All the 'No Specific or Credible Threat' Talk Isn't Reassuring, Mr. President
November 25: Ahead of the busy Thanksgiving holiday, the U.S. government is "taking every possible step" to keep the country safe, President Barack Obama said Wednesday, seeking to reassure travelers and adding there is no known "specific and credible threat" to the U.S. "We are taking every possible step to keep our homeland safe," Obama said following a meeting with his national security advisers. Obama said he and his team "know of no specific and credible intelligence indicating a plot on the homeland and that is based on the latest information I just received in the Situation Room." We know what happened after that: Enrique Marquez Jr., who bought the assault rifles used in a terrorist attack that killed 14 people this month, was charged Thursday with conspiring to carry out two other attacks in 2012, federal officials said. Marquez and Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the shooters on Dec. 2, had planned to attack other targets in Southern California, including a nearby community college and highway, according to a criminal complaint. The documents provide the clearest look yet not only of Marquez but also of Farook, who died in a shootout with police after the massacre. Farook was interested in violent extremism at least two years before he and his future wife, Tashfeen Malik, corresponded online about waging violent jihad, according to Marquez's account to the government. The charges against Marquez are the first to stem from the investigation into the massacre, the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001. President Obama, yesterday: Flanked by his national security team, President Obama reassured Americans that there was "no specific, credible threat" against the country ahead of the holidays. "We do not have any specific and credible information about an attack on the homeland," Obama said today at the National Counterterrorism Center. "That said, we have to be vigilant." For obvious reasons, there is nothing reassuring about Obama telling us he hasn't seen any specific and credible information about an attack on the homeland. Even when this president attempts to tell people he's focused on what worries them, there's that lingering note of condescension. The Washington Post's David Ignatius, after an off-the-record meeting with the president at the White House: Obama seems to have realized that he was slow to respond to public fear after the jihadist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif. His low-decibel approach led the public to worry he wasn't doing enough to keep the country safe. Obama, not a cable television fan, apparently didn't realize the state of anxiety. Yeah, because only cable-news viewers are concerned about terrorism. Today, Jonah summarizes the national mood quite well: [Chris] Christie says, "We have people across this country who are scared to death." No doubt that's true. But for a great many of them, I suspect, the fear is not so much a fear of the Islamic State but a fear that our own government, starting with the president, just doesn't take terrorism seriously. We now know he was very late in taking the Islamic State seriously. I suspect most conservatives think that if America marshaled the sufficient will to defeat the Islamic State, we'd make short work of it. Obama has no interest in such an undertaking. He reserves his passion for attacking Republicans or pushing his other priorities, such as climate change, which persistently remains a very, very low priority for most Americans. Obama is set to leave today for two weeks in Hawaii; "he will stop on the way in San Bernardino to meet privately with the families of the 14 victims of the attack there on Dec. 2." On the one hand, life has to go on; canceling the president's vacation would be a symbolic win for the terrorists. On the other hand, it's not like we haven't seen Islamist terrorists attempt an attack on -- or technically, above -- American soil around Christmas, while Obama was vacationing in Hawaii. Bernie Sanders's Campaign Teaches Hillary a Lesson about Server Security "Kids will grow up knowing that every damn thing that they do is going to be recorded some place in a file, and I think that will have a very Orwellian and very inhibiting impact on the way we live our lives!" Bernie Sanders shouted earlier this year. Sanders and his campaign can't stand the thought of somebody snooping around files of your private information. Because they're all about fair play, right? The Democratic National Committee has temporarily cut off Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign from accessing its voter files after a staffer viewed private voter information compiled by the campaign of 2016 Democratic rival and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Mr. Sanders' campaign has fired one staffer over the incident. His campaign manager blamed the software vendor hired by the DNC for a glitch that enabled the access, according to The Washington Post, which first reported the news. "The DNC places a high priority on maintaining the security of our system and protecting the data on it," DNC spokesman Luis Miranda said in a statement to The Post. "We are working with our campaigns and the vendor to have full clarity on the extent of the breach, ensure that this isolated incident does not happen again, and to enable our campaigns to continue engaging voters on the issues that matter most to them and their families." I can't wait until we see Hillary Clinton complaining about insecure servers. In other news, Gawker reports, "Clinton Aide Who Avoided FOIA Insists He Didn't Want to Avoid FOIA When He Wrote 'I Want to Avoid FOIA'." There's a Democratic debate tomorrow night, but let's face it -- you have something better to do the Saturday night before Christmas, don't you? Democrats, you're a party full of wimps. If you had any guts, you would rise up against Debbie Wasserman Schultz and a party that schedules its debates for times of minimum audience: Mr. O'Malley, who has been the most vocal about the timing of the debates, complained about the issue in August. "They've scheduled it during shopping season, December 19th," Mr. O'Malley said. "I don't know why that is. I think it's out of a false sense that they have to circle the wagons around the inevitable front-runner." A spokeswoman for Mr. O'Malley's campaign said that avoiding prime-time debate slots was a way for the Democratic Party to "protect" Mrs. Clinton, and that it had given Mr. Trump and the Republicans a better platform to express their views. 72 Percent of Americans Think the Country Is Still in a Recession Bloomberg BusinessWeek points out the obvious, which is why despite the Obama administration's crowing about the economy, neither Hillary Clinton nor Bernie Sanders are running on a vow to continue his economic record: It's an angry Christmas, and it's worth thinking about why. Something has changed to create such a shift in the public's leanings, from taking a chance on Obama's audacity of hope to delighting in Trump's straight-up audacity. Fear of Islamic terrorism has something to do with it. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that achieved approximately nothing and the stunning rise of China as a rival power have also left many Americans feeling confused and vulnerable. But the most potent fuel for Trumpism is undoubtedly the sick economy. A long stretch of underperformance has seeded mistrust in the American Dream among millions of would-be breadwinners, especially people without college educations. As everyone knows by now, a winner-take-all economy is producing big gains for a thin stratum at the top but little for anyone else. Bernie Sanders likes to point out that the top 10th of 1 percent of families control as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. The inflation-adjusted income of the median American household is lower now than in 2000. On average, young men are earning less after inflation than their fathers did at the same age. More than a fifth of American children live below the poverty line, according to Census Bureau data. Even though the unemployment rate is down to 5 percent and the last recession ended in 2009, 72 percent of Americans think the country is still in a recession, according to a Public Religion Research Institute survey released last month. ADDENDA: The Christmas week edition of the pop culture podcast arrives today. Jazz Shaw of Hot Air joins us this week, discussing his productive hobby of growing horseradish. Mickey and I dissect all the clichés of Hallmark's saccharine but somehow irresistible Christmas movies, the pitfalls of holiday party attire, and yeah, some movie that's coming out this weekend. Yes, I saw THE movie last night. My one-word, spoiler-free review: "WOW!" (That's a good wow, not a bad one.) Yes, somehow it found a way to live up to the expectations for every Star Wars fan who has been hoping for an indisputably good Star Wars movie since 1983. | 
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