I’ll be appearing this weekend on CSPAN’s Book TV. My taped appearance at Borders in San Diego last month will air at 7 p.m. PST on Saturday, September 8th. It was a pretty interesting reading. Two of Cunningham’s former commanding officers at Top Gun showed up and one them had quite a bit to say. I even had a heckler!

The Congress has thankfully cut off funding for the DP-2, a plane that never flew and cost taxpayers $63 million.

The DP-2 program was a bad idea that refused to go away. It has been funded for nearly 20 years exclusively by earmarks from congressman and presidential aspirant Duncan Hunter. DuPont Aerospace, the company that developed the plane, was based in El Cajon, California in the heart of Hunter’s district.

It was only a matter of time before someone got killed trying to fly this thing. The DP-2 suffered four mishaps in the past four years. In November 2004, a test pilot struck the ceiling of the cockpit as the cabin floor cracked and the aircraft filled with hot exhaust. He exited through the cabin window because the door had been jammed shut.

Tony DuPont dreamed up the concept of a jet that could hover and fly backwards in the 1960s. In the 1980s, he convinced Hunter that the DP-2 could ferry small teams of special operations forces in and out of remote war zones.

Government officials rejected the concept, but Hunter insisted on seeing it through. Report after report came out detailing the deep misgivings that unbiased government engineers had with the project. And year after year, Hunter continued earmarking money for the DP-2. He requested another $6 million this year.

Finally, in June, the House Committee on Science and Technology convened an unusual hearing to find out what the government was getting for its money. The hearing got little attention in the press, but here are some highlights:

John Eney, a Navy aerospace engineer, recalled how disturbed he was during a 1999 visit to duPont’s test platform at a small commercial airport in El Cajon, California:

“That platform was permanently located on the public airport property, less than 30 feet from the chain-link fence on the boundary between the airport property and a public thoroughfare including sidewalks, office and automobile parking in the city of El Cajon. The risk to off-airport property and pedestrian traffic was immense and of little apparent concern to duPont Aerospace.”

Also disturbing to Eney were duPont’s plans to use an ejection seat commandeered by “suspect means” from an F-14:

“That ‘free gift’ F-14 ejection seat was simply plopped into the DP-2 cockpit area with over a foot or more of the seat head box protruding well above the top of the enclosed cabin structure. This was unexplained by duPont management when challenged.”

Several witnesses said that while the DP-2 might be a good idea worth exploring, duPont Aerospace was not the company to do it. Tony duPont is the company’s president, his brother, Rex, is vice president and his wife, Carol, is director of administration. Tony did not like hearing he was wrong, as a former duPont engineer testified:

“The general rule of thumb was, Tony gets his way.”

Whatever merits the DP-2 concept had were doomed by mismanagement, poor morale, bad engineering judgments. DuPont even billed the government $1,700 for polo shirts with the company’s logo, $2,000 for an annual picnic and $3,000 for a family vacation on a cruise ship.

Duncan Hunter appeared blind to the problem:

Although the Pentagon may not have a firm requirement for something and may not have requested funds for it, my job is to listen to our warfighters, to set a vision, and to help the warfighter get the best tools possible to do his or her job. I am willing to take some risks to get there.

If that really was Hunter’s motivation, if the DP-2 was indeed critically important to our armed forces, he should have been the first to recognize that Tony duPont was not the man for the job. He should have worked to ensure that the plane was built by a company with the wherewithal to get the job done.

Sadly, Hunter’s motive seems to have been to help out a friend and keep jobs in his district, and that does not augur well of the leadership abilities of a man who is seeking your vote for president.

Following up on yesterday’s post, I decided to look at anonymous postings from the U.S. Senate on Wikipedia. Here’s what senators and/or their staff have contributed to the general body of Internet knowledge:

• Things You Didn’t Know About Sen. Robert Byrd, D-WVa.: “Robert is 180 years old.”
• Things You Didn’t Know About Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo.: “Salazar has also earned the nickname ‘Shifty Eyes’ Salazar due to his constant and rapid screening of the Senate chamber.”
• Things You Didn’t Know About Cow Tipping: “In Arkansas, however, anything is possible. DUDE you GOTTA tip em with a pickup truck. Yeeeeaaahhhh…city boy.”
• Things You Didn’t Want to Know About a Dirty Sanchez: “When performed as a masturbatory act, the practice is also refered to as a ‘Bauer‘ – and involves the participant smearing their own feces under their nose.” (Note: this computer was later used to edit out an unflattering reference from former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s page)
• Things You Didn’t Know about Zak Baig: “Zak, also known as Zackaroo, currently works for U.S. Senator David Vitter as his projects director.”
• More Things You Didn’t Know About Zak Baig: “Zak is Kyle Ruckert‘s hero. Kyle wishes he could be more like Zak.” (Ruckert is Vitter’s chief of staff)
• Still More Things You Didn’t Know About Zak Baig: “Zak‘s arch enemy is Kyle Ruckert. This is attributable to the fact that Kyle is better than Zak at everything, including fantasy football, life, and spelling (ref: ‘arch enemey’ used as 2 words).”

I’ve been having some fun with Wiki Scanner, a Web-based program that allows you to uncover anonymous posters on the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. Wiki Scanner is the brainchild of Virgil Griffith, a grad student with a devilishly clever imagination.

Turns out that some of these anonymous postings — 3,733 of them — came from users logged on to computers at the U.S. House of Representatives. All the posts come from a single IP address, but it’s apparently used by many people.

Here’s what the people of the House has been up to (see here for yourself):

• Score Settling. Edited Rep. Eric Cantor’s entry to read: “He is a bad person and member of the House Ways and Means Committee” and “Cantor is also Chief Deputy Majority Whip and smells of cow dung.”
• Trivia about Masturbation. “According to one biography, Allen Ginsberg came up with the idea for his celebrated poem “Howl” while masturbating with a broom.”
• Expressing opinions about monster-themed cereals: “It [Boo Berry] is by far the most delicious of all the monster themed cereals.”
• Posting at least six entries to the Wikipedia entry on Dimples
• Calling a whole long list of people gay.
• Vandalizing the entry for basketball player Ray Jackson: “JOHN SANTORE: SUCKS?”
• Giving a shout out to a friend who shares the name of a dead British poet: “Thomas Dermody is an awesome intern who was born in Stockton, CA. He went to school at Cal Berkeley. He is now going to GWU to earn his masters degree in environmental policy planning. If you don’t know him yet, you’re missing out.”
• Oh, and removing unflattering references from a long list of Republican members of Congress.

So far, only Timothy Hill, a spokesman for Rep. David Davis of Tennessee, has admitted editing entries about his boss and his brother, who’s also a congressman. So who’s the Boo Berry lover?

I’ll be live on the KPBS-FM show “These Days” with host Tom Fudge on Tuesday, August 21 from 9 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. PDT talking about my book and the proceedings in the Brent Wilkes case that I’ve been blogging about. You can listen in via the Internet on the station’s Website.