Obama Administration: Better Dead People Than Dead Geese

Let's hope every airline pilot flying the skies around New York City has the guts, the calm, and the cool of Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger. Otherwise your next trip out of JFK could be your last.

Common sense has no place in the world of government bureaucracies:

A year and a half after Canada geese forced an airliner to splash down in the Hudson River, officials are rounding them up in almost every part of the city — but flocks are still free to take off around John F. Kennedy International Airport.

The wild birds were at the center of a government vs. government battle on Tuesday.
A National Park Service official told The Associated Press that, for now, his agency won't touch the hundreds of birds living in a refuge near Kennedy airport's runways.

"Our mission is to protect and preserve wildlife — that's a law — and it isn't a given that the removal of the geese is necessary to protect the flying public," said Dave Avrin, the official at the Park Service's Gateway National Recreation Area, which includes the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge.

Officials of other federal and local agencies want the Park Service to limit the goose population in the only U.S. wildlife refuge under its jurisdiction, but these efforts have failed.

"We can only go onto properties where we have permission," said Carol Bannerman, spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Wildlife Services, which this month renewed measures to cull New York flocks after last year's near-disaster.

"...it isn't a given that the removal of the geese is necessary to protect the flying public" ? Maybe, just like it's not a given that stopping Arabic men paying cash and carrying weapons from boarding an airplane is necessary to protect the flying public....

"We can only go onto properties where we have permission"? Welcome to Obamaland, where even the most common-sense request has to go through a myriad of layers of bureaucrats to get approved; with any one of which, having a bad day or an axe to grind, can deny with a quick government-issued rubber stamp.

But I'm sure none of this will happen once the government takes over the health care system. Right?

And what happens the next time a plane dives into the drink after choking on a flockful of fowl? Unlikely the passengers will be as lucky as they were on Sully's jet. But that's OK. The Obama administration knows exactly how to handle it: Blame the airliner, put "their boot on their neck", disavow any responsibility, and use the catastrophe as an excuse to raise taxes.

Let's call it - from the amazing inefficiency to the unbelievable stupidity - "The BP Model..."