Moore is in the Line of Clint’s Ire

Did you see this with Clint Eastwood and Rotundo Moore?Lloyd Grove’s column in the Daily News did. Personally, I don’t think he was kidding, Chubby… I’d steer clear of the man, myself.

That’s what Reuters is reporting will be in a program to be aired on British TV Thursday night.

Cutting down on fossil fuel pollution could accelerate global warming and help turn parts of Europe into desert by 2100, according to research to be aired on British television on Thursday. “Global Dimming”, a BBC Horizon documentary, will describe research suggesting fossil fuel by-products like sulphur dioxide particles reflect the sun’s rays, “dimming” temperatures and almost cancelling out the greenhouse effect.

Oooh, I can’t WAIT for the screams from the hand-wringing enviro-nazis. It’ll be entertaining, at least.

Bit’s Ballcap gets tipped toward Signifying Nothing for this one.

I note Reynolds and Drezner finally making note of a big burger story I already wrote last November.

Amazing.

Good for you, Michelle Malkin Just don’t expect me to be turning handsprings over it.

To make some of the assertions you are making is to aver that Armstrong Williams would not have taken the positions he took on NCLB… a point we know to be untrue, given that he was among the most vocal supporters of NCLB, even before the Education Dept coughed up some money.

Forgive me, Michele, I love ya, but forgive me please… How long have Democats had financial support?  After decades of payoffs in the form of “nod and a wink” to ‘News’ people who support liberals, and a government that went well out of it’s way to “protect us” from Fox news, and other people on the other networks who dared to move out of the government-demanded liberal lockstep, I find it very hard to work up any outrage for this situation.

There are far larger issues to be dealt with than Williams, and the left knows it, which is why they’re spending so much bile on this issue, instead. It’s called ‘distraction’. 

As to the amount of vile crap you’re getting from the leftists, I’ve got news for you, dear… it goes with the territory.. a point you’ve known all along. And you also know such crap doesn’t NEED a reason for the leftists to spread it.

Let me say this up front for those who don’t know, since I don’t talk about railfanning very much; I’m a railfan. I certainly don’t know nearly what people who work in that industry know about the trade, but I do consider that I know more about it than Joe or Jane average.

That revelation made, I’ve not said much (if anything) regarding that derailment in South Carolina the other day… where 9 people died as a result of an accident that, in turn, resulted in Chlorine leakage… This turned out to be the most deadly Chorine spill from a railroad in around 30 years.

I didn’t say much, mostly because I didn’t think I was getting a good picture of what had gone down. That’s changing, and so I’ll make my first posting on this subject now.

The initial reports put the blame on the dispatcher… and I was not impressed with those reports, mostly because the ‘feel’ was all wrong. It didn’t help when I noticed what must have been factual errors regarding normal railroad operations in the initial news reports… if there’s one thing that’s nearly surefire, it’s that the press is going to get the internal workings of a nearly vertical business like radio, or computers, or railroading, dead wrong.

This report from AP pretty much confirms what I was thinking.  The reort says the FRA now suspects it was an improperly lined manual switch that the Dispatcher didn’t know about. This makes far more sense than the gabled nonsense I got from the intial reports… for nearly two days.

Even in this more credible report, there are several conceptual errors:

First problem:

The report goes to some length to point up the number of similar accidents that have been occurring nationwide;

“FRA data show that there were 23 train accidents caused by improperly aligned switches during the first nine months of 2004, of a total of 2,577 incidents. “

However, it goes on to quote the FRA rep, thus;

“Most trains operate on tracks that have electronic signals that indicate that a switch is in a position to divert a train off the main track, according to FRA spokesman Steve Kulm. But, he said, 40 percent of railroad track in the United States is in territory that does not have signals. ”

While this is technically true, there is some degree of misrepresentation here.  The electronic signals, first of all, are called “CTC”, or “Central Train Control” and he’s right, most trackage areas are indeed under CTC.

The purpose of CTC is not only to tell the train driver what’s what, but also to tell the central dispatcher what’s going on, as well, and that’s equally important. Had the Dispatcher known of the condition of that ‘hand’ switch, the train would have been instructed to handle that track differently.  By definition, hand switches are not controlled by CTC systems, but are manually operated.

Secondly;

The comment about “40 percent of railroad track in the United States is in territory that does not have signals”, means again, that around 40% of track mileage in this country are not in CTC areas. While again, this is technically true, it only accounts for areas where the signaling is not centralized IN TOTAL… and that number does NOT count hand switches which are on lines which are otherwise in CTC areas, and thereby controlled from a central location.

