Tag Archives: charts

CHARTS: You Won’t Believe How Much Disasters Cost Last Year

by dgod36 Posted on June 20, 2013

Mother Jones

2012 was the second-worst year on record for extreme weather events, both in number and in cost, according to a tally released this morning by NOAA. Eleven major events—including tornadoes, wildfire, drought, and hurricanes—racked up a collective bill of over $110 billion, with cropland damage from drought in the Midwest ($17.36 billion in crop insurance payments alone) and Hurricane Sandy, with a $60 billion pricetag, as the most expensive items.

NOAA

As for this summer, the costs are still piling on: Feed and water scarcity have shrunk the nation’s cattle supply to its lowest point since 1952, pushing beef prices to an all-time high, and NOAA scientists predict that pasture conditions will likely be worse this summer than last.

According to the latest forecast, although drought conditions have dropped 21 percent from their peak last September, nearly half of the country is still in some kind of drought, with the worst conditions moving west through the summer into California and Oregon.

“The drought has definitely been pushing westward,” Mark Svoboda of the National Drought Mitigation Center in Nebraska told reporters, adding that the devastating wildfires that have recently hit states like Colorado and New Mexico are “just the start.”

NOAA

Svoboda added that lightning from the upcoming monsoon season in the southwest created a particular wildfire risk in this still tinder-dry region, although Arizona and the central plains are expected to see some improvement of drought conditions, the result of a relatively wet spring:

NOAA

Original post:  

CHARTS: You Won’t Believe How Much Disasters Cost Last Year

Posted in alo, FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on CHARTS: You Won’t Believe How Much Disasters Cost Last Year

Want to Know How Your Rep. Voted on Wall Street Regs? Check the Campaign Cash.

by Polly Browder Posted on June 17, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Last week, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would allow US banks to get out of new financial regulations by operating through their overseas arms. Financial reformers say this is dangerous because markets are global, and a bad bet made by a US bank operating in another country could easily affect banks in the US and cause the US economy to crash again. Bad for America, but good for banks that want to avoid tough new rules. Perhaps that’s why lawmakers who received more money from banks and the finance industry in recent years were more likely to vote in favor of the bill. House members who supported the bill received more than twice as much in contributions from the financial industry over the past two years as lawmakers who voted against it, according to a new analysis from the MapLight Foundation, an independent research group that tracks campaign finance.

Interest groups supporting the bill, including securities and investment companies, banks, and chambers of commerce, contributed an average of 102 percent more to House members who supported the bill than to those who voted no. Check it out:

Democratic House members who voted yes on the bill received 75 percent more money from from the financial services industry than Democrats who voted no.

In 2011 and 2012, groups that supported this bill gave five times more to House members than groups that opposed the bill did. The gap was even larger for donations to Democrats. Over those two years, House Democrats received less than $250,000 from interests that opposed this measure. During the same time period, groups in favor of allowing the banks to skirt regulation gave Dems 28 times as much—close to $7 million. Here’s what that looks like:

What’s remarkable is that some Democrats held firm. Although the bill passed the House last week by a vote of 301 to 124, most Democrats voted against it, which financial reformers say is a significant turn of events. “A majority of Democrats voted against a pro-Wall Street bill…even though it was co-sponsored by Democrats… that was heavily lobbied by Wall Street and everyone had predicted would win by a landslide,” Marcus Stanley, policy director at Americans for Financial Reform, told Mother Jones after the vote last week. “I’m pretty psyched.”

Source:  

Want to Know How Your Rep. Voted on Wall Street Regs? Check the Campaign Cash.

Posted in FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Want to Know How Your Rep. Voted on Wall Street Regs? Check the Campaign Cash.

The Private Intelligence Boom, By the Numbers

by BakenKesselring341 Posted on June 13, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Edward Snowden revealed to the world the startling breadth of the National Security Agency’s surveillance efforts, but his story also highlighted another facet of today’s intelligence world: the increasingly privatized national security sector, in which a high-school dropout could bring in six figures while gaining access to state secrets. Over the last decade, firms like Booz Allen Hamilton, where Snowden worked for three months, have gobbled up nearly sixty cents out of every dollar the government spends on intelligence. A majority of top-secret security clearances now go to private contractors who provide services to the government at stepped up rates.

