Amtrak in Two Accidents

JACKSON, Miss. -AP- An Amtrak passenger train collided with a garbage truck Tuesday on a rural stretch of central Mississippi track, injuring at least seven people, authorities said.Three of those taken to hospitals were Amtrak employees who suffered non-life-threatening injuries, Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari said. He did not know the status of the others hurt, or whether they were train passengers, truck passengers or both.

 

A fire broke out after the collision, authorities said, damaging the engine. The train’s final car, which was empty, left the track.

Oh, I can’t wait for the final report on this one.  CN owns the track through there, and I’m willing to bet that there’s nothing more than a set of crossbucks marking the crossing. Everyone involved with this one got very lucky, indeed.

-0-

Meanwhile we have a pedestrian getting hit by an express train at the Attleboro commuter rail station. Not many details are availble on this one, but the guy lived long enough to make it to an area hospital. Track speed in the area is 150mph. No, that’s not a typo… trains on the NorthEast corridor often run that fast… but the track is usually very well marked and fenced. What this guy was doing in that position, I’ve no idea, but it does sound unliekly that we’re dealing with an accident.

As we expected, Obama has rejected McCain’s proposal that they go to Iraq together. Hot Air makes note of this and says:

Even more amusing than Maverick’s savviness in forcing this choice on him is TPM straining to spin it as some sort of manifestation of principle — a standard Obama reaction whenever he weasels out of some tough decision, belied most recently by his pathetic reclamation of the flag lapel pin just in time for the general election. Spokesman Bill Burton:

John McCain’s proposal is nothing more than a political stunt, and we don’t need any more ‘Mission Accomplished’ banners or walks through Baghdad markets to know that Iraq’s leaders have not made the political progress that was the stated purpose of the surge. The American people don’t want any more false promises of progress, they deserve a real debate about a war that has overstretched our military, and cost us thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars without making us safer.

If they’re worried about the military giving them a dog-and-pony show, the answer isn’t to decline the trip but to counterpropose a more comprehensive trip than even McCain’s suggesting and turn it into a real fact-finding mission.

Correct.  Obama, as I suggested as week ago, is about shielding himself from the truth. It’s that simple.
Allahpundit agrees:

He won’t do it because he’s afraid of what he might hear, which goes back to a point I’ve been making ever since the Jamil Hussein saga: The left would have you believe Iraq hawks can’t admit that any aspect of the war might be going badly, but the opposite has always been more nearly true.

Something of a pattern, there, that I suspect we’ll see all the way to November. When those pesky facts come up, Obama hides. His narrative is so weak, it cannot withstand any input from anyone but himself and his handlers.  Like, for example, from the Iraqi people.

Some leader he’ll make, huh?

There’s been a fair amount of chatter on the web about Jim Webb being Obama’s choice for VP. I’m not sure how much to credit this talk. He’d make a fair enough choice for Obama, but like Obama himself I think him a bad choice for the country. That point aside, though,  one comment I noted yesterday at Outside The Beltway makes note of that discussion:

…nobody – absolutely nobody – is speculating about who Hillary’s veep choices might be. Even the die-hards over at TalkLeft are more focussed on just getting her through to the bitter end of Primaries.

The implication being of course that it won’t be a consideration, she’s not getting there. I have a different take; It’s that her personality is so overbearing it won’t much matter who the VP is. Sorta like with Al Gore.

Ramesh Ponnuru points out yesterday that in a Libertarian fantasy world the Cato institute’s platform would win in a landslide. I would hasten to add that the only reason that the whole thing is a fantasy is because nobody’s bothered trying to sell the American public on it. It’s that vision thing, again, that changing of minds, that’s lacking, here.

All that Cato, the Libertarian party, and so many other groups of the same ilk, have managed to do is to preach to the choir. There is no outreach to speak of, no serious attempt to mainstream the philosophy. As such, nobody really understands what they’re about, what the philosophy is about, and the ramifications of that philosophy put into policy. Nothing in the operational manual apparently about changing minds, which is that long process I spoke to with Billy Beck some months ago, and with several others since. Changing minds is always the harder thing to do, and in the short term, the less productive. We have become, I fear, a nation of short termers, even those who claim otherwise.

