Nothing new under the sun

Faithful readers know that I'm a student of John Boyd. (See A Vision So Noble: John Boyd, the OODA Loop, and America's War on Terror.) More recently I got interested in an older war, the one that began on September 1, 1939, and as is my habit I fetched the bound volumes of Life magazine home to look at contemporary photos and articles. I was flabbergasted to read this analysis of the invasion of Poland, in the October 2 issue:

The German Army Invents a New Kind of War
.... The Germans therefore decided to carry the war of fast mechanized columns to its farthest extreme. Normally the end of war is to destroy the enemy's armed forces. To do so it is essential to maintain one's own strength by keeping lines of communication to the rear open. The Germans tried something radically new.... It was a logical extreme development of the infiltration tactics used by the German army in 1918.
This new tactic was simply to strike for the enemy's bases and communications, hell-bent for leather, and largely ignore his armed forces.... Deprived of [its supplies] by loss of its bases, [a modern army] will sooner or later be rendered powerless. A mechanized army can move as fast as 15 m.p.h., as against infantry's 2 m.p.h. It can flicker around infantry and hit it in the back while infantry is slowly turning around....
The Poles heard that the Germans were at Lodz, at Warsaw, at Random, at Sandomierz, at Brest-Litovsk, at Lwow, and they were filled with bewilderment. Their commanders could not force the Germans to stop and fight long-drawn-out frontal battles. The mechanized columns slid around them and vanished on into Poland.

This is pure John Boyd, even unto the bewilderment, which he regarded as essential to an opponent's defeat, whether in an aerial dogfight, a ground campaign, or basketball or chess. It is also a very good description of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Amazon among the icebergs

That's our only child amidships, with a young Brit steering. The dinghy is Amazon, so called for the Swallows and Amazons series beloved of her daughters. It is 13 feet long, designed by a South African, welded up from aluminum in our garage by our son-in-law, and powered by a second-hand sail from our neighbor Ned McIntosh (who prefers wooden boats). Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The pirate's cave, Lerici

One afternoon Enrico rowed us to the Grotta Azzurra, the blue grotto on a point of land a few hundred meters south of the castle. He was a fisherman in his twenties, tall for the time and well built; he evidently made it a practice to visit the castle and hit upon the foreign girls, on the no doubt well-founded theory that they were more readily available than the young women of his village, which most likely was Fiascherino or Tellaro, farther along the coast. Further, I judged that when the foreigners didn't cooperate, he switched his attention to their male colleagues. I can't be sure of this, because he never hit on me.

Google tells me that there is indeed a Blue Grotto in the Gulf of Poets, but places it four kilometers across the bay on the island of Palmaria, and on the western shore to boot. So the place Enrico took us can only be the Tana del Brigantino, the pirate's cave well known to local boys. There's a shallow bay just below the castle, into which the German bicyclists liked to dive from the heights, then a sharp promontory about 500 meters south in a straight line. This is the Maralunga peninsula, all rocky cliffs on its squared-off seaward edge and along its southern coast.

Somewhere along here, I think, was Enrico's cave. He assured us that it was prettier than Capri's famous Blue Grotto. I have no way of comparing them, having never been south of the Tiber River. But it will serve: silent in the limpid afternoon, the water dripping from Enrico's oars, illuminated in blue indeed, the light coming up through the seawater to reflect upon the walls of the cave. It was one of those enchanting reversals, as when a southern sea is warmer than the breeze blowing across it. In this case, the water contained more light than the air, so that it was our primary illumination. And we were young and would never die.

On the way back to the castle, Letitia began to ruminate upon men and their hairy chests. Enrico's chest hair--curly and black--struck her as very decorative, compared to my mine, which was considerably more sparse and a less masculine brown--a brown, morever, that was blonding almost daily under the sun. As for Giorgio, his chest was quite hairless.

Enrico smiled sweetly, understanding that whatever we were saying, he was the subject of our chat. To change the subject, he took out a pack of Nazionale and handed it around. We each took one except Giorgio, who did not smoke. Enrico smiled more broadly and said: "Will you take it from my lips?" (Letitia translated for me, since Enrico and I were the only monoglots in the party.) Ah, poor Giorgio! Enrico put a Nazionale in his mouth, lit it, took a drag on it, and passed it to Giorgio. Thus he smoked his first cigarette, much as with my help he had learned to make his own bed.

I don't think the two of them ever got it on. Giorgio often left us of an evening and took the tram to La Spezia, to cruise the waterfront for American sailors.

What was Enrico's experience during the war? I didn't ask, and not because we didn't have a language in common. (Letitia would have interpreted, as she did for the quip about the mouth-to-mouth Nazionale.) Enrico would have been a lad in 1945, but boys did their share in the war, on both sides. Nor would his pretty homeland have been spared. Not far north of Lerici, on the Italian Riviera, there's a village I came to know fairly well in later years, Vernazza by name. No road serves Vernazza, though Mussolini drove railway tracks along the shore, so it has had train service since the 1930s. Hard by the railroad station there's a plaque with the village's war dead, roughly divided in thirds: twenty or so young men who died in North Africa, about the same number Caduta in Russia--and what a shock that frozen winter on the Eastern Front must have been, to fishermen from the Mediterranean--and a final twenty or so who were killed in the Resistance. Enrico must have experienced some of that, if only at second hand.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

25 December 2010

                                                         Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Gitmo: the shocking truth revealed

From a December 10 interview on Al-Jazeera with a Sudanese tormented by Jews at Guantanamo prison:

Walid Muhammad Hajj: The most common method to wear down the brothers was witchcraft.
Interviewer: How did they do this?
Walid Muhammad Hajj: There were, of course, Jews among the [staff of] the Guantanamo Base, and they would set traps for the guys....
Interviewer: They would cast a spell on them?
Walid Muhammad Hajj: Yes, but by the grace of Allah, through frequent reading of the Koran and invocation of the names of Allah, they managed to withstand this.
Interviewer: How did you know that somebody was under a spell?
Walid Muhammad Hajj: Someone like that would change.
Interviewer: In what way?
Walid Muhammad Hajj: For example, somebody would take his clothes off, all of a sudden, or would sit on his bed for three days straight without sleeping....
Interviewer: Tell me more.
Walid Muhammad Hajj: I will tell you how the witchcraft affected the guys. A person would suddenly see his brothers and sisters naked before him.
Interviewer: And they weren't really there?
Walid Muhammad Hajj: Absolutely not. It was as if he was in a different world....
Interviewer: Did they ever use witchcraft on you?
Walid Muhammad Hajj: There was one attempt.
Interviewer: How did they do it?
Walid Muhammad Hajj: Once, when I was sleeping – on the floor, not on a bed – I suddenly felt that a cat was trying to penetrate me. It tried to penetrate me again and again. I recited the kursi verse again and again until the cat left.
Interviewer: But there wasn't really any cat there?
Walid Muhammad Hajj: Absolutely not.

 Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Madi, queen of the castle

     In Britain where I had come from, and in Switzerland, Austria, and Germany where I traveled later, a 1950s youth hostel was a rather idealistic affair, owned by a national or sub-national association and run for the betterment of young people, generally defined as someone no older than twenty-five, mostly hikers, bicyclists, and those traveling by public transport. Hitchhikers were tolerated, but anybody who drove up to a youth hostel would be summarily turned away. This was not the case in France and Italy. In Italy, especially, each hostel seemed to be a private affair, run by an individual or a couple as their livelihood, and the rules were enforced with a generous hand. On the Adriatic coast, I met a German family, touring Italy by car; the hostel was a flat-roofed building, and the five of them dragged mattresses up to the roof, there to sleep in familial privacy. And our little gang lived at the castle in Lerici for the better part of two weeks, though three nights was supposed to be the outside limit for a hostel stay.
     At Lerici, Madi made the rules. I find that her name was Maddalena di Carlo, and that she had some local fame as comunista e partigiana, Communist and guerrilla fighter, who carried the Red Flag in the annual May Day parade. I can find no one to tell me, however, what her career as partigiana amounted to. Did she blow up German supply trains, carry a rifle in the mountains, turn the crank on a mimeograph machine, or merely grumble about the fascists? I don't know; I didn't ask, young and stupid as I was.
    Postwar, Madi became custode amata del castello di Lerici, the beloved custodian of the castle, which was her home and source of income until she was evicted. In 1974 the citizens of Lerici concluded that she could no longer provide her young charges with "an effective and hygienic management," as one of her fans explained the situation to me. By that time Madi was quite the crone, all but sexless in her cropped gray hair, lean face, and cast-off clothing. I don't remember her particularly, but as the flower children of a later generation replaced the vagabondi of mine, she became hugely popular among the them, which likely caused her to become less popular among the townspeople. Not only did the "Lericini" get rid of Madi as hostel keeper; in time they also voted to close the hostel. "The flow of young people ended," my email friend recalled. "They did not carry money and they created disorder." I suppose that was true. Our gang was fairly well-behaved, I think, but we were products of an earlier time. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Couldn't stand another of those Vermont winters!

In the 1930s, when I was a babe, the population of the United States was 130 million and there was a clever joke at the expense of the Vermont farmer who was told that the state line had shifted, so that he now lived in New Hampshire. "Thank goodness," he said. "I couldn't have stood another of those Vermont winters!"

Some things change, some don't. The population of the U.S. is now 300 million, but progressive Vermonters are still fleeing across the line to their low-tax, redneck neighbor. Between 2000 and 2010, New Hampshire grew at more than double the rate of Vermont--indeed, double the rate of the rest of the New England states.

The catch, of course, is that most of the newcomers are precisely the same Good People who drove up the taxes in Vermont, Maine, and especially Massachusetts. And now that they are here, they're voting for the same Wouldn't It Be Nice If... projects that got their home states into trouble. Blue skies! - Dan Ford

Um, yes!

From the Australian newspaper:

Bjorn Hurtig, Mr Assange's Swedish lawyer, said he would lodge a formal complaint to the authorities and ask them to investigate how such sensitive police material leaked into the public domain. "It is with great concern that I hear about this because it puts Julian and his defence in a bad position," he told a colleague.

"I do not like the idea that Julian may be forced into a trial in the media. And I feel especially concerned that he will be presented with the evidence in his own language for the first time when reading the newspaper. I do not know who has given these documents to the media, but the purpose can only be one thing - trying to make Julian look bad."

So it goes in the world of Leaky Wikis. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Surviving Hitler: A Love Story

Thirtysome years ago I was ski-mountaineering in Switzerland with, among others, a young couple who were celebrating their graduation from law school. I saw Eddie and Claudia occasionally thereafter, and once or twice met her mother at their house. Now I discover that this lovely woman was born in Germany, by Reich laws a Jew, and that not only did she survive the war but married a German soldier who toward the end became involved in the plot to kill Hitler--and that he too survived! Their remarkable story is the subject of a short film, Surviving Hitler: A Love Story, now going the art-house and prize-competition rounds. It will be released on DVD in March. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

What goes around, comes around...

In an exquisite piece of retributive justice, London's Guardian newspaper has published the Swedish prosecutor's case against Julian Assange, the Leaky Wiki man who is now on mansion arrest in England. The report was--get ready for it!--leaked to the newspaper. And--funnier and funnier--Mr Assange, through his attorney, is calling for an investigation of the leak! Perhaps he and the U.S. State Department could save money by putting their cases in the hands of a single lawyer. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

If I've lost Koren, I've lost upper middle class America

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Making a list of who's naughty and nice

Julian Assange goes back into court today (right about now, in fact) to ask for release on bail of £200,000. This would enable him to spend Christmas in a nice English country home, albeit with an electronic bracelet, though in fact he would doubtless be heading for France in a fishing smack, like a latter-day Scarlet Pimpernel. Lots of luck extraditing him from France, where both sexual misconduct and espionage are considered more in the nature of parlor tricks than high crimes.

Meanwhile the U.S. seems to be scrambling for evidence sufficient to indict Mr. Assange for espionage, since it would be easier to extradite him from Britain than from Sweden for a couple of reasons. MSNBC has enlisted a panel of "experts" to assess the Leaky Wiki's odds if the U.S. does manage to lay hands on him, and the assessment is rather gloomy for Mr. Assange and his supporters.

Of course this all depends on whether he can be extradited. One of the obstacles, if he goes to Sweden to answer the charges of rape and molestation, is a rather funny one: Britain would only be loaning him to Sweden! He apparently can't be sent from there to the U.S. without British approval. (The other reason is more mundane: Britain has a fast-track extradition agreement with the U.S.; Sweden does not.) Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Pity about the crowds!

 

Since I made fun of Aspen's "sustainability" pretenses the other day, I thought I should post this photo taken by my iPhone at about 9:20 one morning, with exactly one other skier visible in the panorama. That's why I take my annual ski week in December: good snow, low prices (well, comparatively low), and few people. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Sustainable excess

One of the joys of skiing at Aspen is the breathtaking amount of bling that's apparent here, even at this time of year. Aspen is the home of the million-dollar fixer-upper. (They don't actually get fixed up. They get bulldozed and replaced.) Sally Wife gave up skiing with me in Aspen because window shopping here had become so preposterous that she no longer enjoyed it. Why gaze into shop windows when the stuff on display is so upscale that you can't even pretend to aspire to it? (One time on the  Snowmass bus, Sally nudged me and nodded toward the woman in the seat opposite. "She's wearing," Sally whispered, "more than our net worth!")

But so pervasive is  Good Thinking that it has spread even to the citadel of excess. The Aspen Times has a pull-out advertising section on the theme of Sustainability. I saw a hymn to Sustainability on the safety bar of the Ajax Express high-speed quad lift. And I saw a large sign--green, of course--on one of the lift towers begging me to Fight Global Warming.

Fight global warming? If I wanted to fight global warming, I would have stayed home and snowshoed through the woods. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Information wants to be free!

And by golly we'll shut down the webite of any organization that thinks otherwise! Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The WikiLeaker

I confess to a bit of schadenfreude in the case of Julian Assange, refused bail in London while he fights extradition to Sweden on charges of rape and molestation. Of course his fanboys will see the evil hand of the CIA behind all this. One could only hope! It's pleasant to think of Sweden, determinedly neutral for nearly two hundred years, suddenly revealed as a sleeper cell of the CIA!

It's tempting to think of Mr. Assange as another Osama bin Laden, bent on destroying the United States. In truth he more resembles  Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who sent letter bombs to people in order to draw attention to his crackpot ideas. Mr. Assange sends document bombs, again to draw attention to his crackpot notion about the Conspiracy that is America's place in the world. No doubt he will make our lives less comfortable, just as bin Laden and Kaczynski did--or if not less comfortable, then less efficient. (The Unabomber is the reason you must take a package to the post office if it weighs more than thirteen ounces, rather than leave it in your mailbox for the carrier, if the package has stamps on it.) Diplomats will be less honest than they already are; they'll miss more opportunities than they presently do. More static, more fog. It's hard to imagine, however, that a diplomatic corps forced to do business on the telephone is such a disaster as to threaten the nation's security.

