Mostly Monday Reads: The Bad and the UGLY

“Hallelujah! Amen!” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

The Texas flooding this weekend was shocking and sad. Aren’t there people, equipment, and methods to mitigate and alert people to these things in this country? Shouldn’t there be people on the ground who can handle the rescue and recovery at least? Well, first, remember this is Abbot’s and Paxton’s Texas, and this is America’s MAGA/Doge experiment. While there was nothing that could stop the flood, Texas and American Republicans failed the people on the ground.  Texas is still early in the investigation process and is still in search and rescue mode. Mexican Firefighters came to the rescue yesterday, while I read about how Texas tanked a bill that would’ve made a big difference. NOAA did a Yeoman’s job as both predicting and alerting the area about dangerous flash flooding. However, cuts by Doge and the Trump administration had an impact. I have to say I’m getting progressively worried about peak hurricane season next month, as Tropical Storm Chantal created problems in the Carolinas.

If you look at what’s still standing on the FEMA website, you’ll see the substantial benefits of mitigation planning. The first deadly mistake in this catastrophe was the biggest, and it sits on the shoulders of the Texas Legislature. This is from the station KSAT. You’ll notice the comments by the idiot who represents this area.  He couldn’t recall why he voted against it, but thought it was likely the cost. Well, now look at the costs they’ve incurred to date.  You want a start a spreadsheet and try to quantify the loss of all those little girls? “Texas lawmakers failed to pass a bill to improve local disaster warning systems this year.”

For the last three days, state Rep. Wes Virdell has been out with first responders in Kerr County as they searched for victims and survivors from the devastating floods that swept through Central Texas early Friday morning.

“All the focus right now is let’s save all the lives we can,” Virdell, who was still on the scene in Kerrville, told The Texas Tribune on Sunday.

Virdell’s closeup view of the havoc wreaked on his district has made a lasting impression, he said, and left him reconsidering a vote he made just a few months ago against a bill that would have established a statewide plan to improve Texas’ disaster response, including better alert systems, along with a grant program for counties to buy new emergency communication equipment and build new infrastructure like radio towers.

“I can tell you in hindsight, watching what it takes to deal with a disaster like this, my vote would probably be different now,” said Virdell, a freshman GOP lawmaker from Brady.

The measure, House Bill 13, would have created a new government council to establish the emergency response plan and administer the grant program, both of which would have been aimed at facilitating better communication between first responders. The bill also called for the plan to include “the use of outdoor warning sirens,” like those used in tornado-prone Texas counties, and develop new “emergency alert systems.”

Authored by Rep. Ken King, R-Canadian, the legislation was inspired by last year’s devastating wildfires in the Panhandle, where more than 1 million acres burned — including part of King’s property — and three people died. The bill failed in the Texas Senate, prompting newfound questions about whether lawmakers should have done more to help rural, cash-strapped counties stave off the deadly effects of future natural disasters.

As of Sunday evening, at least 79 people had died in the floods. Of those, 68 were in Kerr County, many of them camping or attending a private summer camp along the Guadalupe River.

Virdell, a Hill Country native who lives about 100 miles away, made his way to Kerrville early Friday after seeing news that rains raised the Guadalupe more than two feet, swamping its banks in Hunt and other river communities that host thousands of holiday vacationers.

He stressed an alarm system may not have helped much in this instance because the floodwaters came so quickly. Between 2 and 7 a.m., the Guadalupe River in Kerrville rose from 1 to more than 34 feet in height, according to a flood gauge in the area.

“I don’t think there was enough evidence to even suspect something like this was going to happen,” he said. ”I think even if you had a warning system there, this came in so fast and early in the morning it’s very unlikely the warning system would have had much effect.”

Virdell said he doesn’t recall the specifics of the bill or why he opposed it, though he guessed ”it had to do with how much funding” was tied to the measure.

