Republicans: August 2008 Archives
Piyush "Bobby" Jindal (PBJ) is on the boobtoob right now (1730CDT), patting himself on the back for successfully evacuating the bulk of Southern Louisiana. For him, it's Miller time, but there are still thousands on the roads of Mississippi, trying to get out of the way of Gustav. And from reports along I-59, it's not a pretty sight:
Hey, PBJ, if your buddy Barbour doesn't help ease the way through his state, it really doesn't matter how well you do in yours.
My wife and kiddo bailed around 1030CDT, reaching Jackson on I55N by 4pm. They've still got to go across I20E to Birmingham to get to the hotel.
It looks like Louisiana has worked out evac/contraflow up to the state line, but not so well beyond that. The process has a long way to go. PBJ and his state homeland security staff need to put down the celebratory cocktails and get back to work.
We left our home at 3:45am and didn’t get to Hattiesburg until 1:00pm. The contraflow, which we took, was a joke. It only lasted about 10 miles or so, and was bumper-to-bumper from start to finish.
Hey, PBJ, if your buddy Barbour doesn't help ease the way through his state, it really doesn't matter how well you do in yours.
My wife and kiddo bailed around 1030CDT, reaching Jackson on I55N by 4pm. They've still got to go across I20E to Birmingham to get to the hotel.
It looks like Louisiana has worked out evac/contraflow up to the state line, but not so well beyond that. The process has a long way to go. PBJ and his state homeland security staff need to put down the celebratory cocktails and get back to work.
NASA's Constellation booster and Orion manned vehicle, currently under development.
It looks like the things-that-go-bump-in-the-night members of McCain's team are in charge at the moment. Since he's running on a "four more years" platform, scaring the heartland of the homeland is a top-priority strategy.Problem is, the tried-and-true scare tactics of the Cheney administration aren't going to work for McSame. First there was Tom Ridge and his constant (and usually unfounded) terrorist attack warnings. Olbermann used to do a regular feature on how much bullshit came out of Ridge's mouth as DHS secretary. The job is currently held by Michael Chertoff, and his performance during and after the storm puts him in the Gibbering Idiot Hall of Fame. We've been on a state of "high alert" that Orange is the New Green.
Seeing that the scare-them-with-terrorists is Epic Fail, the McSame-ites are going back to the 1984 playbook for a boogyman - the Rooskies! And they're abusing the space program to do it.
NASA's fleet of Space Shuttles is slated to go end-of-life in 2010. They're old, expensive, and arguably unsafe. The agency is developing the Constellation rocket system to replace the shuttle, but it's not expected to fly until 2015. That five-year gap means that manned flights to the International Space Station would be made on Russia's Soyuz spacecraft.
The Soyuz has launched more humans into space than any other type of spacecraft. It's inexpensive and (relatively) safe.
But that's not good enough, says McSame, because it's Russian:
With tensions high between Russia and its ISS partners regarding the recent fighting in Georgia and Russia's subsequent recognition of breakaway Georgian regions, many are reluctant to rely on Moscow for space lift. Senator McCain says he is also upset with the Russians over their sales of weapons and other technology to countries such as Iran, and argues that funding Soyuz manufacture indirectly assists ballistic-missile development by America's possible enemies.
Oh, those naughty Russians!
NASA isn't all that excited about extenging the life of the shuttle:
For its part, NASA says that the shuttles must go in order to free up
cash for Constellation, and that a gap in US manned lift is inevitable
without extra funds. While McCain and his Republican colleagues are
happy to demand more shuttle flights, they don't specify where the
money should come from. McCain's presidential rival Barack Obama has
also called for at least one extra shuttle mission above current plans,
but he too is loath to offer details on the needed lucre. His fellow
Democrats in Congress don't seem even as convinced as he is of the need.
What we need is a firm re-committment to the growth of our space program. If McSame really thought the Rooskies were a threat, he'd find ways to fun NASA and continue their work. Of course, Bush's War makes any new spending tough, one of the reasons Obama and his team are cool towards NASA.
