The horror!

Wait, it gets worse:

At a million-dollar San Francisco fundraiser today, President Obama warned his recession-battered supporters that if he loses the 2012 election it could herald a new, painful era of self-reliance in America.

“The one thing that we absolutely know for sure is that if we don’t work even harder than we did in 2008, then we’re going to have a government that tells the American people, ‘you are on your own,’” Obama told a crowd of 200 donors over lunch at the W Hotel.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Do tell!

From the Gray Lady today:

LAS VEGAS (AP) — President Barack Obama tells donors at a luxury casino in Las Vegas that the country is suffering from an economic crisis and from a political crisis. And, the president says, "people are crying out for action."

He noticed! -- Dan Ford

Religious intolerance in Illinois

The US Department of Justice has wrung a $75,000 settlement out of the school district of Berkeley, Illinois, which also has to provide sensitivity training to all its personnel as a result of denying a request from a Muslim teacher. As the delightful Dorothy Rabinowitz parses the offense:

The school teacher in question, Safoorah Khan, a middle school math lab instructor, had worked at the school for barely a year when she applied for some 19 days unpaid leave so that she could make a pilgrimage to Mecca. The school district denied the request: She was the only math lab instructor the school had, her absence would come just at the period before exams, and furthermore, the leave she wanted was outside the bounds set for all teachers under their union contract.

Thank goodness the Obama administration is on top of the case! -- Dan Ford

But only two thousand of them?

Historians have more or less settled on a figure of twenty-two thousand as the number of Polish officers, noncoms, intellectuals, professionals, and just unlucky men (and one woman) shot by the Russian secret police in the Katyn Forest massacres in the spring of 1940. Moscow has now admitted that they were innocent of any crime--but has reduced the number by ninety percent, according to the Associated Press:

MOSCOW — Moscow is ready to declare thousands of victims of a World War II-era massacre that continues to strain relations with Poland innocent of any crimes, Russia’s foreign policy chief announced Friday.

About 2,000 [sic!] Polish officers and other prisoners were executed by Soviet secret police in the Katyn forest of western Russia in 1940 on charges they were enemies of the Soviet state.

The Katyn massacre has been a source of tension between Russia and Poland for decades since the Soviet Union blamed the killings on the Nazis. It was only last year that Russia formally took the blame when the lower chamber of Russian parliament admitted the executions were ordered by Soviet leader Josef Stalin.

Prosecutors closed the criminal case against the Polish officers in 2004.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in a radio interview on Friday that Moscow is “ready to consider a perfectly legitimate request to declare these people innocent.”

Several Polish families went to the European Court of Human Rights to prove the victims’ innocence. Lavrov said Russia is anxious to work out a solution that would “satisfy families of the Polish officers and keep Russia within the legal framework.”

Russia’s ambassador to Poland said earlier this year that Russia made a political decision to declare the officers innocent of any crimes against the Soviet Union.

Lavrov confirmed Friday that Moscow and Warsaw are still thinking about how to settle the issue.

They could of course start by getting the figures right. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On missing Dad

One of the great things about Friday is the opportunity to read Peggy's Noonan's column in advance. (Noonan was a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, so we know she's a conservative, but she was also an early and bitter critic of George W. Bush.) Here's the keystone from her Saturday essay in the Wall Street Journal:

Sorry to do archetypes, but a nation in trouble probably wants a fatherly, or motherly, figure at the top. What America has right now is a bright, lost older brother. It misses Dad. [Mitt] Romney's added value is his persona. He's a little like the father in one of those 1950s or '60s sitcoms.... He's like Robert Young in "Father Knows Best," or Fred MacMurray in "My Three Sons: You'd quake at telling him about the fender-bender, but after the lecture on safety and personal responsibility, he'd buck you up and throw you the keys.

As for that bright, lost older brother in the White House, she concludes her essay by saying: 'Sometimes he lectures America. But he doesn't buck it up, and he must know in his heart that it's coming for the keys.' Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

To the back of the bus!

Dispatching a second-class citizen to the back of the bus has an ugly history in America, so it comes as something of a shock to discover that the practice is alive and well and living in Brooklyn, where the B110 bus runs into Manhattan with men at the front and women at the back. The bus company is privately owned, but it competed for and won a city contract, so Mayor Bloomberg argues that it's bound by the city's  non-discrimination rules. “Private people: you can have a private bus,” he added. “Go rent a bus, and do what you want on it.” I don't often agree with Hizzoner, who is prone to enforcing his own liberal opinions on the rest of us, but here he has a case. Indeed, I would go further: Guys, if you don't want to sit with women on your way to work, you can get down from the bus and walk. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Trillion-dollar Barack

The line to notice is 2008, when things were considered so bad that many of us voted for "hope and change" in the primaries and the general election. How did that work out for us? Four trillion dollars in deficit spending, with at least another trillion certain for the fiscal year that began on October 1.

The value of a soldier

We now know the precise value of an Israeli soldier as compared to his Palestinian peers: one thousand to one.

I'm happy for Sergeant Shalit and his family, who will see each other for the first time in five years, but I am skeptical that his release will advance the cause of peace in the Mideast. For sure, Hamas is even now looking for the next Israeli soldier to kidnap. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Coach

Just back from TWO successive nights on airplanes. I got the middle seat on the long jump from Fiji to Los Angeles, and Sally got it on the red-eye to Boston.

Both flights were full. I came to the conclusion that protesters would do better to occupy the airlines than Wall Street, especially American Airlines. What was once gracious (I am old enough to remember complimentary drinks whenever anything went wrong with the schedule) has become a truly awful way to travel. As is now customary, every flight was a full one, and nobody cracked a smile when the AA gate attendant came out with her "exciting offer" to gate-check excess bags without charge. Most of the people with three and four carry-ons ignored her, since they had already ensured that they would be the first to board, hence to fill the overhead racks with suitcases, backpacks, and garbage bags packed with souvenirs.

There were two bright spots on the trek. One was the string band that serenaded us onto the 747 in Fiji; the other was the complimentary Samsung recharging station at LAX.  Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Worst thing that ever happened, 8 Oct 1939

Seventy-two years ago today, western Poland was annexed by Germany as part of the Third Reich, to be resettled with ethnically pure Aryans. The central part of the country will be administered as a colony called the General Government, with the Christian population to slave for the Reich and the Jews to be exterminated. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Worst thing that ever happened, 6 Oct 1939

Seventy-two years ago today, the last effective Polish resistance ended. In this photo, German and Russian officers shake hands over their dismembered victim, which would not be truly free again until December 1990. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Governor Perdu imitates Blackadder

From Blackadder:

Vincent Hanna: Master William Pitt the Even Younger, no votes, are you disappointed?

Pitt the Even Younger: Yes, I'm horrified! I smeared my opponents, bribed the press to be on my side, and threatened to torture the electorate if we lost! I fail to see what more a decent politician could have done!

From Governor Bev Perdue of North Carolina, who instead of toruring the electorate would rather do away with us altogether:

"I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won't hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover. I really hope that someone can agree with me on that."

