What's in the Democrats' relief bill? All their fondest dreams to beat Trump

If it is possible to find anyone as economically stupid as a Dem politician, I cannot imagine who that might be.

Furthermore, they know that the Reps will never agree to it, which means they really just want to use this list as a club to beat Trump with.

That their own traditional electorate will suffer the consequences of no bill passing means nothing to them. Schumer and Pelosi and the rest really do think that when they blame Trump, those folks will automatically believe them. And even knowing that Americans will suffer because of them, "Well, you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."

Getting back and then maintaining their own power is the only thing they actually want.

Meanwhile:

Update: Then there is this:
 

The heartbreak in Paris

Absolutely heartbreaking destruction by fire of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris today.

My wife and I visited Notre Dame in 1985. It is one of the most magnificent structures in all the world. I have to think that the French have carefully documented it long before now - if nothing else because of the world wars.That is can be rebuilt is almost certainly not in questions. But it can never be truly reproduced. No matter how expertly they re-create the lost art, it can never be the same. Read it and weep.

Hurricanes and global warming

The Myth That Climate Change Created Harvey, Irma

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in its most recent scientific assessment that “[n]o robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes, and major hurricanes … have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin,” and that there are “no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency.”

Further, “confidence in large-scale changes in the intensity of extreme extratropical cyclones [such as ‘Superstorm’ Sandy] since 1900 is low.”

Other media outlets tying Harvey to climate change took a more measured approach.

For instance, Vox wrote that man-made global warming did not actually cause Harvey, but simply exacerbated the natural disaster by creating heavier rainfalls.

But this claim is discredited by University of Washington climatologist Cliff Mass, who after examining precipitation levels in the Gulf found that “[t]here is no evidence that global warming is influencing Texas coastal precipitation in the long term and little evidence that warmer than normal temperatures had any real impact on the precipitation intensity from this storm.”

Mass went on to explicitly refute those who attribute Hurricane Harvey to climate change:

The bottom line in this analysis is that both observations of the past decades and models looking forward to the future do not suggest that one can explain the heavy rains of Harvey by global warming, and folks that are suggesting it are poorly informing the public and decision makers. 

Politicians seeking to exploit Harvey and Irma as reasons to act on climate change would only make a bad situation worse. Climate policies and regulations designed to prevent natural disasters and slow the earth’s warming simply will not do so.

Then there is the NOAA: 

It is premature to conclude that human activities–and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming–have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity. That said, human activities may have already caused changes that are not yet detectable due to the small magnitude of the changes or observational limitations, or are not yet confidently modeled (e.g., aerosol effects on regional climate). ...

In summary, neither our model projections for the 21st century nor our analyses of trends in Atlantic hurricane and tropical storm counts over the past 120+ yr support the notion that greenhouse gas-induced warming leads to large increases in either tropical storm or overall hurricane numbers in the Atlantic.

Speaking of climate-change, remember all the alarm about how the world's glaciers were melting? Well, as it turns out, they are. And they've been melting for 400 years.

Remember, even former United Nations climate official Ottmar Edenhofer saw through the smokescreen:

"One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole," said Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015.

So what is the goal of environmental policy?

"We redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy," said Edenhofer.

That is what "climate change" is really about: its advocates just want our money.

Hmm:

Taken from this interesting lesson.

Update: Heh!

Update: This is informative, too: Hurricanes, Rainfall, and Climate Change

Faith, not FEMA

USA Today:

... the United Methodist Committee on Relief is known for its expertise in “case management.” After the initial cleanup — where the Methodists have work crews helping pull mud out of houses — the church sends trained volunteers into the wreckage to help families navigate the maze of FEMA assistance, state aid programs and private insurance to help them rebuild their lives. UMCOR also trains other non-profits to send their own case managers into the disaster zone.

In a disaster, churches don’t just hold bake sales to raise money or collect clothes to send to victims; faith-based organizations are integral partners in state and federal disaster relief efforts. They have specific roles and a sophisticated communication and coordination network to make sure their efforts don’t overlap or get in each others’ way.

