Airport woes

James Kunstler describes the journey of the damned when he recently flew from Colorado to New York. He makes this astute observation:

...a lot of this trouble was weather-related. But it was greatly aggravated by the extreme shortage of United Airlines ground employees. There are just no gate agents around. So, when delays occur, there is nobody around to re-book passengers. The majority of Customer Service desks are shuttered, and the few open ones have lines a quarter-mile long, so that even if you got on line, you'd miss the next available flight before anybody re-booked you.
The result of all this is a climate of anxiety, helplessness, and despair that makes air travel a miserable experience. You never know whether your flight will take off. The few ground employees actually on duty lie incessantly about the reasons for delays and cancellations (or say they have no information). If you get on a flight, you never know whether you will make your connection, or whether your connection will be there (if an actual plane will get there from someplace else).
The overall effect of US aviation these days is of life during wartime.
I'm quite sure it's not going to get better.

And that's what happens when airlines lay off staff incessantly.
In my own flight experience, I have learned that it is simply not at all worthwhile to expect the gate staff or the stewards on a flight will be able to give you any information about your connection -- they usually don't know, and if they do tell you anything, it turns out to be wrong anyway.
Or it got changed while you were on the way down.
The only thing you can do is reduce your carry-ons to the absolute minimum, wear running shoes, and sit on an aisle seat as far forward as you can. Then you barge out of the plane as soon it lands, knocking children and little old ladies aside as you go, and rudely interrupt the gate staff at your arrival gate in the hope that they MIGHT be able to give you the gate number for your connection.
But don't get your hopes up...

They did it again

Jerome at Daily Kos says the warmongers have lost yet another war:

Neocons are people that see danger everywhere and seem to crave military solutions in all cases. They endlessly blather about how we need to stand firm against bullies or other threats (Russia being near the top of the list), and protect our brave allies on the front lines, and along with them, democracy, freedom and our honor. They mock cowardly European who think appeasement (read - any diplomacy) might have a chance. They fuel conflicts and perpetually tout military options.
And yet, whenever given the opportunity to stand up to their words (and sent other people to fight, of course, they don't do that themselves), the results are surprisingly poor.
After the catastrophic invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the neocons have just lost a third war, in Georgia.

Actually, its the fourth - Jerome could have included Lebanon in 2006.

The Ossetia War

If you're wondering what is going on between Georgia and Russia in South Ossetia, check Robert Farley's series of posts analyzing the events.
Bottom line -- Georgia bit off more than it could chew (perhaps due to neocon encouragement) and gave Putin an opening to throw his weight around.

Olympic rant

I've added CBC Olympics to the blogroll, just to make it easier to find.
But every Olympics I get frustrated with CBC's coverage. Here I am ranting already and it is only day two.
Why, oh why, are they virtually incapable of doing an actual sports show? You know, the kind of show that sports networks like TSN and The Score do every day, where they have knowledgeable announcers who summarize what happened while they visuals cover the most important highlights of the game? Nope, for that, I have to rely on Newsworld's once-a-night half hour, which in my time zone starts at 5:30 so chances are I'll mostly miss it.
Why, oh why, are they incapable of announcing a schedule of what happened that day and what they will be covering? CBC thinks we've all got five hours a night, every night, to plunk down in front of the TV and mindlessly watch whatever bits and pieces of events they throw at us, in whatever chaotic order they chose, bouncing us from the freestyle relay to soccer with a brief pause at the parallel bars and a quick shot of some unnamed athlete actually putting in a gold medal performance at some event but they don't tell us what, exactly...
Did you know a tiny Chinese woman won a gold medal today in some weightlifting event? I saw her performance twice, for about 30 seconds, with no commentary about what she was lifting and whether it was a world record or not. And there were some shooting medals being won somewhere, but CBC couldn't be bothered covering that event. And some sailing was going on too...
God forbid they should actually throw a graphic up on the screen showing us an actual nightly schedule, like a list of the sports they are going to cover that night and the time they are going to be on. Instead, we get this endless "Coming up, women's swimming!" kind of stuff and even then we don't actually get to the pool for another hour or more.
And why, oh why can't they give us a five-minute highlight reel every hour, so we could check in and be sure of catching the most memorable performances? I think they won't do it because they worry that's all people would watch and the sponsors would be upset.
And God forbid they should upset the sponsors! If they did, why, then we wouldn't get the chance to see the umpteenth iteration of that Royal Bank commercial about some red-haired woman -- you know, the one we're already so tired of that we immediately switch the channel when it comes on . . .

Great line of the day

From Avedon Carol:

I disagree completely with the theory that he [Obama] can't hit back. If that's really true (and this was always going to be a question in this race), he shouldn't have run for president now, either. We need a winner, and if you support a candidate who you believe has to throw away winning strategies just because he's black, you shouldn't have supported him. Either he can play all-out or he shouldn't be in the big leagues. Meanwhile, he proved to be adept in the primaries at spreading nasty memes while mostly keeping his own fingerprints off of them, and I'm sure Axlerod hasn't forgotten how to do that.

