ABC 7 News is reporting possible tornado touchdown in Delaplane, just to the west of Dulles Airport.
MAP OF LOCATION OF POSSIBLE TORNADO.
-GayPatriot

Just clicked some shots off my porch. The winds are picking up and the sky is now quite dark.



UPDATE (8:05PM) : Just got off this last shot before darkness…..

-Bruce (GayPatriot) – gaypatriot2004@aol.com

I had a very long day of work and just didn’t have the strength to make it to the gym tonight. I wanted to… but thought after about 6 weeks straight of constant travel… maybe I should just chill out tonight. Lucky I did.
I flipped on the TV expecting to catch up on the latest about Katrina’s damage in New Orleans. But to my surprise, I’m finding that Loudoun County is right in the path of a part of Katrina’s remnants.
There is a Tornado Watch until midnight for all of the western counties of the District of Columbia.
According to local TV reports, there are two “Doppler-indicated” tornados just south of Interstate 66 in Rappahannock and Culpepper Counties. The storm is now crossing I-66 heading northeast… on a path toward Dulles Airport… and me!
Updates here: www.wusatv9.com

It is becoming increasingly clear this morning that as the result of a breach of the 17th Street Canal levee, has in fact resulted in the beginning of catastrophic destruction of the city of New Orleans. This “after the storm” cruel twist is a blow to New Orleans residents who thought they may have escaped the pre-Katrina dire warnings.

The effect of the breach was instantly devastating to residents who had survived the fiercest of Katrina’s winds and storm surge intact, only to be taken by surprise by the sudden deluge. And it added a vast swath of central New Orleans to those already flooded in eastern New Orleans, the Lower 9th Ward and St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes.
Beginning at midday, Lakeview residents watched in horror as the water began to rise, pushed through the levee breach by still-strong residual winds from Katrina. They struggled to elevate furniture and eventually found themselves forced to the refuge of second floors just when most in the neighborhood thought they had been spared.
“It would have been fine,” refugee Pat O.Brien said. “The eye passed over.” But his relief was short-lived. “It’s like what you see on TV and never thought would happen to us. We lost everything: cars, art, furniture, everything.”

New Orleans is one of my favorite cities. I am so sad about what is happening there today. One of my most memorable vacations (the 1988 Sugar Bowl) was in the Big Easy. And I have a special bond with Louisiana as I was born in Shreveport. My heart aches today.
I join with other GP readers who urge everyone to contribute to the charity of their choice that is involved with the disaster relief efforts along the Gulf Coast.
Katrina Aid Agencies listed here.
-Bruce (GayPatriot) – gaypatriot2004@aol.com

Just in case you aren’t a regular reader of Arthur Chrenkoff, here is his latest installment.
Good News from Iraq, part 34 – Chrenkoff

The first international airline flight to land in the southern Iraqi city of Basra in 15 years arrived here yesterday [22 August] receiving a warm welcome from local officials. A Sharjah-based Phoenix Air Boeing 747 arrived from Dubai with 22 passengers on board.
The company will begin two flights a week between Dubai and Basra, Iraq’s second largest city, officials said. “Hopefully flights to Iraq will increase from the region and the world,” said Basra’s governor Mohammed Al Waili at the airport while greeting the arriving passengers. Since the U.N. imposed economic sanctions in 1990 after Iraq invaded Kuwait, no foreign airline has flown to Basra.
……
Fly into Arbil, the regional capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, and you feel that you have arrived in another country.
It is the Kurdish, not the Iraqi, flag that flutters from Arbil International Airport, Kurdistan’s new, glass-fronted “gateway” to the world, which saw its first flights from Dubai, Beirut and Amman arrive last month.
The airport was built on a former military base once used by Saddam Hussein’s regime to bomb the Kurds of Halabja.
Now it brings in investors. Businessmen, scared away from other parts of Iraq, are coming to Kurdistan instead, and helping its economy to take off.
“Before all we saw was war, and planes bombing our cities and villages,” says the airport manager, Kameran Murad, who fought against the regime in the late 1980s.
“Now the aircraft are our link with the outside world. Everything is changing.”
Take the town of Suleimaniya. Its skyline is dotted with cranes. Everywhere you look bulldozers are at work.
“Things are booming. The price of land is ridiculous. It’s just going up and up and up,” says businessman Bettin Saleh, who has two shops in a new mall.
“People have money, people are spending it, they feel it’s safe to spend – and build for the future.”