In the meantime, Mr. Assange, enjoy your Christmas holiday in London Gaol. Do they have internet access? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On going to war

On 9/11, Nate Fick is on shore leave in Darwin. An Australian motorist gives him and a buddy a ride back to the USS Dubuque, the assault ship cum aircraft carrier that was to have been the Marines' floating home for a six-month deployment in the Pacific. They are to steam immediately for the Persian Gulf. Says the lieutenant, himself probably only twenty-two years old: "Looking at the Marines, I saw football stars and thugs and baby-faced eighteen-year-olds." These are the men he will lead into Afghanistan. (Or so I suppose. I haven't read that far yet.)

I've caught on to the title. One Bullet Away refers to the odd angry shot that could make Lieutenant Fick the Recon company commander--or, by the same token, could make his platoon sergeant his replacement as platoon leader. A convincing, thoughtful book. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The self-contained citizen

One of the great features of travel has been the chance to overdose on movies. But last night I found myself crouched over my laptop while the Hotel Durant's wide-screen television stayed dark. Now that Netflix is streaming (mostly old or odd) movies on the internet, I can do better by reserving the choice of time and title to myself, rather than to Ted Turner or American Movie Channel. By the same token, the Durant's telephone stays quiet while I touch base with my iPhone.

Less and less do we dip into the common pool of experience. Wealthy people live in gated communities and send their kids to Sidwell Friends. Coin-operated telephones are close to vanishing from the public space (and are seldom operated by coins any longer, now that a quarter can't do what a nickel used to accomplish). The Sundeck atop Aspen Mountain still has its bank of phones outside the restrooms, but the only customer they had yesterday was one of the Mexican busboys. (What ski bums used to do in Aspen is now done by Mexicans and by Australians on summer vacation.) The customers each had a cell phone to himself.

We all seem to be specialists now. We pretend to "celebrate diversity," as the posters at the University of New Hampshire say, but in fact our lives are less and less diverse. Gives a whole new twist to the notion of E Pluribus Unum. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

One Bullet Away

I am hugely enjoying One Bullet Away, in which Nate Fick tells the story of his introduction to the Marine Corps in the summer of 1998. I was surprised and impressed that Officer Candidate School in the USMC sounds a whole lot tougher than the basic training I went through in the winter of 1956 at the hands of Korean War veterans who had learned the hard way that untrained troops are a menace to themselves and their comrades. Evidently the Marines never unlearned this basic truth.

I particularly liked what young Mr. Fick says about his motivation for joining up: "I wanted to do something so hard that nobody would ever talk shit to me." He was a junior at Dartmouth, and OCS was his summer vacation; he'll become a Marine second lieutenant in June 1999. This is the same Lieutenant Fick who was chronicled in the HBO mini-series, Generation Kill. As portrayed by Stark Sands, he's appealingly decent and thoughtful--and regularly rebuked by the headquarters POGs for caring more about his men than the orders he's been given. It will be interesting to see what the real-life Nate Fick says on this subject. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

If unemployment is getting worse, we should raise taxes, right?

Reports the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON – In a surprising setback, the nation's unemployment rate climbed to 9.8 percent in November, a seven-month high, as hiring slowed across the economy.

The report was a reminder that the economic recovery is proceeding more slowly and fitfully than many economists had expected. It is likely to push lawmakers before year's end to pass an extension of long-term unemployment benefits, which expired this week.

No mention of taxes! Apparently it escapes the wizards at the Associated Press that if you raise taxes on the hiring class, you'll get less hiring. (You'll also get less work, but that's a much more subtle result.) Could it be? -- could it possibly be? -- that hiring slowed precisely because small businessmen feared their taxes would go up on January 1?

Congress meanwhile thinks this is a great moment to raise taxes, at least on the more favored members of society, who are also the ones running the businesses that aren't hiring anybody this month, thanks all the same! Of course the vote is mostly a symbolic nod to the "progressive" left of the Democratic party, since such a bill has almost no hope of passage in the Senate. But it does show how desperately some people would like to reprise the 1930s, when the Roosevelt administration took a financial panic and turned it into an eight-year Depression. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On Grannie's feeding tube

During the debates on ObamaCare, there was much talk of the Death Panels that would decide whether decrepit oldsters would be allowed to live. It's time to spare a thought for the hundreds, probably thousands, of informal death panels in households around the country: let's suppose that Grannie dabbled in real estate and now owns half a dozen properties each worth $500,000. Her net worth therefore is $3 million and probably quite a bit more when her various checking accounts are factored in. Are the heirs doing the math? You bet they are!

If Grannie dies on or before December 31, the estate passes entire to her loving kin. If she hangs on past the New Year, however, and the U.S. Congress fails to act, they get a tax bill of well over a million dollars (55 percent of everything over $1 million)! How many heirs, do you think, are keeping one eye on Nancy Pelosi and the other eye on Grannie's feeding tube? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Dziekuje!

Poland is one of history's most tormented nations, regularly invaded by its neighbors (and occasionally invading them), and in 1945 shifted like a skateboard several hundred miles to the west. This was Stalin's double punishment: eastern Poland was incorporated into the Soviet Ukraine, and in exchange Poland got a chunk of eastern Germany, thus diminishing both rivals and pushing the USSR's security zone deep into Europe.

The other day, Stalin's successors took responsibility for another of his atrocities against Poland: the murder of thousands of Polish officers and noncoms at Katyn and other forest sites. (The link is to the gripping 2007 film.) This is progress, as noted in the Wall Street Journal today. The editorial tells a lovely story about the jazz pianist Dave Brubeck, who was a soldier in the liberation of Europe from German control, and who visited Poland in 1958 on a cultural exchange mission. At that time, Mr Brubeck composed a piece entitled Dziekuje. He played it the other day at his 90th birthday celebration, at which time he explained that "dziekuje" is the Polish word for "thank you. And I want to play this piece as thanks to the people of Poland for resisting Soviet Communism."

When Soviet agents murdered those thousands of Poles, they intended to decapitate the future Polish society. They then blamed the atrocity on the Germans, figuring that no one could ever challange that story. Instead, they cemented the evil in historic memory, and encouraged rather than suppressed Poland's desire for freedom. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Nate Fick

Last night I watched the sixth episode of the hugely enjoyable Generation Kill mini-series. For the first time (I think), the sympathetic lieutenant's full name was spoken--previously it's been "Nate" or "Lieutenant Fick"--and I was sure I'd heard it before. So like a good child of the internet, I Googled the name, and sure enough: he's the author of One Bullet Away, which some of my classmates in War in the Modern World called the best of the 21st century accounts of warfare. I haven't read it but will soon be doing so. Meanwhile, I hope to catch the final episode of "Generation Kill" before heading off to Aspen for the annual ski week. It's a great show; pity about the title. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On cowing a nation

Roger Cohen, in a Thanksgiving Day op-ed in the New York Times, gives an apocalyptic view of the new security regimen at American (and other) airports. The U.S., he writes, "has empowered zealous bureaucrats to trample on the liberties for which Americans give thanks this week." Our security system, he argues, is "stupid," relying as it does on "dubious gropes" and "daily humiliations." And that's just the warmup:

Whether or not these explosive devices [liquids, shoes, underwear] were ever actually operable remains a matter of dispute, just as it remains a mystery that the enemy — if as powerful as portrayed — has not contrived a single terrorist act on U.S. soil since 9/11. What is not in doubt is an old rule: Give a bureaucrat a big stick and a big budget, allow said bureaucrat to trade in the limitless currency of human anxiety, and the masses will soon be intimidated by the Department of Fear....

Anyone who has watched T.S.A. agents spending 10 minutes patting down 80-year-old grandmothers, or seen dismayed youths being ordered back into the scanner booth by agents connected wirelessly to other invisible agents gazing at images of these people in a state of near-nakedness, has to ask: What form of group madness is it that forsakes judgment and discernment for process run amok?....

