From The Times ...

President-elect Barack Obama is riding a powerful wave of optimism into the White House, with Americans confident he can turn the economy around but prepared to give him years to deal with the crush of problems he faces starting Tuesday, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll.

While hopes for the new president are extraordinarily high, the poll found, expectations for what Mr. Obama will actually be able to accomplish appear to have been tempered by the scale of the nation's problems at home and abroad.

The findings suggest that Mr. Obama has achieved some success with his effort, which began with his victory speech in Chicago in November, to gird Americans for a slow economic recovery and difficult years ahead after a campaign that generated striking enthusiasm and high hopes for change.

Late Update: As TPM Reader SG points out there's also this very striking passage ...

By contrast, 79 percent were optimistic about the next four years under Mr. Obama, a level of good will for a new chief executive that exceeds that measured for any of the past five incoming presidents. And it cuts across party lines: 58 percent of the respondents who said they voted for Mr. Obama's opponent in the general election, Senator John McCain of Arizona, said they were optimistic about the country in an Obama administration.

Maybe time to start looking again at what the Swedes did (warning: long PDF) during their banking crisis in the early 1990s.

Late Update: For more on what I'm talking about and for a possible look just over the horizon, look at this piece in tomorrow's Post.

Going into the next several celebratory days, I want to put out a call for brief notes explaining what the inauguration means to you. That covers a lot of ground, but intentionally so. You can answer the question in whatever way you like. Obviously we will not be able to publish all of them. But we'll try to publish a range of different ones over the next few days.

Please try to keep them as brief and concise as possible. Not because there's anything inherently wrong with going long. But we'll want to publish as many as possible. And if they run too long that will be difficult.

If you're interested, send us your thoughts at the comments email linked at the upper right with the subject heading "My Take."

It's cool how if you cut apart a big unprofitable company all the new little parts become profitable.

Barack Obama declares that this election should only be the beginning of more change to come, and simultaneously transforms his presidential campaign into a new political organization to help him accomplish just that. That and other political news in today's Election Central Saturday Roundup.

From TPM Reader RV ...

As a former Navy guy, I know something about ship handling, and I've got to say that the actions of the captains and crews of the rescue boats, particularly the three large ferries that started pulling up alongside the ditched plane within 3-4 minutes of the landing were totally superb! It is not easy to take large craft like these, racing across the water and get them to slow down enough to ease up alongside a large bobbing object in the water without actually hitting it. A collision between any of those boats and the plane might have tragically sent all concerned quickly to the bottom of the Hudson. Watching these ships pulling gently up, lowering the forward ramps then quickly and calmly embarking the stranded passengers and crew was most impressive for this old sailor!

I don't want to shortchange Captain Sullenberger and the crew of the plane for performing this miracle, but we also need to be aware of and grateful to those first responders that sealed the deal by pulling everyone off the plane safely!

This video apparently comes from a Coast Guard surveillance camera. It's a static scene until just after 2 minutes into the video when the plane, apparently just having touched down, comes into the field of view as a splash line from the left. A few moments later the camera zooms in and you can see the first moments of the passengers coming out of the plane.

TPM Reader JM gives some more perspective on yesterday's events ...

I'm a pilot (though not an air transport pilot), and like you, I was amazed by yesterday's events. Capt. Sullenburger's feat is more than just impressive - I'd say he puts his pants on more than one leg at a time. I'm not aware of any commercial ditchings that didn't involve fatalities, but:

1 - Many ditchings are more last minute than this one, and consequently much rougher. Sullenburger had the presence of mind to plan to ditch early, as soon as he realized that making it to Teterboro would be a stretch (remember that you only get one chance to make a "dead stick" landing, and Teterboro is surrounded by buildings). This early decision was HUGE.

2 - The Hudson, yesterday at 4:00 PM, was about as good a ditching spot as you could get (except for being cold). It was flat calm, and it's long, wide, and straight, which makes it much easier to bring the plane down gently, which is the only way to have a chance at not tearing the plane apart on impact (the reason that smaller planes ditch successfully more often is that they fly much slower - the A320 is about to stall when the plane I fly is approaching its top speed).

3 - As you know, it's also surrounded by docks and rich with rescue craft and ferries, and their prompt arrival at the crash site was also essential to saving everyone.

Sullenburger will be a hero to all pilots for this feat, and he should - he's got ice water in his veins and is one hell of a pilot. Amazing story.

As I noted below, if you look at the map of the flight, it's clear that the pilot decided very early that the Hudson was the place to put the plane down. And that snap decision may have been the one that saved everyone's life. I also remember thinking yesterday that the water looked very smooth, much less wavy than I frequently see it when I walk along the river park. And that was probably critical too.

Pentagon inspector general finds no wrongdoing by DOD in catering to, briefing, and generally coddling retired officers who became TV talking heads.

Late Update: Rep. Paul Hodes (D-NH) calls the IG report a "whitewash" and a "nice parting gift to the Bush White House from the Pentagon."

