It was probably not a great idea for Rick Perry to rent a hunting camp once called Niggerhead. Not that Rick minds offending blacks — he questioned President Obama’s patriotism, didn’t he? — it’s just that sensibilities have changed in the past fifty years in ways that the Texas Governor may not have noticed.

He has called Hispanics in his state “Josés,” as in, “The Josés will sue you at the drop of a hat.” He has implied that President Obama, while lacking any true feeling for the country, is also a coward. Likewise he has said that the head of the Federal Reserve Bank, Ben Bernanke, is “almost treasonous” if he orders more money to be printed before the election. He has called Social Security a Ponzi scheme. He thinks Medicare is a socialist conspiracy and will bankrupt the country. He says government is the problem and the best place to create jobs is in the private sector. To make his point, he cites the large number of new jobs in Texas during his tenure and doesn’t mention that most of them are government jobs.

Even if this latest blow-up on the tough-talking Texan’s yellow brick road is just another dust devil, does it suggest that in his case the N-word might have a different meaning? Nitwit, perhaps? Do you get the feeling that soon enough we won’t have Rick Perry to kick around any more? The cowboy governor’s campaign is reeling.

Yesterday, it was stammering performances against the likes of Michelle Bachmann, Newt and the Mitten. Today it’s the hunting camp; tomorrow, who knows? Pick your favorite gaff, stumble, screw-up, but whatever the reason, the ‘charismatic’ governor is falling fast in the polls and nowhere more precipitously than among those of a tea-party persuasion.

Apparently the tea partiers are disillusioned with Ricky because he’s started to tone down some of his best attention-getting positions. They liked him better when he was completely irrational, like them. Now he’s beginning to sound more like the other Republican candidates, except they’re better at grammar than he is.

Politicians are forever blathering about how canny the American electorate is: “The American people are too smart to be taken in by empty promises,” they say as they make yet another empty promise. Of course, to be fair, when your choice eventually comes down to two candidates, both of whom are running on a platform constructed entirely of empty promises, what are you supposed to do?

Still, there is little evidence to suggest that ‘smart’ is a good word to describe the American voting public. ‘Smarting’ might be better. ‘Fed up’ is good. But ‘smart?’ We elected George W. Bush, not once but twice. Was that smart? Look where it got us. Thousands dead and maimed and trillions of dollars spent, a huge increase in the national debt, and nobody can say for what. Nobody except, of course, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who chant, “We won. We won.” Won what? What did we win? Halliburton won enormous defense contracts and Cheney and Rumsfeld both won fat book contracts. Maybe that’s what they meant.

So now we’re in for another whole year of political bluster and bombast. A lot of us may be disappointed in Obama’s leadership but we can at least be thankful that we will be spared any serious challenge to his candidacy and all the misstatements, cheap posturing, and flatulence that would entail.

The Republicans will have to carry the burden for most of the year and we can all take comfort in the obvious talents they bring to the party. There are lots more N-words to draw on. Yes, N is for nitwit, but that’s not all. N is also for nothing, nada, nil, not, nonentity, nowhere, nobody home, nausea, numskull, nincompoop, none, no one, and no, no, no.

From the New Mexico Independent:

Though medical marijuana is legal in New Mexico, the drug is still regarded as an illegal scheduled substance by the federal government. Given the federal government sets the rules on who can own guns, medicinal marijuana smokers of this state and 15 others are barred from owning guns.

The point was reiterated in a late September letter written (PDF) by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives and sent to federal firearms licensees. Owners of gun stores are instructed to withhold the sale of arms or munitions to anyone suspected of having an interaction or addiction to scheduled drugs, including marijuana. The letter specifies individuals known to have a medicinal marijuana card can be reasonably assumed to be an abuser of a controlled substance and gun shop owners must refuse purchase.

Moreover, the letter affirms the illegality of a medicinal marijuana smoker purchasing weapons. Already, those who seek to purchase firearms or ammunition must fill out ATF Form 4473. Question 11.e. specifically asks: “Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance?” Answering ‘yes’ legally bars the individual from purchasing guns or ammunition.

The ATF letter several times referred to marijuana as an addictive drug. According to a summary of the book The Science of Marijuana (2008) in Psychology Today, a person’s risk of developing an addiction to marijuana is roughly 9 percent, compared to 33 percent for tobacco users and 15 percent for alcohol users.

