Looks like the White House would like the opportunity to revise and extend it's remarks on exactly how bin Laden met his fate.

The White House backed away Monday evening from key details in its narrative about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, including claims by senior U.S. officials that the Al Qaeda leader had a weapon and may have fired it during a gun battle with U.S. forces.

Officials also retreated from claims that one of bin LadenÂ’s wives was killed in the raid and that bin Laden was using her as a human shield before she was shot by U.S. forces.

...However, during a background, off-camera briefing for television reporters later Monday, a senior White House official said bin Laden was not armed when he was killed, apparently by the U.S. raid team.

Another White House official familiar with the TV briefing confirmed the change to POLITICO, adding, “I’m not aware of him having a weapon.”

“The bottom line is the team that entered that room was met with resistance and took appropriate action,” said a third American official.

He, um, didn't have a weapon? That's an interesting little factoid, no?

The obvious and potentially wrong inference to be drawn from that is that capture was not really on the menu at any point. Maybe if he had his hands up or was lying face down on the floor when the SEALs burst in he could have been taken alive. Otherwise he got the same chance as he gave the people in the African embassies, on the USS Cole and 9/11. Let me say one thing up front...I am absolutely fine with that.

I noticed something in Sunday night's statement by Obama that caught my attention. I didn't post on it because it was kind of a small thing at the time but I did email it around to the co-bloggers. Here's Obama announcing OBL's death.

Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.

"After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden". Not 'during' it, 'after'.

"Unarmed" and "after".

Again, this would be a good time to note I'm 100% fine with this. Capturing and trying him was simply impractical. He would have become a symbol for years to come. So far we've managed to try what 2 detainees (the guy in NY and the driver down at Gitmo)? Capturing bin Laden would simply have brought out every nut job liberal lawyer. We also likely would have seen spectacular attacks in an effort to free the guy. Not on the prison itself but imagine a Beslan style hostage taking where a group of jihadis hold schools full of kids hostages while demanding the release of the world's most famous terrorist.

Again, things could change as debriefings continue and information is released official or via leaks but I'll just note this wrap up from Victor Davis Hanson.

Some plaintiffs “preventively detained” for an “indeterminate” period at “al-Qaeda’s chief recruiting tool” in a lame-duck Guantanamo offered critical information about bin Laden’s otherwise not very important “pawns” and “couriers”; some even did so after being subject to superfluous and not very legal “enhanced interrogation techniques.” We then dispatched a questionable “assassination” team into a sovereign nation without its consent, executed bin Laden and various unnamed others,

If Bush had done this the calls for his impeachment would be deafening. Speaking of Bush...America would like to say thanks.

Whatever, I'm just glad it's done. As Jim Geraghty put it, an important message has been sent.

This is the moment to cheer, to scream, to pump your fist, to break into that old bottle of your favorite beverage youÂ’ve been saving for a special occasion. Because the world is different this morning. A key message has been beamed to every corner of the earth, sure to reach anyone who has ever committed terror against Americans, who seeks to do so again, or who is contemplating the act: No matter who you are, no matter how many followers you have, no matter how smart or careful you think you are, our guys can find you. ItÂ’s just a matter of time. If you kill our countrymen, they will look, and they will look, and they will look and they will never quit and we will never forget. You will die in prison at Gitmo or you will die quickly from a covert-ops teamÂ’s bullets. But one way or another, you will pay the price for harming our people.

Amen.

Posted by: DrewM at 09:23 AM | Comments (163)
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Well. yes, why not?

Conspiracy theories are defined by several important elements:

1. They are constructed specifically to be nonfalsifiable.

2. They postulate "wheels within wheels" hidden reasons and secret agendas moving the world's events. They are crafted precisely as a means of ignoring the real, evidenced, surface reason for an event in favor of an imagined, unevidenced, allegedly "real" reason beneath it.

3. They broadly indict large numbers of vague, unnamed people as being part of the illicit conspiracy. "A conspiracy so vast" that it is pointless to name this specific person or that as being in the conspiracy.

4. They are purposely constructed by those with a less-than-exhaustive knowledge base about a subject in order to have a justification to ignore all that knowledge (of which the conspiracist is ignorant); that is, the conspiracist looks for a theory in which his lack of knowledge is irrelevant, and postulates further still that those with knowledge are actually compromised as analysts because their minds are clouded by petty details, whereas the more "unencumbered by knowledge" conspiracy theorist is not so blinded by facts and can see the "big picture."

