Fear and terror and angry speeches, oh my!

There was one election year in which Mr. Brilliant and I were so fed up with electroal politics that we planned a Jamaican vacation for that week. Oh, we finally succumbed and watched a little bit of the election returns on our tiny TV while ensconced in a beachfront room at the old and alas now defunct T-Water Beach Hotel in Negril, but we managed to escape most of it.

I kind of feel that way about the approaching anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, but unfortunately I'm stuck here in New Jersey. It almost seems as if politicians and the nation's security apparatus are happy about this opportunity to once again fan the flames of fear and war once again. Yesterday we heard rumblings of, and today lots of mediaflogging about an "unconfirmed credible threat" against New York City bridges and tunnels this weekend, accompanied by the same footage we see over and over again of guys wrapped in what look like rags, "training" on children's monkeybars. It's astounding that after a decade and over a trillion dollars spent on wars that we were told were an integral part of the so-called "war on terror", we're still in a situation where a bunch of bewildered-looking cops with rifles are going to be posted all around the city looking for...what, exactly? Unless we're prepared to stop and search every vehicle using every bridge and tunnel in the city, how do you stop something?

And again -- a bunch of guys in rags training on monkeybars are going to be whipping people into a panic.

It probably won't be the denizens of the city itself. After all, they don't have the luxury of being afraid. What we ARE going to see, I suspect, is another rush of rhetoric in the flyover states and the south against sharia law, and probably a few anti-Muslim hate crimes as well. But in some ways, these dead-enders who still insist that Barack Obama is a Muslim terrorist and that the few hundred Muslims in their state are somehow going to turn their entire state into a caliphate, aren't all that different from the terrorists they fear. The world to which they want to return, the world symbolized by the conspicuous and radical Christianity of Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, is gone and can never return. It won't be long before every suburban neighborhood has a gay couple raising their children and a house co-owned by five young people who aren't coupled off and a multigenerational immigarnt family living in it. They can promise to return us to their never-existed TV vision of the 1950's, but unless a Rick Perry is prepared to run the entire country by executive order of forced conversion and incarceration/massacre of those who do not conform (and I'm not saying he wouldn't), the forces of a freedom that isn't represented only to corporate greed are already in play.

Andrew Sullivan has a long essay in Newsweek this week that's part of his ongoing mea culpa about having been such an ardent Bushflogger in the early days after the 9/11 attacks. We can grant him his absolution or not as we please, but one tiny excerpt struck me:

From the streets of Tehran to Cairo, it appears that the young Muslim generation does not want to withdraw from the modern world into a cultural and intellectual blind alley forever. They are too busy on Twitter.

There have always been mass movements. Tiananmen Square took place in 1989, long before anyone even thought of something like Twitter. But social networking has certainly made it easy, and the things we viddy on a computer or iPad screen are a window to a different kind of world. In 2001, the web was still largely a "push" medium; today it's participatory and immediate. When young people can see a different world in front of them, it becomes more difficult to talk them into sacrificing themselves for a vague promise of 72 virgins after death. The terrorist dead-enders are still out there, but if we as a nation can just keep from fucking it up, it's just possible that we might be able to help the protesters and fighters in Egypt and Libya and Yemen and every other country that's trying to shake off the despots we've tolerated in the name of oil to pull their nations, kicking and screaming if necessary, into the present. And then our task will be to keep our own from slding back to the past.

I'm not going to be opining much about the 9/11 anniversary, other than just a comparatively dispassionate piece I'll put up on Sunday about my own experiences on that day, because frankly, after a decade of living in a nation governed by one party that is willing to use fear and terror to further its own agenda and another so terrified of that party that it refues to call the sky blue if the other one says it's yellow, I just don't want to relive the last decade. And while New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg has taken a lot of crap for limiting the invited guests to Sunday's memorial to the families of those lost, Sunday really should be for them, not for those of us who only had to watch it on TV and then get on with our lives.

And in the midst of all this, President Please-Like-Me was on the teevee again last night, doing another one of his quasi-populist bellowings in front of a Congress that predictably either sat on its hands of applauded furiously depending on which party they represent. The aforementioned Andrew Sullivan is so far into penitence mode that he actually used the name "Harry Truman" in his critique of the speech, so desperate is he to find something strong and resolute in this president. This was Obama's time to say, "You guys fucked this up, I've spent three years trying to fix it, and you've blocked me every step of the way. I'm sick of dealing with you, now here's what we're going to do." But instead he patronized the crowded under-bus crowd with a few crumb-words like "union" and "polluters" while talking about starving Social Security with "payroll tax cuts" (the better to gut it later in his quest to be Nixon in China) and making sure that already highly-skilled unemployed Americans have NO time to go on interviews for jobs that might pay a living wage by making them work for private companies for the pittance that unemployment pays. But hey, at least American companies will have access to cheap labor....and we'll see how many of them actually hire these people at even one penny more than unemployment pays.

Sullivan isn't the only one sold on the speech, but we know this guy gives good speechifying. But as Digby notes, after a bit of lip service paid to liberal ideals, the rest of it was all about cutting spending, making Medicare unavailable to people between the ages of 65 and 67, and tax cuts that are unlikely to get enough fuel into the demand side of the economy to get this stalled-out engine going again.

Happy Friday, everyone.

Osama bin Laden succeeded beyond his wildest dreams

If you didn't see it last night, watch this segment from Rachel Maddow last night, in which she explains that Osama bin Laden's goal wasn't about Islam, or a caliphate, or even about U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia. No, like most rich kids whose wealth came from family money (including the one who occupied the White House when he attacked the US), his concern was about money:

Note in particular the Bin Laden quote from October 2004:

We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy ... as for the economic deficit, it has reached astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars. The real loser is you. The American people and their economy.

Think about where we are now: deficts as far as the eye can see -- deficits that the very people who used to wear 9/11 around their necks as "wingnut whistles" until a black Democratic president succeeded where THEIR guy failed (or didn't even try, as he ADMITTED barely six months after the attacks, when a visit to lower Manhattan still resulted in burning eyes) now insist have to be paid on the backs of the old and the poor. Think about the cost of two wars, one of which was sold to Americans as being for their safety when it had nothing to do with that. Think about the money shoveled into the pockets of Halliburton executives (including those of the then-Vice President) and other contractors -- unaccountable money resulting from no-bid contracts. Think about the spending for security theatre; for beefed-up patrols, for x-ray scanners at airports designed to make Americans accept being treated like criminals so that they can "feel safe." Think of the society we live in now as a result of a few hundred thousand dollars of expense by a guy who's essentially no different from Paris Hilton, except Paris Hilton buys chihuahuas and lends her name to perfume and likes to go to parties instead of pretending to be a holy man while living in a mansion and cynically recruiting the phony tough and the crazy brave to kill themselves for Allah.

Soon after the 9/11 attacks, Bill Maher was fired from his Politically Incorrect show on ABC for straying from the "terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center are cowards" line, pointing out that to take control of a jet you don't know how to fly and steer it into a skyscraper is many things, all of them horrible, but one thing it is NOT is cowardly. What IS cowardly is sitting in a Pakistan mansion, or even in an Afghan cave, knowing you can GO TO a mansion any time you want to and take a nice shower and have a good meal, knowing you have millions of dollars at your disposal, and let other people do your dirty work.

George W. Bush decided it was Saddam Hussein who was worth the effort, not Osama Bin Laden. Six months after the attacks, Bush had lost interest in the bright shiny object he'd vowed to "smoke out" "dead or alive" barely six months earlier. That Bin Laden was living in comfort in Pakistan ought perhaps to begin questioning again just what DID happen in Tora Bora, and whether Osama was really the black sheep of the Bin Laden family (which has become more difficult to believe, now that we know that HE was the one they all relied on for money), and why he was able to (or allowed to) escape.