One of the most critical resources the faith groups can provide is manpower. The United Methodists have 20,000 trained volunteers around the country who can be called up for "early response teams," basically small crews that can help with debris removal and home cleanup, said Cathy Earl, UMCOR's director of disaster programs. "They are trained they are badged they are background checked and they are part of the team that can be called up on short notice to respond," she said.

When karma comes around

Used cars: The market will soon be flooded

Forbes: 11 Best Bargains in Three-Year-Old Used Cars

Get 'em while you can, because before long the used-car market will be flooded (heh!) with coded-out cars from Hurricane Harvey areas - and the sellers will not tell you (and may not even know themselves).

Coming: Pain at the pump

Largest US refinery Motiva may be shut up to two weeks

Motiva Enterprises' Port Arthur, Texas refinery, the nation's largest, may be shut as long as two weeks for assessment of the plant and repair of any damage, sources familiar with plant operations said on Thursday.

The 603,000 barrel per day (bpd) Port Arthur Refinery was shut on Wednesday due to flooding from Tropical Storm Harvey.

In a statement to CNBC, Motiva said it "cannot provide a timeline for restart at this time." The oil company says it will begin assessing the refinery "as soon as the local area flooding has receded," although Motive is uncertain about how long it will take for floodwaters to diminish.

The refinery has seen better days:

BTW, the refinery is owned by Saudi Arabia, which took full control in May.

Harvey's second guessing well under way

Question asked by Philly.com:

Curiously, though, while the headline still appears on the paper's index, the article itself has been disappeared. Clicking on it takes you only to a photo essay page.

But anyway, question answered by Houston's mayor:

I might snarkily observe that when Philadelphia faces a hurricane like this, let's see what their city's leadership decides to do.

As my correspondent David K. wrote,

During the evacuation for Hurricane Rita over 100 people died while stuck in bumper to bumper traffic in heat over 100 degrees. It took my family 27 hours to make what is normally a 3 1/2 hour trip. To the best of my knowledge less than 10 people have lost their lives during Harvey. Had an evacuation order been given over 3 million people would have been on the road.

One of the major decision points is knowing where to evacuate and in what order and when. It would be nice to know a week out, but they don't. They are lucky to have even a somewhat reliable idea 12-15 hours out. There are more than 4 million people in the greater Houston area. An orderly evacuation of even a decent percentage of them would take how long? Perhaps as long as days, and a disorderly evacuation would be worse than none at all.

And a mayor also has to consider that he would be exposing his police and responder crews to even more severe hazard than they accept on patrol absent an evac order.

Where would you rather be when a Cat 4 sweeps over you - in your own house where you have stockpiled food, clothing, water and other necessities, or on the open road, stuck in traffic, with 130-mph winds and nothing more at hand than what you could cram in the car?

Neither is a walk in the park, but here is the answer for me:

 

Massive SanFran power outage might be ....

See updates

Massive power outage hits San Francisco, shuts down businesses, BART station, traffic lights

A massive power outage in San Francisco on Friday morning caused a blackout in neighborhoods across the city, from the Financial District to the Presidio, forcing the closure of businesses, a federal courthouse and a BART station, officials said.

A spokesman for Pacific Gas and Electric Co. said at least 90,000 customers lost power.

PG&E also said that it had not identified the cause of the outage.

But it might be a good time to remind ourselves that America's power grid is so vulnerable to sabotage and attack that even Scientific American says that it keeps the Pentagon up at night.

A report last year [2015-DS] prepared for the President and Congress emphasized the vulnerability of the grid to a long-term power outage, saying “For those who would seek to do our Nation significant physical, economic, and psychological harm, the electrical grid is an obvious target.” 

The damage to modern society from an extended power outage can be dramatic, as millions of people found in the wake of Hurricane Sandy in 2012. The Department of Energy earlier this year said cybersecurity was one of the top challenges facing the power grid, which is exacerbated by the interdependence between the grid and water, telecommunications, transportation, and emergency response systems.

And The Hill reported a year ago that a power grid attack is a nightmare scenario.

The threat of an attack on the nation’s power grid is all too real for the network security professionals who labor every day to keep the country safe.

“In order to restore civilized society, the power has got to be back on,” said Scott Aaronson, who oversees the Electricity Subsector Coordinating Council (ESCC), an industry-government emergency response program.

