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Christopher Hitchens writes on event in Iran.
For a flavor of the political atmosphere in Tehran, Iran, last week, I quote from a young Iranian comrade who furnishes me with regular updates:
“I went to the last major Ahmadinejad rally and got the whiff of what I imagine fascism to have been all about. Lots of splotchy boys who can’t get a date are given guns and told they’re special.”
It’s hard to better this, either as an evocation of the rancid sexual repression that lies at the nasty core of the “Islamic republic” or as a description of the reserve strength that the Iranian para-state, or state within a state, can bring to bear if it ever feels itself even slightly challenged. There is a theoretical reason why the events of the last month in Iran (I am sorry, but I resolutely decline to refer to them as elections) were a crudely stage-managed insult to those who took part in them and those who observed them. And then there is a practical reason. The theoretical reason, though less immediately dramatic and exciting, is the much more interesting and important one. …
A couple of items from WSJ editors. One on the firing of an inspector general who made trouble for an Obama friend, and another on a favored group of investors in the Delphi bankruptcy. You can tell Obama is from Chicago.
President Obama swept to office on the promise of a new kind of politics, but then how do you explain last week’s dismissal of federal Inspector General Gerald Walpin for the crime of trying to protect taxpayer dollars? This is a case that smells of political favoritism and Chicago rules.
A George W. Bush appointee, Mr. Walpin has since 2007 been the inspector general for the Corporation for National and Community Service, the federal agency that oversees such subsidized volunteer programs as AmeriCorps. In April 2008 the Corporation asked Mr. Walpin to investigate reports of irregularities at St. HOPE, a California nonprofit run by former NBA star and Obama supporter Kevin Johnson. St. HOPE had received an $850,000 AmeriCorps grant, which was supposed to go for three purposes: tutoring for Sacramento-area students; the redevelopment of several buildings; and theater and art programs.
Gerald Walpin, Inspector General of the Corporation For National and Community Service, was fired by President Barack Obama.
Mr. Walpin’s investigators discovered that the money had been used instead to pad staff salaries, meddle politically in a school-board election, and have AmeriCorps members perform personal services for Mr. Johnson, including washing his car. …
Robert Samuelson does not think much of the health plan.
It’s hard to know whether President Obama’s health-care “reform” is naive, hypocritical or simply dishonest. Probably all three. The president keeps saying it’s imperative to control runaway health spending. He’s right. The trouble is that what’s being promoted as health-care “reform” almost certainly won’t suppress spending and, quite probably, will do the opposite. …
Peter Wehner is figuring out the tricks.
In the course of only five months, President Obama has reached into his bag and pulled out a dazzling number of misleading rhetorical tricks.
Let’s begin with his much-touted claim that his Administration is responsible for having “saved or created” at least 150,000 American jobs, even though we have shed well over a million jobs since Obama took office. Jesus may have turned water into wine – but even He did not claim to have turned job losses into job gains. That is the picture Obama is trying to portray. Of course, to place an empirical figure on the number of jobs Obama has “saved” is risible; if Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush had tried to get away with such a stunt, they would have been ridiculed and criticized mercilessly. Among the largely supine and compliant Obama press corps, however, the claim is reported as if it were written on tablets of stone.
Obama’s “saved and created” claim is cousin to the contention by Obama that his Administration – you know, the one which would put an end to “phony accounting” – had identified $2 trillion in savings in his budget. It turns out, though, that $1.6 trillion of this amount qualifies as “savings” under the assumption that the surge in Iraq would have continued for 10 more years. The problem is that Obama made this savings claim despite having already declared that our combat mission in Iraq will end by August 31, 2010 – and despite the fact that the Status of Forces Agreement calls for all U.S. forces to be out of Iraq by December 2011. …
LA Times with the disturbing possibility that the recent Air France disaster could have been prevented.
On June 9, the front page of this newspaper carried a photograph of a red, white and blue object floating, like some sort of gaily colored raft, in a blue-black ocean. To pilots, it brought a chilling sense of deja vu. In November 2001, a similarly shaped and colored object floated in Jamaica Bay, just off Long Island. It was the vertical stabilizer — colloquially, the “tail fin” — of an American Airlines Airbus, Flight 587, that had broken up shortly after taking off from JFK. That fin was practically undamaged; it had parted at the root, each of the massive fittings that attach it to the fuselage torn neatly in half. Here was another such fin: seemingly intact, snapped cleanly from the vanished Air France Flight 447.
The National Transportation Safety Board took almost three years to untangle the mystery of the American Airlines crash. It eventually concluded that the first officer had caused the breakup by stepping too vigorously on the airplane’s rudder pedals, and that the rudder pedals of Airbus airplanes were more susceptible to over-control than those of rival Boeing’s jets.
The rudder is the movable portion of the vertical fin. Unlike the rudder of a boat, it is not used to turn. In fact, the rudders of jets are seldom used at all, except when landing in a strong crosswind or to hold the airplane straight after an engine failure. In this case, the NTSB thought, the pilot had tried to use the rudder to steady the plane in the wake of a 747 several miles ahead and had managed to break the vertical tail off instead.
Pilots were incredulous. The airplane had just taken off and was climbing; it was flying well under its “maneuvering speed,” the speed below which a pilot should be able to use the flight controls in any way without risk of damaging the airplane. How, then, could this pilot possibly have broken the airplane with its own controls? …
News Biscuit announced Windows 7 will be supplied pre-infected.
Software giant Microsoft announced that the long awaited Windows 7 will have all current spyware viruses already pre-installed to save consumers endless hours trawling porn sites to download them at home. The announcement was made live on-line today on both the official Windows site and www.chick-with-dicks.com.
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