Most of us felt after the 9/11 attacks that Afghanistan was a "just war" designed to bring the mastermind and financier of the attacks to justice one way or another. Over time, as we've installed a corrupt puppet in Hamid Karzai, and wandered in the desert for the last ten years, even that war has become just another American misadventure that is bankrupting us just as surely as the Soviets were bankrupted in Afghanistan in the 1980s -- while fighting Osama Bin Laden's minions, who were called mujahadeen then, and also called "our allies".

Many of us who weren't in thrall to the tough talk of the whiny little faux cowboy in the White House knew that Iraq was NOT a just war, that it was unnecessary, and that it was related to either oil (which has turned out to be true) or to George W. Bush's psychosexual issues with his father.

One war that may have started out just and has turned into a quagmire and another that never should have been fought in the first place. Both are wars from which we seem unable to extricate ourselves. Between the wounded and the dead, the body count of American servicepeople is approaching Vietnam levels. And that is the second great tragedy of 9/11 and what Osama Bin Laden and George W. Bush have wrought (and what Barack Obama seems bound and determined to continue).

Captain Shannon P. Meehan writes in the New York Times what it's like to be a veteran of these wars:

As I sifted through the responses of my friends on social networks, I read comments like, “Great news. If only we hadn’t gotten off course with Iraq for so long.” Or things like, “Could have gotten him earlier if we hadn’t wasted our time in the illegal war in Iraq.”

All this made me realize just how disconnected I am from the killing of Bin Laden. The more I reflect upon it, the less I feel a part of it, and the less I feel that I was ever any part of our war against terrorism, in the public’s eye at least.

My war — the Iraq war — is being remembered as quite a different war than the “war on terror.” Its narrative, shaped by the media and the general public, breaks dramatically from that of the war in Afghanistan and the pursuit of terrorists around the globe. The Iraq war has become the “mistake war,” one so many critics feel we should have never been a part of.

I have come to realize that, regardless of my own personal beliefs and opinions, this is how the Iraq war will be remembered. And this brings me to question myself, my efforts and my own worth. How will our achievements and sacrifices in Iraq be remembered? Will all that I did while I served be nothing more than a mistake?

The more I travel and speak about my personal experiences, the more I feel the shifting cultural memory of this war. I’ve felt it devolve over time in those moments when I am thanked not for keeping us safe from terror, but rather shown appreciation mixed with pity for having had to fight in this “illegal”war.

I fear now that we soldiers will be remembered for being in the wrong war, fighting to bring the wrong man, Saddam Hussein, to justice. Consider the difference between the public reception of the killing of Bin Laden and the trial and execution of Hussein, a man responsible for the deaths of U.S. soldiers as well as years of oppression and systematic degradation of a land. The latter was met with questions and controversy. But the death of Bin Laden, a man who dared to bring horrific violence onto the shores of our country, has been met only with approval. Those differences are telling.

So, as much as I want to feel a part of this moment, to feel some sense that I contributed to it, I do not. As a veteran of the Iraq war, I do not feel entitled to any sort of meaningful connection to this achievement. Years of political and public criticism of the Iraq war has pushed me to believe that I did not fight terror, but rather a phantom.

After Vietnam, we hoped that this country would learn from that mistake and not enter into unnecessary wars ever again. We can still argue about Afghanistan, but as much as we recognize the honor the service and the self-sacrifice of Captain Meehan and others, we cannot face our feelings and our guilt about his feelings by recasting Iraq as some kind of noble cause when it so clearly was not. What we DO owe this man is again, a promise (this time to be kept) that we will not put his successors into a war without reason again, no matter how raw we are emotionally.

Such is the legacy of Osama Bin Laden: His enemy nation is on its knees, wracked by debt and declining standards of living and corporate greed and inequality. A nation whose citizens jump at the mere mention of Al Qaeda to the point that we have become willing to give up all of our privacy just to be able to believe, however falsely, that it won't happen again. A nation in which a Congressman can call McCarthyesque hearings demanding that people who are members of the religion Bin Laden professed to practice to somehow "prove" their loyalty to this country. A nation in which a President whose name is associated with Islam is hounded about what constitutes a valid birth certificate by people with no knowledge of legal documentation.

The demonstration in the street show that while George W. Bush wasn't "all that concerned" with Osama Bin Laden, Americans clearly were. We may be uncomfortable with the precedent of assassination (which may at some point in the future be used indiscriminately by another George Bush trying to prove his manhood to his father), and this does not mean the end of Al Qaeda or even of terrorism coming from the Middle East (as opposed to the terrorism brewing in our own heartland). But if we do not take time out from the celebrations and look at what we have allowed Osama Bin Laden to do to our country, not a decade ago, but in the decade since, then we deserve to continue our slow slog into oblivion.

More from Ezra Klein.

Toner cartridges of mass destruction

So what's it going to be next?

When "the terrorists win", it won't be because they turned this nation into a smoking crater, or killed every American in the world. They will win because we died of complete and utter absurdity.

I wrote over the weekend about my experience in "alternative screening" at the Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood airport. Getting on a plane has become an ordeal. I often carry two laptops when I fly -- my work laptop and a netbook for blogging and personal use. So for me to go through security requires at least three bins. Each laptop has to go separately, with nothing else in it. Then off comes the shoes. Then you get felt up or go through body scanners. And no matter how we react to whatever the last thing that Al-Qaeda has come up with, they always come up with something else.

Because explosive material was found in toner cartridges, toner and ink cartridges are now banned from overseas flights. As David Dayen says:

I can’t wait for the day terrorists try to put a bomb in a baby. Because then we won’t be allowed to bring a baby on the plane.

I've been saying for years that we go through all this reactive security theatre while people check their bags at the gate, where the bags go directly onto a plane, because the flight is so full that not everyone's wheelie suitcase is going to fit into the overhead compartment. Cargo coming into our ports is largely unscreened. And yet like sheep we allow unskilled TSA staff to zap us with x-rays "for our safety.

When you think about how we survived the Cuban Missile Crisis, which very well COULD have resulted in this country being turned into a crater, it's mind-boggling that we have been brought to our knees by boxcutters, shoes, underwear, and toner cartridges.

Impotent Old Men

No, I'm not talking about the Vatican this time. I'm talking about the Three Stooges of Faux Toughness, Joe Lieberman, John McCain, and Lindsey Graham, all of whom are every day that the story of the New York car bomb develops resembling more and more the old Al Franken/Tom Davis SNL sketch in which two politicians run ads trying to outdo each other on how tough on crime they'll be. It ends with one ad which has the candidate saying, "We'll kill 'em BEFORE they can commit a crime."

You have to wonder about guys like these three -- two Sore Losermen and a closet case -- and oh, hell, let's throw Dick Cheney in there too while we're at it, who have this hard-on for torture and for eviscerating due process and the Constitution in the name of "toughness" and "strength." Their "strength" is that of the schoolyard bully who still has to wear a diaper in bed at night. Where "strength" became equated with running around like a chicken with its head cut off, screaming "OMYGODTHETERRORISTSARECOMING WE'REALLGONNADIEOMGOMGOMGOMG!!!!!", I have no idea. But somewhere along the line, Republican politicians decided that there way hay to be made among residents of towns in flyover states that have a near-zero risk of actually being the target of a terrorist attack by keeping them in a constant state of fear. Lieberman is a particularly heinous example of this, and he's not even a Republican (though he might as well be). It's appalling that a Jewish politician whose sole concern in regard to terrorism often seems to be the safety of Israel, a country founded to assuage Western guilt about looking the other way while Hitler massacred Jews, would advocate summary stripping of citizenship and presumable deportation if the government doesn't like the crowd with which you hang out. Given the flexible government definition of terrorism in this country, which does not seem to include nurderers of women's health practitioners and white guys who want to overthrow the government, I'm not sure we can trust politicians to decide who should retain citizenship and who shouldn't. We are all Emma Goldman now.