Still, the Rooskies will scare the old folks. After all, Russia scared them when they were young folks.
It's been some time since I've flown into Cincinatti-Northern Kentucky Airport from home. Most of the MSY-CVG flights these days are on "regional jets," those smaller, ~50-seat planes that Patrick Smith of Salon's "Ask The Pilot" decries as the main reason airport delays are what they are. (Capt. Smith argues that airlines want to schedule more flights, so they use the smaller jets rather than packing 300+ people on one wide-body plane.) I'm usually not a big fan of the regional jets, because my fat butt is rarely comfortable in a coach seat on a B737, much less an even smaller CRJ-100.
Still, today was an exception, because Tropical Storm Fay is playing havoc with weather patterns across the Olde South. My comfy first class seat on the 5:30pm nonstop from MSY to New York's LaGuardia airport looked like a Really Bad Idea when I went to bed last night, so I dragged Mrs. YatPundit out of bed at 5am to drive me to Armstrong. Delta re-booked me on a morning run to LGA, connecting through Cincinatti.
I used to go through CVG a lot, back when I was teaching for Digital/Compaq. The Digital mothership facility for Tru64 UNIX was up in Nashua, NH. Not wanting to fight Boston's Logan International, I'd fly into Manchester, NH (MHT). Flying a big jet from MSY-CVG and connecting to a regional jet to MHT, then the reverse was a regular thing for me, right up to 9/11. In fact, I took the MHT-CVG/CVG-MSY route home on 15-Sep-2001.
Back at that time, CVG was a Serious Hub Airport. You could walk along the "A" or "B" concourses and see the Big Jets, the 767s and 777s, heading to California, Japan, and Europe. Delta's bread-and-butter jets, B757s, 737s and MD88s were in-and-out as fast as the ground crews could turn them around. Little Feat even wrote about CVG in their tune "Oh, Atlanta."
Not only did the big jets fly in and out of CVG, but the airport was also the home port of ComAir, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Delta Air Lines. ComAir operated the smaller jets and prop planes that would feed fliers from the hub airport to the single-runway, small-town airports of the south and midwest. Want to go to Grand Rapids, MI? Fly to CVG and take a "puddle jumper" plane to your destination.
Sad to say, the Hard Times of George W. Bush have hit CVG. In its heyday, you'd transfer by bus from the big jet you arrived in on "A" or "B" over to the "regional" concourse, "C." I was worried about time this morning, when the pilot of the Embraer 145 regional jet I took on the MSY-CVG leg of today's trip said we'd be 15 minutes late. Factoring in the bus ride from "C" back to "A" didn't leave me with a lot of time. Imagine my surprise when the flight attendant told me our arrival gate was A18.
A 50-seat jet landing at CVG with the Big Jets? Wow, that was a surprise.
Only that there were no big jets.
With the exception of two MD88s, all the jets parked at gates on "A" were regional in size. There are a number of possible explanations for this decline in the need for big planes at CVG:
1. 9/11 spooked a lot of Americans, and we don't fly as much now.
2. The general economic malaise of the last few years keeps people home.
3. Market forces in the airline industry have pushed the big jets aside.
4. $100+/bbl oil means obscenely high prices for jet fuel.
Take your pick, they're all solid reasons (and if you've got others to add, feel free to do so in comments).
It's interesting that three of these four can be attributed to the policies of the Cheney administration and their Republic enablers in Congress. Still, voters in all of the states where Delta hubs are located (GA, OH, UT), are going to vote for a continuation of those policies.
Go figure.
Still, today was an exception, because Tropical Storm Fay is playing havoc with weather patterns across the Olde South. My comfy first class seat on the 5:30pm nonstop from MSY to New York's LaGuardia airport looked like a Really Bad Idea when I went to bed last night, so I dragged Mrs. YatPundit out of bed at 5am to drive me to Armstrong. Delta re-booked me on a morning run to LGA, connecting through Cincinatti.
