Military officials tell CityBlog that Nellis maintenance crews have begun thorough inspections on their fleet of A-10 Thunderbolts as part of an Air Force wide safety review looking for wing cracks in the aging warcraft.

Air Force officials ordered the inspections on the single-seat, twin-engine attack jets after recent increases in fatigue-related wing cracks in aircraft assigned to a variety of Air Force units around the world.

Combat pilots, who affectionately call the jets “Warthogs,” or simply “Hogs,” have long marveled at its tank-killing capability — although the jet wasn’t heavily used in combat until the first Gulf War. In that conflict, A-10 pilots destroyed more than 900 Iraqi tanks, 2,000 armored military vehicles and more than 1,200 Iraqi artillery pieces.

Michael Estrada, deputy public affairs officer for Nellis’ 99th Air Base Wing, tells CityBlog that maintenance crews are now looking at two of the 13 A-10s still assigned to Nellis. In all, only eight A-10s will need to be carefully examined for fatigue-related cracks. While not a full, formal “stand-down” of the fleet, Air Force officials have ordered that bases re-examine the A-10s before the jets complete another 400 flight hours.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports that the last A-10 crash occurred at Nellis on Dec. 4, 2002; however, Air Combat Command officials say that’s wrong. According to official Air Force records, the last A-10 crash was on Nov. 18, 2003. Although that A-10 also crashed at Nellis, Air Force officials say the accident was not related to wing fatigue.

There's Hope in that thar box, Pandora...

Looks like Pandora.com, the elegantly innovative, free music-streaming project written about on CityBlog here and later here, just may survive after all.

Last August, it appeared Pandora and similar web radio companies were sure to be forced out of business (or at least into emasculating compromise) by outrageous per-song royalty rate increases planned over the next few years, thanks to a 2007 decree from the megacorp-loving U.S. Copyright Royalty Board, which came to its decision like this: by hearing — exclusively — proposals and arguments made by SoundExchange, a “performance rights” consortium driven by the rabidly litigious Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) along with industry behemoths EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner. The Board brushed aside counter-arguments from the International Webcasting Association and other free-streaming-minded parties, the rate hike was greenlighted, and things looked bleak for ultra-popular Pandora, suddenly looking at a royalty rate that would devour nearly 100 percent its profit margin.

Now comes this news. By Thursday, Oct. 2, both the House and Senate had passed the 2008 Webcaster Settlement Act. A simple ‘X’ scrawled at the bottom by Bush means Pandora and other web radio providers will at least be guaranteed the right to negotiate better royalty rates with the big labels, very likely getting the numbers down to survivable levels once it’s all said and done.

For now? Tune in, turn on, rock out.

''McCain/Palin 2008: At Night, We Feed."

• “Cravin’ Change, Aren’t Ya?”
• “McCain/Palin: Narrowly Exceeding Low Expectations.”
• “It’s Morning in America, and You’re at a Soccer Game, and You’re Talking to Other Moms about the Economy, and People Are Scared. They’re Scared. They Want a Maverick, Gwen.”
• “Together We Can Do It If We Define Success in Such a Way That It Means ‘Not Totally Fucking It Up.’”
• “He’s an embittered Vietnam veteran on the brink of madness. She’s a hockey mom with a dark past. They’re teaming up to take on their biggest enemy yet: America.”
• “McCain/Palin 2008. Belligerent. Folksy. Belligerolksy.”
• “Maverick maverick hockey mom maverick reform reform mom American dream maverick reform reform.”
• “McCain/Palin: We’ll Get Back to Ya on That, Okay?”
• “If You Elect Obama, God Will Die and There’ll Be Socialism.”
• “Did We Mention He’s a Veteran? Did We Mention She’s a Mom? P.S. He’s a Veteran.”
• “McCain/Palin 2008: Golly!”
• “Country First.” [Wink]

I’m starting to feel a twinge of sympathy for Gov. Sarah Palin. If I’m not mistaken, I think it’s coming from somewhere in the vicinity of my left ovary.

So I’m going to do something nice for the aspiring veep. After all, isn’t living with that voice its own kind of punishment? Here’s some reasons the moose-shooting mayor of Wasilla isn’t all that bad:

1. Is a better shot than Dick Cheney.

2. Has fewer offspring than George HW Bush. Which means fewer potential political heiresses. So far, anyway.

3. Knows where Russia is. This is no small thing considering her staggering ignorance on other issues of political import, like Supreme Court decisions and diplomatic protocol vis a vis Pakistan.

4. Has at least heard of that one book by Gwen Ifill.

We can surmise - with a fair amount of confidence - that Palin does not read The New Republic. Which is too bad, because it means she probably missed Michelle Cottle’s essay outlining how this year’s election essentially torpedoed feminism, starting with Hillary and ending with Moose.

The weekend is here, people! A few things before we go:

• The House of Representatives passed the Senate version of the bailout bill today, 263-171. The Review-Journal sent out a news flash about it, but left out the most important detail: How does Publisher Sherm Frederick feel about the fact that Congressman Dean Heller ignored his call to vote for the bill?

And what up with Congresswoman Shelley Berkley? Yes, she changed her vote from no to yes, but she attitbuted the change to talking with local businessmen, not to the R-J’s Wednesday news flash containing breaking details of Frederick’s pro-bailout column published Thursday. Come on, people! The R-J sent out out a news flash in which Frederick called on people to do things. You can’t be arguing that it had no impact whatsoever, can you? That’s simply impossible.

• The outrage! Las Vegas Sun reporter Emily Richmond is clearly implying in this story that it was her earlier piece that convinced would-be Clark County school board candidate Ron Taylor that he’d have to resign as a district teacher before he could serve in elected office. Come on! Everybody and his brother knows it was our blog on the much-neglected separation of powers doctrine that was the deciding factor here!