“I like to call Booz Allen the shadow intelligence community,” Joan Dempsey, a vice president at the firm, said in 2004, as captured in Tim Shorrock’s book, Spies for Hire. No kidding. Here’s a look at our mushrooming intelligence contracting sector:

OUR PRIVATE INTELLIGENCE APPARATUS, BY THE NUMBERS

12,000: Number of Booz Allen Hamilton employees with top-secret clearances.

483,263: Number of contractors with top-secret clearances.

1.4 million: Number of public and private employees, total, with top-secret security clearances, as of FY 2012.

7th: Where employees with top-secret clearances would rank, by population, if they were a single American city.

1: Occupations, out of 35 analyzed by the Project On Government Oversight, in which privatization yielded statistically significant savings—groundskeepers.

4.4 million: Number of private contractors serving the federal government in 1999.

7.6 million: Number of private contractors serving the federal government 2005.

1.8 million: Number of federal civil servants in 1999.

1.8 million: Number of federal civil servants in 2005.

70: Percentage of classified intelligence budget that goes to private contracts (as of 2007).

90: Percentage of intelligence contracts that are classified.

1,931: Number of private firms working on counter-terrorism, intelligence, or homeland security, according to the Washington Post.

$1.3 billion: Booz Allen Hamilton’s revenue from intelligence work during its most recent fiscal year, according to the New York Times.

23: Percentage of the firm’s overall revenue.

98: Percentage of the firm’s work that focuses on government contracts

Charts by Jaeah Lee

See more here – 

The Private Intelligence Boom, By the Numbers

Posted in alo, FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Private Intelligence Boom, By the Numbers

Slicing Open Stalagmites to Reveal Climate Secrets

by Mstyslava7ju Posted on June 6, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

If you’ve ever visited a cave, you know the rules: Stay on the path, and keep your greasy paws off the formations. So Stacy Carolin was a bit taken aback the first time she headed into a cave not as a tourist, but as a scientist, and took a step off the beaten path. “I was a city girl back then,” she recalls. “It was very muddy and slippery… and also completely pitch black.” Not exactly the setting you’d expect for cutting-edge climate change research.

A few years later, Carolin, a PhD student at Georgia Tech, is breaking ground in the field of paleoclimatology, the study of ancient climates, using an unconventional but increasingly prevalent tool: “speleothems,” a catch-all term for cave formations that includes stalagmites (remember the mnemonic: those that “mite” reach the ceiling from the floor) and stalactites (those that hold “tite” to the ceiling).

In a study released today in the journal Science, Carolin and her colleagues outline 100,000-year-old rainfall conditions in Borneo, mapped from chemical clues in cave formations there. Like most historic climate reconstructions, the goal is to compile real-life data against which to test predictive models; if scientists know how much rainfall there was in the tropics in the past, they can see how well their models are able to replicate those conditions, and tweak accordingly. But the most commonly-used “proxies” for ancient climates, including tree rings and ice cores, are notoriously inadequate in the tropics, leaving holes in scientists’ geographic picture of the past and making it difficult to measure historic changes in tropical weather systems, like monsoons, which can themselves have major impacts on global climate.

Deep inside caves in Mexico, Southeast Asia, China, and other limestone-rich locales worldwide, scientists have found rich troves of data in speleothems. Researchers look for formations that have already fallen over or broken off, so as not to damage the cave, haul these back to the lab, slice them open (“like a hot dog,” Carolin says), and study the ancient atoms within to discover how old they are and how much rainfall there was at different points in their past (speleothems form when rainwater drips through the limestone, picking up acid and minerals that pile up in the cave).

Tim McDonnell

Continue Reading »

Link to article:

Slicing Open Stalagmites to Reveal Climate Secrets

Posted in FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Slicing Open Stalagmites to Reveal Climate Secrets

Report: Mansions Getting Bigger, Rental Apartments Getting Smaller

by bibw6a Posted on June 5, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

It’s a metaphor for the lopsided economic recovery: Data out from the Census bureau Tuesday shows that new single-family homes are getting bigger, while new rental apartments are shrinking.

