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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Beacons bolster big bailouts

Did you see that article about hikers armed with personal beacon locaters taking inordinate risks because they know rescuers will bail them out? One overmatched group took on a ridiculously difficult hike in the Grand Canyon and ended up hitting the high-tech panic button three times.

California’s Search and Rescue operation has dubbed this “Yuppie 911.”

Great name. You’d think it would’ve already been used to describe Wall Street firms plucked from precarious ledges because they’re too big to fall. Knowing that the government will swoop in, they take bigger chances than common sense warrants.

Or as a rescuer said in the article about irresponsible adventurers: “With the Yuppie 911, you send a message to a satellite and the government pulls your butt out of something you shouldn’t have been in in the first place.”

So what happened before Wall Street firms became so big that the government freaked out about misguided adventures? The same thing that happened with hikers before they used beacons.

“In the past, people who got in trouble self-rescued; they got on their hands and knees and crawled out,” said John Amrhein, San Bernardino County’s emergency coordinator.

Looks like a return to yesteryear would be significant progress.

Rocky courtship. Congratulations to Rosanna Peterson, who is the first woman to be nominated to serve on the U.S. District Court bench for Eastern Washington. But the Gonzaga University law professor better hang onto that day job, because Republicans in the U.S. Senate are dragging out confirmations like never before.

It’s not unusual for the opposition party to stall the process with fights over controversial selections, but they appear to be doing that with nearly all of them. Thus far, only three of President Barack Obama’s 23 judicial nominees have been confirmed. Part of the problem is the president’s deliberate pace as he looks for less controversial candidates. By this time in his first term, President George W. Bush had forwarded 95 names to the Senate.

But Obama’s strategy isn’t working. His first choice, David Hamilton, of Indiana, received the imprimatur of GOP Sen. Richard Lugar, but that hasn’t been good enough for other Republicans. Hamilton has been waiting since March for a vote.

Writing for the online magazine Slate, Doug Kendall, of the Constitutional Accountability Center said: “It seems clear that Senate Republicans are prepared to take the partisan war over the courts into uncharted territory – delaying up-or-down votes on the Senate floor for even the most qualified and uncontroversial of the president’s judicial nominees.”

It was bad enough when the battlefield was controversial nominees, but with 95 vacancies and a growing backlog of federal cases, the collateral damage could be unprecedented.

Earth to pilots. So those pilots who didn’t respond to air traffic controllers and overshot an airport by 150 miles say they weren’t napping. No, they were puzzling over work schedules on their laptop computers.

In other words, they were wide awake while being oblivious. I find that more frightening than a snooze cruise.

Smart Bombs is written by Associate Editor Gary Crooks and appears Wednesdays and Sundays on the Opinion page. Crooks can be reached at garyc@spokesman.com or at (509) 459-5026.