That these guys are continuing to beat the waterboarding-and-torture drum, while Faisal Shahzad is singing like a canary even AFTER having his Miranda rights read, just shows that for them, the whole Bushian torture-and-military-tribunal thing isn't about our safety, it's about a bunch of impotent old men being able to feel that they can still get it up.

Once again, Rachel Maddow debunked the efficacy of this model, which may make John McCain, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham feel like Biggus Dickus, but is actually a less effective way of dealing with suspected and actual terrorists than the law enforcement model they deride:

What, no waterboarding? Damn....

Within 53 hours of a car bomb being found in New York, a combination of a vigilant public, good, solid police work, and federal agency participation, not only has a suspect in Saturday's car bombing been apprehended, but is singing like a canary, apparently without being tortured -- even after having been read his rights.

But why let a good capture stand in the way of the Republican effort to turn this country into Stalinist Russia? Barely able to contain their glee at the opportunity to whip themselves and their sympathizers into a frenzy o'fear again, Republicans from John McCain to Peter King to Joe Lieberman are falling all over each other trying to see who can shred the Constitution the fastest:

Rachel documented the insanity last night:

You especially have to love Lieberman's idea of automatically stripping the citizenship of anyone who affiliates with anyone the government, or more specifically, Joe Lieberman, doesn't like -- without any kind of due process at all.

The sight of these same craven opportunists, getting up again and again to use every incident in which someone swarthy commits a crime, to try to systematically eviscerate the Constitution, while calling Obama a tyrant, is sickening.

And yet, while Republicans are using this as a way to perhaps address the coming white minority by giving the government to walk up to swarthy people on the street and make them non-citizens eligible for deportation immediately, they don't seem to be at all concerned about why Emirates Airlines allowed Faisal Shahzad on a plane in the first place:

But at about 12:30 p.m. on Monday, more certain that Mr. Shahzad was the suspected terrorist, investigators asked the Department of Homeland Security to put him on the no-fly list. Three minutes later, the department sent airlines, including Emirates, an electronic notification that they should check the no-fly list for an update. At about 4:30 p.m., more information was added to the list, including Mr. Shahzad’s passport number, officials said.

Workers at Emirates evidently did not check the list, because at 6:30 p.m., Mr. Shahzad called the airline and booked a flight to Pakistan via Dubai, officials said. At 7:35 p.m., he arrived at the airport, paid cash for his ticket and was given a boarding pass.

Airlines are not required to report cash purchases, a Homeland Security official said. Emirates actually did report Mr. Shahzad’s purchase to the Transportation Security Administration — but only hours later, when he was already in custody, the official said.

Mr. Shahzad had evaded the surveillance effort and bought his ticket seven hours after his name went on the no-fly list. But the system gives security officials one more chance to stop a dangerous passenger.

I guess this is what "unseriousness" about fighting terrorism looks like

Gee, what do we have so far in the last few weeks....first we had the would-be "Christmas Day Bomber" talking to the FBI without even being tortured. Then about two weeks ago we had the capture of the Taliban's top military commander. Now Mullah Abdul Kabir, a leading Taliban military commander in eastern Afghanistan has been captured in Pakistan. And oh yeah...Najibullah Zazi, accused of plotting to bomb the New York City subway system? He's pleaded guilty. In civilian court. Without being waterboarded.

Oy. It's enough to put a torture advocate in the hospital with chest pains, I tell ya.

Is the sole purpose of antiterrorism activities to foster fear in the American population?

It certainly looks that way.

The Republicans like to grandstand about the threat that trying terrorists in civilian U.S. courts poses to this country, but I have to wonder if the mission of our intelligence agencies isn't to apprehend terrorists, but instead to just get information that can then be passed on to the media, which in turn can report breathlessly about "chatter" and "potential for an attack". I wonder if their real mission is to keep Americans, especially those in states that have about as much chance of being attacked as I have of waking up tomorrow as a tall, slim blonde, terrified and longing for a police state of tough rhetoric to reassure them.

It seems that the reason Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's visa wasn't revoked, or so they tell us, is because intelligence authorities feared it would get in the way of "a larger investigation":

Patrick F. Kennedy, an undersecretary for management at the State Department, said Abdulmutallab's visa wasn't taken away because intelligence officials asked his agency not to deny a visa to the suspected terrorist over concerns that a denial would've foiled a larger investigation into al-Qaida threats against the United States.

"Revocation action would've disclosed what they were doing," Kennedy said in testimony before the House Committee on Homeland Security. Allowing Adbulmutallab to keep the visa increased chances federal investigators would be able to get closer to apprehending the terror network he is accused of working with, "rather than simply knocking out one solider in that effort."

So....they're willing to risk one attack because the guy they're looking at MIGHT provide useful information about another? That's sounding an awful lot like LIHOP to me. Is that what they did with Osama bin Laden? Is that why bin Laden was never captured?

In a similar vein, a former Bush speechwriter complains that the Obama Administration is killing too many terrorists (via).

All of this leads me to believe that the REAL purpose of the so-called War on Terror is not to actually do anything about terrorism, but rather, to provide job security for the intelligence community and political fodder for Republicans who long for the good old days of 2001-2005, when Americans were paralyzed with fear and would have put up with just about anything just to be able to sleep at night.

Are they REALLY going to go there?

I can't believe what I was just watching on Countdown. Richard Wolffe is reporting that the Obama Administration plans to investigate whether intelligence information relative to the December 25 attempted airplane bombing was deliberately withheld. The question being asked is whether this is some kind of turf war among intelligence agencies -- the kind of turf war that was supposed to have stopped after the 9/11 attacks; or if the withholding of information was somehow deliberate -- "designed to make someone look bad."

I'm astounded that ANYONE in the press, let alone the Obama administration, is willing to go there. Because when you look at this information Wolffe is receiving in the context of Dick Cheney coming out of his hidey-hole to call Barack Obama weak on national security, it's not hard to imagine whom it was designed to make look bad. And if that's where the Administration is going, then we have something that some of us have been open to ever since that night in September 2001 when Larry Kudlow was on CNBC grinning from ear to ear because the attacks meant an end to any talk of a Social Security "lockbox"; one that should scare the bejeezus out of all of us -- that there are elements in this country's intelligence apparatus who are willing, even eager, to allow terrorist attacks to take place for Republican political gain.

We'll know more about this investigation tomorrow, when the President makes a statement around 4:00 PM Eastern time.

I'll post the clip as soon as I can get it.

UPDATE: Here it is:

...and Rachel's take:

This would be a great op-ed if I wasn't so sure it would be followed by one denouncing any government role in health coverage reform

It's really too bad that "Don't trust the government with any role in regulation of health care coverage" is the subtext that keeps seeping through Bobo's op-ed in the New York Times today, because otherwise it would be a piece he should have written during the Big Daddy era of George W. Bush, who treated Americans like children who needed to be lied to about the risks we face:

...there was a realistic sense that human institutions are necessarily flawed. History is not knowable or controllable. People should be grateful for whatever assistance that government can provide and had better do what they can to be responsible for their own fates.

That mature attitude seems to have largely vanished. Now we seem to expect perfection from government and then throw temper tantrums when it is not achieved. We seem to be in the position of young adolescents — who believe mommy and daddy can take care of everything, and then grow angry and cynical when it becomes clear they can’t.

