The Times (NY) is doing a live update on the hurricane.

The storm is forecast to crawl inland, drenching a wide area with extremely heavy rains — 20, 30 or even 40 inches of rainfall are predicted in some spots on the Carolina coast. Places as far inland as Charlotte, about 150 miles from the coast, could receive more than 10 inches of rain. Learn more about why slow-moving hurricanes are so dangerous here.

It’s kind of hard to imagine 40 inches of rain.

President Trump on Thursday falsely accused Democrats of inflating the death toll from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico last year, rejecting a government assessment that the storm had claimed nearly 3,000 lives. Read more about the president’s comments.

I’m so sick of “President” Trump abusing his office to lie about important facts.

North Carolina lawmakers are facing renewed criticism for a 2012 law that effectively ordered agencies to ignore an increasing rise in sea levels driven by climate change. The law helped allow rapid coastal development to continue.

I’m sure all the legislators who voted for that law are going to compensate the tragic fools who bought coastal property after that law was passed. Jk; of course they’re not.

Ocean water flows like river down Cape Hatteras Pier Drive and washes over NC 12 already depositing a layer of sand. pic.twitter.com/7HywTv24xz

— Jeff Hampton (@jeffhampton56) September 13, 2018

More on that whole North Carolina coast – climate denial – ignore the future tragedy:

The approaching storm almost certainly gained destructive power from a warming climate, but a 2012 law, and subsequent actions by the state, effectively ordered state and local agencies that develop coastal policies to ignore scientific models showing an acceleration in the rise of sea levels.

In the years since, development has continued with little regard to the long-term threat posed by rising sea levels. And the coastal region’s population and economy have boomed, growing by almost half in the last 20 years.

In other words state law has put a large number of people in harm’s way, because of pure obstinate fingers-in-ears Denial.

Business leaders had been jolted by a state commission’s 2010 report saying that sea levels could rise as much as 39 inches by the year 2100, which would devastate the coast and swamp billions of dollars’ worth of real estate.

What do you do when you’re jolted by information about future events? If you’re at least a little bit reality-based you do your best to figure out what’s the best course of action to deal with those events and then follow that course of action. If not, you just close your eyes hard and Deny.

Before the Republicans gained the upper hand, North Carolina was “a leader in really thoughtful coastal management,” said Geoffrey R. Gisler, a lawyer with the Southern Environmental Law Center.

But the commission’s 2010 report about sea level threw a scare into real estate developers, as well as some coastal residents, who worried that the state would respond with new policies that would crimp their profits or their way of life.

“A lot of folks who have interests in developing areas that are currently vulnerable, and would become more vulnerable with sea level rise, objected to the public finding out that there was this projected significant sea-level rise,” Mr. Gisler said. “And so the legislature decided to prohibit looking that far out.”

In other words, because some real estate developers wanted to make a lot of $$$ selling property on a low-lying coast, the state government lied about what is going to happen to that low-lying coast as the sea levels rise. Republican values in a nutshell.

North Carolina was not alone in turning away from the direr warnings of climate science. The administration of Gov. Rick Scott of Florida discouraged the use of terms like “climate change” and “global warming” in official communications.

President Trump has called climate change a “hoax,” and some federal agencies have played down terms like “climate change” in their reports, publications and websites. But the Trump administration’s actions go beyond just words: it is attempting to roll back dozens of environmental and climate regulations.

Michael Mann, a climate change expert at Pennsylvania State University whose work has shown the links between greenhouse gas emissions and sharply rising temperatures, said that the administration’s policies, including a recently revealed effort to relax Obama-era restrictions on energy companies’ release of methane into the atmosphere, will accelerate climate change.

Yes but that’s tomorrow. Today is all that counts.

Ah, this Mark Knight has a history with the racist cartoons thing. Imagine my surprise.

On Wednesday, the Herald Sun provided its response to critics of the cartoon by doubling down. The newspaper republished Knight’s Serena Williams image as part of a front-page montage of Knight caricatures — including of President Trump — with the headline “WELCOME TO PC WORLD” and the text: “If the self-appointed censors of Mark Knight get their way on his Serena Williams cartoon, our new politically correct life will be very dull indeed.” The cover includes the cheeky label “Satire Free Zone.”

…

In early August, for a cartoon about train-station safety in the Australian state of Victoria, Knight also faced ire for how he drew faceless black figures fighting in the background. Backlash against the image included disgust from one Melbourne politician who wrote: “The racist vilification of Melburnians from the Herald Sun continues apace. Utterly shameful.”

The racist vilification of Melburnians from the Herald Sun continues apace. Utterly shameful. STOP. pic.twitter.com/xLe4RHoK6W

— Rohan Leppert (@RohanLeppert) August 10, 2018

Jeezus. Not much ambiguity there, is there.

If you were worrying about Hurricane Florence, about to dump 20 inches of rain on South and North Carolina, don’t: Rush Limbaugh says it’s all a ploy to big up climate change.

The right-wing radio host said during his show that hurricane forecasting has been amplified in order to convince people that climate change is causing greater natural disasters, noting how previous hurricanes are downgraded before they make landfall.