Construction of new homes plummeted as the 2007 financial crisis hit. Residential housing construction is barely coming back to life, but as the New York Times‘ Economix blog reports in a post titled “The Return of the McMansions,” the new homes being built are ballooning in size. Think the 90,000 square foot manse timeshare billionaire David Seagal and his wife Jackie designed pre-crisis, with 30 bathrooms, ten kitchens, and an ice rink. Ok, they’re not all that big. The average size of new single-family homes climbed to 2,306 square feet last year, the largest average home size since the government started keeping track in 1973. The Times has this graph:

The average number of bedrooms and bathrooms per home is also at record levels. Last year, 41 percent of new homes had at least four bedrooms, and 30 percent had at least three bathrooms.

When it comes to new rental units, the opposite is true. The average square footage of new units in multi-family buildings decreased between 2011 and 2012. In 2011, 62 percent of new rental units were under 1,200 square feet, and 17 percent were 1,400 square feet or larger. In 2012, those numbers had changed to 64 percent under 1,200 square feet, and 16 percent above 1,400 square feet. (The percentage of apartments in the mid-range, remained steady.) See here:

The divergence in square footage aligns with the nature of the economic recovery. A new report released by the Federal Reserve earlier this week shows that most of the wealth recovered since the recession has gone to well-off white people. The Fed says that about 62 percent of the wealth Americans have regained since the economy bottomed out has been through the recovery of the stock market. And 80 percent of stock wealth is held by the rich—people with income in the top 10 percent.

Many younger and minority Americans have not experienced any recovery at all, and some are still losing wealth. Hence the need for more shoebox apartments.

Originally from – 

Report: Mansions Getting Bigger, Rental Apartments Getting Smaller

Posted in FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Report: Mansions Getting Bigger, Rental Apartments Getting Smaller

Worse Than Watergate? The Ultimate White House Scandal Matrix

by Amy R. Eddy Posted on May 24, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>


!function(d,s,id)var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)0;if(!d.getElementById(id))js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=”//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”;fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}(document,”script”,”twitter-wjs”);

DisplayInlineAd(Drupal.settings.denali.ad_locations_str,”Middle3″);

Worse than Watergate. That’s the refrain coming from the Obama administration’s critics as it scrambles to tamp down a growing pile of scandals. “The Obama administration’s cover-up of the September 11, 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack surpasses Watergate,” states Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa). The IRS-tea party scandal “is far worse than Watergate,” according to Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.). And Pinal County, Arizona, Sheriff Paul Babeu maintains that Fast and Furious “is a much larger scandal than Watergate.” And of course there is a hashtag: #WorseThanWatergate.

Comparing the scandal du jour to Watergate is an easy way to score political points. (Conservatives aren’t the only guilty ones here.) But if you’re interested in making a more subtle and perhaps accurate comparison, you need only refer to the United States’ long history of White House scandals, starting in the first days of the republic.

To help you keep track of them, we’ve plotted more than 25 on this matrix, organized by their relative seriousness and their place in our current collective memory. (The current crop of Obama scandals aren’t on there since it’s not yet clear where they fall on the continuum between, say, Billygate and Iran-Contra. See a missing scandal? Suggest it in the comments.)

The SCANDALs

Sandra Gligorijevic/Shutterstock

Watergate: The mother of all White House Scandals. It had everything but sex: A burglary, spying on political opponents, secret tapes, an enemies list, obstruction of justice, campaign-finance shenanigans, onimous-sounding acronyms (CREEP), memorable denials (“I am not a crook”), congressional investigations, crusading journalists, articles of impeachment, and the first resignation of a sitting president. Beat that, Benghazi.

Spiro Agnew: Before Richard Nixon stepped down, he was preceded by his alliteration-prone vice president, who had been charged with taking bribes and evading taxes. Agnew insisted until the very end that the “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history” had gotten it all wrong.

Iran-Contra: High-ranking officials in the Reagan Administration made an end-run around federal law by secretly selling missiles to Iran in order to help free American hostages in Lebanon and fund the Nicaraguan contra rebels. What could go wrong?

Missing Iraqi WMD: President George W. Bush and top members of his cabinet insist that Saddam Hussein is definitely almost nearly developing and or amassing weapons of mass destruction which he might probably absolutely use against us. The United States launches a preemptive invasion of Iraq. Ten years, tens of thousands of deaths, and billions of dollars later, the search for the elusive WMDs continues.

KtD/Shutterstock

Plamegate: After former ambassador Joe Wilson blew the whistle on the Bush White House’s claims of Saddam’s pursuit of nuclear materials, his wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA agent. The subsequent investigation leads to the conviction (and pardon) of Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, “Scooter” Libby.

