Saturday, August 13, 2005
Saturday morning blogjam, with commentary
Sitting in the Lay-Z-Boy, watching the Republicans Fox, trolling through the big blogs, slurping on a mocha from Starbucks, I offer a few items of interest.
Michelle Malkin catalogs the major newspapers that have now broken their silence and begun covering the Air America financing scandal. Michelle deserves a lot of the credit for pushing this story, which she has dubbed "Air Enron." After thinking about it a bit, I'm not inclined to adopt the name, in that I think it is disrespectful of the feelings of greedy energy executives.
Most of you have read about Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq who is demonstrating outside the President's ranch in Crawford. While some bloggers are making the point that Sheehan is perhaps not entirely sincere in her caustic accusation that the President Bush was callous in his meeting with her, the entire righty sphere has linked to Mohammed, who explains to Ms. Sheehan precisely what her son was fighting for. It is the must-read post of the week. That a Sunni Arab in Iraq should answer Ms. Sheehan's question "why?" with such humility and eloquence is itself a wonderful tribute to the purpose of the war.
Arthur Chrenkoff posts a translation of a poll published today in an Arabic Iraqi newspaper. The findings are intersting (even if unscientific), and explain why federalism is Iraq's future whether we like it or not:
I would add that this poll is at least some evidence against Maureen Dowd's unnecessarily gloomy column this morning (it is often hard to tell whether Dowd is being disingenuously anti-Bush, or whether she is just depressed and needs to adjust her dosage).
Bill Roggio explains the differences in readiness between Iraqi army units, and why lefty claims that the Iraqi army isn't "ready" are missing the point.
Tom Kirkendall, one of the best business bloggers out there, notices that Delta Airlines is arranging debtor-in-possession financing. A "debtor-in-possession" is the name of the legal entity that is automatically constituted after a corporation files for bankruptcy under Chapter 11. For those who are interested, here's a (hotlinked) chart from Yahoo! tracking Delta's share performance. Delta still has the opportunity to destroy more than $200 million in stockmarket value, having seen its value decline by more than $500 million since the beginning of the year.
As I've written before, hub-and-spoke airlines are dead meat in the long run. The point-to-point airlines (Southwest and Jet Blue being the leaders) can turn their planes around and get them in the air much more efficiently. That means a vastly lower cost of capital per seat-mile, and that means an unassailable cost advantage. The big hub boys can never overcome that because corporate politics and huge investments in local assets will prevent them from changing their business models in time.
Joe's Dartblog reports on the State Department's refusal to recognize bloggers as journalists. Given the bureaucratic wars in Washington in the last few years, it will be interesting to see whether the Defense Department strikes back. If I were the DoD press office, I would seriously consider promulgating standards for credentialing bloggers. The first real agency that does will break the dam.
I almost won a Villainous Company caption contest!
The Fox guys are whacking away at the Able Danger controversy. It will be interesting to see what comes of it. For more, read the ever Able Tom Maguire.
That's it for now. More later if I get inspired.
Michelle Malkin catalogs the major newspapers that have now broken their silence and begun covering the Air America financing scandal. Michelle deserves a lot of the credit for pushing this story, which she has dubbed "Air Enron." After thinking about it a bit, I'm not inclined to adopt the name, in that I think it is disrespectful of the feelings of greedy energy executives.
Most of you have read about Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq who is demonstrating outside the President's ranch in Crawford. While some bloggers are making the point that Sheehan is perhaps not entirely sincere in her caustic accusation that the President Bush was callous in his meeting with her, the entire righty sphere has linked to Mohammed, who explains to Ms. Sheehan precisely what her son was fighting for. It is the must-read post of the week. That a Sunni Arab in Iraq should answer Ms. Sheehan's question "why?" with such humility and eloquence is itself a wonderful tribute to the purpose of the war.
Arthur Chrenkoff posts a translation of a poll published today in an Arabic Iraqi newspaper. The findings are intersting (even if unscientific), and explain why federalism is Iraq's future whether we like it or not:
A poll taken by 76 branches of an organization, which calls it self "Citizen's Alliance for Free Elections" (CAFE) shows that 87.1% of Iraqis polled prefer a federal rather than a central government.
The poll, published on Thursday, was of 30,000 Iraqis in all 18 provinces, and took 2 months to conduct, [was unveiled] in a press conference held by (CAFE) and attended by four of its prominent members. Dr. Janan Mubarek (a woman) (president of the Iraqi center for the advancement of working women) and Mr. Salem Albedry (president of Students against war) and Mr. Fahed Jawad of the "Al-Wusool" a humanitarian organization and Mr. Alwan Aljeboory. All confirmed the following results:
87.1% of those Iraqi polled prefer a federal rather than a central government.
84.4% of those polled requested that it be mandated that women to receive representation.
10.4% said they did not want women to get any representation.
65% preferred that Islam be one of the religious sources for the constitution.
26% prefer that Islam be the only source for the constitution.
I would add that this poll is at least some evidence against Maureen Dowd's unnecessarily gloomy column this morning (it is often hard to tell whether Dowd is being disingenuously anti-Bush, or whether she is just depressed and needs to adjust her dosage).
Bill Roggio explains the differences in readiness between Iraqi army units, and why lefty claims that the Iraqi army isn't "ready" are missing the point.
Tom Kirkendall, one of the best business bloggers out there, notices that Delta Airlines is arranging debtor-in-possession financing. A "debtor-in-possession" is the name of the legal entity that is automatically constituted after a corporation files for bankruptcy under Chapter 11. For those who are interested, here's a (hotlinked) chart from Yahoo! tracking Delta's share performance. Delta still has the opportunity to destroy more than $200 million in stockmarket value, having seen its value decline by more than $500 million since the beginning of the year.
As I've written before, hub-and-spoke airlines are dead meat in the long run. The point-to-point airlines (Southwest and Jet Blue being the leaders) can turn their planes around and get them in the air much more efficiently. That means a vastly lower cost of capital per seat-mile, and that means an unassailable cost advantage. The big hub boys can never overcome that because corporate politics and huge investments in local assets will prevent them from changing their business models in time.
Joe's Dartblog reports on the State Department's refusal to recognize bloggers as journalists. Given the bureaucratic wars in Washington in the last few years, it will be interesting to see whether the Defense Department strikes back. If I were the DoD press office, I would seriously consider promulgating standards for credentialing bloggers. The first real agency that does will break the dam.
I almost won a Villainous Company caption contest!
The Fox guys are whacking away at the Able Danger controversy. It will be interesting to see what comes of it. For more, read the ever Able Tom Maguire.
That's it for now. More later if I get inspired.
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