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More than 30 Red Cross Emergency Response Vehicles are assembled in Hattiesburg, Miss., prepared to move water and food to Gulf Coast residents in the path of Hurricane Gustav, the Red Cross announced Sunday. With crews from across the United States — including one that drove 1,500 miles in 17 hours from Niagara Falls, N.Y. — the gathering of vehicles underscores the Red Cross’ preparedness in advance of Gustav’s landfall, the agency said.

The Red Cross said it has moved nearly 200 mobile feeding trucks into Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama for evacuees. More than 100,000 cots and 200,000 blankets are in place, as well as tens of thousands of comfort kits and ready-to-eat meals. Supplies are being loaded onto 99 shelter support trailers to be dispersed throughout the region. Red Cross workers have been moving to the region yesterday and today. Before landfall, the Red Cross will be on the ground to help with shelters, food, and emotional support as evacuation orders are given.

Crude oil for October delivery rose $1.55, or 1.3 percent, to $117.01 a barrel in after-hours electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange at 8:40 a.m. in Singapore, Gavin Evans and Margot Habiby of Bloomberg reported early Monday. Prices, which dropped 7 percent in August, are up 22 percent this year.

Personnel from more than 70 percent of the platforms and rigs in the Gulf have been evacuated as the storm approaches, the U.S. Minerals Management Service said in a statement on its Web site yesterday. About 1.25 million barrels a day of oil and 6.09 billion cubic feet of gas have been shut, or more than 96 percent of offshore oil output and 82 percent of gas production.

Gasoline for October delivery gained 7.18 cents, or 2.5 percent, to $2.9260 a gallon on the exchange. Electronic transactions started early to allow market participants to respond to Gustav. Trades will be dated Sept. 2 because of today’s Labor Day holiday in the U.S.

“We’re more prepared for this storm than we ever have been for any hurricane that I remember,” said Phil Flynn, senior trader at Alaron Trading Corp. in Chicago. “We’re better prepared, and demand isn’t that strong anyway, so I’m about as optimistic as I can be in this type of disastrous situation.”

Brent crude oil for October settlement rose $1.35, or 1.2 percent, to $115.40 a barrel on the ICE Futures Europe Exchange today.

The Gulf of Mexico accounts for 26 percent of U.S. oil production and 14 percent of natural-gas output. The Gulf normally produces about 1.3 million barrels of oil and an estimated 7.4 billion cubic feet of gas a day, according to the agency, part of the U.S. Interior Department.

CNNMoney.com examined Gustav’s overall impact on consumers and the oil industry. David Goldman reports:

Much offshore oil production has already been shut down and experts say it could get worse. It could damage gasoline refineries, which could send the price of oil and gas back up near record highs.

“Production will be shut down in the path of the storm,” said Cathy Landry, a spokeswoman for the American Petroleum Institute. “Not every rig will be in the storm’s path, but the oil companies tend to be very cautious.”

Barack Obama has shut down the Democrats’ rapid reaction operation in St. Paul, Charles Mahtesian and Carrie Budoff Brown of Politico reported tonight.

The move was an effort to scale back partisan efforts in the midst of a national disaster.

The Democratic National Committee abruptly called off plans Sunday to unveil its St. Paul rapid response operation, canceling a media reception featuring several prominent Minnesota Democrats, including Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Rep. Betty McCollum. The DNC also canceled its daily media briefing for Monday.

“Our thoughts and prayers are with the families in the region,” said DNC spokesman Damien LaVera.

Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, said he spoke with Louisiana Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu on Sunday morning. He was also briefed by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff on the “status of the storm, the evacuation process and coordination between federal, state and local authorities,” according to Obama senior strategist Robert Gibbs.

In Lima, Ohio, Obama said after attending services at St. Luke’s Lutheran Church that his campaign plans to mobilize its huge e-mail list of supporters to volunteer or send money after the impact of Gustav becomes apparent and authorities know better what kind of help is needed. He said his campaign is coordinating its efforts with local authorities.