5. A critical -- the critical -- psychological purpose of a conspiracy theory is to make a complex world simple enough for the simple to understand, and in addition give those believing in the conspiracy theory a moral sheen as well -- they are "brave" for seeing the truth that so many others refuse to see. In two ways, then -- intellectual and moral -- the conspiracy theory serves as a vanity, and as a dubious reason for self-valuation.

By those classic elements of a conspiracy theory, yes, the stupid media, lacking in knowledge about virtually everything except who they have to blow to get a desk-anchor gig, has bought into a simple, stupid, knowledge-diminishing conspiracy theory that everything that happens in America is because White Bitter Clingers Hate Obama Because He's Black.

Posted by: Ace at 08:20 AM | Comments (158)
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A CBS anchor in Los Angeles is terming the death of Osama bin Ladin a "murder," steve_in_hb tells me:

Local CBS2 news anchor just made the following statement while pimping their 8:00 KCAL9 coverage of OBL: "new reaction on the murder of the terrorist mastermind." Murder? Apparently, the killing during legal combat operations of a person who 1) declared war on the US and 2) masterminded a series of attacks, generally targeting civilians, is murder.



A charitable person would assume that, while it was a horrible misuse of the language, it was probably merely a slip of the tongue. However, when I went to their website to write a complaint I found that someone else had already complained about one of their stories describing his death as murder. That complaint (post and link here) was posted 20 hours before the occurence I witnessed. While it appears the earlier complaint refers to a guest describing OBL's death as murder, the occurrence that angered me was a direct statement by Sharon Tay who is described on their website as an anchor.

I asked, to make sure of the context: Did she tease an upcoming interview by asking "Was it murder?" That would also be awful, but at least it would be a question.

No, he informs me. Sharon Tay called it a "murder" in a simple statement.

They cut to her briefly during the CBS2 coverage to pimp the KCAL9 8:00 pm coverage - she rattled off the stories they would be covering and made the direct statemnt "new reaction on the murder of the terrorist mastermind." She didn't say something like "some calling OBL's death murder", etc.

So there you go: Local CBS news reader Sharon Tay in Los Angeles thinks SEAL Team 6 just conducted a state-sanctioned murder.

I wonder what their motive was? Maybe they were all named in his will as beneficiaries. Maybe they wanted to take control of his lucrative vinyards. Maybe he was blackmailing them all with nudie pictures they'd had taken as young men.

Who knows? But I love a murder mystery.

"I need to dust for fingerprints!
That is what you do for fingerprints, right?
You dust for them? Whatever it is, I'm doing
that fingerprint-thing."

From her bio:

Sharon loves traveling the world and speaks Spanish and Cantonese.

Ah. I notice "English" isn't listed. Maybe she just struggles with simple English words.

Posted by: Ace at 07:40 AM | Comments (271)
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It turns out that economists are less like scientists than they are used-car salesmen. That goes double for academic economists. Part of this is because economics has the veneer of the hard sciences about it (math and statistics), but it's really more related to sociology and psychology. And plain old patent-medicine voodoo. Its practitioners (especially in the academy) are more prone than most to fads and ideological philosophies that run counter to plain common sense. The article flenses Joseph Stiglitz, a hard-left Columbia "economist" who exists mainly to push the tired and completely discredited Marxist worldview. (And he used to be "Chief Economist" at the World Bank, which just goes to show how seriously you should take that institution.) The socialist ideology has been defeated in every real-world arena except the University, which only serves to show how little "economics" is actually being practiced.

When an economist (especially an academic) speaks, always remember: just like a used-car salesman, he's trying to sell you something.

In a DOOM! thread last week we got into the relative pros and cons of home-ownership. I asserted that the benefits of home-ownership, while real, have been vastly oversold. Here's another article that makes the same point. The idea was that home-owership would foster character-traits that would benefit society -- stability, thrift, civic engagement. But it turns out many people got the cause-and-effect relationship inverted -- people who exhibit these traits tend to buy homes, it's not the act of owning a home that instills these qualities in them. (And plenty of renters choose not to own homes even though they are thrifty, stable, and civic-minded.)

Teh Bernank isn't convincing many people that inflation isn't a threat. Says Niall Ferguson:

[T]he reason the CPI is losing credibility is that, as economist John Williams tirelessly points out, it’s a bogus index. The way inflation is calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been “improved” 24 times since 1978. If the old methods were still used, the CPI would actually be 10 percent. Yes, folks, double-digit inflation is back. Pretty soon you’ll be able to figure out the real inflation rate just by moving the decimal point in the core CPI one place to the right.

