9/11

Regulation of the Day 139: Mailing Fake Grenades

by Ryan Young on June 3, 2010

in Personal Liberty, Regulation, Regulation of the Day

According to a new United States Postal Service regulation, all fake grenades and other “replica or inert explosive devices,” must be sent via Registered Mail.

You must also write ‘‘REPLICA EXPLOSIVE’’ on the package “using at least 20 point type or letters at least 1?4-inch high.”

Unlike most Regulations of the Day, this makes some sense. Many a post office has shut down because of false bomb scares. An uncle sending his nephew a birthday present could theoretically grind a major city’s mail service to a halt.

That isn’t the uncle’s fault; it’s the hyper-sensitive post-9/11 security mindset’s fault. Sadly, that mindset won’t be going away any time soon. This rule will hopefully prevent some false positives . Labeling the package lets postal workers know that they need not freak out. The Registered Mail requirement allows postal workers to verify that the grenades are, indeed, harmless.

Of course, the new rule treats the symptom, not the disease. It should hopefully reduce the amount of unnecessary bomb scares. But the real problem is the ingrained human habit of over-reacting to terrorism.

Terrorist attacks are extraordinarily rare, and need to be treated that way. Until common sense awakens from its post-9/11 slumber, this regulation may actually do some good.

Or the terrorists could start shipping grenades via UPS.

Fort Hood’s Lessons: Treat People Equally, Without Politically Correct Double Standards

by Hans Bader on November 9, 2009

in Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

Intelligence officials knew that Nidal Hasan, the soldier who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, was trying to contract Al Qaeda.  (He once attended the same mosque as 9/11 terrorists.)

Although the killer’s extremist rantings were common knowledge, “a fear of appearing discriminatory . . . kept officers from filing a formal written complaint,” reports the Associated Press.  As a result, he escaped any disciplinary action or review of his fitness.

The Fort Hood shooter had previously said that Muslims should rise up against the military, “repeatedly expressed sympathy for suicide bombers,” was pleased by the terrorist murder of an army recruiter, and publicly called for the beheading or burning of non-Muslims, talking “about how if you’re a nonbeliever the Koran says you should have your head cut off, you should have oil poured down your throat, you should be set on fire.”  But thanks to a politically-correct double standard, nothing was done to remove him from a position where he could harm others.

The lesson of the Fort Hood shootings is that applying politically-correct double standards, rather than treating people equally, can be lethal.

In a desire to curry favor with the liberal Congress that funds it, the military has increasingly adopted politically-correct policies that abandon equal treatment, such as imposing racial preferences in admissions to the military academies in the name of “diversity.”  (In practice, “diversity” seems to mean “racial proportionality:” it is harder for Asians to be admitted to the academies than for whites and Hispanics, and harder for whites and Hispanics to be admitted than for African-Americans.  Such preferences are of dubious legality under Supreme Court precedent.)

In this climate of political correctness and double standards, it is understandable that officers were afraid to file complaints about Hasan, for fear that they would incur the wrath of the “diversity” police.  Even now, the Army Chief of Staff, General George Casey, seems mainly concerned that the shootings will undermine the army’s commitment to “diversity,” rather than being concerned about the double standard that spawned this tragedy.  He seems more concerned that “diversity” will become a “casualty” of such shootings than that his soldiers will.

President Obama’s initial response to the tragedy was embarrassing, even for some liberal journalists.  Obama’s initial remarks about the tragedy came buried in the middle of a speech laced with “wildly disconnected” ramblings about an unrelated topic, starting with a “joking shout-out.”  Even the liberal Boston Globe chided the president for a speech lacking in ”empathy” for the victims.

In an absurd display of political correctness, early media reports chose to harp on the false claim that the killer had PTSD (which he didn’t: he never even served overseas) or the unsupported claim that he had been subjected to harassment (support groups for Muslim soldiers say they have received no recent reports of a Muslim soldier being harassed “simply because he was Muslim”).  They also jumped to conclusions in denying (as Atlantic Magazine’s Max Fisher did) that the shooter’s motives had anything to do with his extreme religious beliefs or “any related political causes.”

In the aftermath of the shootings, some commentators have criticized a gun-control policy that disarms soldiers while on military bases to create “gun-free zones,” leaving them defenseless in the face of an attack.  The policy succeeded in disarming the killer’s victims, but not the killer himself.

Obama Administration Undermines Airline Security and Railroad Safety: 9/11 Lessons Ignored

by Hans Bader on September 13, 2009 · 3 comments

in Labor, Mobility, Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk, Regulation

In the aftermath of 9/11, Congress foolishly shifted airline security screening to the inept Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which has failed to detect explosive ingredients and fake bombs, in performance tests.

Now the Obama Administration is making matters even worse by undermining both airline security and railroad safety. A study found that the TSA is more than twice as likely to fail to detect a bomb as the private security firms it replaced. And TSA’s failure rate is three or four times as high as the few remaining private firms still allowed to handle airline security.

