The EU has been busy passing a law to enforce full price transparency on airlines and airline resellers, after studies showed that a large percentage of them were failing to provide the full final cost of airline tickets, opting instead to advertise apparently-low-cost "price leader" tickets without adding on fuel surcharges, airport taxes etc.
This would probably be unpopular in the USA, where price transparency for air travel is a quaint relic, a footnote in aviation history. Any day now I half-expect to be asked to pay for the air that I breathe when I fly American Airlines, given their propensity for charging for any service or object as an addition to the base fare. While most of the larger airlines continue to nickel-and-dime travelers to death with additional charges for all sorts of services that used to be free, SouthWest Airlines is spanking their ass with its witty and pithy "bags fly free" series of commercials, which continues to perpetuate the meme of "little customer-focussed upstart runs rings around Leviathan Airlines". Despite years of this stuff, the larger US airlines seem to be clueless as to how to respond.

So, after another humiliating beat-down, this time by the Green Bay Packers, Jerry Jones finally put Wade Phillips out of his misery. Phillips' body language on the sidelines of Sunday night's game was that of a baffled, despondent man. In these kinds of "win or else" situations, coach body language is a powerful indicator of the health of a team and its coaching leadership. I remember watching the last game that Bobby Petrino coached with the Atlanta Falcons, and noticing how the team leaders of the Falcons (led by Warrick Dunn) barely acknowledged the presence of the head coach. They had quiet clearly tuned him out totally. I also recall seeing Bill Parcells' last game as Head Coach of the Cowboys, when he simply looked dispirited as his team quit on the game. The engaged Parcells would have been all over his players yelling and goading them; in that game he simply looked pissed-off as he stood with his arms folded and passively watched the Cowboys go down to defeat.
I suspect that the decision to give the head coach position to Jason Garrett was not a move that Jerry Jones had much discretion over. 2 years ago, when Garrett was interviewing for head coaching positions, Jerry gave him a hefty raise and promoted him to assistant head coach to prevent him from leaving. IMHO his contract would almost certainly contain a clause elevating him to the Head Coach position in the event of Wade Phillips' departure. The only way Jerry Jones would have been able to prevent that would be by firing Garrett at the same time as dismissing Phillips, but that would have left the Cowboys without both offensive and defensive co-ordinators, with no real depth on the coaching staff (remembering that Parcells and Jeff Ireland essentially raided the defensive staff 3 years ago, stealing away Tony Sparano, among others).
Jason Garrett now has 8 games to improve the Dallas Cowboys. The odds are against him; interim head coaches are seldom much of an improvement over their dismissed predecessors. Most commonly they are seen as seat-warmers and cannot impose themselves.
Cowboys players are apparently not much impressed with Garrett; however, as Mike Florio has pointed out, the players loved Wade Phillips and that didn't do much for the win-loss column either, so whether Garrett is popular or not is pretty much irrelevant. His job is, quite simply, to put a stop to gross underachievement by the team.
If the Cowboys (for example) finish the season 6-2, that would put Garrett squarely in the mix for the head coaching position in January 2011. If the team's performance does not improve substantially, expect to see Jerry Jones cut Garrett loose or leave him in limbo until a new head coach decides what to do. Based on past history, a new head coach will not want Garrett around, at which point he will be dumped on the market too late to find a good job elsewhere.
Jerry Jones' worst nightmare would be to have Garrett leave and be successful elsewhere. That has already happened to one former Cowboys offensive coach, Sean Payton, who, tired of clashing with Bill Parcells, went to the Saints and led them to a SuperBowl win. Jones invested a lot of money in Garrett to make him the heir-apparent to Wade Phillips. Garrett is paid almost as much as several head coaches around the league. However, the Rooney Rule prevents Jones from immediately making Garrett the head coach. He has to interview other candidates, which is where the fun begins. Who out there on the job market would want to work for Jerry Jones? It is difficult to see a coach like Bill Cowher agreeing to work for an owner who is his own General Manager.
One sad and visible reality is that Jerry Jones is not good at learning from his football mistakes. He fired Jimmy Johnson in the early 90's, which precipitated a slow and painful decline. After running through several subservient head coaches (Barry Switzer, Chain Gailey and Dave Campo), Jones hired Bill Parcells, but that arrangement lasted only three seasons, as Parcells "retired" from coaching. These days, that might be Parcells' time limit at a club, based on his recent withdrawal from working for the Miami Dolphins.
Jones has shown an inability to learn on the player selection side also. The most obvious example is his decision twice in 18 years to vastly overpay for wide receivers in trades. In 2000 he gave up 2 first round picks to the Seattle Seahawks for Joey Galloway, who immediately tore his ACL. More recently, he traded 2 high-round picks to get Roy Williams, who, despite improvements this season, can not be said to have remotely justified his trade price or his contract.
All of the indications are that Jerry Jones does not learn from footballing mistakes. He appears to have no trusted confidants in football except for the voice in his own head. The biggest challenge for him may be that he played college football, which probably gave him a good feel for the psychology of the game, but did not necessarily prepare him for player selection. If he had never played football, he might have instinctively retreated to more of a hands-off role in the franchise, assuming a profile more like that of Jim Irsay or Robert Kraft, two successful owners who hired General Managers and then left them alone to control player and coach selection.
Whatever you may think of the Dallas Cowboys as a team, the soap opera is guaranteed to continue for a while.
UPDATE - Jerry Jones has been making noise this week about how he may be able to circumvent the Rooney Rule if he wants to hire Jason Garrett as the permanent head coach of the Cowboys. The only snag with this idea is that complying with the Rooney Rule is mandatory unless the interim head coach had a clause in his contract stating that he was to be elevated to the Head Coach position if the then-existing head coach left or was fired. Apparently, Jason Garrett had no such clause in his contract when he was the offensive co-ordinator/assistant head coach, which makes Jerry's latest idea more than a little bit of a stretch. But hey, Jerry can always do what Daniel Snyder did when he hired Joe Gibbs and ignore the Rooney Rule. It cost the Redskins $500k, but that was apparently simply regarded by the team as a cost of doing business.