The unfettered growth of the Department of Homeland Security and the T.S.A. represent a greater long-term threat to the prosperity, character and wellbeing of the United States than a few madmen in the valleys of Waziristan or the voids of Yemen.

America is a nation of openness, boldness and risk-taking. Close this nation, cow it, constrict it and you unravel its magic.

Happy Holidays. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

One gets used to it

On October 2 and 3, 1941, German police and Ukrainian auxiliaries shot 2,273 men, women, and children in the city of Mahileu, in Soviet Belarus. One of the policemen--an Austrian, as it happened, not himself a German national--wrote his wife about what it was like to kill people on the edge of a pit that was to be their grave:

"During the first try, my hand trembled a bit as I shot, but one gets used to it. By the tenth try I aimed calmly and shot surely at the many women, children, and infants. I kept in mind that I have two infants at home, whom these hordes would treat just the same, if not ten times worse. The death that we gave them was a beautiful quick death, compared to the hellish torments of thousands and thousands in the jails of the GPU [Russian secret police]. Infants flew in great arcs through the air, and we shot them to pieces in flight, before their bodies fell into the pit and into the water."

Quoted in Timothy Snyder's magnificent history, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, pages 205-206. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The Bubble Boy

The estimable Peggy Noonan does a delightful take on President Obama's trip to Indiana to "get out of the presidential bubble," as one reporter put it. It's an impossibility, of course: when the president travels, he takes the bubble with him. Ms. Noonan suggests that instead of traveling to Indiana in his special plane, with his entourage and his special cars, Mr. Obama should appoint a Reality Adviser. She then segues into an amusing conversation between the two--on the subject of airport security.

Actually, it's a lot easier. All Mr. Obama need do is call up the clueless John Pistole at TSA and tell him to bring a full-body scanner, a couple of overweight TSA types with their uniforms and rubber gloves, and to set up a conga line in front of Air Force One. Let Mr. Obama spread his legs, raise his arms in the worldwide posture of surrender, and expose his genitals to an anonymous technician in another room. Let him board Air Force One. Then let him get off the plane, this time opting out of the scanner and getting his gonads stroked by a surly stranger with bad breath in a private room. The whole charade would take about half an hour and cost maybe a thousand dollars--a tiny fraction of what's involved in a trip to Indiana.

If Bubble Boy did that, just once, what do you think the odds are that the scanners and the pat-downs would be standard practice for the Christmas travel season? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Light dawns over Times Square

By golly, the New York Times is catching on! In his Political Times column, Matt Bai ruminates on the larger meaning of America's roiling anger about body scanners, pat-downs, and bullying bureaucrats in general:

...the “Don’t touch my junk” fiasco raises, yet again, what has become the central theme of Mr. Obama’s presidency: America’s faltering confidence in the ability of government to make things work. From stimulus spending and the health care law to the federal response to oil in the Gulf of Mexico, Mr. Obama has continually stumbled — blindly, it seems — into some version of the same debate, which is about whether we can trust federal bureaucracies to expand their reach without harming citizens or industry.

Good grief! This could have been a Wall Street Journal op-ed. Mr. Bai goes on to speculate that perhaps the Democrats were misled by their electoral triumphs in 2006 and 2008. (You think?) He holds up the Cash for Clunkers boondoggle as just such an over-reaching, though I suspect it was mostly forgotten by November 2: ObamaCare was the clunker on most of our minds by that time.

White House aides expressed shock this week at how controversial the T.S.A. has now become. They seem to regard this latest argument as a distraction from the security issues that matter more.... But this is just the latest iteration of a larger debate that surrounds much of what Mr. Obama does. And, just as with the health care protests and the reaction to the BP oil spill, the administration’s surprise seems to indicate that it still doesn’t quite get what that debate is really about.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Well, why doesn't the government pay for it?

In the long ago and far away, it was considered very amusing when a child said of a project whose finances were uncertain: "Well, why doesn't the government pay for it?" That stopped being funny in the Johnson administration, if not before. But there are still a few who haven't gotten the word, including Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. The last is the gent to wants to build a mosque and Islamic cultural center next door to Ground Zero. He thinks it would be a dandy idea if we (that is, the American taxpayer) not only agreed that it's a dandy idea, but helped pay for it as well. Toward that end, he has applied for $5 million from a U.S. government fund established for the purpose of--are you ready?--rebuilding lower Manhattan after the 9/11 terrorist strike. Yes. In the immortal words of Dave Barry, I am not making this up. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The Green Card lottery

Here's a lottery no one has ever heard about, except for 15 million people who have entered it: you can get a Green Card (think of it as an American visa on steroids) by the luck of the draw. Fifty thousand are issued every year, so the odds are actually fairly good--one out of 300. The Wall Street Journal has the story. Be sure to read the comments: they'll make your blood run cold.

Personally, I'm all in favor of the Green Card lottery: it proves that 15 million people still love us, in spite of Iraq, Afghanistan, the bellicose George W. Bush, and and the bumbling Barack Obama. (The participants have tripled in the past five years.) Besides, half the applicants are from Bangladesh, which means that they won't be agitating for more signs in Spanish. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

And now--the Maserati Grand Cherokee!

The alliance of Chrysler and Fiat was always a source of amusement, but nothing comes close to the latest bit of hilarity out of Detroit, to wit: Chrysler will build a Maserati SUV on the underpinnings of the Jeep Grand Cherokee!

This follows hard on the heels of other hybrids from CEO Sergio Marcchione, including a rebranded Chrysler 200 to be sold abroad under the Lancia marque, and an Alfa Romeo to be sold in the U.S. by Chrysler dealers.

Pricing will be something to watch. The Jeep Grand Cherokee starts at $30,000, while the cheapest Masarati goes for $118,000. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Palin v. Obama

Frank Rich in the New York Times does his baffled best to analyze the phenomenon of Sarah Palin:

What might bring down other politicians only seems to make her stronger: the malapropisms and gaffes, the cut-and-run half-term governorship, family scandals, shameless lying and rapacious self-merchandising. In an angry time when America’s experts and elites all seem to have failed, her amateurism and liabilities are badges of honor. She has turned fallibility into a formula for success.

What particularly astonishes Mr. Rich is that the premiere of Sarah Palin's Alaska on the telly got twice the number of viewer's as the season finale of Mad Men! (Since we don't ordinarily watch the telly, hence don't have any of the specialty channels, Sally and I crouch in front of the computer monitor to watch Mad Men, which I buy off Amazon at $1.99 the episode, the day after it airs ... or creeps through the cable, or whatever it does to get to more sophisticated homes.)

But here's the thing: if you take away the snark, everything Mr. Rich says about Ms. Palin applies equally to Barack Obama. They are, in my judgment, two empty suits, each with his or her besotted demographic. If they are candidates in 2012, then as far as I'm concerned it will be a reprise of 1968. That was the year I voted for the Farmer-Labor candidate. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

That was the old fine!

The obese ladies and gentlemen of the Transportation Security Administration have created a new American folk hero in John Tyner. Rather like President Obama and Nancy Pelosi, who'd like to fire the American electorate for not appreciating them sufficiently, the TSA is really upset with the "traveling public" and its reaction to full body scanners and the deliberately intimate pat-down given to those who opt out of it. To make their point, they have opened an investigation into Mr. Tyner and threatened him with an $11,000 fine.

It seems that Mr. Tyner warned an agent, "Touch my junk and I'll have you arrested," when the TSA began to explore his "crotchal area," as one agent felicitously called it. He was forcibly ejected from the airport, with a warning that he could be fined $10,000 for lèse majesté. Though the Federal Reserve Board assures us that the consumer price index these days is flat, the TSA evidently hasn't gotten the word: $10,000, explained a representative, was the old fine for injuring the pride of its employees; Mr. Tyner may now have to come up with eleven big ones.