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Killing from behind

One of the few positive accomplishments of the Obama administration--indeed, perhaps the only one--is the targeted killing of Al Qaeda leaders and their associates, from Anwar al-Awlaki to Osama bin Laden himself. I've never been comfortable with the notion of assassination, especially when carried out by military forces--not so much because of the horrors of extrajudicial killing, but because of the effect upon the troops who must carry it out. But I'm glad these murderous nutters are gone. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Tell us a story, Daddy

Here's the estimable Peggy Noonan on President Obama's fascination with spin, as shown in an interview with Ron Suskind:

Mr. Suskind asked him why his team had difficulty creating a policy to deal with unemployment. Mr. Obama said some of it was due to circumstances, some to the complexity of the problem. Then he added: "We didn't have a clean story that we wanted to tell against which we would measure various actions." Huh? It wasn't "clean," he explained, because "what was required to save the economy might not always match up with what would make for a good story."

Throughout the interview the president seems preoccupied with "shaping a story for the American people." He says: "The irony is, the reason I was in this office is because I told a story to the American people." But, he confesses, "that narrative thread we just lost" in his first years.

Then he asks, "What's the particular requirement of the president that no one else can do?" He answers: "What the president can do, that nobody else can do, is tell a story to the American people" about where we are as a nation and should be.

Tell a story to the American people? That's your job? Not adopting good policies? Not defending the nation? Storytelling?

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

D'you suppose Iran would take him back?

Meet Shane Bauer, recently released by Iran on $500,000 ransom paid by the Sultan of Oman after great effort by Secretary Clinton and President Obama, who gave up his lead-from-behind policy long enough to affirm that Mr Bauer is not an American spy. Upon his release, the creep thanked none of these individuals but instead gave a shout-out to Hugo Chávez, Sean Penn, Noam Chomsky and Yusuf Islam (formerly Cat Stevens). He also said: "Two years in prison is too long and we sincerely hope for the freedom of other political prisoners and other unjustly imprisoned people in America and Iran," as if the two countries are morally equivalent. That being the case, Mr Bauer would do us all a favor by going back to Tehran. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

A president to admire

Here's a new biography of James Garfield, who appears to have been one of America's most under-rated presidents (not to mention one of the shortest to serve). The book is Destiny of the Republic. Garfield was a fatherless boy in rural Ohio, who left school at sixteen to do manual labor In time he enrolled at Western Reserve (now Hiram College), paying his tuition by working as a janitor, and made such a splash that the college hired him as an assistant professor in his sophomore year. After getting a degree from Williams College in Massachusetts, he went back to Western Reserve as its president at the age of twenty-six. This is the sort of career trajectory I really admire, and which alas would be unthinkable today.

Garfield served heroically in the Civil War and was elected to Congress while still in uniform. When the Republican convention of 1880 found itself deadlocked, it turned to him, and he became president in March 1881, only to be shot by an assassin four months later. Evidently he would have survived if his doctor had not been an idiot. (Gregory House MD lay far in our future.) Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Dresden gets a war museum

I am skeptical of a war museum in Dresden, which as the subject of a notorious fire-bombing might be inclined to portray itself as a victim, but the new museum (designed by Daniel Libeskind and operated by, of all things, the German military) seems to be stirring controversy for all the right reasons. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The tag-team dictator

Vladimir Putin (on the left) is the new face of Russian authoritarianism. He became prime minister in 1999, president in 2000, and prime minister again in 2008, shape-shifting with Dmitri Medvedev (on the right). There is no question however where the power lay, even though the two men followed the letter if not the spirit of the Russian constitution. Now the smiling Mr. Medvedev has announced that Mr. Putin will run for president again next year, "possibly extending his rule until 2024," in the words of the New York Times.

Mr. Medvedev, meanwhile, will replace him as prime minister. Isn't that cunning? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The sky is falling

Usually the FAA contents itself with sending out safety tips and notifications that airspace will be closed because the President or (more often) Vice President is going on vacation or a campaign speech. But this morning I got this ominous caution in the email:

Urgent Airmen Notification - Satellite Re-entry
Notice Number: NOTC3252

Until September 26, 2011
U.S. airspace and territories

Specific instructions and restrictions are available from normal NOTAM sites and local air traffic facilities.

*For the latest information, call your local Flight Service Station at 1-800-WX-BRIEF.

Really, this raises more questions than it answers. For openers: why is this a warning to airmen and not to people on the ground? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Worst thing that ever happened: 22 Sep 1939

This is for those who believe that Russia and the western Allies were gallant collaborators in the Second World War. Seventy-two years ago today, the Russian and German armies held a joint victory parade in Brest, formerly on the border between Poland and the Soviet Union. That's Panzer General Heinz Guderian at center, Brigadier Semyon Krivoshein on right.

On the same day, Lwow formally surrendered to the Red Army, Generous terms were offered, in which Polish soldiers would be disarmed and allowed to go home, while the officers could keep their personal kit and leave for any country that would accept them. At noon, the NKVD entered Lwow, arrested every uniformed Pole, and sent him to a prison camp or to slave labor. Many were later murdered in the Katyn Forest massacres. Never forget! -- Dan Ford

Five million dollar man

Meet Dennis Gannon, who stands to earn five million dollars from the City of Chicago during his retirement. And he hasn't actually worked for the city since 1991! Even better, for him if not for the taxpayer, his retirement income started at $150,000 a year (in 2004) even though he never earned more than $56,000 as a city employee.

This is possible because--only in Chicago!--Mr. Gannon left the city payroll to become a union officer, and the city pension plan not only let him continue to accumulate pension credits while working for the union, but based that pension on his union salary, which was $200,000 a year.

Mr. Gannon's good fortune is not a matter of interest only to Chicago taxpayers, since Mr. Obama's current stimulus plan is about half devoted to bailing out states and municipalities. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Red, white, and blue

Here are two hundred Chevrolet Sail automobiles lined up for shipment to Chile and Peru. They are manufactured by Shanghai GM in, well, Shanghai. Remember when Japan was known for manufacturing cheap plastic and metal toys, and suddenly took over the American small car market with Toyotas, Hondas, and Datsuns? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Worst thing that ever happend: 20 Sep 1939

I have a particular sympathy for the city of Lwow, because a friend was in the city when it was bombed and besieged by the German army, and later by the Russians. The "official" surrender to the Red Army was on 22 September, but there was an earlier surrender, 72 years ago today, to the German forces. Here a Polish officer signs on the dotted line.

But Lwow was east of the partition line specified in the Hitler-Stalin pact of August 23, so the Germans had to get out of the way and let the Russians take over. That would lead to another signing ceremony on the 22nd. Before that happened, there were a few clashes between German and Russian troops, probably with some fatalities, which likewise have been concealed from history.

Since Stalin was on the winning side in the Second World War, he got to keep his ill-gotten gains in eastern Poland, so Lwow is now Lviv in western Ukraine. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Netflix blows it

Those little red envelopes have become a part American life, in the countryside especially, and especially in the winter. In July my ten-dollar subscription become two eight-dollar subscriptions--a sixty percent increase. I responded by dropping the online streaming option, which anyhow mostly provides old films and obscure Danish and German features. So many people did this (or opted for online streaming only, or gave up the service altogether) that Netflix's profit dropped. Today I got an email apology from Reed Hastings, who identified himself as Co-founder and CEO of Netflix:

It is clear from the feedback over the past two months that many members felt we lacked respect and humility in the way we announced the separation of DVD and streaming and the price changes. That was certainly not our intent, and I offer my sincere apology. Let me explain what we are doing.

