While eating breakfast, I saw this stupid story on “Airports cash in on tax dollars by giving away free flights“, and it pissed me off enough to break out the blog. Oh my god, they got a million dollars. Anyone happen to have a copy of the US budget on hand. My guess is that $1,000,000 is a small portion of it. I bet the budget is more than a million million dollars. This handy link gives the current US public debt at over 12 trillion. Yup. By cutting 12 million of these programs, we can reduce the deficit to zero! No mention of the fact that this program only got about 171 million last year. For reference, Goldman Sach netted 3.5 billion (or 5.1 billion) in first quarter profits.

Also, how can one run a whole piece on this and not mention how it is funded. The original source of it’s funding is from airline deregulation. Huh? Yup, that’s right. All this indignation for something that happened in 1978! When Congress deregulated the airlines, they set up what’s called the Essential Air Service program. And contrary to the “report” by Griffin, it’s not earmarks. The program is codified in 49 U.S.C. § 41731–41748 (mucho thanks to WP otherwise I’d have had to look it up).

He also reports that you could stay all day and not see a plane. Which is, of course, a flat out lie. And he says so in his next sentence. Because if you stayed all day, you’d see 3 commercial aircraft. Nice hyperbole, Drew. Of course, according to Airnav.com the airport saw an average of 125 flight operations per day in 2008. (An operation is either a takeoff or landing.) It’s not a lot compared to Atlanta, which saw an average of 2959 operation per day in 2008. But 15% of those flights were military, and 23% were commercial. To me, that was about 50 flights per day, or about 18 thousand flights per year that were convenienced by the extra million dollars. Flights may have dropped off since 2008, I don’t know. I don’t have the flight data from 2009 or 2010 yet. But I can guarantee, that $1 million to improve our nations infrastructure is a good buy, not a bad one.

So your media took 32 years to get on this story. Pretty soon they’ll report on the construction of the Berlin Wall.

Drew Griffin. Another mainstreet media moron (MMM).

Dr. Michael E Mann,

I can only hope the readers of this letter are as outraged as I am at Dr. Michael E Mann. First things first: Dr. Mann demands that his papers be discussed in only the most positive light. To ensure that this demand is met, he sends his Praetorian Guard after anyone who fails to show the utmost deference when planting big, wet, sloppy kisses on Dr. Mann’s behind. Every time he tells his minions that his subliminal psywar campaigns can give us deeper insights into the nature of reality, their eyes roll into the backs of their heads as they become mindless receptacles of unsubstantiated information, which they accept without question.
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First: Watergate was named “gate” for a reason. Every other “gate” is just a silly name.

Second: The only emails I’ve read, I’ve read involuntarily as they’ve been posted to Wikipedia. I don’t think it’s right reading the email of others.

Third: I assume the ‘worst’ emails are the ones they’re trying to push.

Fourth: From what I’ve read, this seems much ado about nothing.

I haven’t kept up with the climate blogs/news recently, so maybe my assessment is wrong. But it seems like the email conversations you’d expect scientists to have.

My two cents.

From the McCain might not carry his home state news:
CBS is reporting (originally from Talking Points Memo) that McCain was robocalling the good folks of Arizona. Of course, I knew about it before CBS did, but it’s 6PM and it’s the first time I’ve had a chance to blog it since it happened about an hour and a half ago. My last prediction on this blog was Obama with 350 electoral votes (a landslide), and that’s what it was at lunch today. However, with this latest news, I might have to revise my estimate.