[im]perfect storm. Week one.




Call him Ishmael.

Hurricane Neocon

U.S. Military Deaths in Iraq Pass 1,000

Hurricane Kitty

Media View Kitty Kelley's Bush Book With Caution

It is the book that some Republicans have been worrying about for weeks, filled with lurid allegations by a celebrity biographer whose controversial reputation has only boosted her sales.

Kitty Kelley's volume on the Bush family won't be published until next week, but the White House communications director yesterday dismissed the book as "garbage"...

Peter Gethers, vice president of Random House and Kelley's editor, said the publisher's chief counsel and Kelley's own lawyer went over the book "with a fine-toothed comb."

"It was as extensive a legal read as a publisher could give," Gethers said. "Some things didn't make it, and we're 100 percent confident of the things that made it in. We erred on the side of caution because we knew how hard she was going to be hit."

Hurricane Peruvian Flake

Though she is not regarded as a serious biographer by any stretch, Kelley is undeniably a bestseller. The initial print run for the book is 600,000 copies, and anticipation about its contents sent a frisson through Republicans at last week's convention.

And, after a highly effective campaign to smear the wartime record of John Kerry, the Kelley biography is seen as an occasion for Democrats to sling some mud of their own against a Christian president who claims to stand for conservative values.

Hurricane Southern Comfort

After weeks in which John Kerry's military record has been picked to pieces, President George Bush now faces a double blast of scrutiny over his own past, raising new questions over his avoidance of the Vietnam draft and his alleged use of drugs.

The first salvo is due to be fired on CBS tonight, when Ben Barnes, a Democrat and the lieutenant governor of Texas in 1968, will explain his role in securing for the 22-year-old Yale graduate Bush a coveted place in the state's Air National Guard - a unit so full of the sons of Texas's rich and powerful that it was known as the "Champagne Unit".

Hurricane Froomkin

Bush's Youth Under Scrutiny

After weeks in which the political discourse was nearly dominated by the scrutinizing of Sen. John F. Kerry's conduct in the Vietnam War era, President Bush now may find himself under the microscope and on the defensive for actions in his past.

Hurricane Alamo, Tropical Storm Gannett

'Texans for Truth' ad challenges Bush on Guard service
A group called Texans for Truth will release a TV ad today in which a former lieutenant colonel in the Alabama Air National Guard says neither he nor his friends saw George W. Bush when the future president was supposed to be with their unit in 1972.

Hurricane Richard

"[Cheney] blamed the Clinton and Reagan administrations for teaching terrorists that 'they could strike us with relative impunity' and that 'if they hit us hard enough, they could change our policy.' Mr. Cheney cited the attack on United States Marines barracks in Beirut in 1983, in the first Reagan term, along with the 1993 killings of American soldiers in Somalia, a 1996 truck bombing at a housing complex in Saudi Arabia where many Americans lived, the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in East Africa and the attack on the destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000."

Hurricane Dick

"It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States," Cheney told about 350 supporters at a town-hall meeting in this Iowa city.

If Kerry were elected, Cheney said the nation risks falling back into a "pre-9/11 mind-set" that terrorist attacks are criminal acts that require a reactive approach. Instead, he said Bush's offensive approach works to root out terrorists where they plan and train, and pressure countries that harbor terrorists.

Hurricane Marcus Welby

Medicare Premiums To Rise By 17.5%
Percentage Increase Biggest in 15 Years

Health insurance premiums for senior citizens enrolled in Medicare will rise 17.5 percent in 2005, bringing the total monthly payment to $78.20, Bush administration officials said yesterday.

Hurricane Safer World

MOSCOW – Russian investigators said Arab operatives linked to Al Qaida played a major role in the takeover of a Russian school in which 400 people were killed.

Russian officials said authorities have determined that 10 of the 32 suicide attackers who took over a high school in Beslan in North Ossetia last week were nationals from several Arab countries. Most of the attackers were Chechens and Ingush who had been trained at Al Qaida camps in Afghanistan.

The 10 Arab nationals came from Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Syria, officials said. They said security forces seized notebooks in Arabic in the school taken over by insurgents. Officials said survivors told authorities that some of the captors spoke Arabic during the three-day hostage ordeal.

Hurricane Safer World II

Russians Find Same Explosive in the Wreckage of Both Planes

MOSCOW — Residue of the same type of explosive found in the wreckage of one of two Russian airliners that crashed last week has been found in the second, authorities said Saturday.

"Traces of hexogen were found in the course of an additional investigation of fragments of the Tu-134 airplane that crashed in the Tula region," Sergei Ignatchenko, a spokesman for the Federal Security Service, or FSB, told the Russian news agency Interfax.

The FSB, the main successor to the KGB, announced Friday the discovery of traces of hexogen in the wreckage of the other plane, which crashed in the Rostov region in southern Russia. Ninety people died in the crashes after both jets took off from the same Moscow airport Tuesday night.

Heavy squalls. Lots of asymmetical gusts. There were always lots of reasons why Swift Boats wouldn't be like Willie Horton. Somebody really should tell Karl Rove "people who live in glass houses..." Some of the above is doubtless gonna be "teacup tempest." Doesn't matter. Brands can't fake their core. Famed advertising legend Bill Bernbach said it well: "Great advertising will only kill a bad product quicker."

As noted below, fear makes us do ill-considered things. And even lazy reporters can only be gamed and fluffed and dared so much. Even they can't ignore the fact that, sometimes, the shit is coming down so heavy, you need a hat. Or a harpoon. White whale time, batten down the hatches.