[snip]

For better or worse, over the past 50 years we have concentrated authority in centralized agencies and reduced the role of decentralized citizen action. We’ve done this in many spheres of life. Maybe that’s wise, maybe it’s not. But we shouldn’t imagine that these centralized institutions are going to work perfectly or even well most of the time. It would be nice if we reacted to their inevitable failures not with rabid denunciation and cynicism, but with a little resiliency, an awareness that human systems fail and bad things will happen and we don’t have to lose our heads every time they do.

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney treated Americans like children, who needed to be told that their Big Swinging Dick Daddy Wars would keep them 100% safe. That if we just invaded enough countries or dropped enough bombs or eliminated enough freedoms, they could be 100% safe and never, ever, ever die and nothing bad would ever happen to them. Now we have Joe Lieberman advocating turning Yemen into a sheet of glass, we are still in George Bush's phony ginned-up war in Iraq, and we are escalating in Afghanistan. And there are those who think that if we just go to war against enough guys who think that dying will get them laid by 72 virgins in heaven, there will be ABSOLUTELY ZERO RISK to being an American. We will never, ever die and we will live forever.

In my neighborhood, after this winter is over, we will once again see parents putting their kids in what is practically full body armor before letting them get on a bicycle. They don't teach the kids to ride single file; I see entire families riding four abreast with the kids on the outside. But they put kids in helmets and kneepads and elbow pads and wrist guards, thinking this will keep them safe. I used to work with someone whose son was one of the last kids in the state killed on a bicycle before the helmet laws went into effect here in New Jersey. Since the helmet law was passed, parents have deluded themselves into thinking that a helmet will 100% assure that their kids are safe. They are wrong.

And yet when George Bush got up and said that if we just eviscerate everything we stand for; if we give up all our freedoms and allow him to torture anyone he wants to, we can all go to bed with visions of sugarplums dancing in our heads every night and we will never, ever die. And Americans believed it, because it is more comforting to think that a National Guard deserter and dry drunk can keep us 100% safe than to recognize that we live in a world of risk. I never believed that, and it has nothing to do with partisanship. I drive the Garden State Parkway to work every day, in a section where some genius decided that there should be no shoulder on the right and a large one on the left, so that there is nothing between the right-hand-lane and the Passaic River but a concrete divider that doesn't even come up to the door handle of the average car, and where the average prevailing speed is around 75 in a construction zone. So I know that on any day, I could leave the house for work and not come home. It's a risk I have to take because I have to earn a living. One has to leave the house in order to live.

I feel the same way when I agree with David Brooks as I do when Chris Matthews steps out of his Village head -- that what's infuriating about these guys is that they know better. And that they are willfully stupid because it buys them access and invitations to the right parties.

Wednesday Big Blue Smurf Blogging: What They Said

Today's honoree, Joan Walsh, who had the guts to articulate what I thought when I first saw the photographs, and then read about the web postings of the Christmas Day Liar Liar Pants on Fire would-be bomber:

Finally — and this is the sort of thing you're not allowed to say if you are, as Glenn Greenwald notes, a Serious Journalist — but every time I see Abdulmutallab's face I'm struck by how young and vulnerable he looks. His troubled Web writings left the same impression. I'm not sure what that means. He is, increasingly, the face of young militants — the product of a good home and education, even wealth, not of slums and deprivation (although the poverty and chaos of Yemen, Afghanistan and Somalia certainly contribute to al-Qaida's strength and appeal there). Abdulmutallab reminds me more of a troubled American school shooter than, say, Mohammed Atta. Al-Qaida's appeal to such lost souls may well be high, but it's a misery that crosses boundaries of religion and race.

The first thing I thought of when I read how depressed and confused this young man is was not "waterboarding", but "Paxil." There's a lot more of Eric Harris, or, let's face it, Timothy McVeigh, to this young man than there is of Osama Bin Laden. However horrific the results might have been had the bombing attempt succeeded, this is not a trained assassin, this is a fucked-up kid who was ripe for the picking by jihadists. I know the right would rather turn the entire Middle East into a sheet of glass than use the words "root causes", but it seems to me that perhaps we might want to look at why a 23-year-old with every advantage possible would prefer flaming aerial death to living in this world another day.

Honorable mention: White House spokesman Dan Pfeiffer, who finds enough nutsack to point out that Cheney talking about being ineffective against terrorism is like, if I may say, the pot calling the kettle black. Money quote:

Second, the former Vice President makes the clearly untrue claim that the President – who is this nation’s Commander-in-Chief – needs to realize we are at War. I don’t think anyone realizes this very hard reality more than President Obama. In his inaugural, the President said “our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred.” In a recent speech, Assistant to the President for Terrorism and Homeland Security John Brennan said “Instead, as the president has made clear, we are at war with al-Qaida, which attacked us on 9/11 and killed 3,000 people. We are at war with its violent extremist allies who seek to carry on al-Qaida’s murderous agenda. These are the terrorists we will destroy; these are the extremists we will defeat.” At West Point, the President told the nation why it was “in our vital national interest” to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to fight the war in Afghanistan, adding that as Commander in Chief, “I see firsthand the terrible wages of war.” And at Oslo, in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, the President said, “We are at war, and I am responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land.”

There are numerous other such public statements that explicitly state we are at war. The difference is this: President Obama doesn’t need to beat his chest to prove it, and – unlike the last Administration – we are not at war with a tactic (“terrorism”), we at war with something that is tangible: al Qaeda and its violent extremist allies.

I think Dan Pfeiffer just called Dick Cheney a pencil-dick. More like this, please.

Why, when there is a threat of an attack, is the President not told?

What's wrong with this picture:

The president was told during a private briefing on Tuesday morning while vacationing here in Hawaii that the government had a variety of information in its possession before the thwarted bombing that would have been a clear warning sign had it been shared among agencies, a senior official said.

Two officials said the government had intelligence from Yemen before Friday that leaders of a branch of Al Qaeda there were talking about “a Nigerian” being prepared for a terrorist attack. While the information did not include a name, officials said it would have been evident had it been compared with information about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian charged with trying to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit on Christmas Day.

The government also had more information about where Mr. Abdulmutallab had been and what some of his plans were.

Would someone please explain to me why, when intelligence agencies have evidence that there is someone being prepared for a terrorist attack, that the President is not told until FOUR DAYS AFTER THE ATTEMPT? Hell, even George W. Bush was notified in August 2001 that something was being prepped to go down. That he chose to ignore it doesn't mean he wasn't told. But if Barack Obama is telling the truth, then there is something very strange going on within our intelligence agencies. These agencies are charged with gathering information to anticipate and stop people like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from getting on a plane armed with explosives. That they didn't manage to put the pieces together, even after there were plenty of pieces back in 2001 that they didn't put together, is disturbing enough. But that they had the pieces and didn't think the President needed to be informed is even worse. Perhaps they got so used to George W. Bush, who genuinely didn't give a shit. Or perhaps there are elements in the intelligence community who know that an attack on this country would justify the Republican meme of "Barack Obama is a wuss" -- and ensure a return to Republican governance in 2010. And what's worse is I don't know which is a scarier prospect. But something is very, very rotten in the bowels of Washington. And Americans are going to be the collateral damage.

What do increased efforts at security checkpoints matter when someone can just get on the plane at the gate?

This article to which I linked yesterday (and here's the link again) describes a witness who says that a "sharp-dressed man" accompanied Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab to the airport GATE, where he talked the GATE AGENT into letting Mutallab on the plane.

So my question is this: Did Mutallab even go through a security checkpoint at all? Did the "sharp-dressed man" have some kind of special clearance? With all the handwringing going on about airport security in the aftermath of the Christmas Day bombing attempt, is it possible that the checkpoint system didn't fall apart; but rather, that Mutallab somehow never even went through it; that he had some sort of "special dispensation"?