The libertairan movement…. (in which I include the small L and the big) which already suffers under images of kookdom, as a result of that lack of salesmanship, does itself no favors when it nominates genuine kooks like Bob Barr, to the banner’s attempt at the White House. This is decidedly not how to change minds. They’re after the short term gain. McGehee, yesterday, remarked that Bob Barr’s platform sounds amazingly like that of Pat Buchanan. And he’s right. Frankly, both of them have ideas that I find attractive. Yet there is enough kook in them both to turn me off to the whole thing. And the LP signs off on their candidacy because they bring money into the party, and fresh blood. Trouble is, the fresh blood they bring in knows little about what the part is all about past what Barr, in this case, mouths at them… a lot of which seems contrary to the libertarian talking points of even the recent past.

Perhaps part of the problem is that the Libertarian party, like the Democrat and Republican parties, respectively, can’t figure out itself, what it stands for, and thus falls victoim to it’s own short term goals. The party finds itself in unworkable conflicts as regards its basic philosophy and premise. But they’re not alone.

A look across the aisle in the Republican and Democrat parties, it shows a similar situation, where the ends of the party continued to march in their opposite directions. Thus do we see in the Democratic Party for example, the item spectacle of Hillary Clinton being labeled the lesser candidate, because she’s not liberal enough, supposedly. And, thus do we see the Republican Party dealing with a nominee who for the most part, is not conservative enough.

Look; The left had massive success from the 1930s forward, mostly because they took the long view of things. They had a vision in their heads, and were willing to work overtime to convince other people of that vision. Whatever it took; Fireside Chats, and the like. Thus it was that they had nearly 70 years of uninterrupted dominance in both houses of Congress. The whole of the political spectrum these days, and so much of our society, even absent politicking,  anymore, refuses to take that long view. That possibly is our problem.

My own view of the last several cycles has been to elect people who would do us the least damage, so as to allow us to grow past the immediate. The long view, after all, is nothing if not survivalist. It’s that point now, which causes me to have struggles with a vote for John McCain; will we in fact, survive the man in the White House?

And with the short term blinders on, will we be able to identify the politically survivable path when we find it?

Every time I see stories like this I begin to wonder whether or not the author is still Sane. Admittedly those thoughts, disappear a little more quickly when James Joyner is involved, but I have to tell you that I’m getting really, really tired of .the whining about the supposed demise of journalism.

Nobody making any of these arguments seems to understand what Matt Drudge understood so very clearly when he started his website, back in the day;

Here’s the thing; Journalism, as such, is merely a way to sell printed pages, regardless of what they’re printed on, including photons, hopefully being a way to attract attention to advertisers within the pages, so that the owners of the printing press can make some money.  That’s it. Period, end of story. Any higher aspirations for journalism is naught but pretense. anyone who thinks otherwise will doubtless respond to me here with a long diatribe about journalistic ethics, which I have always considered to be a contradiction in terms.

As for the current demise of newspapers, and the supposedly attendant demise of journalism, I am reminded of someone and frankly I’ve forgotten who now, saying that the owners of railroads forgot that they were in the transportation business, and instead thought they were in the train business, instead.  That non- thinking, (along with governmental regulation to that effect, which set the whole thing in stone) spelled the demise of passenger railroads in this country.  I submit to you that what there is of the demise of journalism is from the same non-thinking.  so, yes, businesses change.  Then again, a living things always do change.

There is something that we call things that don’t change: Dead.

Dead tree journalism, is thereby as apt a name as any, for the businesses under discussion.

• Fuel prices have had a small effect on the amount of travel over the weekend, though not as much as they apparently figured on. The difference amounts to about 1% less than last year.  The problem with judging how that all will be going forward is that eventually, they’re going to break down and wanna get outta Dodge.  Staying at home only works for so long before a sort of crazy sets in.  which, by the way always was the issue with these calls for a day of boycotting oil compnaies…. leaving aside that the refiners are not to blame for the prices. I’ve run some numbers, and driving, even while hauling a big trailer,  is still cheaper.  Let’s take a trip from my home outside Rochester, NY to  Myrtle Beach. We’ll take tha trailer, which gives us around 11 to the gallon . Total miles, round trip comes out 1662 miles, which gives us a total of 151 gallons of fuel, and at $4/gallon, that comes out at $604.00 for fuel costs. Rather a lot of money. But consider;  Where can you fly my family of four for that amount? Certainly not Myrtle Beach.  In what other situation can we bring along our own food? Our trailer has a full galley…. We save by eating at the campsite, not in hotels or resturants.  And of course sleeping in your own bed is a serious advantage. Sorry, gang, yes, it’s more pricey… but driving is still the way to go.
• And as for the idiots seeing prices going up and therefore causing people to drive less as a good thing… you have to wonder if they understand the kind of financial trouble less travel will cause our economy.
• So, here comes the state government in Pennsylvania who says that the Amish can’t have outhouses in their schools.  Hey, Pennsylvania…. have you looked at your own campgrounds, of late?
• Another Honorable Mention at the OTB Caption Contest. I was trying for ‘Bottom of the Barrel”, there. Oh, well. Blame the long weekend for my not mentioning it on Friday, as I usually do. Oh, and also, a second place. Oh… and I guess I managed to make the Bottom of the Barrel, on this one. The whole bloody thing. Never seen that done, before.
• Oh, great. Someone in China’s been attacking Q&O’s database. I’ve been through that one, once. Good luck, guys… and I mean that.
• A few nights ago, I made reference to 770/WTOR in Lockport as being a 1kw station. Thanks to a sharp-eyed reader, I can issue a correction; WTOR runs 13 KW, on a fairly broad three tower beam pointed northwest.  As you’ll see here, there’s almost none of that signal coming off the beam’s backside. But, of course the splash is enough to really screw up listening to  WABC, daytimes.
• Nancy Pelosi has violated federal campaign laws? It sure looks like it.
• The White House has released a report which tells me all I need to know about how committed the government is to solving the problems you and I are having with oil, just now. It says that most of the oil and around 40% of the natural gas is in areas they’ve already declared off limits. Let me say that again; The government has declared our oil off limits to drilling. Meanwhile, the government is getting on the order of 80 cents per gallon on taxes. The Democrat solution to the problem? Raise taxes. And I’ve already told you they’re the cause of this issue. Provided massive amounts of evidence for it, too. I’m telling you, folks;.. the person or party who opens up these areas to drilling will be at the top of the political heap for years. It comes down to who has the stones to act on this info.
• I think I can tell you flat that the Democrats won’t be acting on that info. Dodd Harris, writing at OTB, tells us that the Democrats are already suffering from buyer’s remorse…. with both Obama and Clinton. In such a situation the response will be for the candidate… likely Obama… to tilt even further left.
• It sounds to me like the UN is waking up and smelling the nukes. Too late for it to be useful, of course.
• I am no McCain fan. However, I must say in fairness that McCain made a smart move when he asked Obama to come with him to Iraq to see the progress there.  I have my doubts Obama will go. If he doesn’t,  we may take that as a sign Obama wants to isolate himself from the truth. Now, that’s soemthing we’ve known all along anyway, but this brings it out in the open. A masterful move, however you measure it.
• So, the New York Times lied? Who have thought it? Other than everybody, of course.
• Another of those cases of homeowner vs owners association, where owner wants to fly the flag, and the assocaition says no.  Who thinks up these regulations? and who is idiodic enough to sign onto them?
• “Smart” car? No, thanks. I choose LIFE….
• Remember a short while ago, where some TV preachers were telling us AIDS was the wrath of God for our support of homosexuality? Well, now we have Sharon Stone, telling us that the recent earthquakes in China are repayment for their treatment of Tibet. Funny thing is, we don’t have the usual suspects screaming at Stone about how stupid this is. In fact, if I recall, she was one of the ones complaining about the AIDs statements, back in the day.
• If you needed further proof that Jimmy Carter is anti-Israel, look no further.

“If Dan Quayle had seen fallen heroes in an audience Al Franken would have made it the title of a book.”  -Martin McPhillips, in a comment at Q&O

 

Yeah, that’s the snark of the day, by a longshot.