…

“These things have become very politicized as you know, folks. Hurricanes and hurricane forecasting is much like much else that the left has gotten its hands on, and they politicize these things. For those of you asking, ‘What’s the politics of a hurricane?’ Climate change is the politics of hurricanes. The forecast and the destruction potential doom and gloom is all to heighten the belief in climate change.”

That pesky left. How did it get its hands on hurricanes? They’re so wiggly.

He said it last year, too.

“There is a desire to advance this climate change agenda, and hurricanes are one of the fastest and best ways to do it,” he said during a September 5, 2017 broadcast of The Rush Limbaugh Show.

“You can accomplish a lot just by creating fear and panic. You don’t need a hurricane to hit anywhere. All you need is to create the fear and panic accompanied by talk that climate change is causing hurricanes to become more frequent and bigger and more dangerous, and you create the panic, and it’s mission accomplished, agenda advanced.”

And when the hurricane does happen and it does leave devastation in its path…erm…it’s probably the left seeding the clouds with its big leftwing airplanes.

Linda Bloodworth Thomason tells her story about Les Moonves at CBS and this time it’s not about the sexual assaults, it’s about the systematic and deliberate exclusion of female-created content. It’s a bit like a male publisher telling Jane Austen to stop sending her pesky novels, he doesn’t want them.

I was never sexually harassed or attacked by Les Moonves. My encounters were much more subtle, engendering a different kind of destruction. In 1992, I was given the largest writing and producing contract in the history of CBS. It was for $50 million, involving five new series with hefty penalties for each pilot not picked up.

Penalties for the studio, that is; I didn’t understand that until the end, when she says Moonves refused to pay all but a tiny fraction of them.

Designing Women was my flagship CBS show, and Evening Shade had just been lauded as the best new comedy of the season. CBS chairman Howard Stringer and president Jeff Sagansky attended many of the Designing Women tapings, reveling in the show, quoting the lines and giving us carte blanche to tackle any subject, including sexual harassment, domestic violence and pornography. They even greenlighted an entire episode satirizing Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court nomination. It was, to say the least, exhilarating. Little did I know that it would soon all be over.

By 1995, Mr. Stringer and Mr. Sagansky were gone and a new, unknown (to me) president named Les Moonves had taken over. By then, I was producing a new pilot, prophetically titled Fully Clothed Non-Dancing Women. I was immediately concerned when I heard that Mr. Moonves was rumored to be a big fan of topless bars. Then, someone delivered the news that he especially hated Designing Women and their loud-mouthed speeches. He showed up at the first table read and took a chair directly across from mine (actress Illeana Douglas, who later accused him of sexual harassment, sat next to me). Having been voted most popular in high school, I felt confident that I would be able to charm him. I was wrong. He sat and stared at me throughout the entire reading with eyes that were stunningly cold, as in, “You are so dead.” I had not experienced such a menacing look since Charles Manson tried to stare me down on a daily basis when I was a young reporter covering that trial. As soon as the pilot was completed, Moonves informed me that it would not be picked up. I was at the pinnacle of my career. I would not work again for seven years.

This is odd since her shows had been so successful. He just didn’t like them…although he kept telling her he did, while adding that he wasn’t going to do them anyway.

Then, I began to hear from female CBS employees about his mercurial, misogynist behavior, with actresses being ushered in and out of his office. His mantra, I was told, was, “Why would I wanna cast ’em if I don’t wanna fuck ’em?” And he was an angry bully who enjoyed telling people, “I will tear off the top of your head and piss on your brain!”

Soon, I would hear how he had invited a famous actress to lunch in the CBS dining room. Coming off the cancellation of her iconic detective show, the star began pitching a new one. He informed her that she was too old to be on his network. She began to cry and stood up to go. He stood up too, taking her by the shoulders and telling her, “I can’t let you leave like this.” She reacted, suddenly touched. Then he shoved his tongue down her throat. I know this happened because the star is the person who told me.

“Too old” to be on his network.

I took pride in being part of a network that always seemed to be rife with crazy, interesting, brash women, from Mary Tyler Moore and Rhoda, to Maude, to Murphy Brown, to the Designing Women. Many of these female characters paved the way for women to be single, to pursue careers and equal pay and to lead rich, romantic lives with reproductive rights.

As I walked, I noticed that the portraits of all these iconic women were no longer adorning the walls. I don’t know why and I didn’t ask. I just know that the likes of them have rarely been seen on that network again. Thanks to Les Moonves, I can only guess they all became vaginal swabs in crime labs on CSI Amarillo.

For years, Moonves loaded up the network with highly profitable, male-dominated series, always careful to stir in and amply reward an occasional actress, like the fabulous Patti Heaton or the irresistible Kaley Cuoco. But mostly, he presided over a plethora of macho crime shows featuring a virtual genocide of dead naked hotties in morgue drawers, with sadistic female autopsy reports, ratcheted up each week (“Is that a missing breast implant, lieutenant?” “Yes sir, we also found playing cards in her uterus.”) On the day I officially parted company with CBS, the same day Mr. Moonves said he would only pay a tiny fraction of the penalties, my incredulous agent asked what he should tell me. Mr. Moonves replied, “Tell her to go fuck herself!”

