Monday, April 14, 2008

The Morning News...

---Mike Boyd's weekly Monday morning essay is -- as I've said here before -- always incisive and provocative and, even when you might not fully agree, a must-read. An excerpt from this week's:

Cover Up Failure By Pulling A Media Stunt. The FAA looked like sloppy buffoons at Oberstar's hearings. Predictably, Acting FAA Administrator Bobby Sturgell and his management team went into full damage control mode to make it look like they're the guys in the white hats, instead of inept yo-yos who can't do their jobs properly.

Sturgell's plan was brilliant: inflict maximum pain on the flying public, make them and a gullible media believe that the FAA is on the case, and do it in a manner so that the airline industry cannot defend itself. This, of course, was the MD-80 affair.

The MD-80 fleet shutdown was not a safety program. It was an attack against the American public, against honesty, and against integrity, all intended to cover up the real facts. The FAA chose to pull a stunt that unnecessarily inflicted substantial disruption on hundreds of thousands of travelers, trying to look tough. The only thing "safe" was the FAA's belief that the public and some of the gullible don't-bother-to-research-anything media would assume that the problem was with airlines. It proves again that the way the FAA is run and managed at the top is indeed a threat to public safety.

Serious Questions About Oberstar. Yet, despite Kabuki-theatre hearings in Congress, the FAA will not likely be touched...."

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---Here's a heads-up story in USA Today, to put in the file marked "You can't fix stupid." (Which is a line from the comedian Ron White, by the way.)

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---Stories I'm already fed up with and it's only Monday: Katie Couric ... Benedict XVI ... That hideous Olympic torch, especially considering that the Olympic torch-and-flame relay were a spectacle/theatrical stunt cooked up by the Nazis for the 1936 Olympics.

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