A conservative famously is a liberal who's been mugged. Just so, a libertarian is a conservative who's been groped by TSA. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Can ye spare a Euro, mister?

 

The Irish government evidently capitulated to the European Community yesterday, agreeing to take the bailout that it has been resisting for a week. The price, as everyone knows, is that Ireland must raise its taxes to European Community levels, thus ending the run of the Celtic Tiger. What a pity. (The gent on the left is Ajai Chopra of the International Monetary Fund. Though ready to bail out the nation with other people's money, he doesn't seem to have dropped anything into the beggar's cup.) Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Selling off Governmental Motors

Two cheers for Presidents Bush and Obama (and one apiece for CEOs Rick Wagoner and Dan Akerson) for starting us on the re-privatization of GM. We taxpayers paid $50 billion for our shares; we are now on track to get about 80 percent of that returned to us--or, more likely, spent on something else. Assuming the net cost is a mere $10 billion, that comes to $87 per American household. God knows, we've made worse investments in the past. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Honorable man

Sgt Salvatore Guinta is that anomaly, at least in recent years: a living recipient of the Medal of Honor. President Obama will hang the Medal around Sgt Guinta's neck this afternoon in the East Wing of the White House. I would give a lot to know what's going through the minds of each man at that moment! What does the soldier think when he stands face to face with the commander in chief? What does the politician think when he stands face to face with a hero--and not just any hero, but one who nearly gave his life to carry out the presidential strategy?

Sgt Guinta's difficult night is brilliantly related (though at second hand) in Sebastian Junger's War, in my estimation one of the best books ever written about combat.  If you haven't read it, you should. It's The Iliad, except that the heroes are the enlisted men. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On being a Pole during World War II

Many years ago, I hitchhiked from Paris to Perugia with this young woman. She was Polish--born in Lwow in the southeast, her father likely murdered in the Katyn Forest massacre, herself sent to Siberia with her mother and sister. They were among the minority of deportees who were rescued after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and Stalin was persuaded to scratch up a Polish army to fight on the western front. They were sent first to Iran, then the women and children were scattered all over the world, an experience that left Basia fluent in Russian, Arabic, French, and English, and Polish of course; in the spring of 1955, when I took this photo, she was heading to Perugia to perfect her Italian.

This all came alive to me again while reading the magnificent Bloodlands, an account of central Europe's agony from the 1930s to the 1950s. This in turn led me to borrow The Polish Deportees of World War II, containing first-hand accounts of this great hegira and the suffering it entailed. (Roughly ten percent of the Poles died in Iran or en route to it, of disease and malnutrition from their Russian exile--and these, remember, were from the select groups that actually got out of the Gulag, and those in turn were the hardiest of the deportees, who survived weeks in cattle cars or horse-drawn sleighs en route to the Russian outback.)

Lots of those Polish young men died in the Italian campaign, at Monte Cassino and elsewhere. I wonder if Basia knew that? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On bowing to foreign opinion II

Bernard Shaw said there are two tragedies in life: one being not to get your heart's desire, and the other, to get it. Barack Obama entered office with a heart full of desires, including an end to what the historians call the myth of American exceptionalism. He went around the world, apologizing for his predecessors. We have sinned, he admitted! We are a nation like any other! Well, of course the world took him at his word. As a result, he went to the G-20 summit and got sand kicked in his face. He couldn't even get the Koreans to sign the trade agreement that the Bush administration negotiated three years ago, and that was blocked in the Congress by Nancy Pelosi!

This is very popular in the faculty lounge, but it will cost us dearly over the years, as European automobiles enter South Korea at more favorable terms than those from Ford and General Motors.... Oh, and did you catch the news that a Chinese automaker hopes to take 16 percent of those GM shares soon to go on the market, heavily subsidized by your taxes? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

We are all Greeks now!

Thirty-five arrests and fourteen injured, half of them police officers, when university students rioted in London the other day. The window belongs to the Conservative Party, which in the metaphor of President Obama is trying to get the British economic vehicle out of the ditch. In the US, according to our eloquent president, the naysayers stand around with their Slurpies and watch. Prime Minister Cameron must wish he could be so lucky. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On maintaining the nation

I've always thought of the United States as a man on a bicycle (well, better make that a person on a bicycle). He does great as long as he keeps moving. Stopping, however, is an awkward business, especially as one gets older.

Lately I get the impression that the American bicycle is finally coming to a stop. (Perhaps that's why we favor long-legged presidents?) The reasons are many, but one of them is entirely self-inflicted: we're jettisoning the culture that got us this far. The other day in the Wall Street Journal, Tony Blair expressed it beautifully. Muslims were on his mind, but they are or ought to be on our minds as well, and anyhow muslims are a fair stand-in for the entire multi-culti stew:

But there has to be a shared acceptance that some things we believe in and we do together: obedience to certain values like democracy, rule of law, equality between men and women; respect for national institutions; and speaking the national language. This common space cannot be left to chance or individual decision. It has to be accepted as mandatory.

Amen. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Dignity restored

I love this photo, not least because the president of the United States is wearing a tie! Thank goodness. It's high time we had some dignity in the Oval Office, after a dismal season of hearing about "folks" and "Slurpies." (Incidentally, if it's remarkable that a Kenyan-American should be president of the United States, it's also pretty impressive that a Sikh should be prime minister of India.) Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

A fate worse than debt

My goodness, at long last the Gray Lady has taken notice! Writes Landon Thomas in his prominent story in the NYT this morning:

LONDON — When interest rates soared last week on Irish government bonds, it served as a grim warning to other indebted nations of how difficult and even politically ruinous it could be to roll back decades of public sector largess.

Mr. Thomas has mostly European governments in mind, of course, but he does have a sense that it's not just Ireland, Greece, Spain, and California--that we are all Europeans now:

International concerns about the high budget deficit in the United States, and Washington’s seeming willingness to print money rather than tackle tough debt-cutting measures, help partly explain the recent anti-American criticism from countries as diverse as Brazil, China and Germany. Countering those critics may be one of the biggest tasks for President Obama in Seoul, South Korea, this week at the Group of 20 meeting of the leaders of the world’s biggest economies.

I'm not sure that Trillion Dollar Barack is the best man we could deploy for this task. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The Gray Lady meets Facebook

The media is suffering from its biennial bout of post-election depression, to the extent that the New York Times has done a think-piece on the Facebook Problem. It seems that some of our candidates had earlier posted dubious photos of themselves on the internet. I particularly admired Krystal Ball, who in addition to her marvelous name once had herself photographed mouthing what the Gray Lady delicately calls a "sex toy."

Krystal Ball lost, but Aaron Shock (another marvelous name!) is a newly minted Congressman despite or perhaps because of the photo above, in which he poses with a woman in wide-stance bra. (Don't you just love it that the New York Times obscures her face?) Well, of course he won! The women all voted for him because they admired his pecs, and the guys because they yearned to have that cleavage bracketing them at the pool. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

All aboard the QE2!