What’s that old saying about an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure? It makes me believe that some people really do not want to be taught the basics of reality.  My first experience with meteorologists came when I was hired by the Global Weather Wings of the Navy and Air Force to help them improve their process of making forecasts and getting them out way back in the early 1990s. The motivation was the death of soldiers and the accompanying loss of equipment of troops in a huge sandstorm in the Middle East, and a look back on the loss of helicopters and troops trying to rescue the Iran Hostages. A lot came out of that effort, including looking for better types of radar, mitigation, forecasting in general, and then alert systems.  My clearance only went so far, so the Birds in the Back did a lot of work I never really saw.  I just know the systematic approach to it all caused a lot more success in avoiding weather in the Gulf Wars that followed.

I’m still a volunteer storm and weather spotter with my local NWS. Having grown up in Tornado Alley and now in Hurricane Central, my wonderment about weather continues. I just reported and talked to a NOAA forecaster about some severe lightning we had in the hood last month. They love their equipment, but they love the reports from the ground too. It helps them to look back and determine if they could’ve seen that coming by radar patterns. I wish FARTUS and Elon had a strong fascination with weather.  It would be more useful than a fascination with a Mars colony and shark attacks. Their impact on NOAA is and will cause the loss of lives as well as damage to families and communities. I’ve lived it and hope you never have to.

This is from Wired. “Meteorologists Say the National Weather Service Did Its Job in Texas. DOGE cut hundreds of jobs at the NWS, but experts who spoke to WIRED say the agency accurately predicted the state’s weekend flood risk.” We were lucky this time. We won’t be so lucky if it’s a wind event because that takes the best radar to determine the subtleties of wind shift, and Hegesth has cut their access to the military satellites. I got hammered on Facebook by some folks wanting to point fingers at the NWS. I know we all want them to get back to peak operations, but NOAA did its job despite the chaos, and I do not want to see them taking a hit they don’t deserve. They’re missing staff, and that really good winds aloft satellite information that’s best got from the military, but this was a rain event. The exact location of the worst of it can’t be predicted. They just put out a get the fuck to high ground to folks where it’s likely to be worse.

Some local and state officials have said that insufficient forecasts from the National Weather Service caught the region off guard. That claim has been amplified by pundits across social media, who say that cuts to the NWS and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, its parent organization, inevitably led to the failure in Texas.

But meteorologists who spoke to WIRED say that the NWS accurately predicted the risk of flooding in Texas and could not have foreseen the extreme severity of the storm. What’s more, they say that what the NWS did forecast this week underscores the need to sustain funding to the crucial agency.

Meteorologists first had an idea that a storm may be coming for this part of Texas last weekend, after Tropical Storm Barry made landfall in Mexico. “When you have a tropical system, it’s just pumping moisture northward,” says Chris Vagasky, an American Meteorological Society-certified digital meteorologist based in Wisconsin. “It starts setting the stage for heavy rainfall events.”

The NWS office in San Antonio on Monday predicted a potential for “downpours”—as well as heavy rain specifically at nighttime—later on in the week as the result of these conditions. By Thursday, it forecast up to 7 inches of rainfall in isolated areas.

The San Antonio and Hill Country regions of Texas are no stranger to floods. But Friday morning’s storm was particularly catastrophic. The Guadalupe River surged more than 20 feet in just a few hours to its second-highest level in recorded history. Kerr County judge Rob Kelly told media Friday morning that the county “didn’t know this flood was coming.”

“We have floods all the time… we deal with floods on a regular basis,” he said. “When it rains, we get water. We had no reason to believe that this was going to be anything like what’s happened here.”

W. Nim Kidd, the Chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management (TDEM), echoed Kelly’s comments at a press conference with Governor Greg Abbott on Friday. Kidd said that TDEM worked with its meteorologist to “refine” NWS forecasts. “The amount of rain that fell in this specific location was never in any of those forecasts,” he said.

Predicting “how much rain is going to fall out of a thunderstorm, that’s the hardest thing that a meteorologist can do,” Vagasky says. A number of unpredictable factors—including some element of chance—go into determining the amount of rainfall in a specific area, he says.

“The signal was out there that this is going to be a heavy, significant rainfall event,” says Vagasky. “But pinpointing exactly where that’s going to fall, you can’t do that.”