While cybersecurity experts and industry executives describe such warnings as alarmist, intelligence officials say people underestimate how destructive a power outage can be.

The most damaging kind of attack, specialists say, would be carefully coordinated to strike multiple power stations.

If hackers were to knock out 100 strategically chosen generators in the Northeast, for example, the damaged power grid would quickly overload, causing a cascade of secondary outages across multiple states. While some areas could recover quickly, others might be without power for weeks.

But the greatest threat is from the electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) emanating from a near-space atomic detonation. In one instant, power grids across most of the country could be rendered useless. Some estimates of deaths caused, not by the atomic blast but by the years-long effects of sudden reversion to a 18th-century way of life, are in the many millions.

Just last month former CIA Director James Woolsey wrote that,

... former senior national security officials of the Reagan and Clinton administrations warned that North Korea should be regarded as capable of delivering by satellite a small nuclear warhead, specially designed to make a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack against the United States. According to the Congressional EMP Commission, a single warhead delivered by North Korean satellite could blackout the national electric grid and other life-sustaining critical infrastructures for over a year—killing 9 of 10 Americans by starvation and societal collapse.

Two North Korean satellites, the KMS-3 and KMS-4, presently orbit over the U.S. on trajectories consistent with surprise EMP attack.

Ninety-percent of Americans dead? I would not go that far, but more than 10 million, certainly. Probably multiples of that.

So why does North Korea have two satellites in polar orbits, each traversing over the United States several times per day?

Having been a nuclear target analyst in my military career, I find this simply horrifying.

Update: There are many more threats to the country's grid than just EMP or conventional sabotage. "In 1989, for example, 6 million residents of Quebec lost power for nine hours following a geomagnetic disturbance from a solar storm."

What about truly massive solar storms? These are usually called Coronal Mass Ejections and if large enough the ejected solar mass, not just radiation, can penetrate the earth's atmosphere. A "significant flare" occurred less than three years ago.

Much larger CMEs than this have reached earth very recently.

Solar storms would primarily affect the power grid, and are not likely to harm things like computers.  Also, solar storms would only disrupt communications temporarily, and would not be likely to cause direct harm to communications equipment (except for satellites).   An extremely large solar storm, though, would induce geomagnetic currents that could destroy a substantial fraction of the very largest transformers on the power grid (possibly over much of the world).  If this happened, electric power loss due to a large solar storm would be out for a period of years and possibly decades.  Unlike nuclear EMP, such a solar storm is an eventual inevitability.

The last solar storm that could have caused this level of damage happened in 1859, before the power grid was in place (although in 1921 a large solar storm, of briefer duration than the 1859 event, occurred which affected a much smaller area of the planet). The power grid has only been in place for a fraction of one percent of human history, and a really large solar storm (of the size and duration of the 1859 event) has not happened in that time.  There is a general assumption that any solar event that is similar to, or larger than, the 1859 solar superstorm will simply never happen again, although there is no justification for such an assumption -- in fact, we know that this assumption is false. There is a good possibility that such a large-scale solar storm will happen in this century. If it happens in the current situation without adequate spares for our largest transformers, a large part of the worldwide power grid (including 70 to 100 percent of the United States power grid) will be down for years.

Those transformers are custom manufactured for each site. They are not pieces that simply roll off an assembly line. But reverting to an 18th century lifestyle isn't the half of it. We'd also revert to an 18th-century economy. Absent the US national grid alone, to say nothing of Europe's grid and western Asia's, the worldwide economy would simply collapse. Very hard and very fast.

The net worth of the typical American would simply vanish because money today is almost purely electronic. SFGate reports of an ice cream store whose owner kept the store opened despite having no power - may as well sell as much ice cream as possible before it melted, right? But "sales were few and far between."

“No one pays cash anymore,” he said, spoon in hand as a siren wailed outside. “I’m angry. I’m annoyed."

Charge and debit cards are not money, they are promissory notes, basically IOUs. In an EMP or CME, you might have had $50,000 just sitting in your savings account, but not any more. The ledgers would still show it but they are mostly electronic, too. And banks don't keep much cash on hand, anyway. Same for international commerce and currencies. They'd be shut down.

