Pennsylvania Congressman John "Jack" Murtha, a Democrat and the powerful chairman of the House appropriations committee, is a creature of the Washington culture that needs to be changed. Here's another example of why:

At the behest of Rep. John P. Murtha (D), chairman of the House defense appropriations subcommittee, the Pentagon has spent about $30 million equipping the little-used airport named for him so it can handle behemoth military aircraft and store combat equipment for rapid deployment to foreign battlefields....

Some locals call the Johnstown airport "Fort Murtha" because of the stream of wartime projects at the facility. Although its runway is capable of servicing the largest airplanes in North America, the airport now is used only by small commuter planes that make six trips a day back and forth to Washington Dulles International Airport.

Many of the commercial flights, which are subsidized by federal transportation dollars, carry only a handful of passengers. On a recent visit, all of the departing flights were less than half full, and one had only four passengers -- screened by seven federal airport personnel.

All told, Murtha has steered about $150 million in federal funds to the airport. This spring, it was among the first four in the country to receive stimulus money -- $800,000 for a runway-widening project. 

I consider that money stolen from the American taxpayers. High time for earmark reform.

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If the Times's sources are correct, it looks like we're going to see a bankruptcy filling from Chrysler later today. A few debtors have balked at the Treasury Department's offer of 33 cents on the dollar:

To win over several hedge funds, which have been holding out for better terms, the Treasury increased its cash offer to holders of Chrysler’s secured debt by $250 million, to $2.25 billion, these people said. If all of the secured holders would agree to the new deal, which would give them the cash in exchange for retiring about $6.9 billion of debt, Chrysler would still have a chance of restructuring out of bankruptcy court.

[...]

The four big banks that own 70 percent of Chrysler’s secured debt have already signed on to the Treasury’s plan and are trying to line up the other lenders in favor of the new terms.

If all 46 lenders do not agree to the new offer, and a bankruptcy filing occurs, the lenders will be forced to accept the $2 billion they were originally offered or fight in court for a higher amount.

This conjures two questions in my head: Why do these holdouts think they can get better terms? Do they really think the bankruptcy courts are going to be more amiable to them, especially after considering the debtors who hold a vast majority of Chrysler's liabilities have accepted the Treasury's terms? The Treasury's deal would leave about $675 million for the holdouts. I say take the money and swallow your losses on the bad investment; the deal doesn't look like it will get much sweeter.

UPDATE: The Obama administration has confirmed Chrysler will indeed for bankruptcy today.

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The more we learn about the current swine flu outbreak, the more it all begins to sound like what happened in 2005, when the world faced a possible pandemic of avian flu. But with the exception of stocking up on Tamiflu, most governments seem to have taken little meaningful action in response to the bird flu scare, and learned few lessons.

In certain ways, the world’s experience with Avian flu may actually have rendered it less, rather than more prepared for a new outbreak. The Daily Telegraph (UK) reported earlier this week on a meeting of scientists held in Austria back in February, before the swine flu had surfaced. There, Harvard professor Thomas Monath warned that because so much attention had been focused on bird flu, if another strain popped up, “we would be screwed.” The Telegraph’s medical editor writes:

He warned vaccine manufacturing capacity is insufficient, meaning that if a pandemic strain of flu emerged now it would be impossible to make enough for the world’s population in time.

The scientific community had become “complacent” about a new flu pandemic because the avian influenza strain H5N1 has been around for 13 years without spreading around the world.

Prof Monath said: “If it’s a new strain of flu it will be nine months to a year before we have got really good geared up vaccine production. We will rely on antiviral drugs first and then it is a crash effort to make a vaccine. In the meantime there will be clearly an emerging uncontained problem,” he said.

A second unlearned lesson has to do with the way we treat our livestock. Here, again, explicit warnings have been ignored. In an excellent piece on Huffington Post, David Kirby outlines the links among the virulent new flu strains and “confined animal feeding operations” (CAFOs), otherwise known as factory farms, where tens of thousands of animals live packed together in poorly ventilated sheds, standing (and breathing) in their own excrement.

[Read more]

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Oh dear. Here's the bad news on minority educational achievement:

Between 2004 and last year, scores for young minority students increased, but so did those of white students, leaving the achievement gap stubbornly wide, despite President George W. Bush's frequent assertions that the No Child law was having a dramatic effect.

Although Black and Hispanic elementary, middle and high school students all scored much higher on the federal test than they did three decades ago, most of those gains were not made in recent years, but during the desegregation efforts of the 1970s and 1980s. That was well before the 2001 passage of the No Child law, the official description of which is "An Act to Close the Achievement Gap."...

The 2008 score gap between black and white 17-year-olds, 29 points in reading and 26 points in math, could be envisioned as the rough equivalent of between two and three school years' worth of learning, said Peggy Carr, an associate commissioner for assessment at the Department of Education.

When the Obama administration brings the bill up for reauthorization this year, I'm hoping to see the hard-headed, 'it takes a village' kind of thinking that can provide quality education for all our children. It takes after school programs, Saturday schools, and reform of the kinds of dysfunctional educational bureaucracies that stifle innovation and drive out the best teachers. It also takes communities doing their parts; overseeing homework, unplugging the TV, staying in close contact with the kids' teachers, policing their neighborhoods so kids can study in peace. Otherwise, the long term crisis of inner city education will continue in a world which becomes more highly technological and labor-unfriendly everyday.

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