Bad Air

We seem to be closing in on a perfect storm of air travel dissatisfaction in this country: Complaints soar at U.S. airlines

Late flights and lost bags, to say nothing of higher fares, are making air travelers grumpy, an annual survey of airline quality says.

The industry posted declines last year in every area of the Airline Quality Rating, amid rising fuel prices, safety problems and bankruptcy filings that shut down three carriers last week alone.

The biggest change was in the rate of consumer complaints, up 60 percent overall. The rate more than doubled at US Airways and Comair, and rose for 15 of the 16 airlines included in the study. The exception was Mesa Airlines.

On-time arrivals dropped for the fifth straight year, with more than one-quarter of all flights late, according to the survey. The rates of passengers bumped from overbooked flights and bags lost, stolen or damaged also jumped in 2007.

"The trend is bad, and it doesn't look like it gets any better," said Dean Headley, an associate professor at Wichita State University and co-author of the study.

The survey results mesh with the spate of problems that have beset U.S. carriers, starting with surging fuel costs, Headley said.

ATA Airlines, Aloha Airlines and Skybus stopped flying just last week because of financial pressures. Major airlines have slashed jobs and passenger amenities while adding fees for second bags, traveling with pets and booking tickets by phone.

It is not surprising that people responded to higher prices and more frequent delays by complaining more, Headley said.

Well, I don't know about anyone else but my last four or five times flying were such lousy experiences I've been avoiding air travel when at all possible.  As a result I've put a lot more miles on the old auto, but the lack of pointless aggravation is worth the back pain of a ten hour road trip…more than worth it really. 

When you factor in the degree to which the airlines seem to be trying to make their flights unpleasant it is a wonder so many American are still flying at all. I've taken the hint and did something I've never done before:  I've just booked a trip to Washington D.C. from the Twin Cities on Amtrak.  Yes, it is slower and more expensive.  No, it wouldn't be an option for most people travelling on business. Yes, I know the trains in this day and age can often be delayed.  But, actually, I couldn't care less.  The prospect of taking a trip while NOT being treated like a herd animal is positively intoxicating.  Lord knows the actual trip will not live up to the romance I have in my head concerning rail travel (a heady mix of the Orient Express and a little Some Like It Hot), but the sad fact is it doesn't have to be much to outclass the average American airline by a country mile.

I'm pretty sure this makes me an airline customer lost.  The question now is if Amtrak can make me a return customer. 

Potholes From Hell

USA Today reports on the massive amounts of road damage experienced in Maine as a direct result of the brutally harsh winter they have endured. They have potholes so severe that cars are actually being killed by them. Literally.

PORTLAND, Maine — With a bone-jarring jolt, Juanita and Leon Smith's Volkswagen Beetle bottomed out rounding a corner on a potholed two-lane road that seemed more appropriate for a horse-drawn wagon than their car.

Oil poured out of the punctured oil pan, the engine froze up and the car sputtered to a halt in Lincolnville, a small town near the coast. Their insurance company wrote the car off as a total loss.

Potholes are an annual rite of spring in New England, but this monster winter of record snowfall amounts — nearly 200 inches in places — has turned roads into monster problems.

The road had cracks and holes and heaves all over it," said Juanita Smith, recounting the mid-March incident. "It looked like an earthquake had opened up the road."

New Englanders know all too well what spring can bring as roads swell up and break apart when water seeps into pavement cracks and freezes and thaws while the road is being pounded under the heavy weight of vehicles.

Maine's state Department of Transportation faces record pothole repair bills. Through March, it had spent $3.1 million, just shy of the record $3.2 million spent in the winter of 2005-2006.

Maine is spending even more money trying to get their roads into a reasonably serviceable condition. Where I live in the Midwest, our road is a disaster. The town has tried to patch, but the patches are now coming apart, so you get the joy of hitting a pothole and getting pelted with fragments of the failed repairs. The weather report, ever cheerful this winter (and it is very much still winter), is calling for ice this week. Just for the record, here's today's snowfall anomaly in the Northern hemisphere. Blue is more snow than normal. Here's the Southern ice cap and the Northern one.

Bloody Shiloh

On this day in 1862, the first day of the battle of Shiloh (or Pittsburg Landing) saw a tremendous defensive effort by Union troops under the command of Brigadier Generals Benjamin M. Prentiss and W.H.L. Wallace in what became known as The Hornet's Nest. For seven long hours the Union troops stood their ground, giving the rest of the Union forces time to stabilize their defense positions under massed artillery at Pittsburg Landing. The next day, the Union forces under Ulysses S. Grant counterattacked all along the line, driving the Confederate forces from the field. I posted about this last year and Crosspatch provided a link to Grant's autobiography. 