The moral of the story is to make sure your phone will send you emergency alerts from NOAA and from your local emergency center. Then, take it seriously. I lived my entire young life with Tornado Sirens. Each state needs to be prepared and Texas screwed up. The last perspective I want to share is from the Substack of Heather Cox Richardson. Massive floods have been known to be historical events that can change the course of things.  ”

All five living former directors of the NWS warned in May that the cuts “[leave] the nation’s official weather forecasting entity at a significant deficit…just as we head into the busiest time for severe storm predictions like tornadoes and hurricanes…. Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life.”

But former NWS officials maintain the forecasts were as accurate as possible and noted the storm escalated abruptly. They told Christopher Flavelle of the New York Times that the problem appeared to be that NWS had lost the staffers who would typically communicate with local authorities to spread the word of dangerous conditions. Molly Taft at Wired confirmed that NWS published flash flood warnings but safety officials didn’t send out public warnings until hours later.

Meanwhile, Kerr County’s most senior elected official, Judge Rob Kelly, focused on local officials, telling Flavelle that the county did not have a warning system because such systems are expensive and “[t]axpayers won’t pay for it.”

Officials will continue to examine the crisis in Texas but, coming as it did after so many deep cuts to government, it has opened up questions about the public cost of those cuts. Project 2025 called for breaking up and downsizing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, claiming its six main offices—including the National Weather Service—“form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity,” by which it meant the fossil fuel industry.

CNN’s Andrew Freedman, Emma Tucker, and Mary Gilbert note that several NWS offices across the country are so understaffed they can no longer operate around the clock, and many are no longer able to launch the weather balloons that provide critical data. The journalists also note that the Trump administration’s 2026 budget calls for eliminating “all of NOAA’s weather and climate research labs along with institutes jointly run with universities around the country.”

Brad Plummer of the New York Times noted that the budget reconciliation bill passed by Republicans last week and signed into law on Friday boosts fossil fuels and destroys government efforts to address climate change, even as scientists warn of the acute dangers we face from extreme heat, wildfires, storms, and floods like those in Texas. Scott Dance of the Washington Post added yesterday that the administration has slashed grants for studying climate change and has limited or even ended access to information about climate science, taking down websites and burying reports.

When a reporter asked Trump, “Are you investigating whether some of the cuts to the federal government left key vacancies at the national weather service or the emergency coordination?” he responded: “They didn’t. I’ll tell you, if you look at that water situation that all is and that was really the Biden setup. That was not our setup. But I wouldn’t blame Biden for it either. I would just say this is a 100-year catastrophe and it’s just so horrible to watch.”

The tragedy in Texas is the most visible illustration of the MAGA attempt to destroy the modern U.S. government, but it is not the only one.

ICE Barbie made a quick photo op trip to Texas to prop up #FARTUS during his Golf Weekend. She’s not going to escape the glare on this one.

I’ll try to post updates as they come out. If you go to the above links, you’ll see the number of items to be adjudicated. There are several motions. Judge Paula Xinis is up for the job! There are several articles up today about Trump’s ICE. Jason Zengerle has a Guest Op Ed up today in the New York Times on the horrible Steven Miller entitled “The Ruthless Ambition of Stephen Miller.”  In short, he hates everyone.

Flash forward eight years, to this past May, when Mr. Miller, still livid and now the White House deputy chief of staff, paid a visit to the Washington headquarters of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where he berated officials for not deporting nearly enough immigrants. He told the officials that rather than develop target lists of gang members and violent criminals, they should just go to Home Depots, where day laborers gather to be hired, or to 7-Eleven convenience stores and arrest the undocumented immigrants they find there.

