Fausta's Blog

Some of us do not like carols. Take the Carol of the Bells, for instance, a repetitive, brain-numbing, annoying, nightmare-inducing piece if ever there was one.

But we like Christmas music, so, what to listen to?

These 4 selections will bring Christmas joy with a different twist, and better yet, you can get them on MP3 right now.

Enjoy!

Christmas is almost here!

Selected by the WSJ’s editors:

The Astaires
By Kathleen Riley (Oxford)

Fred Astaire was our most elegant film star. But he danced in the shadow of a partner, his glamorous sister, Adele, until she retired from the stage in 1932 and he headed off to Hollywood. Kathleen Riley chronicles this sibling non- rivalry and gives us a broad portrait of a very American art form, the Broadway and Hollywood musical. “A salute to an America at ease with itself,” our reviewer called it. This is cultural biography at its best.
…
The Signal and the Noise
By Nate Silver (Penguin Press)

Numbers don’t, in fact, speak for themselves. Much has been made of Nate Silver’s electoral predictions. But his impressive book explores the principles of prognostication in fields from sports and politics to Wall Street and the weather. His “breezy style makes even the most difficult statistical material accessible,” our reviewer said, as Mr. Silver gently reveals how too often we color data with our hopes and biases.

All of them are available on Kindle, too.

You can track him here.

Via Eneas.

UPDATE
Welcome, Memeorandum readers!

NORAD is tracking Santa Claus! Click here and find out where he is now.

The handling of the Christmas Day bombing suspect: the scandal grows

The real scandal surrounding the failed Christmas Day airline bombing was not the fact that a terrorist got on a plane — that can happen to any administration, as it surely did to the Bush administration — but what happened afterward when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was captured and came under the full control of the U.S. government.

After 50 minutes of questioning him, the Obama administration chose, reflexively and mindlessly, to give the chatty terrorist the right to remain silent. Which he immediately did, undoubtedly denying us crucial information about al-Qaeda in Yemen, which had trained, armed and dispatched him.

We have since learned that the decision to Mirandize Abdulmutallab had been made without the knowledge of or consultation with (1) the secretary of defense, (2) the secretary of homeland security, (3) the director of the FBI, (4) the director of the National Counterterrorism Center or (5) the director of national intelligence (DNI).

The Justice Department acted not just unilaterally but unaccountably. Obama’s own DNI said that Abdulmutallab should have been interrogated by the HIG, the administration’s new High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group.

Perhaps you hadn’t heard the term. Well, in the very first week of his presidency, Obama abolished by executive order the Bush-Cheney interrogation procedures and pledged to study a substitute mechanism. In August, the administration announced the establishment of the HIG, housed in the FBI but overseen by the National Security Council.

Where was it during the Abdulmutallab case? Not available, admitted National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair, because it had been conceived for use only abroad. Had not one person in this vast administration of highly nuanced sophisticates considered the possibility of a terror attack on American soil?

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It gets worse. Blair later had to explain that the HIG was not deployed because it does not yet exist. After a year! I suppose this administration was so busy deploying scores of the country’s best lawyerly minds on finding the most rapid way to release Gitmo miscreants that it could not be bothered to establish a single operational HIG team to interrogate at-large miscreants with actionable intelligence that might save American lives.

The decision can not be reversed, either

Lieberman and Sen. Susan Collins had written an earlier letter asking for Abdulmutallab to be turned over to the military for renewed interrogation. The problem is, it’s hard to see how that decision gets reversed. Once you’ve read a man Miranda rights, what do you say? We are idiots? On second thought . . .

The decision to hold the KSM trial in NY can be reversed. The missed opportunity to gather meaningful intelligence from a terrorist can not.

Now Congress gets in the act, Congress and Terror Trials
Use the constitutional power to set court jurisdiction:, since Congress

can pass a law that strips the federal courts of jurisdiction over such unlawful enemy combatants as Abdulmutallab and KSM.

Let’s hope they do.

UPDATE
Newsy has a report on Yemen, where the pantybomber got his training and materials,