I used to go through CVG a lot, back when I was teaching for Digital/Compaq. The Digital mothership facility for Tru64 UNIX was up in Nashua, NH. Not wanting to fight Boston's Logan International, I'd fly into Manchester, NH (MHT). Flying a big jet from MSY-CVG and connecting to a regional jet to MHT, then the reverse was a regular thing for me, right up to 9/11. In fact, I took the MHT-CVG/CVG-MSY route home on 15-Sep-2001.
Back at that time, CVG was a Serious Hub Airport. You could walk along the "A" or "B" concourses and see the Big Jets, the 767s and 777s, heading to California, Japan, and Europe. Delta's bread-and-butter jets, B757s, 737s and MD88s were in-and-out as fast as the ground crews could turn them around. Little Feat even wrote about CVG in their tune "Oh, Atlanta."
Not only did the big jets fly in and out of CVG, but the airport was also the home port of ComAir, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Delta Air Lines. ComAir operated the smaller jets and prop planes that would feed fliers from the hub airport to the single-runway, small-town airports of the south and midwest. Want to go to Grand Rapids, MI? Fly to CVG and take a "puddle jumper" plane to your destination.
Sad to say, the Hard Times of George W. Bush have hit CVG. In its heyday, you'd transfer by bus from the big jet you arrived in on "A" or "B" over to the "regional" concourse, "C." I was worried about time this morning, when the pilot of the Embraer 145 regional jet I took on the MSY-CVG leg of today's trip said we'd be 15 minutes late. Factoring in the bus ride from "C" back to "A" didn't leave me with a lot of time. Imagine my surprise when the flight attendant told me our arrival gate was A18.
A 50-seat jet landing at CVG with the Big Jets? Wow, that was a surprise.
Only that there were no big jets.
With the exception of two MD88s, all the jets parked at gates on "A" were regional in size. There are a number of possible explanations for this decline in the need for big planes at CVG:
1. 9/11 spooked a lot of Americans, and we don't fly as much now.
2. The general economic malaise of the last few years keeps people home.
3. Market forces in the airline industry have pushed the big jets aside.
4. $100+/bbl oil means obscenely high prices for jet fuel.
Take your pick, they're all solid reasons (and if you've got others to add, feel free to do so in comments).
It's interesting that three of these four can be attributed to the policies of the Cheney administration and their Republic enablers in Congress. Still, voters in all of the states where Delta hubs are located (GA, OH, UT), are going to vote for a continuation of those policies.
Go figure.
One of the things missing from the First Gulf Fiasco that we had in the First Gulf War was a top-down hero. In Desert Storm, H. Norman Schwarzkopf was lionized as a successor to Ike and Grant. While neocons and Limbots have tried to hold up David Patraeus and put him in the same position as "Stormin Norman," it's just not working. As Alterman points out in his column today, it's mainly because, well, Petraeus isn't all that heroic a figure:
Does this mean Petraeus is merely an opportunist who realizes that his career is going nowhere fast if he stays in Iraq? Let's face it, if he can hide in a different job, perhaps he won't be viewed by an incoming Obama as a neocon/Cheney loyalist.
I'm having a little trouble understanding the MSM master narrative on David Petraeus. If he is the savior of Iraq, turning that country from a hellish cauldron of hatred to Tahiti, why is he leaving when he, himself, admits, "It's not durable yet. It's not self-sustaining." What could be more important than sustaining that alleged success and making it durable? A nicer job, perhaps, with cushier circumstances and more status, but really, why walk away from Iraq? Surely, it's the most important priority in US foreign policy right now. Whatever promotion he wants or deserves, why can't it wait?
Does this mean Petraeus is merely an opportunist who realizes that his career is going nowhere fast if he stays in Iraq? Let's face it, if he can hide in a different job, perhaps he won't be viewed by an incoming Obama as a neocon/Cheney loyalist.
There's a lot of outrage this morning over the Cheney Administration's latest assault on the sex lives of Americans:
The Bush administration has consistently opposed providing funding
for international birth control programs, but until now has not tried
to limit the use of contraceptives inside the United States.That could change in the president's final months in office. Health
and Human Services officials are considering a draft regulation that
would classify most birth control pills, the Plan B emergency
contraceptive and intrauterine devices as forms of abortion because
they prevent the development of fertilized eggs into fetuses.