Abu Ghraib, torture memos: Prisoner abuse at American military prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan and the CIA’s extradition and torture program were authorized by Bush and top administration officials. But that’s all behind us now.

NSA spying on US citizens: After 9/11, Bush authorized the National Security Agency to covertly surveil Americans’ email and phone calls—in violation of federal law.

Pentagon Papers: A secret Pentagon history of the Vietnam War leaked by whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg revealed that the Johnson administration had been lying about the true scope and of the war. The Nixon White House tried to prevent their publication

mjaud/Shutterstock

Teapot Dome: Before Watergate, there was Teapot Dome, the early 1920s scandal that led to President Warren G. Harding’s secretary of the interior being convicted for accepting bribes from oil companies to lease Navy petroleum reserves in Teapot Dome, Wyoming.

DNC campaign finance scandals: In 1996, Vice President Al Gore attended an event at a California Buddhist temple that illegally funneled $65,000 to the Democratic National Committee. Eventually, the party had to return nearly $3 million in forbidden gifts, some from foreign donors such as James Riady, an Indonesian businessman who was fined $8.6 million.

Johnson impeachment: Disputes between President Andrew Johnson and Radical Republicans in Congress spun into a constitutional crisis when the House voted to impeach him in 1868. He survived in the Senate—by one vote.

Teddy Roosevelt’s corporate cash: After winning election as a trust-buster in 1904, Roosevelt and the Republican Party are revealed to have quietly courted big corporate donors.

The Grant administration: President Ulysses S. Grant’s terms were marred by a succession of high-level scandals, including the Whiskey Ring, Belknap affair, the Delano Affair, the salary grab, and the Cattelism scandal. The administration’s endemic corruption became known as “Grantism.”

Wikimedia Commons

LBJ’s mystery money: In 1963, Life magazine was preparing a bombshell exposé on how Vice President Lyndon Johnson had amassed a fortune through his connections to Texas oil barons. The article, which biographer Robert Caro says would have linked LBJ to the Bobby Brown Scandal, was set to drop in late November. Kennedy’s assassination killed the story and a planned Senate investigation.

XYZ Affair: A diplomatic kerfuffle led to an undeclared “Quasi War” between the United States and France in the late 1790s. Back home, it led to passage of the draconian Alien and Sedition Acts and fueled the growing split between President John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

Hamilton’s affair and insider trading: In 1797, former treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton revealed that he had carried on an affair with a married woman—while bribing her husband to let it to continue. He also defended himself against accusations of having used his position to engage in insider trading.

US attorney firings: In 2007, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales resigned amid an investigation into whether the firing of nine US attorneys in 2006 was politically motivated.

Pardongate: As he left the White House in January, 2001, President Bill Clinton hastily pardoned Susan McDougal (for contempt of court during the Whitewater case), his brother Roger (for old drug charges), and Marc Rich, a fugitive tax cheat whose wife had been a major Clinton donor.

Library of Congress

Lincoln Bedroom: The Clinton White House provided perks to big donors including stays in the Lincoln Bedroom as well as coffees, golf outings, or morning jogs with the president.

Whitewater: Failed Arkansas land deals involving Bill and Hilary Clinton spawns a wide-ranging investigation into several -gates: Filegate, Travelgate, and Troopergate (and eventually Ken Starr’s probe of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair).

“Ma, ma, where’s my pa?”: “Gone to the White House, ha ha ha!” This catchy slogan followed Grover Cleveland after he won election in spite of reports that he had fathered an illegitimate child.

Clinton-Lewinksy affair and impeachment: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” the hug, the blue dress, Ken Starr, “it depends on what the meaning of is is.” Good times.

Fast and Furious: A botched ATF operation birthed a conspiracy theory that

Jefferson-Hemings affair: Thomas Jefferson was dogged by rumors that he had fathered children with a slave who served as his “concubine.” Jefferson never addressed the allegations, but it is now known that Sally Hemings had six of Jefferson’s children.

SNAP/Entertainment Pictures/ZUMAPRESS.com

Petticoat Affair, a.k.a. the Eaton Affair: Ridiculous by modern standards, this scandal rocked Washington when Andrew Jackson’s secretary of war married a widow too soon after the death of her husband. It led to the resignation of most of the cabinet and was immortalized in the 1936 film, The Gorgeous Hussy, starring Joan Crawford.

