Broken in Brief: Homeland Security fears mass terrorist attack as citizenry exhibits strange behavior

WASHINGTON—Minutes ago the Department of Homeland Security and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that they feared a terrorist attack had resulted in mind altering gases or a virus being released at multiple sites around the United States, that they were taking the precaution of raising the alert level to orange, and were declaring a preliminary state of national emergency.

“It has come to our attention that terrorist groups may have dosed large sections of this country with some noxious, brain scrambling substance at some point around noon,” announced FBI Director Robert Mueller.

“As of now we’re uncertain of the exact means of attack but currently victims are exhibiting signs of low level euphoria and a nationalist interest in foreign frivolities. Be forewarned that if one of these poor souls walks up to you and asks if you ‘saw the soccer’ or can name more than three of the fancy types who play this game, you may be in a contaminated zone and should take shelter immediately.”

CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden added “While these reports are preliminary, we do have to admit that these widespread reports could refer to citizens of other countries showing excitement over soccer, which is normal. Those exhibiting symptoms may in fact be Dutch, we repeat, may be Dutch. We advise American to take extreme precautions -face masks and the like- in the event that this is a viral outbreak and the soccer virus has started to spread from immigrants to the white, indigenous US population.”

For now the government advises that people stay inside and inoculate themselves with televised baseball games and NFL off-season training camp reports.

“We’re on the precipice of something large taking hold here,” Mueller advised. “After years of fighting this foreign footballing menace off, we are in extreme danger of taking an interest in a sport America isn't ready to dominate in. Not on my watch.”

Guns for terrorists

With the recent Times Square bombing plot foiled and capture of the alleged perpetrator, we are again bombarded with suggestions from our political betters on what to do with such haters of freedom.

They want the terrorists interrogated to the exacting dramatical standards of our top terrorism related TV shows. Gitmo! Under no circumstances are they to be Mirandized or afforded any sort of minor legal protections... even if it helps out intelligence gathering and legal efforts. If they are in fact American citizens, just strip them of that citizenship so we can torture and imprison them easier. Double Gitmo! Smoke them for hours over mesquite chips, thinly slice them, pile them up on rye bread with brown mustard, and eat them... for liberty's sake. It doesn't matter, just make sure these people aren't afforded any discernible legal protection or allow them to be within shouting distance of anything that could be called a Constitutional right.

Well, unless....

New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's appeal to what he called "common sense" at a congressional hearing Wednesday morning failed to sway two Republican senators who said that giving the government the ability to block the purchase of guns by suspected terrorists would undermine the Second Amendment's right to bear arms.
...
Admitting that "at first blush" the bill "seems to be an obvious step that we should take," Collins said that many people on the FBI's watchlist don't belong there. "None of us wants a terrorist to be able to purchase a gun, but neither should we want to infringe upon a Constitutional right of law-abiding Americans," she said.

Graham described the bill as an instrument of those who would ban guns altogether. "We're talking about a constitutional right here," he said, explaining that he could not support a bill that would force "innocent Americans" to "pay the cost of going to court to get their gun rights back."

Graham wasn't nearly as concerned about rights when he launched into a disquisition on the treatment of American citizens accused of terrorism. "I am all into national security," he said. "I want them to stop reading these guys Miranda rights."

That's right, these terrorists are dangerous, America hating monsters and they should be treated as if they have no legal rights... but it'll be a cold, cold day in hell before you're allowed to infringe on a terrorist's right to by a gun in America. I mean you can sit back all day and listen to GOP lawmakers tell you all the ways in which terrorist suspects aren't really people and aren't covered by any facet of US law, international law, or the Constitution... except when it comes to the Second Amendment. No, the Second clearly has a specific clause about infringing the rights of terrorists.

So remember, no matter how much Mirandizing suspects and treating them as if they had legal rights helps us gain information, it is a practice we should stop. But if say there were a way to stop terrorist suspects from buying guns or at least identify that they were purchasing guns, like say... in March... in Connecticut... a month before they were to attempt to bomb Times Square... we should under no circumstances try to stop it. Because of the Constitutional protections that don't seem to apply when dealing with any other aspect of terrorists rights.

In case you wanted to know how completely owned our elected betters were by the gun lobby... that's how completely owned. They won't even oppose taking guns away from terrorists inside our country. Stay safe!

Guh?

Hey, sorry I've been away. I parked my 1993 Nissan Pathfinder in Times Square and it seems to have gone missing. Been looking for it the past few days. Anyone seen it?

Oh.... Whoops.

Anyway, with all that behind us and a terrorist attack averted, now comes the most important part of any post-attack period: attacking the President for purely political reasons over a perceived lack of manliness and commitment to making America feel it's enemies have been sufficiently brutalized in the name of freedom. Obama's crime this time? He read the suspect his Miranda rights again and the suspect started freely giving up information again. When will he learn? That stuff might work in the real world, but in the fantasies of the right wing politicians of our country it doesn't and we would be better served by waterboarding these people 10 or 170 times. So let's listen to them bitch about it.

In a steady stream of indictments, top-ranking officials in the GOP said it didn't matter that the Obama Department of Justice was getting information from Faisal Shahzad, the now-detained the Pakistani-born American. The fact that the administration chose to read Miranda rights to the suspect shows a national security policy steeped in naivety and potentially dangerous.

"That is a stroke of good luck," Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) said of the news that Shahzad was cooperating even after getting his Miranda rights read to him. "What if he had not waived them and just quit talking, said 'I want my lawyer'?"

