Acapulco ain't what it used to be

Partying down 1950's Acapulco style

Counted among the many needless tragedies of the pointless War on Drugs is the degradation of the once popular Mexican resort of Acapulco. In recent weeks less than 100 yards from a famous 1950's hotel where John Wayne and "Tarzan" star Johnny Weissmuller threw lavish parties a huge gun battle broke out between Mexican soldiers and suspected members of the Beltran Leyva cartel.

Sixteen of the unidentified gunmen and two Mexican soldiers were killed, nine other people were wounded, including three bystanders. According to the Associated Press, "The battle erupted after soldiers received a tip that a group of armed men were gathered at a gated house in a seedy section of Acapulco where working-class homes bleed into 1950s mansions. Several gunmen tried to flee but crashed their car into a military Hummer that was blocking the gate. At one point, more armed men with grenades arrived to reinforce the men in the house, but they died in the shooting, said an army colonel, who led the operation and spoke on condition of anonymity for security reasons."

Perhaps the most telling line of the story was the one that most encapsulates how the War on Drugs has co-opted not only the streets of Mexico, but the very rule of law, "Inside, soldiers found four men bound and shirtless who claimed they were Guerrero state police officers and were being held hostage." No telling though, were they moles working with the cartels? Actually hostages? Are they who even who they say they are?

Read the whole story here.

Clunker Bill clears the House

The United States House of Representatives passed a bill that would give consumers vouchers to turn in gas guzzling vehicles and buy new cars that are more fuel efficient. Clunkers eligible for the program must get 18 miles per gallon, or less, in combined city/highway mileage. There are $3,500 subsidies that can be used toward purchasing cars and vans that are more fuel efficient than the older clunkers by four miles per gallon. There is a bigger $4,500 subsidy that can be used toward purchasing vehicles that are more fuel efficient than the older car by 10 miles per gallon. However, cars that are older than 25 years are not eligible to be traded in for credit. The bill supported by President Obama faces an uphill battle to pass in the United States Senate.

Read more here at CNN Money.

Military spending continues to spiral

The Clarion Content would love to call it exclusively a legacy of George Bush the II and the Dick, but even we have to admit that there are wider forces at work. The BBC News reported that global military spending rose 4% in 2008 to a record $1,464 billion, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri).

The BBC noted that the 100 leading defense manufacturing companies sold arms and munitions worth $347 billion during 2007 and that almost all the companies were American or European, a staggering 92%. Sipri's report also showed that the United States is not only the world's biggest seller of arms, but its biggest arms buyer, too, accounting for 58% of the total global spending increase on arms during the last decade.

Sipri said, "during the eight-year presidency of George W. Bush, US military expenditure increased to the highest level in real terms since World War II." The Bush II reign certainly didn't create the arms race, but it did help it trend in the wrong direction. Anybody remember the peace dividend that was supposed to come from the end of the Cold War? "Mideast Shift," anybody?

Americans we should protest such expenditure of our hard earned money!

Why do we hate/ignore the whistleblower?

Colgan Air is a regional partner of Continental Airlines

It is a long standing phenomenon that the Clarion Content has never really understood. Why does American culture loathe the whistleblower? And are we doomed to continue to fail to heed their warnings? Is it the old youthful prejudice against the tattletale? Is their something in our primordial collective psyche that detests the whistleblower for violating the sanctity of the Durkheimian community? Dear readers, feel free to weigh-in, because honestly, we don't get it.

Sadly the purpose of this article is to call attention to another egregious instance of America (in this case the Federal Aviation Administration) ignoring the whistleblower. This time it likely costs folks their lives. On February 12th of this year, Colgan Air Flight 3407 crashed in a wintry mix of light snow and fog about five miles short of the runway at Buffalo-Niagara International airport killing all forty-nine people on board and one on the ground.

As the investigation surrounding the crash has continued, a tragic shunting aside of the warnings of a FAA inspector have come to light. This was the inspector who one year earlier was assigned to monitor Colgan Air's addition to its fleet of the 74-seat Bombardier Dash 8 Q400. The same plane that crashed near Buffalo.

The FAA inspector reported that Colgan’s first three test flights for the Q400 were unsatisfactory. He also stated that he observed a candidate for upgrade to captain who exhibited “a lot” of problems during a test flight. Furthermore he noted frequent violations of “sterile cockpit” rules mandating that flight crews avoid unnecessary chatter during takeoff and approach to landing. Worse he saw a Colgan crew takeoff despite “patches on the de-ice boots of the left wing that were not airworthy,” and passengers on another flight were allowed to get on and off with the engines still turning. Finally, he also reported that Colgan pilots “botched” the three approaches they made at the airport in Charleston, W. Va., that they flew the Q400 faster than the manufacturer allowed and refused to report a broken radio for fear that it would delay other test flights.

