The Dish

Utah's Bob Bennett is targeted for insufficient conservatism by the Club for Growth.

It's Alabama. And the GOP's criteria for political office become indistinguishable from a theocracy's.

(Hat tip: TDW)

That is what ABC News broadcast this morning, in the very city where al Qaeda killed over 3,000 people. 

Chait goes another round but fails to link to Manzi's earlier response. Manzi:

The key practical point of the article is that I believe there is a different efficient frontier of smarter political action available to us than is currently being provided by our two major parties if we can try to see both sides of the eternal argument more clearly – that is “the inherent conflict between the creative destruction involved in free-market capitalism and the innate human propensity to avoid risk and change”, that in our case is exacerbated by both “ever-increasing international competition” and “the growing disparity in behavioral norms and social conditions between the upper and lower income strata of American society”.

Manzi follows up again here.

Especially if you're a politician.

Read D.B. Grady's response to the undie-bomber report by the Obama administration. It tells it like it is. The Obama administration is just as incompetent in terror prevention as the Bush administration. But here's the basic point:

The White House blames Abdulmutallab's success on a failure to "connect the dots," but, in fact, the dots were already connected. There were no dots. We already had all the information necessary to shut down Abdulmutallab. No secret missions were in order. No covert bribes in cash-stuffed briefcases needed to change hands at disused bus stops. Delta operatives didn't have to to kick down doors, and there was no need to dust off the waterboard to draw out a name.

We knew everything.

Yes we did. This was emphatically not one of those terror attacks that we could not have seen coming. The huge amount of resources we have devoted to better security since 9/11 did their job: the dude was identified, exposed, and on a list. And the failure was not of a system. It was a failure of individual people in the system, people paid by you and me to do the job they manifestly failed to do. The failure was so profound that the president was only now assigning "specific responsibility for investigating all leads on high priority threats". Is he fucking kidding me? These people don't take personal responsibility for following through on threats? Which people? And why are they still employed? Grady:

The minute Abdulmutallab's father walked into a U.S. Embassy with news that his son was a potential terrorist, the official in charge was duty-bound to see this through. Every scrap of paper and every byte of data on the suspect should have been called up and frozen. That's why we have embassies. When the information was passed to the first special agent at the CIA, he or she was duty bound to see it through. When the information was passed to the first administrator at the National Counterterrorism Center, he or she, too, was duty bound to see it to the end.

Everyone who read the name "Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab" prior to December 25, 2009 should be reprimanded and fired.

Amen. And the rank failure to do so, the closing of ranks, the blaming of the "system", the faux-responsibility: this is one reason many of us found the Bush administration's hubris unacceptable. The hubris now is, however, identical.

Fire every single person who allowed this to happen, identify them publicly, explain what they did wrong. Then I'll believe Obama is serious and can run the government. But right now, in this area, the government is running him.

A reader writes:

Kinsley misses the point completely. So the reason newspapers are failing is because they bother to give historical context in the articles?  No.  Plenty of blog posts do that as well.  What's killing many newspapers is that they developed in a world where every local area read it's own newspaper.  The pages of the newspaper could be filled by regurgitating wire stories because they were still news to the people in the local area.  Newspapers didn't have to invest money in a lot of journalism except to cover the local beats where they weren't getting wire stories that already covered it for them.

To illustrate my point, google any major news story. Hundreds of stories will appear and all of them will say almost the same thing.  The paragraphs may be in a different order, but the quotes, and many of the words are verbatim because they are just regurgitating wire stories.  Seeing as people can get their news directly from the source, they don't need those hundreds of rehashes of the story.  The newspapers themselves end up seeming out of date an irrelevant because so much of their content is just the same thing in paper form.  Blogs provide value to the articles by adding their own spin and analysis rather than just reordering the paragraphs.

Newspapers don't suffer because their articles are written poorly, they suffer because they don't add enough value.  The newspapers that do original reporting, investigation, and analysis are the ones that will survive because people will see a value in paying for them.  If Kinsley had it right, then all of these papers would simply have to go back and change their writing style for their articles.  Does anybody really believe that would save them?

Adam Blickstein pounces on the former prosecutor's latest lecturing of Obama on terrorism:

Besides the fact that Abdulmutallab provided "useable, actionable intelligence” upon initial interrogation, which occurred at the hands of FBI agents without reading him Miranda rights and without having a lawyer present, Giuliani is simply wrong about the notion and utility of naming someone an enemy combatant. As the inimitable Mike Isikoff asserts below, we actually haven't named anyone arrested in America an enemy combatant since June of 2003.

Since then both the Bush and Obama administration have detained and prosecuted terrorists arrested in American using the U.S. criminal justice system. This has resulted in the successful prosecution of several hundred terrorists. Using Giuliani's preferred enemy combatant, military tribunal system found at Guantanamo Bay? We have only had three successful prosecutions since 9/11. But Giuliani prefers beating his chest to actually bringing terrorists to justice.