From Urban Cartography, we see that Jesus Diaz has taken Nate Silver's data on airline terrorism over the past decade and put them in graphical form.
December 2009 Archives
Rachel Maddow's takedown of former Vice President Dick Cheney and the other Republicans who are politicizing the foiled terror attempt on Northwest 253 is a must watch segment.
As she asks throughout the piece, where was Vice President Cheney's outrage when the administration in which he was serving had a similar reaction to the shoe bombing in December 2001? And, as Maddow notes at the end of this piece, members of the media have a choice, they can "just copy down what the Republicans and Vice President Cheney are saying, and click send, and call it journalism, or you can actually fact check those comments and put them into context."
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
FiveThirtyEight.com's Nate Silver does the math.
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.
Atrios is right. Sigh.
And if you haven't read Charlie Pierce's Idiot America yet, which expands on how dangerous this celebration of ignorance is, you should.
Professor Brad DeLong on his blog today included a link to the U.S. Senate reference page on cloture motions.
Looking at the chart will show you just how much things have changed as the filibuster has morphed from being a tool to ensure everyone has time to make all of their arguments in a debate into a weapon to obstruct debate and action.
Let's put it this way: 25.7 percent of all successful cloture motions in the history of the U.S. Senate have happened since the Democrats retook control of the Senate in 2007.
Yes, you read that right. More than one-quarter of all successful cloture votes in the history of our Republic have happened in just the past three years. And the 2000s have seen particular abuse of the system that is accelerating.
This is nothing less than an amendment of our system of government without public debate and without going through our Constitutional process.
For how much longer must we tolerate it?
Climate Progress offers a sampling of the best cartoons of the year about the climate crisis. It's worth a look, even if one of them includes the inaccurate boiling frog metaphor the Atlantic's James Fallows has been trying to stamp out.
The Transportation Security Administration has so far comprehensively failed in its first public test in the aftermath of the attempted bombing of Northwest Flight 253.
Alas, it's just the latest failure in the history of an awful decision to merge a group of agencies in response to the September 11 attacks.
It's not just the pathetic, and all-too-predictable, security theater response (Steve Bruce Schneier has a good initial take-down of this latest round of TSA feel-good-but-not-making-us-any-safer ridiculousness). We need to know how someone about whom there were credible warnings (including from his father) was apparently able to get on a plane to the United States.
Frankly, it's inexcusable. People must be held responsible.
Not letting people use laptops or read books or use the restroom in the last hour of a flight isn't going to make us more secure. The Obama Administration needs to do better. And quickly.
Note: Edited to correct the Bruce Schneier's name above. Thanks for catching that error, ZDR.
The Los Angeles Times' recaps the list of names readers supplied when he asked for their opinion about who were the best and worst politicians of 2009.
After recapping the typical stereotypical blather from those who wrongly think all politicians are awful, Lopez highlights Brandon Ruiz's observation:
"We pass ballot initiatives with no method of funding," wrote Brandon Ruiz. "We put our legislature in a straitjacket with a 2/3 vote requirement on budgets and then ask them to fix our state's problems. We make it easy to cut taxes, but impossible to raise them, meaning that a small majority can deprive the state of needed revenue. . . .
"We killed the dominant school funding mechanism by passing Prop. 13 and then demanded that the state fix it and fund our schools. . . . We want to protect OUR programs and cut THEIRS. . . . We are our own worst politician and our own worst enemy. We, the short-sighted, instant-gratification seeking, detail averse, California public. We refuse to see the difficult choices, nuance, and complicated details of public policy, yet we give ourselves the power to make laws that can virtually never be repealed."
Lopez remarks that Ruiz "nailed it." I agree.
We have created a system that cannot work with our 2/3 vote hypermajority requirements, a dysfunctional initiative system, and insanely strict term limits among the provisions exacerbating our state's problems and making it virtually impossible to resolve them.
We have created a system that cannot work and pathetically act surprised when it does not. We see reform efforts that are trying not to touch some of the elements I list above. We see tax reform commissions with Governor-appointed leaders who have reached conclusions outside of the promised transparent process.