Dutch authorities are investigating:

American lawyer Kurt Haskell, who was standing in line with his wife Lori on Christmas morning at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport, said Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was with a man aged about 50 of Indian appearance in an expensive suit talking with a ticket agent.

Mr Haskell claims that the second man told the ticket agent Abdulmutallab was from Sudan and did not have a passport. The ticket agent then referred the men to her manager down the hall, and Mr Haskell did not see the suspect against until after the failed bombing attempt.

Michael Lind today asks what the hell we're paying the government for:

Whether under Republicans or Democrats, whether the threat is Hurricane Katrina or Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab, America seems to be facing a general crisis of state incapacity. Money can be found by Democratic and Republican administrations alike to bail out campaign contributors on Wall Street, but not to repair our crumbling infrastructure.

The U.S. fought and won World War II in less time than it took to adequately protect U.S. soldiers against primitive weapons in Iraq. We are told that we have to stay in Iraq and Afghanistan indefinitely, because withdrawing would be admitting failure. Translation: We haven't won and are unlikely to win in the foreseeable future, if ever.

And now the narrowly averted Christmas massacre in the skies above Detroit. I don't think I'm overreacting when I say that if ever overreaction on the part of a citizenry has been justified, it is now. We the people deserve to be angry. It's not as though Abdulmutallab came up with a clever new tactic while our national security agencies were focused on the last tactic. He used more or less the same tactic as the "shoe bomber," Richard Reid, and nevertheless got through every layer of international and national security.

It's almost as though Osama bin Laden had been allowed through screening at Boston Logan, used a box cutter to hijack a jet, and would have crashed it but for the heroic intervention of other passengers defending themselves after their government failed to defend them.

Forget Democrats and Republicans for a minute. Every American should be asking the same questions: Why are we paying these people?

Our elected leaders and public servants can't do the hard stuff, and they can't do the easy stuff either. They can't provide universal, affordable healthcare, of the kind that all other advanced industrial societies have. They can't give us a system of banking that channels money from depositors to productive enterprises in our country, without being channeled into gambling with obscene profits skimmed off for the gambler-bankers. They can't win wars or avoid unwinnable ones. They can't even repair bridges and keep levees in operating condition, tasks mastered by the relatively primitive ancient Romans and ancient Chinese.

And now, after two invasions justified in the name of the "war on terror," the creation of a cumbersome Homeland Security bureaucracy and a Patriot Act, and countless studies, reports and hearings, it turns out that we Americans may have to defend ourselves against jihadists. First we were told ad nauseam that it was our job to identify possible terrorists in airports and bus terminals and train stations. What next? "Passengers are advised to be prepared to throw themselves if necessary on the flaming traveler next to them in the aircraft, in order to prevent a bomb from detonating. Please watch the demonstration by the flight attendants."

The reality as well as the perception of government incapacity threatens liberalism more than conservatism. After all, if public safety deteriorates, antisocial plutocrats can retreat into doormanned buildings and gated communities and hire their own private security forces, and rural conservatives can amass home arsenals. And if the costs of personal security reduce the room for taxes for public goods, well, then, so much the better, from the perspective of certain strains of anti-government conservatism.

In contrast, America's modest and inadequate system of social democracy rests on economic growth made possible by effective government provision of basic public goods. Economic growth in turn rests on physical security — the protection of citizens against criminals in their midst and hostile or law-breaking foreigners. Libertarians to the contrary, the indispensable preconditions for the free society are effective armed forces and police forces, be they citizen militias or professionals.

It's all well and good to look at airport security checkpoints, but it's beginning to sound as if Mutallab had one heck of a lot of help getting on that plane; help that may not even have involved lapses in airport security. But Lind's article is interesting in that it posits a world in which government is ineffective and we end up with paramilitary forces and gun nuts -- exactly the kind of world that Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, the teabaggers, and Dick Cheney regard as their utopian vision.

As I said last night, my tinfoil is tingling. Stay tuned.

...every girl's crazy 'bout a sharp dressed man

What else can I title this entry, even if it forces me to post Z.Z. Top videos:

But all kidding aside, if the account we're being fed about Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab didn't already stink enough, what should we make of this:

Flight 253 passenger: Sharp-dressed man aided terror suspect Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab onto plane without passport (MLive.com exclusive)

A Michigan man who was aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 says he witnessed Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab trying to board the plane in Amsterdam without a passport.

Kurt Haskell of Newport, Mich., who posted an earlier comment about his experience, talked exclusively with MLive.com and confirmed he was on the flight by sending a picture of his boarding pass. He and his wife, Lori, were returning from a safari in Uganda when they boarded the NWA flight on Friday.

Haskell said he and his wife were sitting on the ground near their boarding gate in Amsterdam, which is when they saw Mutallab approach the gate with an unidentified man.

Kurt and Lori Haskell are attorneys with Haskell Law Firm in Taylor. Their expertise includes bankruptcy, family law and estate planning.

While Mutallab was poorly dressed, his friend was dressed in an expensive suit, Haskell said. He says the suited man asked ticket agents whether Mutallab could board without a passport. “The guy said, 'He's from Sudan and we do this all the time.'”

Mutallab is Nigerian. Haskell believes the man may have been trying to garner sympathy for Mutallab's lack of documents by portraying him as a Sudanese refugee.

The ticket agent referred Mutallab and his companion to her manager down the hall, and Haskell didn't see Mutallab again until after he allegedly tried to detonate an explosive on the plane.

I don't know about you, but my tinfoil is tingling. And oh, yes, my little chickadees, it gets even better:

Two of the four leaders allegedly behind the al Qaeda plot to blow up a Northwest Airlines passenger jet over Detroit were released by the U.S. from the Guantanamo prison in November, 2007, according to American officials and Department of Defense documents. Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the Northwest bombing in a Monday statement that vowed more attacks on Americans.

Oh, and by the way, whether Dana Perino and Mary Matalin want to believe it or not, Barack Obama was not the President in November 2007.

American officials agreed to send the two terrorists from Guantanamo to Saudi Arabia where they entered into an "art therapy rehabilitation program" and were set free, according to U.S. and Saudi officials.

Guantanamo prisoner #333, Muhamad Attik al-Harbi, and prisoner #372, Said Ali Shari, were sent to Saudi Arabia on Nov. 9, 2007, according to the Defense Department log of detainees who were released from American custody. Al-Harbi has since changed his name to Muhamad al-Awfi.

ART THERAPY REHABILITATION PROGRAM??? After all the tough talk we heard from the Dickster about "the worst of the worst", the Bushcheney Junta released these two guys into ART THERAPY REHABILITATION? Now I'm a strong believer in the redemptive power of art. I mean, look at Robert Downey Jr., who did a couple of years in prison and is now the King of Quality Popular Entertainment. But it's hard to believe that the phony tough Cheney bought this as being rehabilitative.

Everything that's happened regarding our relations with the Islamic world since September 11, 2001 stinks to high heaven. I don't know what's going on, but there's no way this is all a coincidence.

Chasing air terrorism tactics is closing the barn door after the horse escapes

Perhaps the most head-scratching legacy of the past decade is going to be how ragtag bands of misguided men, financed by shadowy figures but not part of any state entity, managed to bring a superpower to its emotional needs. It took nineteen men with boxcutters to do it at the start of the decade, but only one with an explosive taped to his nutsack at the end of it. Ever since the 9/11 attacks, we've been "tightening airport security" in ways that chase the most recently-used tactic, and don't take at all into account that there's no limit to the ingenuity that people who are not only willing, but eager to die are going to use. Richard Reid tries to ignite explosives in his shoes, and we have to take off our shoes. Someone tries to mix an explosive using toiletries, and we can't take anything larger than 3 ounces on a plane. Now there's indications of a coming ban on the use of ANY electronic device on international flights -- no CD players, no iPODs, no Gameboys, no laptops, nothing.

