Bush commutes sentences of 2 Border Patrols - Finally, after 8 years, W did something that I approved of...

I am sure a lot of my liberal friends are going to treat me like a traitor for saying this, but I am glad that the two men, Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, will be out of jail in March, without having to serve the 11-year and 12-year sentences that they were given. There are already a lot of outcry and celebration in the blogsphere: On the Huffington Post, most of the comments expressed outrage at this "anti-immigrant" gesture, and conversely, on the "white supremacy" or self-proclaimed "red-state-leaning" oriented blogs (I am not going to provide links here, just google on your own and you will see...) , this act was celebrated as confirmation that white people won.  Eh, first of all, I believe that Mr. Ramos is not white...

 

I heard of this story last year when my husband got a hold of the wonderful book series "The Best American Writing" for the year 2008 (which by the way is a series worth looking forward to every year, making Christmas all the much better for grown-ups!), and inside The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 , is an extensively researched and well-written article by Pamela Colloff, published in the September 2007 issue of Texas Monthly.  Here is the reprint found on the US Attorney website.  Read this before you make any judgement! 

 

It is hard not to feel bad for the two men once finishing reading the entire article.  The point, in my mind, is not whether they have shot an unarmed-man while he was running away, in the dark, but rather, the fairness in the sentencing of the two men for longer than a decade on the excuse of their violating bureaucratic procedures.  Anybody that is arguing the merit (or demerit) of the commutation of sentence from the perspective of immigration, whether pro- or anti-, is not looking at this issue rationally. 

 

And how many people that are now outraged simply by the sensational headlines or out-of-context comments such as the one posted on Salon.com by Alex Koppelman:  

 

"Bush commutes sentences of former Border Patrol agents - Anti-immigration forces won a partial victory Monday, as President Bush commuted the prison sentences of two of their heroes..." 

 

Alex Koppelman published a long article on salon.com in January 2007 on this case as well which I was not aware of until just now.  He has a completely different take on this case: as a deliberate cover-up by the right wing and a transformation of criminals into folk heroes.  Guess I need to withhold my own judgement now too before I can make up my mind on this... 

 

Why is life so complicated? 

More on the US Air plane landing in the Husdon River...

The BOOT - The Business of Online Travel: Can a plane land on water and have survivors? Of course it can!

This blog post has many more links to information concerning the US Air plane landing in the Hudson River. It is interesting to view this incident from the perspective of someone from the travel industry. (Again, I am able to do all these theorizing now only because everybody was safe and sound).

All of a sudden, there is a Sully fever: apparently more than one fan site was created on Facebook alone, and this one has almost 74,000 fans! And of course, guess what? The domain Chelseysullenberger.com was immeidately bought and put up. America, you never disappoint!

USAir crashed into Hudson River; Twitter received the first picture of the scene

This is the title of the blog entry: "U.S. Airways Crash Rescue Picture: Citizen Journalism, Twitter At Work". A Twitterer sent a photo from his iPhone.

This sort of illustrated what I talked about yesterday. I guess THIS itself is a great reason for Twitter... Instead of coming to my blog, or emailing everybody I know, or updating my Facebook status, the first thing I did when I got an email about the news was to log into Twitter and read the messages there. I also Tweeted myself.

(All of this, I think, is made ok by the fact that all passengers are safe and accounted for, otherwise it would be heartless to talk about the role of social media in the face of a tragedy...)

What amazed me is the cause of the crash: Birds!

A flock of birds apparently hit the engine of the plane. Wow. Apparently this happened more often than we think.

ABC news coverage: The plane is completely submerged under the water now other than the tail. Extremely scary to think of, "What if..."

The hero pilot's name is Chesley Sullenberger, and according to the news report, he even searched the aircraft before he himself left. Lots of people are saying now that this is NOT a plane crash, but a well-executed emergency landing based on an experienced pilot's intelligent split-second decision which turned out to save all the lives on board. It is refreshing to hear of news where people are praising the airlines rather than complaining about the fees they are charging. On the other hand, I am so glad that Mr. Sullenberger did not leave the airline industry because of the financial difficulties felt by all major airlines.

It's January 6, do you know who your Senator is?

Finally.  Dare I say "Finally"?  Al Franken finally was given enough evidence to declare victory, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, based on a 225-vote lead.  Norm Coleman of course immediately indicated, "I am going to SUE!!!"  (Attaboy, like a good old American, that's what I'd do too!) 

 

Please please, let Franken have the chance to run his mouth on the Senate floor.  I cannot wait to hear what he has to say now that he has such an attention-getting mainstream forum, instead of his radio show (and it is NOT even on FM!)