Hmmm... Seems like we have a pattern here.

Video report here.

Print report:

Less than a month after major Nidal Hasan allegedly killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, the Pentagon's top intelligence officer sent the White House a report detailing an earlier failure to connect the dots. It reads like a dress rehearsal for the Detroit bomber case, reports CBS News chief national security correspondent David Martin.

According to that still-classified report, the terrorism task force responsible for determining whether Hasan posed a threat never saw all 18 e-mails he exchanged with that radical Yemeni cleric Awlaki whose communications were being monitored under a court ordered wiretap.

After the Washington task force decided Hasan was not dangerous, it never asked to see his subsequent communications with Alwaki.

In both cases, a complete lack of seriousness about terror.

That's two strikes.

And I'm not saying that's two strikes. Obama's top aide on military and foreign policy said that.

"White House national security adviser James Jones says Americans will feel 'a certain shock' when they read an account being released Thursday of the missed clues that could have prevented the alleged Christmas Day bomber from ever boarding the plane," USA Today writes. "'That's two strikes,' Obama's top White House aide on defense and foreign policy issues said, referring to the foiled bombing of the Detroit-bound airliner and the shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, in November. In that case, too, officials failed to act when red flags were raised about an Army psychiatrist, Maj. Nidal Hasan. He has been charged with killing 13 people. Jones said Obama 'certainly doesn't want that third strike, and neither does anybody else.'"

Obama blames this on Bush -- a systemic failure, he says, and of course he wants you to know the system exists as it did under Bush.

Well, right. But see, Obama was complaining we'd "taken our eye off the ball" on Al Qaeda and all of that in his year-long brief against Bush. And his promise was to put his eye back on the ball.

Instead, he's dicked around with stimulus that doesn't stimulate and health care reform that doesn't reform.

He's had a year now to get the "systemic failure" out of the system and get the system to where it needs to be.

Better get your head out of your ass, Mate. Your aide is right -- a third strike won't just kill a hundred Americans. It will kill your chances of reelection.

The public doesn't seem to mind the blame-shifting in other areas -- the economy, for example. They take that as politics as usual, and tend to agree that Bush really screwed the pooch here too.

But on this? No. No blame-shifting. This is Job One, and either you get it through your skull that you are responsible and no excuses will be acceptable, or you're all done, fella.

The public is right to be scared out of its mind by a President who makes excuses about protecting them. A man armed with a ready excuse is a man armed with the best reason there is to fail.

They don't like that. They understand that that if you think you pass the buck, you won't take ownership of the problem.

Obama says the bucks stops with him. I think that's just focus-grouped rhetoric, but for the sake of the country, he'd better internalize that and believe it.

Thanks to AHFF Geoff.

Posted by: Ace at 04:27 PM | Comments (88)
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Thank goodness we'll end all their complaining and make Al Qaeda like us again!

But the final irony is that many of the detainees may not even want to be transferred to Thomson and could conceivably even raise their own legal roadblocks to allow them to stay at Gitmo.

Falkoff notes that many of his clients, while they clearly want to go home, are at least being held under Geneva Convention conditions in Guantánamo. At Thomson, he notes, the plans call for them to be thrown into the equivalent of a "supermax" security prison under near-lockdown conditions.

"As far as our clients are concerned, it's probably preferable for them to remain at Guantánamo," he says.

No, this doesn't mean "Oh we should send them to Illinois because that's tougher punishment." We should keep them where they are, where we can quarantine them from humanity until this war ends, without implicating the Constitution's more generous protective clauses.

Thanks to DJ.

Posted by: Ace at 04:12 PM | Comments (88)
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I live blogged this earlier but if you haven't seen it, you really need to hear it from them to believe it.

Brennan is shocked that a group that got an individual close enough to wound the head of Saudi counter-terrorism and had expressed a desire to attack us could get a guy on a plane with a bomb? Really?

And Napolitano is shocked! Shocked to find out they might use an individual and not a group as on 9/11? Has she heard of Richard Reed?

Imagine for a moment if Sarah Palin had given the answer Napolitano did. She'd have been laughed out of public life. And rightfully so. Janet however will likely get another loving column from David Broder.