For example; On the old NYC ‘water Route” now run by CSXT, which runs near my home in Rochester, NY, we have several places along the way which are served by ‘hand switches” IE; Switches under manual control which the dispatcher has no way of reading from his central location.. depending instead on reports from the field.  These hand (Manually operated) switches, present the same level of danger as the ones in so-called ‘dark’ areas. Yet track speed for Amtrak in this areas is 79mph… and 65 for some freights. This is done because you’re allowed under FRA rules a set percentage of hand switches within a CTC area, where it still will qualify as a CTC area… and thereby allow higher speed limits, and will follow a different set of operating procedures. (As you might expect there’s a completely different set of operating procedures for CTC and non-CTC areas.)

The point here being that, once again, the press is missing a larger point here… one that makes you wonder…. what else, in other events, are they missing because they’re not educating themselves before they try to represent the facts to US?

PS: And before you start I’m quite aware the investigation isn’t completed as yet, nor will it be for months. Yet, you’d think they could get basic concepts correctly, at least…

Ann Coulter, today…takes up the point I made the other day about writing checks being the only part of disaster recovery that the left understands… but of course that is not the whole story.

“The U.S. did not merely write a check to help the oppressed people of Afghanistan and Iraq: The U.S. did most of the fighting and liberating as well as a significant share of the dying. Where’s Michael Moore with that up-to-the-minute body count of U.S. soldiers when you need him?”
…
At a minimum, in order to discount the largesse of the United States, one must carefully exclude gigantic categories of aid, such as military aid, food aid, trade policies, refugee policies, religious aid, private charities and individual giving.

Bingo, Ann.
To bad the world-wide left hasn’t figured that one out yet.
Nor, the UN… But I repeat myself.

What can you expect, after all, from a group of people whose first response to anything is simply to throw tax money at a problem, rather then get in there and get your hands dirty?

Good to see the Rightpoint blog is back.

IN case you guys didn’t see Hindrocket on Hume’s show last night…(the boy’s been practicing, by the way, I can see why Britt wants him on… he’s good) he’s got a breakout of the CBS Rathergate report, over at Power Line. It’s a must read.

ABC is running an AP news report that says in part:

“WASHINGTON Jan 11, 2005 – President Bush has chosen federal appeals court judge Michael Chertoff to be his new Homeland Security chief, turning to a former federal prosecutor who helped craft the early war on terror strategy, The Associated Press has learned. “

This would replace Tom Ridge. Not a bad choice, from what I can see of his record.

Steve Barnes reports the science is there

Remember Sandy “Lumpy Pants” Berger? The New York Post, does…

John Hawkins at RWN has scored another interview with Victor Davis Hanson. Among other things, we note VDH is still feeling OK about Iraq.

Captain’s Quarters has a link up that describes the long-awaited report from CBS on Rathergate, thusly:

It appears that the full report will give the blogosphere material for much rumination and discussion over the next few days. Whatever else, it isn’t the whitewash that most of us expected.

Really, Captain?  I think there’s whitewash all over this thing.  Check the panel’s own words, as you posted them:

Comon… how white does something need to be, before you start looking around for the brush?

The report does go on…

However, the Panel has identified a number of issues that raise serious questions about the authenticity of the documents and their content. With better reporting, these questions should have been raised before the September 8 Segment aired.

‘Better reporting’? How about simply ‘reporting’, huh? Somehow that never seems to make it into the menu for CBS.

Yes the report was hard on CBS, but I judge, given their history, that this is only because they needed the appearence of being hard on CBS. The bottom line here is CBS thought they had a serious hit against President Bush with the forged documents they submitted to the American people as genuine… and to this day CBS swears the documents were ‘falsified but accurate’, and thought thereby they could throw the election into the lap of the Democrats and John F’ing Kerry.  They were driven to this point by a rabid foaming bias that all but the farthest gone can see clearly. That’s the truth. And the report didn’t say that truth. Rather still has a job.

I call that a whitewash of the first order.