California's system does not work. It cannot under the present rules. And anyone who says that California can be reformed without touching the hypermajority rules, initiative process, and term limits is selling the same tonic which lead to our current failed system.
James Fallows has a round-up of U.S. Senate filibuster commentary, including a note by a lawyer friend that sheds some light on what the framers of the Constitution might think of the 60-vote rule.
As Fallows' friend notes, one of the few defined responsibilities given to the Vice President is: "The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided."
Of course, if 60-votes is the new requirement to do anything in the 100-member body, the Senate shall never be equally divided. The filibuster robs the Vice President of one of his or her few actual Constitutional responsibilities!
This Constitutional travesty is just one of many reasons the filibuster should be eliminated.
The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities has an excellent new report explaining the causes of the federal budget deficit.
If you guessed, as some of our Tea Bag friends appear to argue, that the deficits began only on January 20, 2009, you're wrong!
The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities rightly explains how President Obama inherited the vast majority of the deficit from his predecessor:
The events and policies that have pushed deficits to astronomical levels in the near term, however, were largely outside the new Administration's control. If not for the tax cuts enacted during the Presidency of George W. Bush that Congress did not pay for, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that began during that period, and the effects of the worst economic slump since the Great Depression (including the cost of steps necessary to combat it), we would not be facing these huge deficits in the near term.
Again, I will not find any deficit hawk credible if he or she did not oppose the Bush tax cuts or demand that Bush find a way to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
If you weren't there fighting this fight under 43's misrule, when projections of over $5 trillion in surpluses were turned into trillions of red ink, I'm not really interested in listening to your blather now.
The Big Picture's Barry Ritholtz is right: seeing global statistics updated in real time (at www.worldometers.info) is very cool.
Much will likely be made over the fact that the stock market did not gain anything during the decade of the 00s. (And if when we consider the impact of inflation, and adjust the numbers accordingly, the results will appear even worse.)
But as Calculated Risk points out, we are going to finish the decade of the 00s with fewer total jobs in the United States than we had when the decade began.
That's right: an entire decade in which total jobs were lost. Heck of a job.
And yet there are, stunningly, actual political leaders, who presumably still have functioning brains, who believe we should resort again to the same economic policies which created this calamity.
Via the Long Now Blog, one imaginative (but all-too-real, I fear) take on how badly history can be mangled after 1,000 years.
Paul Krugman correctly points out that even this imperfect health care bill probably would not have been possible without the radical conservatives in the Club for Growth forcing Sen. Arlen Specter to switch parties.
Nice work there.
The Atlantic's James Fallows has a must-read post about how the Senate filibuster, and its 60-votes-required rule, has become standard operating procedure after nearly two centuries of rare use. As Fallows writes:
The significant thing about filibusters through most of U.S. history is that they hardly ever happened. But since roughly the early Clinton years, the threat of filibuster has gone from exception to routine, for legislation and appointments alike, with the result that doing practically anything takes not 51 but 60 votes. So taken for granted is the change that the nation's leading paper can off-handedly say that 60 votes are "needed to pass their bill." In practice that's correct, but the aberrational nature of this change should not be overlooked.
Indeed. It should be shouted from the rooftops. And I look forward to the longer piece Fallows promises will arrive in an upcoming issue of The Atlantic.
Filibusters were not the normal course of business. A chart Fallows includes with this post shows just how dramatic the increase in the filibuster's use has been--with quite a spike as Republicans have resorted to its regular use since losing control of the Senate in 2007.
The routine use and misuse of the filibuster shows that it is time we purged it from our system of government.
Republicans argue sketch artists at trials of terrorists could hasten a nuclear attack on the United States.
No, I'm not joking. Talking Points Memo's Evan McMorris-Santoro has the story. These are actual elected officials making these arguments on the steps of the Supreme Court.
It would be sad, if it were not so serious.
I am just shocked, shocked to learn that one of our famous California initiatives apparently did not allocate a reasonable amount of money to get its job done. KQED's John Myers has the story:
Just a little over a year after voters created an independent commission to draw most of California's political maps, the process is costing a lot more money than was allocated.