In tests, TSA failed to detect fake bombs 60 percent of the time at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, and 75 percent of the time in Los Angeles. Yet the Obama administration plans to make TSA even more bureaucratic by introducing collective bargaining, which will make it even harder to get rid of ineffective employees.

Rather than take over airline security screening, the federal government should have stepped up testing of the private companies that performed it, to weed out bad companies. President Bush initially objected to Congressional demands for a federal takeover, but knuckled under for political reasons.  Ironically, even in European countries run by Socialist parties, airline security and screening is generally in the hands of private companies, which are are usually more diligent, innovative, and efficient, as well as less bureaucratic.

The Obama administration is also undermining the security of railroad passengers by gutting an expert, highly-rated, anti-terror agency at Amtrak, which Amtrak’s unions hate, because it is not unionized.  Political cronyism also appears to be playing a role in the gutting of Amtrak’s Office of Security Strategy and Special Operations (OSSSO). Ultimately, OSSSO’s “highly-specialized officers” will likely be replaced by unionized employees with ”alarmingly low pass rates” in “basic” classes.

Racist, Communist, America-Bashing Obama Adviser Resigns, Over Wacky 9/11 Conspiracy Theory

by Hans Bader on September 7, 2009 · 1 comment

in Energy, Environment, International, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

Obama’s racist, communist, America-bashing Green Jobs Czar, Van Jones, has resigned after revelations that he was a 9/11 “Truther,” who believed that George Bush may have been behind the terrorist attacks on 9/11.

But Obama has long been aware of Jones’ extremism, wacky statements, and arrest record, which would have come to light months ago during the White House vetting process, as former White House staffer Jeffrey Lord and National Review‘s Andrew McCarthy note. The Secret Service would have investigated Jones’ past and Marxist views and informed Obama about them.

As the Washington Examiner‘s Byron York noted, most of the media systematically ignored revelations about Jones’ disturbing past and extremist views, seeking to prevent damage to the Obama Administration. Despite weeks of controversy over Jones’ extreme views on talk radio, blogs, and Fox News, newspapers like the New York Times, and TV networks like ABC and NBC, refused to cover the controversy until after Jones resigned, while the Washington Post and CBS covered the story only when his resignation was imminent.

Slate journalist Mickey Kaus, who voted for Obama but has been critical of the Administration, ridicules newspapers like the New York Times for deliberately concealing the Van Jones controversy in order to protect the Obama Administration. “‘Readers of the print edition will never have heard of the presidential appointee so controversial the President had to dump him. Is this a milestone in the decline of the NYT?’ . . .It seems this may be just another installment of the NYT’s running feature, ‘You Know That Guy You’ve Never Heard About? Well, He’s Gone.’”

Jones is a race-baiter, “self-avowed communist” and Truther who believed that George Bush may have been behind the 9/11 attacks.

Why even a Democratic White House would hire Jones is beyond understanding. In 1998, Jones defended Al Qaeda and bashed Bill Clinton. Why would Obama even think of hiring someone who said a few years ago that he was part of a “global struggle against the U.S.”?

Jones has also glorified convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, in a campaign that likened supporters of the murdered police officer to the KKK.

Jones, who set up a group that is orchestrating advertiser boycotts of Obama’s media critics, was until recently a “member of a radical communist group that was dedicated to ‘organizing a revolutionary movement in America.’”

Jones also claimed that mass murder is a white characteristic, saying that the Columbine killers would not have committed their crimes had they not been white. “‘You’ve never seen a Columbine done by a black child,’ Jones, who’s African-American, said in the 2005 video. ‘Never. They always say, “We can’t believe it happened here. We can’t believe these suburban white kids.” It’s only them.’”

Many officials in the Obama Administration are sympathetic to Marxist regimes. For example, Obama’s appointee to be the FCC’s “diversity officer” is Mark Lloyd, a big fan of Venezuela’s socialist dictator, Hugo Chavez. Although Chavez has shot unarmed demonstrators, Lloyd has called socialist Venezuela a model, praised its authoritarian leader’s “incredible revolution” and defended his attacks on independent media.

Obama’s nominee to be Assistant Secretary of State, Arturo Valenzuela, has a reputation as a loud defender of Venezuelan dictator Chavez’s terrible record on freedom of the press. Valenzuela is a big supporter of imposing sanctions on Honduras, which ousted its left-wing would-be dictator. Americans for Limited Government says that “Arturo Valenzuela has never met a Marxist dictator that he didn’t embrace.” ALG’s assessment of Valenzuela is echoed by liberal Latin America expert Martin Edwin Andersen.

The Obama Administration is extremely hostile to non-communist Honduras and its democratically-elected legislature, demanding that they allow the return to power of Honduras’s bullying ex-president and would-be dictator. The ex-president’s removal was perfectly constitutional, say many experts, such as attorneys Octavio Sanchez, Miguel Estrada, and Dan Miller, former Assistant Secretary of State Kim Holmes, Stanford’s William Ratliff, and “even left-liberal analysts.”

The Obama Administration cites the UN’s support for the bullying ex-president to justify demanding that Honduras allow him to return. But the UN is openly biased in favor of left-wing dictators.

