The Dish

In my view, heads should roll because this latest attempt at mass murder was clearly preventable if the government had been competent. I mean: the nutjob’s dad had had a meeting with the fricking CIA! If they could listen as well as they destroy evidence of war crimes, we might have avoided this.

But that doesn’t mean we should give terrorists more credit, more credibility and more power over us than they deserve. Here is one of the smartest things Bill Maher has ever said on the subject, and it’s worth recalling as we go through another mass conniption and as Cheney pulls another stunt in defense of his record of presiding over 9/11 and then trashing the rule of law:

Those befrocked, super-rich religious dudes who have issues with sex – no, not the Vatican, the trust-fund Islamists – have adopted the classic stoner technique of shoving the stash in the bush:

This is not the first time a ‘butt bomber’ has used the nether regions of their body to try and explode a suicide bomb. In a previous column of mine, I wrote about the would-be assassin of Saudi Arabia’s Prince Mohammed bin Nayef (head of Saudi Arabia’s counterterrorism efforts) who apparently decided in October 2009 to hide his bomb in his underwear, apparently believing that cultural taboos would prevent a search in that part of his body, according to a Saudi government official close to the investigation.

The consequences of these fundie-undies are grim:

Sadly, as I had written before, after this most recent Christmas Day incident with Northwest Airlines Flight 253, there are only two things that are going come out of yet another silly and tragic episode of ‘toilet terrorism’: 1) Airport screeners will probably now invest even more money to buy latex gloves and; 2) In addition to already removing half of our clothing at the airport, young brown six-foot-four Muslim males (like myself) who fit the ‘racial profile’ will probably have to spend a little more time at the airports ‘assuming the position’ and ’spreading our cheeks’ the next time that we want to board an airplane. Thanks a alot, Butt Bombers…

Yes, Palin can't even handle a friendly sit-down with the last surviving reality-based cable news outlet. Here's the sad program note:

Sarah Palin signs copies of her book, Going Rogue: An American Life at Joseph Beth Booksellers in Cincinnati. BookTV visits the bookstore and records Gov. Palin's opening remarks, talks to attendees in line at the signing, and discusses the coordination and preparation for the event with the store's marketing and event coordinator.

An interview with the store's marketing director!

 

Tucson, Arizona, 4.25 pm

There he goes again, the mouthpiece for Rove and Cheney, believing his "access" as a stenographer makes him a journalist. It doesn't. It makes him a stenographer.

Allen gussies up his source's bile with a few fig leaf sentences and a gesture from a Democratic rebuttal. But he also offers the entire Cheney statement – a classic Dolchstoss attack on the president as a traitor – in full.

I hope Allen gets his page-views. But shouldn't the Cheneys be paying him rather than Politico?

A blast from the past.

"The denizens of the left blogosphere consider themselves the Democratic Party's base. But they are not. For Democrats, as opposed to Republicans, the wing is not the base; the legions of loyal African Americans, union members, Jews, women and Latinos are. In the end, the sillier left-village practitioners are stoking the same populist exaggeration—the idea that Washington is controlled by crooks and sellouts—that conservative strategists like Bill Kristol believe will bring the Republicans back to power. The perversity of this is beyond comprehension," – Joe Klein.

"If we can’t catch a Nigerian with a powerful explosive powder in his oddly feminine-looking underpants and a syringe full of acid, a man whose own father had alerted the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, a traveler whose ticket was paid for in cash and who didn’t check bags, whose visa renewal had been denied by the British, who had studied Arabic in Al Qaeda sanctuary Yemen, whose name was on a counterterrorism watch list, who can we catch?" – Maureen Dowd.

I am relieved that Obama has now promised "accountability at every level." I'd say firing Napolitano would be a start. Show you're different from the Bushies. Actually hold someone you know and like accountable.

Just one problem:

The regime that Boot contemplates, like the one that the Pentagon is pushing towards, is illegal. Although international law gives armed forces the right to make security detentions, it doesn’t provide the authority for prolonged detention. Either that occurs under the authority of the Geneva Conventions or the authority must be worked out in an agreement with the host country. On this point, the United States had repeatedly sought authority from the Afghan government, and they have consistently refused to grant it.

Andrew Sprung looks forward optimistically. Some tonic against too much gloom:

Poverty: "Whereas real per capita income [worldwide] increased by about one fifth per decade in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, it is expect to increase by about one third in the 2000s…The poverty rate is expected to continue to fall sharply from 57.2 percent in 200 to 49.7 percent in 2010 at a poverty line of one-half of the mean." (Lynge Nielsen, IMF Working Paper, Global Relative Poverty, April 2009 '

Health: Global life expectancy at birth was 64 in 1990, 66 in 2000, and 68 in 2007. Under-5 mortality rates per 1000 live births were 91 in 1990, 78 in 2000, and 67 in 2007.

From 1990 – 2006, the number of people in developing regions using improved sanitation facilities has increased by 1.1 billion; the proportion of the global population with access to improved drinking water sources rose from 76% to 86% in the same period. (World Health Statistics 2009.) War: Here is the latest tabulation of global battle deaths year by year calculated by the International Peace Research Institute. While these tabulations have been challenged in recent years, they have also been strongly defended (summary here).