That's the ticket

Puppies!

Lets see the Dog Whisperer do this!!


Via Balloon Juice

Songbird McCain

Well, its about time.

Simple answers to simple questions

Digby raises some suspicions about why the tabloids aren't going after the rich and famous McCains:

There must be some explanation as to why there have been no stories about Vicki Iseman, no drug stories about Cindy, no stories about McCain's legendary temper tantrums. Why?

Well, paying them off worked pretty well for Arnold and in Iraq.

Ethical? Not a bit

You know, every time I start to think that maybe I could agree with PETA sometimes, they pull something like this that only opportunistic boors would do.

Yes, our government is embarrassing us

The Conservative government continues to be stupid about the Vancouver safe injection site.

... the World Health Organization issued a new guide for countries on how to best tackle the epidemic of HIV-AIDS that strongly endorsed a broad array of harm-reduction measures, including safe-injection sites.
[Canadian minister of health] Mr. Clement said that it is up to each country to decide what measures are appropriate, and “it's not my job to kowtow to orthodoxy.”
. . . Carolyn Bennett, the Liberal public health critic [says]Mr. Clement “opposes supervised injection sites yet says he supports needle exchange, which makes no medical sense.”
She said the Conservative government's stand is driven by ideology, not compassion, and accused Mr. Clement of “embarrassing Canada” on the world stage.

Funny, isn't it, that safe injection sites have now become "orthodoxy". Canada should be taking some credit for leading the world in developing safe injection sites, but the Conservatives just can't change their ideas.
And there is something very strange about this article, too -- the headline reads "Public supports shutting injection site, Ottawa says" but the article makes no reference to any public opinion surveys or to public opinion at all, only to the Conservative government belief that the safe injection site is not "acceptable".
The people making comments on the article pick up on this right away. Commenter Nathan Cool writes:

This just a bold-faced lie! Disgusting. The public supports In-Site.. and who cares if it does?? Science does!
This is about life and death... and I don't mean zombie Jesus riding a dinosaur.

Friendly Floatees’ World Tour

From the website Strange Maps

. . . On January 10, [1992] a container holding almost 29,000 plastic bath toys spills off a cargo ship into the middle of the Pacific Ocean and breaks open. The unsinkable toys, which were en route from Hong Kong to Tacoma (Washington), include a lot of iconic yellow rubber ducks that have since been caught up in the world’s ocean currents and continue turning up on the most improbable shores. Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a retired oceanographer, saw from the beginning how valuable the rubber duckies could be in tracing ocean currents, and correctly predicted their trip through the Northwest Passage.
The toys, or ‘Friendly Floatees’, as they became known, made their first landfall in mid November of 1992, when the counter-clockwise Subpolar Gyre started dumping the yellow rubber ducks (and blue turtles, red beavers and green frogs) on Alaskan shores. It took the ducks about three years to drift full circle on the Gyre – scientists calculate they drift 50% faster than the water in the current itself. They turned up all over the Pacific: Japan, Hawaii, North America and Australia.
As Ebbesmeyer predicted, some ducks escaped the Gyre to flow North through the Bering Strait into the Arctic. Between 1995 and 2000, they slowly drift eastward, frozen in the arctic ice, at a rate of 1 mile per day. In the new millennium, the ducks started reaching the North Atlantic, being sighted from the shores of Maine to Massachusetts. In 2001, the ducks reached the site where the Titanic sank. In 2003, the plastic toys reached the shores of the Hebrides, off the coast of Scotland. This article in the Daily Mail predicted their arrival on the shores of southwestern England in 2007.
If you spot one of these plastic toys on a beach, its colors probably faded by now, with the imprint ‘The Early Years’, then you’ve found one member of the plastic armada that set sail over 15 years ago.

Credit to Edstock at The Galloping Beaver for the link to this great site.

Great line of the day

From Alison:

Sometimes a lizard is just a lizard.

Go! Read! Laugh!

The wimp factor

Here's the truth about the McCain smear campaign against Obama and why Obama needs to hit back hard.
Regardless of how unfair and egregious and mean-spirited and inaccurate and racist and sexist the McCain attacks are, if Obama can't figure out how to defend himself, then American voters will think he can't defend America.
And voters anywhere won't vote for a wimp. Never have, never will.

The new accountability standard

And Bush wondered how historians would remember him!
Someday the Bush administration will only be a miserable memory, but I'm sure his version of accountability will linger on, particularly in these tried-and-true phrases:

"No one could have anticipated..."
"I'm an idiot, not a crook"
"I don't recall..."
"The previous administration did it too."

and these newer phrases which will prove their utility in the future:

"He's suffered enough."
"Let bygones be bygones."

These set a standard which politicians can achieve and journalists endorse.