And what is he doing? He's changing the Netflix name to Quikster. Oh good! That will help! (Netflix for streaming video, Quikster for the little red envelopes.) Not since New Coke has a corporation done a better job of shooting itself in the foot. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Millyuns and millyuns and millyuns ...

The president seems to have beat a tactical retreat on his odd call for raising taxes on those earning $200,000 ($250,000 for couples) on the grounds that "millionaires and billionaires" supposedly pay federal taxes at a lower rate than their secretaries. (Mr. Obama calls this the Buffett Rule after Warren Buffett, who first made the argument.) Tomorrow he will raise the threshold to $1,000,000. After all, it's hard to whip up class envy against two-hundred-thousand-aires, especially when the president's most devoted followers seem to fall into that income group.

The devil is in the details, of course. You may be sure that, whatever the millionaires' tax is called, in practice it will amount to taxing dividends and capital gains as ordinary income. This ignores the fact (as Mr. Buffett cannily ignores the fact) that dividends have already been taxed at the source, and that capital gains are mostly illusory, generated by government-inspired inflation.

However it works out, it won't affect Mr. Buffett much. Like Bill Gates, he has already socked away his millyuns (billyuns?) into charitable trusts. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The worst thing that ever happened: 17 Sep 1939

By September 17, Poland had been battling the German army for more than two weeks, always outmatched but always valiant. Then the Soviet Union invaded from the east, so that the country was being dismembered not by one of the largest and most powerful military forces in Europe, but by two of them, the Wehrmacht and the Red Army. From this moment, there was no possibility that Poland could remain free, or that Europe would be spared a Second World War. Above: David Low's cartoon in the Evening Standard, 20 Sep 1939. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

About that plug-in automobile ...

David Cohen is a classmate, an engineer, and a writer on energy topics. Here is his take on the Nissan Leaf, Chevy Volt, and other super-green plug-in vehicles:

Our government is embarked on a mission to support the development and production of rechargeable electric vehicles. The reason for this support is to place vehicles on the street that produce no carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and other exhaust pollutants and greenhouse gases in the air of our city streets.

On the surface we can see and understand the desire to minimize the release of carbon products into the earth's atmosphere. However few people in our society seem to realize that at the present time this is a serious mistake. The cost in money and fossil energy actually exceeds that of a vehicle powered by an internal combustion (IC) engine. In addition, the greenhouse gas release and CO2 emission also exceeds that of a normal IC
engine.

What is going on here? How is that possible?

The answer is simple and is obvious to those who know where our electricity comes from. 50% of our electric power originates in power plants fueled by coal. Another 20% is derived from the combustion of natural gas. Up to 3% is derived from burning fuel oil.

Only about 27% of our electric power typically comes from green or carbon free [i.e., nuclear] sources. In fact our electric grid is responsible for more greenhouse gas and carbon emissions than our entire fleet of fuel burning vehicles.

This simply means that we will increase atmospheric pollutants and carbon bearing products into the atmosphere instead of reducing them for every rechargeable electric vehicle that is placed on the road....

Will rechargeable electric vehicles ever be a good idea? Yes indeed, but it requires a green energy source. That is in the far distant future. At present our transportation fleet can save green house gas by raising efficiency and not tapping into our electric grid. Hybrid vehicle technology is our best hope for the near future. The all-electric vehicle may become attractive 50 to 100 years into the future if our power grid becomes 2 to 4 times larger than it is at present, and consumption of fossil fuel at the power source becomes significantly reduced below its current level.

There is currently one other potential flaw in the rechargeable electric vehicle idea. That flaw is grid capacity. Our electric grid is nowhere near big enough to support tens or hundreds of thousands of electric vehicles that may be recharging every night.

The electric vehicle potential must be guided by a professional systems engineering team that will control the growth of this idea to meet our needs as a society. We should not delude ourselves into believing that this is an idea whose time has now come. It hasn't.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The government is here to help

If you go to the doctor or a hospital today, your health care provider must choose one of 18,000 codes to describe your complaint. How anyone can sort through 18,000 choices is beyond me, but it's about to get better, or much worse: Washington has dictated a new set of codes to the tune of 140,000 of the little alphanumeric cuties. Among them: walking into a lamp post: "initial encounter" (W22.02XA) and walking into a lamp post: "subsequent encounter" (W22.02XD).

How many jobs will that "create or save"? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

President Perry? Look on the bright side!

Robert Kuttner in the Puffington Host:

So, barring a miracle, even if Obama is re-elected, the likelihood is for a generation of depressed economic potential, sour politics, and more voter disillusion with government. At worst, Obama could be the Democratic Herbert Hoover for not just one term but two.

Okay then, suppose Obama loses. If the Republicans win, President Rick Perry will almost certainly take a Republican House and Senate with him.

We can imagine intensified assaults on Social Security and Medicare, more moves to turn America into a theocracy, and the courts will be lost for a generation. More deregulation and privatization, too.

However -- nothing the Republicans say or do will improve the economy for regular people. An austerity program, even tempered by tax cuts, will only worsen the stagnation. More Americans will be reliant on a safety net the Republicans are shredding.

So, going into 2016, the Republicans will own an economy in protracted depression. And as opposition party, progressive Democrats will be full-throated, no longer in the awkward position of being upstaged by their centrist president.

Assuming the Republicans don't find a way to cancel the 2016 election, a Democrat would have a good shot at winning. And a progressive Democrat (if one can be found) would have a good chance at being nominated.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

9/11

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Stimulus that's paid for

The most astonishing feature of Mr Obama's speech the other evening was the assertion that his half-trillion-dollar Stimulus II is "paid for." It's like the jobs "created or saved" that have been a hallmark of his administration. (All government programs are "paid for," most commonly these days with borrowed money.)

Holman Jenkins in the WSJ has a hilarious satire on the speech, in the form of its supposed first draft: 'Notwithstanding the economic crisis, I have chosen to pursue my own agenda instead because I'm comfortable with it.' Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

From Ia Drang to Ground Zero, the opera

Rick Rescorla was twice a hero. In 1965 (photo at left) he fought in the battle of the Ia Drang Valley. In 2011, as a security officer for a brokerage firm, he died in the fall of the World Trade Center towers, having rescued all of his charges but returning to the inferno for one last look.

On Saturday, September 10, the San Francisco Opera will show the premiere of the opera based on the trajectory of his life, with Thomas Hampson (photo at right) singing the lead role. (The arts being what they are, you won't see much about Vietnam in the SFO website, but the photograph says enough.)

And think about this: Mr. Rescorla was an adopted American. He was born and reared in Cornwall. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Middle-aged white guys

President Obama has not made a complete success of the past three years, but he has accomplished one notable feat:

He has made the competition look awfully white. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On restoring civility in American politics

President Obama calls for civility after Representative Giffords was shot:

"At a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized - at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do - it's important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds."

And Jim Hoffa introduces the president in Detroit:

"And you see it everywhere, it is the tea party. And you know, there is only one way to beat and win that war. The one thing about working people is we like a good fight. And you know what? They've got a war, they got a war with us and there's only going to be one winner. It's going to be the workers of Michigan, and America. We're going to win that war....

"President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march. Let's take these son of a bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong."