Life would become nasty, brutish, and short very quickly. Civil violence would reach unimaginable proportions as commodities (like food and drugs) become immediately scarce. It would be a zombie apocalypse, minus the zombies.

Explosive tragedy in Mexico

This is not Aleppo, Syria. It is the San Pablito fireworks market in Tultepec, Mexico, near Mexico City.



People were killed:

Mexico City, Dec 21 (IANS) At least 26 people were killed in a fireworks market explosion near Mexico City, an official said.

Mexico State Prosecutor Alejandro Gomez raised the toll of the Tuesday's blast from the previous nine deaths, Xinhua news agency reported citing a local television.

Earlier on Tuesday, Mexican federal police said on Twitter that at least nine persons were killed in an explosion Tuesday at the San Pablito fireworks market in Tultepec, a town close to the capital Mexico City.

At least 60 people were initially reported by Luis Felipe Puente, director of Civil Protection, to have been injured in the blast.

Firefighters and rescue teams from the state and capital converged at the site following the blast.

More recent reports state the death toll is "at least 29."

Hurricane Matthew is bad and might get doubly worse

In "something you don't see every day" department (link):

Here is Matthew's present track prediction:

 The NOAA link is here (may be a live-update link).

And here is Nicole's track prediction:

Fortunately, Nicole is not moving much. The NOAA site says, "If a storm is expected to dissipate within 5 days, its track will be shorter." So hopefully it will. But what will happen if the two hurricanes collide? Maybe no one knows, but it won't be good.

The furious darkness

In an instant the tornado passed right through — literally — his house. Schultz rode the debris from the collapsing chimney down, losing his grip on the phone, getting entangled in a bedsheet, and becoming buried.  

Moments later a neighbor was digging him out of the rubble. Schultz was out and standing within four minutes. 

The neighbor sat him down on one of the house’s beams, but told him, “Don’t look down.”  

“Why?” Schultz asked.  

“Because your wife is right under you. She’s dead.”

A huge tornado killed his wife and destroyed their home. He filmed the whole thing.

When your house explodes

It looks like this.

Fifteen people were injured, two of them seriously, when an explosion ripped through a house in New Jersey on Tuesday.

The blast is thought to have been caused by a ruptured gas main, and seven of the injured were maintenance workers who were trying to locate the source of the leak.

The explosion happened about 90 minutes after police received the first report of a strong gas smell in the area.

Tsunami's 10 year anniversary

Ten years ago a devastating tsunami struck the Indian Ocean, killing a quarter-million people, mostly in Indonesia.

We tend to think of such catastrophes as rare, once-per-millennium events. But now research shows there is no safety in elapsed time. Another such wave may strike any day now - or perhaps not for hundreds of years or more.

Apocalypse without zombies

Huge Solar Storm of 2012 Would Have Sparked Calamity on Earth



If there is any reason to be a "prepper" this is it. If this event happens to hit earth next time, it will cause massive failures of the electrical grid. How widespread can't be predicted in advance. But very potentially it could cause total failures over multiple states, if not the whole country.

Anyone want to estimate how many people would die? Refrigeration and medical equipment won't work. Patients receiving dialysis, for example, would face a terrible near future. Life saving drugs could be neither preserved nor replenished. Food stocks in grocery stores would be exhausted fast and perishable foods would, quickly. With the national transportation system system de-powered, hunger then even actual starvation would set in before long.

What I would like to know is what protective measures can be taken. A CME is not like an EMP, although it would have many similar effects. Are only active, closed electrical circuits vulnerable? Would autos still be operable if, say, their batteries were disconnected prior to arrival of the main force of the CME? What about portable or home generators? Battery-powered lights? If all these things remained operable and only connected grids got blasted then disaster assistance could be reasonable quick and effective.

And the scientists say that within the next 10 years there is a 12 percent chance we will get hit. Them's not good odds.

Update: Reader John Moore, an electrical engineer who has studied effects of both EMPs and CMEs, emails useful info, but it's grim news:

CME is easier to protect against than HEMP, because it only has one of the effects of EMP - the geomagnetic disturbance. I don't know whether HEMP or CME is of potentially greater magnitude, though.

The EMP reports discuss in detail the EMP effects and measures to protect against them. These measures are not very expensive to do a good job of protecting the electric grid, and it is a scandal that our government has done no more than study the problem.