Not the Cunard cruise ship, alas, but the second round of Ben Bernanke's "quantitative easing," which is a fancy term for turning dollars into dimes by way of an extended bout of inflation such as we enjoyed in the 1970s. No longer do central banks actually crank up the printing presses in order to debase the currency; instead they buy U.S. government bonds with money they don't have. Presto! The dollar falls and prices rise. How else did you think we were going to pay off those trillion-dollars deficits of the past two years? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

We're the ones we've been waiting for

Give Barack Obama his due: he nailed it with that prediction, though we had to wait two years for it to be fulfilled. Was there ever such a rebuke of a sitting president and his party? (Perhaps more the party than the president.) Even New Hampshire, once a totem of the GOP but in recent years a bastion of Good Thinking as refugees poured in from Massachusetts, has returned to the Republican fold--for its Washington delegation. We returned a Democrat to the state house, and my home district returned six Democrats to the thundering herd of our state legislature. There's a message in that: not yet does the United States have a two-party system with the Tea Party on the right and the Republicans on the left. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

All you mosques look alike to me

According to CNN:

While there were "no identifiable or specific threats," an FBI official in Chicago said suspicious packages addressed to U.S. destinations found on cargo planes abroad warranted the precautions.

"Since two of the suspicious packages that were intercepted were addressed to religious institutions in Chicago, all churches, synagogues and mosques in the Chicago area should be vigilant for any unsolicited or unexpected packages, especially those originating from overseas locations," said FBI Special Agent Ross Rice.

CNN had the sense to headline the story, "Chicago synagogues warned to watch for suspicious packages," which might spare the local imams, ministers, and priests from rummaging too deeply through the junk mail. But it's scary to think that Agent Rice seens to believe that, even though the bombs came from Yemen, were put together by al Qaeda, and were addresses to synagogues, all "religious institutions" are equally endangered. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Tuesday's child is full of grace

But ah, Wednesday's child is full of woe, and so it seems it will be for the Democratic party on November 3. My favorite pollster says that the next Speaker of the House will be a Republican, while the Senate Majority Leader will probably be a Democrat--though he may not be Harry Reid! Perhaps more important, because this is a Census year and many Congressional districts will be redrawn, a lot of states will have newly minted Republican governors.

Great news for the GOP? Not really, because they'll probably overreach, just as Messrs Obama and Reid have done over the past two years, and Mme Pelosi for four. Scott Rasmussen goes on to say: "But none of this means that Republicans are winning. The reality is that voters in 2010 are doing the same thing they did in 2006 and 2008: They are voting against the party in power."

The Rasmussen pollsters report that 51 percent of likely voters think that the Democrats are the party of big government, while 51 percent view Republicans as the party of big business. Who does that leave to be the party of the people--the Tea Party? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On being a traitor

Kudos to Samir Khan, who in a recent essay explained what neither President Bush, President Obama, nor Osama bin Laden have been able to articulate: why a U.S.-born Muslim would be "proud to be a traitor to America." (I found the article on a website called Unjust Media, but it apparently originated on Mr. Khan's own website-magazine, Inspire.) With beautiful clarity he explains:

I am a traitor to America because my religion requires me to be one.... I am terrifically proud to be a part of such a religion and what Muslim wouldn’t? Islam has the answer to life’s problems and it is what bonds humanity together for the good.... Islam requires its domination and after eighty plus years of living in a post-Caliphate world, I would think that it's about time Muslims came together to tear down the obstacles. The most important of these obstacles today is obviously America.

That bit about eighty-plus years refers I think to the emergence of a secular Turkey in 1924. The idea is that Kemal Ataturk severed the last strand of the once-glorious Ottoman Empire, which at its height ran north almost to Vienna and Kiev, west to Algiers, and southeast to the Indian Ocean. To this you can add Spain, Portugal, Indonesia, and the Philippines, in the more grandiose vision of Islam-as-universal-nation--and perhaps Germany and France as well. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On citizenship

It's now official: you needn't be a citizen in order to vote! Says the New York Times in one of the shortest news stories of the week (copied in its entirety):

A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit struck down a state law that requires people to provide proof of American citizenship to register to vote, saying the law conflicts with the federal National Voter Registration Act. Nina Perales, national senior counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said that few illegal immigrants tried to register, but that 30,000 citizens had been rejected for registration under the law, which voters passed in 2004.

One of the judges on that panel, as I learned elsewhere, was my former favorite justice, Sandra Day O'Connor. What am I missing here? If a state may not require its citizens to be citizens before they can vote, what the hell does citizenship mean? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On bowing to foreign opinion

Shelby Steele--who is that anomaly, a black conservative--ponders the phenomenon of Barack Obama in today's Wall Street Journal. The title is A Referendum on the Redeemer, and basically it's a more intelligent discussion of an emotion first encapsulated by Sarah Palin: "How's that hopey changey stuff working out for ya?"

Mr. Obama, as Mr. Steele argues, is our first 1960s president. This is a much more momentous fact than Bill Clinton's emergence as our first Baby Boomer president: though influenced by the 1960s, Mr. Clinton actually grew up in the two decades that followed World War II, and that was the worldview that shaped him. (It wasn't until 1968, when Mr. Clinton was 22 years old, that The Sixties really got rolling.)

Why is this important? Because the 1960s mindset is one that sees America as essentially evil. Bill Clinton didn't believe that; Barack Obama does, hence the kowtowing tour that marked the first year of his presidency.

This is why (says Mr. Steele) so many Americans believe that their president wasn't born in the U.S., or that he worships in secret as a Muslim. Neither is likely, but the deeper suspicion--he isn't one of us!--most certainly is. America as a force for evil may be a popular notion at National Public Radio and indeed most of the mainstream media, in our university faculties, and among the Good People generally. It doesn't sell so well among the great mass of the Americans, including a good many who joyfully voted for Barack Obama two years ago. We will hear their second thoughts on Tuesday. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The man who saved General Motors

There's a delightful take-down of Steven Rattner's self-congratulatory account of the Overhaul of GM -- in The New Yorker, of all places! I would have expected TNY to revel in the surgical swiftness of Team Obama's remake of the company that was once America's premier builder of automobiles. (Today, of course, America's premier autobuilders speak with Japanese accents.)

Malcolm Gladwell's review is sub-titled "Who really rescued General Motors?" The answer (get ready for it!) is not Steven Rattner, and certainly not the man he installed as GM's new chairman (and who stuck to the job for just over a year before he quit). No, the man who saved General Motors was none other than Rick Wagoner, whom Mr. Rattner fired. It was Mr. Wagoner who got rid of GM's pension burden, persuaded the UAW to accept roughly half the prevailing wage for the company's new hires, and put in motion the new generation of automobiles that are now winning praise from critics (if not yet from buyers).

As for Mr. Rattner, he comes off sounding a bit like a college sophomore. In a devastating last paragraph, Mr. Gladwell lets the auto czar wind his own shroud, as he concludes the story of his second (only his second!) whirlwind tour of Detroit:

Then it was on to G.M. and finally to Chrysler. But not for long, because time was short and the real work of saving Detroit, of course, has nothing to do with Detroit. “We walked among the vehicles—sedans and trucks and even a Fiat 500—as the Chrysler people talked about advanced hybrid power trains and new, environmentally friendly diesels,” Rattner continues. “But by this point our goal was not to miss our flight back to the mountain of work that awaited us back in Washington.”

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Snowing on Ajax!

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Despite?

Jonathan Alter, in the New York Times, has a problem distinguishing cause and effect:

'It’s a sign of how poorly liberals market themselves and their ideas that the word “liberal” is still in disrepute despite the election of the most genuinely liberal president that the political culture of this country will probably allow.'

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Gasp! anonymously financed groups!

As we count down to November 2, the front page of the New York Times more and more resembles a broadsheet from the Democratic National Committee. Here's a screenshot from the website this morning, peppered with scare words. "Anonymously financed groups are starting a coordinated final push to deliver control ..."  How sinister! But isn't this what all "groups" do in all elections? No mention in the Gray Lady that the largest anonymously financed group in this election cycle is the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Workers. "We're the big dog," said Larry Scanlon, the head of AFSCME's political operations. "But we don't like to brag." And if he did brag, you wouldn't read it in the New York Times. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On bombing Iran

I've always assumed that when Iran's nuclear program got so far along that bombs were an inevitable product, the Israelis would blast the facilities out of existence, as it has done to other nations in the past. Not so fast, says Kenneth Pollack in The National Interest:

Most American (and Israeli) nuclear experts now think that Tehran is so far along that it could rebuild the entire program and be back to where it is at present in just a year or two. And many already fear that Iran has secret facilities, or is hiding key machinery and material for its nuclear program—then the program wouldn’t be set back much at all by a military campaign.