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Labor Day blues

Robert Samuelson has a curious op-ed in the Washington Post, in which he seems to settle for permanent stagnation:

On this Labor Day, there is little good news about labor. We have entered a long period of crushing unemployment and downward pressure on wages that may well transform the nation’s economic and political landscape. There was no job growth in August, and the overall numbers are stupefying: 14 million unemployed; nearly 9 million part-time workers wanting full-time jobs; 6.5 million who want jobs but have given up looking and are, therefore, not counted in the official labor force. People are only gradually recognizing the magnitude of the problem.

Wouldn't it be more productive to conclude that for three years the administration and Congress have been making the problem worse rather than better? We have returned to the 1930s, when the Roosevelt administration met every setback with more of the same--more taxation, more regulation, more infrastructure spending. Unemployment in 1939 was still 17.2 percent, even though the United States had already begun to gear up for the Second World War as Britain and France ordered aircraft.

It wasn't Franklin Roosevelt who got us out of the Great Depression. It was Adolf Hitler. Instead of waiting for another catastrophe to change things, Mr. Samuelson would do better to suggest a change in government strategy. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The situation is dire...

Talk about burying the lead! The NY Times has a doomsday story about the postal service that sees it shutting down this winter "unless Congress acts," which I think we can safely assume means "unless Congress throws billions of taxpayer dollars into this sinkhole." It goes on to describe the heroic measures the postmaster general is taking to cut expenses, and even to point out that most of the USPS budget goes to salaries and benefits (80 percent, compared to 32 percent at FedEx). And that its health benefits are more generous even than those of most federal employees!

But not until the ninth paragraph do we come to the kicker: "Missing the $5.5 billion payment due on Sept. 30, intended to finance retirees’ future health care...."


That's not the weight of the world that you feel on your shoulders. It's the weight of all the unsustainable promises made by politicians to governmental employees over the years. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The worst thing that ever happened: 3 Sep 1939

Seventy-two years ago, Britain declared war on Germany to honor its defense pact with Poland. France and most of the Commonwealth nations--Australia, New Zealand, India and South Africa--did the same. Yet the Allies did little to thwart the German blitzkrieg, which would continue unabated for another month. Above: a French soldier takes time out to pick flowers along the roadside in what wags called the "Sitzkrieg."

For all the bad press he later received, it's worth noting that it was Neville Chamberlain who made the declaration of war. Winston Churchill would not become prime minister until May 1940. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The worst thing that ever happened: 1 Sep 1939

Here was Warsaw after the first Germany terror raid, seventy-two years ago this month. Thus began the Second World War, the worst thing that ever happened in the bloody history of the world. The Germans would be followed on September 17 by the Russians, dividing Poland between them according to the Hitler-Stalin pact of August 13. Go here for more about the rape of Poland. The photo, taken from a church tower, is from Wikipedia Commons. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Driving while drunk, illegal, and related to the president

Embarrassing relatives go with the territory when you're president of the United States. However, if you are Barack Obama, you can count on the New York Times not only to bury the story, but to omit it altogether. I was puzzled this morning not to see any mention of Uncle Onyango, arrested in Framingham for drunk driving and being held on an immigration "detainer"  (something like a retainer except that it's injurious to one's freedom of action.) So I did a search on the NYT website and got this response:

Your search - Onyango Obama - did not match any documents under Past 30 Days

It's not as if the NYT doesn't have access to the Boston Globe. They own it, after all. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Neither rain, nor snow, nor ...

Well, to be sure, the old saw says nothing about tropical storms. But in my experience almost anything can stop the U.S. Postal Service. Tropical Storm Irene passed by us at six o'clock in the evening on Sunday. Twelve hours later, the Wall Street Journal was in its accustomed place in the newspaper tube, but here it is Tuesday, and the U.S. mail has yet to make an appearance. In similar vein, the road to Durham has been cleared of a small pine tree that had been blocking it, but the signs are still up: Road Closed. I understand that to mean: Proceed if you like, but don't sue us if anything goes wrong!

Proof, if any be needed, that it will not be government employees who haul us out of the ditch. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The builder

Farewell, Steve Jobs! The Wall Street Journal this morning had an editorial with "Jobs" in the title, but it was not about unemployment, but with the man who more or less by himself built the most valuable company in the world. I personally don't care for the Apple experience--it's too closed for my taste--but I can't imagine life without my iPhone. I work at my computer every day from five o'clock to noon, and visit it occasionally in the afternoon and evening, but it is an anonymous tool, like the chair I sit in. My iPhone by contrast is part of me. I carry it wherever I go. I use it to check my mail, to listen to music, to read books (I do own a Kindle, mostly to check how my own books look in digital form, but I prefer to read on the iPhone), and even occasionally to make a telephone call.

While Barack Obama spends trillions of our dollars in a fruitless attempt to get American growing again, Steve Jobs built Apple into a company worth $346 billion, at no cost to the taxpayer. He made our lives easier and more amusing, and he became rich in the process, adding both to our Gross National Product and our (and the world's) Gross National Happiness. Good on you, Steve, though I could do without that iTunes interface. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The awful pain of austerity

Now that the debt ceiling debate is over, and the Tea Party has done its worst (or best, depending on your political orientation), what does that portend for Federal spending? Gasp! It will only go up a little bit. (The Wall Street Journal has an editorial.) So much for the president's new dedication to spending restraint. Mr. Obama, in his first term, will have spent a bit more than fourteen trillion dollars. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The worst thing that ever happened: 23 Aug 1939

Seventy-two years ago, the 20th Century's premier despots signed the Hitler-Stalin Pact, formally known as the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union. It divided Europe (and in particular, Poland) into two halves, with the western half going to Germany and the eastern half to Soviet Russia. The pact was the keystone of the Second World War, the worst thing that ever happened in the history of the world. Without it, neither country would have dared go to war, for each feared (with good reason!) a stab in the back by the other.

With the pact in place, Hitler and Stalin were free to launch their individual wars of aggression. As was usually the case when he made a bargain, Josef Stalin got the larger share of the booty: in addition to half of Poland, he got the three Baltic states--Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia--and a good piece of Finland, though the Finns would give him a black eye in the course of his land grab there. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Good on you, mate!

Not many thanks to the United States, it seems that the Libyan rebels have stormed the capital, and that for the most part it simply welcomed them in. Good on them!

They probably won't be as friendly to the U.S. as they might otherwise have been, had we been more forthcoming in their struggle. Indeed, they mightn't be friendly at all. That's the hard part of democracy and popular uprisings. But it's their country, and I wish them well with it. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

How to improve your cellphone service

It's magic! says the New York Times:

Spotty cellular service magically improves on Martha’s Vineyard when President Obama arrives each August.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Early days in Vietnam

In May 1964, I took the publisher's advance on my first book, added $26, and bought a ticket to Saigon. I kept a journal of my three months in South Vietnam, hoping to publish the dispatches on my return. Alas, Lyndon Johnson decided to escalate the war, so the conflict by August was far different from the one I'd investigated in my old fatigues, a tiger-stripe bush hat sewn up for me by a Saigon tailor, boots from L.L. Bean, and field gear bought on the black market. So I used the experience instead to write Incident at Muc Wa, later filmed as Go Tell the Spartans with Burt Lancaster starring. (He also contributed $150,000 when the producers went broke.)

