Atlantic thinks airports have no competition

Megan McCardle, of the Atlantic, who oughta know better, was blaming the sometimes shabby service at airports on the lack of competition.
She is clearly out of touch. Airports compete with other airports. For instance, Boston's Logan airport competes with Manchester NH, Worcester MA, and Providence RI. Although Logan may be closer to center city, the regional airports offer cheap and plentiful parking, a shorter walk from parking to the gate, and less traffic congestion. From the north of Boston suburbs it's quicker and easier to pick up a passenger from Manchester than from Logan.

So what happened in DC?

Washington DC suffers from the worst public school system in the nation, high rents, unemployment and gang activity. This despite the river of US taxpayer money flowing into the national capital. DC's one and only industry is government and government is booming.
Fenty, a black reform mayor was doing what he could to improve things. He hired Michelle Rhee, a tough superintendent of schools. Rhee set right in, fired a couple of hundred dead wood teachers and received super favorable press coverage from the Wall St Journal and Time magazine. Test scores were rising, dropout rates were falling. There is still a long long way to go, but the DC system was moving and moving in the right direction.
Then came the election. Fenty lost, beaten by a black city counsel member name Gray. Rhee is looking for a job, she has publicly stated that she cannot work for Gray.
So what went wrong for Fenty and the reformers? So far, the press and my DC sources cannot point to anything substantive they did wrong. They talk about Fenty favoring the white voters over black voters, but this is a smoke screen. Any mayor anywhere is going to attempt to remain on speaking terms with all the voters. No one has offered any specific examples of Fenty or Rhee saying or doing anything outrageous, or even a little bit insensitive.
Far as I can see, the only thing done wrong was firing a load of deadwood. The deadwood has friends, and a union and lawyers. Which says that school reform is going to be hard and getting harder. If reformers cannot fire teachers for cause in the worse system in the country, they won't be able to fire them anywhere.
Anyhow, next time someone gets all worked up about the miserable state of DC public schools, I will say, "They voted for them".

Is India part of the Anglosphere?

Hard to say for real. Interesting discussion here.
The MSM doesn't talk much about the Anglosphere these days, but it is the same alliance that won WWII and has called the shots world wide ever since. It is able to formulate policy and get the members to accept said policy without the baring of teeth.
India has become enormously more powerful than it was in the 1940's. Will the Indians join the Anglosphere or not? In the early days the Indians were "non aligned" which meant they could express some independence from Britain without falling under Soviet control. Now that the Soviets aren't the players they used to be, "non aligned" doesn't mean so much.
Joining the Anglosphere has two parts, the members of the club have to like and respect the potential member, and the potential member has to be sympathetic to the ideals and culture of the Anglosphere.
Never having been to India, my mental picture of the place comes from Kipling, Kim, and the Jungle Books. Kipling painted a colorful, romantic, likable country. I'd be happy to have India join the Anglosphere because of Kipling's inspiring stories of the place. Most Americans feel the same way for the same reasons.
Let us hope the Indians want to join.

Charlie, I never knew ye.

Charlie Bass may not be everyone's favorite candidate for Congress. But he does have some useful friends. Yesterday I received a pro-Bass letter from the NRA. Nice one page letter explaining how Charlie had been on the right side of a number of gun control votes over the years and a Bass for Congress bumper sticker.
Damn. I gotta confess the NRA endorsement means something to me. I'm a member myself, and I feel better about Charlie after reading the NRA endorsement.
We certainly do not want to elect the democrat, Kuster. Kuster is as far left as Obama and is full of new federal programs and the new federal taxes to pay for them. She doesn't talk about the tax part much, but you gotta figure she will vote for them.

Cost effective

A green was enthusing on NPR about a wonderful new thermal solar electric plant in the Mohave desert. They have the permits and the environmental impact statement out of the way. All they have to do is raise the money.
Plant is supposed to generate 1 gigawatt and cost $6 billion dollars.
For $6 billion I could buy a nuclear plant that size and have my lights stay on after dark.
Good luck with the funding. And good luck finding customers in the middle of the Mohave desert.

Time Warner Cable Broadband going Narrowband

My cable modem service has been going down hill. More and more websites fail to connect. Is it Time Warner? Is it growing Internet traffic overloading the web sites? Is it Firefox? Is it malware?
Might have to try dial up again.

NH Republican State Convention

As a genuine Republican candidate for state office, I rate as a delegate. Easily flattered as I am, I hopped in the car and zoomed down to Concord to strut upon the floor of the convention with real credentials hanging around my neck. That early on Saturday morning we had a bit of fog, actually clouds flying close to the ground. It was pretty hard to see as I zipped down I93 at 80 MPH.
The affair was in the Arts Center on Main St Concord. Lobby of the theatre was packed with pols. all sipping coffee and eating donuts. The morning was given over to stemwinding speeches by the major Republican candidates and special guest Mitt Romney. I guess Mitt is thinking about 2012. He has a good store of one-liners and was the most entertaining of the speakers.
Since the invention of primary elections, political conventions have little to do. The only substantive business was to approve the rewritten Republican platform. The platform rewrite is an improvement, the platform is now readable and you can show it to voters and it will mean something. The old platform was a jumble of special interest group gobbledegook.
A motion from the floor to favor state run gambling was defeated. As was a motion from the floor to deny Republican party support from any candidate who failed to take a pro life pledge and an anti gay marriage pledge. That motion was actually kinda dangerous in a procedural way. It wanted to boot out of the Republican party any candidate that isn't anti abortion and anti gay. That's undemocratic. Any winner of the Republican primary is a legitimate Republican. I don't want other people disqualifying candidates for insufficient ideological purity.