Tag: WSJ

All of a Piece

I’m not sure how many times the Republicans have to say the same stuff, plainly and in modern English, before it begins to sink in to the minds of those in the media that they, the Republicans in Congress, want Obama to fail in his bid for reelection and to achieve that goal, they need the American economy to fail.

You, as a GOP House mover-and-shaker (aka Tea Klan fanatic), are faced with the newly rising popularity of Obama (e.g. he’s in the 50s for the first time in a while), the first positive news on housing starts in a long, long time (driven more or less entirely by huge demand for apartments, since vanishingly few folks can qualify to buy houses anymore, at least not considered relative to the bubble excess and the fact that home foreclosures are still relatively high), a suddenly more optimistic public attitude re: the economy, and none of your own GOP candidates for the nomination are exactly setting the woods on fire, and may well be instead burning down the house relative to your broader chances both up- and down-ticket come 2012.

All that considered, do you, the rank and file Tea Klan fanatic, feel comfortable handing that same Obama you want to fail a sure-fired way to boost the economy even more as 2012 rolls along? Or do you want to apply the emergency brakes? With this most recent nonsense, I think no sensate being could still deny that we have our answer.
Now, of course, there is some subtlety to their position. They don’t want the extension of this particular tax break because it a) doesn’t help their prime audience in any way (aka the 1%), because those folks either don’t draw traditional paychecks and/or said pay is a relatively tiny fraction of their entire portfolio, so they could care less and won’t notice either way b) it legitimately does help the broader economy and quickly since we’re in an aggregate demand slump and this is cash in the pockets of the 99% who actually create that aggregate demand in, uh, aggregate, and c) is a quick and relatively easy way to sand the gears of the economy, and they think they can sell it to their crazed idiocratic supporters through ever-willing conduits like FOXnews and the Wall Street Journal (The latter of which is already overboard) using such time-honored tools as goalpost moving and poison-pill additions. No one will ever know, and if they do, we can convince them to blame “Democrat leaders in the Senate.” Who, for once, have grown a pair and are doing their part to (rightly) hang this on the GOP. They even have a “Tea Klan tax hike” style meme going. It’s like they’ve finally gotten hip to the way the other side messaged in, oh, 1992.

But frankly this is a pretty simple calculation for the GOP. Braveheart and all the rest are just window dressing that, as usual, the MSM is lapping up. The real story, the one far too shrill to actually report: Anyone or anything getting in the way slowing the economy can kindly go die in the streets. Tax proposals benefiting the 1%: always welcome. Wedge issues that reliably bring this or that fractional percent of old white voters to the polls in November: always welcome. Anything that might actually help the economy and, by extension, Obama: forget about it. And they have.

Did We Secretly Elect McCain?

Softening the administration’s earlier insistence that Congress raise the so-called debt ceiling without conditions, officials now say they won’t rule out linking an increase of the borrowing cap with cuts aimed at reducing the deficit—even though they’d prefer to keep the issues separate.

Honestly, it’s getting hard to tell. Whoever leaked this circular firing squad horseshit should be out before lunch. That they’ll instead be promoted is why the administration fails.

Did We Secretly Elect McCain?

The board of Transocean Ltd., owner of the drilling rig where 11 workers died last month, eliminated executive bonuses last year over concerns about the company’s safety practices

Rebecca Smith and Ben Casselman. Holy fucking shit that platform must have been a floating abattoir along the lines of the Saw movies. I mean, Christ, tinkering with executive compensation like this is just so barbaric.

19 suicide bombers

The WSJ editorial section hits on one of the most pervasive yet utterly unsupported myths of 9/11/01:

If 19 terrorists (the number who carried out the 9/11 attacks) each blew himself up at one- or two-week intervals in a shopping mall or a movie theater, America likely would become a seething nation of paranoid shut-ins. That it hasn’t happened tells you something: Al Qaeda doesn’t have a ready supply of competent suicide bombers, domestic or imported, to carry off serious attacks.

I’ve seen this false supposition treated as plain fact again and again. It’s one of the most pervasive media and governmental frames there is: that all 19 members of the “team” on 9/11/01 were 100% in on the plan and had committed themselves to fly planes into buildings. Clearly, the optimal way to plan this mission given the obvious (and ongoing) limit re: reliable, willing, and able suicide bombers (in this case “suicide pilots”) is to tell most of each team that you’re just going to pull the old “seize the plane, fly somewhere, and then make some demands.” Exactly what the passengers thought was going to happen, too. Only one or two members of each team need know the true mission on the day and the remaining three or four are merely muscle, and, ultimately also a kind of unwitting victim of the very attacks they helped carry out. In fact, the fewer “in on it” the better, in that under this analysis you only require one suicidal zealot (and this is always going to be the rarest resource, really) per plane. Thus you potentially had only four “suicide bombers” for 9/11. Not 19. It’s at least conceivable that some of that muscle, also finally realizing what was really going on contemporaneously with the other passengers, were in on the struggle that ultimately ended in the crash in Pennsylvania. Unlikely, but possible. Fundamentally, though, if al Qaeda had 19 suicide bombers they could use to carry out the attacks the WSJ theorizes above: they would have done it. There is no reason at all to believe they did not wish to carry out the most spectacular attack possible with the resources at hand. An unremitting series of attacks spreading over weeks would have fit that bill to a T. That they chose another, extremely spectacular but vastly more concentrated style implies strongly that the resources simply weren’t there for the WSJ-style attack. Period. Not on 9/11, not today.

The economics of suicide bombing and the number of willing participants is, was, and will always be a primary limitation on its use so long as the target nation remains a relatively comfortable place to live. Give people a reason to stick around, minuscule as it may be, mostly they will choose to live. This is the underlying logic of the shoe- and underpants-bomber failures: these guys just aren’t the brightest bulbs in the world…but they’re what’s available that has any reasonable chance of getting the job done. You’ll note that they weren’t planted here prior to attempting their attacks; they weren’t deemed sufficiently reliable for a long-term, slow developing infiltration style plan, apparently.

Worth noting that the Israeli government is still working this terrorism opportunity cost issue out as well. With even modest improvements to the daily lives of Palestinians, most of the quasi-daily attacks would begin to melt away, and without further recourse to walls or super-high security. Even a tiny bit of hope is a powerful incentive to the potential suicide bomber to continue living. And the Israelis will continue to fail to understand it so long as they receive billions in untethered, unregulated support from us. The old Sinclair saw applies [with a minor addition]:

“It is difficult to get a man [or a government] to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

Index Israel’s support to GDP of the Palestinian territory going forward. Things would change rapidly. Suddenly, their salary would depend on it.

Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.

Wall Street Journal: Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones; I love how the Journal (and/or their military contact) works Iran into this. Indeed, only Iran could have the wherewithal to back an effort of this expense and complexity…