This great President will be remembered for his courageous decision to become an air traffic controller.
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.
Their freedom requires your slavery.
When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.
The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.
Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.
Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.
Impressively dumb. Congratulations.
Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.
Hot air and ill-informed banter
Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.
Republicans in disarray!
… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP
Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.
Good lord, these people are nuts.
Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.
It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.
Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?
Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.
Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.
Let’s finish the job.
It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.
Fuck the extremist election deniers. What’s money for if not for keeping them out of office?
Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.
We still have time to mess this up!
You are here: Home / President Bush’s Legacy
A different Matt
Hey – at least the guy’s got something to hang his hat on. He’s a legacy, after all. This decision may seem ignoble today, but history’ll vindicate him.
Equal Opportunity Cynic
If the Village Idiot would stick to air traffic control, at least we could just refuse to fly and not have to pay for his other mistakes. Well, until the planes falling out of the sky happen to land on you.
Dennis-SGMM
I, for one, am proud that the past several administrations have done such yeoman work in not only resisting bullet trains but, in actually killing off most passenger rail.
Why use relatively clean running and fuel-efficient trains when we can get crammed into an airliner that, on takeoff, generates as much pollution as 21,530 cars driving one mile at 30 M.P.H.?
Bush’s proposals are all toothless tigers: clearly, we need to throw more money than ever before at our airports and our air traffic control system.
KCinDC
Can’t he just stick to brush clearing? Yes, his incompetence might lead to a few fires, and we’d have to keep people away so he wouldn’t manage to injure anyone but himself, but he loves doing it and it seems like the least dangerous option.
jake
I read about that and wondered if this a special passive-aggressive attempt to hose the airline industry.
The Bush Touch causes enough trouble for people on the ground. Who would voluntarily chance to that particular and highly effective curse while chugging along at 500 mph and six miles above sea level?
laneman
I have the fuzzy thought that shrub has no thought beyond skrewing the country.
If he doesn’t, then my rosemary patch has a higher level of cognizance.
TenguPhule
But think of the poor Planes! Why do you hate the Planes?
jcricket
I love that it’s all “government is the problem, free market is best, blah blah blah” until there’s some kind of thing Bush can do with the government.
I think the FAA might be the one agency he hasn’t installed complete loons at the top of.
Dreggas
And I have to fly wednesday may whatever powers or spaghetti monsters that be help me…
Seriously why do I get the feeling like this will be airplane on a national scale.
jcricket
Tell me Dreggas, ever been to an American prison on Cuban soil? Like gladiator movies? What are your feelings on water? Boards?
My wife and I agreed no more visiting family on Thanksgiving. It’s just ridiculous, especially with a kid now.
Good luck.
jake
Dreggas, I’m shocked. It sounds as if you don’t think the airlines and air traffic controllers and TSAs and baggage handlers will snap to it because President Monkeyshines has decreed that it shall be so.
Seriously, good luck and leave that I (Heart) Bush t-shirt at home.
Dreggas
I’m not so concerned about flying it’s actually been pretty smoothe though I know this is the holidays and all. Of course it will be nuts.
Jon H
I’m still trying to figure out how more flight lanes will help. They don’t create additional runways at destination airports, or additional gates. Nor do more flight lanes do much in the event that a major hub airport has bad weather.
jcricket
They won’t actually help, but it’s a good PR move.
jake
Hey no fair! You aren’t supposed to apply logic to the president’s ideas. Just have faith that they’ll work as planned.
Go on, clap your hands or you’ll do something shameful. Like point out that it doesn’t make any sense for a President to tell us we’re in the early stages of the first quarter of The Wah Against Terra and then deciderate that the Dept. of Def. ought to put it’s training schedule on hold for a few days.
Spartacvs
From what I understand of the proposal, the additional ‘flight lanes’ are in airspace offshore between the Northeast and Florida which are designated as weapons ranges and normally have few civilian routes through them.
It is generally correct to point out that additional ‘flight lanes’ will not really effect congestion, especially in the event a major hub has bad weather, since the en-route phase is not the problem area. As proof I would cite the example offered by the January 2005 introduction of RVSM (Reduced Vertical Seperation Minimums), which raised the number of available flight levels from 7 to 13 over the whole of the USA. RVSM literally doubled the airspace available at the altitudes most commercial jets fly while having no appreciable effect on congestion.
The real bottlenecks are the number of available runways, gates etc. and the ability of ATC to handle traffic in the terminal areas especially when the weather goes down.
Nancy Irving
Is that backdrop of books new? Pretty pathetic. It’s blurry but I’m sure I recognize one of those cheesy “Harvard Classics,” plus a couple of those cheap bookclub Aristotles or Francis Bacons on the right, the ones they’re always trying to give away (unsuccessfully) at the end of Friends of the Library used-book sales.
jcricket
I’ve actually heard that most planes aren’t equipped with precise on-board GPSes (that work on the ground kind of thing). And that equipping them all would help reduce/eliminate runway collisions as well as provide the ability to fly more plans in same amount of space.
But seriously, how come the magic of the free market hasn’t solved all our air travel issues? Or, in a sense, hasn’t it? More and more people keep flying, despite ever worsening service and experience. So what’s the incentive to fix anything?
Spartacvs
Aircraft separation standards in the terminal areas are currently based on ground radar identification and radio communication between aircraft and controller. The FAA is attempting to move ATC toward a higher fidelity satellite based identification and communication system with the potential to increase capacity by reducing separation minimums, ie. squeezing more aircraft into the same airspace. However this will take a lot of money and the argument right now is stalled over who gets to pay for it. The Bush Administration doesn’t want to increase the FAA’s funding from general revenues (taxes) and has been exploring ways of privatizing the FAA’s ATC function through a system of user fees and increased aviation specific taxes (fuel taxes, ticket taxes etc.). Airlines don’t want to pay for it through such fees or additional taxes and are lobbying to ensure they will be in a position to dominate whatever private entity ends up running ATC and able to pass more of the cost onto general and business aviation.
Most commercial aircraft these days do in fact have some form of GPS navigation on board, though many older airliners still in service do not.
Katie
Actually most commercial type airliners are equipped with very precise GPS-type systems along with other collision avoidance equipment. They’ve been experimenting very successfully with some other systems in a couple of markets that look like they may go system wide at some point.
The more precise positioning equipment is what has enabled the FAA to go to the lower (1K feet) vertical separation standard.
The planes/pilots we really have to worry about are the ones flown by recreational pilots. If you start looking at the NTSB reports and see how many boneheaded mistakes they make, it’ll make you cringe.
Of course none of this has anything to do with the enroute paths that were opened up for the holidays–like the military is operating in those spots on the holiday in the first place. Not.
BIRDZILLA
The legacy of BILL CLINTON.LYING CHEATING,TREASON,RAPE,WRECKING OUR NATION ETC and GEORGE W. BUSH THE AME ALL EXCEPT RAPE
ATS
I’ll have you know that Bush is every bit the air traffic controller that he was Segway instructor.
Spartacvs
Er, no, that equipment was more accurate altimeters linked to air data computers. There is no requirement to use GPS navigation in RVSM airspace.
Bonehead mistakes like the Lexington Comair accident?
Peter ve
I thought I was still dreaming when I heard that on the radio. Well, actually having a nightmare is more like it. Yet another WTF????? moment from the krew that brought you Gitmo and the Katrina “recovery”.