BitsBlog has been having problems with the XML-Sitemap plugin, for the last couple of months. This is a plugin that creates a comlete site listing for Google and other search engines, so they know what’s going on here. saves them the trouble of crawling the place and saves me lots of database time and net bandwidth.

Now, when we post, the system updates the search engine XML’s, and pings all the engines to let them know we’ve got new stuff, which is why they’ve been listing our stuff so quickly.

Problem was, that it’s been taking upwads of 90 seconds to run the update and create the proper files to feed the search engines, despite being given a huge 16m of space in memory on the server, and being limited to 8000 posts.  It was taking upwards of 5 minutes before I tuned the thing.

Version 3.0.1 of XML sitemap is available for WordPress, as of this morning… and  it’s doing the same job in about 18 seconds.  I’ve bumped the posts value back to 10,000 posts, which is the limit for some search engines… and it went to 20 seconds.

I’d say offhand, that they fixed something.

According to Maria Gavrilovic, CBS News:

Obama also spoke about his uncle, who was part of the American brigade that helped to liberate Auschwitz. He said the family legend is that, upon returning from war, his uncle spent six months in an attic. “Now obviously, something had really affected him deeply, but at that time there just weren’t the kinds of facilities to help somebody work through that kind of pain,” Obama said. “That’s why this idea of making sure that every single veteran, when they are discharged, are screened for post-traumatic stress disorder and given the mental health services that they need – that’s why it’s so important.

It does not say much for a cBS reporterette to miss the facts that Auschwitz is in Poland and was liberated by the Soviet Army.  It says even less for BO that he would spout such obvious bull while campaigning for president.   

Hugh Hewitt, Townhall:

But with his nomination assured and the most important job in the world on the line, the criticism-free zone in which Obama has long prospered simply cannot be sustained, and even MSM’s many accommodations cannot camouflage the gaffe parade that is Team Obama from top to bottom.  The litany of stock responses from the left’s library conveys that the senator really hasn’t spent much time thinking through the issues that face the country, and his unpreparedness is both breath-taking and discomforting, even to his supporters.  “Rolling the dice” with an untried rookie might be something a desperate NFL franchise might try with a quarterback, but the world cannot afford to have its only superpower turned over to a completely unqualified and wholly inexperienced lightweight.

More, Sister Toldjah.

I believe than nobody can be as stupid as BO seems to be on the campaign trail.   No rather than being stupid, BO is trying to bullshit his way to the presidency.   As Gavrilovic demonstrates, the media is willing to accept BO’s bovine excrement without critical comment.  Will you?

Addendum:

BO’s lies gets worse.  Jim Geraghty, National Review,  notes that BO’s mother was an only child.  He didn’t have an uncle.  Hat tip Allahpundit, Hot Air.

Good news for CBS, bad news for the media, the Washington Post also employs reporters whe are ignorant of history   Then maybe ignorance explains why the MSM is so excited about BO?

?

PowerLine:

Barack Obama must be the most gaffe-prone politician in memory. Today, he delivered a Memorial Day speech in New Mexico. After greeting the local Democratic Party dignitaries, he began:

On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes — and I see many of them in the audience here today — our sense of patriotism is particularly strong.

Memorial Day honors those who have died in our nation’s military service. Is it possible that Obama does not know this? Sometimes the things that come out of his mouth defy understanding.

Well, clearly, either Obama is saying Dead soldiers support him (Obama is a South Chicago politician after all, and may well need to explain dead voters having voted for him) or he’s being haunted by soldiers he’s dishonored.

Q&O is also on this one. So is Michelle Malkin

That’s the question we’ve been asking here for some time. Simon at Classical Values asks the same questions, and comes up with the same answers we have.

An article I noted over the weekend in the Toronto Star peaked my interest a bit;

There were no pleasantries, there was no small talk. Safa Rigby had expected to hear her husband’s voice when the phone rang one morning. Instead, the caller didn’t even bother to say hello.

“You think you know your husband. You don’t know him at all,” said the man, a friend of her husband’s. “His car is parked outside my house right now. He is with my ex-wife. They just got married last week,” the man said.

