancy graphics and no soul. The blogs this evening are talking a bit about the Joel Kline memo about an arresting "Category 4" graphic. I wonder if Joel wonders as hard about the actual content of what they're getting on the air.

These folks at KPLC have reminded me, just by telling the story, stripping it free of all the crawls and the rest of the crap that have infested broadcast news, what a good, solid news story is. It also reminds me of a couple of other stellar broadcasts I've seen in my life.

The first really good one I saw myself was on January 16, 1991. David French was anchoring an interview on CNN when he interrupted the interview to say, "We need to go to Baghdad." He threw to Baghdad, and* a very nervous Bernard Shaw came on and said, "Something is happening outside." And for the next 17 hours or so, they were broadcasting live from Baghdad. In the wake of Gulf War II, that sort of thing seems a little provincial (no, there was no live video of the explosions, just the excited voices after feeling the bombs detonate near the hotel... very Murrow-esque). But it was the only link anyone from the West had to Baghdad. Dick Cheney, who was then Secretary of State, even joked (maybe only half-so) that everything he knew about the situation on the ground in Baghdad was coming from CNN. It was that remarkable.

There has been other good news coverage since then. But what broadcasters credit as the beginning of this Breaking News mindset, scrambling resources to cover the story as best you can, was the Kennedy assassination in 1963. In 1988, to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the assassination, A&E ran a program they called "As It Happened". It was a brilliant program. It was nothing more and nothing less than the coverage, as it aired on NBC, of the assassination.

NBC News broke into their regular network programming about half an hour(!) after the shots rang out in Dealy Plaza to report that they were hearing that Governor Connally of Texas and the President were fired at, and there were conflicting reports, but it sounded like Governor Connally received the worst of it. The fog of war...

What made coverage of this story so peculiar, so compelling and so revolutionary was the immediacy of it. For the first time, television news was trying to cover a massive story as it was happening and not relying on passing on wire reports as their sole source of information. Frank McGee (the guy at far left in the picture above) was on the phone with their man in the hospital where Kennedy (who they later figured out had been grieveously wounded) was. He would listen to their reporter, who was on one of the hospital pay phones, and then recite, word-for-word, the "copy" the hospital reporter was dictating. Later, as the revolution in Breaking News coverage continued as people watched, Frank McGee was handed some kind of device that he attached to the earpiece of the handset, which he attached, then held the phone up to the mic and let the hospital reporter deliver his material directly.

The reason why I offer this history lesson, and why I'm geeking out about this tonight, is that the strategy KPLC appears to be using (or, at least, had been before their feed was interrupted) is similar. Stripped of the trappings of their studio, they had to rely on their journalistic talents alone. And the singular talent of a journalist, a good journalist, is the ability to tell the story. The way the KPLC anchors were telling the story was to contact their sources (NOAA folks, emergency folks, correspondent folks) by telephone, hold up the phone to the microphone, turn on the speakerphone feature, and let them deliver their reports. It was the struggle and the simplicity that makes for riveting television, and the best reporting on Rita I've seen tonight.

So, even though your transmitter has been knocked over, or your web server has lost power, or whatever has happened that I can no longer watch you this morning, folks at KPLC, bravo on everything you could do.

* At 3:49 am edt, the KPLC net feed just stopped. Switch to KHOU.

Both of these are AP stories, with the times they were originally posted:

Bush Nominates Roberts As Chief Justice
Sep 05 8:05 AM US/Eastern

Bush, Congress to Investigate Response
Sep 06 1:11 PM US/Eastern

So, I was right by over 29 hours.

What a piece of shit this President is.

I spent the first quarter century of my life growing among the shit-covered farm fields of Lancaster County. My schools were surrounded by them, and in the spring the smell wafting in on what would normally have been a fragrant spring breeze was enough to make even us sturdy locals gag.

The stank coming from 1600 Pennsylvania NW and the truth-twisting support network it has is far, far worse.

Most odious of everything that's going on (and there's a lot of odious stuff going on) is this claim being fronted by the heads of FEMA, DHS, and every right-wing blogger out there that the federal government had to play second fiddle to the local governments in Katrina relief operations. Had to. You know, states rights and all that.

I call bullshit.

In June 1963, then again in September that same year, President Kennedy nationalized the National Guard troops to effect the integration of Alabama schools after Governor Wallace literally stood in the doorway of state schools preventing black students from entering.

So, it could be fair to say that in a time of great national need, the President would have the authority to nationalize the Guard.

It would also be fair to say the President fiddled while Rome burned.

It would also be fair to say that the heads of DHS and FEMA are incompetent.

I'll put $10 on the table as a wager to the first taker: The president names a successor to the dearly departed Chief Justice before he calls for an investigation, Congressional or independent, into the pathetic response of FEMA and DHS in the Katrina fiasco.

I'm serious. One taker, first one to comment and accept the bet. Timestamped news reports from CNN or AP for verification.