And that is just a small sample of the entire posting. Funny, I didn’t hear any of this on the CBS Evening News lately…..why?
-Bruce (GayPatriot) – gaypatriot2004@aol.com

I’m proud to report (though sad at the same time) that GayPatriot is banned by Communist China — where the government controls what the people see, read, and consume. And some people wanted them to buy an American oil company?!?
The Malcontent (blogging from China) has the low-down in his article, “Censors and Senselessness“.
Hey, at least Michelle Malkin is getting through! 🙂
-Bruce (GayPatriot) – gaypatriot2004@aol.com

In response to some of the angry commentary to my post on the chickenhawk slur, Reader DebK offered a comment that I thought was so good I republish it on our front page (with her permission):

Please stop this ridiculous argument. I served for 8 years, my husband is currently active duty and if I didn’t have 2 kids under the age of 5 I would sign up today to serve again. This chickenhawk accusation is completely illogical. Let me just say this – I’ll denounce all those who support the war but haven’t signed up to serve when those who keep throwing out the chickenhawk accusation denounce all those who attack the war and the military (and YES they do attack the military …) and who have never served themselves. (What could they possibly know about war when they themselves have never served, right??) Guess that would mean denouncing Michael Moore, most of Hollywood and the entertainment industry, the vast majority of anti-war activists, and perhaps some of the chickenhawk accusers on this blog!
If you accusers were genuinely concerned for the troops overseas, you’d spend some time learning how they think and what they think about this war. What you would find is that, though many in the military may have criticisms about specific aspects of how the actual operations on the ground have been run, the vast majority of them support what we are doing in Iraq, recognize the inherent morality of the mission, and would serve again. My husband is a perfect example. He served for 7 months and moved on to a different command. He has a lot of issues with specific items related to how the war has been run, but he will go back to Iraq in a heartbeat if the opportunity arises again. If people in the military don’t mind that people who haven’t served and aren’t planning on serving still support the war, why do you anti-war folks spend so much time and energy squawking about it! Get over it and start using your brains to really think about the issues at hand. If you don’t like the war, fine – come up with a better way to handle the foreign policy issues of the day. But spare all of us the sad chickenhawk accusations. Please.

In a private e-mail to me (& reproduced with her permission), she added:

The sad thing is that those folks [i.e., those who use the chickenhawk slur] (by the way, I truly believe it is just a vocal minority of the left) simply can’t believe that anyone would be willing to risk their life for their country, or for a cause greater than themselves. Cliché yes, but still the truth.

In the first comment to a recent post where I agreed with a man who lost his son in Iraq that the media should offer “equal time to the other loved ones of fallen heroes,” a reader quoted a Democratic Senator, who himself was just mimicking one of the left’s standard refrains in criticizing supporters of the war. He called us chickenhawks. He probably thought he had won the argument by accusing certain supporters of the war of being afraid to fight.
But, in so labeling us, he effectively forfeited the field. Instead of taking issue with the facts we are presenting and the arguments we are making, he attacked us personally. They’re no longer engaging us; they’re baiting us. “After participating in a lengthy comment session” on this blog, ThatGayConservative concluded liberals use this tactic to “justify their own hatred.” Sometimes I think he’s right, that liberals are just trying to find a rationale to express their hatred of and contempt for conservatives and our ideas. On my more generous days, I think they’re just looking for means to dismiss our arguments without having to acknowledge our ideas.
The Gay Conservative wasn’t the only one to take issue with the absurd, but standard left accusation. In comment #82 to my post, Joe, echoed Clint in calling the accusation, “petty ad hominem; ‘at best’ trying to get a rise; more likely the mark of intellectual desperation.”
It’s just a mean-spirited charge, especially given the fact that many who serve, indeed, many who have seen friends and colleagues die, continue to stay and fight for our country. According to a report in today’s New York Post, “Every one of the Army’s 10 divisions — its key combat organizations — has exceeded its re-enlistment goal for the year to date.” (If you don’t believe me, read whole thing. (Via Powerline, via Betsy Newmark.)
As long as we have a volunteer army, the Chickenhawk slur is just that, a slur. A means to insult certain conservatives while dismissing our ideas.
[Read more…]

