Eight Feet Deep

Fox News, which can be sanctimonious as often as it can demonstrate a right-wing bias, jumped on the Denison, Texas, school district today for releasing the elementary school records of Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III. Sullenberger was the United Airlines pilot who miraculously landed his Airbus A320 in New York’s Hudson River Thursday without any loss of life or life-threatening injuries.

The news story on the Fox News Web site said the district released the 57-year-old Sullenberger’s records, which were almost a half-century old, by accident. And even though Fox’s headline castigates the Denison district for giving out the private information, the network doesn’t see anything wrong with running a copy of those same records for all to see. Luckily Sullenberger was a very intelligent individual as a young man as well as in adulthood so perhaps the release won’t be too upsetting to him.

Sullenberger is rightfully being hailed as a hero for his actions. That is almost as obvious as his intelligence and his overwhelming luck. For as one news person noted yesterday, whenever a plane crashes rarely is just one thing that has gone wrong but it instead is a chain of events. All the events involved in the ditching yesterday, the flock of geese excepted, seemed to go right for Sullenberger, his crew and his very alive passengers.

George Walker “Gee Dubya” Bush will give his farewell address tonight. Is he gone yet?

As I have mentioned here many times Bush Jr. has been not only a terrific disappointment as president he has been the worst president in my memory, which goes back to Jack Kennedy. I loathed Richard Nixon even though Tricky Dick was my first military commander-in-chief and actually did make some positive contributions while in office. All the more GHWB is a personal disappointment because he is the only president I ever interviewed, although those interviews were before he even ran for Texas governor. And I covered a good many functions at which he spoke as governor as well as attending several news events when he was president. While actively working in the news biz I experienced his entire elected political career, abysmal as that was.

Shrub was a divider, not a uniter, to use the converse of his little campaign phrase. He took us into an unnecessary, unwise and probably illegal war in Iraq. He trampled upon our civil liberties. If the Republicans hadn’t had their knickers in a wad over Bubba Clinton, Bush might have been impeached. I don’t know. Maybe I give Congress way too much credit sometimes. It goes on and on and on though. I wish Bush would have been a success even though I believe the Supremes crossed the line when their decision made him president.

I hope Obama is better. If he’s not, we are in some kind of trouble.

An old pilot saying goes something like: “Any landing you walk away from is a good landing.” So the U.S. Airways flight that crashed into the Hudson River in New York technically made a good landing.

Just the other day I read that the U.S. had experienced two straight years without a fatal airline crash. Then my heart started to sink when I saw the headline a few minutes ago when I logged on. Apparently a bird struck the Airbus A320 and all passengers have escaped relatively unscathed. Wikipedia reports that for the entire A320 family there have been 19 hull-loss accidents with a total of 631 fatalities as of 27 November 2008.

Wikipedia has a post on U.S. Airways Flight 1549 here.

Pro football is probably the one professional sports I watch more than others but for some reason I probably keep up with baseball more. But while I am a fan, I am no fanatic.

It never ceases to amaze me what football crazy folks will do as will boosters of a particular city to get their civic moment in the sun. The latest example is Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl has changed his name to Luke Steelersthal to honor his hometown team the Steelers. The Steelers, of course, will play the Baltimore Ravens this weekend for the AFC Championship.

This is reminiscent of the small town of Buffalo, Texas, changing its name to Blue Star, Texas, during the Super Bowl weekends in 1993 and 1994 to support the Dallas Cowboys who were playing the Buffalo Bills. The town south of Dallas also changed its name in 1999 to Green Star, Texas, to honor the Dallas Stars NHL team.

Some folks will do anything for a little attention. Maybe I should change the name of my blog to “Bernie Madoff With Your Money.”