Bear in mind that these are the same clowns who brought you the Waco massacre and armed the Mexican drug cartels in the “Fast and Furious” insanity.

This is from a letter written in 1973 by one famous socialist to another (now deceased). In it, an American is trying to induce his European pal to come over for an extended stay in the US, but the latter is reluctant to do so. He just had surgery and didn’t want to leave the excellent health insurance he enjoyed in Europe. He’d previously lived in the United States for a full ten years, and seemed keenly aware of the risks of “falling ill away from home.”

Not to worry, says the American …

“You may be interested in the information that we uncovered on the insurance and other benefits that would be available to you in this country. Since you have paid into the United States Social Security Program for a full forty quarters, you are entitled to Social Security payments while living anywhere in the Free World. Also, at any time you are in the United States, you are automatically entitled to hospital coverage.”

… “In order to be eligible for medical coverage you must apply during the registration period which is anytime from January 1 to March 31. For your further information, I am enclosing a pamphlet on Social Security.”

So just who were these two, anyway? The answer might make George Will a bit clammy, but that’s Charles Koch writing to F.A. Hayek. He wanted Hayek to come serve as distinguished senior scholar at his eerily named Institute for Humane Studies, a libertarian think tank dedicated to dismantling the welfare state.

You have to invent a brand new vocabulary, a whole array of new concepts, to capture the full dimensions of their hypocrisy. The tools we’re currently working with are insufficient.

So I guess there’s a new lesson in right-wing doublethink for us all to learn. If libertarians pay into Social Security, it’s right and proper, moral even, for them to collect when they are eligible. For the rest of us it’s not. Check.

Thank you, sir, may we have another?

Read the whole article at The Nation.

Here’s Anwar al-Awlaki on page 1 of Saturday’s New York Times:

…the American-born cleric whose fiery sermons made him a larger-than-life figure in the shadowy world of jihad…

…the leader of external operations for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula…

…taken “the lead role in planning and directing the efforts to murder innocent Americans…”

…inspired militants around the world and helped plan a number of terrorist plots, including the December 2009 attempt to blow up a jetliner bound for Detroit…

…Internet lectures and sermons inspired would-be militants and led to more than a dozen terrorist investigations in the United States, Britain and Canada.

And here he is, tucked away on page 14 of Sunday’s New York Times where only news nerds go:

“…A dime-a-dozen cleric…”

“…I don’t think your average Middle Easterner knows who Anwar al-Awlaki is…”

“…It seems totally irrelevant to how Arabs view the world right now. They don’t care about Awlaki…”

…In a region transfixed by the drama of its revolts, Mr. Awlaki’s voice has had almost no resonance…

“…It seems totally irrelevant to how Arabs view the world right now. They don’t care about Awlaki…”

“…When the Obama administration and the U.S. media started focusing on him, that is when Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula pushed him to the fore. They were taking advantage of the free publicity, if you will. And any stature he has now in the Arab world is because of that…”

“…The U.S. focus on Awlaki was a function of his language abilities and their understanding of his role as a recruiter and propagandist. If recent events can be said to further marginalize violent rejectionists such as Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri, then there is very little room for a virtual unknown such as Awlaki to command any serious attention…”

…he is not unique in his role as the American voice of Al Qaeda recruiting. United States counterterrorism officials say there are as many as 100 English-language sites offering militant Islamic views.

Yesterday, just past eleven in the morning, a large glowing object appeared in the sky over West Cornwall, Connecticut. The villagers rushed outside, much alarmed, and ran about praying to their gods. After a quarter of an hour the strange object disappeared and the blessèd rains returned.

Jamie Dimon has put a down payment on his own police force:

JPMorgan Chase recently donated an unprecedented $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation.

The gift was the largest in the history of the foundation and will enable the New York City Police Department to strengthen security in the Big Apple. The money will pay for 1,000 new patrol car laptops, as well as security monitoring software in the NYPD’s main data center...
“These officers put their lives on the line every day to keep us safe,” Dimon said. “We’re incredibly proud to help them build this program and let them know how much we value their hard work.”

I thought us li’l old taxpayers were supposed to pay for those things. So that the police would, you know, protect all of us.

Silly me. That would be socialism...

