At Least 37 confirmed dead in monster Oklahoma tornado

"After the ear-shattering howl of the killer storm subsided, survivors emerged from shelters to see an apocalyptic vision -- the remnants of cars twisted and piled on each other to make what had been a parking lot look like a junk yard. 

Bright orange flames roaring from a structure that was blazing even as rain continued to fall. At least one school was in the tornado's devastation zone in Moore, Oklahoma. Lance West, a reporter for CNN affiliate KFOR, said that rescuers were searching for students trapped in debris at Plaza Towers Elementary School. 

There were no immediate reports on the condition of the children but rescuers swarmed to the scene to begin a painstaking search. There were 75 students and staff at the school when the storm hit, KFOR reported. "Our worst fears are becoming realized this afternoon," Bill Bunting, with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Storm Prediction Center, told CNN soon after the tornado struck.


The massive tornado first touched down in Newcastle and churned toward Interstate 44 and S.W. 149th Street. It ripped down Santa Fe and hit Briarwood Elementary School, destroying the building. Parents ran to the school, trying to make sure their children were all right. Firefighters and police are also on scene, trying to rescue trapped students and staff. The tornado left behind incredible destruction. It wiped out entire neighborhoods, leaving behind piles of debris." 


Possibly the worst tornado to ever touch down in an American city.
Horrible reports of children and teachers unaccounted for.

This is something the medical examiner from Moore, OK, said he's never seen in his life.

I will post the Red Cross numbers where we can donate to the survivors and the families of the victims.


Horrible.

UPDATE 11 PM EDST:

Number of dead at 51.


RED CROSS DISASTER RELIEF FUND

MORE ON HOW TO HELP TORNADO VICTIMS

SOME THINGS THAT NEED TO BE REPORTED

Much is being shouted in Scandal Land.  But much has also been lost down the memory hole. 

To refresh our memories while the Scandal Land Follies are being played out, and to bring some proportion to the hysteria that is being manufactured by the opposition, I'm posting the following (with links):




"The one dismal benefit of this particular NotSufficientlyTaxExemptGate pseudocrisis may be that, as with all screw ups or distortions or outright abuses of government power, it's only discovered to be Very Very Bad when a conservative somewhere finds themselves on the receiving end of it. 

Under the last administration, protesting against the Iraq War got you put on an actual Pentagon list of possible terrorist threats, and nobody from the other side of the aisle gave a flying f--k. Quakers got put on that one. Effing Quakers. 

The uncanny nature by which the Terror Alert Level got itself raised before important elections or other politically helpful dates didn't result in outrage even after one of the architects of the Rainbow of Terror admitted that yes, he was pressured to do exactly that. 

And yes, as others have pointed out, one of the vanishingly few times the IRS ever investigated a church for possible violations of their nonpartisan, nonprofit status it was for an anti-war sermon, during the Bush administration, two days before the election that won Bush a second term. That wasn't a scandal either. During the same year the IRS launched an investigation of the NAACP for opposing Bush's reelection. 

No Republicans were calling for Bush to resign over that particular outrage. 

 The Fast and Furious program, long been peddled by current Republicans as the worstest scandal to hit anything anywhere until the next worstest scandal, started under Bush. 

Nobody gives a damn. 

During the Bush administration, there were 13 terror attacks on U.S. diplomatic compounds (not including Iraq or Afghanistan), killing 98. 

You couldn't find a Republican lawmaker then who could even tell you what the talking points for a particular bombing or rocket attack or armed assault were at the time, much less one who decided that the real scandal was whether administration officials classified the attack as a "terrorist attack" or an "act of terror" in the days afterwards, and what might that difference mean? 

What's this? In trying to track down illegal leaks of classified information, the Department of Justice obtained reporter phone records? Yeah, that's nasty. And it's funny how that kept happening; under the Bush administration, the FBI did it to the New York Times. It was under the Bush administration, in fact, that we decided government could obtain all phone records, nationwide, and no longer even needed a reason for doing it, and if they had done it illegally—oops!—then we passed a damn law making it legal after-the-fact and immunizing all the people who did it. 

That's how much of a non-scandal it turned out to be. We were so damn helpful that we passed laws allowing government to break laws. What about the very Department of Justice itself being politicized—being intentionally populated with members of a single ideology while removing less stalwartly ideological members? That happened. 

That was a damn fine example of, in McConnell's parlance, an administration using the powers of government to "squelch" their ideological opponents. It was almost a true scandal, even, given how overt it was and how close the architects were to the White House itself. Almost, anyway, but you'd be surprised at how quickly we can get over these things."





Down the memory hole!  

Glad to be able to remind people who are apoplectic over these "scandals" what REALLY GOOD scandals look like.

And I'm glad to remind everyone of how this is more partisan than it is "scandal." More attempts at throwing more doo-doo at the president, hoping it will stick.

Instead of waiting for all the facts to come out, the rightwing noise machine had indicted and impeached the president.

This has never been about getting to the truth in the Benghazi tragedy, the IRS bungling, or the DoJ leak tracking.  

This is and always has been about "getting Obumma."

John Dean: I knew Richard Nixon. I actually worked for him. Barack Obama is NO Richard Nixon.

John Dean in his own words debunks those who are howling about President Obama being the second coming of Richard Nixon.  In their feverish, crazed state of scandalitis, anything that their delirium presents to them seems like reality.

Here's John Dean who intimately knew how Richard M. Nixon, when it came to being a crook, was in a class all by himself.

"John Dean, who served as White House counsel under the disgraced former president, said that anyone applying the Nixonian label to Obama is 'challenged in their understanding of history.' 

There's no legitimate comparison, Dean argued, between the Internal Revenue Service's improper targeting of conservative groups, the Department of Justice's subpoena of Associated Press phone records or the investigation into the deadly attack in Benghazi, Libya and the scandals that ultimately led to Nixon's undoing.

 'There are no comparisons. They’re not comparable with any of the burgeoning scandals,' Dean told the Boston Globe. 

 Dean was present in the Oval Office when Nixon suggested using the IRS to target his foes." 







The truth is that every president since Nixon — except possibly Gerald Ford — has been compared to Nixon at some point, according to The New Republic‘s Eric Kingsbury: 

 "Of course, most of these comparisons require a bit of historic amnesia. While Nixon used the IRS to intimidate and investigate his enemies, there’s no evidence that Obama had any clue about the agency’s wrongdoings. There also doesn’t seem to be any cover-up, since the story itself was uncovered by an Inspector General report that was slated to be made public this week. And it appears that the Justice Department broke its own binding regulations, but not necessarily the letter of the law, in secretly obtaining two months’ worth of Associated Press phone records. It’s troubling, just not quite Nixon territory." 

Other recent presidents — notably George W. Bush — came much closer to Nixonland. 

President Obama isn’t even in Iran-Contra territory, another Republican scandal the GOP often likes to invoke. 

Notably, the only scandals those on the right can use as a reference point for a real administration-shaking crisis were all perpetrated by Republicans.