...and so it begins. Calls are going out for tax hikes to pay for bloated public-sector pensions at the state and municipality level. And I guarantee you, the assessment of "fees" for everything from licenses to permits to special services are going to skyrocket too, while the overall service level sinks. We're going to be paying more and more for less and less -- states are going to be spending all their money paying pensions and servicing debt, with little left over for the actual business of government.

Illinois has displaced California as Chairman of the Loyal Order of the Terminally Boned (LOTB). It was a close race, but Illinois has worked hard for the honor. (Related articles here and here.) (Thanks to PensionTsunami.)

California swears to retake the leadership of the group, however.

The US corporate tax rate is the highest in the world. But remember: the Obama Administration is all about economic growth, baby!

[UPDATE 1]: Take another look at this post from Ace on the "stimulus" that wasn't. Obama took a turd and tried to convince us that it was a tea-rose.

[UPDATE 2]: Killerating Osama bin Laden was good for the soul, but it didn't bump the economy. I didn't expect that it would, frankly. Americans tend to hold foreign policy and domestic policy in separate parts of their brains. That's why I don't think any "bounce" President Obama gets from this operation will help him in the 2012 elections, which will turn on domestic economic issues, not foreign policy. (Though the two are inextricably linked in reality.)
more...

Posted by: Monty at 05:04 AM | Comments (157)
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I hate to say 'I told you so', but sometimes we have to do things we hate, don't we?

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:53 AM | Comments (321)
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Looks like Stephen Harper is not only going to remain Prime Minister, he's going to take the Conservatives from a minority government to a pretty strong majority one.

As of 10:45 p.m. ET, the Conservatives had won or were leading in about 160 seats out of the 308 in the House of Commons, five more than needed for a majority, while the New Democrats had soared past 100 and the Liberals had tumbled to about 30.

The Conservative run started in Atlantic Canada, where the Tories overtook the Liberals in the popular vote and added three of the 12 additional seats needed to ensure solid control of Parliament.

The Liberals emerged from the Maritimes scarred but alive, having dropped two seats to the New Democrats and three to the Conservatives. The Tories picked up one seat by a razor-thin margin in Newfoundland and Labrador after being shut out in the last election.

As polls had suggested, the NDP trounced the Bloc in Quebec while the Harper Tories scored big gains in Ontario at the expense of the Liberals who once owned the province federally.

The other major story seems to be the destruction of the Liberal Party and the Quebec separatist Bloc Québécois. The Liberal party which ran the country for over a decade not all that long ago (they led a minority government as recently as 2004) is going to go from 77 seats to the low 30s. The Bloc will go from 47 to about 5.

Basically the NDP is taking over Quebec.

The NDP is going to go from the 4th place party to the Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition with over 100 seats (they had 34 in the last Parliament).

This is a pretty major realignment.

The NDP is running some odd candidates that are going to win like Ruth Ellen Brosseau.

The single mother who lives in Gatineau, Que., and works in Ottawa as an assistant manager of a OliverÂ’s pub at Carleton University in Ottawa is a classic parachute candidate.

Yet there’s no sign that her parachute ever landed in Berthier-Maskinongé, a Quebec riding near Trois-Rivières that is about a three-hour drive from her home.

Local media say she has not granted any interviews and an NDP spokesman could not confirm whether she ever visited the riding.

“She is both excited and nervous,” said NDP spokesman Marc-André Viau, who has spoken with Ms. Brosseau since she returned from a previously scheduled vacation in Las Vegas. Another NDP spokesman had told The Canadian Press that Ms. Brosseau was “a little freaked out” by the sudden media attention.

“She was not ready to do a press conference, but she’s learning,” said Mr. Viau, who said she will need to “perfect” her French-language skills. “She will be learning in the days to come to be more confident to talk to media and to be a public figure. So if she’s elected, we’ll make sure that she’s ready.”

Thanks to James Schmidt for that link.

Basically the NDP just needed names on the ballots in some ridings where they figured they had no chance to win. And now a bunch of these place holders are going to be Members of Parliament. It's like taking the first 40 names from the English version of the Montreal phone book and throwing them in Parliament.

Amazing stuff.

Update: Hockey Legend Ken Dryden, who went into Liberal Party politics after his Hall of Fame career, apparently lost. That's a shame.

Posted by: DrewM at 07:00 PM | Comments (333)
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Whew - after all of last night's excitement I'm ready for a nice relaxed ONT, so the drunken monkey show has been rescheduled for a later date.

Finally - A Worthwhile Use of the Animated GIF

Here two artists have used them to create images that straddle the border between photographs and video. Like the portraits in Harry Potter ‘cinemagraphs’ are photos that contain just a bit of motion to give them the feeling of a live scene.

New York-based Miss Beck told The Atlantic magazine: ‘There's something magical about a still photograph - a captured moment in time - that can simultaneously exist outside the fraction of a second the shutter captures.

‘We feel there are many exciting applications for this type of moving image.

‘There's movement in everything and by capturing that plus the great things about a still photograph you get to experience what a video has to offer without the time commitment a video requires.’

If you like these cinemagraphs, you can find more here. more...

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:03 PM | Comments (617)
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I'm so old I remember when it was wrong to use 9/11 for political purposes (Warning: DU link)

New TV Ad Condemns Republicans for Politicizing 9/11, Ad Planned to Air Nationally this Week

Cites GOP Misinformation Campaign Intended to Bolster President & Keep Control of Congress

9/12/2006 4:14:00 PM

To: National Desk

Contact: Trevor FitzGibbon, 202-246-5303, Alex Howe, 202-822-5200, both for MoveOn.org Political Action

WASHINGTON, Sept. 12 /U.S. Newswire/ -- A new TV ad attacks Republican attempts to use the fifth anniversary of 9/11 to resuscitate the President's popularity and help Republicans hang on to control of Congress.

MoveOn.org Political Action's thirty second spot is planned to begin airing nationwide on cable this week. The ad buy is $100,000.

The ad, "Exploiting 9/11," reminds Americans of the now discredited claims and promises made by the President and Republican leaders in Congress about the connection between 9/11 and Sadaam Hussein; the capture of Osama bin Laden; and making the country safer by invading Iraq.

Want a more recent example? Barney Frank attacks Eric Cantor for politicizing bin Laden's death.

But in the era of CHANGE we have this.

President Obama will travel to New York City on Thursday to visit Ground Zero and meet with families who lost loved ones on Sept. 11, 2001, communications director Dan Pfeiffer said.

It's almost like there are different rules for Democrats and Republicans.

As for the political fallout of this (which I guess we can now talk about since Obama is basically setting up a campaign trip), he'll get a bounce but I doubt it will mean much. We're way too far away from the election for people to be permanently swayed by this.

Also, George W. Bush was reelected despite the fact that he was unable to get bin Laden leading up to the '04 election. And remember W's dad, he was riding high post Gulf War but a much shallower recession that was over before November of
'92 help doom him.

Obama might still win but odds are it's going to be the economy that seals his fate one way or the other.

Related enough: Will we ever get to see the photos of a resting DEAD bin Laden?

The argument against releasing the pictures: theyÂ’re gruesome. He has a massive head wound above his left eye where he took bullet, with brains and blood visible.

I want a nice high quality copy to use on my computer's desk top.

Oh, he was shot in the chest too. You know the old rule...anything worth shooting is worth shooting twice.

Posted by: DrewM at 04:03 PM | Comments (227)
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The idea of the "fiscal multiplier" is that for every dollar of government stimulus spending you generate some other number of dollars in actual economic impact.

If you spent $1 but got $2 out of new economic activity out of the deal, you'd have a spending multiplier of x2. Which would be "good," in the sense you're getting ban for your buck.

Liberal economists (and then liberals generally) always claim the "commonly-accepted" fiscal multiplier for stimulus is 1.4x. For every $1, we "make" $1.40. This is why Paul Krugman believes, insanely, that there is virtually no limit to how much the government can/should spend -- we're always coming out ahead on the deal!

But in fact, that "1.4x" is not "commonly-accepted," except for die-hard leftists and former Enron shills like Paul Krugman, and it's incredibly unsophisticated to speak of it that way anyway -- there is no common multiplier at all. It depends on what the stimulus is spent on, and the conditions and circumstances of the country in which it is being spent.

Krugman's know-nothing, just-barely-above-the-100-level-in-college-economics "1.4x" multiplier is actually based on the best, most impactful type of stimulus (I think increases in personal spending power -- like tax cuts or other real-income-increasing measures) and only for the economy of the 1930s United States, which isn't much at all like the current economy.

So you need to be more nuanced than the ignorant, redneck tractor-pull-cheering backwater ignoramus Paul Krugman in guessing at a multiplier.

Much of Obama's stimulus was spent on the least stimulative sort of spending at all, subsidies for state and local government, which is just used to jigger around debt, and isn't spent (and hence can't multiply at all).

So, given the type of stimulus Obama -- or I should say Professor Emeritus of Economics Nancy "The Word is The Word" Pelosi -- inflicted on the country, and given the type of economy this country now has (post-industrial), what was the multiplier?

