From The New York Times:

Cellphones in Flight? This Means War!
By BEN STEIN

Published: March 26, 2006

By BEN STEIN
JOHN BELL HOOD may well have been the most destructive American of all time. He was a Confederate general of undisputed courage and daring, but dazzlingly little strategic or tactical wisdom. ("All lion and no fox," said Robert E. Lee about this horrifyingly misguided soul when it was really too late to do much about it.)

Among his many other misdeeds, he ordered the assault on virtually impregnable Union positions in Franklin, Tenn., in November 1864. That led to far more casualties than Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg and accomplished absolutely zero for his side, because the Union was about to evacuate its positions anyway. It led, in a way, to the absolute dissolution of the Army of Tennessee, an irretrievable disaster for the "lost cause."

(By the way, he's "the gallant Hood of Texas" referred to in the fourth stanza of "The Yellow Rose of Texas," added as the Civil War was ending — if anyone remembers that song.)

This comes to mind because I believe that an award in General Hood's honor should be created for the most disastrous government decision of the year, or of the decade. Now, some may say the award should go to George W. Bush for deciding to invade Iraq, but the jury is still out on that, and in any event, at the time it seemed a good idea to people much smarter than I am.

But there is a decision pending within the bowels of the federal government that may be the single most incomprehensibly wrongheaded decision of the century. It's small when compared with Iraq, but it's still maddening. It involves allowing passengers to talk on their cellphones while they are in flight.

Now, as everyone who has the misfortune to fly commercially knows, air travel today is mind-bogglingly uncomfortable. The seats are small. The flights are nearly always full to overflowing. The food is unspeakable. The air is fetid and filled with germs. Many a time I board an airliner hale and hearty, only to emerge with a raging pneumonia.

But there is one saving grace. Unless you are seated behind or next to really rude people — which happens surprisingly rarely — air travel is fairly quiet. Yes, the flight attendants stand around and talk. Yes, before the plane takes off people scream into their cellphones, but along about three hours into the flight from, say, Kennedy to LAX, it's pretty peaceful.

That's solely because passengers can't use cellphones aloft. That prohibition was one of the great decisions ever. Now, in a fit of idiocy, some airlines are suggesting that they be allowed to sell the use of cellphones in the air at nominal prices. This will mean yelling and screaming and boasting and complaining for almost all the time you're sealed in that sardine can. The government is apparently planning to allow this anarchy.

Why? Well, for a long time, cellphone use was barred because safety experts worried they had the "potential" to interfere with navigation systems or cellphones on the ground — concerns that now, apparently because of technological advances, they no longer have. (The real reason for the ban, as I am told by airline personnel in secret, is that cellphone screeching made many passengers so crazy that flight attendants feared incidents of air rage.)

The ban worked well. Now, in the rush to mine every penny they can from passengers, airlines plan to jettison that old excuse and, when planes are above 10,000 feet, let people holler into their cellphones, or maybe it will be the airlines' cellphones.

This is rank madness. It will make most of us hide by listening to deafening music. (I recommend the live concert version of "Idiot Wind" on the "Hard Rain" disc of the immortal Bob Dylan to drown out the idiot winds of the people around you.) It will make us retaliate by talking into our own cellphones. It will take what could have been a bearable experience and turn it into hell.

Why would the government, already reeling from criticism about Iraq and Katrina and the deficits, now make a decision that has absolutely no merit? If the airlines are that needy, let's bring back the Civil Aeronautics Board and allow the government to set prices again. Let's allow a $10-a-passenger surcharge to pay the airlines for silence. But please, Mr. Bush, don't let me be seated next to a man who talks on the phone for an hour, telling his mother what he just bought that day at Costco. Please don't make me sit next to a woman fighting with her boyfriend or a salesman speed-dialing his entire prospect list for concrete blocks.

It is bad enough to allow cellphone use in a confined space anywhere. But on an airplane flight? No. Some planes already allow use of built-in telephones, but those are so hard to use, so amazingly costly, that they might as well not be there. Virtually unlimited cellphone use in the air will turn a swamp into Armageddon.

Please, Mr. Bush, step into this one and just say no to turning airplanes into penal colonies. It is only a matter of time before someone gets killed over this, and I don't want it to be on my flight. Let's not make us think about John Bell Hood.

ON another matter, some kindly readers complained that my recent list of high-dividend-paying stocks — the DeMuth 7 Percent Solution — contained some that returned principal and some that, in the same vein, paid out more than they earned (although this is tricky with real estate investment trusts because of depreciation issues that may not be realistic in terms of income). So I sent Phil DeMuth back to the drawing board. Here is a revised diversified portfolio of 10 stocks (each with a payout ratio less than 100 percent), along with their dividend yields..

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Allied Capital, 7.8 percent.

REIT'S Bedford Property Investors, 7.5; Crescent Real Estate Equities, 7.1; One Liberty Properties, 6.8; National Health Investors, 7.4.

PRINTING Deluxe, 6.8.

MINING Great Northern Iron Ore Properties, 6.0.

PIPELINES Magellan Midstream Partners, 6.9.

CHEMICALS NL Industries, 4.7.

RETAILING Tuesday Morning, 6.6.

Live it up.