It was about the money. The Miami Herald reports that Charlie got his money, and the medevacs started almost immediately. Somehow all of the space and coordination problems vanished when the “extortion payment” was guaranteed.

From the beginning of the crisis military aircraft have been transporting people to a Central Florida airport for processing: Flights from Haiti continue to arrive in Sanford airport

So far, the airport has received 8,596 passengers on 110 flights, Crews said. Of those, 6,544 were American citizens and 2,052 were foreign nationals. Emergency workers have transported 67 passengers to area hospitals because of injuries or illnesses.

The officials at the airport, near Orlando have been talking about asking for National Guard or Federal help with the processing because of the number of flights.

Of course, most people don’t know that the charter flights organized by the NGOs and relief groups cannot, for the most part, carry passengers, so this is another task the military takes on. They fly relief supplies in and then convert the cargo bay for passenger use, including medical evacuations.

Badtux gets his tail feathers in a knot over ignorant proposals to create jobs. The people making them keep showing up on the op-ed pages and the talk shows, but none of them has ever been in business. They honestly don’t understand how a business works.

If you want more jobs, you have to create demand. The easiest way of doing that is with a sizable stimulus package that begins to repair the neglected US infrastructure.

If you are in business, you hire the number of people necessary to meet the demand you have. You don’t hire more people unless you have a good reason to believe they are necessary to meet increased demand.

You don’t hire people based on taxes or wages, you hire based on demand. If you aren’t selling anything, it doesn’t make a bit of difference how many tax breaks you will get, or how cheap labor is, you are losing money.

If people don’t get back to work, the deficit will get worse as tax revenues continue to fall. If people go back to work the deficit will decline as revenues increase. You have to spend money to make money. Currently the only entity capable of spending the kind of money necessary to kick start the economy is the Federal government. A spending freeze will make matters worse and shut the economy down. We know this, because we have been through it before.

It’s Groundhog Day and some of the militant marmots object to being disturbed.