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I’m catching up on Meet the Press and listening to the Casey Santorum “Debate,” which had some promise of being an interesting discussion of views on the important issues facing Americans today. Unfortunately none of them can get past the first 5 minutes: Casey with accountability, Russert and his Iraq vote fetish and Santorum reciting the GOP 2004 platform as written by the post-Sorkin West Wing writers. Do we get to vote for a new media this November?

Another day, another false alarm?  We don’t know yet, but the more planes get turned around for seemingly innocuous reasons the sooner passengers will get tired of it.  At that point we will have taken a step back in security, just as the boy who cried wolf tried the villagers once too many times.  Security is difficult and it is not clear that being overly cautions is effective at stopping terrorists from accomplishing their goals.

McCain also pitched the part line argument that setting a date for withdrawal would encourage the militias in Iraq to lay low and wait for the date before erupting even more violence.  I wonder sometimes how many civilian deaths per day it will take for people to realize that we have no such influence in the region.  If the militias wanted us to leave wouldn’t they just pause the violence long enough for Bush to save face and withdraw?  Before you ask, yes, they are that smart.  The truth is that they do not want us to leave.  The presence of US Armed Forces are a much better recruitment tool for the insurgents in Iraq than they have been here at home.  Maybe if we set a date the insurgents will fear that they will not longer be able to blame us for their suffering and 26 million Iraqis will kick them out.  I wouldn’t count on it though - date or not, the vacuum left in Iraq when we removed Saddam will take years if not decades of violence to fill and will require much more than 100,000 troops to win.

I have been wondering recently about the FISA court (overlooking the fact that the Bush administration usually goes around it) and the method by which warrants are issued and executed ex parte (with the defendant not present or notified).  If one were to frame this as a deprivation of liberty without due process, possibly violating the Fifth Amendment, a reasonable rebuttal (one championed by the Bush administration) is that Article II Section 2 in combination with various laws passed by Congress (the Patriot Act being one often cited) give the President the power to deprive people of their liberty without due process in order to ensure the security of the United States.  Put another way, one may conclude that the President has the power to take a way a little bit of your liberty to attempt to preserve someone else’s based on a perceived threat.

Put in this context, here’s my question: do we want to give our government unchecked power to decide how much liberty we get or give up?

Update: The Bush Administration cites the Joint Resolution Authorizing the Use of Military Force, which authorizes the “use of all necessary and appropriate force” - not the Patriot Act.

Taking a page out of the Bush (or is it the Rove) playbook, IBD puts up a list of examples of how a number of companies’ boards were bullied or stood up to ‘Activist Investors.’  The folks at IBD may have the best of intentions in defending the board of directors of these companies but they seem to conveniently forget that the board members tend to be minority holders, at best, and when the owners - i.e. stock holders - believe the company needs to make a change or that the board is not operating in their best interest, it is their right to do something about it, whether they are correct or not. 

Security Concerns Divert Fla. Jetliner

Two Asian men forced to leave plane

‘Suspicious’ pair taken off plane

Mutiny forces passengers off plane

Pair taken off plane because of “suspicious” behaviour

Passenger detained; bomb squad sweeps plane at Texas

Passenger, plane detained in San Antonio

Plane diverted due to locked bathroom doors

Bomb note on plane was ‘false alarm’

Plane diverted over fuel odour

Plane diverted after bomb scare

Plane Searched After Arriving at Midway Airport

AA Flight Delayed By Drinks

U.S. Flight Delayed After Passengers Bring Drinks on Plane

‘We feared jet would explode’

Men removed from jet for ’speaking Arabic’

Finally, a commentator who gets it: Terrorists change airport security, provide comedy

After his 2002 re-election McCain had a chance to split with the GOP, take a page from Dean’s 2004 playbook and raise support to run on his true views.  Unfortunately he has taken on the burden of towing the party line in order to have a chance for the presidency.  Listening the McCain on MTP I want to believe that he can make good decisions but then he throws in his mandatory hat tip:

“I have confidence in the president and I believe that he is well aware of the severity of the situation.”

“I know that the president’s committed to win and I know the president’s committed to prevail.”

“I think the president should pick his team and I will support the president’s selections.”

Then there are the hints that the Neo-Con mind-set has overtaken McCain’s better sense of reason:

“We cannot allow that to happen.”

“I believe we can prevent it.”

“We can fix it.”

Here’s a wake-up call to McCain and other Republican’s who have not yet been brainwashed: 130,000 troops cannot fix, save or prevent the strife amongst 26 million people.  They have to decide to put history behind them and move on for their children’s sake.

in an article by Peter Hirschfeld we can observe the kinds of paranoia when people think that their flight is the one that is going to be blown up by a hysterical white woman in the front row.  If we dispatched F-15s every time someone thought they saw something suspicious or drew some far fetched conclusion based on something they saw or said we’d rapidly run out of jets.  There are significantly more suspicious and strange occurrences - especially when everyone is on edge - than actual dangerous activities.  Are we going to overreact to every one just because the consequences may be dire?  Or are we going to realize that sometimes when someone buys 1000 cellphones they’re just trying to make a living.