It is also worth keeping in mind that Iran probably will retaliate against the United States.... The Islamic Republic has a formidable capacity to employ terrorism and a lot of allies, like Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who could also cause a great deal of damage on Tehran’s behalf. If there is anyone out there who might be able to replicate a terrorist attack as terrible as 9/11, it is Iran.

Sanctions, he thinks, have a better chance of success--but tougher sanctions, allied with covert action and a greater emphasis on human rights. South Africa is the model here: the whole world was ready to dump on South Africa, especially the Good People, not for its nukes but for the odiousness of its regime. Worth a read. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

'If I've lost Maureen Tucker, I've lost Rolling Stone!'

I've never before heard of Maureen Tucker, nor the Velvet Underground, and I've only once before read Rolling Stone (that being the story that brought General Petraeus to Afghanistan). But if I were Barack Obama, I'd be having nightmares about this interview:

"I disagree with spending / borrowing / printing — damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead! I disagree with the 'we won' attitude, which is the cowardly way of saying fuck you," Tucker said of the Obama presidency. "I disagree with an administration that for twenty months blames Bush. If the president and his minions are so damn smart, why didn't they know the severity of the situation? The president has actually said (and I saw it on video) that they didn't know!" Tucker added that she's not usually conservative-leaning. "I have voted Democrat all my life, until I started listening to what Obama was promising and started wondering how the hell will this utopian dream land be paid for? For those who actually believe that their taxes won't go up in order to pay for all this insanity: good luck," Tucker said.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Requiem for the Congressman

The Rasmussen pollsters asked "likely voters" if they thought their Congressional representative should be reelected. The results are amazing. Whereas the rule in the past has been that the United States Congress is doing a lousy job, whereas my Congressman is terrific, that now is very much a minority view:

Sixty-two percent (62%) of voters think it would be better for the country if most congressional incumbents are defeated this November. Just 27% think their representative in Congress is the best possible person for the job, and only 37% think their local congressional representative deserves reelection.

The problems are three: the auto bailout, the stimulus, and ObamaCare. For his part, the President worries that the people are scared. Indeed we are! We're scared of him. Mr. Obama's best option, it seems to me, is to follow the pundit who was so disappointed with the electorate that he thought the government's ought to fire the people and appoint a new one. Who the devil said that? For the first time in years, Google fails me. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Requiem for the buck

I ordered a pair of ski poles yesterday, and when I clicked on the Confirm button, it occurred to me that the price ($129) was more than what I paid for my first pair of metal skis, which I bought second hand at a ski shop in Littleton NH. That was of course before the Great Inflation of the 1970s, which turned our dollars into dimes. Lyndon Johnson wanted a Great Society plus a war, and the only way to pay for that was to print greenbacks. "It's our currency, but it's your problem," his Treasury secretary John Connally said to the Europeans when we exported our inflation to them. (By that time, Mr. Connally was Richard Nixon's Treasury secretary: inflation takes a while to work through the system.) Now I habitually move the decimal one place to the left when pricing things. Gasoline at $2.74? Not bad! That's actually cheaper than the 29.9 cents I paid to put a gallon in my Volkswagen Beetle.

Now we have another president whose ambitions are higher than the nation's ability (or anyhow willingness) to pay for them. The solution of course will be to flood the world with greenbacks. The gold bugs have already bid the price of their pretty metal up to $1300 an ounce; it was $35 when Mr. Nixon closed the door to Fort Knox and unhinged the dollar from reality. Can $3,500 be far off? Then I'll be moving the decimal point two places left. Gasoline at $28 a gallon is the legacy we'll leave to our children. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford
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The season's over?

Except for the occasional Seinfeld re-run, we gave up broadcast television years ago, in large part because prime time begins just about the time we go to bed. Then a friend urged us to watch Mad Men. I didn't even like the title! But I rented the DVD of the first season, then the second and the third. Now we huddle around the computer and buy the episodes from Amazon the day after they're aired for a buck ninety-nine--that's how addicted we are.

But it's over, according to the show's creator in the NYT. Mr. Weiner tells us a bit too much about how Mad Men comes to be (as with sausages, the less about that the better), but the big news is that the season ended last night. Good grief. No wonder Don Draper looks so sad: it's back to the Seinfeld re-runs! Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

It was a German war

I've devoted a good part of my life to World War II--living it, studying it, writing about it--and one of the things I find most irritating about the way it's remembered is that it was the work of the Nazis. I read of "Nazi-occupied Europe," as if Germany were just another conquered nation. And I read of "the Nazi army," when there was no such thing, only the Heer, abetted by the Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe. These were German institutions, not Nazi inventions. (To be sure, there was also the Waffen SS, a combat branch that could fairly be termed "Nazi.")

The Good People who dominate our universities and the press still hew to the Nazi/German dichotomy, but the Germans at least are beginning to spread the blame more broadly. (It helps, I suppose, that those who were active during the war are now either dead or in their eighties and nineties, and no threat to anyone.) The photo is from an exhibit at the German Historical Museum in Berlin, nicely written up in today's New York Times. There's also a slide show of images, including the one above. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

NYT 2.0

God, whatever happened to our "Newspaper of Record"? I go to the New York Times website and I see this: Education of a President. It's a puff piece of a nature so obsequious that Don Draper would have blushed to pitch to a Timesman of the 1960s.

"On a busy afternoon in the West Wing late last month," writes Peter Baker in prose that used to be restricted to what was then known as The Women's Page, " President Barack Obama seemed relaxed and unhurried as he sat down in a newly reupholstered brown leather chair in the Oval Office.... As he welcomed me, I told him I liked what he had done with the place."

The president of the United States, we are told, likes taupe. (I confess I had to Google the word. Mr. Obama has that effect on me. Neither did I know what arugula was, until he made it famous as an indicator of the Consumer Price Index during the campaign.)

I liked what he had done with the place! Mr. Baker goes on to explain what excited his admiration:

"The curved walls now had striped tan wallpaper, and the coffee table had been replaced by a walnut-and-mica table that, Obama noted, would resist stains from water glasses. The bust of Winston Churchill was replaced by one of Martin Luther King Jr. The couches were new. [The president] told me he was happy with the redecorating of the office. 'I know Arianna doesn’t like it,' he said lightly. 'But I like taupe.'"

It's all symbolic, we are led to believe, of a grand makeover of the presidency, which goes by the code name of Obama 2.0.

In the immortal words of Dave Barry, I am not making this up! I don't know who is more to be pitied, the president of the United States or a once-great newspaper. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

And a sad day for the District of Columbia

Michelle Rhee, who held out hope that the thousands of children mired in the nation's worst school district might actually get an education, has resigned her post. Congratulations to the district's inept teachers, who held onto jobs they can't perform. And to President Obama, who sat by and did nothing while his own children were  limo-delivered to Sidwell Friends. And to the voters of Washington, who failed to reelect the mayor who appointed Rhee, and who actually believed in hope and change. Instead we get more of the same. It's a sad day for the kids, for the District, and indeed for the nation. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

¡día feliz!