Link: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/10/17/911242/-AK-Sen.-Millers-Security-Detail-Grabs-+-HANDCUFFS-Editor-w-questions-

...in which an Alaskan newspaper editor is arrested and held in cuffs by a private security detail hired by an Alaskan senate candidate. What is this illegal crypto-fascist crap?
In the UK, where I used to live, this would probably result in felony charges against the security detail for impersonating law enforcement.

Ed Brayton uncovers an exchange between Anderson Cooper and Rep. Debbie Riddle, which is notable for the shock, followed by deployment of BS, when Cooper demands some evidence from Rep. Riddle for her repetition of the "terror babies" claim also advanced by another idiotic Texas politician, Rep. Louis Goehmert. Riddle's response to a challenge is priceless for it's utter chutzpah:

When your folks called me in the preliminary, that was part of the conversation. They did not tell me that you were going to grill me for this specific information that I was not ready to give to you tonight. They did not tell me that, sir.

Well, I would give the woman a couple of points for honesty...but my indulgence stops there. She marches onto network television to make a claim, and is not in possession of any evidence that she can present to back up the claim?
I guess I am amazed by her sheer chutzpah in showing up with nothing other than an empty slogan, but also by her working assumption that she would not be challenged on the slogan, which in itself tells you a lot about how far the media has fallen in presumed capability. For me, this is yet more evidence that the USA is becoming a zero-accountability society.