Years later, I got out that old typescript and found it a fascinating snapshot of insurgency in its early stages, when there was still a chance of containing it. (Is there ever a chance of containing revolution?) So I published it as The Only War We've Got. More recently, I touched up the digital edition and lowered the price to $3.99. If you have a Kindle device, or are willing to download a bit of software for your computer or smartphone. it's worth a read. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On promoting tolerance and civility in London

A story in London's The Telegraph is so poignant it deserves to be quoted at length:

An Oxford University law graduate threw bricks at police officers in broad daylight during last week’s riots in London, a court heard yesterday.

Fahim Wahid Alam, who also has a Master’s degree from the London School of Economics, is accused of being part of a mob that attacked police in Hackney last Monday afternoon.

Mr Alam, 25, attacked police as he walked home from a job interview with an organisation that helps to promote a more tolerant and civil society, Highbury Corner magistrates’ court heard.

He is alleged to have thrown two bricks at police officers, one of which hit a constable on the leg, during almost three hours of disorder outside Hackney town hall, on Mare Street. He was arrested at 6.30pm that evening....

Yesterday the court heard that on the same day he is alleged to have attacked police, he had attended a job interview with the London Civic Forum.

The organisation’s website says its aims are to “build healthy communities and improve quality of life for all.” The website carries pictures of Londoners cleaning the streets after the riots and a statement that reads: “London Civic Forum has been shocked and saddened by the wave of destruction that has rocked our city and others since last Friday.”

A spokesman confirmed that Mr Alam had been offered a job as an intern researcher, which he had been due to start next Tuesday.... The London Civic Forum said his job offer would now be reconsidered.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The Battle Bus

The BBC, which is the Gray Lady of British television, has not for a generation seen a liberal cause it didn't applaud. But President Obama's million-dollar campaign bus (one of two that have been pimped up by the Secret Service at taxpayer expense) is an exception:

In British elections we're used to what we call "battle buses", cheerfully painted wagons, festooned with party slogans and colours.

US President Barack Obama has embarked on his first bus tour in office. But his vehicle for the trip through the rural parts of three Midwestern states looks like it really is heading for a battle.

Big, blocky, black, with painted-out windows, it looks more like a police mortuary van than a symbol of hope arriving on your street.

Mr. President, if you've lost the BBC, you've lost Mittel Europa. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The shrinking dollar

Somewhat unfairly, the chart attributes the dollar's decline to the day forty years ago when President Nixon "closed the gold window" and made the dollar what economists call a fiat currency. Lewis Lehrman has a good op-ed on the subject in today's WSJ. Personally, I date the decline a bit earlier, as starting in the 1950s, and the result even shabbier: those 1950 dollars were each worth ten of ours. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Barbie looters

It's reassuring to know that the British (or "Afro-Carribeans") still queue up, even when breaking and entering. More great photos here. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Reuters celebrates community spirit

Remember when Reuters was a news-gathering organization? Here's how it reports on the British riots:

(Reuters) - Residents of a London housing estate laughed at a televised plea by police for parents to call their children and help rein in the youths who looted and burned swathes of the city.

Not only were some of the parents at the riots themselves, but many of those taking part were not the hooded, teenage delinquents on which many have pinned the blame for the worst street riots Britain has seen for decades.

"Some of the parents were there. For some parents it was no big surprise their kids were there. They've gone through this all their lives," said an Afro-Caribbean man of 22 who gave his name as "L," voicing the frustration and anger felt by youth and parents over yawning inequalities in wealth and opportunity....

Other young men were sitting with him, on a wall outside the drab flats typical of the subsidized housing that is home to many of Britain's poor.

One man held a marijuana joint, another rode in circles on a bike with his hood drawn tight over his face, a so-called "hoodie," a stereotype blamed for much of the violence....

"If you're not working, you find out what your friends are doing. We're just socializing, generally. Keeping out of the radar of the police looking to get in our business," said Ariom, 23, wearing baggy jeans and sporting corn-rows in his hair.

The young men sat within sight of a recently installed surveillance camera at the entrance to the estate.

A police car drove by, and all heads turned toward it....

Michelle said she had quit her job with the police youth offenders unit because her children and others saw her as an informer.

"The reason I don't work for them any more is ... it's a white institution, and I won't change my identity," she said.

She sympathized with the rioters and looters.

"Before, it was if a black man is killed, it's OK, 'black on black crime'. Now, when it's property damaged or stolen, it's uproar. What other platform have the youths got?" she said.

At a nearby housing estate, heavily tattooed Jackie, 39, resented what she saw as the media's portrayal of the riots as mindless youth violence.

"This was not kids. This was youths and adults coming together against the crap that's been going on since the coalition," she said, referring to Britain's conservative-led government, which has made deep austerity cuts since coming into power last year to tackle a big budget deficit....

"I was out in the riots. My 16-year-old daughter was calling me asking where I was," she said, chuckling.

She stood with a group of Afro-Caribbean men and women on a street corner, muttering and eyeballing the police who stood some meters (yards) away across the road. Shattered glass from the riots still littered the road in places.

She and others had little sympathy for many of the store owners whose premises had been looted and burned, identifying most as big chain stores that offer little to their community.

Many of the more upmarket stores cater for growing numbers of middle-class professionals and white hipsters who have moved in recent years into Hackney's handsome townhouses, of which many sit yards away from poor housing estates.

"The looting was done, not just because they can't afford the stuff, it was done to show they just don't give a shit .... We're here and not going away," Michelle said....

"It's like the old days. It's bringing the community spirit back. Even though it's a sad way to do it, it's bringing the community together," Ariom said.

As the sun set, the men at the estate said they would hang out on a typical evening, play football or visit girlfriends.

"But if the riots kick off again, I'm going. It's history, it's a revolution," Ariom said.

"I loved Hackney during the riot. I loved every minute of it. It was great to see the people coming together to show the authorities that they cannot just come out here bullying."

You'll notice that Reuters doesn't describe the blacks as hyphenated British, but Afro-Caribbean. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The new face of destitution

The Providence Journal has a heartbreaking story of a jobless man who plans to sell his automobile rather than pay the state's ad valorem tax on it:

The single 45-year-old ... lost his job when the Cleanscape recycling plant closed its doors in April. He and his nephew pay $1,050 each month for their half of a Sunbury Street duplex.... He also has a cell phone, electric, cable, heat, grocery, car insurance and Internet bills.

His $551-a-week unemployment covers all that, and the new tax bill. But it leaves little for him to indulge his love of dining out.

Since he lost his job, he’s begun to do things more cheaply — bargain movies, not as many pastries from LaSalle Bakery, and getting a less expensive steak on Wednesdays at Texas Roadhouse.

$551 a week is $28,652 a year. The per capita income in the U.S. for 2009, the most recent year available, was $27,041. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

This is not Athens

Now London has been taken over by the mob, as another yet another European country reaches the end point of the welfare state. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On the bright side: Shakespeare in Central Park

From The New Yorker. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On shooting the messenger

After weeks of predicting a calamity if the debt ceiling weren't raised, President Obama managed to get both the rise and the calamity. So now, after weeks of blaming Republicans for not doing it his way, he is undertaking to blame Standard & Poor's for its downgrade of America's credit rating!

The problem was never the debt ceiling. The problem is the debt. It was 40 percent of the national product--the sum of all our efforts to build, earn, and create--when he took office. It is now heading inexorably for 70 percent. It is not true, as Michele Bachmann has claimed, that Mr. Obama has borrowed more money than the preceding 43 presidents combined. But he has come uncomfortably close. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The Dow, on the other hand, IS falling

Why would that be? Peggy Noonan has some thoughts, though none of them gets to the heart of the matter as neatly as the cartoon that accompanies her Saturday column: it's never a good idea for a president to predict catastrophe. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Well, my goodness, the sky didn't fall after all!