Well, for starters, it was less than 1. So, like, for each dollar we spent, we got, say, 70 cents out of the deal. That's a stone-cold loss.

But it could be worse than that: Because we're exactly the sort of country (not growing quickly, developed, heavily indebted) where each dollar of stimulus actually has a negative multiplier, that is, you're not merely losing the dollar you spent but actually subtracting money from your economy when you spend.

But Obama's a frigging genius. So, there, wingnuts.

Posted by: Ace at 03:32 PM | Comments (94)
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(Plus the bounty on bin LadenÂ’s head and an unexpected bonus)

After the 9/11 attacks it was widely proclaimed that this would also be “The End of Irony.” (Rumors of its death were highly exaggerated as we know now.) 10 days after the attacks there was a great piece at The Onion of which I’ve kept a printed copy tacked to a bulletin board ever since. What was great about the piece was that while it was funny (and the first time I and a lot of other people had got a chuckle out of something since the attacks), but it was also hard-hitting in a kinda’ ‘Hell Yeah!’ way.

I was planning on re-posting it on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, but somehow it seems appropriate to do so now as a reminder of what bin Laden is now currently experiencing. The language may not be entirely SFW, but hereÂ’s the beginning of the piece:

”JAHANNEM, OUTER DARKNESS—The hijackers who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon expressed confusion and surprise Monday to find themselves in the lowest plane of Na'ar, Islam's Hell.”

“’I was promised I would spend eternity in Paradise, being fed honeyed cakes by 67 virgins in a tree-lined garden, if only I would fly the airplane into one of the Twin Towers," said Mohammed Atta, one of the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 11, between attempts to vomit up the wasps, hornets, and live coals infesting his stomach. "But instead, I am fed the boiling feces of traitors by malicious, laughing Ifrit. Is this to be my reward for destroying the enemies of my faith?’”

“The rest of Atta's words turned to raw-throated shrieks, as a tusked, asp-tongued demon burst his eyeballs and drank the fluid that ran down his face.

So itÂ’ll be just like a class reunion for ObL and the boys! More likely itÂ’ll be some small relief for Atta and company that Ifrit and the others will turn their tender mercies to a new target, at least for a little while.

Whither the Bounty on bin LadenÂ’s Head?

(Apologies if this has been covered already but I don’t even read my own crap, much less any of the other posts here. Plus I needed an excuse to use ‘whither’ in a sentence.)

As you may recall:

”The $25 million (£15m) reward for information offered by the US Government was bolstered by a further $2 million (£1m) raised privately by the Airline Pilots Association and the Air Transport Association.”

“The FBI made no comment yesterday as to whether any part of the bounty would now be paid after US Navy Seals successfully targeted his compound in Pakistan.”

HereÂ’s the take on it from a relative of one of the 9/11 victims, and itÂ’s fairly representative of what IÂ’ve read on the innertubes so far today:

Scott Cleere, from Tampa, Florida,whose father Jim was killed in the September 11 attacks, said: “I’d like to see if these six Marines will get the bounty reward for him. And I would hope that they do because they do deserve it.”

I think thatÂ’s probably an honest gut-reaction to it, but is it the right way to go? What about the helicopter crews that also risked their lives? Or you could take it back even further, really, but where would the cutoff point be? What about the interrogaters who pried the information loose that allowed the raid to be successfully carried out?

And if you asked the SEALS themselves, theyÂ’d probably tell you they were just doing their duty and would feel wrong about taking the money (I could be wrong, but these guys typically have a very high sense of duty and honor.) I dunno myself what the answers are, so IÂ’ll pose it to you: What, if anything should be done with the bounty?

And finally,

V-ObL Day?

(Or V-UbL day if you want)

The thing that makes this all the sweeter is that it took place on May 1st, AKA May Day, where communist creeps worldwide get together and celebrate working stiffs with such cherished activities as decorating a May Pole and rioting.

(Ok, technically it was already May 2nd in Pakistan when the assault occured but it was still May 1st in the US, so bite me.)

So I find it pleasing that the greasing of bin Laden overshadowed the annual far-left temper tantrum and drove it off the nightly local news broadcasts where it most likely would've been one of the lead stories.

As far as I'm concerned, the Red Menace no longer has complete ownership of May 1st, at least for a little while (And the double-juicy irony is that the protests/riots typically protest anything and everything military. Well, anything and everything military that doesn't involve armed leftist revolution.)

Yesterday was a very good day indeed.

Posted by: Genghis at 02:30 PM | Comments (120)
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