So that’s years of feminist-flavored sitcoms that never happened along with years of misogynist drooling over female corpses.

Oh well, it’s only women.

Now the Herald-Sun, the Australian paper that ran the strikingly racist cartoon of Serena Williams, is doing the free speech martyr act.

The Herald Sun newspaper has republished its controversial cartoon of tennis star Serena Williams on a defiant front page in which it attacked its critics and foreshadowed a future where satire is outlawed.

“WELCOME TO PC WORLD,” read the paper’s headline, over a collection of Mark Knight cartoons, including the depiction of Williams spitting a dummy and stamping on her racquet.

The cartoons are broad, yes, but they’re not racist. That one of Williams – we’ve seen those before.

“If the self-appointed censors of Mark Knight get their way on his Serena Williams cartoon, our new politically correct life will be very dull indeed,” the paper wrote.

No, it really won’t. It’s perfectly possible to do biting satirical cartoons without racism.

Knight has rejected suggestions his depiction of Williams was racist or sexist, while others said it drew on racist tropes of African-Americans.

“I saw the world number one tennis player have a huge hissy fit and spit the dummy,” Knight said on Tuesday.

“That’s what the cartoon was about, her poor behaviour on the court.

“I drew her as an African-American woman. She’s powerfully built. She wears these outrageous costumes when she plays tennis. She’s interesting to draw. I drew her as she is, as an African-American woman.”

Er…as a generic African-American woman in the mind of one male Australian cartoonist. That is not, in fact, her face.

Australian writer Maxine Beneba Clarke said she believed the front page demonstrated a “misunderstanding” of the criticism levelled at the cartoon.

“I think it’s really interesting that the Herald Sun has not included really any other caricatures or cartoons of black people — either Aboriginal people or African-American people, black people of any descent,” said Ms Clarke, who is of Afro-Caribbean descent.

“So what you have is essentially a front page that has pictures like Donald Trump being caricatured for his hair, Tony Abbott being caricatured for his big ears, you know the Prime Minister being portrayed as a muppet, kind of this innuendo that he’s having his strings pulled … and I think it’s fundamentally different to racial caricature.”

Ms Clarke said the front page had been carefully constructed.

“What it’s trying to say is that all people are caricatured, but the criticism of the Serena Williams caricature is that it’s specifically racist, and there’s a reason why the Herald Sun isn’t able to put other cartoons that they’ve reproduced of black people on the front page.”

But what about freedom of cartooning?

Syndicated cartoonist Paul Zanetti, a friend of Knight’s for forty years, said cartooning was under threat from political correctness, and the Herald Sun front page “spelt out exactly where we are at at this point”.

“Political correctness is really all about censoring, it’s about being bullied into conforming to a view of the world,” he said.

No, it really isn’t, at least not necessarily. Take this, for instance:

It’s obvious enough, yeah? I bet even Mark Knight would be able to see it.

Nothing of value is lost if cartoonists no longer do that kind of thing.

Hey it costs money to lock up more and more scary Mexicans illegal immigrants, and that money has to come from somewhere. Oh I know: take it from FEMA, they don’t do anything useful.

Newly revealed documents show the Trump administration took nearly $10 million away from FEMA and other federal agencies to apparently pay for immigration detention centers. A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, the agency which FEMA is a part of, said under no circumstances was any disaster relief funding transferred from FEMA to immigration enforcement efforts.

CBS News’ Jeff Pegues reports the money in question was transferred back in August to ICE. A source at DHS tells Pegues the funds were transferred to ICE for adult detention beds, not to house children. The funds were transferred from FEMA’s operational account at FEMA headquarters.

Over the last year there have been questions about whether FEMA’s resources are stretched thin as it responds to hurricanes and that’s why that nearly $10 million is getting a lot of attention, Pegues reports. Sen. Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon who called the transfer a “scandal,” first made the budget adjustment documents public.

Silly Democrats, always making a fuss about nothing. I’m sure it will be fine. The next big hurricane is at least 24 hours from striking South Carolina, so chill.

Merkley spoke to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Tuesday night about how he obtained the documents.

“It means that just as hurricane season is starting…the administration is working hard to find funds for additional detention camps, and of course this is all part of the child separation policy, and that’s how this information came into my hands because of my work on the issue of trying to stop the child separations,” he said.

The documents came to light as Hurricane Florence, called “the storm of a lifetime,” emptied homes and hospitals in the Carolinas. More than five million people are now under hurricane warnings with the Category 4 storm expected to make landfall on Friday or Saturday.

Florence could cost the East Coast more than $170 billion and damage nearly 759,000 homes and businesses, according to analytics firm CoreLogic. That would make Florence the costliest storm ever to hit the U.S. in terms of property loss.

Well there you go then. $10 million is a drop in the bucket, so it might as well be diverted to separating more parents from their children.