The power is out on Oahu after a thunderstorm yesterday:
HONOLULU (AP) — The island of Oahu lost power during heavy rain and lightning, blacking out the population of some 800,000 people and thousands of tourists including vacationing President-elect Barack Obama.
Residents were advised by the power company and civil authorities to stay home after the Friday evening outage and to conserve water. Several radio stations broadcast emergency information.
Maybe my memory is really bad but when I lived there as a kid, one of the things I noticed was that there *weren’t* any thunderstorms on Oahu. It could be that I lived there during the two years that they had freak weather patterns but it was something I definitely noticed. No lightning.
It is the rainy season in the Hawaiian islands but most of us would adjust fairly well. My older daughter lives on Maui and she told me that Christmas day was unusually hot. It’s probably just a freak weather occurence.
Then again, Obama is staying at a villa on the east side of Oahu (very swank) and apparently, Linda Lingle, the governor, had to take an emergency generator out to him. Obama, in turn, said he would just go back to sleep. Yeah, right, have the secret service freak out during the emergency on your behalf while you catch some Z’s. Typical.
In other news: Lady Caroline says that 9/11 spurred her to public service. That’s great! I’m just not sure there’s much left to do on The Pile eight years after. But it’s swell that 9/11 has finally gotten her attention. I’m pretty sure I would have noticed if she had decided to walk Ground Zero while it was still smokin’ like Citizen Hillary did.
Hillary senatating post-9/11
Or if she had rounded up her friends and taken some hot dish down to the firefighters who sacrificed their lungs for their buried colleagues. That would have been nice. Or if she had lifted one of her perfectly manicured fingers to go public about what she was going to do about the plight of Afghan girls that would have demonstrated global concern in a Peace Corpsy kinda way. Does she even remember the Peace Corps?
“Ask not what Caroline can do for her country. Ask what her country can do for Caroline.”
Caroline is so obviously not cut out for this job:
She agreed to sit down for interviews Friday with The Associated Press and NY1 television.
“I was trying to respect the process. It is not a campaign,” she said. “It was misinterpreted. If I were to be selected, I understand public servants have to be accessible.”
Kennedy said she wished her brother, John F. Kennedy Jr., could see the drama that has developed over her quest for the Senate.
“He would be laughing his head off at seeing what’s going on right now,” she said.
Yes, he would be laughing his head off. He wasn’t the brightest of the Kennedy clan but he had more charisma and better political instincts. Never explain why you are so obviously avoiding the voters. They’ll never buy it anyway.
But what does Caroline think he’d be laughing about? That she is actually facing some resistance to her nervy queue jumping? Maybe the irony of it all that now, after 51 years of avoiding the spotlight, now that she wants to start at the top like her family always told her she could, she is finding herself the butt of ridicule and hostility? That she can’t trade on her name after all? She might have to put some kind of effort into *campaigning*?
Fancy that.
Filed under: Barack Obama | Tagged: Hawaii, Oahu, Obama, thunderstorms | 74 Comments »
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