T decides to kill his daddy

Taken at Philadelphia Museum of Art

Does terrorism justify exempting the Defense Department from budget cuts?

That's what Bentley Rayburn suggests at National Review today:

Congress should remember that we are still facing very real threats. Today, we are fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and fighting al-Qaeda across the globe using intelligence and special-operations forces backed up with Predator drones and other modern technologies. We’re also protecting the nascent democratic movements in Libya and elsewhere, expanding operations to hot spots like Yemen, and rotating home a fighting force worn down by a decade of repeated, extended combat deployments.

Terror attacks are on the rise as the threat spreads around the globe — according to the National Counterterrorism Center, there were 2,534 terror attacks worldwide in 2010, nearly triple the 945 recorded five years ago.

I found that last paragraph interesting, so I went to the National Counterterrorism Center website. I couldn't verify Rayburn's numbers, but I did find a couple of other very interesting charts in the NTC's report on 2010 activity.

Like this one:

And this one:

So: Barely any non-military Americans were killed in terrorist incidents around the world in 2010—and 13 of the 15 who did die, died in Afghanistan. (One in Iraq, one in Uganda.) No private-citizen Americans were kidnapped.

Which is to say: It sure doesn't look like Americans are the targets of all this rising terroristic activity.

That's not to say that the United States doesn't have a legitimate concern with this trend. And these numbers don't include uniformed U.S. personnel who died in terror attacks in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the charts above raise the question of whether rising terroristic activity "worldwide" is an actual threat to American security. That's the metric that should determine defense spending priorities: A civil war in the Congo—tragic as that is—doesn't necessarily count.

But the arguments by Rayburn and Max Boot and other hawks rest on the presumption that the United States military should remain a globe-spanning colossus. That's an issue that should be on the table. Our interests—and our security—doesn't stop at our borders. But neither are they infinite. Certainly our resources aren't. Nor should the defense budget be.

John Yoo's red herring

The former Bush Administration torture advocate thinks Obama is a wuss for actually trying to justify the assassination of an American citizen:

It may be that the Obama administration thinks that U.S. citizens who join the enemy are entitled to special rules — like those that apply to the police, instead of those that apply to the military. But this would be wrong too. As I explained in the Wall Street Journal last week, ever since the Civil War, our national leaders and the Supreme Court have agreed that a citizen who joins the enemy must suffer the consequences of his belligerency, with the same status as that of an alien enemy. Think of the incentives that the strange Obama hybrid rule creates. Our al-Qaeda enemy will want to recruit American agents, who will benefit from criminal-justice rules that give them advantages in carrying out operations against us (like the right to remain silent, to Miranda and lawyers, to a speedy jury trial, etc.). Our troops and agents in the field may well hesitate in the field, as they will not be able to tell in the heat of the moment whether an enemy is American or not.

I call BS. Nobody—nobody—disputes the right of American troops to engage enemy combatants in battle on an actual battlefield. If that's what Yoo means by the heat of the moment—and it seems so—then there's no dispute. If Anwar al-Awlaki had been charging against American troops in Afghanistan, AK-47 in hand, there would be no debate to be had. The chance that an American soldier will hesitate in that moment, wondering if the enemy is an American citizen, is virtually nil. And Yoo—once again—is disingenuous for suggesting so.

The debate comes in murkier areas. If reports are to be believed, al-Awlaki was tracked by American drones for weeks while officials waited to get a clear shot at him that wouldn't result in massive collateral damage. That's admirable if true, but it's also something less than a "heat of the moment" situation: American officials were able to make a considered decision to assassinate the man. And because of that, it's more than fair to question the process by which al-Awlaki was targeted.

But this is the world Yoo inhabits. There are precious few ticking time bombs, yet they always justify extreme action where considered processes might serve Americans better.

Today in inequality reading: Americans are getting poorer

WASHINGTON — In a grim sign of the enduring nature of the economic slump, household income declined more in the two years after the recession ended than it did during the recession itself, new research has found.

Between June 2009, when the recession officially ended, and June 2011, inflation-adjusted median household income fell 6.7 percent, to $49,909, according to a study by two former Census Bureau officials. During the recession — from December 2007 to June 2009 — household income fell 3.2 percent.

The finding helps explain why Americans’ attitudes toward the economy, the country’s direction and its political leaders have continued to sour even as the economy has been growing. Unhappiness and anger have come to dominate the political scene, including the early stages of the 2012 presidential campaign.

via nytimes.com

It's this kind of dynamic that helps create the "Occupy Wall Street" movement.

When Philadelphia sucks

A MOTHER of four who was the director of her own elementary school and day care in Overbrook was a bystander killed by reckless gunfire Saturday night, police said.

"She was an excellent person," said Homicide Lt. Mel Williams. "You have a real victim here."

Hafeezah Nunrid-Din, 31, was heading to a car with her father on Malvern Avenue near 58th Street shortly before 8 p.m. when two young men ran past her and her dad, Williams said.

Shortly after, gunshots rang out, according to police. It's believed the bullets were intended for the two men who ran past Nunrid-Din but instead, they hit her once in the left shoulder and once in the right side of her back, police said.

via philly.com

What I saw at Occupy Philly

Occupy Philly: Oct 9, 2011 from Joel Mathis on Vimeo.

The Occupy Philly movement, as far as I can tell from my visit today, is dominated by neither fringe conspiracists nor the middle-class mainstream. Mostly, it seems to be made up of plucky twentysomethings who seem to have expected that the world they grew up in—the go-go 1990s and the "go shopping in the face of disaster" aughties—was the world they would inherit, and are cranky they didn't.

Yes, there were Marxists and Socialists and anarchists scattered among the crowd. But the tired "dirty, smelly hippie" stereotype doesn't fit what I found. Much of the crowd was, to all appearances, Standard Urban Hipster—not exactly suburbanites, exactly, but not nearly so outré as to alienate the masses either.

What it did seem to be, in fact, is a movement of privilege. The protesters were overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly literate—and Philadelphia, for all its greatness, isn't really either. Most of the faces of color on Dilworth Plaza belonged, frankly, to homeless panhandlers who were sleeping there long before all the kids with liberal arts degrees showed up. Why not more minority participation? It could be that a big chunk of Philadelphia's population has gotten the short end of the stick for so long that the current crisis doesn't seem like that much of a crisis—only more of the same. The people who are protesting who the ones who had something to lose in the first place, and lost it.

For all that, there wasn't a lot of rage to be found at City Hall either. The spirit, in fact, seemed to be upbeat. Some protesters were helping gather and distribute food. There was a library set up, as well as an area for wi-fi use and tech support. One area was designated for a solar-powered battery to charge up; volunteers collected litter. There was even a stickball game on the north side. Speakers reminded the crowd that the plaza, for now, is their home—and to treat it as such. But far from the air of petulant, hypocritical entitlement that some media reports had led me to expect, what I found was a bunch of young people in the act of building—in miniature—the kind of society that they seek. That's nothing to scoff at.

Not that there weren't eye-rolling moments. One speaker exhorted protesters to use the readily available public toilets. "Please do not pee on your neighbors," he pleaded—apparently because that had already happened. A young woman took the mic and introduced her boyfriend, a young man who is on a hunger strike "until he gets some answers from Wall Street, or until medical professionals tell him to quit" the hunger strike.

Despite the crankiness at Wall Street—well-represented in the signs I photographed for the video above—I didn't see a ton of radicalism. Again, yes, the Marxists and the Socialists. But the angriest-sounding speaker inveighed heavily against corporate CEOs and their multimillion-dollar compensation packages—but added he didn't want to take those away: He just wants to ensure that everybody else can get by, too. Not exactly "when the revolution comes, you'll be first against the wall" stuff.

I do not know what Occupy Wall Street and all the related protests will become. Maybe they'll peter out. Maybe the fringe radicals will come to dominate. But that isn't what is happening right now. Right now, regular folks—young, smart, educated folks to be sure, but not weirdoes—are frustrated because they don't see a way to claim their piece of the American dream. And yeah: That should make the Top 1 percent very nervous.

Tent City at Occupy Philly