Some clarification:

The F.W. Woolworth Company — better known as Woolworth or Woolworth’s — was established in the United States in 1878 and later expanded abroad. In 1962, it founded the Woolco chain of discount department stores. Kinney Shoes was purchased in 1963 and that led to the founding of several chains of more specialized footwear stores, notably Foot Locker in 1974.

During the 1980’s, the company’s traditional operations started to suffer from competition from the likes of Wal-Mart and Kmart and the company began shifting its focus to sports and specialized footwear. The Woolco stores in the USA were closed in 1983. About a decade later, the Woolco stores in Canada were variously sold to Wal-Mart or Zellers or were closed. In 1997, the company changed its name to Venator and closed the last of its traditional Woolworth’s and Kinney stores in the USA and Canada. It vacated the landmark Woolworth Building in New York City the next year. The corporate name was changed to the Foot Locker, Inc., in 2001. It remains in business as the operator of specialized stores such as the Foot Locker and Sports Champ.

As for its operations elsewhere, the UK branch was sold in 1982 and the subsidiary in Germany and Austria was sold in 1998. The Mexican subsidiary was sold at some point as well. These continue to operate under the Woolworth name or a variation of it.

The Woolworth companies in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa took their name from the American company, but never had any corporate ties to it.

the EMPEROR did participate in the invasion of southern France in August. US Navy Hellcats also fought in that operation, flying from the “jeep” carriers KASAAN BAY and TULAGI. The Hellcats performed strikes and shot down a handful of German aircraft.

That was Operation Dragoon. I once heard a contemporaneous recording of a radio reporter’s interview of a USN Hellcat pilot who expressed disappointment at not encountering German aircraft that day. For that reason, he and the other F6F pilots were redirected to ground targets.

At the beginning of the interview, the reporter asked what type of plane the pilot flew. When he answered “F6F”, the reporter asked for the name because “I can’t keep those letters and numbers straight.”

Via Instapundit and TigerHawk:

The New York Times

November 9, 2008

Show Me the Money

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

So, I was speaking to an Iranian friend about what a mind-bending thing it must be for people in the Middle East to see Americans, seven years after 9/11, electing someone named Barack Hussein Obama as president. America is surely the only nation that could — in the same decade — go to war against a president named Hussein (Saddam of Iraq), threaten to use force against a country whose most revered religious martyr is named Hussein (Iran) and then elect its own president who’s middle-named Hussein.

Is this a great country or what?

Much has been written about how people all around the world are celebrating the victory of our Hussein — Barack of Illinois, whose first name means “blessing” in Arabic. It is, indeed, a blessing that so many people in so many places see something of themselves reflected in Obama, whether in the color of his skin, the religion of his father, his African heritage, his being raised by a single mother or his childhood of poverty. And that ensures that Obama will probably have a longer than usual honeymoon with the world.

But I wouldn’t exaggerate it. The minute Obama has to exercise U.S. military power somewhere in the world, you can be sure that he will get blowback. For now, though, his biography, demeanor and willingness to at least test a regime like Iran’s with diplomacy makes him more difficult to demonize than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

“If you’re a hard-liner in Tehran, a U.S. president who wants to talk to you presents more of a quandary than a U.S. president who wants to confront you,” remarked Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment. “How are you going to implore crowds to chant ‘Death to Barack Hussein Obama’? That sounds more like the chant of the oppressor, not the victim. Obama just doesn’t fit the radical Islamist narrative of a racist, blood-thirsty America, which is bent on oppressing Muslims worldwide. There’s a cognitive dissonance. It’s like Hollywood casting Sidney Poitier to play Charles Manson. It just doesn’t fit.”

But while the world appears poised to give Obama a generous honeymoon, there lurks a much more important question: How long of a honeymoon will Obama give the world?

To all those Europeans, Canadians, Japanese, Russians, Iranians, Chinese, Indians, Africans and Latin Americans who are e-mailing their American friends about their joy at having “America back,” now that Obama is in, I just have one thing to say: “Show me the money!”

Don’t just show me the love. Don’t just give me the smiles. Your love is fickle and, as I said, it will last about as long as the first Obama airstrike against an Al Qaeda position in Pakistan. No, no, no, show me the money. Show me that you are ready to be Obama stakeholders, not free-riders — stakeholders in what will be expensive and difficult initiatives by the Obama administration to keep the world stable and free at a time when we have fewer resources.