In fact, it's possible the commission that's slated to convene in 2011 may have as its first task to ask lawmakers for more funding.
Because if it is one thing California's general fund needs, is more unexpected funding demands placed upon it.
One of the reforms under discussion in California right now would require initiatives to spell out a funding source instead of relying on the general fund and thus forcing cuts to education and health and human services programs.
Proposition 11 is just the latest example of the need for such a standard.
Answering Dean Baker's question, I think it should be news when the Chairman of the Federal Reserve does not correctly describe his organization's mission.
As Baker notes, full employment (actually part of the Federal Reserve's actual mission) is not the same as growth (what Bernanke told the Congressional hearing).
FiveThirtyEight.com's Nate Silver, who was known for his baseball statistics innovations and knowledge before taking over last summer's presidential predictions beat, has taken his skills to the world of soccer. He has a new rating system, the Soccer Power Index, that he has used to analyze today's World Cup draw for ESPN.
Fans of the beautiful game will enjoy this analysis. Unfortunately, Silver's analysis indicates the chances are good that the United States will find itself in a difficult group next summer in South Africa.
Atrios fears he may be making an obvious point when he notes one of the ways to fix the deficit so to make sure employment is high.
Alas, I fear it is not at all obvious as it should be to our self-proclaimed-and-quite-issue-selective deficit hawks.
The Big Picture's Barry Ritholtz is unimpressed with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's announcement that that TARP program is close to concluding.
The government, first under Bush/Paulson, now under Obama/Geithner, has set a horrific precedent. Banks, Investment houses and speculators are well aware that the Federal government stands ready to intervene when the screw ups are large enough.
That was one of the lessons of the Bailouts of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. Don't just mess up, bankers learned . . . but make sure your cock ups are so enormous as to threaten the entire economic system. The perverse moral hazard of the 2008 Bailouts is that it is very likely to encourage greater risk taking in the future, once the current era fades into distant memory.
Nothing good seems to come from the Obama Administration taking ownership of programs created by the Bush/Cheney regime.
Joe Conason encourages everyone to remember the failure of the Bush/Cheney Administration in Afghanistan, since it created the set of bad choices from which President Obama had to choose.
From now on, the headlines about Afghanistan will be slugged "Obama's War," and perhaps that is fair enough given the president's many endorsements of what he has called a war of necessity. It would be much less fair, however, to ignore the events that led us to this moment, when any choice offers no great guarantee of progress and no small prospect of trouble.
Those events began with the inexplicable decision by officials of the previous administration to allow Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and other ranking leaders of al-Qaida to escape from Afghanistan to Pakistan in December 2001. At the time, as a new Senate report on the battle of Tora Bora recalls, Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, and Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of American forces in Afghanistan, decided not to augment the tiny contingent of special operations troops on the ground with sufficient force to capture or kill b in Laden and his deputies. They later claimed to be worried that "too many American troops in Afghanistan would create an anti-American backlash and fuel a widespread insurgency," a rationale that can only evoke bitter laughter now.
For many people, world events appear to have begun on January 20, 2009. Things that happened before that date simply do not count. Some of this political amnesia is the natural state of politics, and it is a dangerous symptom I fear the Obama Administration does not take seriously enough.
It makes me angry that Obama now owns a war that had lasted far longer than World War II before he took office, one which continues because of the awful errors made by the previous president and his team--including their inexplicable decision not to capture or kill the leaders of the enemy and to focus on another war having nothing to do with the September 11 attacks.
Life and politics isn't fair. But it would be nice if a few Americans remembered this history when they review and comment upon what happens in Afghanistan over the coming months.
Our men and women in uniform were failed by the previous administration. I pray they will not be similarly failed by the current one.