So now the debt limit has been raised, as everybody knew it would be. I am reminded of a lunch at the Athens Olympia in Boston where a friend admitted that he never watched the Evening News, "Because there's no news in the News." True enough. Ninety percent of what the newsies get excited about is of no importance whatever.

That's not entirely true of the debt-limit debate. What happened was a compromise. Everybody is in favor of compromise, including the president of the United States, but what he means by compromise (what the New York Times means by compromise, what PBS and NBC and CBS and most of the newsies mean by compromise) is that Republicans should vote for Democratic priorities. That has worked for fifty years that I know of, with some minor exceptions during the Reagan presidency.

Then came the Tea Party, which for some reason the newsies present in lower-case letters. The Tea Partiers refused to capitulate, much as Mr. Obama has refused to capitulate over the past three years. (Because "I won.") The result of the fracas was--a compromise! The nutters on both sides are furious, as nutters are prone to be, though we only hear about the fury of the Democratic left.

Tough. You wanted compromise; you got compromise. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The sky is still falling

But not to worry! The Congress is working through the weekend, and presumably the President is on call, so all is well. The choices now seem to be between a bill that does no great harm and not an awful lot of good, and another bill that doesn't do an awful lot of good but no great harm. I truly believe that the wisdom, maturity, and patriotism of the Members, the Senators, and the President will enable them to make that choice before Tuesday noon ... well, before Wednesday anyhow. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

I haven't gotten too excited about the catastrophe that is supposed to visit us at one minute past midnight on August 2. I really don't think President Obama is going to stop granny's Social Security check; after all, she might live to November 2012 and take her revenge at the ballot box. But, much as I am disappointed by the president's acting-out of recent days, I am disappointed as well by the Republicans in the House of Representatives, who failed to pass a bill last night.

The phrase of the month is "the adult in the room." Well, that adult in my mind is John Boehner. Where Mr. Obama has been childish, Mr. Boehner has been very much the grownup. It's a pity that Sarah Palin and others on the nutty right haven't fallen in behind him. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Is this man a Christian?

Well, he could be, but so what? He's also white, balding, and likes to dress up in fancy uniforms. Is he an extremist? Well, of course he is! Who but an extremist would shoot seventy people in cold blood? But the attempt of the New York Times and other mainstream media to paint him as the Christian equivalent of Osama bin Laden is not only pathetic but dishonest. When Mr. Breivik finished his dirty week, a few score young people were dead, and that was the end of it. (He'd like to think otherwise, but he's surely wrong.) When bin Laden finished his dirty work, several thousand people were dead, and his minions were gearing up to do it all over again, in multiple places.

What is Mr. Breivik? He's a white extremist. He's a balding extremist. He's a fancy-dress-uniform extremist.... He's a one-of-kind nutter like Timothy McVeigh or Ted Kaczinski (whose Manifesto Mr. Breivik quoted, along with John Stuart Mill). Far from exculpating Osama bin Laden or the Fort Hood shooter, as the NYT would like to do, Mr. Breivik actually makes them more fearful. Not only are they mass murderers, but they inspire mass murderers elsewhere, not only of their own sort (Islamic nutters) but also of Mr. Breivik's sort (fancy-dress-uniform nutters). Blue skies! -- Dan Ford
s

Oh, never mind!

Says the New York Times on its front page today:

As Washington continues to debate a debt deal, the Obama administration has been preparing the country for the worst, with officials essentially saying the sky is about to fall.

But so far, oddly enough, nothing has happened. Despite warnings that a deal would need to be brokered by Sunday night before the Asian markets opened, stocks merely stumbled on Monday — the type of weakness usually associated with soft corporate earnings instead of an economic apocalypse.

Wall Street’s blasé response presents a serious challenge for the administration. The government has been ringing the alarm bells of an impending catastrophe to add urgency to its efforts to get Republicans to hash out a compromise.

Now they tell us? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Oslo Suspect Wrote of Fear of Islam and Plan for War

Fascinating! After I linked to the NYT story in the blog post below, the newspaper changed the headline. Instead of the dubious and inflammatory "Christian Extremist Is Charged in Norway", the same story is now headed: "Oslo Suspect Wrote of Fear of Islam and Plan for War". How much more neutral can you get?

The lead paragraph remains the same, however, as does the lead on the NYT story on the Fort Hood shooter, whose ethnicity and religious affiliation are doggedly concealed from view. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Christian Extremist Is Charged in Norway

That's the headline on the New York Times's story about the Norwegian shooter: Christian Extremist Is Charged in Norway. Can you imagine a similar headline if he'd been a Muslim? And the story goes on from there:

OSLO — The Norwegian police on Saturday charged a man they identified as a right-wing fundamentalist Christian in connection with the bombing of a government building in central Oslo and a shooting attack on a nearby island that together killed at least 92 people.

"Right-wing" and "fundamentalist Christian" are words that require no hedging, no attribution; they are mere facts in the eyes of the Gray Lady's reporters and editors, whereas "left-wing" and "Muslim" are inflammatory statements that must be concealed from the world. Compare, for example, the NYT story two days ago on the arraignment of the Fort Hood shooter:

FORT HOOD, Tex. — Wearing a camouflage Army uniform and sitting upright in a wheelchair, the military psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people in a shooting rampage here appeared in court on Wednesday at his arraignment, without the civilian lawyer who had been his lead defense attorney.

He's a uniformed member of the U.S. Army! He's a military psychiatrist! Even his name is carefully pushed into the second paragraph because it gives away the unspeakable truth that he is not a right-wing fundamentalist Christian. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

So what about a small deal?

As Mr. Obama and the U.S. Congress go through their circus act, everything hinges upon their inability to reach a Big Deal. Why not just kick the can down the road a bit? Raise the debt ceiling by a mere trillion dollars with no tax increases and few or no spending cuts. Then have the argument again next summer when the prospect of elections in November will have clarified the minds of the president, the House of Representatives, and a third of the U.S. Senate. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The walking headache

One of the reasons Peggy Noonan is worth reading is that she is dependably nice. She got a bit testy about Dubya in his couple of years, but then, so did most everybody. And she's now getting testy about his successor. In her Saturday column, readable in advance on Opinion Journal, she has this to say about the president (with a little slap at one of those who would replace him):

He's like a walking headache. He's probably triggering Michele Bachmann's migraines. 

Mr. Obama, when you've lost Peggy Noonan, you've lost Nice America. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Omigod!

I maintain a Google alert for anything about the Flying Tigers. It sends me all kinds of stuff, but I never thought I'd see anything like this. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Back to the 1960s

Notice that that earlier run-up, from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, accompanied the Great Inflation set off by the Johnson-Nixon administrations and their monetary policies, which turned our dollars into dimes. Then the curve was bent downward by the Carter-Reagan discipline and Reagan's tax cuts, in a splendid boom that last until the Bush administration. (The recent, and scarier, blowout is actually a Bush-Pelosi-Obama phenomenon.) Chart from the Wall Street Journal. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Porcelain Unicorn

Winner of the 2011 "Tell It Your Way" competition for a film of three minutes with no more than six lines of dialogue. It was directed by Keegan Wilcox. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Back to the 1930s

From the Wall Street Journal. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The paradox of fuel-efficient automobiles

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article by Joseph White on the subject of Kicking Hybrid Cars Out of the Fast Lane. It seems that the convention Toyota Prius has become so ubiquitous in California that the state highway department is revoking its HOV privileges. No longer can you cruise in solitary splendor down the High Occupancy Vehicle lane in your hybrid Prius. The coveted yellow sticker will now be restricted to vehicles that are more politically correct, like the Nissan Leaf, Honda's natural-gas-powered Civic, and the plug-in version of the Prius. But here's what fascinated me:

"A lot of us will change our patterns of driving," says Cathy Margolin, president of the Orange County Prius Club and owner of a 2005 Prius.

