Small potatoes malfeasance

I realize this is small potatoes amidst the endless pantheon of Bush administration malfeasance. But kindly explain to me the public policy rationale behind making it easier for airlines to deceive their customers. From today’s New York Times...

...if the large airlines win their lobbying battle to loosen industry advertising regulations, the proposed changes would give them leeway to also advertise fares that do not include the entire amount that the airline would receive.

...Critics fear looser advertising rules would reduce the transparency of pricing and thus give traditional airlines more market power to raise fares. Well-informed buyers are able to drive a harder bargain in most cases, but opaque pricing favors sellers.

Shopping "would be more difficult and would take much more searching around," John Herrman, a retired college professor in Libby, Mont., said of the proposed relaxing of the rules... In comments to the Transportation Department, it appears that most individuals opposed loosening ad regulations. But experts nevertheless expect the agency to approve some relaxing of the rules.

Loosening the rules is all but a done deal, concluded Paul M. Ruden, senior vice president for legal and industry affairs at the American Society of Travel Agents. "Why else would this rule be up for re-evaluation?" he said. "They want to make it more difficult for people to compare fares."

Civil war

So, now, Iraqis are poised on the brink of civil war, if it has not already started. And America has two choices.

We can stay and try to do the impossible: hold the two, three, many sides apart, supporting an Iraqi “government” that now possesses precisely zero battalions capable of fighting alone.

Or we can leave, and watch mass slaughter, beginning with the deaths of every Iraqi who was naïve enough to believe our promises and offer us assistance.

Everywhere we look, we see America weakened: everywhere we turn, we’re viewed as the “paper tiger” Red China used to call us back in the 1960s, manacled by the catastrophic destruction of both our military and our moral authority.

These are the choices George Bush has given us, the corner he has painted us into. George Bush and his vast apparatus of ideologues, apologists, corrupt contributors, and phony moralists. There is nobody else to blame: Bush’s cabal got everything it wanted, ran this war and its aftermath exactly as it chose, with zero accountability, zero openness, and zero honesty.

Now, as Bush moves inexorably towards the war he wishes to wage against Iran, he must stand quietly in the background and allow others to make the case. Even Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and Rove know this: in the age of Bush, the world views America’s words as worse than worthless.

At what point do we hold these people accountable? A sane country would throw them out of office today, and see to it than none of them ever served again.