Top 10 Reasons to Vote for Obama #6: Joe Biden

The man’s famous for telling it like it is, even when he’s supposed to tell it like it’s supposed to be, which is what makes this story even more amazing: Joe Biden recently said that transgender issues are “the civil rights issue of our time”.

The mom of Miss Trans New England asked Biden if they would help trans people from “being killed” and in getting their civil rights, which is when Biden said it was “the civil rights issue of our time”.

I’ll add, too, that the Obama-Biden presidency was the very first to send a representative to a trans conference.

Bill McKibben’s NYC

“New York is as beautiful and diverse and glorious as an old-growth forest. It’s as grand, in its unplanned tumble, as anything ever devised by man or nature. And now, I fear its roots are being severed.” – Climate change journalist Bill McKibben, writing for the Guardian.

 

My City #Sandy

Chilling.

Everything is flooding.

911 is receiving 20k calls an hour; normal is 2k/hr.

The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel is flooded.

The Gowanus Canal flooded its banks (that’s a Superfund site, folks, hugely toxic).

Much of Manhattan has no power. More than a quarter of a million people don’t.

The Carousel in DUMBO was breached.

Long Island is under several feet of water, as is the Jersey Shore. My niece reports 42″ on the ground floor of my sister’s house in Bellmore.

Five people have already died.

The NYC Subways may be closed for a week or longer; there’s 4′ of sea water in the tunnels.

On the other side of the world, a storm has killed 30 people in Viet Nam and the Philippines.

Coney Island looks beautiful.

People gathered in Times Square with a massive sign that said END CLIMATE SILENCE.

Mayor Bloomberg’s Spanish is really, really terrible.

Love to you all on the East Coast. Stay safe.

Sandy

Stay safe, East Coast. Please do all report in as often as possible, please.

The NYT is posting a new photo every minute.

The most extraordinary description of this storm – from a weatherman who claims not to be prone to hyperbole – is here.

There’s this messed up news about the possibility of the Gowanus Canal flooding into Brooklyn.

You can even watch various live feeds in & around NYC.

And NCTE has put out a great guide (pdf) for trans people in the midst of these kinds of storms – basic information on emergency shelters, contact numbers, and lists of supplies that wouldn’t be on most guides for hurricane preparedness.

Love to all my friends & family on the East Coast. I hope this doesn’t suck half so much as it sounds like it’s going to.