You ask:

... would autos still be operable? Yes, most would, as a CME has only very low frequency effects. Even with HEMP, many autos would be operable.

... are only active, closed circuits vulnerable? Only circuits with long wires are vulnerable. I don't know *how* long, but we are talking pretty long - like power lines.

...portable and home generators? If they were not connected to the grid at the time, they'd still work. Even if they were connected, some would survive, maybe many.

...battery power lights? No problem.

...radios (you didn't ask)? No problem.

I think the big danger is you last statement: " then disaster assistance could be reasonable quick and effective." I suspect that the enormous magnitude of the disaster would swamp the world's capacity for disaster assistance, resulting in millions of deaths and enormous disruption. Just the destruction of the electrical grid would pretty much wreck modern society. These days, vital commodities are delivered in a just-in-time manner - there are not huge stockpiles of food or medicine. The good news is that most people can survive a month without food (when I was in SERE school, they emphasized this: stay hydrated and don't worry about eating). The bad news is that it would take months to restore the grid, due to the loss of the HV and EHV transformers that would have to be re-manufactured and then transported (which is very hard - these things are huge). As you mentioned, water systems would go out. 

In a disaster that covered most of the US, I doubt if there are enough generators and fuel to be able to even run just the water system (and don't forget its computerized controls). Communications systems (but not individual radios for the most part) would go out, due to both direct effects and the loss of power. A lot of computer systems would fail, due to both direct effects and loss of power. It would be a nightmare.

 Millions of deaths? Yes, I would say so, potentially tens thereof. What the upper limit could be is incalculable.

Who's coming across the border?

Here's a thousand words' worth of explanation.

Not to mention the unmitigated medical disaster that's already here.

The Search for Religious Relevance

The Search for Religious Relevance:

The 800 pound (363 kg) gorilla in the room is that Christianity is supposed to affect the culture. Christianity admixes with genetics and environment and other memetic residues to produce certain kinds of culture. Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism produce different kinds. Everyone expects this. And what kind of culture is American Christianity producing today? One in which “Gay Marriage” can go from a funny joke to a self-evident sacred right in less than a generation. An entire generation of “Youth Pastors” is quite busy making Jesus look incredibly cool and could not be reached for comment. 

Forgive me, but I don’t think that’s how Christianity is supposed to work for meaningful definitions of “work”. Well, why the hell not? The first reason is theological: Go ye therefore and teach all nations presumes a position of cultural superiority. Christianity is not just a propositional gloss that can be painted over an extant, formerly pagan culture, leaving it unchanged (except that now they’ll get to go to Heaven when they die). Certainly Christianity can add local customs to its own nature (cf. pagan winter solstice and spring equinox customs), but it cannot water down its universal call to repentance and holiness and kinship within the Church. 

When it does, it ceases to be authentic Christianity. The relevance-minded Christians who imagine Jesus’ Great Commission as being about just getting people to pray certain prayers therefore sell the real gospel short. Conversion is a lifelong result of a lifelong commitment to a lifelong process. The signs of true spiritual conversion may be seen far more clearly in the reduction of various social pathologies than in the number of hands raised “with every head bowed and every eye closed”. Faith without works is dead. 

The second reason I believe that Christianity drives culture is historical. Christianity came and changed the course of empires. Kings and princes and emperors once depended upon the Christian Church for their legitimacy. In return for the favor, secular rulers enforced Christian norms in their domains. For example, when the faith spread to England, cousin marriage soon died out and that nation experienced dramatic growth in well-being and collective power. Christianity played a crucial role in establishing science, the university system, modern economic and legal practices—virtually everything we associate with Christendom. 

The EndWhenever Christians try to make their religion hip and relevant to the wider culture, it reveals instantly a wider culture that wears the pants in the relationship. Christianity adopts the role of the supplicating special pleader. It is not a masculine Christianity. It reduces religious practice to a source of entertainment or therapy–at most a curiosity to place alongside all the accouterments of a life otherwise untouched by its life-giving, culture-bestowing essence. You might get attendance figures or increased donations, but you’ll never get a transformed culture. You’ve already given that up as unnecessary cultural baggage. 