They say a picture’s worth a thousand words:

(h/t Politics in the Zeros)

The Marquis de Sade wrote 120 Days of Sodom in hopes it would be “the most impure tale that has ever been written since the world exists.” He failed, of course. The Old Testament remains unchallenged as the most vicious, cruel and evil book of all time. Just a taste, this one from Leviticus 21:

And the Lord spoke unto Moses, saying,
Speak unto Aaron, saying, whosoever he be of my seed that hath any blemish, let him not approach to have of the bread of his God.
For whatsoever man he be that hath a blemish, he shall not approach: a blind man, or a lame, or he that hath a flat nose, or brokenhanded
Or crookbackt, or a dwarf, or that hath a blemish in his eye, or be scurvy, or scabbed, or hath his stones broken…
Only he shall not go into the vail, nor come nigh unto the altar, because he hath a blemish; that he profane not my sanctuaries: for I the Lord do sanctify them.

…in this case from The American Conservative:

…The Sailer analysis is ruthlessly logical. Whites are still the overwhelming majority of voters, and will remain so for many decades to come, so raising your share of the white vote by just a couple of points has much more political impact than huge shifts in the non-white vote. As whites become a smaller and smaller portion of the local population in more and more regions, they will naturally become ripe for political polarization based on appeals to their interests as whites. And if Republicans focus their campaigning on racially charged issues such as immigration and affirmative action, they will promote this polarization, gradually transforming the two national political parties into crude proxies for direct racial interests, effectively becoming the “white party” and the “non-white party.” Since white voters are still close to 80 percent of the national electorate, the “white party” — the Republicans — will end up controlling almost all political power and could enact whatever policies they desired, on both racial and non-racial issues.

From Frank Rich’s latest, in New York magazine:

The important thing to remember about Perry is that he’s anathema to Mitt Romney, Karl Rove, and many conservative pundits no less than to liberals. His swift rise does not just reflect his enthusiasts’ detestation of Barack Obama. Perry’s constituency rejects the entire bipartisan Establishment of which Obama is merely the latest and shiniest product.

For two decades, the elites in both parties and in the Beltway media-political combine have venerated a vanilla centrism, from Bush 41’s “thousand points of light” to Clinton’s triangulation to Bush 43’s “compassionate conservatism.” They’ve endorsed every useless bipartisan commission and every hapless bipartisan congressional “Gang of Six” (or Twelve, or Twenty, not to mention the new too-big-not-to-fail budget supercommittee).

Perry, by contrast, is a proud and unabashed partisan. If he’s talking about gangs, chances are they’re chain gangs, not dithering conclaves of legislators. He doesn’t aspire to be the adult in the room, as Obama does, but the bull in the china shop of received opinion…

Should Perry get the GOP nomination, he could capsize like Goldwater on Election Day. That’s the universal prediction of today’s Restons. But maybe he won’t. Perry would have a cratered economy to exploit, unlike Goldwater, who ran in a boom time when unemployment was under 6 percent and the GDP was up 5.8 percent from the previous year. Whatever Perry’s 2012 electoral fate, his lightning ascent is final proof, if any further is needed in the day of the tea-party GOP, that a bipartisan consensus in America is as unachievable now as it was after 1964…

From New York magazine:

The so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” finally opened Wednesday at 45–51 Park Place. Last year, Park51, as the mosque–community center two iconic blocks from the WTC is called, was the flashpoint of the most heated New York City public debate in decades, prompting raucous community-board meetings, much incendiary rhetoric about the supposed Islamization of America, and, eventually, the uncommon sight of Mayor Bloomberg crying on television while defending New York as an unending beacon of tolerance where “no neighborhood is off-limits to God’s love and mercy.”

On Wednesday night, however, aside from the cop car that sits outside the building 24/7 and a number of burly, black-clad bouncers, Park51’s recent history was little in evidence…

No one I talked to wanted to discuss the outrageous events of the past year. In fact, neither Pamela Geller or Robert Spencer — the firebrand bloggers who concocted the bulk of the anti-mosque talking points — even mentioned the Park51 opening on their sites. Then again, they may still by lying low in the wake of the disclosure that their views were widely quoted in the papers of Norwegian gunman Anders Behring Breivik.