Normally, we’d start a blog war over this offense, but the fact is, Richmond is such a nice person, we just can’t bring ourselves to do it. We just can’t hate you, Emily! So, let’s just say that we’ll agree to share credit on this one. And, as an added sign of respect for the notoriously proper Richmond, we wrote this entire item without a single swear word. (Warning: Read on at your peril!)

• Mitt Romney is a lying sack of shit. (Hey, we warned you.) Not only did he say — falsely — that Barack Obama wants an entirely government-run health care system, he also said this: “If instead we take a turn to the left, [the country] will be less strong, less free and less able to defend ourselves in a dangerous world.”

Oh, really? So the fact that all of our troops are tied up in an illegal, immoral, unjustified occupation of Iraq — thus leaving them unavailable to respond, say, to Russian aggression against Georgia — is the fault of … the left? The fact that the main perpetrator of Sept. 11 — Osama bin Laden — is still at large after we handed off the search for him to notoriously unreliable tribal warlords, that’s the left’s fault? The illegal wiretapping of American citizens — a direct assault on our freedom, as well as the Constitution — the left did that? The huge deficits that plagued our post-Sept. 11 economy because of a war of choice, not to mention growing foreign ownership of our debt, that was the left?

See because all this time, we thought it was that A-hole George W. Bush who did that. Wasn’t it? Oh, that’s right, it was. And guess who wants to undo all that damage? Obama, baby.

And as if the quote above wasn’t enough to make Romney look like a horse’s ass, he had to add that he supports the bailout bill, which conservatives disliked because they think, as Heller so colorfully put it, it borders on socialism.

Hey, Mitt, guess which side of the political spectrum socialism is on? That’s right, buddy: The left.

Maybe you should shut up now?

Well, he did it. Joe Biden managed to go an entire 90 minutes debating Sarah Palin without losing his cool or smacking her in the head with a shovel. So, good job, senator. You win.

Not that you could blame Biden if he did lose it: Palin held her own, which is to say, she carefully regurgitated rehearsed talking points in a more-or-less cogent fashion, although at many points viewers could have been excused if they thought they were watching the Miss Alaska pageant as a particularly nimble contestant struggled through an uncomfortable question.

Palin said, in fact, she wasn’t going to answer the questions in the way moderator Gwen Ifill of PBS or Biden wanted, which was true, in that she wasn’t going to answer the questions. But we still managed to spy a few outrageous things worthy of highlighting. Here we go:

• Palin labeled the Barack Obama tax plan a “redistribution of wealth,” although nobody making less than $250,000 will likely see their taxes increased. Biden replied that it was simple “fairness” to tax weathier people more to pay for government programs. The truth? Our income tax system is a redistribution of wealth, and always has been. Do John McCain and Palin secretly want to end that “redistribution of wealth,” which by the way funds programs from Social Security and Medicare to the national defense? If so, we’d love to hear about it.

• Palin’s recent trick-turning for the oil industry was obvious, not only when she failed to defend McCain’s indefensible support for oil industry tax breaks, but also when she corrected Biden on the industry’s big slogan. “The chant is drill, baby, drill,” she said. Well, she would know. But Biden scored big-time when he mentioned that oil industry taxes Palin imposed in Alaksa should be taken nationwide. (She also increased the sales tax in her little town, which means when she says she cut taxes, she’s once more only telling part of the story.)

• “Your plan is a white flag of surrender in Iraq,” Palin lectured Biden. Oh, really? Obama and Biden want to end a war that we had no business starting in the first place, a war that is a stain on our national honor. McCain and Palin want to continue that misbegotten conflict indefinitely. If this were the only issue on the table, the Iraq war alone would provide enough evidence that Obama should be the next president. “John McCain has been dead wrong,” Biden said flatly. And that is quite literally true.

• “Oh, man, it’s so obvious that I’m a Washington outsider and someone just not used to the way you guys operate,” Palin said, for once a statement that’s entirely true. “Like so many other politicians, you were for the war before you were against it. Americans are just craving that straight talk.”

Palin was referring to Biden’s explanation of his unfortunate vote to allow the use of force in Iraq, a vote he said was intended to keep pressure on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the U.N. While it would have been better for Biden to admit he was simply wrong, his point — “Nobody knew George W. Bush was so batshit crazy as to lie to the entire world and go to war on false pretenses only to thereafter mismanage the occupation and turn the entire thing into what our Special Forces might call a ‘complete goatfuck’,” — is nontheless defensible.

• Asked about what criteria should be used to employ a nuclear weapon, our notes reflect the following: “Palin says words.”

• Our notes also contain a not-so-rare “WTF?” beside this Palin statement: “I’m thankful the Constitution would allow a bit more authority given to the vice president also if that vice president so chose to exert it in working with the Senate and making sure that we are supportive of the president’s policies and making sure, too, that our president understand what our strengths are.”

Thank goodness constitutional law professor Biden was there to remind Palin that the Constitution provides no such authorization. Perhaps she was thinking of incumbent Vice President Dick Cheney? “Dick Cheney most dangerous vice president we’ve had in American history,” Biden summed.

• “America is that nation of exceptionalism…” Palin said at one point. Really? Because the notion of American exceptionalism — we can do whatever the hell we want, since we are right and good and pure and true — has pretty much been proven false during these past eight years. (People running for high office cannot mention this, lest they be considered anti-America, but we’re not running for anything, so we’re free to tell the truth.) Under Bush, we’ve proven we’re exceptional only in the amount of misery we can bring to the world. It should be the opposite: America should be looked at as a partner in progress globally, not a dictator. Which of the two candidates for president do you think can pull that off?

• Our favorite Palin flub: “All of us recognize he [McCain] is the man we need to leave … to lead…” No, you had it right the first time.