Stumble of the Week

Friday the 13th The Wrong Stuff. When I board an airplane, I assume the pilot's in charge. Not so, it turns out, on Korean Air. In the much-ridiculed “nut rage” case Cho Hyun-ah was sentenced to a year in jail for ordering the pilot to return to the gate so she could kick off the chief steward, who had already apologized on his knees. What's scary is that the pilot complied. It’s hard to picture Chuck Yeager doing that.

Candor. Asked by a British reporter about his belief in evolution, current Republican presidential frontrunner, Scott Walker said, “I’m going to punt on that one.” Now for the hard questions.

Judicial Restraint. In King v Burwell, the challenge to Obamacare that somehow found its way to the Supreme Court, all four plaintiffs, writes Linda Greenhouse, “can’t afford health insurance but want to be declared ineligible for the federal tax subsidies that would make insurance affordable for them.” Huh? One listed her address as a short-stay motel where she hasn’t stayed since 2013. Another claims Obama is a Muslim.

Accountability. “It is ironic, to put it very mildly,” writes Joe Conason, “that more than a decade after the Iraq invasion, which resulted from official and journalistic deceptions on a vast scale, the only individual deemed worthy of punishment is a TV newsman who inflated a war story on a talk show.” Still, that’s one more than the number of top bank executives who have been fired since they took down the economy in 2008.