Grounded

Lots of big important things in the news today, but I'll focus on this instead. Steve Benen points up the grilling the FAA chief took over last week's air travel abomination.

Politics as Usual

Why were all those AA planes grounded by the FAA last week? I didn't know this before, but it wasn't, apparently, due to a major flaw that could take an aircraft apart at 35k feet. Instead, it had to do with the spacing of wiring bundles, a relatively simple, if tedious, thing to fix without paralyzing an airline to do so.

Sound political? I didn't think so either, until I read Kevin Drum, who taps Andrew Tobias to explain how this is actually the fault of the Bush Administration.