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, many political candidates are discovered to have exaggerated or (in some cases) flat out lied about their past achievements.
Currently, senate candidate Richard Blumenthal appears to have been caught claiming that he served in the armed forces in Vietnam, when he in fact served in a military unit that never went to Vietnam. The original national media report in the New York Times was deficient in that it did not tell the whole story, since the newspaper apparently decided to major on Blumenthal's alleged deceit over statements he made that he served "in Vietnam".
Blumenthal's attempt to claim service in Vietnam is part of a pattern of behaviour by many candidates for public office in the USA, who try to talk up any aspect of military involvement or service.
The irony in all of this is that, based on recent presidential election results, having any form of military service record is far from essential to winning elections. In 1972, Richard Nixon, who had not served in a war, beat George McGovern, a highly decorated WW II bomber pilot. In 1980, Ronald Reagan, who had no military service, beat Jimmy Carter, who had served in the military in WW II. In 1988 the story was more equal; George H.W. Bush, a WW II flying veteran, beat Michael Dukakis, who had served in Korea. Normal service was resumed in 1992 when Bill Clinton, who had avoided military service, beat Bush Sr. In 1996, Clinton beat Bob Dole, a WW II veteran with permanent disabling battle wounds.
Blumenthal's exaggeration of his military record is nothing new. Numerous candidates for public office have been discovered to have either exaggerated or invented aspects of their past.
My hypothesis is that this is common because the USA is moving towards becoming a low-accountability society. Electors and the media lack any consistent interest in fact-checking pronouncements by politicians and political candidates. As long as there is insufficient interest in checking on claims made by political actors at the time those claims are made, other candidates are likely to conclude that the risk of inflating their past achievements is worth the reward.
UPDATE - Another candidate has been apparently borrowing language from other politicians for his primary campaign. The irony here is that this is a Republican Party candidate apparently borrowing whole chunks of a speech by President Obama...a double whammy of hypocrisy and insulting the intelligence of smart electors.
UPDATE 2- Mark Kirk has been progressively caught in a web of duplicity and deceit over his military service...
UPDATE 3 - And now the best word on the whole sorry mess so far, from The Onion...
UPDATE 4 - And here is yet another example of a state-level elected representative who has apparently been claiming a professional football career that did not actually exist...

I am having trouble determining whether this letter from the CEO of Target, responding to criticism of his personal decision to donate money to a Republican electoral candidate who is quite clearly hostile to equal civil rights for gay people, is really an apology. Although he does use the word "sorry":

The intent of our political contribution to MN Forward was to support economic growth and job creation. While I firmly believe that a business climate conducive to growth is critical to our future, I realize our decision affected many of you in a way I did not anticipate, and for that I am genuinely sorry.

The fact that he feels the need to add the word "genuinely" ahead of "sorry" suggests that he is worried that he will be regarded as insincere.
My take on this letter: I think it does not really qualify as an apology. He does not say "I should not have donated money to this candidate". He merely apologizes for upsetting people, while neatly side-stepping the root cause, namely that he donated money to a candidate who appears to be of the opinion that gay people do not deserve equal civil rights (what part of "we hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal" do these people not understand?).
So my verdict is; nice try, but I think I am about to add Target to my list of Places That I Will Not Buy From.

...about the scandal of the prison system in the USA.

Following the original justified invective heaped on Ferrari for its blatant use of team orders in the German Grand Prix, it is time to take stock and think outside of the box.
One major underlying issue that surreptitious team orders in Formula 1 have been trying to address is the reality that even if one driver has a faster car than the driver in front, it is currently almost impossible for the faster driver to overtake. The Overtaking Working Group's attempts to define changes to the regulations to reduce downforce have been totally undermined by the slide back to diffuser-generated downforce, beginning at the start of the 2009 season.
It is my belief that the OWG has been compromised because it is composed of insiders - engineers and designers who are familiar with the current regulations and principles of car design and aerodynamics. Ideas implemented thus far have centered on reducing aero grip and downforce in favour of mechanical grip. The move to slick tyres has increased mechanical grip, but the increases in downforce have nullified this gain.
One idea that has been surfaced, which seemingly has not been seriously discussed, is to move to a very hard tyre. Superficially this seems at odds with the OWG principles. However, one of the challenges with overtaking in a Formula 1 race is that after a few laps, there is usually only one racing line, due to tyre material (the infamous "marbles") accumulating off-line and reducing grip. A very hard tyre would more or less eliminate marbles, allowing drivers a lot more overtaking options and spots on a circuit.
The reality is that, with overtaking next to impossible on many circuits, teams are resorting to artificial methods to establish race-time position relationships between drivers. This artificiality cannot be reliably managed as long as it is officially against the regulations. Hence the occasional slipping of the mask that we saw last weekend...
Allowing team orders will simply consolidate this dysfunctional way of managing competition, which will open Formula 1 to the (justified) allegation that the race positions are being "fixed". Trying to continue with the ban on team orders as per the current sporting regulation risks opening Formula 1 to more ridicule when the next team is caught managing race-time positions for its drivers.
The reality is that the pressure to manage driver relationships would be less if drivers could actually overtake. Some radical solution is needed. The OWG was supposedly radical, but it has proven to be toothless.