From Kevin Drum, in Mother Jones:

The mosque was introduced to the public in December 2009, Pamela Geller shrieked about it, and no one cared. In May 2010 the project was approved, Pamela Geller shrieked about it, and no one cared. A week later, a New York Post columnist wrote a piece called “Mosque Madness at Ground Zero,” Pamela Geller continued shrieking about it, and —

And suddenly Rupert Murdoch’s other New York-based news operation took notice. After all, there was an election coming in November, and what better way to rally the troops? It was just one more log for Fox to toss onto its Bonfire of Xenophobia last summer..

Bet you always wondered what thesis Tennessee Williams had in mind when he wrote “A Streetcar Named Desire.” So here’s your answer, from a three-page picture spread in the December 15, 1947, issue of Life:

The drama ends when Blanche, clinging to her pitiful delusion that she is a grand lady, is led away by asylum attendants. Her sister and husband can now resume their happiness, proving Williams’ thesis that healthy life can go on only after it is rid of unwholesome influence.

Click image to enlarge

To find out what this is all about, you’ll have to go here.

The New Yorker has a wonderful story this week about the only pharmacist in Nucla, Colorado (population 700). His name is Don Colcord, and he does his best to serve an area of 4,000 square miles. Somehow he manages in spite of Medicare Part D, George W. Bush’s unfunded gift to the insurance industry and the nation’s deficit:

…He keeps watch-repair tools behind the counter, and he uses them almost as frequently as he complains about Walmart, insurance companies, and Medicare Part D. Since 2006, the program has provided prescription-drug coverage for the elderly and disabled, insuring that millions of people get their medication. But it’s also had the unintended [Editor’s note: my ass] effect of driving rural pharmacies out of business.

Instead of establishing a national formulary with standard drug prices, the way many countries do, the U.S. government allows private insurance plans to negotiate with drug providers. Big chains and mail-order pharmacies receive much better rates than independent stores, because of volume. Within the first two years of the program, more than five hundred rural pharmacies went out of business.

Don gives the example of a local customer who needs Humira for rheumatoid arthritis. The insurance company reimburses $1,721.83 for a month’s supply, but Don pays $1,765.23 for the drug. “I lose $43.40 every time I fill it, once a month,” he says. Don’s customer doesn’t like using mail-order pharmacies; he worries about missing a delivery, and he wants to be able to ask a pharmacist questions face to face. “I like the guy,” Don says. “So I keep doing it.” Don’s margins have grown so small that on three occasions he has had to put his savings into the Apothecary Shoppe in order to keep the doors open…

From the New York Times:

The hemisphere’s oil boom is all the more remarkable given that two of its traditional energy powerhouses, Venezuela and Mexico, have largely been left out, held in check by entrenched resource nationalism. Venezuela is now considered to have bigger oil reserves than Saudi Arabia, putting it at the top of OPEC’s rankings. If it opened up more to foreign investment, it could tip the scales further in the hemisphere’s direction.

Gee, I thought we were going to have to drill, baby, drill and run Canadian pipelines through the heartland and frack Pennsylvania and New York till flames shot out of everybody’s faucets and poison the Gulf of Mexico to keep our Hummers on the road. (Whatever happened to all those Hummers, anyway?)

Now it turns out that we didn’t really need to waste three trillion dollars to fail to seize the oilfields of Iraq. We could have just acted like adults in 1999 instead of throwing childish tantrums over the election of Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s version of Joe Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung combined. (I take it that “entrenched resource nationalism” is double talk for kicking out foreign oil companies, an old commie trick.)

If I didn’t read The Guardian I probably would have missed it. But I do, so I didn’t, and I therefore wish to note the passing of an interesting and provocative voice, Carl Oglesby, who died a couple days ago.

In addition to writing a classic of conspiracy literature, The Yankee and Cowboy War (1976), Oglesby was an early (1965) leader of the Students for a Democratic Society, SDS, but as he tells it the group gradually moved to the left of him, and he was eventually expelled when a more radical leadership took over. He was interested in looking for ways to bridge the gap between the SDS view and the Pentagon view, an approach that is either deep or naive depending on your philosophy. He did not view the men in government whose decisions brought on the war on Vietnam as essentially evil; rather he saw them as exponents of a system that has evolved to create necessities, with the corollary that we must change the system rather than the individuals running it.

On Nov. 27, 1965, Oglesby gave a wonderful speech, relatively short and to the point.

We are here again to protest a growing war. Since it is a very bad war, we acquire the habit of thinking it must be caused by very bad men. But we only conceal reality, I think, to denounce on such grounds the menacing coalition of industrial and military power, or the brutality of the blitzkrieg we are waging against Vietnam, or the ominous signs around us that heresy may soon no longer be permitted. We must simply observe, and quite plainly say, that this coalition, this blitzkrieg, and this demand for acquiescence are creatures, all of them, of a Government that since 1932 has considered itself to he fundamentally liberal.

The original commitment in Vietnam was made by President Truman, a mainstream liberal. It was seconded by President Eisenhower, a moderate liberal. It was intensified by the late President Kennedy, a flaming liberal. Think of the men who now engineer that war — those who study the maps, give the commands, push the buttons, and tally the dead: Bundy, McNamara, Rusk, Lodge, Goldberg, the President himself. They are not moral monsters. They are all honorable men. They are all liberals.

But so, I’m sure, are many of us who are here today in protest. To understand the war, then, it seems necessary to take a closer look at this American liberalism. Maybe we are in for some surprises. Maybe we have here two quite different liberalisms: one authentically humanist; the other not so human at all.

…Read on

Why do they hate us? You don’t suppose fifty years of overt hypocrisy could be related to it, do you?

“When we come back here next year, we can have an agreement that can lead to a new member of the United Nations, an independent, sovereign state of Palestine living in peace with Israel,” Obama said in [a] 2010 [UN speech].

So now here we are a year later, and the Palestinians want him to live up to that. Naturally he didn’t mean it, it was just a bunch of rhetoric; but it cost him big with pro-Israeli voters in the US, and it left him vulnerable once again to the charge of saying one thing and doing the opposite. Supporters of Israel are angry with him for pushing to end settlement activity; supporters of Palestine are angry with him for failing.

Politics is the art of compromise, they used to say, but in the US it hasn’t been true for at least thirty years. When Reagan came into office we gave up our last shred of seriousness and replaced it with full-time PR. JFK had nearly weekly press conferences where he spoke directly with reporters who had at least to pretend to be interested in the country’s welfare. Reagan was carefully protected from questions because, being both stupid and uninformed, he always made a fool of himself when he tried to answer. They came up with the idea of keeping the rotors on the Presidential helicopter running while he walked to the White House door so that reporters would be unable to shout questions at him as he walked past.

As the empire fails, we’ll see more and more of this kind of behavior, completely out of keeping with the actual situation. Leadership in the US continues to act as if we’re the sovereign power and everyone else knows they must defer, but it isn’t true. In fact the world has seen us lose our grip, hand control of our economy to China, and expose our military weakness by being unable either to win or withdraw in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is why now is the perfect time, from a game-player’s point of view at least, for the Palestinians to go to the UN in search of recognition.

Most likely the US will end up vetoing the Security Council resolution in favor of statehood for Palestine, very possibly being the only negative vote. This will, as the former Saudi intelligence chief and ambassador to the US recently pointed out, make the US toxic in the region, or more precisely more toxic than at present.

Ironically, Obama is doing all this for political reasons as his support among Jewish groups in swing states like Florida drops and Netanyahu continually thumbs his nose at the President. Yet Obama has his UN ambassador proclaim that:

There’s no shortcut, there’s no magic wand that can be waved in New York and make everything right. In fact, there’s a risk in that because if you’re an average person in the Palestinian territories and your hopes have been raised that by some action here in New York something will be different, the reality is that nothing is going to change.

And why is nothing going to change? Because the US will continue to fund and support the occupation it claims to be against. Everyone can see this but Americans; we’re fooling no one, and endangering ourselves in the process. Obama is doing this for political reasons, and it isn’t working. That is simple ineptitude.

Here’s the latest rogue trader story, this one apparently resulting in a $2 billion loss for a Swiss bank. I’ve read several different accounts now, and am just as confused as I was by all the earlier rogue trader stories.

Did this kid walk away with $2 billion and stash it in some other Swiss bank? Seems impossible. Was he making bets on his bank’s behalf that went south instead of north? If so, why was he arrested? Because he exceeded his authority by not telling his bosses he was making those bets, or concealed that they had gone south? Are these crimes? Cause for firing, sure. But criminal offenses? Help me out here. What’s going on?

Further information may be had here. Meanwhile:

…Bettybeauty Inc., which makes pubic hair dye, was started by Nancy Jarecki in 2006 and sells its products at salons and beauty stores. The $14.99 product works like normal hair dye but is formulated to be safe for the pubic area. The colors run from basics like black, brown and blonde to hot pink, turquoise and purple.

Jarecki said sales have tripled since the line was introduced, although she declined to give figures. Some women are looking to cover gray hair, while others just want a fun color, she says. “When I came out with it, there was this kind of burst of ‘Oh my god, you solved our problem. I didn’t realize how much gray hair was down there,’” she said…

Rick Santorum offers up this frothy bit of wisdom:

“Does anybody in this room believe that somebody that’s 62 years old is too old to work in America today?” Santorum asked. “Social Security was established for people who were too old to work and therefore they needed the support of the federal government.”

For the moment, let’s leave aside that this is not historically correct. (Thom Hartmann neatly pointed out on his show today that both Roosevelts believed people should be able to retire after a lifetime of work. But since they were both commies, that probably doesn’t count.) Instead, let’s take Santorum’s statement on its own terms. Just for a few moments.

I don’t know specifically who was in the room when the statement was made. But the reality is that there are a lot of people who believe that someone who is 62 years old is too old to work in America today. Most CEOs. Most HR managers. Most of the so-called “job creators.” Pretty much everybody, in other words, in a position to actually hire someone who is 62 years old.

But don’t worry — they feel the same way about someone who is 52 years old. This is the reality in America today: the de facto retirement age is somewhere in the neighborhood of 49. That’s the age at which business is done with you — unless it’s your own business, of course. But if that’s the case, you’re most likely not hiring people older than 49 either. And if you’re a Republican you are most likely berating everyone you think is too old to hire for being lazy when everyone else with a job to offer makes the same unfair assessment of older workers that you did.

So, Rickster, here’s a modest proposal: Ask your campaign contributors if they think 62 is too old to work.

And then get ready to offer “the support of the federal government” to a whole lot of middle-aged, able-bodied people.

William Pfaff on United Nations membership for Palestine:

However, what al-Faisal does not say is that the U.S. is the only nation to possess the strength and opportunity to act preemptively to solve this crisis. Israel now is incapable of rescuing itself because of its quasi-permanent internal political deadlock.

President Obama could spectacularly reverse policy and save the day. He could declare that the U.S. will vote in support of Palestine’s full membership in the U.N. It will use all of the means at its disposal to support Israeli withdrawal of illegal settlements from territory designated as part of the Palestinian state in the 1948 U.N. partition of Mandate Palestine. It will do all in its power to impose the solution that everyone — including realistic Israelis and the Palestinians — understand to be the inevitable, permanent and just solution of this problem.

True enough. Unfortunately, however, the United States of America now is incapable of rescuing itself because of its quasi-permanent internal political deadlock. For more on how stupid we’re about to be and why, read Pepe Escobar here.

Excellent point from Jonathan Last, whose blog I found via Steve Sailer. I’d add only that, if my memory is correct, the leader among the heroes aboard was a gay rugby player. If any of my old mates on the Washington Rugby Club were gay I never knew it, but there can hardly be a gayer formation in all of sport than the rugby scrum. So good for rugby and good for gays.

Despite the national memorial now emerging in Shanksville, I don’t think America has fully begun to appreciate where Flight 93 fits into the pantheon of great moments in American history. I’d argue that — for a host of reasons — it belongs somewhere in the same neighborhood as Little Round Top and Revere’s ride. It’s fitting that we mourn the World Trade Center and Pentagon dead on 9/11, but properly understood our commemorations every year should start there and build toward reverence and appreciation for the men and women of Flight 93. That field in Pennsylvania, not the hole in Manhattan, should be our enduring symbol of the day.

The Washington Post has a story today about another untold effect of the heroism of Flight 93. In addition to everything else they did, the people who fought in that narrow, terrible aisle saved the lives of Lt. Heather “Lucky” Penny and Col. Marc Sasseville. They were the two F-16 pilots sent on a suicide mission to ram the plane and bring it down. Their story is worth reading in full.

Here’s Rick Raznikov’s answer:

“Freedom” was not attacked on September 11, 2001. It was two towers in New York and, apparently, the Pentagon. It had nothing whatever to do with freedom.

On the other hand, America’s freedom has been under attack ever since, mostly by the U.S. government.

One does not defend freedom by wiping out amendments to the Bill of Rights, kidnapping citizens and holding them without trial, torturing thousands and holding them in prisons without habeas corpus, and conducting warrantless wiretapping and unrestricted electronic surveillance of an entire citizenry. That is how one attacks freedom.

From Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz:

Today, the US is focused on unemployment and the deficit. Both threats to America’s future can, in no small measure, be traced to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Increased defense spending, together with the Bush tax cuts, is a key reason why the US went from a fiscal surplus of 2 per cent of GDP when Bush was elected to its parlous deficit and debt position today. Direct government spending on those wars so far amounts to roughly $2 trilllion — $17,000 for every US household — with bills yet to be received increasing this amount by more than 50 per cent.

There is a saying, “The less said the better mended.” That kind of simple wisdom seems lost on contemporary America. Do you think that if we made less of a big deal out of the tenth anniversary of 9/11 that terrorists might also? By turning it into such a gigantic event, we’re announcing to the world that we’re deeply wounded and scared; and wounded, scared people invite bullying. If the purpose of terrorism is to demoralize people and instill fear, the terrorists who attacked us succeeded beyond their wildest hopes. All any wannabe Jihadist has to do is yell “Boo” to turn us into a bunch of hysterical ninnies.

By all means memorialize 9/11, but do so in a quiet, dignified way. Don’t saturate the airwaves with endless, over-sentimentalized retrospectives and ceremonies. That kind of overkill cheapens the event and turns genuine grief into mere spectacle. Just for once can we not go over the top? Make it solemn and proud, modest and brief. Make it worthy of the kind of people we imagine ourselves to be, the kind of people we should be.

Most importantly, don’t use it as a pretext to justify more pointless, self-destructive wars.

But there is a sinister aspect to all of this as well. Look at New York City’s security preparations:

There are radiation detection boats in the waters, cameras that have been placed all over lower and Midtown Manhattan and there are cops with guns and tanks and all kinds of weapons, because in New York a terror attack could come from anywhere, and anyone.

“There’s no shortage of people who are willing to give up their lives for the cause,” NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly said.

[…]

For openers, he has his own navy.

“We actually have the ability to have a small submarine, not manned, to check the part of the boats that are submerged,” Kelly said.

“We have a new boat on order. We envision a situation where we may have to get to an island or across water quickly, so we’re able to transport our heavy weapons officers rapidly.”

Kelly also has his own army — 1,000 anti-terror cops with tanks and weapons, carved out of the NYPD after 9/11.

None of which, one should add, would prevent a random psychopath with a legally obtained assault rifle from walking into a restaurant and opening fire, which happened in my neck of the woods just over a week ago.

Would a terrorist be so stupid as to march into the teeth of such defenses, or would they attack some soft underbelly, like Omaha or Bismark or some equally sedate and unsuspecting place? All of this hyper-security is largely ineffective, and like so much else in America it is primarily designed for show, for effect. In this case, to make us feel safe.

One need hardly point out that turning our police departments into full-fledged armies is dangerous beyond words. It’s far more dangerous than vague terrorist threats from abroad which, in the long run, will have proven to be ephemeral. But when Islamic terrorism is a caption in history books (which, of course, few will read), some new existential menace will have emerged from the self-interested minds of our military, police, and political establishment. It might be the Chinese. It might be the Russians. If someone like Rick Perry manages to bumble into the White House, it might be liberals. Regardless, the mechanisms of full repression will have become an established, immovable fact, something we’ve been conditioned to accept, like torture and warrantless wire-tapping have become now.

I said that one need hardly point this out, but in a population as ignorant and pliable as we’ve proven ourselves to be, perhaps one does need to point it out, loudly and continuously, although it’s doubtful it would do any good. From the same article:

It’s been 10 years but our concerns about terrorism are still staggering and constant. Even the death of Osama bin Laden didn’t lessen the fear.

Two thirds of Americans, 67 percent in a stunning CBS/New York Times poll say killing the al Qaeda mastermind didn’t make them feel safer.

But that’s not all. A majority – 57 percent — say subway security measures are insufficient.

And as for other potential terror targets:

* Only 27 percent say airports are a lot safer.

* Only 20 percent say bridges and tunnels are safer.

* And just 14 percent say area nuclear plants are safer

All of those “unspecified threats” have done the trick, aided, no doubt, by complicit pollsters.

I don’t think I’m being overly cynical when I point out the following. Our people have become timorous and semi-literate, and our institutions are irredeemably corrupt. Given such a combination, the worst case scenario is a frighteningly realistic possibility, and the worst case scenario has nothing to do with foreign terrorists.

Who says there’s no bipartisanship in Washington?

An open mic caught Vice President Joe Biden (D) and House Speaker John Boehner (R) joking before President Barack Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress Thursday.

“Hey, I’m one of those barbarians,” Boehner said, greeting Biden with a handshake.

“You are,” Biden agreed, laughing. “We’re at the gate.”

“I was playing golf in August,” Boehner volunteered. “Seven birdies, five bogies. I shoot two under. So, we have lunch, sitting around for about an hour and and I thought, ‘Why don’t we play nine more holes?’”

“Six pars, three birdies and I missed a four-foot, straight-in birdie on the last hole,” the Speaker added.

“No!” Biden remarked.

“Oh, so the next day, I go to Sandhills, I shoot a 86,” Boehner added, with a big laugh. “One day I play great, the next day I play awful. But this is the round of the decade. I haven’t done this for 12 years. I shot a 67 one time.”

Here’s Rick Hertzberg, hitting below the belt again. Way to go, Rick.

Obama made a forthright argument that primitive individualism has to be paired with what he called “another thread running throughout our history — a belief that we are all connected and that there are some things we can only do together, as a nation.” He cited the example of his (and history’s) favorite Republican:

We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union. But in the middle of a Civil War, he was also a leader who looked to the future — a Republican president who mobilized government to build the transcontinental railroad, launch the National Academy of Sciences, and set up the first land-grant colleges.

All true. But it helped that, in the middle of the Civil War, there were no Senators or Congressmen from the part of the nation that, at the time, styled itself the Confederate States of America. In other words, Lincoln didn't have to deal with so many of the sort of people of the type we would today call “Republicans.”

Take heart, my fellow Americans, there are still a few things we can be proud of. I found this nifty little graphic at Cat in the Bag:

What about spousal abuse, meth addiction, alcoholism, obesity, type II diabetes, infant mortality, illiteracy, and psychopathic gunmen who kill people for no other reason than they feel like it? Surely we deserve an honorable mention in those social problems as well?

Observe that Puerto Rico is ranked #2 in divorce. That pretty much means the US is ranked both #1 and #2 in that category, doesn’t it? They’re technically American citizens, they just don’t have the right to participate in those inter-active reality TV shows we call elections. They don’t have any congressional representation either, but who’s kidding who, do any of us really have that? They can also fight and die in our wars if they so choose, but that’s an honor; it’s a unique privilege that comes along with being a colonial subject of the US. They should thank us for it. In fact, you could say that the status enjoyed by Puerto Ricans closely resembles the one that our elites envision for us at some point in the near future. So, yeah, we’re #1 and #2 in divorce.

That slightly compensates for the fact that a couple of two-bit nobodies like New Zealand and Slovakia (!) are gaining ground on us in the teen pregnancy department. The nerve of those upstarts.

The Justice Department got the headline, but the spadework for this giant bust was done by a new unit in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services called the Center for Program Integrity — created by President Obama’s health care legislation to fight the Medicare fraud that costs the taxpayers billions of dollars a year. And a highly-placed source (one of my sons, who works there) says this is just the beginning:

The Justice Department on Wednesday announced charges against 91 people including doctors, nurses and other medical professionals allegedly involved in a nationwide Medicare fraud scheme in eight cities totaling $295 million in false billing.

“The defendants charged in this takedown are accused of stealing precious taxpayer resources and defrauding Medicare – jeopardizing the integrity of our health care system and our nation’s most critical health care program for personal gain,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a press release. “Our highly coordinated, nationwide Strike Force operations are working aggressively to combat Medicare fraud and our anti-health care fraud efforts have never been more innovative, collaborative, aggressive – or effective. We will continue to work with our law enforcement partners and partners across government to fight against health care fraud.”

According to the Justice Department those charged are accused of a variety of fraud-related crimes including conspiracy to defraud the Medicare program, health care fraud, violations of the anti-kickback statutes and money laundering. The scheme involved home health care, physical and occupational therapy, mental health services, psychotherapy and durable medical equipment services, the Justice Department said…