"Maybe we got lucky and [Shahzad] said I will go ahead and talk to you anyway," said Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.). "But you didn't know that when you read [him] the rights. So I stand by what I said -- it is better in these kinds of cases to get the intelligence first and then, if you decide you want to proceed with an Article 3 prosecution, then read the Miranda rights."

Peter King and John McCain joined the din shrieking against Mirandizing and having a terrorism policy that made sense, but had to be rebuked by Glenn Beck.

"He is a citizen of the United States, so I say we uphold the laws and the Constitution on citizens… If you are a citizen, you obey the law and follow the Constitution. He has all the rights under the Constitution… We don't shred the Constitution when it is popular. We do the right thing."

Yes, that Glenn Beck.

Dizzy. World spinning. Must... find couch... to... faint on. What kind of world do we live in where Glenn Beck is making sense on terrorism policies and actions taken by the Obama Administration? Wasn't it more likely that Obama would grow a Lenin style goatee, unleash robot death panels, goose step down Pennsylvania Avenue with his Obama Youth squads, and turn into the fascist parody Beck had been painting him as, rather than Beck deciding to make actual sense on terrorism and the Constitution?

This is too much for my brain to process. I heroically overcome a bout of SuperAIDS and have to deal with this mindfuck? Still, score one for Beck doubling his meds and joining the fight to see our counter-intel and interrogation strategies get based on strategies that work instead of something you half remember as being completely awesome when Jack Bauer did them in Season 3 of 24 and would assuredly result in the man not getting convicted. Some other Fox commentator will have to worry about the stiffness of America's war boner, Glenn Beck is dabbling in rationality today. I'm sure we'll have to rescind this literally seconds from now, but... good job... Glenn Beck.

/tepidly golf claps
//belts scotch from a flask

Quote of the day

One America's most entertaining sane congressmen Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) on his interactions with the Tea Party movement.

“I follow Twitter for the Tea Party and just show up to fuck with them,” he said. The crowd of 20-somethings crowed.

“No, I don’t actually do that. I just sit at my desk and they send me talcum powder every couple of weeks.”

I guess that's a badge of honor then. Or are you disappointed that it was only talcum? You have to keep your hopes down, the right wing fringe groups only break out the anthrax for the big dogs. Just keep plugging at it, pushin' for liberal stuff and someday soon I'll bet some poorly read terrorist with a copy of the Turner Diaries signed by Sean Hannity will cut out a letters from a magazine to concoct a poorly thought out threatening letter and dust it with the good stuff.

Hang in there. Low level demonization by half-wits is still something to be proud of.

Stay classy, Eric and the rest of the GOP

As Sean referenced in his post yesterday, the dead-enders of the teabagging spectrum of American politics are not taking the prospect of cheaper, more accessible health care well. In no small part egged on by the litany of right wing commentators and politicians calling majority enacting of broadly popular legislation tyranny, the end of civilization, the end of America, Armageddon, and calling for revolution or at least an armed insurrection, there has been an uptick in violence towards Democratic lawmakers who voted for the bill. Everything from bricks through windows, to phoned in death threats, to faxing nooses to lawmakers, to cutting the gas lines of the brother of Congressman Perriello, to mailing white powder to Anthony Weiner, it's really a cavalcade of dangerous low level right wing terrorism by petulant children. Catalog the ongoing stupidity at TPM.

And so the response from Democrats has been to condemn the attacks and ask that Republicans maybe tone down the insanity juuust a few notches, maybe stop the calls for a new American revolution, and downgrade the danger to society from complete apocalypse to minor Armageddon. So in turn John Boenher went out and released a statement affirming that bad things were bad and good things were good, but wanted you to understand that he knew bad things were bad. Thus the response from Democrats was "Uhhh... Ok" and they knew in their hearts that this was as much of an apology as they were going to get.

But apparently some memo has been going around the halls of Congress and the GOP has decided that they aren't coming across as big enough assholes during this run of violence, so Eric Cantor immediately followed up Boehner's vague speech with one placing the blame on where it truly lied: with Democrats.

"I've never blamed anyone in this body for that. Period. Any suggestion that a leader in this body that would incite threats or acts against other members is akin to saying that I would endanger myself, my wife or my children."

Cantor said a bullet was shot through the window of his Richmond, Va., campaign office this week, and that he's gotten threatening emails.
...
"It is reckless to use these incidents as media vehicles for political gain," he said. He called out DCCC Chair Chris Van Hollen and DNC Chair Tim Kaine by name as those who are "dangerously fanning the flames by suggesting that these incidents be used as a political weapon."

"To use such threats against members of congress is not a partisan issue," he said. "By ratcheting up the rhetoric some will only inflame these situations to dangerous levels."

There's video, so you can see that he actually said that with a straight face. Yes, it is not the people who are calling for revolution and heralding the end of all things that are to blame for violence, it's people who point out that the violence is politically motivated after the fact that are clearly to blame. And he's been subject to violence too! Not that he would ever stoop to politicizing it by politicizing it in a political speech about politicizing violence. Sure, police called bullshit on his claims and said that his "bullet attack" was just random and the result of a bullet, fired into the air, randomly coming down and striking his office. Don't you see how that's worse? Gravity is attacking Eric Cantor!

Soon, other Republicans were taking Cantor's ideas to heart and were out in full force blaming Democrats for this. Reps Price and Bachmann hit the airwaves to decry Democratic politicization of right wing fueled attacks. In the case of Tom Perriello, where a Tea Party activist deliberately posted up the address of Perriello's brother and told fellow teabaggers to "drop by", thinking it was Rep Perriello's house, and then, magically, a gas line got cut, the NRCC not only downplayed the violence but excused it and claimed that the real victims were those in Periello's district who would be harmed by cheaper health care. It should be noted that Periello's brother has a wife and 4 small children.