Back in 2002, we Formula 1 fans had our intelligence insulted when Ferrari blatantly ordered Rubens Barrichello to let Michael Schumacher past him to win the Austrian Grand Prix. The outcry was deafening, and deservedly so. To use an old English expression, Ferrari were "taking the piss", insulting the intelligence of casual spectators and fans alike. Despite all manner of weasel words from the likes of Jean Todt, Ferrari found themselves on the wrong end of a tidal wave of condemnation.
Officially, team orders are now banned in Formula 1. However, it seems that teams are still engaging in team orders, the only objective now being to meet the infamous Rule 1 (Rule 1: Don't get caught).
Today Ferrari once again insulted the intelligence of racing fans by indirectly telling Felipe Massa to move over for Fernando Alonso in the 2010 German Grand Prix. Before I continue, I must say that if anybody from Ferrari tries to claim otherwise, I will burst out laughing. The communication from Rob Smedley to Felipe Massa ("Fernando is faster. Do you understand?") is clearly coded language for "move over and let Fernando into the lead". If anybody from Ferrari tries to claim otherwise, I would dearly like to hear a response along the lines of "just how much do you think that you can insult our intelligence?".
Joe Saward has nailed the whole affair on his blog. As he points out, Fernando Alonso is doing himself and Formula 1 no favours by complaining about media questioning. If he doesn't want to be asked awkward questions about how he won the race, then he should either win it fair and square (and stop whining "this is ridiculous" over the radio when Massa makes his car wider), or tell Ferrari to stop issuing team orders in code. Either way, he is not going to get much respect from racing fans until he stops being handed race wins.
As for the $100,000 fine for Ferrari from the race stewards, my understanding is that this is the maximum that the stewards could fine them. For a team with Ferrari's budget, this is chump change, and it is unlikely to have much effect. In a highly competitive sport such as F1, the only punishment that changes behaviour is being denied the opportunity to compete. A one race ban from F1 for Ferrari would be far more effective at sending the message that this sort of shoddy practice is not tolerable.
The other alternative is to allow team orders once again. However, in my opinion, that will erode the credibility of Formula 1 even further. The sport is already lacking in transparency compared to other forms of top-flight motor racing such as NASCAR. There are multi-car teams in NASCAR, and while they may work together for part of a race (particularly on the drafting circuits such as Daytona and Talladega), at some point in a race it is every driver for himself. There is also a ban on encryption of pit-to-car radios, so anybody can listen in on radio chatter, which is very different from Formula 1, where we are merely listening to whatever snippets of unencrypted radio chatter that the TV broadcast director considers to be important.
The tempting answer for the FIA would be to allow team orders back into Formula 1. However, for the reasons that I explained above, allowing team orders will further devalue the spectacle of two car teams. We can never be sure that drivers in the same team are even racing each other at all. Nick Fry understands this, as he explains in Autosport today:

"Personally I think the show is the most important thing," he said. "I heard David Coulthard talk about the history and the fact there always were team orders, but I think times have changed.
"This is sport and the fans out there want to see the drivers fighting. While the teams think it is a teams' championship, most of the fans - possibly with the exception of Ferrari - support the drivers who happen to drive for a team.
"I think we have to let them fight it out and only intervene if it is getting out of hand, and they are knocking each other off."