So the question really never was how to make religion relevant to culture, but how to make culture relevant to religion. If people cannot make themselves relevant to religion, then the problem lies with them… and, by the way, they know it. Whosoever is the coolest doesn’t need to qualify himself to others. If you are tempted to attend a church growth conference that conflicts with your first wedding anniversary, just say “No”. Please stay home and cherish the company of your wife instead.

What if Yellowstone erupted when we got EMP-attacked?

The Yellowstone caldera is the remains of a super-volcano that has erupted three times during the last two million years, the most recent 640,000 years ago. The caldera isn't dead; it could erupt again any time. In fact, lesser volcanic eruptions have occurred many times since then.



Such an eruption would be a world-significant event and would devastate life in almost all the western United States. Compare the previous eruptions' ash fall with that of Mount St. Helen's ash fall:

This map from the U.S. Geological Service shows the range of the volcanic ash that was deposited after the three huge eruptions over the last 2.1 million years.

Reader Don. P. emails:

I found this little article on alleged contingency planning in the event that the Yellowstone caldera erupts. I don’t know how reliable the site is; today is the first time I’ve looked at it. Intriguing, at least for me. And much less depressing than reading most of the political commentary out there. 

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/662805-yellowstone-volcano-eruption-report-claims-that-us-has-contingency-deal-with-brazil-australia/

I’m reminded of sf writer H. Beam Piper’s Future History series, where much of what was left of western civilization is relocated to the southern hemisphere before a nuclear war devastates the northern hemisphere.

According to the site, the South Africans say that if the caldera goes up, they will not accept American refugees because we are too white.

But if the Yellowstone caldera exploded at the same time as a North Korean EMP warhead a few hundred miles overhead, we'd really be screwed!

Obama finds a new Snidely Whiplash to demonize

'Show Some Heart' Obama Slams Insurance Companies At Hurricane Photo Op:

President Barack Obama had nothing but praise for all the government agencies involved in the clean-up and recovery effort in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy as he spoke from Staten Island Thursday afternoon. Staten Island has been the center of some of the worst devastation in New York and has also been the focal point of much anger from residents who felt ignored by government rescue efforts.  

At the end of his remarks, which included several "shout outs" for individuals in his government and in the Cuomo Administration in New York, President Obama dealt a blow to private insurance companies by saying, "not everybody's gonna be satisfied. I gotta tell ya, the insurance companies and some of the other private sector folks who are involved in this, we need you to show some heart and some spirit to help people re-build as well."

Just wait: the might of the federal government will soon descend upon Big Insurance. Like BP during the oil spill, they'll be coerced into donating millions of dollars to a Democrat-approved slush fund purportedly for general disaster relief, but really to bring them under the government's heavy thumb and to siphon money to Democrat-friendly businesses and unions in the afflicted areas.

Thank you, proles. See you in four years

In my summary of the future of the Republican Party (it ain't got one), I also laid out what the Democrats triumphant means for rank and file blue voters. One bullet point was:

• Crony capitalism? You ain't seen nothing yet. Increasingly, government contracts and stimulus money (by whatever name) will be funneled to the ideologically pure. You, the ordinary Democrat voter, will be frozen out of this largess. You are of neither use nor concern to the Party except on election day. You are a mere prole. Get used to it.

Commenter Ellie at Small Dead Animals observes the still-massive failures of Sandy relief efforts and concludes:

Barack Obama doesn't care about white people!
Seriously though: the election's over, he doesn't need these people's votes now. He spent today on the golf course according to reports, and next week he and Michelle head off to Thailand for some R&R. All hail Emperor Nero and Queen Marie Antoinette!
Posted by: Ellie in T.O. at November 10, 2012 7:49 PM

Obama to Thailand while untold numbers of his base constituency suffers and starves?

Well, yes.

And don't forget that just after the election, Obama went straight back to his primary presidential duty: GOLF AND PRIORITIES: New Yorkers Still In The Dark As Obama Hits The Links. 

The proles' chickens are coming home to roost.

Another commenter dissects why Sandy relief is failing to relive and concludes,

The only organizations in this whole farce that showed up like they meant it have been churches. Not seeing much of that covered in the MSM are we?

Certainly not. The oldline media are the Ministry of Truth.