Examples: I understand any foreigner who objected to the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the gross mishandling of the postwar. But surely everyone in the world has an interest in helping Obama, who opposed the war, bring it to a decent and stable end, especially now that there is a chance that Iraq could emerge as the first democracy, albeit messy, in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world. Obama was against how this Iraq war started, but he is going to be held responsible for how it ends, so why don’t all our allies now offer whatever they can — money, police, aid workers, troops, diplomatic support — to increase the odds of a decent end in Iraq? Ditto Afghanistan.

The U.N. says it doesn’t want Iran to go nuclear and doesn’t want the U.S. to use force to prevent Iran from going nuclear. I agree. That’s why I want all those people in China, France, Russia, India and Germany who are smiling for Obama to go out and demand that their governments use their tremendous economic leverage with Iran to let the Iranians know that if Tehran continues to move toward a nuclear weapon, in opposition to U.N. resolutions, these countries will impose real economic sanctions. Nothing — and I mean nothing — would more help President-elect Obama to forge a diplomatic deal with Iran than having a threat of biting Chinese, Indian and E.U. economic sanctions in his holster.

President Bush, because he was so easily demonized, made being a free-rider on American power easy for everyone — and Americans paid the price. Obama will not make it so easy.

So to everyone overseas I say: thanks for your applause for our new president. I’m glad you all feel that America “is back.” If you want Obama to succeed, though, don’t just show us the love, show us the money. Show us the troops. Show us the diplomatic effort. Show us the economic partnership. Show us something more than a fresh smile. Because freedom is not free and your excuse for doing less than you could is leaving town in January.

Prediction: When Obama asks for help, he will get the same official and public response as Bush, just more politely.

Courtesy of Instapundit, a forecast for 2009-2013:

http://chizumatic.mee.nu/not_the_end_of_the_world

STEVEN DEN BESTE

November 04, 2008

Not the end of the world

It’s easy to let yourself go in despair and start thinking things like “We are well-and-truly ****” or “This is the worst of all possible outcomes”. But it isn’t true.

I think this election is going to be a “coming of age” moment for a lot of people. They say, “Be careful what you wish for” and a lot of people got their wish yesterday.

And now they’re bound to be disappointed. Not even Jesus could satisfy all the expectations of Obama’s most vocal supporters, or fulfill all the promises Obama has made.

I think Obama is going to turn out to be the worst president since Carter, and for the same reason: good intentions do not guarantee good results. Idealists often stub their toes on the wayward rocks of reality, and fall on their faces. And the world doesn’t respond to benign behavior benignly.

But there’s another reason why: Obama has been hiding his light under a basket. A lot of people bought a pig in a poke today, and now they’re going to find out what they bought. Obama isn’t what most of them think he is. The intoxication of the cult will wear off, leaving a monumental hangover.

And four years from now they’ll be older and much wiser.

A lot of bad things are going to happen during this term. But I don’t think that this is an irreversible catastrophe for the union. I’ve lived long enough to absorb this basic truth: the US is too large and too strong to destroy in just 4 years. Or even in 8. We survived 6 years of Nixon. We survived 4 years of Carter. We even survived 8 years of Clinton, God alone knows how.

The President of the United States is the most powerful political figure in the world, but as national executives go his powers are actually quite restricted. Obama will become President, but he won’t be dictator or king, let alone deity. He still has to work with the House and the Senate, and he still has to live within Constitutional restrictions, and with a judiciary that he mostly didn’t appoint.

The main reason this will be a “coming of age” moment is that now Obama and the Democrats have to put up or shut up. Obama got elected by making himself a blank slate, with vapid promises about “hope” and “change” — but now he actually has to do something. Now he has to reveal his true agenda. And with the Democrats also having a majority in both chambers of Congress, now the Democrats really have to lead. And they’re not going to do a very good job of it. It’s going to be amusing to watch.

And the people who fell for the demagoguery will learn an invaluable lesson.

Oh, the Democrats try to blame failure on Republican filibusters [stalling a bill in the Senate through endless debate], of which there will be many. But that’s always been a factor in our system, and many people believe it’s an important check on government excess. The tradition in the Senate is that it is supposed to be a buffer against transient political fads, and the filibuster is a major part of that.

