Free Republic

Have your fun, Gulf Coasters. Go ahead, LOL at us. And Californians, please join in. It is a national pastime, apparently, to whip out our rulers and measure our natural disasters against one another in an endless, cross-country, chest-thumping smackdown. Yes, you’re totally right, America, about Washington’s wimpiness. We nearly crashed Twitter last week when the 5.8-magnitude earthquake knocked the political biographies off our bookshelves and tipped over our patio chairs. The horror! As Hurricane Irene churned toward the Mid-Atlantic, we bought enough dry goods to stock a humanitarian aid airlift for an entire continent and seriously discussed who could...

Headline only.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Insured damage from Irene will range between $2 billion and $3 billion, and the total losses will likely be about $7 billion, according to preliminary estimates by Kinetic Analysis Corp. a consulting firm. Both figures are less than had been feared, a bit of reassuring news for a fragile economy. Still, the long-term costs of Irene will likely grow as storm-ravaged areas deal with lost business, insurance claims, dislocated workers and transportation disruptions -- costs that will take months to fully calculate. The preliminary estimate from Kinetic Analysis, based in Silver Spring, Md., suggests that Irene will...