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The penis-bomb fizzle in Detroit (there's a phrase I never imagined writing!) points up the utter failure of U.S. intelligence agencies. Abdulmutallab bought his ticket with cash and didn't check a bag! His own father had reported him directly to the Nigerian embassy. Our Nigerian embassy.
Systems fail, though. All systems.
What I'd like to see as follow-up to this good factual story from the New York Times is a way for me to assess whether this was a rare failure due to imperfection or a symptom of systemic failure. That requires numbers:
Here's a slash at Darth Cheney with a light saber:
To put it simply: this President is not interested in bellicose rhetoric, he is focused on action. Seven years of bellicose rhetoric failed to reduce the threat from al Qaeda and succeeded in dividing this country. And it seems strangely off-key now, at a time when our country is under attack, for the architect of those policies to be attacking the President.Amen.
Ezra Klein lays out the case for Senate rules reform - specifically, of course, a drastic weakening of the filibuster. Then he goes off the rails:
[A]ttract Republicans to the project by phasing the filibuster out six or eight years in the future, when we can't predict which party will initially benefit.No, there's already too much delay. When the new Senate is seated on January 3, 2011, change the rules by majority vote.
Who knew!
I don't wish the man dead. Off the air, sure, but not dead.
Just imagine, though, the application of the Republican Le Chatelier's principle to Rush's chest pains. In response to every economic act - and especially the economic acts of the government - conservatives claim:
It's more important to Jim DeMint (R-Ft. Sumter) to be a dick about unions than to secure Americans against terror threats:
Sen. Jim DeMint, R-South Carolina, has been holding up the confirmation of Erroll Southers to be TSA chief, in an effort to prevent TSA employees from joining a labor union. Southers is a former FBI special agent and counterterrorism expert.But is he chastened in the least about his role? Nope, he doubles down on the labor hatred:
"I hope this incident will lead the President to re-think this policy and put the interests of American travelers ahead of organized labor."Not ahead of organized management, mind you, just ahead of labor in any form.
Another Republican finds the law dispensable if he's hysterically afraid enough.
New Yorkers just aren't killing each other the way they used to. In trying to understand why, I've run into the major puzzles of America and murder.
The national rate of murder in America has been rising while that of nearly all our friendly rivals in Europe has fallen dramatically (PDF) over the past several centuries. New York's current rate of 6 murders per 100,000 people per year is pretty much average for America as a whole, quite an accomplishment for a large city, but it's six times the norm in Europe.
Gun possession, measured as the number of households owning at least one gun, has actually decreased over the long term. Handgun ownership, though, has increased dramatically. Is that the explanation?
If so, it's only part of the explanation, since even neglecting the majority of 2009 New York murders that were indeed committed with a gun, New York's murder rate is still more than twice the European rate.
Maybe we're just meaner than the rest of the so-called civilized world.
Parker Griffith is no longer a DINO. Good riddance!
Finally he's found a home among the Republicans. What took him so long?
(h/t Lawyers, Guns, and Money)
This terrorist wannabe set off an incendiary device inside his pants between his legs. It may have taken balls to try what he tried, but here's hoping he has burned through his lifetime supply.
Kudos to the passengers for not standing idly by.
Well, none in the big media, anyway:
The breach of "journalistic objectivity" comes not from calling this conduct what it is, but from refusing to do so -- from obfuscating what took place by using soothing euphemisms and according equal deference to the plainly false denials of those who did it...Torture, war crimes, atrocities. The Bushists did them all in our name. The national media refuse to hold them criminally accountable. The Democrats refuse too.
Listen carefully (around 0:15) and you will hear that this prayer group prayed for Sen. Robert Byrd to die so that the current tepid health insurance reform wouldn't pass a procedural vote in the Senate. The caller explicitly states that they got the message from wingnut Sen. Tom Coburn to hold their prayer vigil:
The degree to which Mr. Byrd’s condition looms over the proceedings was underscored Monday when Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, outraged Democrats in a floor speech by declaring that "what the American people ought to pray is that somebody can’t make the vote."He didn't explicitly call on Byrd to die. He left that for wingnut bloggers - and eager Christianists. Is the Christianity of forgiveness and mercy passé?
Liberal media bias is a bullshit article of faith not representative of the real world. It's evergreen because it's fake.
A survey conducted by the liberal media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, which focused on the first two weeks of February 2003, found that of 393 people interviewed on-camera for network news reports about the war, just 17 percent of them expressed skepticism about the looming invasion. This at a time when polling showed that approximately 50 percent of Americans had doubts about the planned war. And according to figures from media analyst Andrew Tyndall, of the 414 Iraq stories broadcast on NBC, ABC, and CBS from September 2002 until February 2003, almost all the stories could be traced back to sources from the White House, the Pentagon, or the State Department. Just 8 percent of the television news reports were of independent origin.The fundamental source of existential danger to the American republic is the hardy ability of a large portion of the population to believe obvious lies.
Republicans have real opportunities in the 2010 mid-term elections, but they are determined to go even harder right. Charlie Crist isn't wingnut enough, so they'll give Democrats a better chance to win a Senate seat in Florida. Maybe they want us to have to deal with another conservadem.
You can usually tell when the party out of power really, really wants back into power. They move to the middle. Today's insane Republican Party clearly hungers for power, but they are unwilling to compromise at all.
That unwillingness to compromise is dangerous for any democracy.