The Confederate assaults were made with such a disregard of losses on their own side that our line of tents soon fell into their hands. The ground on which the battle was fought was undulating, heavily timbered with scattered clearings, the woods giving some protection to the troops on both sides. There was also considerable underbrush. A number of attempts were made by the enemy to turn our right flank, where Sherman was posted, but every effort was repulsed with heavy loss. But the front attack was kept up so vigorously that, to prevent the success of these attempts to get on our flanks, the National troops were compelled, several times, to take positions to the rear nearer Pittsburg landing. When the firing ceased at night the National line was all of a mile in rear of the position it had occupied in the morning.     

In one of the backward moves, on the 6th, the division commanded by General Prentiss did not fall back with the others. This left his flanks exposed and enabled the enemy to capture him with about 2,200 of his officers and men. General Badeau gives four o’clock of the 6th as about the time this capture took place. He may be right as to the time, but my recollection is that the hour was later. General Prentiss himself gave the hour as half-past five. I was with him, as I was with each of the division commanders that day, several times, and my recollection is that the last time I was with him was about half-past four, when his division was standing up firmly and the General was as cool as if expecting victory. But no matter whether it was four or later, the story that he and his command were surprised and captured in their camps is without any foundation whatever. If it had been true, as currently reported at the time and yet believed by thousands of people, that Prentiss and his division had been captured in their beds, there would not have been an all-day struggle, with the loss of thousands killed and wounded on the Confederate side.     

With the single exception of a few minutes after the capture of Prentiss, a continuous and unbroken line was maintained all day from Snake Creek or its tributaries on the right to Lick Creek or the Tennessee on the left above Pittsburg. There was no hour during the day when there was not heavy firing and generally hard fighting at some point on the line, but seldom at all points at the same time. It was a case of Southern dash against Northern pluck and endurance. Three of the five divisions engaged on Sunday were entirely raw, and many of the men had only received their arms on the way from their States to the field. Many of them had arrived but a day or two before and were hardly able to load their muskets according to the manual. Their officers were equally ignorant of their duties. Under these circumstances it is not astonishing that many of the regiments broke at the first fire. In two cases, as I now remember, colonels led their regiments from the field on first hearing the whistle of the enemy’s bullets. In these cases the colonels were constitutional cowards, unfit for any military position; but not so the officers and men led out of danger by them. Better troops never went upon a battle-field than many of these, officers and men, afterwards proved themselves to be, who fled panic stricken at the first whistle of bullets and shell at Shiloh.

24,000 casualties were recorded in the two days of Shiloh. Wikipedia details the Union casualties as 13,047: 1,754 killed, 8,408 wounded, 2,885 captured/missing.

Mugabe Channels Gore

Robert Mugabe's party in Zimbabwe is resorting to calls for a recount after their apparent loss in last week's elections. This despite the fact that the official results have yet to be released some eight days after the election. Opposition figures are outraged over the developments.

The Movement for Democratic Change, which claims its leader Morgan Tsvangirai won the March 29 presidential ballot outright, said it would not accept a recount, did not want a runoff and pressed ahead with legal attempts to force publication of the results.

"How do you have a vote recount for a result that has not been announced? That is ridiculous," said opposition spokesman Nelson Chamisa.

He accused the ruling ZANU-PF party of vote fraud, saying that police have told opposition leaders that the ruling party has been tampering with ballots since early last week.

"These claims are totally unfounded and they are only meant to justify ZANU-PF's rigging," he said.

The ruling party cited "errors and miscalculations in the compilation of the poll result" and asked the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission to defer announcement of the presidential election results because of the "anomalies," the Sunday Mail reported.

The report came a day after Tsvangirai called on Mugabe to step down and accused the 84-year-old longtime ruler of plotting a campaign of violence to bolster his chances of winning an expected runoff.

The opposition fears that Mugabe will deploy troops and assorted thugs to intimidate people into voting for him in a runoff. Since Mugabe has a long history of doing exactly that, the fear is not unfounded.  

Autopilot To Ruin

The Washington Post today points out the awkward fact that politicians are refusing to address: entitlement spending is out of control and on autopilot, heading rapidly toward ruin. There is a proposal on the table to make politicians actually have to face up to the facts. While the Post is unsure whether the idea would work, they think it is at least worth a look - because just continuing along the same path we are on is not at all a good idea.

Last week an impressive and ideologically diverse collection of economists and budget experts proposed an intriguing mechanism for forcing lawmakers — and the next president — to focus on the problem. The group, whose members come from think tanks ranging from the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute to the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, would take Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid off autopilot growth and require lawmakers to set 30-year budgets. These would be reviewed every five years to determine whether the costs are set to remain within the allotted limits. If not, there would be automatic adjustments — the experts' paper doesn't specify what those would be — unless lawmakers acted to override this trigger.