Okay, I have to confess… I have a love/hate relationship with my new favorite blog, The Malcontent. What’s not to love? The content is great, the topics are stuff I don’t see anywhere else. So why the hate? He is funnier than I am, the bastard! 🙂
Here is the latest from The Malconent…. a SWOT Analysis of Cindy Sheehan. I spit out my Cheerios at this one! Very creative….

By the way, how long will it be before someone on the Wacky Left blames her mother’s stroke on President Bush?
-Bruce (GayPatriot) – gaypatriot2004@aol.com

Since I couldn’t have said it better myself, I’d like to reprint ThatGayConservative’s column in full here at GayPatriot….
-GP
======================
ThatGayConservative: Thoughts from the Smoker’s Porch* — The “Chickenhawk” Slur Arises Once Again.
Once again, the liberals are blast-faxing/e-mailing their minions to break out the “Chickenhawk slur again. Jim Hawkins at RightWingNews explains what a Chickenhawk is here:
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the word or who associate it with its more vulgar meaning, when the left uses the term, they are generally referring to a foreign policy hawk who has not been in the military and is not seeking to join up.
Again, the liberal left is trotting out their tired, worn out arguments of the past. They make the same old claims that Bush shouldn’t have started a war because he never served in the military. Supposedly, you can’t support a war if you’ve never been there. For added measure, they throw in the Michael Moore lies that nobody in Congress has children serving in Iraq or they use the worn out excuse that neither of Bush’s daughters are serving in the military. They’ve also rolled out the failed “Bush was AWOL” story again.
The race for the White House should be about leadership,…We do not need to divide America over who served and how….Are we now to descend, like latter-day Spiro Agnews, and play, as he did, to the worst instincts of divisiveness and reaction that still haunt America? Are we now going to create a new scarlet letter in the context of Vietnam?
John F.You Kerry 30 January, 1992
First of all, American Diplomacy notes that of the 41 presidents the U.S. has had since 1798, sixteen of them, or 39% did not have prior military service. Seven of those, including Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt who presided over both world wars, were Democrats. Most recently, President BJ Clinton deployed the military more often in 8 years than any other president in the previous 50 years while providing less funding.
The American Heritage Foundation explains the problems with that policy here. The hypocrisy here is that BJ didn’t serve. He went so far as to dodge the draft by running away to England and to Soviet Moscow. He even went so far as to send a letter to his ROTC commander that he “loathed the military”. Yet there’s nary a whimper from the liberals that BJ never served.
[Read more…]

Why should anyone be surprised that the Clinton Foundation has pulled a fast one on those suffering from AIDS in Africa?
The Real Tragedy of AIDS – TechCentralStation

With great fanfare, the Clinton Foundation last year announced that it had negotiated a price of $140 a year for ARV treatment, about half the typical price in Africa. But that figure is a cruel hoax, as a transcript of a meeting in Mumbai between AIDS activists and officials of Indian drug companies confirms. Hardly anyone pays it.
The representative of Cipla, one of the largest Indian firms, said that the $140 offer had rigid unpublicized conditions, including “large, confirmed irrevocable orders,” which were never met. Clinton promised 200,000 patients by 2005, but another Indian drug official said that the foundation had not produced even 40,000.
An activist from Cameroon then said, “The Clinton deal is not working…. I’m surprised that you believed what Clinton told you.”
Said Cipla: “He is a very good talker.”

I mean, after all, this is the man who was embraced as the “Gay Messiah” by our community; yet repeatedly sent zeroed-out AIDS funding budgets up to Congress only to have them overturned and increased by the Republican-controlled Congress since 1995.
Will our gay leaders everrrrrrrr learn?
-Bruce (GayPatriot) – gaypatriot2004@aol.com