Ms. Margolin, an accounting professor, says she recently changed jobs and cut her commute to about 10 miles from 50, but adds she will cut out tasks requiring long drives now that she has lost solo HOV-lane access.

So you see, the yellow sticker encouraged Ms Margolin to waste gasoline! She drove her Prius five times farther under the old regime, which means that the world actually was worse off than if she'd been driving an SUV. According to Edmunds.com, the Prius gets 48 mpg in highway driving. Ms. Margolin could have achieved an equivalent reduction in her carbon footprint, and saved a whole lot of money, by making the same job change and driving a 1980 pickup truck!

This tracks my own experience with compact fluorescent lightbulbs. There's one in our hallway, which we never turn off. What the heck, it only burns 23 watts.... Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The Katyn Findings

In the spring of 1940, under Stalin's order, the Russian security police shot 22,000 Polish officers, enlisted men, and civilians and buried them in mass graves in Russia and Ukraine. The atrocity was discovered by the Germans when they overran this territory in 1942, but the Russians successfully blamed the killings on the invaders. To their shame, the American and British governments connived in the coverup, so as not to sully the reputation of their new best friend, Joseph Stalin in Moscow. In 1951, however, the 85th Congress began hearings into the massacre, compiling thousands of pages of testimony over the next six months. I've published the short version as a Kindle ebook with the title The Katyn Findings 1952. (These ebooks are also accessible in a variety of free apps for smartphones and computers.) The book has a foreword drawn from my current research on Poland during the War years, and I'll be adding to it as I learn more. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

It's the assimilation, stupid!

Of all places, the New York Times has a sensible essay on the failures of multiculturism in Europe, and especially in Britain, though the same issues apply to the United States today. The op-ed is entitled "Assimilation's Failure," but of course the problem is quite the opposite: not assimilation's failure but the failure to assimilate.

Britain never tried to assimilate its minorities, nor did France or Germany or any other European country that I know of. Even a tourist in London can click off the ethnic/religious/racial/national groups as he goes down the street: there a Sikih, there a Muslim, there a Nigerian.... Who's the true minority in London now? Why, it's the Englishman!

A Polish friend tells the story of riding in a London taxi which came to a screeching halt to avoid hitting a brown-skinned man in a turban. "Bloody British passport!" cried the driver, a reference to the policy that allowed any resident of the British Empire to claim the highly valued, dark blue hardcover book that was then the UK passport.

"I'm a British passport too," Basia chided him.

"Yes, love," he answered, "but you're different." Right: different because she was white, she was pretty, she was conventionally dressed, and she spoke English without a notable accent. In other words, she had assimilated.

In multiculturalism lies the destruction of cultures. European countries are now paying the price of that mistake, and the United States seems ready to follow them. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Mr. Obama's coal-burner

It was a tight squeeze, but the president got his photo op the other day, sitting at the wheel of a Chevy Volt to boost his administration's plan to oblige automakers to average 56 miles a gallon across their fleets of cars and trucks. Huh. What do you suppose the chances are that Mr. Obama will every actually drive a 56 mpg automobile, as opposed to the black SUVs with hidden machine guns that convoy him around every day?

The solution would be a Volt, I suppose, assuming it could be modified to a comfortable fit. If he returns to Chicago after his presidential tour is over, the $41,000 automobile would be powered in reality by electricity generated in--yes!--a coal-fired plant. That would seem to conflict with another of his pie-in-the-sky goals, that of a pollution-free environment. "If ever a president seems to have learned nothing from the times he's living in," writes Holman Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal, "Barack Obama is it. Economies around the world are foundering from an accumulation of policy excesses produced by the sort of straight-line, robotic thinking he's applying to so-called corporate average fuel economy rules." Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Assassination as statecraft

I've long been uncomfortable with the notion of sending in commandos with the mission of killing someone the current administration doesn't like. Why this should be so, I'm not entirely sure: I don't have the same queasiness when it comes to troops invading another country, or even of sending a Predator drone to blow the same evil-doer into oblivion. Now here come two British academics who ponder the larger question of Targeted Killings. Among their points:

The United States is intensifying its targeted strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan to a level causing astonishment even among Israeli security specialists. American forces now carry out more targeted killings than any state in the world.

The writers object to the use of the word "assassination," since it's a moral judgment. They go further, to argue that international law explicitly condones such killings:

Article 51 of the UN Charter permits states to defend themselves against actions attributable to other states, but also to sub-state and nonstate entities threatening their national security. That is, targeted killings undertaken in self-defense—to include preemptive attacks—do not breach international law.

It goes on. None of this may interest those who argue, simply, "whatever it takes!" But it does interest me. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Bronze Rons, all over the place

Here's Ronald Reagan newly burnished in Budapest. A British version--twelve feet tall!--will be unveiled in Grosvenor Square later this morning. As is appropriate for an homage the Great Conservative, the two thousand guests will have paid for their tickets! That tidbit comes from the BBC story, which is hilariously sour. The Daily Mail is more generous. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The Deluge

What better way to absorb history than sitting back and watching a handsome rascal and a pretty maiden brighten dreary events? In the case, the event is the Swedish invasion of Poland in the 17th century--what Poles call "Potop" or The Deluge. One quarter of the population died. (Yes, the Swedes were once the bloodiest interlopers in Europe. Perhaps it was their brush with the Poles that reformed them?) No matter: it's a splendid film, sprawling across two disks and more than five hours. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Oops, sigh, sorry!

 

The unlovable groper, M. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has been released from his luxurious house arrest in Manhattan, though prosecutors are holding his passport for the time being. Seems that his accuser has been lying about some things, which leads to the perhaps unfair assumption that she has been lying about everything. Sigh. I suppose I owe him an apology for the mockery that I among others heaped upon his noble head this spring. But there's a bright side! It may be some little time before the next overpaid international technocrat makes a grab for the maid in a $3500-a-night Manhattan hotel suite. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Memo to the debt-limit negotiators

Townhall.com is a right-wing magazine, and Victor Davis Hansen is an eminent and conservative historian. All the more notable then is Mr. Hansen's column of June 23,  in which he takes on the U.S. Department of Agriculture:

"The Department of Agriculture no longer serves as a lifeline to millions of struggling homestead farmers. Instead, it is a vast, self-perpetuating postmodern bureaucracy with an amorphous budget of some $130 billion -- a sum far greater than the nation's net farm income this year. In fact, the more the Agriculture Department has pontificated about family farmers, the more they have vanished -- comprising now only about 1 percent of the American population."

Can that really be true? The USDA spends more money in a year than American farmers earn? It's unbelievable ... almost!