Asked if McCain’s visit to Mississippi was appropriate, Obama responded, “A big storm like this raises bipartisan concerns, and I think for John to want to find out what’s going on is fine.
“The thing that I always am concerned about in the middle of a storm is whether we’re drawing resources away from folks on the ground because the Secret Service and various security requirements, sometimes it pulls police, fire and other departments away from concentrating on the job.”

“I’m assuming that where he went that wasn’t an issue. We’re going to try to stay clear of the area until things have settled down, and then we’ll probably try to figure out how we can be as helpful as possible.”

If everyone recalls, one of the most devastating criticism of President Bush is that he stayed away from Louisiana after Katrina and viewed the damage from the air. The left howled that Bush was uncaring, he was racist, he was aloof, he wasn’t hands on. McCain is showing that he is the opposite. He is basically chucking an opportunity to highlight his campaign by scaling back the GOP convention, probably losing any anticipated bounce in the polls. He is actively trying to get as much information he can of the situation by being on the ground. The time he spent in Mississippi was minimal, and apparently not a security concern. Nor did it cause any delays in evacuations. CNN reported tonight that there are about only 10,000 people in New Orleans tonight. About 1.9 million got out.

But if Obama is easing off of criticizing McCain during this emergency, many of his followers have not. In keeping the spin machine turning, a host of left-leaning bloggers have blasted McCain’s trip.

Moria Whelan, writing on the Huffington Post, notes:

Today, Obama stated that he would stay out of the way as Hurricane Gustav once again threatens the Gulf Coast. Even Bush, who three years ago celebrated Katrina’s landfall at John McCain’s birthday party, is staying away.

What does McCain do? Just like he did when he traveled to a market place in Baghdad, he puts the lives of Americans in danger, and diverts the mission for his own personal political gain. He will travel to the Gulf Coast to give a speech while emergency professionals are urging people to leave. Not only is it political grandstanding, it’s a disgusting display of the type of bad leadership we would see if John McCain became President.

The blog Revolution Calling said this:

McCain and Palin were in Mississippi earlier today. Who were they fooling? Exactly why were they there? Are they the governor of any of the Gulf States? No. Mississippi’s Governor, Haley Barbour, invited them. Gee, I wonder whatever for? Could it be for the headlines? So they look like they actually care? Never mind the fact that the two of them there is completely worthless and is just for appearances sake.

Harsh words? Not really. Considering McCain’s comments on MSNBC earlier this afternoon AFTER being “briefed” on the Hurricane and disaster efforts. McCain said (and I’m QUOTING his words):

“The hurricane will make landfall tomorrow at noon”. WRONG. Tomorrow near daybreak.
“The storm will reach tropical status at midnight tonight”. It passed being a tropical storm about a week ago!

My point is that McCain obviously wasn’t paying attention to anything anyone said to him regarding the hurricane. He’s just there for the photo-op and to grab some headlines. And to distance himself from what he was doing when Katrina hit (celebrating his birthday with Dubya)

Another blogger wrote:

“That doesn’t mean that McCain and company couldn’t score “heckuva job brownie” points by making an appearance at a Jackson, Miss. emergency center. McCain, Sarah Palin, Miss,Gov. Haley Barbour and others showed up to shake hands and generally give the impression that they gave a damn about the people and property in the storm’s path. As if they had the power to do anything.
McCain and Palin don’t have any authority whatsoever–they are merely political candidates–so this was no more that a cheap opportunity for the old codger to look “presidential” while he got in the way of the folks actually doing something. Palin, for her part, tried to look “veepish”. She smiled pretty while she said uplifting things like “I’m so glad you speak English here” and “It’s cold where I come from”.

Meanwhile, Dick Cheney had already come to Mississippi for some hunting. He’s shooting passing refugees from Haley Barbour’s front porch.

A pox on all their houses.