Update: So do many others. Boortz for example, remains unconvinced, reminding us that there are…

“two big names are missing from the story: Dan Rather and CBS News President Andrew Heyward.  It was Dan Rather that defended the story over and over on TV, grinding his political hatchet with the Bush family and refusing to admit the documents were forgeries.  Les Moonves, CEO of CBS, says since The Dan is retiring from the anchor chair, that’s punishment enough.  But he’s still going to be a reporter for 60 Minutes, he’ll still get paid and he won’t lose his job, unlike the others.  It’s too bad CBS felt the need to protect Dan Rather to the end.

Also getting a pass is Andrew Heyward, president of CBS News.  I’m not sure I understand this one.  The senior VP gets canned because the story happened on her watch, yet the big cheese doesn’t so much as get a slap on the wrist.  Too bad. Wrong message to send to the rank and file at that network.”

And, to the MSM in general, for that matter. James at OTB seems less than impressed.

James points to the above quote about absolute certainty on the docs being forged and says, rightly;

“What kind of standard of proof is “absolute certainty”? We put people to death based on mere “beyond a reasonable doubt” and hold people liable for people hundreds of millions in civil damaged on mere “preponderance of the evidence.” “Absolute certainty” is not only impossible to achieve but, frankly, rather a strange bar if “unimpeachable integrity” is the standard.”

If there’s a plus… a bright side in all of this, it is that CBS doesn’t need to worry about their credibility dropping lower. They may need to sandblast the bottom of the bucket to get it up, though.

Son of an Update: Hugh Hewitt makes a good case on this report being a whitewash, as well.

Bill Hobbs is doing a good job of tracking the reaction.

The latest nonsense argument being brought up is that Armstrong Williams got paid for expressing opinions in support of the ‘No Child Left Behind act’. This, we’re being told by the left, is somewhere between blasphemy and treason.

Well, before we got too excited about this, let’s look closer; “No Child Left Behind” is a program that Williams has been supporting right along… to no small amount of gnashing of teeth from the usual suspects. They scream about (gasp!) how unethical it all is… this from the troop that found no problem at all with the self-declared ‘most ethical administration in history’. Thing is, however, for there to be any ethical issue at all, I’d need to be shown how the money offered, changed Williams’ position on the subject. Williams, after all, is not a news man, but rather a pundit.

More, I’d need someone to explain to me how this is a worse offense than, say, the Mainstream Media being a mouthpiece for the Democrats, and the democrats responding with wink and a nod regulations and enforcement. After all, THOSE offenses at least were done under the banner of ‘objective reporting’… Something Williams has NEVER claimed to be.

In a choice between the two situations….Guess which way I’ll go?

And tell us… At what point do the white folks at Err America get nailed to the same cross the decidedly darker hands of Mr. Williams are being nailed to? Where, after all, has Err American gotten IT’S funding from? No questions about THAT, I notice. And what is Williams, but a talkshow host and political colmnist, ala Randy Rhodes, for example?

Sorry, Democrats. No sale.

I notice that some on the right are equally willing to drive the nails in. Q&O for example. While I am somewhat more inclined to think that such people are trying to take the principled road, here, what they’re doing, in the end, is letting the party of Clinton decide what is and is not ethical, since neither side has said thing one about the aforementioned Err America. The Democrats have been moving toward killing off America. There are some on the right, I fear, willing to hand the Democrats the knife to do the job, and claim it’s principled to do so.

Update: Boortz pipes up on the matter and says, today, in part:

AND ANOTHER REASON FOR THE HARSH CRITICISM OF ARMSTRONG WILLIAMS

Well now, this one is really pretty simple, isn’t it?  Armstrong Williams is black and Armstrong Williams is a conservative. This means that the leftist mainstream media will be all-too-ready to pounce given even the flimsiest of reasons.  When black conservatives speak out .. and especially when black conservatives become effective .. black conservatives must be silenced.  How DARE Armstrong Williams attempt an escape from the plantation?

Remember … this is all about the No Child Left Behind Act.  A principal part of the NCLB Act is vouchers.  Any good liberal knows that parents must not be allowed to gain any meaningful control over their child’s education.  No way, no how.  Government schools are an absolute necessity if liberals are to instill in our children a sense of helplessness and a need for more and more government in their lives.  Liberals love to talk about free choice when it comes to having a child .. but once that child is born they immediately claim virtual ownership and woe be unto the person who rises to challenge.  Armstrong Williams did just that.  That’s why he’s taking far more heat for this incident than any liberal would.

Just so.
And my other points still stand.

Not much to report in this week’s Bit’s Bit, called Settling in for the long haul. Then again, this time of year around here, that’s the point.