Assuming that it's true that there's never been a planned ditching of a commercial jetliner where all the passengers survived, I asked in my earlier post whether there's even been one that didn't have a catastrophic result. I've been reading over the pointers and impromptu research from readers on this question, and the answer seems to turn a series of qualifiers and definitions.

For instance, here is a list on Wikipedia of survival rates in cases where planes were intentionally ditched or landed in water. The examples run the gamut. But the gist is that while there are a couple cases of 100% survival, those were with planes that were much smaller and carried far fewer people. A Russian passenger plane was ditched in the Neva River in 1963. And everyone survived. But the plane had only a third the number of passengers as yesterday USAir flight had. A plane went down in the water in Java in 2002 after an engine flameout during a hail storm. In that case, one flight attendant died -- out of 66 people aboard the plane.

Most of the ditchings seem to end something like how this one did in 1970 in the caribbean -- with a substantial number of people surviving, but a lot of fatalities too.

Then there are cases of unintentional water landings. You'd think those would not go as well as the intentional ones. But there was a 1968 case in which a Japan Airlines plane miscalculated where the runway was and came down in the water about two and one-half miles short of the runway at San Franciso International. There were 96 passengers aboard. And all survived. You can actually see a picture of the crashed plane here (.pdf), which looks surprisingly similar to yesterday's incident. But again, this is seen as being in a different category since the plane was not in distress. The pilot just misjudged where the runway was.

I'll post with more examples if they come in.

Late Update: Apples and oranges. This incident in Sweden in 1991 was different from the ditchings we've discussed. But in some respects it's quite similar. MD-81 takes off with 122 passengers and seven crew, quickly develops problems in one engine and then a similar failure in the other. At this point they're at 3000 feet with no power. They try to get back to the airport for an emergency landing. But they come out of the cloud cover and 600 feet and decide to put down in a clearing in the forest. The plane breaks into three pieces and two passengers were seriously injured. But no fatalities. The cause of the engine failures was determined to be overnight ice on the wings which had entered the engines.

Is Obama's relationship with Google too close?

Will Google use its immense, and growing, power wisely?

This and more in our latest book club on New York Times columnist Randy Stross' Planet Google.

Like many of you I'm sure, when I heard yesterday that a USAir jet had crashed into the Hudson River, I steeled myself for a horrible story. So when the first images came up on our bank of TV screens here at TPM, a quizzical look came over my face as I saw an apparently fully intact jet liner gently bobbing on the surface of the water. And with people more or less calmly emerging from the plane, apparently uninjured.

Now, as I've told you before, I'm a recovering aerophobe. And recovery is a very relative thing. So every time I've boarded a plane over the years and gotten that speech about how, after the plane goes down in the ocean, we'll grab our flotation seat cushions, walk down the aisle and hop into the inflatable boats, it's always been with a mix of terror and gallows incredulity that I've thought to myself: "Right."

So when I saw this amazing turn of events, I started thinking: Has anyone ever pulled something like this off before?

Last night on the local news, a reporter said this was the first time in the history of American aviation that a pilot (presumably of a large commercial craft) has ditched a plane in the water and escaped any fatalities. And this article in today's Journal similarly suggests this is an extremely rare feat.

Writes J. Lynn Lunsford ...

Although commercial jetliners are equipped with life vests and inflatable slides, there have been few successful attempts at water landings during the jet age. Indeed, even though pilots go through the motions of learning to ditch a plane in water, the generally held belief is that such landings would almost certainly result in fatalities.

But I'm curious. Set aside no fatalities. Has a commercial jet ever been ditched in the water and not been a mass fatality event? Not a rhetorical question. Does anyone know the history on this?

As a separate matter. You may have heard that in addition to being a demonstrably impressive pilot, Capt. Chesley Sullenberger, the man piloting the plane yesterday, has a resume that makes him a legitimate air safety expert. (Talk about good luck matching the bad luck of a double bird strike!) He even played some part in developing the Crew Resource Management training for his airline that most experts say has played a real part in the improvement in commercial air safety over the last decade and one half. And he's worked a number of NTSB crash investigations. (CRM, in very broad terms, is a leadership and collaboration training program that helps pilots and co-pilots make the right decisions in the seconds or minutes that make the difference between close calls and catastrophes.)

And one other little detail that adds to the drama, at least for me. The jet's engines didn't go out over the water. They went out over the Bronx. And there's not a lot of open land around here. There was some brief discussion with the air traffic controller of trying to land at Teterboro Airport across the river in New Jersey. But Sullenberger apparently made the snap decision that that was not a viable option. And after managing to get over the skyscrapers in Manhattan and only a few hundred feet above the George Washington Bridge, he maneuvered the plane over the Hudson and down onto the water, having decided that that was the best option, from the very short list of choices that remained.

Late Update: In the spirit of everything is out there on the web, here's a Jet flight blog that has a plotted map with the exact course of the USAir Flight. Amazing to look at, and appears to contradict what I'd read about the plane going over the Empire State building or any of the big Manhattan skyscrapers. If this map is right the plane was never over lower Manhattan and appeared to get out over the Hudson around the 130s or above in Harlem. At that point he was flying at around 1200 feet. Looking at the map with my very untrained eye, it looks like the pilot made a deliberate decision to use the Hudson as a runway just after the initial accident over the Bronx.