The UN has just declared Fidel Castro, the longtime Communist dictator of Cuba, the “World Hero of Solidarity.” Castro killed thousands and thousands of people during his rule, torturing some to death (including a few American citizens), and Cuba remains an oppressive dictatorship even today.

So it’s not surprising that the UN backs Honduras’s bullying ex-president Manuel Zelaya, given his fondness for left-wing rhetoric. (Two months ago, soldiers acting on orders of Honduras’s Supreme Court arrested Zelaya after he systematically abused his powers. After the Court quite legally declared that Zelaya was no longer president, he was duly replaced by Honduras’s Congress with a civilian, the Congressional Speaker).

The Obama Administration recently decided to impose sanctions on Honduras, and indicated it will not recognize future democratic elections in Honduras unless Honduras first lets ex-president Zelaya return to power.

“Green jobs” is a scam and excuse for vast amounts of corporate welfare, as is the cap-and-trade “global warming” scheme backed by Obama, which would rip off the public and do nothing to protect the environment, while enriching politically-connected companies like General Electric and destroying millions of jobs.

Wacky Obama Adviser Slated for Attorney General?

by Hans Bader on November 12, 2008 · 5 comments

in Economy, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

Earlier, I wrote about Obama’s possible appointment of Charles Ogletree, who believes that America is a racist country that is to blame for 9/11, to be assistant attorney general in charge of the Civil Rights Division.

Some commentators, like the award-winning journalist A. Barton Hinkle, wondered whether I wasn’t overstating Ogletree’s links to Obama (by calling him Obama’s “top adviser” on race), given his out-of-the-mainstream views.

Actually, it seems that I understated Ogletree’s links to Obama and possible role in the Obama Administration. As legal commentator Walter Olson notes, Ogletree is now being described as a possible Attorney General — not just Assistant Attorney General — by CBS News and Newsweek.

Moreover, Newsweek describes Ogletree as Obama’s “top criminal-justice adviser,” not just his adviser on race issues. (Neither CBS nor Newsweek discusses Ogletree’s well-documented controversial positions, such as claiming that Obama’s election was only possible because he is part white, and his long-time advocacy of race-based reparations. Among liberal journalists, unlike the general public, these positions may not seem out-of-the-ordinary. But Ogletree’s left-wing positions have attracted a great deal of criticism on talk radio, from broadcasters like Rush Limbaugh, which might help to explain why liberal lawmakers want to shut down talk radio using the misleadingly-named “Fairness Doctrine“).

[click to continue…]

Controversial Appointments & Cliffhangers

by Hans Bader on November 3, 2008 · 2 comments

in Economy, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual

From the polls, it looks like Obama will be our next president.  So who will he be appointing to high office? 

Deval Patrick, who avidly backed censorship and racial quotas, has been suggested for the Supreme Court.  Ed Whelan looks at his left-wing record of pushing racial quotas, which drew criticism from even from liberal judges and liberal Senators like Carol Moseley Braun, and suggests that other choices would be better. 

Patrick, who has also been suggested as a potential attorney general, has claimed that speech opposing halfway houses for substance abusers (defined as disabled by the Fair Housing Act) is as unprotected as using “baseball bats” to deny them access to housing.

Obama aides have suggested Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for Secretary of Interior.  But legal commentator Walter Olson calls him “America’s most irresponsible public figure” for scaring parents into not getting their children vaccinated for diseases, and labeling those who disagree with him as traitors.  Even the liberal publication Slate describes Kennedy as “too partisan and kind of a nut.”

The ABA Journal predicts that Charles Ogletree will be in charge of civil rights at the Justice Department, despite his controversial remarks blaming America for 9/11 and calling America a racist country.

Let’s hope better-qualified people actually end up getting these jobs.

(McCain has his own truly stupid advisers, like Martin Feldstein, whose proposal to buy up all the bad loans in America has been aptly described as “the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard,” and cost him the support of the editor of the Arlington Sun-Gazette, one of the few moderate or conservative papers in the Washington, D.C. area.  But McCain’s advisers now appear to be moot).

In contrast to the presidential race, many Congressional races will apparently be cliffhangers this year, as previously “safe” Republican seats have become fiercely competitive.  The Democratic majority in the Congress will expand, perhaps including a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. 

From the latest polls, many Congressional races look like they are neck-and-neck and will be decided by a tiny margin.

Top Obama Adviser Blames America for 9/11, Says America Is Racist

by Hans Bader on November 1, 2008 · 20 comments

in Legal, Sanctimony

Top Obama adviser Charles Ogletree says that America is to blame for 9/11 and that Americans are stupid.  He also says that America is a racist country, and that Americans will only vote for Obama because he is half-white.

Ogletree, a Harvard law professor, will likely be the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Civil Rights Division during the upcoming Obama Administration.  He has attracted controversy in the past for plagiarism and his association with Al Sharpton.  (The Washington Examiner declared him a “dim bulb”).  He is a leading proponent of race-based reparations.