The NBC Today Show hosts Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira, the world's greatest golfer (Tiger Woods), the world's best basketball player (LeBron James), Sandy Koufax who won the pitching "triple crown" (wins, strikeouts and ERA) in 1963, 1965, and 1966 in his unanimous pan-Major League Cy Young wins, and was the first pitcher to throw 4 no-hitters (one of which was a rare "perfect game") by the time he retired at the age of 30, two of the Monkees (Davy Jones and Michael Nesmith), conservative talk show host Sean Hannity, and the singer of today's musical interlude, my favorite hit from the early 60's.
Oh, and there's somebody else, but I can't seem to remember... You know what they say: the memory is the first to go...
Dems Determined Not to be Typecast as Soft on Homeland Security
The Democrats are determined not to be portrayed as weak on homeland security. How many times over the past 8 years have we heard Democrats repeatedly all but accuse Bush of failing to act on his August 2001 briefing? So we now have "inconvenient truths" like the Nigerian terrorist's father surfacing last month warning of his son's radical views, the terrorist's name got added to a 500,000-plus "people of interest" file, but did not filter down to the 4000-member no fly list or "additional screening" 14,000-member list. Not to mention pre-Christmas intelligence from Yemen of an unnamed Nigerian being prepared for a terrorist attack. Now how many Nigerians pay cash for a ticket, check no luggage on an international flight, are on the people of interest list, and hold a US visa? Connect the dots...
I don't blame Obama any more than I blame Bush given the imprecise nature of briefings, but surely we've learned something over the past 8 years. Terrorism in the skies is no longer a novel concept. What is interesting is watching Obama operate: this seems to be a replay of his johnny-come-lately jawboning against executive bonuses earlier this year, except this time he's dealing with turf battles and government inertia within his own administration.
The Democrats are trying to turn the tables on the Republicans based on votes last summer on Homeland Security. There are a couple of relevant issues. First, there was the desire to fund new technology, which could better detect certain hidden weapons--but also had the effect of providing a de facto nude image of the passenger, which many liberals and conservative libertarians consider a privacy issue. Most conservatives wanted less intrusive methods (e.g., the use of drug-sniffing dogs). But unless you force everyone to use this screening technology, it's only as effective as your sampling procedure, and the fact is that progressives tend to regard "profiling" (i.e., risk-based selection) as inherently unfair. Second, the House Republicans were upset at being shut out of being able to bring to the floor their own amendments on a number of spending bills and so voted against the bill as a clearly identified political protest. I have my own criticisms to make about Congressional Republicans, but being soft on terrorism is not one of them; there's the record of no repeated incident following 9/11 under the Bush Administration. (And, if I"m not mistaken, the Nigerian terrorist, now nicknamed in the media as the "underwear bomber", boarded the plane in Amsterdam, not a US airport.)
The key issue is not how much money Democrats can throw inefficiently at a Homeland Security issues or add to bureaucratic complexity and lack of accountability. But Secretary Napolitano Sunday seemed to be taking political credit ("the system worked") for something that was clearly more due to terrorist incompetence or bad luck than in the system's effectiveness. This is dangerous, because the logical lesson we would learn from an HHS take-away that "the system worked" is maintenance of the status quo. That's manifestly absurd and a state of denial.
The system would have worked if the terrorist had never boarded in Amsterdam in the first place. I don't really know or care how this is done (whether a powerful new technology or drug-sniffing dogs or a portfolio approach). One thing is for sure: Democratic defensiveness is not the answer.
Political Cartoon
RJ Matson wants you to know that after you walked in the snow looking for a job and later hung your stockings to dry, Santa Obama and his fellow Democratic elves Harry and Nancy will be by shortly with more national debt cash to burn (but, unfortunately, nothing left to put in your stockings). How wisely did they spend their $787B stimulus? Let us count some of their ways:
- over $200K for the NIH to study the #1 thing taxpaying parents want to hear about: the sexual behavior of their college kids
- $5M investment in green energy for a mostly empty Tennessee shopping mall
- over $1.5M to study fossils in Argentina
- over $200K to conduct exit polls in Africa
- over $200K to figure out why men don't like to wear rubbers during sex
- almost $1M to study how ants (versus people) work
- $100K to put on progressive-theme puppet shows
Musical Interlude: Happy Birthday to Singer Del Shannon:
His Signature Hit: "Runaway"
