Monthly Archives: May 2010

When Will Liberals Figure Out What’s in Roe v. Wade?

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Liberals have been shooting themselves in the foot over the abortion issue for years, in part because they remain woefully ignorant of what Roe v. Wade actually established. And now they’re doing it again.

In 1997 Elana Kagan, then a White House adviser, wrote a memo to President Clinton supporting a bill introduced by Sen. Tom Daschle that would have banned all abortions of viable fetuses except when the physical health of the mother was at risk. The memo has come to light, and some lefties are going ballistic about it.

But the truth is that by 1997 elective post-viability abortions already were illegal in most states, and this was not in violation of Roe v. Wade as long as an exception was made for the life and health of the mother.

This gesture on Kagan’s part was not made in a vacuum. In 1997 the Republican Congress was working overtime to pass a bill that banned the intact D&E procedure, or what the Fetus People misnamed “partial-birth abortion.” In their propaganda the FPs were conflating the D&E with “late term” abortions, even though it was mostly a second-trimester procedure.

Some Dems and a few pro-choice Republicans were talking about a simple ban on all elective post-viability abortions, regardless of the procedure used, as a kind of controlled burn to reduce the chance that a federal “partial-birth” law might pass in the future. You know, the way one was passed in 2003 and upheld by the Supreme Court in 2007.

Duh.

I am sad to say that many of my fellow liberals are too stupid to understand that being in favor of such a ban in 1997 — or now, for that matter — doesn’t mean one is anti-choice. It means one is thinking strategically. I agree with Jeff Fecke — “when we look at what Kagan actually said in her memo to Clinton, we see someone who was proposing something less than a ban on late-term abortion. Indeed, we see someone who was trying to preserve as many rights for women as possible.”

I thought the ban was a good idea at the time, for the simple reason that it would have deflated many of the FP’s misleading talking points and left intact D&E alone. In fact, I’ve thought since the 1970s that NARAL and NOW and other organizations were idiots for not pushing for a federal law that restated and reinforced what the Roe v. Wade decision established.

Instead, many pro-reproduction rights advocates took the remarkable position that they supported Roe, and supported state laws that followed the Roe guidelines, but a federal law that supported the Roe guidelines was unthinkable. And I don’t think this was because they were closet libertarians.

Yes, Roe established that states may not ban all abortions. However, Roe allows the states to ban some abortions. Specifically, states may ban elective abortions after 23 weeks’ gestation, or the point at which the fetus might be viable. A full-term pregnancy lasts for 38 weeks.

So, since 1973 states have been able to enact bans on abortions in the last 14 weeks of pregnancy, as long as exceptions are made for the life and health of the mother. According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, 38 states have such a ban in place.

And I understand that physicians won’t perform a third trimester abortion unless there is a medical reason to do so even where it is not specifically illegal. Because terminating a pregnancy becomes much more medically complicated later in the pregnancy, as a practical matter women who are terminating for non-medical reasons should terminate as early as possible. And, in fact, 88 percent of abortions in the U.S. are performed in the first 12 weeks of gestation. Only 8% of all abortion providers in the U.S. offer abortions at 24 weeks.

I understand the one thing the Daschle ban would have changed is to place more restrictions on post-viability abortions done for mental health reasons as opposed to physical health reasons. I explained a couple of years ago that this was not necessarily a problem, as long as the legislation made clear that a pregnancy could be terminated if the fetus was severely compromised and would not long survive after birth.

And I’m going to keep explaining this as long as there’s anyone out there who is confused. Which is pretty much everybody.

Again With the Jerking Knees

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There may be many legitimate reasons for progressives to feel skeptical about Elena Kagan as a Supreme Court justice. But it boggles the mind that anyone bright enough to finish college thinks that lack of prior judicial experience is one of those reasons.

I found lists of the most and least conservative (i.e., “liberal”) Supreme Court justices since 1937, according to some law prof. Here are the liberals, most liberal first.

  • Marshall
  • Douglas
  • Murphy
  • Rutledge
  • Goldberg
  • Brennan
  • Black
  • Warren
  • Ginsburg
  • Cardozo

Of these, three had no prior judicial experience — Douglas, Warren and Goldberg (see complete list). And of those, Warren’s record prior to his nomination would have sent today’s liberals — me included — to the barricades to fight his confirmation.

And the fact is that several justices have proved to be far more liberal after being seated on the court than their record suggested they would be (Earl Warren being a prime example). I’m not saying that Kagan will prove to be more liberal than expected. But if liberals are going to oppose her nomination, they need to come up with a better reason than her lack of judicial experience. (Conservatives, of course, don’t need a reason …)

Elena Kagan to Replace John Paul Stevens

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It appears to be official that Elena Kagan is the choice to replace John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court. Progressives are pretty uniformly underwhelmed. The consensus is that she’s an unknown quantity. Scott Lemieux writes that Kagan has “no judicial experience, very limited political experience, and no record of influential scholarship.” Glenn Greenwald writes, “Nothing is a better fit for this White House than a blank slate, institution-loyal, seemingly principle-free careerist who spent the last 15 months as the Obama administration’s lawyer vigorously defending every one of his assertions of extremely broad executive authority.”

On the other hand, James Doty writes that Kagan has spent her career working with or for liberals (clerking for Thurgood Marshall, for example, whom Kagan has called her “legal hero.”). Doty presents an argument that Kagan reliably will vote with the Court’s liberals on most issues.

While I share the opinion that President Obama could have seized the opportunity to appoint someone with a clearly liberal record, I’m withholding judgment on Kagan. The fact is, today’s liberals would have fought tooth and nail to keep John Paul Stevens off the Court, because his record as a judge in the federal court of appeals was moderately conservative.

And let us not forget that Earl Warren, who arguably pushed the court into being as liberal as it ever was, had been one of the primary movers behind the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II.

So, having read some background on Kagan, I can’t say I have a strong opinion one way or another. There’s no way to predict how she will vote.

Update: This comes under the heading of “Why African Americans vote for Democrats.” The Hill reports that the RNC is using a 1987 speech by Thurgood Marshall to slam Kagan. As explained above, Kagan was once Marshall’s clerk and also has praised him as her “legal hero.”

In the speech, Marshall — referring primarily to the infamous “three-fifths” clause — said the Constitution as originally conceived and drafted was “defective.” So now the RNC is circulating talking points that taunt Kagan — “Does Kagan Still View Constitution ‘As Originally Drafted And Conceived’ As ‘Defective’?”

I infer from this that today’s Republican Party wants to restore the three-fifths clause, since they don’t think the clause was defective. It ain’t the Party of Lincoln any more, is it?

Why Are Righties So Obsessed With Labels?

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Neocons (and, yeah, that was a label) Stephen Hayes and Thomas Joscelyn write at the end of a long article,

There has been very little talk about the global war that the Obama administration sometimes acknowledges we are fighting and virtually nothing about what motivates our enemy: radical Islam.

This is no accident. Janet Napolitano never used the word “terrorism” in her first appearance before Congress as secretary-designate of Homeland Security on January 15, 2009. Shortly thereafter, the Washington Post reported that the Obama administration had dropped the phrase “Global War on Terror” in favor of “Overseas Contingency Operations.” And just last month, we learned that the White House’s forthcoming National Security Strategy would not use religious words such as “jihad” and “Islamic extremism.”

When asked why she did not utter the word “terrorism” in the course of her testimony, Napolitano explained that she used “man-caused disaster” instead to avoid “the politics of fear.”

The Department of Homeland Security was created after the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history to prevent further terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. And the head of that department is worried that using the word “terrorism” is playing the politics of fear.

As many people have pointed out, the label “war on terror” is, um, stupid. It’s not “terror” we’re supposed to be “fighting,” but a movement that foments terrorism. Further, affixing the label “war on terror” on something limited to “radical Islam” is a distortion of reality, since radical jihadists are not the only terrorists potentially active in the U.S.

Even more further, as I wrote a few days ago, there are pragmatic reasons why it’s useful to keep the rhetoric toned down. The only real effect of wantonly tossing around the words “terror” and “terrorist” is to make people more terrorized. Making people feel more terrorized is hardly an effective way to counter terrorism.

Most furthest, slapping the label “terrorism” on something doesn’t change what it is. If we hear news stories saying some Muslim guy tried to blow up a car in Times Square, does it really add anything to our knowledge or understanding of the incident to label it “terrorism”? It was what it was. It might be useful if we were all more discriminating about the use of the word terrorism and confined it to a limited definition, but when you slap it onto every alarming act that happens to have been committed by a Muslim, the word no longer has a useful purpose.

I think the authors do have a point when they say,

But success in the war on terror is not apprehending terrorists after their attacks fail. Success is preventing them from attempting the attack in the first place.

However, the idea that there could ever be 100 percent prevention is sheer fantasy. Real success, the ultimate goal, is reducing the level of extremism in the world so that fewer people will be inspired to attempt acts of terrorism. Even then, there’s no way to prevent lone wolf whackjobs from, say, killing 14 people in a shooting rampage. And let’s not forget those who bomb abortion clinics or blow up a federal building.

How many times has some individual committed some act of mass violence, after which people commented, Wow, I never would have thought he would have done something like that. He was such a quiet guy? The only way you could attempt to prevent all such incidents would be to turn the U.S. into a police state, encouraging people to report to authorities every time their family members and neighbors make an offhand remark about wanting to shoot somebody.

And, of course, that much statist authority would provoke a lot of people into violence.

Hayes and Joscelyn continue,

The Times Square attack was the third time in the past six months that an individual terrorist with ties to high-level Islamic radicals overseas has launched an attack on the American homeland. In each instance, America’s vast, multibillion dollar intelligence and law enforcement establishment failed to detect the terrorists’ plans beforehand. And in each instance Obama administration officials moved quickly to minimize the significance of the attack and downplay the connections that the attackers had with international terrorists.

The degree to which Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, Maj. Malik Nadal Hasan or Faisal Shahzad had “ties to high-level Islamic radicals overseas” is a bit squishy, but this is coming from Stephen Hayes; he and Dick the Dick were among the last holdouts to abandon the much debunked “Atta in Prague” story (if indeed they ever really abandoned it). So you know Hayes really wants there to be “ties to high-level Islamic radicals overseas,” and will see ties whether they are there or not.

Anyway, my understanding is that Abdulmutallab and Hasan were in contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, thought to be a high-level al Qaeda recruiter. But it seems doubtful they were acting under the direction of al Qaeda leadership (and if they were, al Qaeda leadership ain’t what it used to be). They and Shahzad seem more like wannabees than anything else. Even the Right’s one-time hero Gen David Petraeus is saying that Shahzad acted on his own. He was “inspired by militants in Pakistan but didn’t have direct contact with them,” Petraeus said.

The vast, multibillion dollar intelligence and law enforcement establishment is, I hope, tuned to the machinations of real high-level radicals, Islamic or otherwise. The fact that only low-level lone-wolf amateurs have been able to slip through the cracks ought to be reassuring, I would think.

All three men appear to have turned to radical Islam after making a mess of their personal lives or otherwise wandering into some psychological cul-de-sac. One suspect their radicalization was as much a product of psychological pathology as anything else. Their ethnic and religious backgrounds determined how the pathology expressed itself, of course. These three fancied themselves to be warriors for Allah as opposed to, say, freedom fighters striking a blow against big government.

But in Hayes’s world, death and destruction fomented by radical Muslims is more worser than death and destruction fomented by radical [fill in the blank]. This is why the labels are so important to him, I suppose.

Spoiled Brat Corporations Whine Again

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Immediately after the health care bill passed, some major corporations complained that the bill would cost them millions of dollars. AT&T claimed it would suffer a $1 billion loss. A new article in Fortune says these companies are considering dropping their employee benefit health insurance and paying the fine instead. They think it might be cheaper to “pay” than to “play.”

The Fortune writer, Shawn Tully, wrote “The legislation eliminated a company’s right to deduct the federal retiree drug-benefit subsidy from their corporate taxes.” Read that carefully. The corporations were deducting a government subsidy from their corporate taxes as if it were a cost. They’ve lost that “deduction,” which was actually bare-assed corporate welfare.

They’ve been doing this since January 2006, when the Medicare Part D act went into effect. The Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act (MMA) had the government reimbursing employers 28 percent of the cost of retiree drug benefits that met certain requirements. But the same act also allowed employers to deduct 100 percent of the cost of prescription drug benefits, including the 28 percent that was subsidized by taxpayers already.

As Brad DeLong pointed out, this meant that for companies in the 35 percent tax bracket, $63 of every $100 spent on prescription drug benefits was being paid by taxpayers.

The just-passed health care reform bill closed the “double dip” and allows companies to deduct only that part of their prescription drug benefit costs they paid themselves. And now some of these companies are complaining that their business models will just about collapse if they can’t continue to deduct the subsidy, because just deducting the amount they actually spend on drug benefits will break them.

Of course, a gaggle of rightie bloggers jumped on this article as proof that Obamacare will destroy America, screaming about taxes and penalties, when what really happened is a cut in corporate welfare.

Now, it may very well be true that dropping employee health benefits and paying the penalties would be more cost effective for these companies, but it would have been even more cost effective for them to drop employee health benefits before there were any penalties. And they didn’t. And they didn’t because it would be harder for them to hire quality people if they don’t offer benefits. As long as that’s true, they’re going to offer benefits.

The other Big Lie implied in the righties’ screeds is that the health reform law will drive up health care costs more than they would have gone up otherwise. Ain’t so. Last year, the Kaiser Family Foundation estimated that without reform the average cost of an employee benefit family policy could go from $13,375 (the average in 2009) to $30,803 by 2019.

The Evils of Mirandizing

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Apparently, mirandizing doesn’t stop people from talking:

According to all reports, Mr. Shahzad started talking even before he was read his rights (“the law enforcement approach” allows investigators to question suspects immediately if there is an imminent threat to the public). When he was read his rights, Mr. Shahzad seems to have kept talking. The Times reported on Wednesday that he waived his right to a speedy arraignment — to go on talking.

And, you know, we can’t have people talking. We’re supposed to give Congress new constitutional authority to strip Mr. Shahzad of his citizenship and send him to Gitmo without due process of law, where he can be tortured into an incoherent pulp from which no accurate information can be extracted. And we’re supposed to do this in the name of protecting our freedoms.

Naturally, America’s Most Annoying Senator® wants the federal government to have the power to strip an American accused of a crime of his citizenship so that he can be deprived of due process of law. Even more naturally, the same crew forever yammering about the evils of big government and fascism approve of this.

The proposed law would make it illegal for an American citizen to join a foreign army except Israel’s. Violators will lose their citizenship. So, boys, no more running off to join the French Foreign Legion, the Royal Highland Fusiliers, or the Royal Canadian Mounted Police no matter how romantic it sounds.

From the other side of the aisles, someone suggested stopping people on terrorist watch lists from buying guns. As attractive an idea as that might be, it’s still constitutionally iffy. Further, the fact is that firearms are so easy to obtain in this country that making it harder for potential terrorists to purchase guns legally will just send them underground to purchase them illegally. However, I wish that whenever someone on a watch list makes a firearm purchase, all kinds of alarms would go off in national security agencies. Apparently that didn’t happen with Shahzad.

Righties believe that if someone can be denied the right to purchase a firearm by being on a watch list, the Obamaführer will declare all conservatives to be potential terrorists so they can’t purchase arms. I’m serious. However, depriving a citizen of his citizenship on suspicion of a crime is OK.

Anyway, apparently the talkative Mr. Shahzad is telling people he was trained to make bombs by the Pakistan Taliban. If so, either Shahzad is not much of a student, or the Taliban doesn’t know how to make bombs. The Pakistan Taliban, which claimed responsibility for the not-bombing last week, is denying any connection to the incident this week.

When Reality and Expectation Don’t Meet

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This is actually funny. Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute for years has been a big promoter of “school choice,” meaning he thinks parents should get vouchers so that taxpayers can pay for their private school education. He has an op ed in today’s New York Times called “Why Charter Schools Fail the Test” about the effectiveness of the Milwaukee voucher program, which has been in effect since 1990.

A recent comprehensive study found Milwaukee “voucher” kids, many of whom attend charter schools, do no better on standarized tests than kids who stay in the public schools. Reports like this come out from time to time, and righties always explain them away. But for once Murray seems willing to accept defeat —

This is just one of several evaluations of school choice programs that have failed to show major improvements in test scores, but the size and age of the Milwaukee program, combined with the rigor of the study, make these results hard to explain away.

Then comes the next paragraph —

So let’s not try to explain them away. Why not instead finally acknowledge that standardized test scores are a terrible way to decide whether one school is better than another?

And from there, Murray goes on to extol the glories of “school choice,” free of the need to weigh down the sales pitch with tiresome stuff about “facts” and “proof.” Charter schools are better just because they must be better.

If my fellow supporters of charter schools and vouchers can finally be pushed off their obsession with test scores, maybe we can focus on the real reason that school choice is a good idea.

The real reason seems to be that charter schools teach what parents want their kids taught. The “greater good” of tax money supporting an educated public doesn’t enter into it, he admits. “The supporters of school choice need to make their case on the basis of that shared parental calculation, not on the red herring of test scores.”

Test scores don’t mean anything, anyway, he says —

This is true whether the reform in question is vouchers, charter schools, increased school accountability, smaller class sizes, better pay for all teachers, bonuses for good teachers, firing of bad teachers — measured by changes in test scores, each has failed to live up to its hype.

From here he goes to a study done in 1966 that shows all of these factors don’t change test scores. Of course, when someone has to go back more than 40 years to find a study that matches his conclusions, there’s probably a rat around to be smelled. Sure enough, a few seconds of googling turned up a whole bunch of studies done since 1966 that showed a strong correlation between smaller class sizes and higher test scores.

He also argues that the biggest determinant of how well a kid does in school is his home environment, anyway.

What happens in the classroom can have some effect, but smart and motivated children will tend to learn to read and do math even with poor instruction, while not-so-smart or unmotivated children will often have trouble with those subjects despite excellent instruction. If test scores in reading and math are the measure, a good school just doesn’t have that much room to prove it is better than a lesser school.

But if a “good” school cannot prove by any objective measure that it is better than a “lesser” school, what then is the real difference between “good” and “lesser”? Other than the subjective views of the observer, of course?

Murray’s final pitch is that it doesn’t matter whether vouchers increase the quality of education. What matters is that the purpose of tax money for schools is to fulfill the desires of parents, not to benefit society by providing an educated population.

Charles, fail is fail. Deal with it.

Righties on the Side of Terrorism

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Regarding the arrest of a suspect in the Times Square not-bombing, I’m of the same opinion as Steve M — if that’s the best the Jihadi Islamic Menace (JIM) can do, they aren’t that much of a menace. High five, everybody.

Naturally, the fact that JIM in America is too incompetent to build even a simple fertilizer bomb has not stopped the rightie blogosphere from going into mighty orgasms of JIM hysteria. If you aren’t whipped into a state of high terror, buckaroos, you must not love America. Or something.

Further, righties want to honor the alleged perpetrator by sending him to Gitmo to face a secret military-tribunal type trial, instead of a mundane, pedestrian, inglorious civilian criminal trial. I’m with c u n d gulag — “Now, we try him in a court of law. And, if guilty, sentence him to the appropriate prison. Not Gitmo. No martyr. No hero. Just a criminal.”

They’re also screaming that this arrest somehow signals some kind of incompetence on the part of the Obama Administration. Actually, seems to me things have gone pretty smoothly. Bombing attempt on Saturday, no one hurt, New York shrugs it off, arrest made Monday. System functioning.

For lo these many years, when any of us on the Left pointed out that the Bush Administration had all kinds of screaming neon warnings about an imminent terrorist attack in 2001 and took no steps whatsoever to prevent it, we were told we were crazy. But because the FBI didn’t bother to personally keep surveillance on one of millions of Middle Easterners in the U.S., somehow this is incompetence. Right.

(Somebody should ask these geniuses how high they want their taxes cranked up to pay for all this individual surveillance.)

I also appreciated what Roy Edroso wrote at Village Voice (and not just because he linked to me):

You may remember that right after 9/11 it became trendy for conservatives to gush over New York and Rudy “America’s Mayor” Giuliani. Then, when it became apparent that New Yorkers still weren’t going to vote Republican, they went back to their usual uncomprehending contempt toward the big, bad City (“I get the feeling these New Yorker liberals just don’t understand how 9-11 changed things. It’s like they don’t even remember it”).

But this weekend a car bomb was found, undetonated, in Times Square, and rightbloggers rushed to explain that the non-explosion was, like the crotch-bomber’s non-explosion, all Obama’s fault, and to generally try to make terror work for them, as it did back in those marvelous days of September 2001, by wrapping the city they despise in their oily, insincere hugs.

What really infuriates them about New York is that New Yorkers don’t stay terrorized. It’s a patriot’s duty to be terrorized, you know.

See also James Fallows, “If the TSA Were Running New York.”

Why I Don’t Like to Speculate

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The New York Post published a video that allegedly shows a suspect in the Times Square bomb attempt —

In a chilling surveillance video, the man is seen at the end of Shubert Alley peeling off a sweatshirt he’d been wearing over a short-sleeved red shirt, furtively glancing over his shoulder, then stuffing the sweatshirt into a bag.

Yes, some guy removing a sweatshirt on a warm spring day is certainly suspicious. So I looked at the NY Post video, which was made with a phone camera, and I have no idea why this particular guy was more of a “suspect” than anyone else seen in the video.

At times like this I think of Jean Charles de Menezes. If the name doesn’t ring a bell —

Think back to the 2005 London subway bombing. In the aftermath of the bombing, London police spotted a Middle Eastern-looking man acting very suspiciously —

[The man] was wearing a thick coat when he ran into the Stockwell subway station in south London Friday. Temperatures in London on Friday were in the 70s. Police began following the man when he left his home in an effort to arrest him as part of their investigation.

The man “was challenged and refused to obey police instructions,” Blair said. Witnesses said about 10 armed police in street clothes chased the suspect, he tripped, and, after telling bystanders to get down, police then shot him; the man died.

“They pushed him onto the floor and unloaded five shots into him. He’s dead,” witness Mark Whitby told the British Broadcasting Corp. “He looked like a cornered fox. He looked petrified.”

Whitby said the man didn’t appear to have been carrying anything but said he was wearing a thick coat that looked padded.

Another witnesses, Anthony Larkin, told the BBC that the man appeared to have “a bomb belt and wires coming out.” Sky News reported that there were no explosives found on the man after he was shot.

If you read the early news stories about the guy, he certainly sounded suspicious, if not downright guilty. However, after a few days it finally came out that the man who was killed was 27-year-old Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian national. Menezes had been working as an electrician in London since 2002.

His visa status was questionable; some news stories suggest his visa might have expired, but that was never completely clear. Other than the possible visa violation, however, the guy had no criminal record and no ties to any terrorist group that anyone ever turned up.

Basically, Menezes was killed for being at the wrong place at the wrong time while looking sort of Middle Eastern.

I appreciate the NYPD might have some reason to suspect the balding white guy in the video that they’re not telling us. But to call the bit of video at the NY Post “chilling” is just silly. It’s a video of an average guy taking off his shirt. And I think whipping up hysteria over this guy (going on at some rightie sites; the usual ones) is irresponsible.

The “T” Word and Times Square

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[Couple of updates below.]

On a warm Saturday night, Times Square has got to be one of the most densely packed places on the planet. Sometimes the crowds are so thick that walking just one block is nearly impossible.

So, while last night’s car bomb didn’t hurt anyone, panicking people with the “t” word — terrorism — might have been very dangerous.

New Yorkers don’t panic easily, but the Times Square crowd last night no doubt contained a high percentage of tourists. This is partly because the natives have enough sense to not go near Times Square on a Saturday night unless they have a very specific reason to be there. If you’re just out for dinner and a stroll, several other parts of the city are less crowded and have a better choice of restaurants.

The other kind of panic the city doesn’t want is the kind of panic that causes people to vacation somewhere else. NYC needs those tourism dollars. Who else is going to see all those Walt Disney musicals that have been on Broadway forever and pay $25 for a pastrami and corned beef sandwich at Lindy’s?

So, there are all kinds of practical reasons why the city of New York is reluctant to attach the word “terrorism” to the car bomb, even though by most definitions of the “t” word a car bomb automatically qualifies. There’s always a chance the perpetrator did not actually intend to terrorize anyone but was just following the orders of the voices in his head. Clearly, the perp was not part of al Qaeda’s “A” team.

Of course, these obvious and practical reasons for keeping the rhetoric toned down do not occur to rightie bloggers, who are quivering with outrage that the “t” word isn’t being plastered all over today’s headlines. They suspect some kind of cover-up. For example, the predictably thick Darleen of Protein Wisdom wrote, “With NYPD already attempting to squash any terrorism link, how much can we trust them to be honest with the findings of their investigation?”

In other words, in Darleen’s world an honest and forthright NYPD would immediately have declared the bomb a possible act of Muslim jihadists, thereby pretty much destroying the city’s summer tourism season, before they’d had time to investigate anything.

Pam Geller (do you really want me to link to her?) wrote, “Finally get out and about — Saturday night in NY — and I have to bolt home to report this story. Can we count on Muslim bombs failing? And catching every jihadi before he gets one of his balls bombs off? Is that our strategy now?” Let’s not jump to any premature conclusions or anything.

Several accounts have said the SUV that contained the incendiary device (which, experts said, would never have exploded [update: click on link in second paragraph, above, for corroboration]) was parked near the theater running the “Lion King.” Maybe the perp was a disgruntled former Disney employee.

Seriously, other than picking a very crowded area for maximum injury, I don’t see an obvious connection between Times Square and anybody’s righteous cause. The perp might be Muslim, but not necessarily. (And if he is, all the Muslim cab drivers who make a living picking up fares in the theater district might be less than approving.) But if it turns out the perp is a right-wing loon trying to purify Manhattan for Jesus, can we all count on Geller to never admit she was wrong? Of course!

I have no doubt that Mayor Bloomberg is busting chops (that’s a New York expression) right now, pushing the investigation as hard and as fast as possible, because no one wants to prevent another such incident more than he does. One car bomb is a fluke; two is a rash of canceled hotel reservations.

Update: The SUV was indeed parked right next to the Viacom building, which means one possible reason someone might have for attempting to set off a bomb in Times Square is in retaliation for South Park’s portrayal of Mohammad. However, if that’s the case someone should explain it to the Pakistani Taliban, which is claiming credit for the attempt without linking it to South Park. I suspect the Pakistani Taliban is just grandstanding, though.

Update: Newshoggers notes that there also is a Bank of America next to where the SUV was parked. This is true, but the main Bank of America building is on 42nd Street near Bryant Park; the one on 45th and Broadway is a branch. So I doubt there’s a Bank of America connection.

Doug Hughes points out (and I should have thought of this) that it’s terribly difficult to park exactly where you want to in Manhattan. If someone were determined to park a car right next to the Viacom building he might have had to drive in circles for hours until a spot opened up. It’s more likely the perpetrator just parked as close to Times Square as he could get.

Update: The average ten-year-old boy could have made a better bomb.