Way to keep it classy, GOP. I thought there wasn't a lower place you could go, but the inciting of violence and then tacitly endorsing it and excusing it when it happens, only stopping to blame victims, was something I didn't see coming. It was my mistake for thinking some shred of human decency existed when things like gas lines being cut, children being endangers, and anthrax threats were being made and you'd have some sort of discernibly human reaction. Guess not. Whatever, keep calling for revolution, uprisings, and coded statements about "showing lawmakers the will of the people... wink wink", I'm sure it has no connection to any of these attacks. Keep it classy. Maybe there will be an actual death soon for you to blame on the victim.

I'm sure this won't result in some sort of declaration of jihad

British satirist Chris Morris, whose work you really should familiarize yourself with, has decided to write and direct a comedy based on an idea he had: wouldn't it be funny to do a slapstick comedy of errors about four dimwitted Islamic jihadists? I think it would be and the first trailer seems to bear that out.



Morris is famous for his highly controversial satire, pranks on public officials and the newsmedia, and some of the best British comedies around. He spent a lot of time working with Armando Iannucci who released the great In the Loop last year. If you're interested you should check out the Daily Show precursors On The Hour and The Day Today, I'm Alan Partridge with Steve Coogan, Blue Jam, and the great Brass Eye. You know, before he's exploded for this film.

Stay classy, Stevesy

Steve King (R-IA), sometimes know as the House GOP's other crazy congressman named King, hates his ass some IRS. And who could disagree with him. I mean they just take our money and give it to the government to spend on things like roads, defense, and other such things a government does. Who came up with this idea? The IRS sucks! Also the DMV is slow and why can't the airlines give us a bigger bag of peanuts, amirite?

But considering that whole thing where a fringe lunatic rammed his airplane into an IRS building in a bloody, fiery explosion of short-sighted, petty, and murderous spite, you'd think that maybe a certain IRS hating congressman would want to tone down his rhetoric just a tad. Well, that's why you don't have the smarts to get elected in Iowa's 5th District.

KING: I think if we’d abolished the IRS back when I first advocated it, he wouldn’t have a target for his airplane. ... It’s sad the incident in Texas happened, but by the same token, it’s an agency that is unnecessary and when the day comes when that is over and we abolish the IRS, it’s going to be a happy day for America.

TP: So some of his grievances were legitimate?

KING: I don’t know if his grievances were legitimate, I’ve read part of the material. I can tell you I’ve been audited by the IRS and I’ve had the sense of ‘why is the IRS in my kitchen.’ Why do they have their thumb in the middle of my back.

It's sad and all, but he sympathizes with a terrorist. The IRS, who do they think they are investigating discrepancies in tax filings?

But while someone might think that saying something like that while bodies and a building are still smoldering is a touch indelicate, isn't smart, and that staffers somewhere would be imminently yelling at their boss to just shut the fuck up already, well, again, that's why he's in the House and you're sitting there in your house.

During his closing remarks [at CPAC], King veered into a complaint about high taxes, and said he could "empathize" with the man who flew a plane into an IRS building last week.

During the question and answer session, the Media Matters staffer asked King to clarify his comment, reminding him of his sworn duty to protect the American people from all sworn enemies, foreign and domestic. In response, said the staffer, King gave a long and convoluted answer about having been personally audited by the IRS, and ended by saying he intended to hold a fundraiser to help people "implode" their local IRS office.

Don't you understand that this man was audited! Audited! A US Congressman, one of the most honest subset of people of earth. On earth! That's why we need to implode the IRS. Implode, which I'll note is a totally classy suggestion and not at all as offensive as using the word explode.

So congrats to Iowa's Steve King. You took a right wing terrorist attack against the government that resulted in dead Americans and tried to spin it into right wing street cred by repeatedly announcing your empathy for a terrorist, announcing how you sympathized with his motives (I still can't get over the fucking gall of that audit), and noting how you wanted to organize citizens to take further action against the IRS, though probably not with airplane attacks. How nicely offensive of you. The IRS sucks, don't let any terrorist attack, basic human decency, tact, or common sense momentarily sway you from that crusade. Stay classy.

My God, what are we doing?

If there is one thing we know about the war on terror and terrorists in general, it's that the only way to get useful information is though not only violating the Constitutional rights of Americans and through the brutal interrogation methods that are totally not torture. If you want intel you use waterboards, stress positions, hot and cold rooms, sonic and mental warfare, sensory deprivation, beatings, barking dogs, rendition to countries that aren't so nice, and the removal of all ethical, moral, and legal protections. As we've learned from some of our manliest and patriotic elected leaders and political pundits: it's the only way.

Which is why I'm sure that this was just a one time, fluke,... a mistake.

The family of the failed Christmas Day bomber, Umar Farouq Abdulmuttalab, played a pivotal role in getting their son to start cooperating with federal authorities in sharing information about Al Qaeda, a senior administration official said Tuesday evening.
...
“One of the principal reasons why his family [helped] is because they had complete trust in the US system of justice and believed that Umar Farouq would be treated fairly and appropriately," the senior official said. "And that they would be as well.”

The FBI and Abdulmuttalab's family approached the subject and “gained his cooperation. He has been cooperating for days," the official said.