This is a position so out in right field that most American Catholics reject it and the gay old men in the Vatican who have tried to push it since Paul VI's Humane Vitae. But this move by the Republic Anti-Sex League comes at a time when it can be used against them for maximum effect.
George W. Bush and his boss, Vice-President Cheney, the foul-mouthed Dick, have run their final campaigns. Not so for John McSame McCain. This is the kind of government action that can be taken into the streets and used as a club to beat McCain. Do these idiots really think young Republic men and women want to make more babies indiscriminately? Do 40-something Republic couples who have teenage girls want to be raising their grandchildren because their promiscuous daughters didn't use The Pill?
The Republic Anti-Sex League will continue to push and push. This isn't about abortion and "baby-killing," but rather stopping people from fucking. That's where they're out of mainstream Republic thought.
Rush Limbaugh used to argue that people would support repealing the Estate Tax, even though the overwhelming majority of them would never be subject to that tax in the first place. The reasoning was that, even if they weren't multi-millionaires, they subscribed to that part of the American Dream where anyone could pick himself up by his/her bootstraps and become a millionaire. if the protections against that virtual fortune they don't have yet are taken away, they'll never live the dream.
Now, apply the same logic to McSame and the Republic Anti-Sex League. There's not a lot of chance that your average Republic middle-class guy is going to get the chance to spend a weekend in Milan, banging supermodels. Shit, there's really not much chance he's going to get the chance to bang one of the local Hooter girls, when you get down to it, but he dreams of that chance. If those girls can't get on The Pill, the potential pool of girls-Republics-want-to-bang is going do drop dramatically. That situation is just as unacceptable as the "Death" Tax.
Obama clearly opposes this latest Anti-Sex move:
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has signed a letter of protest written by a group of U.S. senators. (Republican candidate John McCain has not taken a position.)
Democrats should take every Republic candidate running for office to task for this position. If the Anti-Sex forces succeed, use it as a club against them all. Karl Rove used gay marriage as an effective wedge issue against Dems in 2004. This could easily become the karmic payback for that.
There are days when I wake up and read whatever the next stunt the Cheney Administration has pulled and I scratch my head. Sometimes an elegant scheme will be revealed that makes you wonder, are these guys really that smart? Then there are the days when it's clear that they're dumber than a box of rocks.
When you listen to Cheney and Rice talk about the current flare-up between Russia and Georgia, they sound like sensible people, but Juan Cole's column in Salon this week makes it clear that they really have no idea what they're doing:
When we look back on all the pre-war projections and claims made by Cheney and his planners, it's easy to see they were clueless. Their main motivation was to re-direct goverment spending to companies they or their close friends controlled. Republicans have certainly not created an environment of less government, just one where their friends rake in the profits.
But they didn't factor in the laws of unintended consequences. They changed the rules of international diplomacy to make a buck, and now we all have to live with a Vladimir Putin and his own version of the "Bush Doctrine."
What's disturbing about this is that Putin can truly get away with whatever he wants. Even if he couldn't point to Cheney's actions as justification for his own, the US military has been so weakened by the neo-cons that there's just nothing we can do about Russia.
Throughout the latter quarter of the 20th Century, we worried about nuclear proliferation. After this Republic administration, we're going to have to guard against Stupidity Proliferation.
When you listen to Cheney and Rice talk about the current flare-up between Russia and Georgia, they sound like sensible people, but Juan Cole's column in Salon this week makes it clear that they really have no idea what they're doing:
In a unipolar world, the Bush doctrine of preemptive war allowed
Washington to assert itself without fear of contradiction. The Bush
doctrine, however, was never meant to be emulated by others and was
therefore implicitly predicated on the notion that all challengers
would be weaker than the United States throughout the 21st century. Bush and Cheney are now getting a glimpse of a multipolar world in which other powers can adopt their modus operandi with impunity.