Skeetgate: After President Obama says that “at Camp David, we do skeet shooting all the time,” skeptics demand proof. A photo of the president shooting is produced; the skeptics insist it’s faked.

Andrew Jackson adultery scanal: Forty years after he wed his wife Rachel, presidential candidate Jackson was attacked for marrying her before her divorce from her first husband was finalized, making Old Hickory an adulterer and the First Lady a bigamist. He blamed the smear campaign for causing her death shortly after he took office.

Solyndra: The federal government gave more than $500 million to a solar firm that went belly up. Even congressional inquisitor Rep. Darryl Issa (R-Calif.) eventually had to concede there was no there there.

Keystone Pictures USA/ZUMAPRESS.com

Billygate: President Jimmy Carter took major heat when it was revealed that his ne’er-do-well brother Billy had received payments from the Libyan government.

Mary Todd Lincoln’s price “flub-dubs”: When Abraham Lincoln assumed the presidency, the first lady set about remodeling the White House, but went over budget by $7,000. As complaints of her profligacy spread, the president wrote, “It would stink in the nostrils of the American people to have it said that the President of the United States had approved a bill overrunning an appropriation of $20,000 for flub-dubs for this damned old house when the soldiers cannot have blankets.”

Original source: 

Worse Than Watergate? The Ultimate White House Scandal Matrix

Posted in Citizen, FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, solar, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Worse Than Watergate? The Ultimate White House Scandal Matrix

Poverty Flees to the Suburbs

by pitery Posted on May 20, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Poor residents in cities and suburbs, 1970 – 2010 (millions)

Brookings Institution analysis and ACS data

Suburbs such as Highland Park (Detroit), Carol Stream (Chicago), and Forest Park (Atlanta) once stood for escape from the hard times of the inner city. Now their deceptively bucolic names conceal a national epidemic of suburban poverty. According to a report released today by the Brookings Institution, the suburban poor now far outnumber the rural and urban poor: Their ranks grew by 64 percent during the aughts to 16.4 million—a rate of increase more than twice that seen in America’s cities.

What’s going on here? Well, for one, Ward and June Cleaver’s house wasn’t exactly built to last. And as retiring baby boomers downsize and young millennials flock to hip inner cities, not that many people want to live in a half-century-old suburban tract home—except people with no other options.

Continue Reading »

More – 

Poverty Flees to the Suburbs

Posted in FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Poverty Flees to the Suburbs

This Town Took On Fracking and Won

by Myrna Posted on May 8, 2013

Tiny Dryden, New York, just won the right to send frackers packing. Kate Sheppard/Mother Jones There was a time not so long ago when the most contentious issue in Dryden, New York, was hiring a new dog catcher. Situated in New York’s Finger Lakes region, Dryden is a rural town with a population of just 14,500 spread over 94 square miles. It’s “a little more progressive than your average upstate town,” explains town supervisor Mary Ann Sumner, because it gets some spillover residents from nearby Ithaca, a college town. “But we’re still just an upstate town,” best known for dairy farms and cornfields. But everything changed in August 2011, when Dryden became one of the first towns in New York to ban fracking. Natural gas interests swiftly sued, putting the once sleepy spot in the middle of a nationwide debate over gas drilling. Last week, after a spending a year and a half in court fighting to protect its ban, Dryden became the first town in the state to prevail over the gas industry—in a case that could set a precedent for other towns that are trying to keep frackers out. In 2008, New York imposed a statewide moratorium on fracking, until more research could be done on the environmental and health effects of the practice. But towns all over the state have tried to find their own way to exert control over the industry if and when the state decides to let drilling go forward. Fifty-four other towns have fracking bans in place, and another 105 have passed moratoria. The court’s decision last week also upheld a similar ban in Middlefield, a town in central New York, and the two cases together are expected to give traction to the other towns looking to take similar actions. To keep reading, click here. Taken from:   This Town Took On Fracking and Won ; ;Related ArticlesScientist at Work Blog: Empty Nets on the MekongDot Earth Blog: Exploring Environmental Issues and Communication With Students in JapanHow the coconut tree provides food, fuel, roofing, rope and more for Sri Lankan farmers ;

