Things I’d Like To Post About Today ….. (122608, Morning)

….. But I Don’t Have Any Time For:

• National treasure Brit Hume signed off as anchor of Fox News’s Special Report for the final time Tuesday night. He defined fair and balanced as no one on any other network did. Fortunately, he’ll be around from time to time as an analyst. The more often the better. The video clip at the link demonstrates that his passion for fairness (”it’s a skill) will live on in those he clearly trained well.
• Two stories from Tuesday make me wonder if some local and state governments have their priorities right on handling their highways. The priorities should be: Safety first, including necessary snow and ice clearance in bad weather; maintenance second; improving existing roads third; and building new ones fourth. Seattle is clearly not doing Number One. Further, on Tuesday evening, the highway department in Northern Kentucky didn’t do Number One either.
• Here’s more on how the earth is cooling, and thus how globaloney (the belief that the earth is warming catastrophically, that humans are significantly contributing to it, and that radical changes in how society must occur if we are to save ourselves) is, well, baloney. Possibly related? “Seals return to the Belgian coast.”
• Now here’s something interesting (to me; your mileage may vary) — Gawker (HT Instapundit) has screen caps showing that the New York Times’s local City Room blog is deleting comments at posts about Senator-in-waiting Caroline Kennedy that ask whether or not she and Times Publisher “Pinch” Sulzberger are romantically involved. It so happens that the Times’s City Editor is one Wendell Jamieson, the very cretin who wrote the preposterously scathing critique of “It’s a Wonderful Life” in the Times last week. In it, he said that the mythical Pottersville with its gambling and moral rot was more fun than George Bailey’s boring Bedford Falls. Well if that’s so, Mr. Jamieson, what’s there to be ashamed of in discussing Caroline and Pinchy?
• General Motors’ Moraine Plant near Dayton closed on Tuesday. Note one last time that this was an IUE union plant that was singled out for closure even though less productive UAW plants were spared — for now.
• With NPR providing the microphone, Dan Rather is still insisting that that the Rathergate documents have legitimacy — “Nobody has ever proven the documents to be anything but what they purported to be,” Rather says. “What the documents stated has never been denied — by the president or anyone around him.” Even if that’s true, there was no need for an answer, because, as Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs demonstrated for the umpteenth time, they were, and will always remain, bogus. And since the documents were, and will always remain, bogus, who cares “what they stated”?
• Thomas Sowell’s column Tuesday about how the Great Depression came about and persisted makes an excellent overall point that I can summarize in a soundbite (my words): “Barack Obama’s stated intentions for 2009 are to take the worst of the 1930-1932 Herbert Hoover, combine it with the worst of the 1933-1941 FDR, and expect a different result.” Read the whole thing.