Climate Progress' Dr. Joseph Romm links to several analyses of the stolen email scandal that has been unimaginatively called Climate Gate, including an editorial to appear in Nature magazine. That editorial makes several important points:
The e-mail archives stolen last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, have been greeted by the climate-change-denialist fringe as a propaganda windfall (see page 551). To these denialists, the scientists' scathing remarks about certain controversial palaeoclimate reconstructions qualify as the proverbial 'smoking gun': proof that mainstream climate researchers have systematically conspired to suppress evidence contradicting their doctrine that humans are warming the globe.
This paranoid interpretation would be laughable were it not for the fact that obstructionist politicians in the US Senate will probably use it next year as an excuse to stiffen their opposition to the country's much needed climate bill. Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real -- or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails. (emphasis added)
Stolen emails, alas for the climate change deniers, do not change that last highlighted fact.
The Bay Area News Group's Josh Richman notes a recent example of California's initiative process at work!
The Washington Independent's David Weigel reports that Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Government are targeting the continued utilization of secret holds in the United States Senate.
Good. A hold is a bad enough practice. Those that dare use it should be forced to admit it publicly.
In his analysis of President Obama's announcement of an escalation of our nation's war in Afghanistan, Truthdig's Robert Scheer reminds us how our country's involvement there has lasted more than 30 years.
We continue to pay for the mistakes of the past. It is also disturbing to see how so many careers of people advising the president have been intertwined with Afghanistan during this time.
There was, of course, a reason why Congress and the legislative branch is outlined in Article I of the Constitution. While we have three co-equal branches, the legislative branch was to be the first among equals. Within the Congress, moreover, the House of Representatives was supposed to be more prominent than the Senate overall.
Of course, that is not the present situation, as Klein explains:
But that hierarchy has been tossed on its head. For all practical purposes, the House is less powerful than the modern Senate and Congress has taken a back seat to the president. The reasons for the preeminence of the president are complicated, but a big reason that the Senate has stepped to the forefront of modern politics is that it's less democratic than the House, and thus most attention focuses on whether it can pass legislation, and most compromises focus on helping it pass legislation. That's unavoidable given the filibuster's centrality to the system, but it's not a good state of affairs, and it is not how the Founders intended for things to go.
It is just one more reason for why we should work to eliminate the Senate filibuster.
Sorry for the day away from the blog. My life has been, um, interesting since about 8:50 p.m. on Monday night, when my youngest son (the five-year-old known on the interwebs as Splig) slipped while climbing on furniture in his room, splitting open his chin quite badly and resulting in a late-night visit to our hospital's emergency room.
Fourteen stitches and an exhibition of seriously impressive bravery by Splig (as he accepted huge needle injections of local anesthetic to allow us to avoid a several-hour-delay for a room where general anesthetic could be administered) later, we were home. Unable to sleep for awhile. But home.
Needless to say, such an episode has thrown off the schedule, to-do list, and sleeptime a bit.
Splig is now fine, although I did receive a tweet from my wife after he decided, far too soon, to start climbing on furniture again. Sigh.
To make this political for a second (that would be my world): this situation was stressful enough with the blood and the open wound and the crying and the trying to figure out whether to call 9-1-1 (quicker in this case to get to the hospital ourselves, we only live about 10 minutes away): but it was nothing compared to what far too many other people would have to face in a similar situation. I knew what our co-payment was. I didn't have to worry about getting a bill that could force bankruptcy.
It is insane that every person does not enjoy a similar comfort when facing such circumstances. Even if we fail to get there with the current health care reform under discussion, we must continue the work until every U.S. family can know they can get health care services without facing financial ruin.
That should be the minimum bid.
Oh, why did the Splig slip? Our gymnastics-ninja boy also loves pretty things. (See his holiday wish list here for an example of his wonderfully complicated desires.)
So, while climbing around on furniture in his room, he saw one of his "very pretty colorful rocks" on his dresser. He reached for one and lost his balance, hit hard the corner of the dresser, thus setting off a rushed visit to the hospital.
My wife made some changes to his room yesterday. The big chair is no longer next to the dresser. It will be, however, easier for him to jump on his bed. Which is softer and has no edges. Such are the trade-offs with a gymnastics-ninja-princess-loving boy.
| Blog: |
| Craig Cheslog |
Topics: |