Talking? Getting the family involved? Engaging in a "'thorough and comprehensive' background investigation"? Trying to gain an "understanding of the subject”? Miranda rights? Trials in US courts? No torture? I mean, no enhanced interrogation? This doesn't give me a war on terror boner, no, this doesn't give me a boner at all.

How this country supposed to feel like a man if it doesn't know that terrorists aren't being brutalized in order to extract intelligence? How is this country supposed to feel about freedom if at the very least thousands of volts haven't been applied to the testicles of a suspected terrorist in an Estonian gulag? How does this make us feel a sense of revenge for that thing with the buildings that happened a while back? God damn these seemingly more effective methods and Abdulmuttalab's co-operation!

We need to decide, as a country, what's more important: feeling good about ourselves my beating up terrorists and suspected terrorists while attempting to cover up and legitimize Bush era abuses or do we want and effective defense of this country and sensible terrorism policies. I think we know the answer to that question. Someone go get 183 buckets of water and a barking dog.

Cheap Blogging Crutch 01.26

Why Some Comics Aren’t Laughing at Jay Leno (Essay)
Nathan Rabin of the Onion AV club looks into the most important issue of our time, the Coco/Leno feud, and analyzes why everyone seemed to take Conan's side and heaped unending vitriol on Leno. Essentially he's boring, not funny anymore, tries to play the innocent guy shtick while he's stabbing people in the back, he isn't funny, he never wrote one single monorail related Simpsons episode, and he isn't funny.

In audio message, bin Laden says he endorsed Dec. 25 airline bomb plot
I'm not in the business of giving advice to terrorists. Well, not for free anyway. But Osama, you're starting to lose your terror cache. There use to be a time when we'd fear your proclamations of Jew hate and promises of fiery death from the sky. Now? You're repeating old material and trying to take credit for a guy who staged the greatest public groin singeing in the US... outside of the rural south. Get your shit together man, all we have to fear nowadays is the complete idiocy of our legislative branch. It's just not the same.

Slime Mold Grows Network Just Like Tokyo Rail System
You know how me and Sean are always saying that Japanese engineers are as smart as pond scum? Turns out it's not a racist remark anymore, it's a complement. When mold is allowed to grow on a grid the shape of Tokyo, they end up laying out nutrient channeling tubes much in the same manner as the Tokyo rail system, one of the best designed rail systems in the world. Looks like all those people who protested at our offices for our Japanese slime mold jokes owe us an apology. We still refuse to apologize for the Bulgarian physicist jokes.

US to lift 21-year ban on haggis
Finally, our senseless ban on haggis is ended. I know you haggistotalers wanted this delicious concoction banned from American life, but all your meddling laws did was empower the mob and the haggisrunners. Hell, we've all dabbled in a little haggisrunning, brewing up some bathtub minced sheep offal and selling it in underground speakeasys. Now we're finally allowed to come out into the light of day and enjoy haggis out in the open as God intended. Our long national nightmare is over.

NASA Reveals New Batch Of Space Program Artifacts
If any of you are in the market for some slightly used spacesuits, lunar landers, or a space shuttle or two, NASA is being kind enough to auction some of these items off to the highest bidder in the next coming months. Why build your own spacesuit when you can just drop a couple grand on an Apollo or Mercury era one? If you want the ultimate front lawn centerpiece forget a garden gnome and get a decommissioned shuttle. Only $28 million and the shipping is free. Help them out and buy a goddamn rocket or two. Science is expensive and their budget just got frozen for petty political reasons.

The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures
Dating site OK Cupid is not only a sit for hipsters to meet other hipsters for the purpose of discussing Vampire Weekend at tapas bars, it's also a site where statistics nerds analyze pictures and response rates of it's members to create mathematical and statistical breakdowns of what does and doesn't work online if you're trying to meet another human. Girls making that annoying duck face in a profile shot? Bad. Guys looking away in their profile shot? Good. The Myspace shot? Winner winner chicken dinner. In addition they also have studies done on how different races interact online, the receptive response rates/cruelty of men and women in relation to perceived attractiveness, and what responses work best when human contact is attempted. Check it out, it's sociologically interesting.

Noun, verb, ....

I don't want to alarm our audience here, because I know you're all great fans of the man, but I think there's something terribly wrong with Rudy Giuliani. He looks fine from the outside, but on the inside... I think something is affecting his memory. Because not only did Mr. 9/11 forget to mention 9/11 in an interview about terrorism, he forgot that 9/11 even happened at all.

Rudy Giuliani, the man who was mayor of New York City during the 9/11 attacks, appeared on Good Morning America today to say President Obama should take lessons from former President George W. Bush on how to prevent a terrorist attack.

"What [Obama] should be doing is following the right things Bush did. One of the right things he did was treat this as a war on terror. We had no domestic attacks under Bush. We've had one under Obama," Giuliani said.

My God, get this man a CAT scan. Not only has he lost the ability to recall the largest terrorist attack in US, he's forgotten his chief duty as former mayor of New York: to crassly exploit 9/11 at every single opportunity for his own personal, political, and monetary gain. Plus, for some demented reason he decided to count a failed attack by the underpants bomber as an attack, but failed to count the failed shoe bombing during the Bush Administration as one. Or count the anthrax attacks that killed Americans. Or, again, count that tiny little event where three thousand people died, two rather large buildings were destroyed, and a mayor tried to chisel every nickel out of it he could. I can't believe he doesn't remember that last part.

