The Next Terrorist Threat: Canada Geese

Evil Geese But for some fancy flying by Captain Chester “Sully” Sullenberger and his co-pilot Jeffrey Skiles, a menacing flock of geese would have managed to pull of the same feat that Osama Bin Laden’s gang of thugs took pains to plan and execute. La Guardia Airport is as close to Manhattan as an airport can get. It wouldn’t have taken much for that plane to kill many people. The geese almost got their way.

Now it has been shown that geese can wreak havoc on our infrastructure, especially those Canada geese that crap all over the east coast. Probably the Canadians planned it that way. Blame Canada, too. Next we should probably invest in goose protection technologies. I’m sure DARPA is already on it. Harboring geese? Better beware. I’m sure you’re being watched already. How do you think Bin Laden managed to get them positioned? Did he pay them off? Did he seed their trail right through Queens? Let us flock to investigate and excoriate the guilty.

In the meantime, as we evict the 43rd president from the White House, a man who defined his administration by the war on terror, who led from a place of fear, and who capitalized on the fears of others, let us shut the door on this sorry chapter of our history by endeavoring to remember the miseries we have to go through at airports, the violations of our privacy that were made in our names, the destruction of our international reputation through the reckless disregard for human rights and international law, and now goose poop, which perhaps is best cleaned up with the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, as they have no better use.

Apparently, we have legalized torture

Scales of Justice This past week Eric Holder went before the United States Senate Judiciary Committee so that he might be confirmed as the next Attorney General. In that hearing, he was asked whether waterboarding was torture, and he gave a pretty unequivocal answer of “yes”, much along the lines that his soon-to-be boss President-elect Obama has said.

According to an article in the New York Times, and a separate one in the Wall Street Journal, the statement itself, obvious as it may seem, will have consequences for those who committed the acts, and for the United States government itself, who is party to a treaty that requires prompt investigation of all credibly alleged acts of torture.

The Times article mentions, however, that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (where they probably mean the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, PL 109-148 §1004) protects officials from prosecution if they acted in good faith based on the opinion of the Attorney General and the President.

Let’s put this another way: if the President and AG say it’s okay to torture, then according to that law, ain’t thing one a future president can do about it. Furthermore, simply changing the law would not remove the protection for officials, as any prosecution would be considered ex post facto, which is prohibited by our Constitution.

Of course nobody ever said that the President or AG said torture was okay. They just defined it in such a way that waterboarding wasn’t included. Well, why not do that with electrical shock, or caning? It’s a hole of infinite size through which any numbskull could step through.

What, then, does it mean when we say that the United States doesn’t torture people?

And yet more WSJ crap: “MN Recount was unconstitutional”

Once again, the WSJ is moderating away any criticism. Another example is a whine about how the statewide recount somehow compares to what happened in Florida in 2000. Nonsense in so many ways, not the least of which would be remedy. There may be one area in common, which is that the U.S. courts probably shouldn’t have jurisdiction in a state matter.

It is my recollection as well that The US Supreme Court had said that the decision should not be cited as precedent. While I can’t find the statement, the obvious logic was that the Supreme Court was under the gun for a decision where the electors had to meet, which is not the case here. A decision under pressure often leads to bad law and charges of partisanship. While I would accuse the Wall Street Journal of such partisanship with incessant and inane attacks against seemingly any and every Democrat, I do not so charge the court. However, the logic behind the decision is questionable, based on their starting point as to whether or not they even had jurisdiction to intervene.

The Latest WSJ Inanities

I am actually a fan of the Wall Street Journal, and have subscribed for the better part of 25 years, either in paper or electronic form, since the day my economics professor, J.J. Seneca, handed out discount cards in class. Their reporting gets right down to the heart of an issue, without reiterating all sorts of basic information from yesterday’s news story.

However, I have never been a fan of their editorial page, as it is too far to the right for the son of a teacher and life-long Democrat. Friday’s editorial by Stephen Moore, recounting all the glamour of the Ayn Rand days (something Alan Greenspan did in his biography), is no exception. As the free market melts around us because it was not properly regulated, here we have a guy whining about both past and present economic stimulous packages on the table. The sheer lack of humility exhibited by the article is appalling. When Alan Greenspan can admit that he was wrong, the Wall Street Journal seems incapable of allowing for the possibility that Libertarian methods might not be the only path to salvation.

This follows up a previous article in which the WSJ claimed that the New Deal had failed. Failure is in the eye of the beholder, and simply putting food on the table in the 30s was considered quite an accomplishment. Perhaps this is why FDR was elected four times.

But this isn’t the worst of the WSJ’s latest crimes. Last year they added a feature where readers could comment on stories by simply clicking on a comment tab. More recently that tab has disappeared from political editorials. So go ahead and comment on a factual story, but please save your disdain for their snobbish opinions for somewhere else. How very Murdoch-esque.

Mind you, I don’t know if a New New Deal is the right approach. But I guess I’m just a little more chastened than these guys.

Who needs an opposition party? We’ve got Democrats

Roosevelt As long as I could recall, we Democrats have prided ourselves on being the “Big Tent” party. This probably stems from a combination of deft political maneuvering by FDR and a singular hatred of the Republicans after the stock market crash of 1929. The downside of the big tent is that nobody inside agrees on much. Here is an article by Peter Baker and David Herszenhorn of the New York Times that talks about how allies in the U.S. Senate are criticizing President-elect Obama and his team about a stimulus package that they claim looks a little too much like trickle-down economics. Everyone agrees that we need more jobs created. Even Republicans! But nobody agrees on how to go about it. President Bush was the darling of the party (not to mention their leader), and was able to set the agenda. But he certainly did that with a lot of support from Republican congressional leaders. Obama doesn’t seem to be doing the same.

This does not bode well for the next administration. If Democrats form a circular firing squad, as they did in 1994, we can expect a Republican Congress just two years from now.