This is just ridiculous

Thanks mom Secretary Clinton, but I think I’ll take my chances and still travel to Europe. It’s hard to know how to respond to such nonsense. I appreciate that the government wants to warn us against the risks we encounter in a dangerous world, but how am I to react when the chance that I will die in a terrorist attack is far lower than the chance I will die by riding in a vehicle or being near a police officer? I guess the administration wants to cover itself in case an attack does happen. While there is nothing wrong with this per se, it clearly demonstrates that the politics of fear has made us a completely irrational polity.

The Shadow War

The Obama administration apparently is conducting a covert war on al Qaeda:

In roughly a dozen countries – from the deserts of North Africa, to the mountains of Pakistan, to former Soviet republics crippled by ethnic and religious strife – the United States has significantly increased military and intelligence operations, pursuing the enemy [al Qaeda] using robotic drones and commando teams, paying contractors to spy and training local operatives to chase terrorists.

Perhaps I’m jaded, but nothing in this article surprised me.

Israeli leader endorses terrorism

Tzipi Livni, Head of the Opposition Kadima Party in Israel and former Foreign Minister:

Both of [my parents] were in the Irgun. They were freedom fighters…they robbed a train to get the money in order to buy weapons.

Perhaps I am reading this wrong, but it sure sounds like an endorsement of terrorism to me (even the Government of Israel said the Irgun was a terrorist organization – it did, you know, blow up stuff and kill people). Maybe her parents were the good kind of terrorist, while today we only have the bad type.

New kids on the Kush

One problem with the war in Afghanistan is that its getting increasingly difficult to determine who is on what side.

Sympathy for the decider

J. Scott Carpenter and Dina Guirguis take the Obama administration to task for not fulfilling most of the promises Obama made in his Cairo speech one year ago, specifically on democracy, economic development, women’s rights, religious freedom, and countering terrorism. While they are correct in the narrow sense that the administration has not made much progress on these issues, I think its perhaps an unfair criticism. The administration is dealing from a host of difficult problems, from Afghanistan to the economic crisis to the largest oil spill in the history of the US. The administration has largely been in reactive mode since it took office, not by choice, but because of a non-stop series of crises. The administration appears to have more fires than fire trucks. Its not as if Obama is sitting around the White House playing solitaire on his computer. I can understand why the administration has made little progress in advancing a lot of its goals and find it difficult to fault them in many of these areas.

Michael Allen at Democracy Digest is less sympathetic.