John McCaslin has a column today on how the new dollar coin isn’t catching on.

Why do they insist on making it so similar to a quarter? Up the size on it, and people will use it.

Joe Katzman over at Winds of Change has lots of new good stuff on the SFSU anti-semitism problem.

Joe Katzman over at Winds of Change has lots of new good stuff on the SFSU anti-semitism problem.

Joe Katzman over at Winds of Change has lots of new good stuff on the SFSU anti-semitism problem.

Probably not–they’ll fly a cosmonaut instead. But despite the fact that there are four candidates, there may not be a space tourist flight this fall. According to Av Week, Russia is bidding up the price. They think they undercharged Tito and Shuttleworth, and now want to get the full twenty million.

I’m having trouble understanding this. It seems to me that any price they can get above the perceived value of sending their own cosmonaut should be acceptable–they should simply accept the highest qualified bid. They don’t have a lot of time to dicker over this–whoever it is has to start training Real Soon.

All of the increased airport security (and more likely, fear of irate passengers) has apparently dissuaded the Arabs (and little old swedish ladies, and six-year-old kids) from hijacking any more airplanes.

How the mighty have fallen–instead of driving an aircraft full of Jet-A into skyscrapers at six hundred miles an hour, they’ve been reduced to driving barges into bridges at five miles an hour.

The accident occured when Joe Dedmon, the 61-year-old pilot of a towboat pushing two barges side-by-side, apparently blacked out at the helm, said Joel Henderson, a spokesman for Magnolia Marine Transport Co., which owns the boat.

“Blacked out at the helm,” eh?

Sounds mighty suspicious to me.

Do they mean “chloraformed at the helm by Islamic scuba divers”?

Hmmmmm….?

Dedmon appears to have passed out for about two minutes and was unable to steer the barges through the river channel under the bridge, Henderson said. Nobody was on hand to take the helm from him.

Well, of course not, they slipped back into the river after they diverted the barge…

[slowly extracting tongue from cheek]

John Magaw at the FAA says that pilots can’t have guns–they have to “focus on flying their airplanes.”

This is an ignorant statement.

Airplanes require very little focus–for the most part, they fly themselves. It’s not like driving a car. The pilot is only there in case something goes wrong. One of the things that can go wrong is a hijacker attempting to break into a cockpit, and if that’s happening, that’s where the pilot’s focus needs to be (particularly since, HELLO! MAGAW? he has a co-pilot), and he should be given every tool needed to defend that cockpit.

But of course, it’s to be expected that Mr. Magaw would be ignorant of this issue–he has no experience whatsoever with aviation. He’s apparently never piloted as much as a hang glider, let alone an airliner, yet he presumes to know more about the pilots’ job than they do.

But of course, since one of his stints was at BATF, he probable thinks the world would be a better place if people didn’t have guns (except for law enforcement types like him).

And here’s the stupid statement that Mineta made when he appointed him.

“If I could have designed an individual for this job, it would have been John Magaw.”

Gee, Norm, don’t you think it might have been useful for him to know a little something about, well, transportation?

Rich Lowry, over at The Corner, says that a pilot performing violent maneuvers to thwart hijackers would result in massive liability suits because it “could conceivably cause some sort of actionable injury to everyone on the plane.”

Well, no. Not that I think that this is a great anti-hijacking strategy, but only the ones who are not in their seats, or who ignore the standard pre-flight instructions to wear your belt while seated, would be injured. It’s rare for a belted passenger to be injured due to turbulence or sudden maneuvers in an aircraft.

Over in his letters section, Andrew Sullivan publishes a letter from one of his readers that makes a point that I like to harp on as well–the limited applicability of the concept of “innocent until proven guilty.”

This is a legal concept, and not one that’s meant to apply to discourse. It applies to the court of law, not the court of public opinion.

And not to beat up any more on the ex-football player…(ah, heck, why not? He deserves it)…just because OJ was found innocent by a jury of questionable mental acuity doesn’t mean that we are required to believe him innocent. It only relieves him of a visit to prison–it doesn’t entitle him to being absolved in the mind of the public, who does understand DNA, and the concept that some possibly tainted evidence doesn’t entitle one to throw out the whole evidentiary baby with the dirty bathwater.

As the letter writer points out, this weird notion that everyone is supposed to be considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law was used to great effect by Clinton apologists to illegitimately shut down his critics. Despite all of the evidence shredding, the amnesia under oath, the lying to diaries, the friends and associates indicted and convicted, we were not supposed to criticize the Big He, because he was “presumed innocent.”

To shut down speculation on Mr. Clinton’s, or more recently, Mr. Condit’s possible guilt because they are “presumed innocent” is to remove one of the tools by which wrongdoing is punished when the courts do not, can not or even, in some cases, should not act–public opprobrium. And to use such a tactic as a tool to quiet political opponents is, if not the last one, a refuge for a scoundrel.

That rascal Reynolds has already scooped me, and written my Fox column for tomorrow (and more) at TechCentralStation.

Now I have to come up with something else. Or at least a different angle.