Conservative Call To Torture Abdulmutallab
Just yesterday (although today I can't recall the source), a blog asked "how long will it take until conservatives call for Abdulmuttalab to be tortured?" Today, we have the answer: about 36 hours. Headlining over at Hot Air:
Who’s for waterboarding Abdulmuttalab – before it’s too late? – UPDATE: Poll added
[Michael] Goldfarb and his correspondent suggest that 65% or so of Americans would vote for waterboarding.
I’ll add that I believe, if a campaign of attacks actually occurs, that percentage would quickly hit the 80% level or higher, even and especially if you worded the question to include techniques to the “right” of waterboarding.
That 65% number is literally pulled from a random e-mail. Michael Goldfarb himself comments:
A friend emails a question Scott Rasmussen might want to poll.
So, let's check the actual poll results for some verification of these claims (WaPo/ABC, January 2009, emphasis in original):
By a wide margin -- 58-40% -- Americans say that torture should never be used, no matter the circumstances. Let's repeat that: "no matter the circumstance." That margin is enormous among Democrats (71-28%) and substantial among independents (56-43%). As usual these days, Republicans hold the minority view, but even among them there is substantial categorical opposition to torture (42-55%).
And from the most right-leaning poll (Pew, April 2009, emphasis mine):
The survey by the Pew Research Center found that 15 percent of respondents said torture can often be justified while 34 percent say it is sometimes justified, for a total of 49 percent. Another 22 percent said torture is rarely justifiable and 25 percent said it should never be used.
Which leads me to a recurring question: is research really too much to ask of conservatives?
Nate Silver’s Calculus of Terror
The whole article is quoted below, because it's too good to edit. For that reason, standard indentation will be eschewed.
Not going to do any editorializing here; just going to do some non-fancy math. James Joyner asks:
There have been precisely three attempts over the last eight years to commit acts of terrorism aboard commercial aircraft. All of them clownishly inept and easily thwarted by the passengers. How many tens of thousands of flights have been incident free?
Let's expand Joyner's scope out to the past decade. Over the past decade, there have been, by my count, six attempted terrorist incidents on board a commercial airliner than landed in or departed from the United States: the four planes that were hijacked on 9/11, the shoe bomber incident in December 2001, and the NWA flight 253 incident on Christmas.
The Bureau of Transportation Statistics provides a wealth of statistical information on air traffic. For this exercise, I will look at both domestic flights within the US, and international flights whose origin or destination was within the United States. I will not look at flights that transported cargo and crew only. I will look at flights spanning the decade from October 1999 through September 2009 inclusive (the BTS does not yet have data available for the past couple of months).
Over the past decade, according to BTS, there have been 99,320,309 commercial airline departures that either originated or landed within the United States. Dividing by six, we get one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 departures.
These departures flew a collective 69,415,786,000 miles. That means there has been one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 mles flown. This distance is equivalent to 1,459,664 trips around the diameter of the Earth, 24,218 round trips to the Moon, or two round trips to Neptune.
Assuming an average airborne speed of 425 miles per hour, these airplanes were aloft for a total of 163,331,261 hours. Therefore, there has been one terrorist incident per 27,221,877 hours airborne. This can also be expressed as one incident per 1,134,245 days airborne, or one incident per 3,105 years airborne.
There were a total of 674 passengers, not counting crew or the terrorists themselves, on the flights on which these incidents occurred. By contrast, there have been 7,015,630,000 passenger enplanements over the past decade. Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning.
Again, no editorializing (for now). These are just the numbers.
Now, Back to Your Regularly Scheduled Fearmongering
Hot Air responds to the Christmas bombing attempt by spreading some good old-fashioned Christmas fear with this video of an explosive so powerful a single drop can destroy an entire watermelon. Hours later, our friend Ed Morrissey is informed by one of his own readers that the movie is both old and fake, and refutes the video's claim with some quality science-sleuthing:
Another example, of 4g PETN this time (remember, this is 80 times the amount claimed in the hot air video).
After being confronted with the evidence, Morrissey doubles down, apologizing for feeding his readers crap while simultaneously defending his decision to do so:
[T]here’s still a smidgen of credibility in the fact that we don’t know which chemicals are being used here. (I wouldn’t have posted it if we did, obviously; it’s a classic Mythbusters blur-and-blur mix!) Some commenters at Breitbart’s site also claimed that the video was fake, though, as well as very old. So apologies, in that case, for raising the alarm with bad info.
In any case, events like this Christmas attempt actually make me feel safer -- if faulty exploding underwear is the best thing Al-Qaeda can throw at us after years of careful plotting, are the skies really as dangerous as alarmists like Michelle Malkin, Ed Morrissey, and other want us to believe?
Why Democrats Have Won
Also from Politico's health-care wrapup:
But congressional Democrats always remained remarkably united on the need to finish the job. In the last month, as Senate Republicans threw up procedural hurdles and portrayed the bill as a dangerous experiment, Democrats emerged as a more cohesive unit than when the process began.
“Ultimately, every Democrat from the most liberal to the most conservative realized we had to get a bill, whether they wanted to do health care at the beginning or not,” said Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y) after Nelson, the last holdout, committed his vote last weekend. “Everybody realized there was just no option, and nobody wanted to be the last person to bring it down.”
This is truly the definition of political success w/r/t the situation in the Senate. Democrats - even Joe Lieberman - were forced to create a powerful voting bloc that they aren't always able to create when Republicans are involved in the process. Because they needed unanimity to pass anything, they found a way to achieve it.
Despite left-wing criticisms such as WWLBJD, progressive Democrats compromised as little as possible when forging the necessary coalition. The key division in the party - economic liberals v. economic centrists - was bridged largely without sacrificing the social progressivism (save for the heated abortion question) that truly characterizes the Democrats.
In that compromise, Democrats found a winning strategy, and it is one that will persist for years to come.