He summed up his report on Colgan Air like this according The Buffalo News, “As a culture the problem starts all the way at the very top. You have young pilots coming in and the next thing you know they’re swapping seats with the engines turning.”

What did the FAA do in response? Whitewashed his complaints and transferred him to a desk job.

What did National Transportation and Safety Board (NTSB) inspectors find during their investigation of the crash of Colgan Air flight 3407?

The flight recorder showed indeed that sterile cockpit rules were violated on Flight 3407's approach to landing. The NTSB found that pilots at Colgan didn’t as a group have the hard training and grounding that was in compliance with federal regulations. And that the egregious safety violations the FAA inspector observed over the year were systemic. The pilot at the controls of Flight 3407 only had 109 hours of flying time in the Q400.

The FAA inspector filed a whistleblower complaint about his transfer, which the Department of Transportation inspector general is now investigating. Unfortunately, that won't bring back any of the folks who paid for the anti-whistleblower bias with their lives.

Hardly sounds like the kind of thing that could have happened under the government of Bush-Cheney. Because we all know they never forced government agencies to change the results of their reports or data to comply with their pre-conceived notions. They were and are paragons of intellectual honesty. (Just like Clinton never spun the truth or cheated on his wife.)

Read more here in The Buffalo News.

Russians buying a car company

Putin and Schroeder share an awkward hug

The German government announced yesterday that it had picked a partnership led by Magna International Inc., a Canadian auto-parts supplier, Russia’s biggest bank, OAO Sberbank, and Russian carmaker OAO GAZ as the buyer for Opel, the European division of GM. This augurs ever closer ties between Russia and Germany, which in turns stokes the fears of every Eastern European living between the two states.

The last premier of Germany, Gerhard Schroeder, was hired by Russian state gas export monopoly, Gazprom OAO, months after he left office in 2005 to spearhead the construction of the Nord Stream pipeline that will provide Russian gas to Germany (while circumventing Eastern Europe).

As the Polish opposition noted in a comment to Bloomberg news services, “Nothing’s ever purely economic with the Russians, there’s always political interest involved.” No doubt.

The Clarion Content finds the arguments in favor of Russian ownership specious. Firstly, there is no indication that the rule of law as yet reigns supreme in Russia. Nothing exists that would stop the Russian state from outright confiscation of the company and/or its assets. Secondly, as the Poles know well, Russia always has ulterior power projection motives in mind, take a look at their natural gas blackmail of the Ukraine! Which incidentally still simmers and could explode at any time, likely taking down the democratically elected government of the Ukraine with it. The Germans, always suckers for authoritarianism, probably secretly sympathize with the style and manner of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. The laughable suggestion made by a German professor in the Bloomberg article that Russia is poised to become Europe's biggest car market ignores the reality of Russia's plummeting population decline and massive income inequality.

Fact is, if this is a legal acquisition, it is hard to oppose as a libertarian. The Clarion Content decried the ludicrous Senate maneuvering that blocked the Chinese state owned oil monopoly's purchase of Conoco, same for the jingoistic blocking of the sale of American ports to the state of Dubai. We do not actually oppose the Russians purchase of G.M.'s Opel. We just want to sound the horn of caution about what it says for erstwhile United States ally, Germany.

Hooray!

The Chattahoochee National Forest

This was one of the changes the Clarion Content had in mind when we endorsed Barack Obama for President last fall. The Obama administration announced yesterday that no new timber-cutting or road project could begin in road-less areas of national forests without the permission of the secretary of agriculture. Hooray!

This is a major reversal of the environment gutting policies of King George the II. The directive applies to almost 58.5 million acres of road-less areas.

However, the 9th and 10th Circuit Appeals courts have issued contradictory rulings on the policy and the issue could eventually end up in front of the Supreme Court, possibly as a states rights issue. Somehow, according to the New York Times, national forests in Idaho are exempt from yesterday's announcement. The Agriculture Department called it an interim measure meant to bring “consistency and clarity” to decisions on an ecological issue that has been subject to legal battles since the Clinton administration banned such projects in road-less areas in 2001.

Read more here in the New York Times.