When we look back on all the pre-war projections and claims made by Cheney and his planners, it's easy to see they were clueless. Their main motivation was to re-direct goverment spending to companies they or their close friends controlled. Republicans have certainly not created an environment of less government, just one where their friends rake in the profits.
But they didn't factor in the laws of unintended consequences. They changed the rules of international diplomacy to make a buck, and now we all have to live with a Vladimir Putin and his own version of the "Bush Doctrine."
What's disturbing about this is that Putin can truly get away with whatever he wants. Even if he couldn't point to Cheney's actions as justification for his own, the US military has been so weakened by the neo-cons that there's just nothing we can do about Russia.
Throughout the latter quarter of the 20th Century, we worried about nuclear proliferation. After this Republic administration, we're going to have to guard against Stupidity Proliferation.
...for white teenagers, that is. A St. Tammany Parish criminal jury convicted a 18-year old white boy yesterday in the shooting of a Salvadoran laborer. There was a lot of compassion displayed in the courtroom:
Not sure how many tears were shed for Jose Luis Martinez, the man that Glenn Carter popped a couple of .45 rounds into, though. No doubt they didn't see Sr. Martinez' life to be worth so much that a young white boy should pay with his own for the crime. The verdict was 10-2 for conviction on first-degree murder. A Louisiana jury must be unanimous on a murder conviction for the death penalty to be considered, so Carter was convicted of second-degree murder.
And even then, the good people of St. Tammany cried.
I can't help but wonder if they'd cry if a black teen had killed Martinez. Maybe not, after all, it's not like Martinez was a white American, after all.
Still, while it's easy to mock the duplicity of the values of this jury, I agree that we're potentially wasting the life of a teen. Even though this young man and his friends (three others are to be tried for Martinez' killing) appear to be unredeemable pieces of crap, I'm opposed to giving them or anyone under 30 life-without-parole. Ten or twenty years in prison is a long time, and a person can indeed change over such a span of time. There may come a day when even these white-bread criminals from Slidell are worth more than labor on the farm at Angola. To give up on them now and do the "throw away the key" thing isn't fair.
It's not right to do that to any 18-year old, black, white, brown.
I'm sure there would be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth from the families of victims if the law was to be changed so these killers had a chance of going free. I'm not all that concerned about them, because most of them want public executions brought back. They're going to scream at any remedy short of that, so it's easy to turn a def ear to them.
Not that anyone is really listening to the family of Sr. Martinez, mind you.
Meanwhile, the 12 jurors -- six men and six women -- shed their own tears. One juror said later that the group"went through the gamut of emotions" as it contemplated sending such a young man to jail for life. Themurder was committed two months after Carter's 17th birthday.
Not sure how many tears were shed for Jose Luis Martinez, the man that Glenn Carter popped a couple of .45 rounds into, though. No doubt they didn't see Sr. Martinez' life to be worth so much that a young white boy should pay with his own for the crime. The verdict was 10-2 for conviction on first-degree murder. A Louisiana jury must be unanimous on a murder conviction for the death penalty to be considered, so Carter was convicted of second-degree murder.
And even then, the good people of St. Tammany cried.
I can't help but wonder if they'd cry if a black teen had killed Martinez. Maybe not, after all, it's not like Martinez was a white American, after all.
Still, while it's easy to mock the duplicity of the values of this jury, I agree that we're potentially wasting the life of a teen. Even though this young man and his friends (three others are to be tried for Martinez' killing) appear to be unredeemable pieces of crap, I'm opposed to giving them or anyone under 30 life-without-parole. Ten or twenty years in prison is a long time, and a person can indeed change over such a span of time. There may come a day when even these white-bread criminals from Slidell are worth more than labor on the farm at Angola. To give up on them now and do the "throw away the key" thing isn't fair.
It's not right to do that to any 18-year old, black, white, brown.
I'm sure there would be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth from the families of victims if the law was to be changed so these killers had a chance of going free. I'm not all that concerned about them, because most of them want public executions brought back. They're going to scream at any remedy short of that, so it's easy to turn a def ear to them.
Not that anyone is really listening to the family of Sr. Martinez, mind you.