If the Democrats go all in, and change the filibuster rule [ending a filibuster now requires 60 votes], then they’ll have truly seized the nettle with both hands and won’t have any excuses any longer. That’s why they won’t do it. It’s their last fig-leaf. But even with the filibuster rule in place, they’ll be stuck trying to deliver now on all the promises implied, or inferred, during this election. The Republicans can only filibuster on bills the Democrats have already proposed.

And it ain’t possible for the Democrats to deliver what’s been promised. Gonna be a hell of a lot of disillusioned lefties out there. A lot of people who felt they were deceived. A lot of people who will eventually realize that the Obama campaign was something of a cult.

Disillusionment will turn to a feeling of betrayal. And that will, in turn, convert to anger.

In the mean time, Obama and Congressional Democrats will do things that cause harm, but very little of it will be irreversible.

I would have enjoyed watching lefty heads explode if McCain had won. But we’re going to see lefty heads exploding anyway; it’s just going to take longer.

In the mean time, those of us who didn’t want Obama to be president have to accept that he is. And let’s not give in to the kind of paranoid fever dreams that have consumed the left for the last 8 years. Let us collectively take a vow tonight: no “Obama derangement syndrome”. Obama is a politician. He isn’t the devil incarnate.

So what are the good sides of what just happened?

1. It is no longer possible for anyone to deny that the MSM [mainstream media] is heavily biased. The MSM have been biased for decades but managed an illusion of fairness. That is no longer possible; the MSM have squandered their credibility during this campaign. They’ll never get that credibility back again.

2. Since the Democrats got nearly everything they hoped for in this campaign, they’ll have no excuses and will have to produce. They’ll have to reveal their true agenda — or else make clear that they don’t really have any beyond gaining power.

3. Every few decades the American people have to be reminded that peace only comes with strength. The next four years will be this generation’s lesson.

Now, a few predictions for the next four years:

1. Obama’s “hold out your hand to everyone” foreign policy is going to be a catastrophe. They’ll love it in Europe. They’re probably laughing their heads off about it in the middle east already.

2. The US hasn’t suffered a terrorist attack by al Qaeda since 9/11, but we’ll get at least one during Obama’s term.

3. We’re going to lose in Afghanistan.

4. Iran will get nuclear weapons. There will be nuclear war between Iran and Israel. (This is the only irreversibly terrible thing I see upcoming, and it’s very bad indeed.)

5. There will eventually be a press backlash against Obama which will make their treatment of Bush look mild. Partly that’s going to be because Obama is going to disappoint them just as much as all his other supporters. Partly it will be the MSM desperately trying to regain its own credibility, by trying to show that they’re not in his tank any longer. And because of that they are eventually going to do the reporting they should have done during this campaign, about Obama’s less-than-savory friends, and about voter fraud, and about illegal fund-raising, and about a lot of other things.

and 6. Obama will not be re-elected in 2012. He may even end up doing an LBJ [President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who dropped his bid for reelection in 1968 after losing the New Hampshire primary] and not even running again.

One last thing: I’m not saying I’m happy with this outcome. I would much rather have had McCain win. But this is not the end of the world, or the end of this nation. We’ve survived much worse.

And now we need to show the lefties how to lose. Our mission for the next four years is to be in opposition without becoming deranged.

UPDATE: One other good thing: no one will be spinning grand conspiracy theories about this administration’s Vice President being an evil, conniving genius who is the true power behind the throne.

A color illustration of G-ATOY represents the Comanche in Private Aircraft Since 1946 by Kenneth Munson. She also autographed the picture. As I recall, her signature was in the style of the Piper trademark of the late fifties and early sixties.

My question is why ? why convert a tricycle undercarriage aircraft to tail dragger, I wouldn’t have thought there was a shortage of tail draggers at that time ? was it to make use of the slightly better speed and range of the PA22 with the nostalgia etc of the PA20 ? would the conversion retain the same operating charicteristics ?

The Pacer has the reputation of being one of the best handling lightplanes of its time and the Tri-Pacer for being one of the stodgiest due to the extra weight and drag. A lesson in aerodynamics.

The Tr-pacer was Pipers answer to Cessna all-metal tricycle aeroplanes in the early 1950’s.

According to Wikipedia, the Tri-Pacer outsold the Pacer by 6 to 1 during the former’s first year on sale. A lesson in marketing.