And while the TSA claims that it doesn't want to "tip off terrorists", the restrictions are leaking out:

The government was vague about the steps it was taking, saying that it wanted the security experience to be “unpredictable” and that passengers would not find the same measures at every airport — a prospect that may upset airlines and travelers alike.

But several airlines released detailed information about the restrictions, saying that passengers on international flights coming to the United States will apparently have to remain in their seats for the last hour of a flight without any personal items on their laps. It was not clear how often the rule would affect domestic flights.

Overseas passengers will be restricted to only one carry-on item, and domestic passengers will probably face longer security lines. That was already the case in some airports Saturday, in the United States and overseas.

So if your five-year-old has to pee during the last hour of the flight, too bad. If you want to carry a handbag and your laptop bag, too bad. And none of this is going to make one iota of difference, because those who would try to bring down jetliners have already come up with a new and different way to get explosives on planes. How much of checked baggage is really checked for explosives again? And are we going to start doing cavity searches? What makes the TSA think that a guy who seeks martyrdom is going to balk at carrying plastic explosives in his rectum? Is this where we're headed? Cavity searches for everyone? What is this, Beavis and Butthead Do America?

Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Looneytunes) is blaming Barack Obama for the failed terrorism attempt. I guess Obama should have flown to Nigeria and screened Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab himself. Perhaps he's also muttering into his breakfast mug of Wild Turkey that since Obama has a funny name too and African roots, they're in cahoots. But what no one seems to want to look at here is George Bush WAS half right about one thing: These people are very resourceful. They're looking at holes in our security, and there is absolutely no way to plug all of them.

First, do no Harm; The Inmate Takes the Asylum

What goes on in the human brain when its pushed to the breaking point? Could today's massacre at Fort Hood possibly be the result of a terra-ist plot? The country is shocked, shocked, once again, to experience the war right here at home. I believe they call this a frag, but I don't know if it could possibly ever be as simple as that. Bush's wars have created a new kind of crazy, and I'm afraid that we are only just beginning to see the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the particular form of pain coming our way in the fallout from these long, pointless wars and our shoestring budget for military after-care.

Major Nidal Malik Hassan was career military soldier, specializing in getting an education. He had not been at Fort Hood long; it was his first deployment and he was reportedly treating soldiers with PTSD. Hassan otherwise was just one of the close to 50,000 military members and almost 8,000 family members living at Fort Hood, America's largest Military base. Of course, in a population like that, the reasons for enlisting vary, and its safe to say that probably its the minority who actually look forward to overseas wartime deployment.

Before going for his M.D, Hassan got a masters in public health, so he owed years of service to the military, having attended their schools, and had recently found out that he was to be deployed himself. This was an idea that he was reportedly opposed to. In a country where higher learning is often so expensive as to be out of the reach of most people, the time had finally come for the perpetual student to pay the piper.
Hassan, 39 and on his first assignment, had become a military psychiatrist specializing in the most difficult cases of traumatic stress. It makes some sort of perfect sense in a senseless world that treating the victims of this war with their percussion injuries and paranoia about every little thing, was more than he had bargained for.

This incident is being covered wall to wall as if something like this could never possibly happen on American soil, and not just that, on the beloved soil of a military base. But really, it seems like a regular day full of all the possibilities of a trip to the Mall of America. Bush's America is armed and as surely as Hassan shot up the soldier preparation area of Fort Hood with 2 semi-automatic handguns, every 3rd person at the mall likely has one of those tucked somewhere waiting for the inevitable. This is not a case of a soldier with AK-47's shooting up the place; its actually less fire power than the average gang member off the street has; But it was enough to kill 13 people and injure 31.

Of course also, the name Hassan sounds a little too Arabic for comfort, which has caused some punditry to mention the possibility of him becoming a part of a terraist network or some such. According to the punditry, a shooting of this type was recently called for by Al Qaeda leader, ex-American wunderkind, Adam Gadahn, and heaven knows, anything is possible at this point. It gives Tweety something to go on about; could Hassan have contacted Al Qaeda on the Internet tubes and been converted in his spare time? The possibilities are endless and we will likely be treated to every scenario along the way.

The inevitability of this thing is what is so glaring. Yeah, it's unusual and shocking that the guy either acted to make a statement or succumbed to this level of insanity, directly before he was to be deployed and that no one noticed that something was wrong. And yeah, it makes little sense that he would kill the very people that he was trained to help. There is surely more to this story, but the rub here is that whether or not he meant for this to be a political statement, it is one. The injuries and PTSD suffered by the soldiers he treated may well have been horrific enough, and his empathy or fear deep enough, that he couldn't take it. So, for whatever reason, he cracked, for whatever reason he crossed over into a place where he could do this much harm. His actions speak volumes on the damage of these wars and how overused our soldiers, in every capacity, are.

Hassan killed 13 people who had lives and families, fears and beliefs of their own. He locked his own fate in those actions, as he must have intended to die today. There is just no knowing what causes someone to snap, but we have to know, very clearly, that we are going to be seeing more of this. Its not going to be something predictable or something that you can prevent. The injuries suffered because of the Bush Administration's lies are vast and deep. We were going after Bin Laden, not nation building, but all of these years later, now we're responsible for the whole area.

So expect the unexpected and keep your eyes peeled for odd behavior or normal behavior or packages left untended on the subway platform. Bring a biscuit for the bomb dogs in Grand Central and realize that this is how much of the rest of the world lives their lives largely because of our meddling. Get used to the new landscape; Obama cant make things OK again...too much has happened.

The unsure nature of things is really not so different than the rest of life, except that we know that we can stop the setting that causes this particular problem, and really, as much as our representatives don't listen to us, we may have to try to make a louder statement that we have to stop the wars...both of them...

Stop.The.War.s.

That's all.

**** ******* ****

Breaking 10:45 PM via CNN: Hassan, who had been believed dead in the massacre, is alive and in FBI custody. So, maybe we are gonna get some answers after all. So much for going out in a blaze of glory!

c/p RIP Coco

Does a president have to allow a terror attack to get credit for "keeping us safe" afterward?

Unfortunately, I haven't been paying as much attention to the terror plot allegedly being cooked up by Najibullah Zazi and others. I think this all started while I was in Germany, where the upcoming national elections in that country were of more concern. Since I've been home, I've been getting settled back in, including a new office location following a move of my entire department to the local corporate headquarters. This has involved a sizable adjustment, as my group now is spread out over a huge floor instead of crowded into one floor of a smaller building, so we've lost the sense of being a small company instead of just one cog in a huge one. In addition to now being a full-fledged cube rat, I have the worst cube location in the building -- right in front of two managerial offices, so I feel much of the time as if I'm on the other side of the one-way glass in a psychological experiment. Now we deal with things like weekend raids by security of "unauthorized electronic equipment", which means anything from coffeemakers to electric fans, which are not returned to you until a guard follows you to your car to make sure you take the offending item home. But whatever -- it's a living.

After eight years of George W. Bush ratcheting up the terror alerts every time he was in political trouble, it's difficult to find much other than skepticism about the new terror plots. We've heard about threats against sports stadiums, shopping malls, and other places designed to work the South and the flyover states into a frenzy while New Yorkers go about their business because they don't have the luxury of fear. But with Barack Obama having far less to gain than Captain Codpiece by ginning up phony terror threats, and without a pattern of such things (yet), let's assume for a minute that the plot has been real and the Justice Department is in the process of breaking up a ring that was more sophisticated than the penny-ante ninja wannabes that constituted the average Bush Administration-era terrorist threat. Suppose that something big and imminent has been broken up here. Does the Obama Administration get credit for "keeping us safe"? Or does "keeping us safe" only matter after a spectacular, made-for-TV attack is allowed to play out?