But don't worry, Obama took the blame so we're in the best of hands.

Posted by: DrewM at 02:56 PM | Comments (181)
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A lot of people are impressed by this:

“I am less interested in passing out blame than I am in learning from and correcting these mistakes to make us safer. For ultimately, the buck stops with me. … When the system fails, it is my responsibility.”

I'm not, and was talking about it with cobloggers (similarly unimpressed) and figured why talk about it in email.

He dodged responsibility for a week. He minimized it and claimed it was just an independent actor, unconnected to anything bigger, even when it was pretty firmly established it was Al Qaeda.

I don't think he made this statement because he believes it, or because he wanted to. I think he made this statement because polling and focus-groups told him that if he didn't make it, he was risking an even bigger loss in his poll numbers than anything he'd seen before.

So it's a case -- I am 99% confident -- of "doing the right thing when there are no other options left."

Posted by: Ace at 02:11 PM | Comments (198)
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Welcome to, um, New Jersey?

The state Senate rejected a same-sex marriage bill today, a major victory for opponents who contend the measure would infringe on religious freedom and is not needed because the state already permits civil unions.

The 20-14 vote defeating the measure followed an hour and a half of public debate inside the packed Senate chamber. The nearly thousand supporters and opponents of the bill held rallies on the Statehouse steps.

Statewide polls have shown New Jersey residents closely divided on same-sex marriage, and leading up to todayÂ’s vote, indicators showed a majority of the senators opposing the measure.

When will these hateful people, like their Christianist neighbors in NY just stop standing in the way of progress?

BTW-noted opponent of same sex marriage Barack Obama was unavailable for comment.

Posted by: DrewM at 02:05 PM | Comments (32)
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Above the fold update:

Gabe sends along a link to the White House review (pdf).

Bottom line is on page 2 of the file they had enough information to have stopped this guy from getting on the plane and they simply didn't.

Right now Brennan and Napolitano are going through the report.

I will say in all honesty, this is an almost impossible task. The old story is the terrorists only have to succeed once while the defenders have to be right all the time. That's a hell of a task.

Still, in this case they seem to have pretty much have had as much information and leads as they are likely to get (the guys dad, the fact he'd been to Yemen, the one way ticket paid for in cash, no luggage, etc). If they didn't flag this guy, I'm not sure who they are getting.

Ordering people to do more of what they are doing or to do it better is simply political spin. There's always going to be a danger or even likelihood that given the amount of information that comes in and the size of the bureaucracy things are likely to fall through the cracks.

Brennan says the most shocking thing he learned is that AQAP is an off shoot of AQ main body in Pakistan and wanted to and was able to attack the US. Really? That shocked him?

Helen Thomas wants to know if the screening in Amsterdam was done by contractors and what was his motivation? Dumbest woman in the world.

Brennan says religion is at the heart of what AQ does but of course, it's a perversion of Islam.

Awesome...TSA was set to chat with the bomber when they landed.

Brennan says he gave Leiter permission to go on leave with his kid.

He also says AQAP was 'aspirational' in its desire to attack us. See, thing is when people say they are coming to kill you, it's best to assume they are and they can. Alas, that's not the Obama way. For the opposing (and correct) view, see Cheney's 1% Doctrine.

Unrelated...NBC's Savannah Gutherie is hot.

I'm sorry but why was Brennan so surprised that AQAP could get a guy on plane with a bomb? Seriously, how can this be a surprise? This is a group that got a guy in close enough to attack the head of Saudi intelligence. Getting on a plane is not a stretch from there.

Just a reminder...two weeks ago this was "a lone extremist" and now he's the leading edge of a dangerous and surprising new source of attacks. Why the hell did Obama pop off back in Hawaii? No one will call him on this but it shows you what his first and true instincts are...minimize the danger of Islamic attacks.

Original Post:
more...

Posted by: DrewM at 12:35 PM | Comments (319)
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Hard core:

Troubled comic Artie Lange landed in the hospital after stabbing himself nine times in an apparent suicide attempt, sources told The Post. Lange's frantic mom called 911 Saturday morning after she entered his Hoboken apartment and found the bloodied funnyman, a law-enforcement source said. Lange sustained six "hesitation wounds" and three deep plunges.

