Stepped out this morning to walk the doggie, and stepped into one of those rescue scenes from a movie when hikers are stranded on the summit of a mountain as a blizzard hits.
Good day to be inside.
Archives for 2009
The worst sin in Washington
This is almost comical (from a pretty good column by E. J. Dionne):
With Pelosi off the hook, the Washington press corps needed a new goat, and along came Harry Reid. The Senate majority leader, it should be said, sometimes makes it easy for his critics. He can be irascible, and has no qualms about yelling at journalists. (It’s happened to me.) He is not always careful with words. Earlier this month, he at least implied that Republicans were slow on the slavery issue, an odd charge since opposition to slavery was the passion that animated the founding of the GOP. (In those days, most Democrats were, as we might put it now, bad on the slavery issue.)
And, yes, Reid criticized my friend and colleague David Broder. It’s true that Reid was hitting back, since David is not wild about Harry. Nonetheless, I dearly love Broder, as does everyone who has ever worked with him.
I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you how absurd this is, that the very worst sin a Senate leader can commit is to insult a lazy, senile newspaper columnist.
Early Morning Open Thread: Don’t Fear the Reaper Undie-Bomber
Nate Silver puts the numbers in perspective for the Pantswetting Brigades:
Over the past decade, there have been, by my count, six attempted terrorist incidents on board a commercial airliner than landed in or departed from the United States: the four planes that were hijacked on 9/11, the shoe bomber incident in December 2001, and the NWA flight 253 incident on Christmas…
Over the past decade, according to BTS [the Bureau of Transportation Statistics], there have been 99,320,309 commercial airline departures that either originated or landed within the United States. Dividing by six, we get one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 departures.
These departures flew a collective 69,415,786,000 miles. That means there has been one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 mles flown. This distance is equivalent to 1,459,664 trips around the diameter of the Earth, 24,218 round trips to the Moon, or two round trips to Neptune…
There were a total of 674 passengers, not counting crew or the terrorists themselves, on the flights on which these incidents occurred. By contrast, there have been 7,015,630,000 passenger enplanements over the past decade. Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning.
(h/t Balloon Juice commentor BR)
When will Bill Kristol and/or Jonah Goldberg demand that President Obama declare a War on Weather?
Early Morning Open Thread: Don’t Fear the <del>Reaper</del> Undie-BomberPost + Comments (64)
Villager Alert
After Bill Clinton was impeached for lies under oath (and terminal tackiness)…
I guess you could say he came into Washington and trashed the place with his tackiness, ehh, Noemi?
The soft bigotry of lowered expectations
Atrios catches a real winner from Mary Matalin today on CNN:
We inherited a recession from President Clinton and we inherited the most tragic attack on our own soil in our nation’s history. And President Bush dealt with it. And within a year of his presidency at this comparable time, unemployment was at 5 percent. And we were creating jobs.
It’s an outright lie and not just because they didn’t “inherit” 9/11 — unemployment was actually 5.7% December 2001, as compared with 4.2% when Bush took office, and it rose to 6.3% by 2003. Obviously, no one called Matalin on it, the same way no one in the media will call Joe Klein’s friend Pete Hoekstra on any of his craziness.
The main thing I’ve learned since I began blogging and following national media closely the last year is that Republicans are simply not held to the same standards that Democrats are. There’s so many examples but compare “it was standard practice not to pay for things” to the constant — and often nonsensical — budget-scolding that we see now. I don’t know why this is. Maybe it’s that conservatives will always follow their old men wherever they want to go while liberals prefer to call their leaders sell-outs and phonies. Maybe it really is that reporters are liberals who regard Republicans as redneck retards who should be lauded for not fucking things up even worse than they do.
None of this is necessarily good for Republicans in a larger sense. They’d be better off if they felt pressure to come up with their own alternative health care plan, their own climate change proposals, realistic economic policies, and so on. Sometimes I think they’ve gotten so good at working the refs that they don’t even bother to play the game anymore.
The soft bigotry of lowered expectationsPost + Comments (114)
NEW TSA SECURITY MEASURES TBA
A passenger onboard the same Northwest Airlines flight that was attacked on Christmas Day was taken into custody in Detroit on Sunday after becoming verbally disruptive upon landing, officials said.
A law enforcement official said the man was Nigerian and had locked himself in the airliner’s bathroom. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing.
Officials told NBC News the passenger refused to come out and may have had “stomach problems” that prevented him from leaving. The passenger became abusive when flight attendants opened the door and dragged him out, NBC News reported.
Let’s see. A man in his seat tried to ignite an underwear bomb, and they decided to ban electronics and require everyone to stay in their seat. Now that someone was caught dropping a “bomb” in the bathroom and became disruptive, I predict they will ban toothbrushes, women named Ruth, and all passengers will have to remove their left lens from their corrective eyewear.
There Will Be Blood
If this is true, there will be serious rioting:
Before I begin, let me just state that TSA has yet to confirm any of this on its website, so the details aren’t entirely clear at the moment. That said, there are several indications that orders have been issued to cease the use of electronics during international flights. Yes, that means no laptops, no iPods, no Kindles, no CD players, no portable DVD players, no Nintendo DSes — nothing that requires any sort of power on these flights. If this is true, it’s absolutely awful news.
Obviously, this is all in reaction to the Nigerian man who attempted to bring down a plane coming into the U.S. And the TSA is going to do whatever it thinks is necessary to prevent further attacks of a similar nature. But the simple fact is that if the TSA was really this seriously worried about electronic devices, they could have banned them anytime since the attacks on September 11, 2001. Instead, they’re doing it more than 8 years later after a man apparently lit some sort of mixture of powder and liquid in his lap. How that relates to electronics, I’m not sure. This just reeks of a “well, we have to do something” move.
Some nut blows up his nuts with an explosive sewn into his knickers, and the TSA might ban electronics devices. I’m kind of hoping it happens, so the public can see how how hysterical we as a nation have become.