Free Republic

A Canadian shipment of relief goods bound for storm-ravaged Oklahoma has been stopped at the Canada-U.S. border in Windsor, Ont. American officials will not allow the 20,000 kilograms of food, blankets and diapers into the country until every item on board is itemized in alphabetical order and has the country of origin of every product noted. Dennis Sauve, the volunteer co-ordinator for Windsor Lifeline Outreach and the food bank co-ordinator at the Windsor Christian Fellowship, the two organizations that gathered the goods, said it's a "physical impossibility" to do the paperwork required in time to get the perishable food to...

If you were looking for righty-bashing blog posts related to the Moore, Oklahoma disaster, Daily Kos was the place to be this past Wednesday. Ian Reifowitz argued that conservatives’ childish hostility to government regulation boosted the tornado’s death toll because neither state nor local law requires safe rooms or shelters, and that absent a mandate, such life-saving structures quite often won’t get built. Reifowitz wrote:Free market conservatism kills? Yes, that’s right…[T]here were no rules in Moore or anywhere else in Oklahoma mandating that buildings…have so-called “safe rooms” or underground shelters to protect people during a storm…

Everything had to come together just perfectly to create the killer tornado in Moore, Okla.: wind speed, moisture in the air, temperature and timing. And when they did, the awesome energy released over that city dwarfed the power of the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima. On Tuesday, the National Weather Service gave it the top-of-the-scale rating of EF5 for wind speed and breadth, and severity of damage. Wind speeds were estimated at between 200 and 210 mph. The death count is 24 so far, including at least nine children. The United States averages about one EF5 a year, but this...