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney received warnings of plots by Osama Bin Laden -- and did absolutely nothing. George Bush fussed at CIA agents who delivered him a briefing because he didn't want to be disturbed while on vacation. Dick Cheney said nothing about terrorism until after the 9/11 attacks, even though the World Trade Center had been attacked in 1993. And yet the World Trade Center site is now a hole in the ground, and has been for eight years.

If a terrorist plot falls in the forest and does not happen, does anyone hear it? Does it "count" if you actually prevent anything from happening, or only if you say "Whoops! Now we'll take action" after thousands of people die?

We are owed an apology

We were called traitors. We were told to leave the country. We were called every name in the book because we said that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. We were called un-American when we questioned why Osama bin Laden was allowed to escape at Tora Bora. We questioned the need for the kinds of 4th Amendment violations to which the Bush Administration was committed and we were told that only terrorists would be targeted, not Americans. And we also noticed that imminent threats seemed to always appear when George Bush was in trouble -- and wrote that we thought such threats were being ginned up for political reasons. Keith Olbermann noted this in a continually-updated series:

And once again, we were right:

Tom Ridge, the first secretary of homeland security, asserts in a new book that he was pressured by top advisers to President George W. Bush to raise the national threat level just before the 2004 election in what he suspected was an effort to influence the vote.

After Osama bin Laden released a threatening videotape four days before the election, Attorney General John Ashcroft and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld pushed Mr. Ridge to elevate the public threat posture but he refused, according to the book. Mr. Ridge calls it a “dramatic and inconceivable” event that “proved most troublesome” and reinforced his decision to resign.

The provocative allegation provides fresh ammunition for critics who have accused the Bush administration of politicizing national security. Mr. Bush and his Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, were locked in a tight race heading into that final weekend, and some analysts concluded that even without a higher threat level, the bin Laden tape helped the president win re-election by reminding voters of the danger of Al Qaeda.

The progressive blogosphere was called every name in the book because unlike those who dove under the bed with a plastic tarp in one hand and a roll of duct tape in the other every time George Bush or Dick Cheney said "Boo!", we looked at the evidence and what was going on OUTSIDE the Administration and rightly concluded that they were full of shit. Unlike those who dove under the bed with a plastic tarp in one hand and a roll of duct tape in the other every time George Bush or Dick Cheney said "Boo!", we noted that when warnings came in of an impending attack, George Bush and Dick Cheney did nothing -- and yet they insisted they were the ones who kept us safe. By the time they left office, they'd convinced the plastic sheeting and duct tape crowd that 9/11 had happened on Bill Clinton's watch. But on every single issue on which we noted the truth, we were called traitors by the right. But we were correct and they were wrong.

They owe us an apology, but I know full well it isn't coming. Because as we are now seeing in the health care debate, the right and their frothing, screaming, spittle-caked willfully ignorant minions don't care about truth. Because to them, ideology trumps everything. The next time a conservative says "Country first", I hope people recognize that it's just another lie out of a right-wing mouth. Because it's NEVER "Country first" with these people. It's always about ideology and power.

Keith Olbermann will have an update tonight.

I really don't need this a week before going to Germany: random musings

Yes, folks, Your Humble Blogger will be only sporadically posting between June 20 and January 3. I am headed to the Rhineland, where I will lead a project team of people who know a lot more of what they're doing than I do. I must say that my employer does want to make its employees comfortable on a trip like this. Most companies these days, if you're not a top executive, would put you on a hang-glider and blow, then if you get to your destination, put you up at a youth hostel. But I will be at a nice hotel that claims to have wireless internet access, albeit at 22 euros per day. So unless I can hang two laptops off the same connection, in which case I may be able to post nightly (which would mean afternoon Eastern Time), posting will be sporadic for those two weeks. I'm sure my loyal compatriots, and perhaps a few surprise guests, will pick up the slack. But yes, I'm bound for my first trip to Europe, even if it is for work.

Cologne sounds like a fun town; too bad I'll be returning home on the day the biggest reggae and world music festival in Europe starts, and I'll miss the Cologne festivities of Gay Pride month. But there's the cathedral, and apparently there is a zoo and a botanical garden, and I will have a weekend there in which hopefully I won't have to spend ALL my time working.

But I am a nervous flier under the best of circumstances, and being someone who is, I'm ashamed to admit, less well-traveled than George W. Bush at this point, I needed the crash of a major European airline's jet like I needed a second navel. And to make matters worse, John Aravosis has noted a couple of peculiarities about Air France #447 passengers that just make me want to don my tinfoil chapeau right now, then pop a Benedryl and drink a glass of wine the minute I get on board and conk out rather than freak out:

• Two names on the passenger list are also on highly-classified documents listing the names of radical Muslims considered a threat to the French Republic. I'm skeptical of this one. Remember when four of the supposed 9/11 hijackers turned up alive? First of all, names are often the same. The head of my department on my former job was hassled every time he flew because his name -- a common one -- was on a watch list. Second of all, this is the kind of claim that could be very self-serving on the part of a government already taking heat for setting up a military base in the Middle East. And the documents are conveniently classified. Still, file this away under "odd."


• Then, it seems that two prominent figures in the fight against the illegal arms trade and drug trafficking were on the flight. This starts to seem like a highly unlikely "two-fer," unless you want to subscribe to the Grand Unifying Theory of Criminal Villains and think that everything bad in the world is related. The problem with this, even for a sometime tinfoiler like me, is that if you keep up like this, you either end up like James Von Brunn, blaming the Jews for everything, or you end up like Alex Jones, muttering about the Trilateral Commission and the Bavarian Illuminati. Readers of this blog know that while I have my own tinfoilish theories about the 9/11 attacks, they extend solely to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld's cold, cost-benefit ratios being calculated as to whether losing a few planes would be worth the opportunity to invade Iraq.
• 
  
• Then there's the woman who just missed getting on the flight who died in a car accident this week. Now this one just falls under "Some people have no luck at all."
  

If everyone is connected to everyone else by only six people, these coincidences are easy to explain. They're creepy, and perhaps it's just that I'm going to be getting on a flight to Europe in a week and don't have the luxury of going down that road, but I'm not convinced they mean anything.

But when right before Barack Obama made his Cairo speech and Osama Bin Laden released one of his "booga-booga" tapes right beforehand, it sounded like a plaintive cry for attention from someone realizing that perhaps his influence was waning now that his best recruiting tool was no longer on the world scene. Today the Iranians go to the polls. If Mahmoud Ahmadinejad loses this election, as he may very well, on the heels of the Lebanese election earlier this month, it will be a sign that the carrot works far better than the stick, and that the Middle East just might be rethinking its relationship with the west.

Last night I was on the phone with my mother, talking about single-payer health care and why "socialism" was still such a hot word. I opined that perhaps everyone whose fear button was pushed during the Cold War will have to die off, or at the very least, leave the corridors of Washington, before the knee-jerk response to the idea that the government perhaps ought to provide certain things that are NECESSARY, rather than leaving it up to people wearing headsets in cubicles at for-profit, publicly-held corporations to decide what care you get, is abject, pants-crapping terror. Watching the young people of Iran on the NBC special on Iran last Sunday getting involved in the future of their country, I had the same sense that change is coming there too, but it may take another generation of people without the baggage of the Shah, and the U.S. embassy hostage crisis, to do it.

Perhaps this is why neocon Daniel Pipes and his warmongering compatriots WANT Ahmadinejad to be re-elected. Becuase fear is a powerful tool. Without fear, what do the neocons have?

So next Saturday, I'll get on that plane loaded up on Benadryl and forget all about fear. Mr. Brilliant will mind the home front, and other folks will mind the blog front, and just maybe I'll be able to post some photos from the ancient city on the Rhine.

