First things first. It isn't time to panic....yet.
But the National Hurricane Center's latest tracking model takes what will be Hurricane Rita by the time it makes landfall and shifts the track eastward. The best guesstimate of landfall right now is somewhere in the vicinity of Galveston, Texas, sometime Saturday morning--which puts all of Louisiana within the probability cone. At least one model is also supposedly pointing toward a Category 4 storm making landfall directly in New Orleans, God help them.
Bu$hCo take note: We're absolutely not going to forget it if you fuck this one up. And my prayers and the prayers of everyone else in the world that New Orleans isn't going to get hit again aren't going to constitute a sufficient response.
Since we probably can't count on FEMA to get this one right either, it might be a good time to start thinking about what to do if you're anywhere in that stippled white area on the graph. A good resource is AlphaGeek's series of disaster-preparedness diaries:
Update [2005-9-19 14:21:59 by musing85]: Via
Siberian's diary, some further discussion
by Steve Gregory at Weather Underground on the model forecasts.