Gustav continues its northwestern drive to New Orleans, according to the National Hurricane Center at 8 p.m. Eastern today. The center of the hurricane was near latitude 26.9 north. The longitude was 87.7 west. That position is about 260 miles south-southeast of New Orleans. The storm is moving northwest at 17 mph. Hurricane force winds are expected overnight in New Orleans.

Currently, the storm’s maximum sustained winds are near 115 mph with higher gusts. Gustav is a Category 3 storm on the Saffir-Simpson scale, but weather officials say they anticipate the storm will intensify tonight. Currently, the central pressure is 952 millibars.

The area of hurricane force wind have expanded to about 70 miles from the eye of the storm, and tropical storm force winds extend outward up to 220 miles from the center. Aircraft data indicated that hurricane force winds have expanded in the northwest quadrant of Gustav, the 8 p.m. warning said.

The warning said:

A HURRICANE WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM JUST EAST OF HIGH ISLAND EASTWARD TO THE ALABAMA-FLORIDA BORDER…INCLUDING THE CITY OF NEW ORLEANS AND LAKE PONTCHARTRAIN. A HURRICANE WARNING MEANS THAT HURRICANE CONDITIONS ARE EXPECTED WITHIN THE WARNING AREA WITHIN THE NEXT 24 HOURS. PREPARATIONS TO PROTECT LIFE AND PROPERTY SHOULD BE RUSHED TO COMPLETION.

A TROPICAL STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM EAST OF THE ALABAMA-FLORIDA BORDER TO THE OCHLOCKONEE RIVER. A TROPICAL STORM WARNING MEANS THAT TROPICAL STORM CONDITIONS ARE EXPECTED WITHIN THE WARNING AREA WITHIN THE NEXT 24 HOURS.

AN EXTREMELY DANGEROUS STORM SURGE OF 10 TO 14 FEET ABOVE NORMAL TIDAL LEVELS IS EXPECTED NEAR AND TO THE EAST OF WHERE THE CENTER OF GUSTAV CROSSES THE NORTHERN GULF COAST. ABOVE NORMAL TIDES IN THE DRY TORTUGAS SHOULD DIMINISH TONIGHT.

GUSTAV IS EXPECTED TO PRODUCE TOTAL RAINFALL ACCUMULATIONS OF 6 TO 12 INCHES OVER PORTIONS OF LOUISIANA…SOUTHERN MISSISSIPPI AND SOUTHERN ARKANSAS…WITH ISOLATED MAXIMUM AMOUNTS OF UP TO 20 INCHES POSSIBLE THROUGH WEDNESDAY MORNING.

ISOLATED TORNADOES ARE POSSIBLE OVER THE CENTRAL GULF COAST TONIGHT.

The current New Orleans radar is here.

Here are the advisories from the National Hurricane Center for Gustav. Go to the bottom of the page to see the latest warning.

The Weather Channel’s hurricane page is here.

Almost 2 million people have taken to the roads out of New Orleans. The French Quarter is virtually shut down and all tourists have been asked to leave. There will be no mass shelter (ie. No Superdome situation). All routes into the city have been turned into one-way routes out.

“You need to be scared, you need to be concerned, and you need to get your butts moving out of New Orleans right now. This is the storm of the century,” warned Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, as he issued a mandatory evacuation order.

“This storm is so powerful that I’m not sure we’ve seen anything like it … this is the real deal, this is not a test, so anyone out there thinking they can ride this storm out, I have news for you: that would be the biggest mistake of your life.”

The Associated Press reports the city’s 311 hot line has been inundated with calls from residents trying to get information or sign up for rides out of town ahead of Hurricane Gustav. The city has been using 311 as a way to register the elderly, infirm, people without transportation and others who need the city’s help evacuating. New Orleans’ assisted evacuated plan is set to begin Saturday morning with city buses slated to pick residents up at 17 sites and take them to a processing site, where they will be put on buses expected to go to shelters in the state or on trains bound for Memphis.

The Causeway Bridge was scheduled to be closed at 7 p.m. to allow for sandbagging.

