Justin Raimondo on Radio

Antiwar.com editorial director will appear on a panel to discuss the Presidential campaign of Rep. Ron Paul. Your Call is doing panels on each candidate running for President.

It will be broadcast Wednesday morning 10-11am (Pacific time), 1-2pm (Eastern time).

You can listen live on the Internet or in the San Francisco Bay Area on KALW radio (91.7 FM).

An archive of the show will be available here within a day.

The Socialist Party Debate

There’s one candidate on-stage in New Hampshire who believes that the free market – the real, honest-to-God free market, sans subsidies and global military intervention – should determine the price of energy resources. Guess who.

UPDATE: That godd**n fool John King just claimed that ALL of the Republicans said the troops must stay in Iraq or else there will be a disaster. Guess which one didn’t.

UPDATE 2: Ridiculous pandering to The Troops™ – except, again, from Ron Paul (who actually served in the military). McCain invokes the popular sunk-costs fallacy, claiming that we must stay so that all those Americans will not have died in vain. But Benito goose-steps around the diamond after hinting that the media is stabbing The Troops™ in the back with all the negative coverage. The crowd goes wild.

UPDATE 3: Rev. Huckabee: We’re the sh*t because we don’t strap bombs to our fetuses the way the jihadists do. Or something.

UPDATE 4: When asked what’s the most pressing moral issue today, Ron Paul answers that it’s our country’s policy on preemptive war, especially the potential of a nuclear attack on Iran. Hell yes.

Now back to the pro-life baloney from the Strangeloves.

UPDATE 5: Mitt Ronald Reagan Romney makes a play for McCain and Giuliani’s militarists by pledging more troops, more “defense” spending, more more more. Giuliani and McCain fight to win them back by playing the nobody’s-calling-it-ISLAMIC-turrrr card.

And now, thank Jeebus, it’s done.

See, the JFK plot was bogus

Just like I said when the story broke.

LA Times:

Aviation experts cautioned Saturday that the alleged plot targeting John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York would have faced many hurdles, not least of which is the fact that jet fuel does not easily explode.

“The level of catastrophe that may be created is much more limited than most people would expect,” said Rafi Ron, former head of security at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport. “The fuel that we are talking about is mostly jet fuel, which, unlike the gasoline most people put into their cars, is not that susceptible to explosion.”

That difficulty apparently concerned one of the alleged plotters — an engineer who, federal authorities said in their complaint, explained to his associates that the tanks at JFK would probably require two explosions to provide enough oxygen to ignite the fuel.

But even then, aviation security experts said, fire would not have spread through the pressurized pipelines that bring fuel out to airplanes parked at gates.

“The probability that an explosion would travel through the pipeline and destroy targets along the tarmac is almost nil,” said Ron, now president of New Age Security Solutions in Rockville, Md. “The exception would be pipelines that are not in use and contain vapor.”

New York Times:

The criminal complaint filed by the federal authorities against the four defendants in the case — one of them, Abdel Nur, remained at large yesterday — suggests a less than mature terror plan, a proposed effort longer on evil intent than on operational capability. …

Some law enforcement officials and engineers also dismissed the notion that the planned attack could have resulted in a catastrophic chain reaction; system safeguards, they said, would have stopped explosions from spreading.

The complaint, filed in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, also suggests that at least two of the suspects had some ambivalence. One of the men was game for bombing the airport but leery about killing masses of people, the complaint says. Another dropped out of the plot for a time to tend to his business. …

As with many post-9/11 terror plots, the line between terrible aspiration and reality can get lost in a murky haze.

In case after case, from what authorities said was a dirty bomber to the Lackawanna Six, federal prosecutors hail arrests of terrorists and disruptions of what they describe as sinister plots. But as these legal cases unfold, the true nature of the threats can come into question. …

The papers give reason for doubt about the competence of the suspects. The details tend to suggest a distance between Mr. Defreitas’s dream and any nightmarish reality.

There is, too, the question of the role played by the unidentified undercover informant who befriended Mr. Defreitas.

The informant is a convicted drug trafficker, and his sentence is pending as part of his cooperation agreement with the federal government, said the authorities. …

Many of the plot’s larger details are left to the imagination.

Surprisingly frank discrediting of the DoJ’s assertions by the two Timeses, I’d say.

Generally, I think the rule of thumb is that the louder TV yells the less scared we should be.

Update: The AP has more on the informant-provocateur here.

Update 2: Arthur Silber takes on the case and the sissy-pants scaredy cats at the National Review.