Thankfully though, it appears that Giuliani, while forgetting 9/11, can still use nouns and verbs. Tragically he's not the only one suffering from this affliction of 9/11 related dementia. In the past months fellow Republicans Dana Perino and Mary Matalin have have had memory related afflictions surrounding 9/11. Hopefully some money can be raised to find a cure for this disease. Actually maybe that is the cure. Just tell Rudy that he has to raise money to pay off some debts or build a statue to himself, I'm sure memories of 9/11 will flood back into his brain and he'll be able to give the necessary speeches and acquire the necessary funds. We can only hope Rudy remembers before the 2010 political campaigning starts and the 2012 Republican primaries are underway.

Things that don't sound good

The why's and how's of how a terrorist was able to pack his Jockey's with exploding groin candy and was only stopped through a combination of incompetence and passengers noting that a man trying to light his sack on fire isn't normal already don't look very good. But as we get deeper and deeper into investigations into what was and wasn't done, well, the specifics don't sound any better. Take for instance this USA Today interview with crotchety old National Security Adviser/Dip-set rapper Jim Jones.

White House national security adviser James Jones says Americans will feel "a certain shock" when they read an account being released Thursday of the missed clues that could have prevented the alleged Christmas Day bomber from ever boarding the plane.

President Obama "is legitimately and correctly alarmed that things that were available, bits of information that were available, patterns of behavior that were available, were not acted on," Jones said in an interview Wednesday with USA TODAY.

"That's two strikes,"

Well, unless it involves some revelation about Michael Jackson's death or an additional dozen mistresses for Tiger Woods, I doubt America will even stifle a disinterested yawn, let alone get "shocked". But it is a tad disturbing when your national security adviser looks at all the facts and decides that should be the reaction the American public and would be... if we had an adult country or a functioning political system.

But what would theoretically shock Americans? I don't know, something like this maybe?

U.S. border security officials learned of the alleged extremist links of the suspect in the Christmas Day jetliner bombing attempt as he was airborne from Amsterdam to Detroit and had decided to question him when he landed, officials disclosed Wednesday.
...
"The people in Detroit were prepared to look at him in secondary inspection," a senior law enforcement official said. "The decision had been made. The [database] had picked up the State Department concern about this guy -- that this guy may have been involved with extremist elements in Yemen."

If the intelligence had been detected sooner, it could have resulted in the interrogation and search of Abdulmutallab at the airport in Amsterdam

Ahh, your information told you that this man should not be allowed to board a plane without first going through an interrogation and search, but not only is this database watch list information not work quickly enough, when you do get the word that he's a terrorist super-freak you decide to let the man complete the flight he shouldn't be allowed on in order to question him at the completion of it. But don't worry, security types in the article will assure you that's wasn't where the mistake was made. No, the mistake was made when the father called the government to warn them about his son and, despite having enough evidence to put him on a 'no fly' list, he was allowed to get on a plane. Well, that does make me feel better.

Actually the scary thing is that we still might not be able to address this stuff because our national security and terrorism policies are more focused around exploiting the politics of the situation instead of fixing things. So it's 50/50 on whether or not we can fix things like "not letting the guy on our watch list get on the plane". Let's just put in the work to make our security lapses go from "shocking" to merely "mildly surprising". Baby steps.

Airport security is serious business

The whole underwear bomber has got people understandably a little rattled and more questioning of their safety and security at an airport, despite the fact that air travel is still quite safe. But it's also got airport security on higher alert for shady figures, not wanting to be the one who lets another guy with Semtex in his shorts or perhaps a cable knit cardigan made out of C4 onto a plane. So what does this mean? It means we can't let obvious national security threat Joan Rivers back into this country because she's too fucking suspicious.

Rivers wasn’t allowed on her Newark-bound flight in Costa Rica this past weekend by a “jittery Continental Airlines gate agent” who thought the two names on her passport, which reads “Joan Rosenberg AKA Joan Rivers,” seemed “fishy.”

Yes, because when you want to avoid any suspicion you pick a Jewish name and write it as your alias on your passport. On the other hand, Rivers has had so much facial surgery that at this point anyone in a wig could be wheeled out in front of us and as long as they talked shit on what celebrities were wearing we'd believe it was her. So clearly this could have been any number of terrorists trying to use the name of a famous comedienne to rage destruction on the American mainland. Thankfully, Costa Rican security was thinking laterally and had foreseen this very chain of events.

So, for those of you playing at home, let's recap here. A Nigerian man whose father had warned intelligence agencies that he was being radicalized in the known terrorist breeding ground of Yemen, who had already made it onto watch lists, and bought a one way ticket, in cash, and checked no bags: not suspicious. Comedy legend: very suspicious. I'm just glad that we seem to have our best and brightest on the front lines defending us from former Tonight Show guest hosts. Someone start tailing Gary Shandling and Jay Leno, they could be planning something big.

Cheap Blogging Crutch 01.05

Serial Catastrophes in Afghanistan threaten Obama Policy
Juan Cole runs down the problems facing the Obama Administration in Afghanistan. They are not limited to killing schoolchildren a few too many times, enraging the Afghan public, provoking a student protest movement, double agents betraying us, the Afghan army not effectively existing/being dependable/not showing up to anything important/taking potshots at US troops, and the fact that the Afghan government barely functions if at all. But on the bright side, the law of averages states that a sometime somewhere something in that country has to go right and if we stick around long enough the chances are that it'll be a big and important thing. So... fingers crossed.

C.I.A. Is Sharing Data With Climate Scientists
That's right, the CIA is using spy satellites and specialized sensors to collect advanced data and assess "hidden complexities" in climate change in collaboration with scientists and universities. In addition they've been waterboarding polar bears three at a time to get them to spill the beans on glacier melting and they've rendered a few arctic foxes to Egypt for some "enhanced interrogation" about temperature data. Finally we're putting some government hardasses on the climate change front. A few targeted assassinations, a few rigged elections and we might finally get this problem licked.

New scanners break child porn laws
In the aftermath of the flight 253 flaming underwear bombing there have been renewed calls for the use of full body optical scanners to ferret out bombs, knives, and average genitalia size of your bog standard air passenger. But instead of merely whining about personal freedoms, police states, encroaching fascism, or civil liberties, opponents in the UK have opted for a different track: they say if you use it on a kid it's legally defined as child pornography. It seems all the civil liberties people have finally learned how to do battle. When it's security vs. civil liberties, civil liberties always gets handcuffed, beat up, and tased. But security vs. child pornography? That's a whole new ballgame. Who says hippies can't learn?

Hell Freezes Over: Rush Limbaugh Loves Union Hospitals and Socialized Medicine
Among the many thing that were hilarious about Rush Limbaugh's heart almost exploding were the fact that his heart nearly exploded, he was treated in the hospital at the center of the Obama birth certificate conspiracy, and that after months of railing against socialism, unions, and health care, he was subjected to all three and liked them without understanding that the hospital was the evil hotbed of socialism, unions, and Kenyan birth certificate fraud that it was. I know, I know "Rush Limbaugh doesn't understand something, gets facts wrong" isn't as much of a headline as it is a fact of daily existence. But it did give the SEIU a nice chance to tee off on him. Plus, as I've previously mentioned: his heart almost exploded. We're getting closer and closer to the day when the rotten fuck finally shuffles off this mortal coil.

Knut Haugland, Sailor on Kon-Tiki, Dies at 92
An obituary worth reading. Know that you will never accomplish anything this great or worthwhile or heroic or manly if you were given two lifetimes. A tip of the cap and raise of the glass to Mr. Knut Haugland.

I don't feel that my fear is being exploited enough

What with a terrifying and groin singing attack so recently in our minds, we need the calming voice of authority to sooth our jangled nerves with rash, shortsighted action. Thankfully today it looks like we're getting the start of that as the President has returned from vacation, our security and intelligence heads have been gathered, and we have been deemed to be sufficiently past the New Year and Christmas to be relied upon to pay attention. What are we getting? A big important meeting, promises from both Congress and the White House to look into what happened, and... not a lot in the way of new rules or onerous assaults on our personal freedoms.

The Transportation Security Administration already has directed airlines, effective Monday, to give full-body, pat-down searches to U.S.-bound travelers from Yemen, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and 11 other countries.

White House officials, while eager to portray Obama as aggressive on the issue, also sought to minimize expectations for the president's remarks. He planned no big airline security announcement, officials said.

Since the attempted attack, the government has added dozens of names to its lists of suspected terrorists and those barred from flights bound for the United States.

So... brown people pat down theater and updating a list that should be constantly updated? We're not even going to frisk white people and pull grannies out of line to make it look like security is getting serious? This isn't pseudo fascist police state I was led to believe we lived in. They're barely putting any effort into making air travel more miserable.

If all they want to do is one semi-meaningless thing and one thing they should have been doing all along, I have a few other suggestions for them: mandatory flip-flop wearing for all passengers, airports are officially "going commando" underwear free zones, one-up Lt. General Tom McInerney and not allow any Muslims anywhere to use any flying contraption, and Joan Rivers is not allowed to use any form of transportation. That's just a start, but I think you get the picture.

I'm worried that if we don't take enough petty, reactionary measures and mainly stick to behind the scenes tweaks and inter-agency co-operation we're in danger of damaging our national character. Tell us about vague unspecified threats that may kill us! Marshall our fear into a bad war or two! Do something crazy! Not this "gathering important figures together and have them talk" shit. We're in danger of losing our national governmental identity as a collection of bed wetting, vapors getting reactionaries if this course continues. Invent a color coded system and then raise it arbitrarily! C'mon. Frisking foreigners? That's so 2001. Get creative. The nation is depending on it.

Big important meeting of big important individuals

Today the President is meeting with 20 of his top advisers to discuss both the failures leading up to the Flight 253 attempted underwear bombing to solutions they have going forward.

Among the things expected to happen at the meeting are:

• Obama banging Janet Napolitano's head off the conference room table while yelling "You couldn't think of anything better to say than 'the system worked'?"
• Obama incredulously asking "He's a foreigner from a country we recognize as dangerous, whose father warned us about his increasing radicalization in a terrorist country, he paid for a one way ticket in cash, checked no bags... and we still couldn't piece this shit together?" punctuating the speech with a "fuuuuuuuuuuuuck"
• Obama angrily asking "and where was the TSA on this?" before gesturing to a chair that he turns around to find out is empty and not likely to be filled soon. He punctuates that revelation with a slap to his forehead and a groaning "fuuuuuuuuuuuuck"
• The President casually mentioning that this is the first meeting he's had where Tim Geithner and Larry Summers weren't telling him something awful about the economy
• Obama will casually remind everyone that their fuckups ruined both his families' vacation and his families' Christmas and that he would be holding a grudge and planning revenge. Note that Sasha seemed most upset and referred to Homeland Security adviser John Brennan as a "big doodyhead" and a "rotten son of a bitch"
  
• 45 minute improv session where advisers try to come up with best underwear, security, and explosives related jokes, one-liners, and skits they can think of. Best will be performed at the January 23rd Security Follies show at the Kennedy Center.
• Again note how great it is to not see Tim Geithner in this meeting with a hangdog expression and using the phrase "I need to tell you something awful about the money"
• Ask the security experts to place a provision in the law that makes sure that the President is sent the best photos from the body scanners that are being installed. Noting that he wants to see "big boobs", "big wangers", ""famous celebrities", and "the most pear shaped humans America has to offer"

Sounds like a serious discussion by serious individuals. I can only hope that they're able to solve some of this county's more serious security issues

Your new "security"

In a bit of good news, today the US finally lifted it's longstanding travel ban on anyone with HIV or AIDS from entering this country. For those of you counting at home, that's one more list we're off of where our only companions are extremely repressive and regressive regimes. Funny how often we find ourselves on them.