See the original article here: 

This Town Took On Fracking and Won

Posted in eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, Monterey, ONA, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Town Took On Fracking and Won

Charts: How Much Danger Do We Face From Homegrown Jihadist Terrorists?

by Andrew Karolitz Posted on April 24, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

p.mininav-header-text background-color: #000000 !importantMore MoJo coverage of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings


How the FBI in Boston May Have Pursued the Wrong “Terrorist”


READ: Here Are the Federal Charges Against Boston Bombing Suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev


The 11 Most Mystifying Things the Tsarnaev Brothers Did


What We Know About the Tsarnaev Brothers’ Guns


What These Tweets Tell Us About Dzhokhar Tsarnaev


Stunned Reactions From Former Classmates of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev


Did Boston Bombing Suspect Post Al Qaeda Prophecy on YouTube?


Boston Marathon Bombing Suspect Charged With Using WMD

Perhaps the most unusual thing about the Boston Marathon bombing is that it happened at all. While we’ve seen all manner of terrorist bomb plots since September 11—the Times Square bomber, the underwear bomber, even the guys who fantasized about destroying the Sears Tower—all have been thwarted by the FBI, the perpetrators’ own bumbling, or both. If one or both of the suspects in last week’s attack, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, were motivated by radical Islamic beliefs, then they will have the dubious distinction of being the first domestic jihadists to have set off a bomb on American soil since the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

While America has been fixated on the threat of Islamic terrorism for more than a decade, all but a few domestic terror plots have failed. Between September 11, 2001, and the end of 2012, there were no successful bomb plots by jihadist terrorists in the United States. Jihadists killed 17 people in the United States in four separate incidents during this time, according to data collected by journalist Peter Bergen and the New America Foundation. All four of these incidents involved guns, including Nidal Hassan’s shooting rampage at Fort Hood, which killed 13 people. In contrast, right-wing extremists killed 29 people during those 11 years.

The jihadists’ record as bomb makers would probably be even worse if not for the FBI, which has reeled in dozens of would-be terrorists with its controversial informant program. Of the 203 jihadist terrorists counted by the New America Foundation, just 23 got their hands on explosives or materials to make a bomb; more than half of those obtained the components (often nonfunctioning) from federal informants or agents as part of a sting. Of the 174 nonjihadists, 51 right-wing terrorists and 5 anarchist terrorists tried making bombs. Only five of the right-wing terrorists got their bomb-making supplies via sting operations.

Using a slightly different methodology than Bergen, Brian Michael Jenkins of the RAND Corporation also found that “homegrown” jihadist terror plots have had little success. Most post-9/11 plots, he writes, most “never got beyond the discussion stage, and most of those that did were stings in which the FBI provided fake bombs.” A Mother Jones examination of the cases of more than 500 defendants charged in terrorism-related cases after 9/11 found that 31 percent were nabbed in a sting, while 10 percent were lured by an informant who controlled the conspiracy. Perhaps one reason the Tsarnaev brothers’ alleged plot went as far as it did was that they did not seek out collaborators, avoiding tipping off the FBI—which had already checked out Tamerlan but apparently decided not to investigate him.

Continue Reading »

More: 

Charts: How Much Danger Do We Face From Homegrown Jihadist Terrorists?

Posted in alo, FF, GE, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Charts: How Much Danger Do We Face From Homegrown Jihadist Terrorists?

The Immigration Bill’s Security Poison Pill

by london Posted on April 17, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Naming its long-awaited comprehensive immigration bill the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013 wasn’t just an alphabetical flourish by the bipartisan Senate Gang of Eight: Securing the border always was going to be its No. 1 stated goal.

So it’s no surprise that the bill calls for the Department of Homeland Security to present Congress with plans for security and fencing strategies for the southern border before any of the country’s 11 million undocumented immigrants can become “Registered Provisional Immigrants,” allowing them to legally live and work in the United States. And before RPIs can apply for green cards, a border enforcement plan must be “substantially operational,” “maintaining effective control in all high-risk border sectors” in the Southwest.

Too bad, though, that there’s still no way to know how the bill’s benchmark border security stats will be determined.

Continue Reading »

Read more – 

The Immigration Bill’s Security Poison Pill

Posted in ALPHA, FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on The Immigration Bill’s Security Poison Pill