Drawing a lesson (intended or not) from Bruce Schneier’s recent post on Human/Bear Security Trade-Off, our largest fault in how we go about protecting ourselves from terrorism is that we are impatient.  Meanwhile the terrorists are infinitely patient.  This is the same problem we are experiencing in Iraq.  This is not a statement of support for “staying the course” rather an admission that when Bush says his successor will have to deal with withdrawing troops he understands that it is going to take a long time to achieve a period of stability in Iraq.

Has apparently become a euphemisms for disrobing for the TSA…or am I misinterpreting this political cartoon by Michael Ramirez:

While Bush may be the President of the United States, he is king of wishful thinking.  Claiming that Israel won and Hezbollah lost because “There’s going to be a new power in the south of Lebanon, and that’s going to be a Lebanese force with a robust international force to help them seize control of the country - that part of the country” is not far from the Whitehouse’s PR gaff of 2003 claiming Mission Accomplished after capturing Baghdad.  When 30,000 international and Lebanese troops manage to patrol southern Lebanon without daily attacks from Hezbollah then one may claim that Israel has accomplished its goal.  At this point the odds are that Israel will be back in Lebanon sometime next year.

Update: Dave Winer says it just right.

Even IBD, ever the Bush supporter, suspect he’s being more than a bit premature.

Three links to people who get it:

James Fallows Declares Victory

Rex Hammock knows The Only Thing we Have to Fear

and Steven Berlin Johnson assesses The Risk

Reading the evening headlines about the turmoil that a few people have caused I started thinking about how the threat of terrorism alone has caused our society to self-impose onerous surveillance and invasion of privacy to our own economic detriment.  Hundreds of millions of us are choosing (through our elected officials) to suffer untold inconveniences due to the mere possibility that a dozen people might kill a few thousand.  Terrorists no longer have to carry out their plots in order to terrorize.  So long as they are discovered and we react disproportionately they have succeeded.

Lieberman was defeated in the recent Democratic primaries in Connecticut recently not just because Democrats in Connecticut disagree with him on the war and just because he is close to Republicans. Lieberman lost his party’s nomination because he has gotten wrapped up in the propaganda that fuels the GOP’s campaigning. Lieberman believes that this is a war that can be won - that terrorists wish to destroy all of us and that we can possibly destroy all of them. The world will go on forever with terrorists and “freedom loving folk” alike in an enduring battle until, as the Israeli Ambassador to the US put it, “they start loving their children more than they hate us.” Sending 150,000 troops into their sovereign territory only makes them hate us more. Telling millions of airplane passengers that they are quite literally going to have to be treated like cattle in order to fly makes us hate our governments. That’s why Lieberman lost.

The BBC is running non-stop stories about the foiled terror plot to blow up 10 planes from the US to the UK leading to “loss of life on an unprecedented scale.” It is difficult to put this into perspective without sounding dismissive - more people were killed in September 11th than would have been on 10 transatlantic planes. If you consider more than one day’s worth of killings, more people die in automobile accidents in a month or due to violence in Iraq in the same time period. As many people die from lung cancer in a week. 8 million people were killed during World War II. In one day in 1915 over 5,000 Armenians were killed by the Turkish government. Unprecedented? How about unhelpful. Let Scotland Yard, the FBI and the CIA do their jobs and let the 1 million air passengers who fly each day do so and take the risks that we have been taking for decades. This isn’t the first time it was dangerous to fly and it won’t be the last. We are still statistically safer on an airplane than in our own living rooms.

After Scotland yard uncovered a plot to blow up more airplanes, the UK government has reevaluated what you can bring on flights leaving from airports in the UK. You could make a mint sending everything via FedEx and shipping the passengers naked.

Follow-up - the TSA has imposed similar restrictions including no beverages. I second Bruce Schneier’s feelings: I’m glad I’m not planning on flying anywhere anytime soon. This is pure craziness - if we can’t fly because our government is paranoid then I’m pretty sure any eager terrorists have successfully accomplished their goal of terrorizing us.

I’m fairly comfortable claming that my displeasure with the thought of being blown up in an airplane equals that of most people.  Thanks to the propensity of our government to overreact I am at least temporarily saved from this possibility.  The American and UK governments have reduced the casualty risk by at least one.  Short Delta, AA - long Amtrak.

Out of the three major streets that run through town the middle street seems to be the new arena for this year’s Darwin awards competition.  On our way home tonight, three kids - two on bicycles and one pedestrian - deliberately wandered through the street, toying around with oncoming traffic.  There is a dangerous thrill and a kind of rebellion in trying to ride your bike quickly across the street as the cars whiz by or quickly crossing an intersection when the light just turned green.  While foolish, even the “tough” kids who are out to prove something move quickly and carefully.  They are smart enough to realize that the person driving the two ton hunk of metal with which they are playing chicken may not be able to stop in time.  I pity the parents of the third thug who thought it adventurous to cut in front of our vehicle and ride briefly between us and oncoming traffic before returning to the side of the road.  For their own wellbeing and that of their parents I will try to make the city’s bicycle patrol unit aware of these incidents.  As for the pedestrian, good luck in the Darwin games.

Tips on Bicycle Saftey

Ned Batchelder quotes columnists from the Boston Globe and New York Times (both owned by the NYT) performing reductio ad absurdum using the judges’ arguments in two recent rulings upholding the states right to refuse marriage licenses to gay couples.  Ned makes a very good point, the counter arguments are flimsy at best and the sensible among us will come around.