Deadbeat bureaucrats

Something about this Washington Post story really tickled me--the circularity of people whose salaries are paid by the taxpayers, but who themselves don't bother to pay taxes! What could be neater than that?

• Federal employees nationwide owe $1 billion in unpaid taxes
• Senate and House employees alone owe $9.3 million (the WaPo doesn't say whether that includes any actual Congressmen, but I'll bet it does)
• While those working in the White House itself owe $831,000 

Alas, the WaPo story doesn't give a deadbeat figure by executive department, but one assumes that the Treasury under Timothy Geithner runs a cleaner ship than most. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Would you buy a used mosque from this man?

According to the Newark Star-Ledger, there's a bit more to the Imam with a Plan who wants to build a 31-story mosque and Islamic cultural center two blocks from Ground Zero. It seems that he's a slumlord well known to the building inspector of Union City: 

"He’s a terrible landlord who’s unresponsive to the residents who live in his building," said [a spokesman for the mayor]. "City officials and inspectors have reached out to him to express the urgency in correcting problems in his buildings, and it’s unfortunate that it’s gotten to this point, but it’s our responsibility to insure that residents receive the care that is needed." 

After being cited repeatedly for fire hazards, and after a fire did break out in one of his buildings, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf did what any good slumlord would do: instead of fixing the mess, he boarded up the building and wouldn't let the tenants back in.

The city is trying to put that building and a neighboring one into receivership, so it can collect rent from the tenants and make needed repairs. I eagerly await the assurances from President Obama, Mayor Bloomberg, and the New York Times that Imam Rauf is just the sort of neighbor that the Freedom Tower should have. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The parrot who died for love

My granddaughters live on a boat, which is presently in Uruguay, and they are schooled by their mother. She decided recently that they ought to learn to catch a ball, so she sent them out with their father, Hamish to pitch, they to catch. The younger is named Anna. As her mother emailed:

Earlier in the afternoon, a parrot flew into Anna's head and died, possibly of a broken neck, possibly of a heart attack, or even, perhaps of a broken heart.  Hamish and Anna were playing catch with a bright yellow tennis ball (Anna's catch is coming along enormously, as is Helen's.  They can also walk along a 1" wide board fence in crocs, but that's another story). Hamish threw the ball straight up in the air and caught it, and then tossed it to Anna.  The next thing she knew, a parrot came screaming out of the tree and crashed into her nose.  We can only assume that it  was a territorial male and it thought the tennis ball was a handsome rival.  Fortunately, it did not get her in the eye!  It lived briefly after the encounter, but is now interred under a very fine tombstone (with portrait) under a nearby tree.

Or possibly the poor bird thought the ball was a pretty female. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford
 
 

Ailing hiker for sale

Is Iran a great country, or what? Having jailed three American hikers for over a year, it is now offering one of them for sale at a knock-down rate of $500,000. It seems she is sick. What do you suppose a healthy male American goes for, in the demented minds of the mullahs? A million, I suppose. D'you think they might sell the three captives as a package, say for $2 million? Or perhaps, like North Korea, they'd settle for a visit by Jimmy Carter. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Remembering Vietnam

Karl Marlantes has quite a record: he graduated from Yale, was a Rhodes Scholar, and commanded a Marine rifle company in Vietnam. He won the Navy Cross, Bronze Star, and two Purple Hearts. For all that, it took him 35 years to get Matterhorn published. It's a great war yarn, in a tradition that the Vietnam War nearly killed off. Indeed, it reminds me of The Naked and the Dead for its starving infantrymen, their relentless grunge, and their foul language. ("Oh yes," Tallulah Bankhead supposedly said of Norman Mailer: "The young man who can't spell 'fuck'." Mr. Marlantes does not have this problem.)

I particularly liked the easy way he shows a casualty count being inflated, from one North Vietnamese shot in the face by the point man, which becomes three dead and six probables by the time the count is processed through headquarters ... and nobody's being dishonest! As a result, Bravo Company is ordered to stay out in the bush for another week, to its great cost.

On the other hand, I was puzzled by the quantity of leeches Mr. Marlantes's Marines encounter. I rattled around South Vietnam for three months and never saw leech one, thank God, though I heard stories similar to the one he presents here as happening to one of his squad leaders. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The mosque is needed for our own safety!

The kooky pastor behind Burn A Koran For Jesus has given up his plan. He has conceded that his constitutional right should not be exercised, because what he proposed is offensive, gratuitous, and injurious to America's image of itself.

Not so the kooky imam behind the Ground Zero mosque.("Kooky" is the kindest word I can think of in his connection. "Smarmy" is another.) If he had it to do over again, he assured the media in a full-press public relations offensive the other day, he would certainly choose another site. Alas, it's too late! For our own good, he must press ahead! As ABC News reports:

A Muslim imam behind a proposed cultural center two blocks from New York's Ground Zero said he must build there despite angry protests in order to defend America and its citizens against a "danger from the radicals in the Muslim world to our national security."

When the Mafia does this, it's called the Protection racket: if you don't contribute to our pension fund, who knows what terrible things might happen to your restaurant?

Imam Abdul also had the gall to call upon Pastor Jones to cancel his Koran-burning exercise--again, for the sake of America's national security, and indeed to show the true Christian spirit! As he explained:

"We have freedom of speech, but with freedom comes responsibility. ... This is dangerous for our national security, but also it is the un-Christian thing to do."

The imam evidently feels no such obligation. He'll take the freedom, plus public financing if he can get it, but responsibility? That's for Pastor Jones to display. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Don't know much about historee

Paul Krugman, who won a Nobel prize in economics, has just shown us why students need a broad liberal education--one that includes some courses in history. In an op-ed for the NYT, Mr. Krugman explains why we must throw more trillions of dollars after the stimulus programs that got us to our present dismal situation: it worked so well in 1938!

Here’s the situation: The U.S. economy has been crippled by a financial crisis. The president’s policies have limited the damage, but they were too cautious, and unemployment remains disastrously high. More action is clearly needed. Yet the public has soured on government activism, and seems poised to deal Democrats a severe defeat in the midterm elections. 

The president in question is Franklin Delano Roosevelt; the year is 1938. Within a few years, of course, the Great Depression was over. But it’s both instructive and discouraging to look at the state of America circa 1938 — instructive because the nature of the recovery that followed refutes the arguments dominating today’s public debate, discouraging because it’s hard to see anything like the miracle of the 1940s happening again.

The "recovery that followed" the 1938 election is better known to history as World War II. It wasn't Franklin Roosevelt but Adolf Hitler who ended the Great Depression, by sending the Germany army and air force into Poland. Fearing for their own safety, Britain and France began to buy war materiel from the United States. American factories began to hum again, and in 1940 the draft began to take unemployed young men off the streets. Will that miracle happen again? Doesn't seem at all likely. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford