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Comment by Adriana on May 2, 2011 at 2:45pm

I found this article on Hullabaloo about Bin Laden's killing almost 10 years after 9/11 very well written, sobering, I agree with the author (digby) completely in his view of the event.

Comment by Sydni Moser on May 2, 2011 at 1:08pm

TEE-HEE

 

 

 

Comment by Sydni Moser on May 2, 2011 at 6:43am

Comment by doone on May 2, 2011 at 1:17am

Macro of the Day

May. 1, 2011

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Macro of the Day: This should have been his official statement.

Comment by doone on May 2, 2011 at 12:53am

Live-Blogging: The Arc Of Justice

12.50 pm. The eighth anniversary of "Mission Accomplished." To the day. The 66th anniversary of the anouncement of the death of Adolph Hitler. To the day.

12.45 A reader writes:

I find myself torn morally. I am against capital punishment. Against torture. Against war except for self-defense. Yet I feel nothing but happiness that Bin Laden is dead.

12.42 pm Von Hoffmann Award Nominee:

Carter blew it with Iran, encouraging the Iranian armed forces to stay in their barracks, while Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's radical Islamists (whom Carter thought of as "reformers") took power, and then approved the ill-conceived hostage rescue mission that ended with ignominious failure in the desert. Obama, by contrast, could only wish for such success.

- Glenn Reynolds.

12. 41 am. I have been sometimes at a loss to understand why president Obama would have escalated the war in Afghanistan as far as he did. Do you think it could because he was aiming for this all along?

12.40 pm. Wolcott:

It's taken so long for his death to come (although it's been rumored for years, that he was being used as a useful ghost to keep the specter of terrorism alive) that I didn't think I'd be tearful when word finally came, that his death would be a long overdue postscript to a terrible decade, but I was wrong.

12.35 am. Quote for the Day:

When a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you're supposed to do something about it. And it happens we're in the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed, it's-it's bad business to let the killer get away with it, bad all around, bad for every detective everywhere.

- Humphrey Bogart, as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon.

12.34 am. Here's the Beast's tweet-feed. Osama was shot in the head? And here's how the story spread around the Internet.

12.30 am. I want to go down there. Aaron rushed down 16th Street about half an hour ago. He's headed to the White House. The whole neighborhood is stirring.

12.21 am The more I hear the more Obama seems very close to this over the last few months: in weekly meetings, deeply involved in five national security meetings recently. This was not a lucky break. This was the end-point of several weeks of coordination. And Obama's cool throughout. As Donald Trump was birthering out, Obama was aiming right at this country's deadliest enemy.

Everyone in both the Bush and the Obama administration who helped make this happen deserve our thanks, especially the unsung federal employees in the CIA and the special forces who are loyal to no party but to the constitution. But it remains obvious that the president who kills Osama bin Laden is a president who is going to be almost impossible to beat in 2012.

This has the feel of the kind of operation John Kennedy would have loved to have pulled off - and had a martini after. Here's hoping the president enjoys at least one Martini and one cigarette.

12.20 am One piece of conventional wisdom over-turned: the Pakistani military was not cooperating with the US. It seems they were crucial in the operation, on the ground.

12.17 am So Donald Rumsfeld's spokesman broke the news in the tweet: “So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn.”

12.08 am Can I say how deeply moving it is that a man named Barack Hussein Obama gave the order for the operation that killed Osama bin Laden?

The pre-eminent symbol of our the multicultural, multiracial society of the future defeated the pre-eminent symbol of the darkest, bleakest throwback to medieval religious fanaticism. Im not ashamed to use the following language: Good defeated evil. And hope rekindles again.

12.03 am. This sounds like a highly dangerous, immensely courageous act of daring, a military and intelligence coup that will be taught in high schools for as long as America exists. This wasn't just a lucky bomb or a drone attack; it was an elaborate, carefully planned and successfully completed operation - deep in an urban area in deepest Pakistan. This was one badass achievement.

11.44 pm. The president's announcement walked the fine line between the appropriate sobriety of a profound moment and the immense pride and joy the United States must feel in bringing an end to this monster's threat to the world. It framed the successful attack as a result of a presidential decision to make getting Bin Laden the highest priority of American forces. And the way he revealed how long this has operation has been going on and how persistent the US forces have been, the prouder one becomes.

11.30 pm. I put the video up above for obvious reasons. The TV anchors are all abut the future right now, what the impact will be, how it will interact with the Arab Spring, etc etc. And that's understandable. But can we first take a moment to remember what was done to more than 3,000 human beings nearly ten years ago by this religious mass murderer? It was not just done to them, but to the families and friends of all of them, and to the principle of freedom of religion and freedom itself. That day changed a huge amount for all of us. We thought of it as a war (with all the awful consequences of that definition) because the act that started it was an act of war. And so we feel now that this moment is, in some ways, the end of that war.

We know, of course, that this struggle will go on with new groups and new plots and new atrocities. But this man symbolized its hideous beginning. Almost its meaning.

So victory. Yes, victory. And justice. Yes, justice.

God Bless America.

11.20 pm. What to say? To know that this mass murderer has been killed, and by US forces, brings a sense of joy that surpasses adequate expression. Finally, this ghastly ten year old war feels as if it has been for at least something. Saddam had not attacked us. Bin Laden had. This is the moment of justice for his despicable act of mass murder.

Comment by doone on May 1, 2011 at 10:11pm

Washington Post:

“The nation’s unnerving descent into debt began a decade ago with a choice, not a crisis.

In January 2001, with the budget balanced and clear sailing ahead, the Congressional Budget Office forecast ever-larger annual surpluses indefinitely. The outlook was so rosy, the CBO said, that Washington would have enough money by the end of the decade to pay off everything it owed.

Voices of caution were swept aside in the rush to take advantage of the apparent bounty. Political leaders chose to cut taxes, jack up spending and, for the first time in U.S. history, wage two wars solely with borrowed funds. “In the end, the floodgates opened,” said former senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), who chaired the Senate Budget Committee when the first tax-cut bill hit Capitol Hill in early 2001.

Now, instead of tending a nest egg of more than $2 trillion, the federal government expects to owe more than $10 trillion to outside investors by the end of this year. The national debt is larger, as a percentage of the economy, than at any time in U.S. history except for the period shortly after World War II.”

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/05/from-surplus-to-debt/

Comment by doone on May 1, 2011 at 10:10pm

Comment by doone on May 1, 2011 at 10:08pm

Glenn Reynolds: Anti-Muslim Craziness Is All Obama's Fault

 Carles Johnson
WINGNUTS • Sun Oct 17, 2010 at 10:45 am PDT • Views: 2,149

Glenn Reynolds provides us with a textbook example of Obama Derangement Syndrome, mixed with a blind dumb partisan instinct to deny responsibility for their own inflammatory rhetoric, and blame the other side for absolutely everything.

It occurs to me that right after 9/11 we saw the beginning anti-mosque demonstrations but those quickly dissipated. Why? Probably because right after this march, we had Bush’s WTC bullhorn speech and people started to feel confident that Bush would protect the country. With less confidence in Obama, are they resorting to self-help? It’s a long way from bacon to beheadings, of course, but a sense that the powers-that-be can’t be trusted to protect the country is dangerous and destabilizing.

With all of the anti-Muslim hysteria being promoted not just by idiot bloggers like Pamela Geller, but top GOP politicians, Fox News, and every single right wing talk radio host, Glenn Reynolds twists the fabric of space and time itself to find a way to blame it on President Obama. Amazingly pathetic.

Comment by doone on May 1, 2011 at 7:57pm

The Most Extreme Governor in America on Planned Parenthood

by Kay

Wanted to return to Mitch Daniels in Indiana today because he’s already being sold, hard, by public intellectuals and media personalities, as outlined here by Steve Benen:

 

It’s indefensible. Daniels should be ashamed of himself and the pundits who praised Daniels’ “seriousness” should feel awfully foolish right about now.

 

If he becomes a GOP primary contender (or fake candidate:is that a new category?) I assume we’ll be buried in an avalanche of worshipful ill-informed blather so we may have to adopt a defensive posture and start the scramble toclarify some facts before any of the national fairy tales take hold.

This is an extreme move:

 

The bill puts Indiana at risk of losing $4 million a year in federal family planning grants likely to be cut off because of the legislation. Daniels, known as a fiscal hawk, did not address the loss in his statement.

 

 

The bill wasn’t part of Daniels’ agenda and he did not publicly advocate for the Planned Parenthood provision, but signing it might help his chances of winning the GOP nomination.

 

 

Daniels opposes abortion rights, but his call for a Republican “truce” on social issues has drawn the ire of the social conservatives. Bill sponsor state Rep. Eric Turner, R-Cicero, said social conservatives will be happy with Daniels’ decision. “No one will talk about the truce,” Turner said. “People in the conservative community care about action, and he’s clearly the most pro-life governor in America with a signature on that bill.”

 

 

Planned Parenthood says the bill could leave as many as 22,000 patients without access to Pap tests, birth control and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases.
The governor’s office said the law will affect 7 entities in Indiana that have a total of 34 locations in 21 counties.

 

22,000 ordinary people in Indiana just lost access to the affordable, preventative health care that they were getting so Mitch Daniels can call himself the “most pro-life governor in America”.

Those 22,000 people are sacrificing a lot for Mitch Daniels and his political ambitions. In return, I suggest we make Daniels own that new title, before he gears up the national conservative commentary sales force.

He’s now the most extreme governor in America on this issue, according to the bill’s sponsor, and who would know better than the anti-choice activist who is the bill’s sponsor? Not me. I’m going to take his word on that.

Step up and accept 1st prize, Mitch. Most extreme in America. Don’t be shy. People should know where you really stand.

Comment by Adriana on May 1, 2011 at 6:47pm

From Paul Krugman:

 

May 1, 2011, 6:31 pm

Origins of the Deficit

Steve Benen gets exercised about the way Republicans place blame for our deficit on excessive spending, when that is very much not the story. I’ve been thinking about ways to make that clear; here’s one effort.

What I do in the figure below is look at changes in real revenue and spending per capita. Real, to take account of rising prices; per capita, to take account of rising population. Now, even that adjustment still biases the calculation toward laying blame on spending, since both revenue and spending tend to (and should) grow over time even in real per capita terms; think about the forces driving Social Security and Medicare spending. But it gets us most of the way there.

And one more adjustment: as in my Taylor takedown, I distinguish between safety net spending — income security and Medicaid — and the rest. So here’s what I get:

CBO, BEA  

Even on this crude calculation, it’s obvious that the slump is responsible for the great bulk of the rise in the deficit. Anyone who says otherwise is either remarkably ill-informed or trying to deceive you.

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