Howard Kurtz is pissed that Hurricane Irene didn’t live up to its trailer:

Someone has to say it: cable news was utterly swept away by the notion that Irene would turn out to be Armageddon. National news organizations morphed into local eyewitness-news operations, going wall to wall for days with dire warnings about what would turn out to be a Category 1 hurricane, the lowest possible ranking. “Cable news is scaring the crap out of me, and I WORK in cable news,” Bloomberg correspondent Lizzie O’Leary tweeted.

Yes, well, a violent storm forecasted to visit one in five Americans certainly isn’t something to get excited about.

Read more »

Even before I watched all 10 of Gawker’s Hurricane Reporter Blowdowns I knew my favorite:

Title: “Fed Up!: Our Fight to Save America from Washington”

Author: Rick Perry

Rank: 414

Blurb: “We are fed up with being over-taxed and over-regulated. We are tired of being told how much salt to put on our food, what kind of cars we can drive, what kinds of guns we can own, what kind of prayers we are allowed to say and where we can say them, what we are allowed to do to elect political candidates, what kind of energy we can use, what doctor we can see. What kind of nation are we becoming? I fear it’s the very kind the Colonists fought against.”

Read more »

[via Know Your Meme]

Stinque International has learned that Denmark is planning an invasion of the Arctic just as soon as the ice melts – which should be any day now – allowing access to the vast deposits of oil and natural gas known to lie north of Greenland.

What impact this will have on Santa’s Workshop remains unclear.

Given their long history of aggression against the English – can you blame them? – will the war-loving Danes be content with just the Arctic? Or should we expect to see them leapfrogging from the Faroes to Icelend, Iceland to Greenland, Greenland to… ?

Using Leif Ericson’s colonies in Labrador and Newfoundland as staging posts will we see Denmark lay claim to Canada’s eastern seaboard? Can we then expect a pincer movement of Scandinavian hotness using Greyhound buses and Amtrak to deliver an elite team of danish commandoes into the nation’s capital just in time to derail Perry’s candidacy, institute single-payer health care, and make George Will STFU?

Isn’t it time someone saved us from ourselves?

My Red Cross radio is here! A buddy of mine who survived Katrina made me buy it. Thirty bucks on Amazon, runs off a crank or solar, will recharge a cell phone and has a flashlight! I am so ready for Irene, the bitch.

Priorities, people.

Tuna. Batteries. Gin.

Update: Cuomo has ordered a complete shutdown of all mass transit tomorrow. The Thruway and bridges into the city will be closed if winds exceed 60 mph.

Bloomberg has ordered compulsory evacuation of zone A and partial evacuation of zone B, namely the Rockaways.

I’m so glad I never ever have to go to Long Island again since my mother is no longer there. For those benighted west coasters who know no better, the Rockaways is a stretch of beach on Long Island that has become heavily built up with condo towers right on the water.

Fire Island is shut down tighter than a vicar’s sphincter. The Pines is a wasteland. Cherry Grove is fucked.

BTW. It’s pronounced eye-REEnee.