Hurricane Gustav is now a Cat 4. As of the 12 UTC update, looks like there is a 20% chance of hurricane force winds in New Orleans. (About a 70% chance of tropical storm force winds.) I guess that is high enough already that they are starting evacuations. Given what happened three years ago, I can’t blame them.

Having said that, there is a non-trivial chance of hurricane force winds for not only New Orleans, but the entire coastlines of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama as well as parts of the Texas and Florida coasts. Not to mention a decent ways inland in Louisiana. In terms of tropical storm force winds… looking at Hannah as well, the ENTIRE gulf coast of the US is at risk in the next five days, as well as the east coast of Florida as well. (And of course Cuba, parts of Mexico, and a large number of other Caribbean Islands.)

But.. Cat 4 (although expected to weaken before landfall), with a 20% chance of hitting New Orleans… and pretty much a 100% chance of hitting somewhere on the gulf coast… just as the Republican Convention starts.

This will be quite a week.

I have to head out in just a few minutes. But I thought I’d post some initial thoughts. Palin’s name had floated around occasionally, but it was not one of the names brought up time after time as the most likely choices. I honestly don’t know all that much about her other than the summary points. Like everyone else, I’ll be learning a lot more about her over the next week, and my opinions may change as that happens.

In the mean time though, my initial thought is that this is a gutsy move by McCain. It might even be a brilliant choice. Or it could backfire completely.

Pro: By picking a young woman, McCain breaks the mold… this isn’t a stodgy old white man. This does push back on the “historic” bits of Obama’s candidacy.

Con: It makes it much harder to make the experience argument against Obama.

Pro: This will make the conservative base very happy, from initial reports, she is very conservative.

Con: This may make moderates who liked McCain because he was moderate think twice.

Pro: This may push some Hillary dead enders over the line to McCain.

Dunno. We’ll she how this plays out.

But I think it does make this a very different game than if McCain had picked one of the “safe” choices.

The next two months should be quite fun.

The best rumors this morning are about Sarah Palin, based primarily on a charter flight from Anchorage to Dayton last night. But nobody is willing to go out on a limb and say she is it for sure.

I hope they hurry up and leak and confirm. I need to go to work before the official event.

(Although I’ll have a few breaks when I’ll be able to do quick news checks.)

Any regular reader knows I’ve been pretty much in sync with Andrew Sullivan on Obama. A brief excerpt from his thoughts on the speech below. Click through to read the whole thing.

The Hope We Confess
(Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish, 28 Aug 2008)

What he didn’t do was give an airy, abstract, dreamy confection of rhetoric. The McCain campaign set Obama up as a celebrity airhead, a Paris Hilton of wealth and elitism. And he let them portray him that way, and let them over-reach, and let them punch him again and again … and then he turned around and destroyed them. If the Rove Republicans thought they were playing with a patsy, they just got a reality check.

He took every assault on him and turned them around. He showed not just that he understood the experience of many middle class Americans, but that he understood how the Republicans have succeeded in smearing him. And he didn’t shrink from the personal charges; he rebutted them. Whoever else this was, it was not Adlai Stevenson. It was not Jimmy Carter. And it was less afraid and less calculating than Bill Clinton.