Hey, wouldn't it be hilarious if the day that we were patting ourselves on the back for tolerance on one type of passenger we announced that we were also going to declare anyone darker than an albino Irishman was to be considered suspicious? Funny I should mention that...

Citizens of 14 nations, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, who are flying to the United States will be subjected indefinitely to the intense screening at airports worldwide that was imposed after the Christmas Day bombing plot, Obama administration officials announced Sunday.
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Passengers holding passports from those nations, or taking flights that originated or passed through any of them, will be required to undergo full-body pat downs and will face extra scrutiny of their carry-on bags before they can board planes to the United States.
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The changes will mean that any citizen of Pakistan or Saudi Arabia will for the first time be patted down automatically before boarding any flight to the United States.

That's right, if you want to come to the land of milk and honey, we get to cup your balls first. Just to be sure. But only if you're in violation of Homeland Security's new color alert system. Right now it's at 'Eggshell White', meaning everyone gets searching in order to make everyone feel better. Soon it'll be reduced to 'Khaki' and then 'British Tan', so just us white people can feel better when we see pat downs and increased security for those "dangerous types". You know the ones I'm talking about. Ethnics.

Now I know what you're saying: "Aren't passports easy to fake? Aren't terrorists smart enough to get around this? Has any terrorist ever actually hopped on a Saudi Arabia-to-US direct flight with C4 in his boxer briefs? Wouldn't it be better to pump money into getting uniform shared databases so that information can be shared and pieces could be connected, like what didn't happen in the Detroit case? Why don't we take things seriously for once? Isn't this just more of that 'illusion of security' shit we've been going through since 9/11? Stuff that just makes us feel better but doesn't actually protect us?"

Yes, yes it is. I have an interesting response to that: Shut up. Sure, none of this will make a difference. Sure, it's kind of racist and probably harms our relations with Muslims more than it protects us from them. Sure, this is all empty theater. But it looks good and makes us feel good, so we'll take that in lieu of real safety measures. Thankfully our leaders are content to follow our lead and only deal with security and terrorism in terms of empty gestures, rhetoric, politics, and tough guy posturing.

At least they didn't decide to make us all take our underwear off at the scanners as well. There's at least that.

That's different

Hey, remember back a few years ago when Richard Reid tried to blow up an airplane with his shoes and failed? Remember how he was arrested, put on trial within the American legal system, and sentenced to serve a life sentence in an American prison? And how all of this happened under the watchful eye of the Bush Administration and DHS Secretary Tom Ridge? Well, if you're remembering something like that, it's probably because someone has tampered with your memories. THAT NEVER HAPPENED, DO YOU UNDERSTAND? THAT NEVER HAPPENED!

In fact, despite the similarities between the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber, even down to the explosive type, the fact that we're going to try Abdulmutallab in a court with laws and shit just proves that President Obama is a week-kneed weak weak-ass who is weakening the country with his weaky weaking on matters of national strongness. Letting this man into our legal system is a violation of all we stand for. Just listen to former DHS head and hypocrite Tom Ridge:

"I take a look at this individual who has been charged criminally, does that mean he gets his Miranda warnings? The only information we get is if he volunteers it?" Ridge said. "He's not a citizen of this country. He's a terrorist, and I don't think he deserves the full range of protections of our criminal justice system embodied in the Constitution of the United States."

Hell, even Former Vice-President Cheney came out to opine on the matter, grunting the same line of cliches he usually does out of whatever orifice it is he speaks out of these days:

"As I've watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won't be at war. He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won't be at war. He seems to think if we bring the mastermind of 9/11 to New York, give him a lawyer and trial in civilian court, we won't be at war.
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But we are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren't, it makes us less safe. Why doesn't he want to admit we're at war?"

Because he's a liberal pussy that hates America? I thought we were all clear on this.

But what is their response to the fact that when they had a crazy foreign Muslim come to this country and fail to blow up an airliner with a hidden cache of PETN, that they felt it OK to arrest him (the shame), Mirandize him (the horror), charge him in US courts (Constitution shattering), try him in US courts (shanking freedom in the gut), and house him in US prisons (retroactively negating America through a time-space wormhole)?

*crickets chirping* *silence* *off in the distance... a wolf howls*

I'm sure they meant to say "That never happened" or, if someone actually points out that it did happen, a nicely timed "Well, circumstances were different" ought to suffice. I just think it's a shame both of these guys couldn't come out a dramatically/hypocritically politicize this on the day it happened. We're five days past it. These guys must be slipping.

We are a serious country governed by serious people

With all the furor and scrutiny surrounding Homeland Security and the TSA over the failed Detroit bombing, you would think that the heads of both branches would be in for some criticism. Of course DHS head Janet Napolitano has been taking fire over her contention that "the system worked", but why haven't we heard anything from or about the head of the TSA for their failures? Oh, that's right, there is no head of the TSA and there hasn't been for nearly a year. That's probably a good idea, it doesn't seem like an important position.