Most journalists who were planning to cover the GOP convention in St. Paul this week started to head out of town for the Gulf Coast today to shift its focus on Gustav.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper, CBS’ Katie Couric, NBC’s Brian Williams, FOX’s Shepard Smith, who had planned to anchor the convention from the Twin Cities, left for the Gulf Coast on Sunday afternoon. Others were diverted from other points in the country.

Executives for major news organizations are torn between the two stories. Michael Calderone of Politico asked David Bohrman, CNN’s senior vice president for programming, about what CNN will focus on this week. Bohrman replied: “Is it a hurricane? Is it the convention? Or is it a blend of the two?” Jay Wallace, Fox News’ vice president of news editorial, told Calderone, “It almost feels like having a two-front war.”

Several Fox anchors will travel to the Gulf from New York, including Geraldo Rivera, Trace Gallagher and Jon Scott. At this point, Fox’s anchors slated to arrive in St. Paul are still going as planned. The group going to St. Paul includes Greta Van Susteren, who told TVNewser last week that she’d “expect to be on the first plane to the hurricane.”

“We haven’t made any plans to send her,” Wallace said when asked about Van Susteren’s statement. “Like any good journalist, they’re all eager to go down there.”

John McCain announced today that the Republican Party will pare down its activities at least for the first day of its convention in St. Paul, Minn., on Monday.

“So of course this is a time when we have to do away with our party politics and we have to act as Americans. We have to join with 300,000,000 other Americans on behalf of our fellow citizens. It’s a time for action. So were are going to suspend most of our activities tomorrow except those absolutely necessary,” he said.

“It’s time to open our hearts, our efforts, our wallets, our concerns, our care for those American citizens who are now under the shadow and the probability of a natural disaster,” he said. “We will act together.”

President Bush and Vice President Cheney both scrapped plans to speak on Monday. The program on Monday has been cut from seven hours to two-and-half hours. McCain has chartered a jet to get Gulf state delegates back home to deal with the storm. Here is the Associated Press story.
As for the other days of the convention, McCain said decisions will be made on a day-by-day basis.

CNN’s John Roberts cached reporter Dana Bash off-guard on Friday asking if Sarah Palin will neglect her child, who has Down’s syndrome, if she become vice president. “The baby is just slightly more than four months old now. Children with Down’s syndrome require an awful lot of attention. The role of Vice President, it seems to me, would take up an awful lot of her time, and it raises the issue of how much time will she have to dedicate to her newborn child?”

Bash, who was visibly troubled by the question, kept her composure. “That’s a very good question, and I guess — my guess is that, perhaps, the line inside the McCain campaign would be, if it were a man being picked who also had a baby, but — you know, four months ago with Down’s syndrome, would you ask the same question?”

There is a new buzz on the Internet regarding potential GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin regarding an allegation that she illegally hacked into a co-worker’s computer in 2003.

On Aug. 13, 2007, Salon.com published a report headlined “What’s wromg with Alaska?” that was written by Benjamin Wallace-Wells, a national affairs for Rolling Stone. Page 2 of the report contained this:

In a neat symbolic fit, the agent responsible for Alaska’s current moment of reform and modernization is a woman, a breed once nearly as rare in far Northwest politics as a Democrat. Sarah Palin, a libertarian and hockey mom from the fast-growing suburbs of Anchorage, began her political career — as an appointed member of the state’s Oil and Gas Commission — by hacking into the computer of another commissioner, Randy Ruedrich, chairman of the Alaska Republican Party. Palin was seeking the evidence that she would eventually use to charge him with an improper relationship with lobbyists. (Ruedrich would later settle state ethics charges against him by paying a $12,000 fine.)

