Tragedy on the Red Line Metro
As someone who has lived in Maryland but worked in DC (within a few blocks of the White House), I have spent hundreds of dollars in Metro fares and parking. I myself have never taken the Red Line, but Fort Totten is a terminating point for the Yellow Line and a key transfer station with the Green Line; I've found myself on many occasions waiting at the Fort Totten station for the Green Line to take me the rest of the way to Greenbelt. Hearing that this tragic incident on June 22 occurred as both southbound trains approached the Fort Totten station made it more personable to me. I cannot count the number of times where my trains stopped between stations precisely for the safety reasons resulting in the Red Line crash. The last thing I've heard is that there was some (undiagnosed?) software problem with the striking train (which should have stopped automatically); the train operator had to engage the emergency break. It's not clear whether there was a brake failure or if the brake was applied too late. There were known issues with the kinds of cars on the striking train and the brake maintenance was overdue. My thoughts and prayers go out to families of the casualties.
It goes without saying that we don't expect public transit managers to cut corners on maintenance and known issues. As an IT professional, I'm curious as to the nature of the problem, but I'm also interested in terms of human factors issues. For example, it's very important for operators, pilots, etc., to maintain operational skills and not depend for the most part on automated mechanisms: You do not want operators with rusty skills all of a sudden having to perform crisply and accurately under challenging circumstances.
Dennis Miller Defending Sarah Palin
I've been listening to some older post-election conservative comedian Dennis Miller podcasts, and I got exasperated with some of Miller's comments on Sarah Palin. Miller, along with his slobbering-love-affair colleagues at Fox News, suggested that Sarah Palin was the only reason that McCain did as well as he did last November. I think he was being serious (you never can tell with a comic doing a radio show heavily weighted on politics, but he has repeatedly praised Palin). Any regular reader of this blog knows that I am not a Sarah Palin fan, but let's deal with reality. I am sure that Sarah Palin helped motivate the base, but basically McCain won solidly red states which would never have voted for the most liberal Democrat since McGovern. He would have won those states no matter whom the Veep was. People seem to forget BEFORE McCain selected Palin at the end of August, he had slipped ahead of Obama 46-44% in the national Gallup Poll. He was leading in swing states like Colorado and New Mexico, which Bush had carried in 2004, but which he eventually lost by a significant margin.
Do I mean to imply Sarah Palin was the only reason McCain lost? No. I think in the aftermath of the economic tsunami most Americans were concerned with economic security and the safety net, which Democrats have emphasized in their agenda. John McCain did make a puzzling decision to suspend his campaign, and the McCain campaign found itself at a deep disadvantage in funding in the battleground states; Obama's funding advantage was so massive that he could afford to take the offense into red state territory, including McCain's home state of Arizona, leaving the McCain campaign on the defensive needing to defend what should have been safe states, never going on the offense with the exception of a play for Pennsylvania.
But make no mistake: 60% of Americans felt that Sarah Palin was unprepared to be President, and not a few people, including Colin Powell, felt that McCain had largely thrown away his experience argument by picking Sarah Palin. This may of not been as big a factor as it was except for the fact that McCain is over 70 years old, and whether or not the argument was ageist, McCain did have an issue with a significant number of people worried about his age to begin with.
The point is--McCain ran into problems with independents and moderates, many of whom were turned off by a largely negative campaign, including Sarah Palin's role in pursuing it. To a certain extent, I can't blame Sarah Palin for that; it often falls on the Veep candidate to play bad cop. Oddly enough, it was never intended to be that way. I feel McCain saw in Palin a kindred soul: she was a reformer and a bipartisan leader.
On a different show, Miller was talking to a Reagan biographer and gingerly asked what Reagan would have made of Sarah Palin; the guest made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that other than her surface charm and charisma, Sarah Palin was no Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan had fleshed-out, articulate policy viewpoints. (Miller did agree that Sarah Palin's inability to cite a Supreme Court decision beyond Roe v Wade bothered him but was willing to cut Palin some slack under the circumstances.) Ronald Reagan not only read newspapers and magazines, but wrote syndicated columns and delivered radio commentaries. He impressed Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman If you read Ronald Reagan's 1975 interview with Reason Magazine or, say, his National Review reflections on the failure of 1973's California Proposition 1, the contrast with Sarah Palin's abysmal national interviews is manifest; there is no meandering rhetoric, recurring sound bites and bumper-sticker insights.
Mark Sanford: An Astonishing Political Swerve
Fox News had been tracing the unusual circumstances of South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, probably on everyone's top 5 list or so of potential challengers to Obama in 2012. [He would have been a formidable candidate with 3 Congressional terms and 2 terms as governor.] Then he disappeared last Thursday through Father's Day weekend, purportedly to do hiking along the Appalachian Trail after the end of a contentious session with the South Carolina legislature. (In essence, Sanford, who did not want to accept federal stimulus bill money, was forced to do so.)
The governor left last Thursday and apparently shut off his cellphone for a few days, last using it near the Atlanta airport. South Carolina law enforcement tried to contact him by cellphone without success on Friday. The GOP lieutenant governor and a state senator raised questions over the weekend, but the governor's office on Saturday said there was no reason for concern. On Monday the situation escalated and included a weird revelation that Mrs. Sanford said she didn't know where her husband was, that he hadn't spend Father's Day with his sons.
I watched the puzzling press conference on Fox News this afternoon and did notice when at one point he said something to the effect of letting the chips fall where they may. I had no idea what he was about to admit to: an affair with an Argentinian woman, and he went on a trip to see her.
I'm not sure why he admitted the adultery, but people were writing his political obituary before the speech was completed. A social conservative like Sanford admitting adultery faces a political death sentence because American voters hate hypocrisy. There are other weird parts to this story, including the release of a couple emails or letters between the governor and his mistress.
I'm mostly concerned about the fact that he did not keep in touch with proper authorities. I do believe strongly in married men honoring their vows to their wives. However, unless his private life affects his job performance, I do think we should keep private lives out of the media. I do think Mark Sanford is an outstanding politician whom made a mistake and deserves a political future, but I think any talk of him being on the national ticket in 2012 is now dead.