Stabbing himself? Jeeze Louise.

In related news, Jackie "The Jokeman" Martling just got a boner.

Posted by: Ace at 11:49 AM | Comments (250)
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In the words of Steve Perry, Don't Stop Believin'.

At this point, we suspect that the race has indeed closed somewhat and that the result will probably be closer than it ought to be, but we continue to believe that [Republican Scott] Brown has a very uphill struggle in his quest to pull off a Massachusetts Miracle. At the same time, we have a well-earned appreciation for how unpredictable special elections can be even in states or congressional districts that sit solidly in one partyÂ’s camp or the other. For that reason, and an abundance of caution, we are moving it from the Solid Democratic column to the Lean Democratic column.

Via Instapundit, who links Brown's new ad-- a change ad.

Incidentally, several of his commercials feature his daughters, who are pretty cute.

My old friend Boston Irish tells me his brunette daughter, Ayla Brown, was a contestant on American Idol and just barely missed making the cutoff for the top ten (or twelve, or whatever) finalists who would compete week-by-week on the show.

Apparently she's a pro or semi-pro singer. You can listen to her cuts on the side of that page.

Posted by: Ace at 11:36 AM | Comments (64)
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I got into a spat with Jake Tapper on Twitter about whether it was "disingenuous" for "some conservatives" to make an issue of this.

I assume that it's not disingenuous for this broken-down old pinko to make an issue.

Posted by: Ace at 11:18 AM | Comments (118)
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The government was trying to bail out AIG, to keep the mega-insurer from going down, which could (maybe) bring down the financial system for a year or two.

AIG was loaded up with obligations it could not possibly meet. It had insured all those subprime mortgages, figuring that only a fraction of them could go bust at any particular time, which was a gross miscalculation, as it turns out.

They also had a lot of credit-default swaps, which, I'm not going to lie to you, I don't know really what they are. Except you don't want to have a lot of those on your books as the system comes crashing down.

So here is the malfeasance: AIG paid other banks 100 cents on the dollar -- that is, full freight -- for their own credit default swaps, which were now either worthless or worth pennies on the dollar.

Why would AIG do this? Why would it put out good, hard cash to get back virtually worthless paper? And why in the hell would you want to saddle a company which was already insolvent with even more insolvency-creating bad paper? All the while pumping its cash (cash from the government, of course) right out the door?

Well, the government -- or more specifically, Tim Geithner -- seems to have instructed them to do so as a requirement for continuing government assistance. And he instructed them not to disclose such 100-cents-on-the-dollar swaps to the public.

Here's my possibly naive belief: In this sort of situation, you want the bad paper spread out among as many actors as possible. That way everyone takes a loss -- takes a haircut -- but it's not necessarily anything that most companies can't bear, that will put them under. It just might give them a few lean years. But the system -- the thing we're trying to keep intact -- continues on, bruised and battered but still alive.

So why was all this bad paper being sucked into one company? Well, that one company was The Big One as far as bailouts, and it was the one the government was acknowledging trying to save.

Why was this extraordinarily generous 100-cents-on-the-dollar backdoor bailout offered to banks like Goldman Sachs? To the extent you're bailing them out -- why not something that makes a lot more sense like 60 cents on the dollar? Why so generous -- careless -- with taxpayer money?

Is it necessary that Goldman Sachs not even take a haircut -- not even lose some profitability or the ability to pay huge bonuses -- for a year or two?

No. Or at least it doesn't seem so to me. Even if I accept that some bailing out is necessary or prudent, what the hell is this crap with the full-on 100-cents-on-the-dollar complete immunization of Goldman Sachs against its extraordinarily bad decisions, all on the taxpayer dime?

Well, you can maybe see why Geithner demanded this be illegally withheld from the public, from stockholders, for example, who had a legal right to an accurate accounting of where AIG's money was coming from and where it was going. If you make it known to them, the public is informed, and then people start to get very annoyed that Goldman Sachs and other mega-banks aren't even being asked to take a 30% haircut on one portion of their accounts.

And that the American taxpayer, meanwhile, is being shellacked for the full cost of this.