So here's a challenge for farm-state Republicans who want budget cuts in return for raising the debt ceiling: what if we abolished the USDA? For its last act, let it identify each American farmer by name and address, and mail him a pro-rata share of $130 billion along with a farewell note of thanks. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

What happens when we all work for the government

This is how it went in Athens yesterday, as club-swinging thugs attacked police because--their parliament is voting to cut back the public payroll! One out of four Greek workers is a government employee. So now one government employee is swinging a club at another in hopes that somehow this will enable the gravy train to roll on forever. It won't. Someone must create value before governments can redistribute it. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

I love curmudgeons. Jan Morris plays the part today in the WSJ, railing against (of all things!) RMS Titanic! http://ping.fm/rRttc

Why your kid isn't ready for college

I live in a university town, where faculty members are a fairly significant presence on community organizations. So your public library is probably less elevated than ours, and that's a scary thought. Sally Wife picked up a Summer 2011 Reading List from the Durham Public Library the other day in hopes of finding books to recommend to our granddaughters, who live on a boat and who therefore read a lot. Good luck with that, as the children say!

Of twenty books on the list, only three seem remotely worthy. Two of those--Wuthering Heights and Water for Elephants--have recently been filmed, which probably explains their presence on the list; the third is a biography of Benedict Arnold. (This list, by the way, is indicated for students in the eighth grade through seniors in high school.) The others are all of the category called Young Adult, and they all feature dwarfs, "vampyres," Shadowhunters, the Maze, synthetic brains, overpopulated worlds, serial killers, and suchlike concerns of hormone-addled young minds. Here's a sample:

"Cameron Smith, a disaffected sixteen-year-old who, after being diagnosed with mad cow disease, sets off on a road trip with a death-obsessed video gaming dwarf he meets in the hospital in an attempt to find a cure."

Now, it is perfectly possible that some of this dreck is well-written, just some of the spy novels I read in high-school were well-written. But that it should be recommended? God protect us from the guardians of our culture, if this is the best a professional librarian can do. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Al Gore's inconvenient truth

Blogger Walter Russell Mead on the former vice-president's oxymoronic crusade against global warming:

You cannot be a leading environmentalist who hopes to lead the general public into a long and difficult struggle for sacrifice and fundamental change if your own conduct is so flagrantly inconsistent with the green gospel you profess. If the heart of your message is that the peril of climate change is so imminent and so overwhelming that the entire political and social system of the world must change, now, you cannot fly on private jets. You cannot own multiple mansions. You cannot even become enormously rich investing in companies that will profit if the policies you advocate are put into place....

A fawning establishment press spares the former vice president the vitriol and schadenfreude it pours over the preachers and priests whose personal conduct compromised the core tenets of their mission; Gore is not mocked as others have been. This gentle treatment hurts both Gore and the greens; he does not know just how disabling, how crippling the gap between conduct and message truly is. The greens do not know that his presence as the visible head of the movement helps ensure its political failure.

The whole essay is worth reading. And it's only part one of what promises to be a two-part roasting. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The 178th victory

In a dark hallway of the Sikorski Institute in London, this tail section of a German Junkers bomber sits more or less forgotten. (The engine in front of it doesn't belong to the Ju-88 but to a British Hawker Hurricane fighter.) It is billed as the 178th aircraft shot down by RAF 303 Squadron, known as "Warsaw-Kosciuszko" because it was made up mostly of Polish pilots who'd escaped to France and then to Britain when their own country was invaded and occupied by Germany and Russia. Overall, the Poles were credited with 297 German aircraft destroyed. Their story is most recently told in 303 Squadron: The Legendary Battle of Britain Fighter Squadron, in which the true names of the pilots are given for the first time. (They were previously concealed behind aliases so as to protect their families in occupied Poland.) Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

600 zloty and a bar of soap

When the NKVD arrested the Deszberg family in April 1940, Mama took her treasure box with her into exile. Among the treasures were 600 zloty--several months' wages for a laboring man--and a bar of soap. She couldn't spend the money, which was useless in Siberia, and she never used the soap, which seventy-one years later still retains its faint perfume. Mama wrote on the box that she would open it when she returned to Lwow. She never did, alas. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Spent a very emotional afternoon visiting Gunnersbury Cemetery in London, to view the monument to the twenty-two thousand Polish officers and intellectuals murdered at the Katyn Forest near Smolensk on Stalin's order. When the Germans discovered the mass grave in 1942, Stalin of course attributed the murders to them, and the British and American governments to their shame went along with the hoax. Nor was the crime officially acknowledged until the Russians did so, in Gorbachev's time. Then and only then were the Poles permitted to add the year--1940--to the monument in Gunnesbury.

David McCullough not only writes about history but thinks about the teaching of history to our children. What they know, he says, is "comical." The problems include political correctness, the fact that teachers are trained in education rather than in subject matter, and teaching by theme (women, blacks, gays) rather than by chronology. http://ping.fm/TKvwr

The B-17 that crashed in Illinois seems to have been Liberty Belle, owned by the Liberty Foundation and en route to Indianapolis Regional Airport where it was scheduled to give rides for Father's Day. I find sites that variously number the airworthy Flying Fortresses as 12 and 14. Whatever the number, there's one less now. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Live in fame or go down in flame

As boys during the Second World War, we sang with gusto the Army Air Corps Hymn, with words whose meaning was quite lost on us: "We'll live in fame / or go down in flame / Nothing can stop the Army Air Corps!" With 1930s engines and tanks full of 115-octane gasoline, every wartime aircraft was a fireball waiting to happen. Here's one of the grand old ladies, a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, burning to cinders in a field in Illinois after a (good) emergency landing. Happily the crew and passengers all got out safely. That didn't always happen. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The case of the emails that didn't bite in the night

Seventeen news organizations sent their political reporters flying to Juneau to fetch (and I trust pay for) 275 pounds of printouts of Sarah Palin's emails from the few years she was governor of Alaska. That's bad enough, but the New York Times and the Washington Post went a step deeper into the sewers by enlisting their readers to read the emails and play Gotcha! with the results. "Notice the patterns," said the WaPo to its panting volunteers. "Identify recipients and senders. Connect specific emails to larger themes."

Guess what? It was tedious stuff such as any harried bureaucrat-politician might send out. "For her admirers and her detractors alike," concludes Gordon Crovitz in the Wall Street Journal "it turns out that with Mrs. Palin, what you see is what you get."

In a week when we've been deluged with dreck about Anthony Weiner's crotch, that comes as a great relief. I hope the nosy reporters had to pay a surcharge on their baggage, coming home from Juneau. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Courting irrelevance

Robert Gates has been a fine Secretary of Defense, and he has done one last service for his country by warning that Europe is courting "collective military irrelevance" by its low level of defense spending. He is of course being polite: Europe is already militarily irrelevant, as it showed in the former Yugoslavia and is showing again in Libya. For sixty-five years, the United States has acted as Europe's defense department, to the point where we now pay 75 percent of NATO's operating costs.

This would matter less if we had another president than Barack Obama, whose fondest wish seems to be to turn the United States into another sweet-tempered European society. Even his military successes (shooting three Somali pirates, assassinating Osama bin Laden) have an ominous tone, showing the same sort of fascination with Special Ops that marked Winston Churchill's management of a declining British military. If you can't put an army in the field, you send a commando team.

Europe has prospered under the American military shield. But whose shield will protect the United States? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford