FAA accused of lax aircraft inspections

CSPAN covered the FAA hearings live. The House transportation committee held hearings about FAA inspections and the Southwest Airlines $10 million dollar fine. Something has gone wrong with FAA. The committee heard from a bunch of working level FAA inspectors, the guys who are supposed to walk the flight line and hangers looking at airplanes, and make sure they are air worthy. The working stiffs all accused FAA senior management of suppressing inspections, supressing reports of bad aircraft maintenance, and giving airlines the OK to fly passengers in planes that were out of compliance (planes that had not been inspected or reworked in accordance with air worthiness directives).
This is fairly bad. "The air, even more than the sea, is terribly unforgiving of the smallest mistake". I spent six years doing aircraft maintenance for USAF. On the flight line we all knew that if the plane broke in flight, the aircrew could die. That was a tremendous incentive to do things right lest you bear the guilt of causing a fatal aircraft accident. This attitude goes all around the aviation business. I'm sure Southwest's maintenance guys have it.
But then there are operational pressures. "We need that airplane to fly a mission today. If we can't fly it we will have to cancel a scheduled flight and leave our passengers stranded in the airport".
That aircraft is in good shape except an air worthiness directive hasn't been complied with yet.
The air worthiness directive says something like "After 5000 landings, inspect wiring in a hard to get to place for chafing. " Hard to get to might mean drilling out rivets and pulling off sheet metal, might take a day to pull the plane apart, inspect the wiring and then put it back together again. The plane has exactly 5000 landings.
A reasonable man might decide that nobody is going to get hurt if the plane makes a few more landings before the inspection.
On the other hand, if short cuts are permitted here, then soon enough they will be permitted there, and somewhere else, and pretty soon anything goes. The job of the FAA inspector is to say "No short cuts, ever".
According to testimony I watched on CSPAN, senior FAA management was permitting short cuts, over the objections of the line inspectors.
Time for a new FAA administrator and laying off the top two or three layers of FAA management.

Income Tax Break for Intelligence Agents (aka spies)?

I just finished the yearly chore of doing income tax. I'd rather clean out a stopped up toilet. Be that as it may, I read the instructions, and I found a new-this-year tax break (tax loophole?) just for "intelligence agents", presumably civil servants working for CIA or NSA.
Why do they get a special tax break? A reward for the excellent intelligence they have furnished over the years? Because of the extraordinary dangers they face driving into the office every day?
Or did the intelligence community blackmail congressmen by threatening to reveal dirty laundry in public?

Fairpoint to pay 13.5% interest. From my phone bill.

Union Leader article says Fairpoint deal is going thru even though Wall St is demanding 13.5% interest on the $500 million loan Fairpoint is taking out to pay Verizon for the northern New England telephone system.
Wow. That's gonna hurt us bad. If the loan is only $500 mil, then Fairpoint will pay $67 million in pure interest per year. Guess where they are going to get that money? Where else but out of my telephone bill? What ever happened to usury laws?
It may be worse. The Union Leader article said the whole deal is $2.3 billion, of which Fairpoint only borrows $0.5 billion. Where the other $1.8 billion was coming from was not disclosed. I doubt that Fairpoint has that much cash on hand, so they are borrowing it from somewhere. Where and for how much is not disclosed either.

Reform or re arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic

Yesterday Treasury Secretary Paulson proposed a big re-organization of the Federal bureaucracy that regulates banks, brokerages, thrifts and insurance companies, in short the financial industry. And in fact, the number of bureau do seem excessive. We have the FDIC, the Federal Reserve, the Comptroller of the Currency, the Office of Thrift regulation, the SEC, a commodities trading office, and probably more. Of these, the Federal Reserve is the most powerful, they can actually write checks, rather than just memo's and regulations. A check is something that makes people really pay attention.
However, more important than how the paper gets shuffled, is some basic financial policies. The financial system is doing good when it raises the money to build factories, roads, schools, hospitals, single family homes, or even finance the purchase of new cars. It is doing bad when it acts like casino gambling, merely swapping assets and "securities" back and forth between Wall St players like a poker game.
Policies for the financial industry should encourage the raising of capital and discourage gambling.
First new policy. Declare mortgages to be a deal between a borrower and a lender only. Lenders shall not sell or trade mortgages. The bank that writes a mortgage is required to keep it on their books until paid off. This rule would make banks evaluate the creditworthiness of the borrower and the market value of the property and get it right, because if they don't get it right it costs the lender real money. The sub prime crisis that is pushing the US into recession was caused by banks writing shaky mortgages and then selling them to gullible investors. So, prohibit trading in mortgages.
Second new policy. Business will keep just one set of books. Right now they keep one set of books showing great profit to impress investors, to make them buy the company's stock. The
other set of books shows how little money they made. They show this set of books to the taxman. This is even legal. One set of books is all we need. If the company made money, it should pay tax there on.
Third new policy. Lenders will quote interest rates in just one way, namely percent of original loan, per year. Right now, my little rural bank has a sign advertising rates on loans. Each interest rate is given two ways, differing by a tenth of a percent. If a little rural bank is quoting interest two ways, imagine how many ways the big city slicker banks can confuse the issue. There ought to be one standard way to quote interest rates to permit comparison shopping in a meaningful way.
Fourth new policy. Everything must be on the company/bank balance sheet. No more inventing fancy IOU's (mortgage backed securities) and not showing them as a liability on the balance sheet. They are liabilities, 'cause the holders can return them and demand cash. Big banks made their balance sheets look better with trickery that moved the fancy IOU's off the balance sheet.

So who is suffering from the subprime mess?

Obviously banks, brokerages, and investors have been burned to a crisp. On the other hand, I don't feel too bad for them, they were dumb or greedy or both. How about the homeowners? How many sub prime borrowers are there? How many of them deserve our compassion, and a bailout? How many are speculators who bought the house to flip it? How many would be better off mailing the keys to the bank and walking away from a gigantic mortgage that is way more than the house is worth? How many can refinance and come out with lower mortgage payments?
Does any one know? Who would be honest about it? I wouldn't want to trust anything I heard from a mortgage broker. The newsies are clueless as usual.
The price of houses is going down. That's good news for those who need a house, 'cause of a child, or another child, or a new job in another town. It's not so good news from home owners.
Why are house prices going down? Partly 'cause the price of a house is set by how much the banks is willing to lend on it. Back when there were gullible investors to take the subprime mortgage backed "bonds" the bank didn't care how much it loaned on a house, cause it would sell the mortgage, and come away with cash. The investors have wised up, so the banks are going back to previous lending standards. This means they will no longer write humongous mortages on cheap new tract houses.

How pledged are the pledged delegates?

So, Obama and Clinton get to the convention. It's still a tie. They have a first vote, and it's still a tie. Now, as the wheeling and dealing for the superdelegates proceeds in back rooms, are the pledged delegates still pledged? Use to be, back when candidates were selected at the convention, that delegates were ONLY pledged for the first vote. After that first vote, the delegates could vote any way they liked. If that is still so, the wheeling and dealing for the second vote will be something to see.

10,000 BC, a kid's action adventure movie

Let's get one thing straight, this is a kid's movie, with lots of CGI action. Being a still a kid at heart I took it in on the last day it was playing up here. Not a great mney maker, I shared a nearly empty theater with maybe three teen age couples. So I won't bother to discuss all those adult movie virtues like plot, characterization, message, acting, etc. The setting, long long ago in a history similar to that of Conan the Barbarian, has some possiblities. D'leh,the hero, is a member of backwoods and primitive tribe that lives in the high snowy mountains and prospers by hunting mammoths. The mannmoths are very good, big, shaggy, and dangerous looking. D'leh's tribe is raided by horseback riding bad guys who carry off to slavery D'leh's girlfriend. You can pretty much guess the the rest of the flick from there.
The makeup and costume departments don't do a very good job. D'Leh and all his people are burdened with really ugly black wigs, and powdery war paint that makes Boy George and Michael Jackson look suave. The costumes run to fur and leather and no tailoring at all. Everyone looks shaggy. shabby, and overweight. The wigs are dry, dirty, and dusty looking and make everyone look just awful. Plus it's hard to tell even D'Leh apart from the rest of the shabby members of his tribe. Continuity suffers.
And the prop department is just as bad. All the spears, even the one that takes down a mammoth, are light, flimsy, twisty, gnarled and lacking decent flint spear points. They don't look capable of stabbing a toad, let alone a bad guy or a mammoth.
The mammoths are good. The civilized bad guys use domesticated mammoths to haul the stone blocks for their pyramids. To kick off the predictable slave rebellion we have a really good mammoth stampede.
The writers manage to mess up a couple of promising scenes. As the bad guy starts to ravish the pretty heroine, she gets her hand around the hilt of his dagger. Before she can cut him a new one, the door bursts open, and the high priest, with body guards dashes into the room. Scratch one opportunity for heroine to show some spunk. At the climatic showdown between the hero and the bad guy, the bad guy attempts to get out of Dodge on his horse, with the protesting heroine thrown across his saddle. Something goes wrong, and both bad guy and heroine fall from the horse giving the hero his chance to get his hands around the bad guys neck. It is not clear, at least on a first watching, if the fall from the horse is caused by plucky heroine fighting hard, or just an accident.
Bottom line. A medium good kid's movie that could have been much better.