And no, I don’t mean Teh Ceiling Cat. Sober up. (Slaps readers upside head.) Concentrate! Noam Speaks:

Power resides in the hands of those that Madison called “the wealth of the nation.” The primary responsibility of government is “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority,” Madison declared. That has been the guiding principle of the democratic system from its origins until today.

Read it again. Prescient old fart, however inadvertently: (Madison, not The Noam!) the Opulent Minority is going to need protection one day. Man them barricades, you lazy-ass—Oh. Well, whenever and wherever the barricades go up, see you there.

To watch the whole (short) lecture, go here. | digg story

And the downside of this would be?

Thanks to Terry Frazier’s good eye, for the list on Security from which the following wondrous facts were drawn:

More people are killed every year by pigs than by sharks, which shows you how good we are at evaluating risk.

(Now reread the post title. Think “Jaws.” I crack myself up.) Read the rest of this entry »

“I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center,” Condoleezza Rice, President Bush’s national security adviser, said in May 2002.

1. … in its investigation, the commission found that an attack described as unimaginable had in fact been imagined, repeatedly. The commission said that several threat reports circulated within the government in the late 1990′s raised the explicit possibility of an attack using airliners as missiles.

2. … in September 1998, based on information provided by a source who walked into an American consulate in East Asia, that “mentioned a possible plot to fly an explosives-laden aircraft into a U.S. city.” In August of the same year, it said, an intelligence agency received information that “a group of Libyans hoped to crash a plane into the World Trade Center.”

3. The North American Aerospace Defense Command had gone so far as to develop exercises to counter the threat and, according to a Defense Department memorandum unearthed by the commission, planned a drill in April 2001 that would have simulated a terrorist crash into the Pentagon.

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McCain had been rumored for months to be on Democrat John Kerry’s list of potential vice-presidential running mates, an overture he has rebuffed on numerous occasions. While McCain has defended Kerry against Republican attacks on his patriotism, he left no doubt yesterday about his support for Bush. “He has led this country with moral clarity about the stakes involved,”McCain told the crowd. “He has not wavered in his determination to protect this country and to make the world a better, safer, freer place. You will not yield, nor will he.”

link: Seattle Times

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