It is difficult not to see Palin’s ascendance not just as a challenge to the state’s establishment but also as presenting a crudely cut choice between the state’s cronyist, resource-economy past and its future. She beat Frank Murkowski, the incumbent, in the GOP primary; voters began to sour on Murkowski as soon as he picked his daughter to replace him in the Senate, and then grew angrier over his grubbing for a private jet and other perceived ethical lapses. He left office the least popular governor in the country. Since her election as governor last November, Palin has made a public point of cutting down on Alaska’s excesses, and challenging the easy habits of its past — getting the state to put Murkowski’s infamous jet up for sale on eBay, canceling pork projects and firing patronage appointees. By early this summer, with the scandals plaguing the rest of the Republican Party, Alaska Democrats had made some headway in the polls. But Palin’s approval ratings are over 90 percent. Whether in the long term Alaska’s economy can modernize and the state can wean itself from government welfare remains to be seen. But as Stevens hits back at the FBI through press releases, the senator’s old legislative aides plead guilty, and his son endures a federal investigation, the moment is beginning to look like a pivotal point in Alaska’s history. Perhaps the rough edges are being ushered out and something more modern and nationally acceptable has begun to move in.

What is happening in Alaska is not simply the collapse of one ancient Republican power and the rise of another, in Palin, that is more fragile and conditional. It is the assertion that for all of the country’s divisions into red and blue, the national culture does exert a crude centrifugal tug, a tendency to iron out protruding regional discrepancies. The plaintive, humbled sounds coming from Alaska right now are those that always emerge when the exception succumbs to the rule.

Palin’s actions, which could be seen as unethical and illegal, were the subject of a story in the Anchorage Daily News on Sept. 19, 2004 written by Richard Mauer.

Mauer writes that Palin was apparently working at the request of Paul Lyle, an assistant attorney general in Juneau. Mauer wrote that Palin was simply looking for evidence that Ruedrich, who had been a member of the Oil and Gas Commission while Palin was the chairwoman, had broken the state ethics law.

Kim Zetter of Wired.com boils the case down in her blog:

Palin, as chairwoman of the Oil and Gas Commission and its ethics supervisor, was entitled to examine Ruedrich’s computer, since the computer was state property. According to the Anchorage Daily News, a technician who worked for the commission found a way around Ruedrich’s password (presumably by simply using an administrative password) and recovered some files from his computer’s trash bin. Palin found dozens of e-mails and documents on the computer that suggested an improper relationship between Ruedrich and oil companies, which she forwarded to the attorney general’s office.

While Mauer’s report tells Palin’s side of the story, voters this fall will question whether Palin’s computer-hacking activities were justified, ethical and/or legal. It may be all three. But the Internet is fertile ground for political attacks. This revelation in conjunction with her current ethics investigation will be a tough hurdle for her to overcome in a national election.

Mike Allen and Jonathan Martin of Politico are reporting tonight that President George Bush and Sen. John McCain are unlikely to attend the Republican Convention in St. Paul because of Hurricane Gustav and the devastation it might cause in New Orleans almost three years to the date after Katrina.

Their report opened with this:

President Bush is unlikely to make it to the Republican National Convention and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) may deliver his acceptance speech by satellite because of the historically huge hurricane threatening New Orleans, top officials said.

But officials insisted that the convention, scheduled to open here on Monday, will go on—albeit in a more limited and sedate form — even if Hurricane Gustav stays on its projected path. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin ordered a mandatory evacuation beginning at 8 a.m. Sunday after federal officials said Gustav could grow to a catastrophic Category 5 and hit Monday afternoon somewhere between eastern Texas and western Mississippi.

In other news concerning Hurricane Gustav tonight:

Gustav slammed into Cuba’s Isla de Juventud as a Category 4 hurricane today, causing havoc on that Caribbean island, evacuations in New Orleans, and political issues in St. Paul, Minn. Forecasters expected that the storm would grow into s Category 5 hurricane, but weaken somewhat before striking the U.S. coastline near New Orleans sometime Monday. The hurricane was expected to impact oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday. At least 81 have died in the storm so far.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin late tonight described Gustav as the “mother of all storms” and ordered a mandatory evacuation of the west bank of New Orleans for 8 a.m. Sunday and the east bank for noon.