From our Reader who's watching this closely ...

The stimulus bill gives the Secretary of the Energy Department the power to guarantee about $100 billion of loans to alternative energy projects. While this pales in comparison to guarantees given to many banks, and definitely in comparison to the $7.5 trillion of debt guaranteed by Treasury, FDIC and the Fed over last year, still this ability to get alternative energy investing across the valley of death now faced by the sector is hugely important as a green job creation mechanism and a major step toward energy independence and climate change abatement. Hat's off to Chris Van Hollen and Ed Markey and other members of Congress --- if the Energy Secretary has the freedom to administer the guarantees in a commercially reasonable way.

Last month I spent a lot of time marshaling arguments and expert opinions suggesting that the president actually lacked the power to revoke a pardon, as he did in the case of New York real estate developer Isaac Toussie. But as Steven Aftergood reports, a new Congressional Research Service report concludes that President Bush probably did have the power to revoke the pardon since it had yet to be 'executed'. Again, past DOJ pardon attorney have said there's no real 'execution' of anything that the Pardon Attorney does. And it's worth noting that the CRS has no legal standing. But that's their take.

We're in the final 100 hours of the Bush era, but we're not out of the woods yet. Before its time is up, the Administration is still trying to open up new areas to offshore drilling, and they're trying to bury a Pentagon inspector general report on the military's TV pundits program with a 4 p.m. Friday afternoon release. Then there are the last-minute pardons expected sometime between now and noon Tuesday.

I remember back during the dot.com bubble they had a few websites with really snarky titles that chronicled each company that bit the dust.

It's sort of similar now. Only these are real companies.

I've been keeping you updated on the rash of major newspaper bankruptcies and other papers that are slated to cease publication altogether in weeks or months. But as TPM Reader JS notes the situation is more complicated and in some ways more promising than papers just not being able to make money any more. A lot of these papers that are in trouble are still profitable on an operating basis. They're just leveraged with crazy amounts of debt and/or run by people who insist on making a annual profit margin that was just never sustainable ...

I just wanted to comment on this (and other) newspaper bankruptcies. I have done a significant amount of strategic planning and management consulting work with major metro newspapers over the past 10 years and saw much of this coming via scenario-based planning in the late 90's.

The problems are well documented by now - classified advertising (the most profitable part of the old print model) is done much better and much more cheaply online, young (and not so young) readers prefer the immediacy of the online channel, core display advertising clients have consolidated (fewer department stores, cellular providers, etc.). Meanwhile, advertising revenues always fall in a down economy (and this is a very down economy).

But, most of these businesses are still fine on an operating basis (i.e., they make money before interest and taxes). Having gone public (seemed like a good idea at the time given the 20% margins, etc.) and subsequently having been leveraged to the hilt, they are getting killed on debt-service as well as in the public equity markets (which prices assets based on future growth potential). For goodness sakes, every single operating entity owned by the now bankrupt Tribune Company is making money - but, Sam Zell (and John Madigan before him) loaded the company up with so much debt, there is no way out other than a bankruptcy judge.

The current owners (particularly the Sam Zell's and private equity firms of the world) don't give a hoot for the public trust aspect of the major metros that they own - unlike the families that started and ran these papers for generations. If they lose all their equity and the bond holders take big hair cuts (I'm talking buzz cut...), that strikes me as a fair and equitable outcome for people who never believed in the missions of the entities they owned.

So, these bankruptcies may in the medium to long run be good for journalism (in the traditional sense). Assuming the new owners emerge from bankruptcy with limited debt, the papers have many positive attributes upon which to earn a reasonable profit while building new sources of revenue. They have an unparalleled local focus and understanding, they are the most efficient vehicle for several categories of advertising, and they have significant advertising sales forces that can be re-focused on lines of business that can sustain the papers over the long haul. This is particularly true if the surviving owners are people who believe in the public trust mission of their papers and news-oriented web channels.

A Reader comments on the green energy provisions in the stimulus bill ...

The range of subsidies for energy in stimulus bill is very impressive. It is noteworthy that there is a grant program for alternatives. Grants to start up businesses are very rare. Tax policy usually returns tax payments or creates deductions and credits against taxes. To send checks to people is quite extraordinary for Congress. So this is a sign of awareness that wind and solar need real cash, given that they are start up projects where there haven't been taxes paid in the past. Giving them a transferable tax credit, one that they can sell to others, is not effective for the special bad reason that there is no appetite for buying tax credits just now, since folks don't have profits and have plenty of losses from their own businesses and portfolios.

It is also good that loan guarantees appear in the proposal. But the big question is this: can the energy secretary guarantee $8b of loans or does the provision mean that he can guarantee approximately $100b as long as he doesn't actually spend (that is, lose) more than $8 b.