Who Matters . . .

WHO, IN THE END, MATTERS?

Republicans care SO MUCH about the four Americans who died serving their country in a dangerous part of the world that they’ve completed seven investigations into the tragedy.*  An eighth is under way.

They were so concerned with the . . . zero . . . Americans who’ve died from Ebola that the weeks leading up to the midterms allowed for talk of little else.  (Once the election was over, so was the talk.)

So I have a question.  What about the American lives being saved by Obamacare?  Like this guy’s?  What about the estimated 45,000 American lives previously lost annually for lack of access to affordable insurance?  Do they matter in any way?  Or the thousands dead for lack of universal background checks?  Or the millions blocked from a better life by Republican refusal to raise the minimum wage? How about seven or eight investigations into those?

BOEBUS

I mentioned last month the Marketforce Future of Air Transport conference WheelTug planned to attend.  (And, Friday, the upcoming IATA conference in Miami.)  Apparently, London went well, with an enthusiastic response to The Adventures of Boebus, a faux children’s book it will take you just a minute or two to read — it’s kind of sweet.  (Or twelve minutes if you’d like it read to you, with videos of accidents WheelTug-enabled jets would avoid.)

If/when the WheelTug vision is realized, passengers should be pleased by shorter travel time, especially those now stuck in the rear waiting to deplane (they’ll be able to exit the rear door); airports should be pleased to have meaningfully more capacity without having to build new terminals and runways; airlines should be pleased to save hundreds of thousands of dollars a year per plane.

Inch by inch, we taxi toward take-off.  Or so I like to think.  (Newcomers: click here for the first installment of this saga, 15 years ago, before the parent company even thought to put its motor into the nose wheel of an airplane.)

*WASHINGTON (AP) — A two-year investigation by the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee has found that the CIA and the military acted properly in responding to the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, and asserted no wrongdoing by Obama administration appointees.

Debunking a series of persistent allegations hinting at dark conspiracies, the investigation of the politically charged incident determined that there was no intelligence failure, no delay in sending a CIA rescue team, no missed opportunity for a military rescue . . .

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, intelligence about who carried it out and why was contradictory, the report found. That led Susan Rice, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to inaccurately assert that the attack had evolved from a protest, when in fact there had been no protest. But it was intelligence analysts, not political appointees, who made the wrong call, the committee found. The report did not conclude that Rice or any other government official acted in bad faith or intentionally misled the American people. . . .