God's Hand-Picked President Admits to Base Bodily Functions!

And Condi is the go-to gal for clearing the way for evacuation, so to speak.

Rapture Ready After the Flood

Today, your humble correspondent had to travel to a large southwestern megalopolis, freeways jammed to the max with spotlessly clean SUVs piloted by tiny blonde women talking on cell phones, skin pulled tight by the best cosmetic surgeons in America and leathered by the unrelenting sun of the region. My god, but sprawl is nasty out here.

Anyway, after Hurricane Katrina, the pending Ophelia mess, and 120 some Iraqis blown up by the "last throes" of the insurgency, I realized that I had not checked in with the Rapture Ready people to see how close we were to the Second Coming. As I recall, the last time I checked, some two months ago, it was at 142, just below the critical threshold of "fasten your seatbelts." As a reminder, here's what Rapture Ready Index is all about, from the site:

You could say the Rapture index is a Dow Jones Industrial Average of end time activity, but I think it would be better if you viewed it as prophetic speedometer. The higher the number, the faster we're moving towards the occurrence of pre-tribulation rapture.

Rapture Index of 85 and Below: Slow prophetic activity
Rapture Index of 85 to 110: Moderate prophetic activity
Rapture Index of 110 to 145: Heavy prophetic activity
Rapture Index above 145: Fasten your seat belts

Imagine my shock when I saw it was sittng a full fifteen points above that threshold at a whopping 160! Jesus must be lacing up his sandals already. Another flood, a couple of plagues of locusts and a famine or two and He'll be here, sure as shootin'. Although I realize that 182 is the all-time high for the index, this delta since I last looked really shocked me.

So now I have a little side project for myself, to create a moving average of the index to see if it is trending in a manner that could cause me to consider some serious rethinking of my godless position. I am frequently haunted by Pascal's argument in belief in God (summarized as simply, "It can't hurt.") and although I realize that only a sincere embrace of belief is going to insulate one against the agony of eternal roasting on the spit of Satan's barbecue, if God is at least a little compassionate and not a total Old Testament bastard about retribution, He'll appreciate the gesture and cut a few aeons off of my infinite sentence.

Stay tuned.

Nothing to See Here, Folks. Move Along.

No tinfoil hats here, no, no, no. I am not saying that there is anything funny going on at all. It's all just the normal course of business.

At least two major corporate clients of lobbyist Joe Allbaugh, President Bush's former campaign manager and a former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, have already been tapped to start recovery work along the battered Gulf Coast.

One is Shaw Group Inc. (Research) and the other is Halliburton Co. (Research) subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root. Vice President Dick Cheney is a former head of Halliburton.

There is absolutely nothing odd here. Just because the Department of Defense under then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney in 1991 underwent massive privatization which primarily benefitted Halliburton after the Cheney-championed Iraq War in 2003, there is absolutely no reason to think that there's a pattern here. Just because Joseph Allbaugh oversaw the essential internal destruction of FEMA during his tenure in the Bush administration, and then became a lobbyist for Halliburton, there is no connection there.

No, no, no. No corruption here. Just business as usual. Business as usual. Business as usual.

Here's Your Fearless Leader at Work During Crisis

Newsweek has published a long investigative piece on the immediate reaction to what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Although just the first few paragraphs are absolutely shocking (well, not to some of us) regarding Bush's dislike of bad news, what I think demonstrates absolute dereliction of duty is this (emphasis mine):

Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a motherly but steely figure known by the nickname Queen Bee, knew that she needed help. But she wasn't quite sure what. At about 8 p.m., she spoke to Bush. "Mr. President," she said, "we need your help. We need everything you've got."

Bush, the governor later recalled, was reassuring. But the conversation was all a little vague. Blanco did not specifically ask for a massive intervention by the active-duty military. "She wouldn't know the 82nd Airborne from the Harlem Boys' Choir," said an official in the governor's office, who did not wish to be identified talking about his boss's conversations with the president. There are a number of steps Bush could have taken, short of a full-scale federal takeover, like ordering the military to take over the pitiful and (by now) largely broken emergency communications system throughout the region. But the president, who was in San Diego preparing to give a speech the next day on the war in Iraq, went to bed.

And I hope the Secret Service had his favorite pillow for him to put his little empty head on.

Incompetent? Criminal? Don't forget, as Chimpie himself put it, "We solve problems, because we're problem solvers." Poor people drowning? Chaos? Got to bed. Problem solved.

How these people sleep at night or even live during the day knowing what bastards they are, I do not understand. Is there a psychologist out there who can explain it to me? Isn't it called "malignant narcissism"?

59 million suckers.