Many other Formula 1 figures, including David Coulthard, seem to think that this is perfectly normal practice and it should be allowed. Sorry, but that shows a high degree of introversion. It is also amusingly ironic to see Coulthard, who by all accounts was penalized by team orders at several points during his career, to be defending this practice.
Formula 1 has no magic entitlement to audiences. Many casual viewers will take one look at this result and conclude that the sport is rigged. This is not an image that any sport can promulgate and expect to thrive with.
UPDATE - It is my belief that the order to move Felipe Massa out of the way could have been executed in a way that was pretty transparent to viewers. However, Ferrari made a major mistake in asking Rob Smedley to relay the request. Smedley is head of Massa's team of mechanics. He is an advocate for Massa, he can be expected to fight for his driver. By demanding that he personally relay the message to Massa, Ferrari put him in an impossible position. Smedley's unsubtle reading of the message is exactly what I would have done in his situation.
If team politics or commercial considerations require a driver to swap places with his team-mate, that order should come from the team principal, so as to not make the driver's own team supporters have to be the bad guys. By demanding that Smedley relay the message, Ferrari leadership showed themselves to be cowards. Smedley and Massa's responses are exactly what I would have expected from them. It is borderline insubordination, but Ferrari cannot sanction either man without having to deal with a tidal wave of anger from within and outside the sport, so I do not expect anything to happen to either man in the short term.
UPDATE 2 - The real story here, which nobody is talking about, is why this order was issued in the first place. My own speculation is that Felipe Massa's new contract has made him the de facto number 2 driver, with Alonso now getting priority within the team. However, Ferrari probably cannot disclose this publicly. The reality is that Santander have invested a small fortune into Formula 1 and specifically Ferrari, they are rumored to be paying Alonso's salary for this year as part of the deal to get him into the team in 2010 instead of 2011. They want Alonso to be the favoured driver within the team as a result. The presence of Santander's CEO in the Ferrari garage, next to none other than Piero Lardi Ferrari, bears out the current importance of the relationship between Ferrari and Santander.
If I was a formula 1 journalist I would be trying my utmost to find out exactly what the two drivers' contracts say with respect to their status within the team.
UPDATE 2 - I commented over at James Allen's blog on the latest pompous bloviations from Ferrari as they attempt to retrospectively justify and spin their actions. My comment is #705 in a very long thread...

1. Sharron Angle has launched a new website, which makes me wonder: who is the Real Sharron Angle? This is possibly the most egregious example of a would-be politician airbrushing their past..so far this election cycle. Given the low levels of ethical fidelity demonstrated by people running for elective office in the USA, I am sure that right now somebody is working to beat this...
2. The Home Secretary in the UK proposes to jail less prisoners because (a) it costs a lot of money, and (b) serves no useful purpose. Eegads. This sounds frightfully logical...this is not going to play well with those intellectually deficient voters for whom "hang 'em high" is much more than a movie title. How dare a politician issue sensible proposals for law enforcement and jurisprudence...doesn't Kenneth Clarke realize that you are supposed to bloviate about being "tough on crime" and then announce another slew of dumb-ass half-baked stupidities in order to show the intellectually deficient voters that You Are Doing Something? (shakes head)...
3. If you needed evidence that the presence of a written constitution in the USA guarantees precisely nothing in the way of individual rights to privacy, then this map showing which states engage in illegal surveillance is worth more than a cursory examination. That is, if you failed to notice the impact of the Patriot Act (which is still the living modern exemplification of the old saying that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel..).
4. We have Idiot Of The Week...step forward Rick Santorum. I guess there is no lower limit to some of the nonsense that this guy is capable of uttering:

"Obama is detached from the American experience. He just doesn't identify with the average American because of his own background. Indonesia and Hawaii. His view is from the viewpoint of academics and the halls of the Ivy league schools that he went to and it's not a love of this country and an understanding of the basic values and wants and desires of its people."

I'll leave it to the commenters on the linked blog posting to explain better than me why this paragraph is illogical, bloviating verbal wankery...
5. Once again, a political candidate who won a primary running as "different" from the mainstream is caught trying to disremember their past pronouncements. In this case, it is Rand Paul, who promoted the idea of an underground border fence, but now appears to be unable to recall these comments...