This is not, and was not intended to be, a solution to the problem of runaway entitlement spending. The group, not surprisingly given its ideological scope, does not offer answers to the toughest questions: What should the spending levels be? What benefits should be cut, taxes raised or provider payments reduced? Rather, the paper offers a mechanism to force Congress and the president to face up to these difficult policy choices. There are legitimate worries about whether this mechanism would function as intended. Tax breaks, too, are on an automatic course; why not require that they be revisited as well? Would the trigger mechanism really work — or would lawmakers just vote to waive the limits ?

If nothing is done, the retirement of the baby boomers is set to raise entitlement spending to more than the entire current Federal budget. The entire paper can be downloaded from the Brookings website. As always with any proposal of this kind, the devil will be in the details. But it certainly is a starting point on a long overdue dialog on entitlement spending.

Tribal Warfare

Michael Barone analyzes the voting in the Democratic primaries to date and notices the emergence of what he calls tribal warfare among the voters. Essentially, you have various identity groups at odds with one another right across the nation. Barone sees a nasty little trap looming for the Democrats.

Exit polls have shown that the contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama has produced deep divisions among Democratic constituencies. It looks something like tribal warfare. Whites have voted, if you average the results from the states, 53 percent to 39 percent for Clinton; blacks, 80 percent to 17 percent for Obama; Latinos, 58 percent to 39 percent for Clinton; Asians, in California (the one primary state where they're numerous enough to gauge), 71 percent to 25 percent for Clinton.

The differences in voting by the young, overwhelmingly for Obama, and the elderly, overwhelmingly for Clinton, are as large as any I can remember in either a primary or general election. Upscale voters are heavily for Obama; downscale voters are heavily for Clinton.

As the contest has continued, increasing percentages of Clinton and Obama voters say they wouldn't vote for the other candidate against John McCain.

But the exit polls don't show another tribal division, one that emerges when you examine the election returns by county and congressional district. In state after state — from New Hampshire and Michigan to Texas and Ohio — Obama runs unusually strongly in counties with large universities. Academics — and I include here those who choose to live in university towns as well as those actually in or teaching school — seem to find Obama particularly appealing.

Also, Obama runs unusually well in many state capitals — Concord, Lansing, Tallahassee, Atlanta, Nashville, Santa Fe, Dover, Jefferson City, Sacramento, Trenton, Madison, Columbus, Austin — which of course have unusual concentrations of public employees (and in some cases big universities, as well). 

You'll want to read his entire analysis, it is some interesting stuff. A slightly different take on the problem the Democrats face in November, regardless of who finally wins. Since it looks like it will be Obama, a large chunk of Clinton supporters will be unavailable to the Democrats according to Barone. I suspect he's correct, as polling has shown recently.  

Identity politics comes full circle for the Democrats this year. We're going to need more popcorn, Maggie. 

Charlton Heston, 1923-2008

Charlton Heston, the legendary actor, has died. He was 84 years old.

With a booming baritone voice, the tall, ruggedly handsome actor delivered his signature role as the prophet Moses in Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 Biblical extravaganza "The Ten Commandments," raising a rod over his head as God miraculously parts the Red Sea.

Heston won the Academy Award for best actor in another religious blockbuster in 1959's "Ben-Hur," racing four white horses at top speed in one of the cinema's legendary action sequences: the 15-minute chariot race in which his character, a proud and noble Jew, competes against his childhood Roman friend.

Heston stunned the entertainment world in August 2002 when he made a poignant and moving videotaped address announcing his illness.

Late in life, Heston's stature as a political firebrand overshadowed his acting. He became demonized by gun-control advocates and liberal Hollywood when he became president of the National Rifle Assn. in 1998.

Heston answered his critics in a now-famous pose that mimicked Moses' parting of the Red Sea. But instead of a rod, Heston raised a flintlock over his head and challenged his detractors to pry the rifle "from my cold, dead hands."

Like the chariot race and the bearded prophet Moses, Heston will be best remembered for several indelible cinematic moments: playing a deadly game of cat and mouse with Orson Welles in the oil fields in "Touch of Evil," his rant at the end of "Planet of the Apes" when he sees the destruction of the Statue of Liberty, his discovery that "Soylent Green is people!" in the sci-fi hit "Soylent Green" and the dead Spanish hero on his steed in "El Cid."

That's from the Los Angeles Times obituary, which is wonderfully detailed, as you would expect from a newspaper located in the heart of the entertainment industry. Heston is survived by his wife of 64 years, Lydia, and their two children. Rest in Peace. 

UPDATE: Others, via Memeorandum . Power Line, Scared Monkeys, THE ASTUTE BLOGGERS, Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, Outside The Beltway, The Other McCain, Gateway Pundit, The American Mind,