An attempt to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day would be all-consuming for the administrator of the Transportation Security Administration — if there were one.

The post remains vacant because Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., has held up President Barack Obama's nominee in opposition to the prospect of TSA workers joining a labor union.

Yeah, who needs to worry about airline security and the leadership of the organization behind most of it when there's a cheap political attack to make on the concept of unions? I'm sure complex agencies like the TSA run themselves and it's best that there's no boss type figure there to confuse everyone with uniform goals, policies, implementation, or structure. Hell, if that happens you might get confusion and some nut with C4 in his Jockey's might be able to slip through. No, thankfully Jim DeMint is there to stop the confusion that a properly run organization can cause.

Thankfully these kind of forward thinking and meaningful Seante holds are common practice on Obama Administration nominations. Out of some 200 open nominations only 75 have gotten past delaying tactics in committees to face the delaying tactics of the Senate floor. But you must understand that the reason we didn't have something like a US Trade Rep for a long time (and in this economy who needs one) is for very important reasons of principle.

One of those finally approved was Miriam Sapiro, who had become the Obama administration’s prime example of stalled nominations since being chosen in April to be a deputy United States trade representative. Senator Jim Bunning, Republican of Kentucky, put a hold on the confirmation of Ms. Sapiro, an Internet policy consultant, to try to pressure the trade representative’s office to file a complaint with the World Trade Organization against Canada over a law that bans cigarettes with candy flavors.

See! Candy flavored cigarettes. Whining about unions. Important shit.

I'm just glad we have serious individuals like Jim Bunning and Jim DeMint out there looking out for this country in a serious manner. A properly run government and properly run government agencies aren't important, candy flavored cigarettes are. I'm just glad someone finally had the balls to stand up and say so.

We need to start a new war

What with the revelation that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian terrorist who thought that the US would notice death and destruction in Detroit, had ties to terrorist networks in Yemen, it was only a matter of time before it was made clear to us that Yemen was a place that definitely needed a war started in it. As if on cue Joe Lieberman, a man only good for advocating for new ill thought out wars and stopping things that might benefit actual humans, was right out there telling us all how good America would look in a third war.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, (I-Conn) a renowned hawk and one of the foremost champions of the invasion of Iraq, warned on Sunday that the United States faced "danger" unless it pre-emptively acts to curb the rise of terrorism in Yemen.

"Somebody in our government said to me in Sana'a, the capital of Yemen, Iraq was yesterday's war. Afghanistan is today's war. If we don't act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow's war," Lieberman said, during an appearance on "Fox News Sunday". "That's the danger we face."

Compelling. If we don't start a war in Yemen today, we'll have to start a war in Yemen in the future. Makes sense to me. All I want to know is when we can start calling for a surge in Yemen.

I am worried though. How will Joe Lieberman's imaginary war in Yemen affect our imaginary war in Iran? I'm sure Joe wouldn't want a new imaginary war to take away from our theoretical war efforts in Iran that he has advocated for so long, but I'm concerned with the sheer weight, scope, and toll that so many fanciful "brown people go kaboom" conflicts are having. Is America mentally strong enough to have so many hypothetical wars to fight alongside our real ones?

Thankfully we don't have to grapple with such esoteric concerns. No, such serious thoughts are reserved for the very smart men in our government who think that the only solution to any terrorist threat is a bombing run or full scale military conflict in the country that can most easily be linked to said terrorist. Men like Joe Lieberman. Thank God we have him out there, advocating for dozens upon dozens of new wars.

Good to be back

Ahh, it's good to be back from the rest and relaxation of doing nothing during a holiday, to the rest and relaxation that doing nothing while the small fraction of people who have jobs in this country are heading to work. And what happened whilst we were gone? The Senate finally passed their health care bill, I got a free three-month preview of HBO and Cinemax, and a lunatic tried to blow up an airplane. Since we've hashed out the health care bill ad nauseum here and most of you are too self-absorbed and unwilling to admit just how much me getting free movies in HD means to global security and well-being, I guess that means we'll just have to deal with the fallout and pants wetting that is inevitably flowing from the failed terrorist attack.

Yes, for all the billions upon billions we spend on security, homeland defense, wars, and various measures designed to protect us, it seems that the best defense America has is a terrorist fucking up the attack in the exact place he was trying to attack after numerous threats, warnings, and specific descriptions of his goals and beliefs should have had the 5-0 hauling his ass in or, at the very least, not allowing him to board a plane. Maybe that's the future for Homeland Security: no screening, intel, or police work, we just flood the arms market with so many shoddy bomb parts that any weapon Al Qaeda does make is destined to malfunction.

But because we live in an intelligent country filled with so many smart and worthwhile elected leaders, the response to this has been swift and extremely well thought out. There's already been a call to racially profile every Muslim. Jim DeMint used the attacks as an obvious rallying point to... attack unions. Plus there were the standard attempts to Monday Morning QB and place political blame while claiming they weren't doing either. I'm sure in the next days/hours there will be calls for war with Yemen, war with Nigeria, a ham-handed attempt to point out that both the terrorist and the President are black, an attempt to place the blame for this attack on some innocuous section of popular culture (early candidate: hip-hop music), and perhaps a drive to have everyone who enters an airport rectally scanned for any components that could conceivably explode. Because the standard operating procedure of America's leaders after any high media profile terrorism event is to wet themselves and cower in fear for as long as possible while not doing anything effective.

Ahhh, it's good to be back.