brainrow

Tom Tomorrow brings back a comic strip from 2001, to remind us how Americans fight fundamentalist terrorists.

More retro-funnies here and here.

Daily Kos looks behind the scenes at Osama bin Laden’s final moment:

Ah, yes, my [Terrorist Mastermind Daily Brief]! I don’t even know why I bother reading them anymore. They always say the same thing: ‘Trail is cold. Trail is cold. Trail is cold.’ Look, it’s been ten years…I got away with it. I tell you, this is going to be the last TMDB I ever read. I simply do not need them anymore.

Warning: some may be offended by the language.

The Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen on Republican attempts to claim credit for getting bin Laden:

In March 2002, just six months after 9/11, Bush said of bin Laden, “I truly am not that concerned about him…. You know, I just don’t spend that much time on him, to be honest with you.”

In July 2006, we learned that the Bush administration closed its unit that had been hunting bin Laden.

In September 2006, Bush told Fred Barnes, one of his most sycophantic media allies, that an “emphasis on bin Laden doesn’t fit with the administration’s strategy for combating terrorism.”

And don’t even get me started on Bush’s failed strategy that allowed bin Laden to escape from Tora Bora.

I’m happy to extend plenty of credit to all kinds of officials throughout the government, but crediting Bush’s “vigilance” on bin Laden is deeply silly.

Let’s be fair: some things are fundamentally difficult.

I didn’t consider it a black mark against the Bush Administration that they didn’t “connect the dots” before the 9/11 attacks. I didn’t consider it a black mark against the Bush Administration that bin Laden escaped from Tora Bora — even if a case could be made that Defense Department errors made that possible.

Hindsight is easy. Getting the answers right when you can’t even be certain what the questions are — that’s hard.

Getting Osama bin Laden required enormous competence, a lot of hard work, and patience.

But, from The Lost Year in Iraq:

Bremer, who arrived with sweeping plans to remake the country, had a young and inexperienced team, but his staff had passed a political litmus test in Washington. “It’s a children’s crusade … of former Republican campaign workers, White House interns [and] Heritage Foundation people,” says Thomas Ricks of The Washington Post.

Col. T.X. Hammes, a counterinsurgency expert and adviser to Iraq’s Interior Ministry, felt Bremer’s staff could have been better trained. “We had so many of these very, very young people that are dedicated Americans, brave enough to take a chance and go into Iraq to try to do something right for their country,” he tells FRONTLINE. “But [they] didn’t get any training; they have no background. … And yet we put them in charge of planning at [the] national level.”

It seems to me that the Bush Administration didn’t value competence, didn’t respect hard work, and didn’t have patience.

That is the black mark against them.

Today is Pete Seeger’s 92nd birthday.

Happy birthday, Pete.

Via Daring Fireball: The Newseum has hundreds of front pages from Monday’s newspapers.

Hmm… I wonder whether the death of Osama bin Laden will have any influence on Muammar Qaddafi’s willingness to negotiate his exit from Libya?

On Friday, President Obama ordered action against Osama bin Laden.

On Saturday, he spoke at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The video seems a little different, knowing what we know now — especially when he says, “What a week!” or “These are the kinds of decisions that would keep me up at night.”

Donald Trump, who seemed so important last week, looks about as significant as a damp, soiled dishrag.

Here’s a challenge: how do you make a thoughtful person talking for ten minutes interesting? Here’s one approach.

Rachel Maddow on Republican overreach — Financial Martial Law:

Sometimes, to steal what poor people have, you first have to steal their rights as citizens.

Last week, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of manned spaceflight, astronaut Cady Coleman played a flute duet with Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull.

If you have a high-speed internet connection, try viewing in full-screen mode.

Too brief, but very nice.

This looks interesting:

Update: NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is this 2003 photo of the earth from the International Space Station, looking much like it might have looked to Yuri Gagarin:

Commenting on the first view from space he reported, “The sky is very dark; the Earth is bluish. Everything is seen very clearly”. His view could have resembled this image taken in 2003 from the International Space Station.

Fifty years ago today, the headline on the front page of the New York Times read, “Soviet Orbits Man and Recovers Him; Space Pioneer Reports: ‘I Feel Well’; Sent Messages While Circling Earth.”

It was the first time any human being had gone into space.

The human being was Yuri Gagarin, a Russian pilot in the Soviet Air Force. He orbited the planet once, in the process flying higher and faster than any human being before him.

At the time, his nationality seemed to be the most important fact about his achievement. The Soviet Union and the United States were engaged in a desperate space race — almost exclusively for propaganda bragging rights. President Kennedy’s famous challenge to land a man on the Moon by the end of the 1960s was an attempt to set the finish line sufficiently distant so that the United States, starting from behind, might still have a chance to win.

The space race ended in July 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon. The United States won.

That rivalry seems unimportant now, with Americans and Russians and other nations working together on the International Space Station (ISS). Late last year, the ISS marked ten years of continuous human presence in space.

Yet, without that rivalry, I doubt that humans would have gone to the Moon yet. And that would be a shame.

More important than the technical advances called forth by the drive to get to the Moon, more important than the scientific knowledge beamed back by scientific instruments and brought back in boxes of Moon rocks, was this: astronauts could look up and see the whole Earth.

During the Apollo 8 mission, astronaut Jim Lovell realized he could cover the entire planet with his thumb. Everyone any of us has ever heard of — all of history, science, the arts, philosophy; all the nations, all the causes, all the beliefs and faiths; all the great achievements, all the great crimes — all of it on that little blue sphere suspended in the blackness of space.

I think that has something to do with why Americans and Russians work side-by-side with people of other nations on the ISS.

We couldn’t see our rivalry in proper perspective until the rivalry lifted us high enough to truly see ourselves.

Russians certainly have reason to be proud of Yuri Gagarin. Fifty years later, as a fellow human being, I’m proud of him, too.

A few weeks ago, Cartoonist Ruben Bolling looked at one kind of government shutdown.

Those unintended consequences can be surprising, sometimes.

From NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day site, here’s an amazing photo of the tallest known cliff in the Solar System, Verona Rupes, on Uranus’ bizarre moon Miranda. The cliff is estimated to be 20 kilometers deep — almost 12 and a half miles, and ten times the depth of the Grand Canyon.

The photo was taken way back in 1986. Why was it featured on the NASA site now? I’m guessing that NASA believes this will increase Congressional interest in funding deep space missions. To politicians who seem determined to run the country off a cliff, this has gotta be irresistable.

From a reader question on a blog at the Washington Post:

In one respect, [Sarah Palin] is like Tinkerbell–if you don’t applaud she fades away.

Wish I’d said that.

Expect the same for Donald Trump.

I said that.