A happy day for Chile and the world. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Maybe today

Things look good for the men below ground, as those on the surface prepare the hoist that will bring them half a mile to the sunlight after two months entombed. The Phoenix rescue capsule made its trial run yesterday and "didn't even raise any dust." Wonderful. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Roughnecks to the rescue

Reports the Associated Press from San Jose, Chile:

Jeff Hart was drilling water wells for the U.S. Army's forward operating bases in Afghanistan when he got the call to fly to Chile.
He spent the next 33 days on his feet, operating the drill that finally provided a way out Saturday for 33 trapped miners.
"You have to feel through your feet what the drill is doing; it's a vibration you get so that you know what's happening," explained Hart, a contractor from Denver, Colorado.

That's Mr. Hart at left above; on the right is Matt Staffel. Both are from Denver, and if the Chilean miners escape from their tomb this week, it will be in large part thanks to them and their drilling skills.

There was a time when American roughnecks to the rescue was standard fare in newspapers, on television, and in movies. Now it's a rarity. Is that because Americans have changed, or the media? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Valhalla at the 'plex

Yesterday afternoon we went to the multiplex, a thing we rarely do. The occasion was the season’s first broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera: Das Rheingold, and also the first in the Met’s new production of the Ring . Gosh, what a great three hours it was! Mr. Lepage’s production has come in for mixed reviews, to say the least, but I was enchanted. I liked the effects. I even liked Bryn Terfel's greasy Wotan. And Jimmy Levine, now pale as parchment and as corpulent as Sarah Caldwell (and like Ms. Caldwell, his legs can no longer bear his weight, so that he must conduct from a chair), proves once again that genius can overcome all obstacles. Ah, the music!

And a tip of the virtual hat to Adam Diegel as Froh (on the left). He was the cleanest of the immortals, and a voice we will surely hear again. Blue skies! – Dan Ford

Thank God for the First Amendment

The nutters at the Westboro Baptist Church have an odd (I almost said "queer") notion that God is punishing the United States for its toleration of homosexuals in the armed forces. That punishment takes the form of striking down American soldiers in Afghanistan.

Do they have a right to picket at funerals of dead Americans? Absolutely! It's protected speech under the First Amendment.

Should they picket at funerals of dead Americans? Absolutely not! What they're doing is offensive, ugly, hurtful, and unnecessarily provocative, and it shames them much more than the victims of their shabby harassment.

And of course the same is true of the offensive, ugly, hurtful, and unnecessarily provocative drive to build an Islamic mosque and cultural central next door to Ground Zero.  Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Would you like fries with that?

This enchanting photo appeared in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. What we see here is one of 105 drive-through McDonald's fast-food restaurants now open for business in China, with 100 more planned for each of the next three years.

It's all part of China's discovery of the joys of the automotive culture. The country has built 30,000 miles of expressways in the past ten years. Chinese households and businesses bought 13.6 million vehicles in 2009, substantially more than the 10.4 sold in the U.S. (which, to be sure, was the smallest deluge of autos and light trucks in 27 years). China is now the world's largest automotive market, though it will take a while before the number of cars on China's roads approaches those in the United States.

All of which is grist for the doomsayers who predict that China is about to replace the U.S. as the world's dominant economy. Yet the odd thing about this supposed transition is that, when America took off in the 1950s, it was creating something never seen in the world before. China by contrast is more or less replicating what happened here half a century ago. Does that mean that nothing new will ever happen again, and that the whole world is about to be Americanized? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford
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No pressure!

Posted without comment. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The Arlington cemetery vote

Harold "Hal" Groves enlisted in the Air Force in 1953, earned a commission and his wings in 1955, and flew as an F-4 pilot during the Vietnam War. He worked for Boeing for fourteen years, finally retiring to Myrtle Beach, Florida. He died in August, leaving behind a wonderful funeral notice online. The last sentence has attracted some attention: "In lieu of flowers, Hal has requested that donations be made to your local animal shelter or to any candidate running against Barack Obama in 2012."

Mr. Groves will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery on December 9 at 9 a.m. I wonder if the president will attend? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

And it's rated PG!

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Meet the FETs

As the French have discovered, bracing someone in a burqa is a bit dicey: is this a housewife going to market or her husband with explosives around his waist? In Afghanistan, one can't cope with this problem by banning facial coverings, so the U.S. Marines have deployed Female Engagement Teams to do the bracing. Here's a great video from the NYT today. (You see what a newspaper can do when it does the news instead of ideological oversight?) Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

latest from the new york times

What you see here are a christian, a muslim, and a hindu (not a jew, I wouldn't think!) strolling happily through the proposed islamic cultural center next door to Ground Zero, as reported in the new york times today.

The nyt, which insists on calling the project "park51," is fast becoming a parody of the America-hating left, even to the point of devaluing the language we used to have in common. Thus Ground Zero has become "ground zero." It's much more difficult to become attached to an icon when it's expressed in lower case letters, isn't it?

For the editors at the new york times, there in times square on manhattan island, here's a quick guide to usage:

ground zero: the point on the earth's surface directly above or below an exploding nuclear bomb

Ground Zero: the point on Manhattan Island where the Twin Towers collapsed on September 11, 2001.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Sssh! it's a secret!

The Wall Street Journal has a hilarious lead story today, of which the first paragraph informs us:

WASHINGTON—The U.S. military is secretly diverting aerial drones and weaponry from the Afghan battlefront to significantly expand the CIA's campaign against militants in their Pakistani havens.

Secretly? For crying out loud, this story appears on the front page of the nation's largest newspaper! It's accompanied by the above chart, revealing that there were exactly 22 secret strikes in September as opposed to exactly four secret strikes in August. Let's hope that Pakistan and the Taliban don't spies in the U.S. military who are could ferret out those figures and use them to their advantage. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

General Junior, General Sis

The pudgy young man on the left is a four-star general in the North Korean army. How did he rise to such high rank? Easy: he's the son of the decrepit gentleman on the right, who happens to be the country's dictator.  Kim Jong Eun is 26 or 27, and he has presumably been tapped to be the third generation to rule the starving nation. (Clearly, however, some of North Korea's limited supply of edibles has been diverted to feed General Junior.)

Also presumably--nobody really knows what's going on in North Korea--there's a hedge against the possibility that daddy might die before General Junior is up to taking over. Another newly appointed four-star general is Kim Kyong Hui, the 64-year-old sister of the dictator. She would presumably (that word again!) act as regent while General Junior grows into the job. She didn't get to sit in the front row, however. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Bring me your poor!

Lately I've been bugged by this photo as a full-page advertisement in The New Yorker and the Wall Street Journal. On the left is somebody named Ali; on the right is the rock star Bono, who I am pretty sure is not the late Sonny Bono, who for all his faults at least had the decency to employ two names. The lightplane in the background looks like a contemporary update of the venerable Piper Cub.

It seems that Ali, Boni, the wannabe Cub, and the photographer were all in Africa for a photo shoot to help the poor and downtrodden. Yes! I found the photographer's website, which helpfully explains:

For the Core Values campaign, both Ali and Bono wear Edun clothing. Ali carries a Louis Vuitton/Edun collaboration bag. This collaboration bag is a brown Keepall 45 in Louis Vuitton’s embossed Monogram Révélation leather. The bag is accessorized with a Monogram charm hand-crafted in Kenya by Made, a fair-trade fashion accessory company which strives to provide employment and promote ethical trade in Africa. Made regularly partners with Edun. Both the charm and the inside of the Monogram Révélation bag bear a plaque with the inscription “Every journey began in Africa.” Along with his guitar case, Bono carries a waterproof Keepall travel bag in Monogram canvas.

Kinda makes your eyes water, don't it? How could any two individuals (well, three, counting the photographer) be so big-hearted? I feel like running right out and buying a Louis Vuitton billfold, or watch fob, or whatever they make in my price range. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford