Last Call

Arizona's GOP Gov. Jan Brewer wants to play for the big money round already on "So You Think You Can Be A Bigot?"

Arizona's Republican Governor Jan Brewer said on Monday she would seek an "immediate petition" with the Supreme Court to lift an injunction blocking key parts of the state's controversial crackdown on illegal immigrants.


Brewer signed the law in April 2010 requiring police to check the immigration status of anyone they detained and suspected was in the country illegally. It was challenged by President Barack Obama's Democratic administration in a lawsuit arguing it improperly meddled in federal issues.

A federal judge blocked key parts of the law shortly before it came into effect in July, in a ruling upheld last month by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Brewer told a news conference in Phoenix she would seek an "immediate petition" with the Supreme Court to lift the injunction.

"When faced with injustice, Arizonans will not sit idly, we will act," Brewer, accompanied by state Attorney General Tom Horne, told reporters.

Jan forgot to finish the sentence with the missing two words:  "like assholes."   She's very, very eager for the Supreme Court to strike down her little "Let's round up all the brown people" law, I guess.

While the three-judge panel on the 9th Circuit last month determined 2-1 that provision forcing police to check immigration status in the Arizona law were unconstitutional, all three judges agreed that Arizona had no right to create its own state-based immigration policy when that right is clearly reserved in the Constitution for the federal government, upholding the lower court injunction against the provisions to punish illegal immigrants at the state level.

In other words, the bill is a mess.  It will not pass muster in its current form.  The only question is how much of the law will be struck down.

The League Of Extraordinary Wingnuts Vs. The League Of Women Voters

If you want to know what's up in the Galtian Republic of Rick Scott, formerly known as "Florida", then the Reid Report is your go to news source.  For example, the League of Women Voters is ceasing voter registrations in the state thanks to Florida's soon to pass voter registration law, HB 1355.

It is with great regret that the League of Women Voters of Florida announces that we must cease our voter registration efforts in this state should HB 1355, the elections bill recently passed by the Florida legislature, become law.

Despite the fact that the League of Women Voters is one of the nation’s most respected civic organizations, with a 91-year history of registering and educating voters, we will be unable to comply with the egregious provisions contained in HB 1355.

Not only does the bill make it more difficult for voters to participate in our democracy via a decrease in early voting and new policies regarding address changes at the polls, it also imposes an undue burden on groups such as ours that work to register voters.

So what does HB 1355 do?

HB 1355, which passed the legislature last week, would force people who need to change their address on election day to vote on provision ballots, which are often not counted; would cut the number of early voting days from 14 to 8, and would place new restrictions and liabilities on groups that register people to vote. Republicans say the changes are needed to stop voter fraud, but presented no evidence of widespread voter fraud in Florida to back up their claims. The law is seen by many as an attempt to suppress the kind of votes that typically go to Democrats.

It would greatly increase the number of voters given provisional ballots instead of official ballots (particularly college students) and impose steep fines for any third party voter registration organization that failed to turn in any voter registration card with 48 hours of being signed by a resident.  The early voting period being shortened too makes it more difficult for low income voters to vote.  Republicans say the measures are needed to prevent voter fraud, but passed the bill in the state legislature without citing a single example of fraud that these measures would have prevented.

The bill is designed to disenfranchise the vote of traditional Democratic voting groups, period.  To Florida Republicans, anyone voting Democrat is probably guilty of fraud anyway.  The measure will almost certainly end up before the Supreme Court.  Whether that will happen before the 2012 election is anyone's guess.

They Never Existed In The First Place

Evan McMorris-Santoro wonders why every single member of the House GOP who took money from the Republican Majority For Choice PAC voted for the brutally anti-choice HR 3 bill.

For pro-choice Republicans, the vote means embarrassing questions. Basically every pro-choice group says H.R. 3 is an anti-abortion bill that goes far beyond the government's current prohibitions on abortion funding and actually raises taxes on women who want to seek abortion coverage in their private insurance plans.

That's a double-whammy for pro-choice Republicans. One, raising taxes under any circumstances is a no-no for anyone in the modern GOP. And, two, the bill has been cast as the biggest assault on abortion rights in years.

Voting against such a measure, then, would seem like a no-brainer. Except it wasn't. None of the about a dozen House GOP members the the Republican Majority For Choice PAC considers allies voted against H.R. 3. In fact, all of them voted yes.

"We opposed the bill, we considered it an anti-choice, big government intrusion and politically we think it's a bad move for the Republicans to keep focusing on this," K.R. Ferguson, executive director of the PAC told TPM.

Still, she says that she's not prepared to say the members who voted for it have given up their pro-choice credentials. She pointed to the refusal of some Republicans to sign on to the House plan to defund Planned Parenthood as the kind of thing that will keep the PAC's endorsement coming.

"I would not say we would stop supporting any of the members who took this vote," Ferguson said. She said that though it's hard to rectify being pro-choice and voting for H.R. 3, support from her PAC isn't "an all or nothing" prospect.

Seems to me that either all the Republicans who got the support of the RMFC PAC are full of crap or the PAC itself just exists to sneak in anti-choice Republicans into purple districts.  And since the set of anti-choice Republicans in the House now includes all Republicans in the House, I'm going to go with both.

There are no pro-choice Republicans in Congress.  Anyone who says they are is lying to you, because they think you're stupid enough to give to a Republican "pro-choice" PAC.

Cloudy Future - What Each Person Should Know

The cloud computing era is coming, and with it people are learning of its advantages as well as its weaknesses.  Sony was only the tip of the iceberg, when we take into account the global nature of the Internet, it becomes easy to spoof and trick the vulnerable into giving up their private information.  The article I have linked to also explains how reusing passwords is a serious no-no, as is exposing any private information that could hint to security question information and password resets.

When we hear of people falling prey to hackers, it isn't because they had to go through hoops and incredible feats.  It's almost always because of poor security habits ("password" is still used for a password!) and people's failure to understand just what can be done with a little data.

"Rogue cloud service providers based in countries with lax cybercrime laws can provide confidential hosting and data storage services," he said.

"[This] facilitates the storage and distribution of criminal data, avoiding detection by law enforcement agencies."

An easy parallel to draw is with the way Swiss bank accounts were rumoured to operate in the past.

While bank customers were offered the utmost of discretion with their financial transactions, that same courtesy could now be offered to those wishing to de-encrypt sensitive data.

It doesn't take a genius to see where this is going.  The real question is, what path are we going to take to a safe and private computing network?  If some people refuse to take accountability and push their safety onto others, that will lead to a heavily governed cloud environment.  It doesn't have to be this way, if only some folks would learn some basic safety measures.  Dear Lord, there are still people falling for the Nigerian bank account scam.  Perhaps the Clue Fairy will pay them a visit.

Gimme a "B!" Gimme a "U!" Gimme an "L L Y!" What's That Spell?

SENECA, Mo. (AP) — A lawsuit filed by two southwest Missouri high school cheerleaders who were removed from the squad has been dismissed.

The two Seneca High School cheerleaders sued the school district and several school officials last December after being kicked off the squad for alleged cyber-bullying.

While the letters OMG have served to take the intellectual value out of online chatting, it appears that if cheerleaders can now have their great works immortalized on Facebook.  I've been following this for a while, thinking it may lead to an actual story, but it turns out the only lesson is that we still need to clearly define what is legal and what is not, so that the gray areas are few and far between.  Was this normal high school catty behavior?  Was it something way out of line that could have seriously affected someone?  I don't know.  But all around the country, this is happening.  For the sake of the victims as well as those who may be accused for unbelievable reasons, it's time to get a game plan together.

Things Fall Apart, The Ryan Unicorn Plan Cannot Hold

As Republicans continue to backpedal away from the Ryan Unicorn Plan to scrap Medicare, Brian Beutler notes that without the savings from cutting trillions from the social safety net, the Ryan Unicorn Plan doesn't exactly balance the budget anytime soon.

It turns out that if you strike the Medicare plan from the GOP budget -- authored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) -- it doesn't achieve fiscal balance anymore.

"It certainly blows a major hole in his plan," said Paul Van de Water, a health care and budget expert at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, in a phone interview.

If you take Ryan at his word, and assume that the tax-side of his plan is revenue neutral -- a big "if" -- his plan balances the budget over decades entirely on the spending side of the government's ledger. Van de Water explains that if you take the Medicare privatization plan out of the equation, the budget sinks -- dragged down by higher spending, and then higher interest payments as a result of larger-than-projected deficits.

"That plus interest gets you into a range where you no longer balance the budget," Van de Water said.
That's not to say Ryan's plan would blow up the deficit. "Would it turn [it] into a disaster? Probably not because he was cutting so much elsewhere in his proposal. He has very deep cuts in in Medicaid, he also has very, very deep reductions in the rest of the government as well."

Of course, eliminating deficits is supposedly Congress' entire raison d'etre at this point. But if phasing out Medicare is off the table, and tax increases are off the table, that's just not going to happen.

Shocker:  Republicans have no interest in balancing the budget.  Now destroying the New Deal social safety net and doing everything they can to all but eliminate taxes for the richest Americans and for corporations?  That's another thing entirely.  But their economic plan has nothing to do with balancing the budget at all.

The Return Of The Nameless One

Someone jump-started Dick Cheney's battery and he emerged to complain about the President picking up after his mess.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday that President Barack Obama should put waterboarding back on the table.

Intelligence derived from the Bush-era enhanced interrogation program "probably" contributed to the of death Osama bin Laden, Cheney told Fox News' Chris Wallace.

"Which raises the question, if we were to now capture another new high value target, which is certainly more likely given this apparent trove of information that they recovered in bin Laden's compound, should the president reinstate enhanced interrogation including waterboarding?" Wallace asked.

"Well, I certainly would advocate it," Cheney replied. "I'd be a strong supporter of it."

"We went to a lot of trouble to find out what we could do, how far we could go, what was legal and so forth. Out of that emerged what we called enhanced interrogation. It worked. It provided some absolutely vital pieces of intelligence."

"It was a good program," he continued. "It was a legal program. It was not torture. I would strongly recommend we continue it."

You know, we've established that enhanced interrogation techniques goddamn torture didn't get us the info we needed to get bin Laden but regular interrogation techniques and smart fieldcraft did.  Cheney is flat out lying when he says it helped to capture OBL.  Let me repeat:  he's lying.  He wants us to now restart a program that did not yield any reliable intelligence towards getting bin Laden.

And like anyone at FOX News is going to call him on it.  But after all, this is what FOX News exists for:  the spreading of GOP propaganda, period.  You can tell the entire thing is falling apart at the seams, and the Republicans try desperately to claim total vindication for their sins.

Go home, Dick.  Nobody believes you anymore.

No Dealing On The Debt Ceiling, Part 6

Sunday, the NY Times editorial board summarily rejected the Republican plan to hold the country hostage to the debt ceiling to force draconian budget cuts.

The Republicans have long insisted on deep spending cuts — ignoring the fact that a failure to raise the limit by August at the latest would disrupt financial markets and endanger the recovery. The administration understands the danger, but giving in to overly deep spending cuts and making unwise tax concessions would also be damaging.

Both sides have indicated that a probable deal would impose a budget target and enforcement triggers, like automatic spending cuts, if the target was not met. A deal built on such mechanisms could keep markets calm, but they can also be a trap.

Democratic lawmakers and the White House must reject targets and triggers that rule out tax increases, because without higher taxes, the burden of cutting would fall largely on lower- and middle-income Americans. Some Republicans also have said they want the deal to include many of the spending cuts in the House-passed budget. That would be a disaster for vulnerable Americans and for the fragile recovery. Farm subsidies for rich farmers can go but not food stamps and Head Start. 

Seems like a complete dismissal of the Republican position to me.  As I've said time and time again, none of the real players in Washington politics, the major multinationals and financials, are going to allow the Republicans to blow up the bond market and ruin their profit margins.  They could give a damn about the lower and middle class, but they are directly threatened by massive cuts in government spending that many of these companies have government contracts for, and by the threat of default on the debt that would drive up borrowing costs and end the Fed's free money junkie train.  The Republicans are messing with the profit margins here, and you're going to see a lot harder push from the corporate media on this against the GOP here.  The editorial concludes:

It would be better if lawmakers would pass a clean debt limit increase for another year or two, and use the time to work diligently toward a true budget deal. Unfortunately, seriousness of purpose is not on the table.  

Which is Village for "You better knock this off before we kick your asses."  If the Village is breaking out the S-word..."seriousness"...and suggesting the Republicans lack it, then the Powers That Be are playing hardball.  No wonder Orange Julius is going to Wall Street again today to face angry corporate types on the debt ceiling, and their message to him is "get it together."

However, the financial experts that litter Wall Street have been essentially unanimous in telling Congress to not play games with the debt limit, echoing warnings from the White House that a default on U.S. debt would be an economic catastrophe.

Jamie Dimon, the chairman and chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase, said in March that it would be "crazy" to not raise the debt limit.

"This chatter about not meeting our obligations, I just don't understand it," he said at an event hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "It's a moral obligation to ourselves. ... They should know that the United States is good for its money. Period."

The Manhattan group says it gathers members from "top executive levels of business, industry and finance."

Executives from Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan are listed among the group's trustees, as well as David Koch of Koch Industries and William Dudley, the president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

In other words, Orange Julius is facing his real masters today.  And they are not pleased with him at all.  I've been predicting this for months now, and I fully expect to see a clean vote on the debt ceiling passed, and soon.

StupidiNews!

• Near-record flooding along the Mississippi River is now threatening Memphis, Tennessee and soon, New Orleans.
• The national average of a gallon of unleaded gas crossed the $4 mark this weekend, but some experts say last week's oil price mini crash may spell relief soon.
• Angry GOP state lawmakers are demanding President Obama declare Texas eligible for federal disaster money as wildfires ravage the state and plan to confront him during his Tuesday visit.
• Apple has overtaken Google as the world's most valuable brand, according to market figures.
• The secretive FISC court has approved every single request last year for surveillance on suspected foreign agents in the US.

Last Call

Hey guys, Libya, remember them?  The Libyan rebellion is all but functionally over, folks.  The coming NATO/US ground war is now all but certain.

Libyan government forces destroyed four fuel storage tanks and set several others ablaze in rebel-held Misrata, dealing a blow to the port city's ability to withstand a government siege, rebels said on Saturday.

The attack on the western city came as artillery rounds fired by forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi fell in Tunisia in an escalation of fighting near the border with rebels trying to end Gaddafi's rule of more than four decades.

Misrata, the last remaining city in the west under rebel control, has been under siege for more than two months and has witnessed some of the war's fiercest fighting.

Rebels gave varying accounts of the bombardment but said it hit fuel used for export as well as domestic consumption.

"Four (fuel) tanks were totally destroyed and a huge fire erupted which spread now to the other four. We cannot extinguish it because we do not have the right tools," rebel spokesman Ahmed Hassan told Reuters.

"Now the city will face a major problem. Those were the only sources of fuel for the city. These tanks could have kept the city for three months with enough fuel," he said by telephone.

No fuel means no way to survive the siege and no way to defend the city from the ground.  At this point it's only a matter of time before Qaddafi's forces roll into the last rebel city and end this revolution with a bloody massacre.  Qaddafi has all but won this war short of a major international intervention, and that intervention will now have to include ground forces.

And you can bet that will be coming.  The siege of Misrata has all but broken the Libyan rebels.  Things are about to get very, very ugly.

The Laboratory Of Democracy Has A Chemical Spill

Florida's Republicans, with an unstoppable super-majority in the state legislature and Rick Scott in the Governor's Mansion in Tallahassee have just bet their careers on Randian social economics.

A bill that would establish some of the deepest and most far-reaching cuts in unemployment benefits in the nation is heading for the desk of Gov. Rick Scott.


The Republican-controlled House and Senate passed the compromise measure just before the legislative session ended Friday night.

The legislation would cut maximum state benefits to 23 weeks from 26 when the jobless rate is 10.5 percent or higher.

If lower, the maximum would decline on a sliding scale until bottoming at 12 weeks if the jobless rate was 5 percent or less.

Both chambers were agreeable to a sliding scale, but the House wanted to cut the maximum to 20 weeks while the Senate wanted to keep it at 26.

The benefit reduction is expected to cut unemployment taxes paid by employers, but not until next year.

Florida has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, 11.5 percent, and already had some of the lowest unemployment benefits.

Critics called the legislation cruel and wrongheaded. But its supporters — including the bill’s sponsor, Representative Doug Holder, Republican of Sarasota — argued that it was needed to help businesses and to aid job creation. 

So there you are.  The best way to create jobs?  Cut off jobless benefits, then people will have to get jobs, so jobs will be created.  Or something.  Scott will certainly sign the bill, and since businesses will have to pay less in taxes, they will certainly use it to invest in job creation, right?

Well, there is that nasty demand problem of the American people not having enough money to buy extra things and cutting back on spending while paying down debt, so there's no extra demand for goods and services to justify creation of additional jobs, but if we increase business profits, that will do something, right?

So if this theory is correct, if the problem in job creation is lazy workers not taking tens of thousands of open jobs, then Florida's unemployment rate should plummet back to well under 7% and Florida should soon have one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country.

We'll see how that works out.

In Which Zandar Answers Your Burning Questions

Angry Black Lady asks:

I’m at a loss. This story hurts my soul and explodes my brain. When did women cease being people? When did we become merely penis receptacles and baby incubators?

About the time Republicans (and particularly conservative Republican women) decided that failing to do either of these constitutes a failure of not only womanhood, but personhood as well and that across the country, the chief aim of the "small government" Republican Party in 2011 is to enshrine into law on a state-by-state basis what women must do with their reproductive systems.

Waiting For Employment Godot

The Washington Post editorial board has some helpful advice on preventing structural unemployment.

NEW DATA CONFIRM that the economy continues to recover slowly from the worst recession since the 1930s. Good news: The private sector generated 268,000 jobs in April, the most since February 2006. Bad news: The unemployment rate remains stuck at 9 percent of the workforce, up from 8.8 percent in March. But, good news: The higher rate reflects job-seekers reentering the market because their prospects are better.

The main point is that unemployment remains well above what it should be; the longer this persists, the more we risk a “new normal” of structural unemployment, which is a fancy term for elevated human suffering and snowballing economic waste. We dare not let this happen. The question, though, is how to generate the new jobs.

Big new fiscal and monetary stimulus is probably not the answer...

Mmm, delicious Hayekian principles.   We dare not let structural unemployment happen, but actually doing something about it is off the table.  Here's the rest of their plan:

1)  Do nothing about the risk of structural unemployment.

2)  ????????

3)  PROFIT!

Which, if you look at the 1Q 2011 numbers coming in for business profits, why this is exactly what's happening, except, you know, for the actual jobs part.  The profit part?  Well that's down cold.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

The right is pretty desperate at this point to try to do everything they can to rob President Obama of all credit for bin Laden, and giving him 110% of the blame for everything else.  Case in point:  John Hindraker.

All of this praise is due to the fact that Obama approved, rather than nixing, the killing of bin Laden. A good decision, to be sure. But is there a single person, anywhere, who doubts that George W. Bush would have made the same call? Or John McCain, if he had won in 2008? Of course not. The Democrats' jubilation results from the fact that their guy didn't wilt under pressure, but rather lived up to the standard that George W. Bush and John McCain easily met. For this, he is called "courageous" and "gutsy."

One wonders: if killing bin Laden was a courageous, gutsy decision by Barack Obama, where were the liberals when President Bush approved the killing of Zarqawi? Do you remember any of them praising that decision as courageous and "game changing?" No, neither do I. Or how about the apprehension of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? How many congratulations did that skillfully-executed operation draw from the Left? And how about Bush's decision to topple, and then capture, Saddam Hussein, one of America's bitterest enemies, whose forces tried to shoot down American airplanes and who attempted to assassinate a former American President? Was that a courageous and gutsy decision? We all know the answer to that question.

What we are currently witnessing is the strange spectacle of liberals trying to grab, for their guy, a mantle neither he nor they ever sought: cold-blooded assassin of anti-American terrorists. This has nothing to do with their true values and priorities, and everything to do with the fact that Obama's economic policies have put him in a deep hole as he seeks re-election next year.

Let's break this down, shall we?

John's first point is that there "isn't a single person who doubts" that Bush 43 or McCain would have made the same call, so you can't give Obama any credit for emulating what Republicans would have been sure to do.  The problem is that isn't true:  there's plenty of evidence to doubt that Bush or McCain would have even bothered to pursue bin Laden in the first place.  In the case of Bush 43, this is cold hard fact:  He directed the CIA's bin Laden hunters, the famed "Alec Station" unit, to shut down in 2006.  Bush gave up the hunt for OBL.  Obama restarted it.  We know Bush would have blown that "gutsy" call because that's exactly what he did.  And as far as John McCain is concerned, he said during the 2008 campaign that as President, he wouldn't go into Pakistan to get bin Laden.  He said that during a presidential debate against Obama, and he said it again later on Larry King, after saying he would pursue OBL during the Republican primary:

KING: If you were president and knew that bin Laden was in Pakistan, you know where, would you have U.S. forces go in after him?

MCCAIN: Larry, I'm not going to go there and here's why, because Pakistan is a sovereign nation. I think the Pakistanis would want bin Laden out of their hair and out of their country and it's causing great difficulties in Pakistan itself.

So here is John McCain himself saying that he would in fact not make the call Obama did.  But in John Hindraker's world, there's not a single person who would doubt that McCain would.

His second point is to then compare Obama's actions and wanting to know why the left doesn't give Bush the same credit for giving the orders to take down al-Zarqawi, KSM, and of course, Saddam Hussein.  If I recall, while all of those three men were evil killers, none of the three of them killed 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001.  Bush took his focus off bin Laden to invade Iraq, at the cost of thousands of US troops and trillions of US dollars, to settle a personal score (oh and to get oil.)  There was nothing gutsy or courageous about any of that, because all three represented Bush's failure to get OBL, period. 

His final point:  Obama's just trying to distract voters from "his" failed economic policies.  Conservatives say we need to do three things:  cut government spending, eliminate government jobs in favor of private sector jobs, and keep taxes low.  Which is funny, because that's exactly what we're doing, and yet the economy has yet to improve for 80% of the country.  Obama extended the Bush tax cuts and tax breaks for businesses.  Local and state governments are laying off tens of thousands of employees each month, and private sector job growth is increasing.  And the talk in Washington is that Republicans will cut spending come hell or high water.  But these are "Obama's failed economic policies"...doing exactly what Republicans want him to do.

It's getting to the point where the right is beyond classless, but simply ignoring basic facts in order to try to justify the failures of the Bush administration.

It's pathetic, really.  All they have left is Obama Derangement Syndrome and a firm believe nobody will even bother to call them on it.  Well, sorry there, Johnny.

Home Movies Of The Damned

The CIA and Pentagon released a number of home videos taken of Osama bin Laden at his compound in Abbotabad, Pakistan and recovered in the raid that killed him last Sunday.

U.S. officials, who Saturday released five videos, emphasized the recordings and other materials seized at bin Laden's Pakistan compound show the terrorist still had a firm hand atthe tiller, managing strategic and tactical control of his organization, even as he stayed out of sight in Abbottabad.

The undated videos make clear bin Laden "remained active in al Qaeda terrorist propaganda operations, especially in shaping his own image," said a senior intelligence official granted anonymity under the ground rules of a briefing at the Pentagon.

Four of the clips show bin Laden, who was killed along with four others Monday by U.S. commandos, in more formal attire. No audio of the terrorist leader speaking accompanied the images.

The intelligence official said the audio was removed because it would be "inappropriate to spread the words of terrorists and propaganda messages, especially Osama bin Laden."

Besides the missing audio, the videos, according to the intelligence official, were not altered in any other way.

Still, the release of the home movies sends a message to those who doubted bin Laden was killed: Navy SEALs got footage that likely could have been held only by bin Laden at his hideout.

It may also have accomplished something else: diminishing the bin Laden mythology of invincibility.
CNN national security contributor Frances Townsend said U.S. officials "picked these videos pretty deliberately."

Portions are unflattering of bin Laden and reflect his vanity, Townsend said.

And yet as unflattering as the videos are, we still spent trillions of dollars as a direct result of our reaction to his attack on 9/11.  Victory does not get more Pyrrhic than that.

Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz estimates that the price tag on the Iraq War alone will surpass $3 trillion. Afghanistan likely amounts to another trillion or two. Add in the build-up in homeland security spending since 9/11 and you’re looking at yet another trillion. And don’t forget the indirect costs of all this turmoil: The Federal Reserve, worried about a fear-induced recession, slashed interest rates after the attack on the World Trade Center, and then kept them low to combat skyrocketing oil prices, a byproduct of the war in Iraq. That decade of loose monetary policy may well have contributed to the credit bubble that crashed the economy in 2007 and 2008.

Then there’s the post-9/11 slowdown in the economy, the time wasted in airports, the foregone returns on investments we didn’t make, the rise in oil prices as a result of the Iraq War, the cost of rebuilding Ground Zero, health care for the first responders and much, much more.

But it isn’t quite right to say bin Laden cost us all that money. We decided to spend more than a trillion dollars on homeland security measures to prevent another attack. We decided to invade Iraq as part of a grand, post-9/11 strategy of Middle Eastern transformation. We decided to pass hundreds of billions of dollars in unpaid-for tax cuts and add an unpaid-for prescription drug benefit in Medicare while we were involved in two wars. And now, partially though not entirely because of these actions, we are deep in debt. Bin Laden didn’t — couldn’t — bankrupt us. He could only provoke us into bankrupting ourselves. And he came pretty close.

Here endeth the lesson.