This was kept illegally secret from the public because the public would never have blessed it had they known about it. Actually, the public never really blessed any kind of financial sector bailout, but they seemed to accept, reluctantly, the version of it they were sold on; but they never, in a thousand years, would have accepted this grotesquery had it been revealed to them.

So, here is the story:

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, then led by Timothy Geithner, told American International Group Inc. to withhold details from the public about the bailed-out insurerÂ’s payments to banks during the depths of the financial crisis, e-mails between the company and its regulator show.

AIG said in a draft of a regulatory filing that the insurer paid banks, which included Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA, 100 cents on the dollar for credit-default swaps they bought from the firm. The New York Fed crossed out the reference, according to the e-mails, and AIG excluded the language when the filing was made public on Dec. 24, 2008. The e-mails were obtained by Representative Darrell Issa, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

The New York Fed took over negotiations between AIG and the banks in November 2008 as losses on the swaps, which were contracts tied to subprime home loans, threatened to swamp the insurer weeks after its taxpayer-funded rescue. The regulator decided that Goldman Sachs and more than a dozen banks would be fully repaid for $62.1 billion of the swaps, prompting lawmakers to call the AIG rescue a “backdoor bailout” of financial firms.

“It appears that the New York Fed deliberately pressured AIG to restrict and delay the disclosure of important information,” said Issa, a California Republican. Taxpayers “deserve full and complete disclosure under our nation’s securities laws, not the withholding of politically inconvenient information.” President Barack Obama selected Geithner as Treasury secretary, a post he took last year.

As you know, I'm not a conspiracy-type guy, but this is, in fact, a conspiracy.

As they say, every profession is a conspiracy against the laity; those on the inside of the profession, of course, always have a conspiracy of shared interest in advancing their own collective cause against every one else's interest. Geithner -- and maybe his boss, Bernacke; who knows about him -- seems to have joined this conspiracy gladly and made sure his friends, and his likely future employers, did not, as the rest of America was expected to do, suffer at all for these catastrophically bad decisions.

Perhaps there's a good, sensible explanation for all this besides just keeping Goldman Sachs in the black, black, black (and pumping out millions of your money in undeserved bonsues).

Maybe I could even be persuaded, had I heard the explanation.

But I never did hear it. They just kept it illegally secret from me. Because the easiest way to "explain" a sketchy action is just to keep it secret from the person to whom an explanation is due. Ask any cheating spouse about that -- it's a no-brainer.

Just to Reiterate: Let's say I accept I want to keep these companies solvent.

Does that mean I want to keep them profitable? As profitable as ever?

No, I don't. Put aside moral considerations -- in pure economic terms, I want them to suffer, to keep them from doing this again, to keep them honest, as it were, and to keep them from thinking I'll always be there to write them a check if they risk too much.

Their profits are private; their losses are socialized. What?

A lot of people are losing money in this recession. A lot of companies have gone under; many are just barely keeping their doors open.

Why in the hell are the people most responsible for this disaster being immunized completely from their catastrophically bad decisions? Why are those harmed by their decisions being asked -- did I say asked? No asking was involved; they just did it secretly -- to subsidize those who caused all the problems?

Goldman Sachs and all the others should have had at least three years of losses and at least three years without bonuses. At least. Keep them from going under completely I understand.

Keep them from even having a year of losses? No, sorry, I don't understand that.

Which is why, I suppose, Geithner kept this secret from me.

Thanks to AHFF Geoff.

Counter-Argument: Spongeworthy sends this post by Megan McArdle, making (or at least stating) the case that Goldman Sachs didn't have to agree to any haircut at all, and could have just pushed to get 100% reimbursement.

Okay, I have duly linked that. I do not, however, believe it. If you know that pushing your claims 100% will drive a firm under (and you might wind up getting very little out of it), you don't push your claims 100%.

Sponge -- and I think Holdfast too -- are saying that the government had no leverage because it was known that they wouldn't let AIG go into bankruptcy under any scenario, so they couldn't get tough with Goldman et al.

Eh. I don't know. These guys sure seemed to be able to boss companies around. If I'm remembering right, there was also some chicanery like this involving another bank.

Posted by: Ace at 10:45 AM | Comments (121)
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