This time, the officials did what Mr. Miller said. ICE greatly stepped up its enforcement operations, raiding restaurants, farms and work sites across the country, with arrests sometimes climbing to more than 2,000 a day. In early June, after an ICE raid in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles triggered protests, Mr. Trump deployed several thousand National Guard troops and Marines to the city, over the objection of Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The crisis, from the immigration raids that sparked the protests to the militarized response that tried to put the protests down, was almost entirely of Mr. Miller’s making. And it served as a testament to the remarkable position he now occupies in Mr. Trump’s Washington. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, who reportedly accompanied Mr. Miller on his visit to ICE headquarters, seems to defer to him. “It’s really Stephen running D.H.S.,” a Trump adviser said. The attorney general, Pam Bondi, is so focused on preparing for and appearing on Fox News that she has essentially ceded control of the Department of Justice to Mr. Miller, making him, according to the conservative legal scholar Edward Whelan, “the de facto attorney general.” And in a White House where the chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is not well versed or terribly interested in policy — “She’s producing a reality TV show every day,” another Trump adviser said, “and it’s pretty amazing, right?” — Mr. Miller is typically the final word.

There is much truth to the conventional wisdom that the biggest difference between the first and second Trump presidencies is that, in the second iteration, Mr. Trump is unrestrained. The same is true of Mr. Miller. He has emerged as Mr. Trump’s most powerful, and empowered, adviser. With the passage of the big policy bill, ICE will have an even bigger budget to execute Mr. Miller’s vision and, in effect, serve as his own private army. Moreover, his influence extends beyond immigration to the battles the Trump administration is fighting on higher education, transgender rights, discrimination law and foreign policy.

Mr. Miller, 39, is both a committed ideologue and a ruthless bureaucratic operator — and he has cast himself as the only person capable of fully carrying out Mr. Trump’s radical policy vision. “Stephen Miller translates Trump’s instinctual politics into a coherent ideological program,” Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist, said, “and he is the man for the moment in the second term.”

It’s a long article, and it basically starts with his family background. Maybe BB can give us some hints as to why he turned into such a monster. This concluding paragraph shows what a monster this man became.

For the moment, though, it seems Mr. Miller and Mr. Trump are aligned — and that means Mr. Miller has achieved a level of success, and satisfaction, that he didn’t dream of during Mr. Trump’s first term. Last year, in another podcast interview with Mr. Travis and Mr. Sexton, Mr. Miller told the two hosts what to expect if Mr. Trump returned to the White House. “You will wake up every morning so excited to get out of bed to see what’s happening on the border, to see what’s happening with immigration enforcement, you’ll set your alarm clock two hours earlier every morning just to get two more hours of daylight to watch the deportation flights happen,” he said. “That’s how excited you’ll be. That’s how wonderful this will be.”

I continue to wonder if we’ve become so broken that we won’t be able to put ourselves back together again.  I was heartened by my North Shore neighbors who had a slightly bigger parade in their neighborhood in Covington than Temple and I did in the Bywater. The small town is beautiful, and what started out as a cool getaway from New Orleans’ heat became a white flight zone. They had a MAGA approach them on the 4th, who attacked someone and also damaged a truck. The Covington Police came to their rescue, arresting this guy for attacking people who were just exercising their right to Free Speech.

“Covington police make arrest after person attacked while exercising right to free speech.”  The guy has a face that only a mother could love, and if he shaved, he could possibly pass as Steven Miller.

The Covington Police Department has made an arrest after it says someone was attacked for exercising their right to free speech on July 4.

According to police, Jeremy Judice was arrested and is facing a charge of simple battery and criminal damage to property.

Police did not disclose details surrounding the attack; however, they issued the following statement saying they take a zero-tolerance approach to violence in the community:

“This kind of behavior will not be tolerated in the City of Covington, regardless of anyone’s political ideology. We are committed to upholding the rights and safety of all individuals in our city and will take decisive action against those who seek to undermine them,” said Chief Michael Ferrell.

WDSU has reached out to the police department for more information on the incident.

Well, he’d better have enough money for a good lawyer. There are a lot of them that live in that neighborhood.

I hope your Independence Weekend brought you some relief and peace.

What’s on your Reading and Blogging list today?

If it wasn’t for you I’d be happy
If it wasn’t for lies you’d be true
I know that you could be just like you should
If it wasn’t for bad you’d be good