Loose Nukes

Whether it was strictly a photo-op or something actually came of last month's meeting between President Obama and two former Secretaries of State, Republicans George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former Democratic senator and defense wonk Sam Nunn, and William Perry, a former Secretary of Defense about the issue of the control and security of the world's existing supply of nuclear weapons, it was a Presidential bully pulpit moment and we were glad to see it happen. Even if all Obama is able to accomplish this early in his presidency is raising the volume on the subject, we are glad to see he is at least doing that. The Clarion Content believes loose nuclear weapons are probably the single greatest short-term threat to humanity.

Securing these existing nuclear weapons as tightly as possible is an extremely high priority, revitalizing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is a far more specious and far less worthy goal.

David Feherty on the divide

Who gets it first?

It is easy to forget in these days of Obama-mania that ex-dictator George Bush II still has many ardent supporters. Golf analyst David Feherty writing for D Magazine provided a sharp reminder. Feherty, an Irishman by birth, has been living in the Dallas area for twelve years. He has been a big supporter of American troops, visiting Iraq to entertain as well as, working with the "Troops First Foundation," which is raising $15 million for soldiers who return wounded, many of them without limbs. He created his own division -- "F Troop" -- and last year took eight soldiers to South Dakota for pheasant hunting.

The 43rd and worst president ever is moving to the Dallas area. Feherty was writing for D Magazine about the return of the bumbler. King George the II received 62 million votes in 2004. In 2008 more than 61 million people voted for a candidate other than Barack Obama. Many of those folks were vitriolically opposed to Obama or any Democratic candidate. Feherty offered a semi-kidding commentary about how, in his view, most American troops feel about Democratic politicians today,

"From my own experience visiting the troops in the Middle East, I can tell you this though. Despite how the conflict has been portrayed by our glorious media, if you gave any U.S. soldier a gun with two bullets in it, and he found himself in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden, there's a good chance that Nancy Pelosi would get shot twice, and Harry Reid and bin Laden would be strangled to death."

The Clarion Content is quite cognizant that America is still a 50-50 country, starkly divided on many issues, despite the papering over supported by many in the mainstream media. The Clarion Content reads comments like Feherty's and fears the huge backlash that is likely coming if President Obama isn't a massive, and all but immediate, success.

Read more here.

Head honcho's of Hype

The WHO has a dangerously bad habit

The head honcho of hype at the World Health Organization (WHO) has hardly been humbled by its highly inflated claims of pandemic surrounding the swine flu. Despite being forced to admit worldwide there were only 950 cases! And 25 fatalities! Talk about much ado about nothing.

Have these people ever heard of Aesop's The Boy Who Cried Wolf? Heck the name of their organization is right in the title, one might think they at least must have stumbled on to it Google searching at some point.

Dr. Margaret Chan, head of the 193-nation World Health Organization, told the Financial Times that, given the potential scale of the possible threat, the World Health Organization did not overreact to the swine flu threat.

The Clarion Content's response, "Ha!" Ask Mexico about the devastating effect on their economy in a time of massive slowdown already. The WHO which has a long history of overclaim did it again. It is an innate downside risk of establishing this sort of singularly mission focused organization, they feel compelled to make these kind of claims of significance to justify their budget. The United Nations feeding trough is home to many piggish, bloated, pseudo-governmental entities whose budgets are rife with waste and corruption.

Problem Saturation

Swine flew indeed.

You may have wondered why the Clarion Content hasn't spent any time covering the swine flu. This contributor to Urban Dictionary is on point. We could not have said it any better ourselves. We do not want to contribute to the unnecessary, overboard, needlessly sensationalist coverage of the issue.

Too bad Veep Joe Biden can't say the same. What, nobody told him we already have a happy national consensus that Dan Quayle was the dumbest Vice President ever? He has got to try to move in on that role? Avoid closed spaces, Joe? Thanks, brilliant. Obama needs to ship him on a three month tour of the back country of New Zealand or somewhere equally out of the way.

Governments all over the world are reacting with a bludgeon to a problem that requires a scalpel. Hong Kong has quarantined a hotel full of people based on the probable case of one Mexican tourist. Egypt is attempting to kill all the pigs in the country (not coincidental primarily owned by a discriminated against minority, Coptic Christians.) This despite not having a single confirmed case of the so-called swine flu.

The hue and cry of the media is outrageous. The Clarion Content is coming to believe that their distortions and complicity in government and other power brokers behavior is almost as big a systemic problem as any. Michael Moore has been on this theme for a while, underlining in Bowling for Columbine the climate created and maintained by the media that serves America so poorly. In this case, the media by blowing the story way out of proportion is pressuring governments into unwarranted action. This kind of government action and overreaction fills our little 'c' conservative bellies here at the Clarion Content's offices with dread.

As for the swine flu, all we can say is here we go again.