September 22, 2004
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Say What?
According to the Star Tribune, our (Rep) Governor endorsed an plan from Northwest Airlines to reserve an expanded Lindbergh (Main) terminal for Northwest and partner airlines. Carriers who are not partners of Northwest would be moved to an expanded Humphrey Terminal.
Say what? Hasn’t enough public money been spent on that place to make it a public facility that should NOT be allowed to be controlled by a private monopoly (or oligopoly)? Of course, the fact that I can’t stand NWA may bias me.
This shift would be part of a new $862 expansion plan that would be funded by ticket prices, the FAA, the TSA, the airport commission, and NWA. Northwest would pick up about 10% of the new expansion – not a bad price to get control over the complete Lindbergh terminal.
In general, I think the government should either consider air travel to be a public transit issue and provide their own service (with which the private market would be free to compete) or they ought to get out of it. Either way, they should stop supporting lousy private companies.
Btw, why is our main airline terminal named after a racist Nazi supporter? We might as well have named it the Henry Ford terminal. I suppose Lindbergh did at least serve in the Pacific theater. Who knows, perhaps it was more about patriotism than about having the opportunity to kill a bunch of Japs while pursuing his passion of flying.
Cat Stevens back in the newsIn the 1970s, the well known singer Cat Stevens became a Muslim and changed his name to Yusuf Islam. He gave up his career because it interfered with his religion and more or less disappeared from the spotlight. He did gain some infamy and was rejected by many of his former fans in the late 1980s when he stated that he supported the fatwa against Salman Rushdie.
Now, he’s turned up on the U.S. watch list. On his way to Washington from London, his plane was diverted to Maine, he was removed, and will be sent back to London.
Since I don’t know why he was placed on the list, I’ll withhold further comment, but as a big fan of Moonshadow and Morning has Broken, I found it interesting and thought that others might, as well.
Btw, does it say anything about my upbringing that, as a child, I once dressed as the firecat from the album Teaser and The Firecat for Halloween?
GW Bush, the Al Qaeda Candidate?Karen Kwiatkowski, a libertarian, wrote an article arguing that Bush’s administration has achieved many of “the oft-stated goals of the Wahhabist Sunni radical Osama bin Ladin”.
Enjoy!
The Radical MiddleCheck out this excerpt from the illustrated book We The People : A Call To Take Back America by Thom Hartmann. If anyone wants to give me a gift …
