Obama’s officials represent the president, it seems you fail to acknowledge this fundamental fact. If security officials are on the job – Obama is effectively on the job because he is their employer after all.
Unless you prefer Obama to leave behind the Christmas turkey in favour of immediate interviews with the press than I see no real reasoning behind your comments or any others along such lines for that matter.

Apart from the bleak lapse in airport security I find it premature to criticize Obama as president for a somewhat belittled response.

“the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning.”

I haven’t looked at the numbers too closely, but there is a very obvious error in his assumptions. Terrorist attacks are not independent and random events like a lightning strike. In fact they are very much connected to the airport security. You can’t by any reason think that the likelihood of being subject to a terrorist attack is the same with current security or with zero security.

Maybe the low likelihood is because of current security.

Read the whole thing to get his ballpark calculations. We are spending insane amounts of money and time on airport security relative to the risk.

An interesting thought experiment: take the amount of time people spend dealing with airport security across (say) America over a year, and divide it by the average human life-span..

@Repton: you’ve nailed it. CYA.

@Eszett: Naive? Maybe. But even if the attack succeeded, that doesn’t make the case for tighter security! Millions of flights run every year. Don’t give me any of this “Even one is too much” crap. Because if that’s the case, then EVERYBODY gets a full strip search full body cavity search before every flight and nobody gets any luggage, carry on or checked. It’s all about the margin.

The risk is very very low. At the current margin, we’re doing WAY too much security. Here’s Nate Silver, who’s run the numbers (with which I’d be updating my prior post absent GOOGLEFAIL):

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/12/odds-of-airborne-terror.html

“the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning.”

Read the whole thing to get his ballpark calculations. We are spending insane amounts of money and time on airport security relative to the risk. How much did you spend this year to keep yourself from being hit by lighting? If zero, ask yourself why the hell you’re being forced to spend infinitely more than that to avoid something that’s two orders of magnitude smaller risk.

Is it:

(a) Immediately after a previous hijack or bomb attempt.
(b) After a long quiet period since the last hijack or bomb attempt.

If you answered (a), congratulations, you are qualified for a public service career in airline security!

Suppose you’ve a TSA manager with some decision-making power. You make the intelligent decision (i.e. you get rid of some of this pointless “security”, or decline to increase it), but then later, an attack happens and succeeds. People will be calling for your head. Do you think you can win an argument in the media about probabilities and complex trade-offs? It’s not likely. So you order the increase. It won’t cost _you_ much personally, and at least you keep your job if the unthinkable does happen.

Razork, this could easily have been a Christmas Day tragedy. The timing of this guys action, 10 mins from landing, indicates he wanted it to blow up over Detroit and crash into the city. On Christmas Day.

Obama is sending a message to America both with his lack of response and this new policy that requires passengers to sit in their seats. The message is: it’s OK to do nothing.

If he can’t see that’s not right, he doesn’t deserve to be President.

That’s the point.

BTW, I gave you that particular link because it was coming from a liberal, thus showing that his inaction is being condemned across the spectrum and is not just a partisan move from the usual suspects.

Primarily it was the incompetence of the terrorists that saved everyone, on this latest incidence as well as with the show bomber Reid. Only the fact that the detonators did not work properly did give the passengers enough time to overpower him. And only because of airport security weren’t they able to bring proper detonators on board in the first place.

They probably had no doubt in their minds that the bombs would go off immediately. Why else would they not go to the lavatory to set off these bombs. It seems the obvious choice.

December 28th, 2009 at 11:12 am
Obama after hearing about it went to the gym then had a game of golf.

Missed the boat.

AS OPPOSED TO?
What did you want him to do?
Rush back and interview the guy?
He’s not Jack Ryan.

You do know that don’t you?

Missed the boat.