1) There will not be another event like 9/11. We were safe before that event, and are just as safe after. The event itself was so off-the-wall that it succeeded.
It is not new security measures that prevents re-occurrence of such an event. The reason I feel comfortable saying this is that mass killing of innocent people is very easy to do. People in other countries are very angry at us, so that it should have happened by now. But no matter how mad people may get at our government and our bombs and bombers and sociopaths, it is very rare for them to vent their anger by killing innocent people. There’s no satisfaction in that. That’s our shtick.
Here’s how easy it would be to do some real mayhem: All our elaborate airport security cannot prevent someone from carrying a bomb into an airport and detonating in the security screening area. Bombers don’t need people gathered on an airplane – they only need for people to be gathered at a single place. All of our elaborate security has merely shifted the gathering point.
As I have long known, and George Carlin reminded us, the whole point of airport security is to keep us in a state of fear. If someone wants to set off a bomb and kill innocent people, it is impossible to prevent.
So no more 9/11’s. Please relax, folks. You’re safe.
Obama is employing the same strategy with tax cuts as he did with the public option in health care. He is candidate Obama again, our progressive friend. It’s triangulation. At an appropriate time after the election we are going to learn that Obama will ‘accede’ to ‘pressure’ from the Republicans to preserve the cuts.
For right now, due to public opinion, the Democratic leadership had to forestall any action on the tax cuts until after the election. That part is done.
The worst part will be that Obama will apply a little Vaseline, offering up a little morsel here and there, as he did with health care, to convince Democrats that they got something meaningful in return for capitulation.
And they will eat it up. The politics I understand, but this constant capitulation I do not. Where is the validation in losing, losing, losing? How can Democrats live like that?
Piece of Mindful 
Not so fast Mark, I agree with this quote.
“Congressional democrat’s decision to delay voting on extending the Bush Tax cuts until after the election will almost certainly become the mechanism vindictive lame duck Democrats use to punish Americans for voting them out of office.”
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Would be nice to cite the source – it’s interesting, but off-the-mark. If you rise above mere partisanship and concentrate on policy, the objective is to preserve the tax cuts. It doesn’t matter which party gets it done – Democrats punted to after the election because they can’t do it now without making the bloodbath even worse.
I doubt that corporate Democrats much care about the “Democratic Party’ per se, but rather preservation of the corporate free-trade low-tax aggressive-war and torture regime. The leadership of both parties are unified in purpose. They are Coke and Pepsi. The product is the same.
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Source isn’t cited, but I’m assuming it’s Rodger (the real king of France). Link provided.
http://curmudgeonlyskeptical.blogspot.com/2010/09/donk-revenge-on-usa.html
As far as the Coke/Pepsi thing goes I’m thinking this adm’s is following the Cloward-Piven playbook. Via Am. Thinker.
“One of two things must be true. Either the Democrats are unfathomable idiots, who ignorantly pursue ever more destructive policies despite decades of contrary evidence, or they understand the consequences of their actions and relentlessly carry on anyway because they somehow benefit.
I submit to you they understand the consequences. For many it is simply a practical matter of eliciting votes from a targeted constituency at taxpayer expense; we lose a little, they gain a lot, and the politician keeps his job. But for others, the goal is more malevolent – the failure is deliberate. Don’t laugh. This method not only has its proponents, it has a name: the Cloward-Piven Strategy. It describes their agenda, tactics, and long-term strategy.”
Which is not to say that the Reps helped during Bush’s terms-call it Coke light.
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Googling Cloward-Piven led me right to Beck, I’m afraid, but did find that it is traced back to the sixties and a couple of liberal sociologist, one of whose name I knew. More interesting to me is that the guaranteed national income was also proposed by Friedman and advanced by Nixon as the Family Assistance Plan. That would be more my thrust – that the two-party structures acts as a herding device for the differing personality types – Republicans more authoritarian, Democrats more nurturing, and that political campaigns revolve around manipulation of personality traits.
But the key is that both parties at the top are on the same page, and are keyed in to achieving that agenda by manipulating the respective bases, even as they think themselves working against one another. So my point above is that the upper-echelon Dems and Republicans support the Bush tax cuts and will see that they are preserved.
I liked your link – any blog that has both the words “skeptic” and “curmudgeon” in it has me at the get-go. Thanks for that.
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The “pressure” is only delivered by Republicans (they don’t write the script) so the oligarch puppet-masters do not have to expose themselves to public scrutiny. Except for an occasional interview in their own media circus, the ruling class is safe behind the two-party front. Like NFL owners, the teams, players, refs, and hot dog venders all ask “how low” when threatened. We citizens of so-called democracies have been “locked out” for decades, but still don’t know it.
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