Who says we can't foil terrorist plots without torture?

Yes we can:

Four men were arrested Wednesday night in what the authorities said was a plot to bomb two synagogues in the Bronx and shoot down military planes at an Air National Guard base in Newburgh, N.Y.

The men, all of whom live in Newburgh, about 60 miles north of New York City, were arrested around 9 p.m. after planting what they believed to be bombs in cars outside the Riverdale Temple and the nearby Riverdale Jewish Center, officials said. But the men did not know the bombs, obtained with the help of an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, were fake.

The arrests capped what officials described as a “painstaking investigation” that began in June 2008 involving an F.B.I. agent who had been told by a federal informant of the men’s desire to attack targets in America. As part of the plot, the men intended to fire Stinger missiles at military aircraft at the base, which is at Stewart International Airport, officials said.

[snip]

n April, Mr. Cromitie and the three other men selected the synagogues as their targets, the statement said. The informant soon helped them get the weapons, which were incapable of being fired or detonated, according to the authorities.

Mr. Kelly told Jewish leaders Wednesday evening that the attackers planned simultaneous attacks, and the men planned to leave the bombs in the cars in front of the two synagogues, drive back to Newburgh and retrieve cellphone-detonating devices and then proceed with the attack on the air base — simultaneously shooting down aircraft while remotely setting off the devices in the cars.

On Wednesday night, they planted one of the mock improvised explosive devices in a trunk of a car outside the temple and two mock bombs in the back seat of a car outside the Jewish center, the authorities said. Shortly thereafter, police officers swooped in and broke the windows on the suspects’ black sport utility vehicle and charged them with conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction within the United States and conspiracy to acquire and use antiaircraft missiles.

See? THIS is how it's done. This isn't a bunch of guys who like to get dressed up like ninjas and talk, and therefore you have nothing on them that's likely to hold up. You get in early, you set it up so that you can catch them in the act with them unaware that their "weaponry" is useless, and then you swoop in.

Very nice work by the FBI here.

By the way, just for the benefit of Mr. Richard B. Cheney, who insists that the Bush Administration kept America safe, but only AFTER 9/11, let me remind him of this:

The FBI failed to seize at least five opportunities to intercept two 9/11 hijackers before the attacks, including two instances in San Diego County when the terrorists lived with an FBI informant and were befriended by a subject of a previous FBI investigation.

And don't tell me that prior to 9/11, there was a "failure of imagination." There had already been an attack on the World Trade Center, there was the infamous August 6 PDB, and a great deal of other information that an Administration not already involved in two public relations disasters and already obsessed with Iraq would have been able to put together. It took three tries to get any convictions of the so-called "Liberty City Six", the aforementioned ninja-costumed bumblers. Funny how when an administration doesn't have a vested interest in having a terrorist attack happen to provide it with an excuse to invade a completely unrelated country, the FBI is capable of doing crackerjack work like this.

Don't Rain on my Parade...

"The stabby ends of very, very sharp sticks..."-Driftglass

Just as I was closing up brain and shop, concentrated on matters of chicken poo, hay, and pie ,(not necessarily in that order) out of the corner of my ear yesterday I overheard some pundit or other say something to the effect of "torturers will not be brought to justice," and so goes the rest of this disgusting culture and any morality that was still clinging to the underside of the lip.

India is in flames, supposedly...or you would think so by the reportage...wasn't there a parade that I used to peel potato to?...Ive been brewing coffee, feeding dogs and thinking, thinking, about whether its right at all to post a gut feeling without all the necessary research...and then whether its OK to cross post that opinion/gut feeling over on Mrs. Brill's blog and further. I mean here she is actually brave enough to state the things that she is thankful for, with seemingly no worry that they're gonna come and take it all away, poof!, just like everything else....and here I am with my usual half empty perspective. Yesterday I was asked to answer yes or no as to if I was an optimist or a pessimist, in order to get into a focus group that pays $100 cash that I need right now (what with the household publication of the boy's Christmas/Birthday list and the credit cards deciding to implode with higher minimum payments and APRs.) I kept trying to tell the guy that there must be something between the two, no?...I mean...WTF? Well, its a panel about the credit/economy crisis it turns out, and I was able to get on by a hair...but if I had been pessimistic in general, like, in life, I wouldn't have. More on that as it unfolds; they sometimes cancel and even though the screener told me that this one was definitely on...well. we'll see.

So, I guess its not so horrible that the India thing, when shown on holographic map and zoomed in upon, with flaming American style hotel and obligatory escaped hostage shown over and over, strikes me as another part of the M$M bamboozle that will, no doubt for anyone willing to actually look into it, lead back to a rise in terrorism due to American influence, Mumbai and India being our worker arm after all. And its only a short hop to the connection with our outgoing administration and their crush-the-mushroom strategy on terrorism. If the way the terrorists landed and spread out in multi attacks hits a little close to home, and smacks of being sophisticated enough to rank up there with the best that Al Quaeda Worldwide has to offer, well...
But still, what the fuck is going on? Bangkok anti-government protesters? A coup?....
Don't they know its turkey day? Isn't this when we stuff ourselves with genetically altered, oil injected, bird and lay like slugs in front of American football, watching the helpless, hopeless, meaningless travels of a ball up and down a field?

Ultimately, my gut feeling about all of this terrorism and uncertainty in the world can point in only one direction.... And if a couple of Americans are hurt in the crossfire?...well, there must be some rejoicing in the streets!
Someone called me this morning and stated bluntly that all of this Oh MY! about this operation, in that the number of dead equals a tiny, tiny percentage of people who are dying across India from tooth infections and the like. Get your priorities straight! Honestly, if terrorism is really just a dramatization of the feeling of portions of the population across the country, this wasn't all that bad, considering the desperate conditions out there. Just have a look at where Jack Bauer has been all these months (...blame the writer's strike!)...and I want to know if Obama is gonna at least hold Bauer responsible for what he's done in the name of country.

To the reportage attacks on India are worthy mainly due to great footage of flames and ongoing standoffs, and the hushed exclamation that 2 Americans, maybe more, have been HURT!!
Whatever made Americans feel like we were superior and special must by now be tempered by seeing with our own eyes what happens when we give away what made us strong; Natural resources, resiliency, ingenuity and the intelligence to reinvest in our beautiful country and its superior inhabitants. We gave all that away so that capitalism could cycle into the self destructive part, which is the inevitability in any unregulated economic sceneario; that is unless human nature has changed for the better while I was asleep. The moment Reagan stood at a podium, half addled already, reading the script put in front of him, charmingly, saying that there was no need for regulation as large corporations were very capable of regulating themselves, we were done for.

Which brings me back to the stabby sticks of Driftglass today and the flotation of ideas that the guilty will not be punished...on any level...ever!
Our beloved President Elect is not in any sense a better man than you Drifty; he merely expects less of people than you do....He must know that the American, and hell probably the worldwide attention span, is not long enough to withstand what might be necessary to demand justice. The accusation of holding a grudge or being backward-looking seems to now be stronger than the reality that we will never really be able to move forward without looking at what happened and showing the world, no matter how long it takes, that we really are who we pretended to be before the money took over.
I suppose that cleaning up the mess while you cook is too much to expect of this very messy country and its lazy inhabitants, but I think that we should at least expect some semblance of the realization and knowledge that this was not just a few rogue actors screwing things up, but an aberration in the entire American culture, manipulated by threats and our inherent weakness! I think we should expect more...but having an educated and strong populace doesn't serve those who profit from our weakness.

Meanwhile, over on NBC, thank God for New York City and Macy's, Broadway shows, balloons, clowns, confetti, kids, and anyone able to feel anything real anymore.

(The real thankful part maybe later...Now, I gotta bake a pecan pie...)

c/p RIPCoco