Blog-IT-o ergo sum

	1/11/2005

Bill James Update

Mecklenburg County commissioner Bill James has apparently decided that cleaning up the "moral sewer" in Charlotte's black community was over reach on his part. At tonight's meeting he plans to get behind a much less challenging effort: passing a county wide ban on smoking in public places.

12:21:49 PM

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What does Howard Coble know...

that we don't?

As a US Congressman, you would hope that Howard Coble has access to a bit more information as to what is going on in Iraq than what is freely available in the public domain...and, that he is paying attention to it. At a minimum, I am sure he has a larger stream of private stories coming in from Iraq sent by his concerned constituents. For example:

Last night, I was shown a printed version of an e-mail which had been sent by a national guardsman serving in Iraq to his co-worker in a finanacial services office. The guardsmen asked that the e-mail not be passed around electronically and his request is being honored.

Nothing scandalous in the attached pictures mind you, just photos of a broken and burned C-130 type aircraft with no markings US or otherwise sitting on a runway somewhere in Iraq. A crumpled nose down into the concrete, the fuselage was mostly intact but both wings and the tail were snapped off. Apparently, this is what happens when one of these beasts tries to land at night on a runway with a major section of concrete missing.

What's interesting is that the one of the photos clearly shows the landing gear tracks running 30-40 yards across the smooth sand where several slabs of concrete have been cleanly removed in what looks like preparation for a repair. It appeared that it was not the landing gear droping off a foot or two into the sand that was the problem. Rather, it was the inability of the transport plane to negotiate a jump back up onto the good concrete at the other end of the hole. The set of landing gear came to a rest pretty much at that point. The rest of aircraft traveled a bit farther before skidding to a rest sans wings and tail.

Remarkably, no one was reported injured in this crash. No reason was given though in the e-mail as to why the plane was landing on a runway under major repair. The commentary was only to the effect of, "What were these guys thinking?"

I can only imagine the type of stories and picutures like this (and worse) that are finding their way to Congressional offices around the country. Citizen journalists may be a pain to leviathan during wartime, but they can't compare to the damage that soldier journalists are capable of inflicting on the party line.

12:17:10 PM

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