As you know, it seems there was some level of intelligence failure in the Xmas Bomber case. Our key intelligence agencies didn’t piece together several different shards of evidence which may at least have led to Abdulmutallab to get a closer screening in Amsterdam and maybe caught before he boarded. But as I’ve read more into this I’ve found that there’s been at least some level of media failure, in that I’ve had a hard time finding in one place all the different things that we allegedly knew.

Now, clearly, it’s going to be very hard to find out officially and on the record just what was known. But I’ve wanted to find in one place all the things that credible news organizations have claimed this or that arm of the US government knew. And here are two examples of things I’ve come across in the last couple days but had not heard more widely. Read More

If you’re a crooked sheriff, dealing weed out of your Sheriff’s Dept SUV, one good way to make your drug dealing partner flip on you and become a snitch for the DEA is to threaten to kill him and ask for a percentage of his drug dealing profits.

Why are we giving these terrorists the honor of being called ‘criminals’ when we could really stick it to them and label them ‘warriors’?

Think Dodd’s withdrawal was a good thing for the Dems.

The PPP poll out today had Dodd losing narrowly to Rob Simmons, former House Republican and most likely GOP nominee, by a margin of 40% to 44%. And that’s actually an improvement on where he had been.

When they slotted in Richard Blumenthal, the state AG who’s now almost certain to get the Democratic nomination, he outpolled Simmons by a margin of 59% to 28%. And he had actually did slightly better against Linda McMahon, the only major contender for the GOP nomination.

As noted below, Chris Dodd’s departure leaves Democrats in a very strong position to hold the Connecticut senate seat. If yesterday was a dismal day for Democrats in general, as I explain in the post below, it was an even worse one for Rob Simmons.

But there’s another odd and paradoxical beneficiary: Joe Lieberman. Read More

The LA Times is currently running this breaking news headline: “U.S. learned about alleged extremist links of airline bomber as he was in the air.”

Good bet that that’s a leak from the report the White House is going to release tomorrow about the preliminary investigation into the incident.

Should be an eventful day.

Late Update: The Times piece is up now. The gist is that US Border enforcement officials figured out that Abdulmutallab might be a problem once the flight had already taken off. And they were actually planning on questioning him once he landed in Detroit. Here’s a key passage:

“the window for identifying a passenger as a potential threat before boarding is limited, according to a senior homeland security official. Although U.S. border enforcement officials have access to passenger data based on reservation lists and use them for preliminary assessments, the in-depth vetting by Customs and Border Protection only begins once the flight manifest has been generated, just a few hours before takeoff, and focuses on potential actions to take at the U.S. border, the official said.”

In addition to the big ticket races you’re hearing about, one of the big stories of 2010 is going to be the “tea party primaries,” the series of GOP primaries around the country in which Tea Party candidates are either challenging GOP incumbents or going up against the anointed (and usually more moderate) challenger to the sitting Democrat. Here are three ‘tea party primaries’ we’re currently watching.

Today we’re going to get the first official read out of the White House on just what happened and what went wrong on the intel front with the Xmas Bomber. But another point I’ve wanted to get to the bottom of is whether there’s really anything to the claims that some former Gitmo inmates were involved in planning the attack. So I had Justin Elliott look at everything we know and separate the facts from the Sunday show hullabaloo. Take a look at his report. It’s an excellent primer for making sense of this part of the debate.

Later today we’re going to have another write up, putting together all that was allegedly known in advance about Abdulmutallab. To help us put that post together, click here.

Whatever else you can say about the ‘Yes Men’ political hoaxster group, they’ve got this uncanny ability to get the targets of the pranks to go completely nuts and wildly overreact. In this new case, the ‘Yes Men’ spoofed/imitated a Canadian government website. And the Canadian government created a sort of international case in response, pulling in law enforcement and other counterpart agencies across Europe to force the site offline. And in the process, once Germany and Denmark had been pulled into the hunt, they managed to zap thousands of other websites in the process.