It took a minute for the news to sink in. Then she called her husband of 14 years, demanding to know if what she had just been told was true – that while she spent a year in Egypt raising their four children in a more Islamic environment, he had used it as an opportunity to marry not just one, but two other women in Toronto.

“Yes, I’m married,” he said, quashing all her dreams of their future together.

He told her he was married in a small ceremony 20 days earlier, officiated by Aly Hindy, a well-known Toronto imam, at his Scarborough mosque.

“I cried for six days straight. Lost my appetite, ignored the kids, even had to start taking antidepressants,” said Rigby, 35. “What I couldn’t understand was how such a thing could happen in Toronto, my hometown, where polygamy is supposed to be illegal.”

It was easy. He simply found an imam willing to break a Canadian law, in exchange for upholding an Islamic one.

Scoot backwards just a few days, and reconsider the goings on down in Texas, where Child Protective Services has broken up a cult of FLDS members.  Clearly, there is much in the way of comparison, here, that needs some serious examination.  In pinning victimhood on the FLDS members… (Even while leaving claims of sexual abuse of children by the side of the road)… are we as a society encouraging the behavior we see in this report in Toronto?

Addendum:  (David L)

I do not defend the FLDS, but I note a legal disinction.  There is a major difference between FLDS case in Texas, and similar ones, and the case in Toronto.   The FLDS were not and are not legally polygamous marriages.   No FLDS male was legally married to more than one women.   One wife was legal.  The rest were only spiritual marriages, in the eyes of God, not the state of Texas.  The FLDS did not purport to either the state or the girls involved to legally married to more than one wife.   So while you are free to disapprove of the FLDS lifestyle, aside from the issue of statutory rape, the lifestyle was, and is, legal.   Not so in Toronto.   The FLDS made an effort to have their choose lifestyle conform to state law.   Not the case in Toronto.

The Pheonix has landed.

JPL has pictures.

I should think about adding the JPL ffeed to the BitsBlog Newsroom. Maybe I’ll get that going this week.

The AP is reporting that director/Actor Syndey Pollack has died of Cancer at age 73. His credits include “Out of Africa”, “Tootsie” “They shoot horses, don’t they?” and “Sabrina”

Look, I’ve been saying for months now, that once the people figure out that Obama comes from a long line of South Chicago crooked pols, all but the hardcore Democrat support will wither. But as of yesterday morning, we seem to have some evidence in Michael Isikoff’s investigative piece in Newsweek, even though Newsweek tried to bury the story.

There does, however, seem to be a leak or two in the dike, and I doubt even Newsweek has the right amount of thumbs to plug them all.

In short, the story comes down to a rather interesting relationship between Obama, and David Axlerod. Says Isikoff:

When Illinois utility Commonwealth Edison wanted state lawmakers to back a hefty rate hike two years ago, it took a creative lobbying approach, concocting a new outfit that seemed devoted to the public interest: Consumers Organized for Reliable Electricity, or CORE. CORE ran TV ads warning of a “California-style energy crisis” if the rate increase wasn’t approved—but without disclosing the commercials were funded by Commonwealth Edison. The ad campaign provoked a brief uproar when its ties to the utility, which is owned by Exelon Corp., became known. “It’s corporate money trying to hoodwink the public,” the state’s Democratic Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn said. What got scant notice then—but may soon get more scrutiny—is that CORE was the brainchild of ASK Public Strategies, a consulting firm whose senior partner is David Axelrod, now chief strategist for Barack Obama.

Last week, Obama hit John McCain for hiring “some of the biggest lobbyists in Washington” to run his campaign; Obama’s aides say their candidate, as a foe of “special interests,” has refused to take money from lobbyists or employ them. Neither Axelrod nor his partners at ASK ever registered as lobbyists for Commonwealth Edison—and under Illinois’s loose disclosure laws, they were not required to. “I’ve never lobbied anybody in my life,” Axelrod tells NEWSWEEK. “I’ve never talked to any public official on behalf of a corporate client.” (He also says “no one ever denied” that Edison was the “principal funder” of his firm’s ad campaign.)

Ummmm Yeah.

Well, we can see where this one’s going, can’t we?

Addendum:(Bit) Welcome Real Clear Politics readers