The eagle flies on Friday . . . and freezes its a** off. Even in Florida.

This is an Open Thread.

The New York Times reports some first-hand experiences this week on the world's new virtual battlefield: Airport security.

Will you fly, if you don't have to for work?

I gave it up in January, 2008 after the Iowa caucuses. With one exception in 2008 and two in 2009, I have gone from someone who for years flew somewhere every ten days, sometimes more, to someone who just said "Enough" with the waste of time and the hassle. (I think it was the "arrive at the airport 2 hours before your flight" and having to get your bags to the check-in counter 45 minutes before the flight, as well as the constant lifting of the carry-on bag to get the laptop out at screening and then packing it back in again and remembering the noise-canceling headphones and money spent unnecessarily on magazines and bottles of water and lousy food and always having my arms full, that pushed me over the top.)

And that was before all these new measures. I have no flights planned for 2010. I'm going to try to get through the year without taking any.

How about you? How much time waste and physical inconvenience are you willing to put up with?

For the college football national championship. From the Rose Bowl. Tonight.

I like Alabama's defense to stifle Colt McCoy and Mark Ingram and Trent Richardson to wear down the Longhorn defense.

I like the Crimson Tide (-4).

This is an Open Thread.

In a very ugly case of alleged domestic violence, John Farren, former Deputy Counsel to George W. Bush, is charged with attempting to kill his wife, a lawyer with Skadden, Arps in Washington. The incident occurred at their home in New Canaan, CT.

Police said Farren attacked his wife at their New Canaan home Wednesday night. According to police, she passed out during the attack but regained consciousness and fled with their children to the house of a neighbor, who called 911. There, police found her bleeding from her head, face and body.

She is reportedly at Norwalk Hospital in stable condition with a broken jaw, a broken nose and other injuries.

He is being held on a $2 million bond and appeared in court with bandages on his face and neck -- perhaps self-inflicted. He allegedly tried to kill himself two days before the attack when his wife served him with divorce papers. He's on a suicide watch. [More....]

OSI Systems, which owns Rapiscan, which makes the Rapiscan WaveScan 200 I described here, just got a new 10 year contract with Puerto Rico for its cargo imaging system, called the Rapid Eagle. But Puerto Rico says it's not for terrorism, but crime, including tax evasion:

Director of the Puerto Rico Ports Authority, Mr. Alvaro Pilar-Vilagran, stated that "the Puerto Rico Ports Authority is implementing this unprecedented scanning program....The program aims to eliminate the import of drugs, illegal weapons and other contraband into Puerto Rico, while affording the Ports Authority a mechanism to fight tax evasion.

In the last three months, the company's stock has grown 67%, from $17.03 to $29.07. I doubt it's peaked yet. And this is interesting: The company's CEO is Deepak Chopra. According to the company on December 30 (Dow Jones Newswire, subscription, no link): [More...]

Update: Overall theme: Here come the whole imaging body scanners. (Added: And, from Napolitano, here come the "behavior analysts," more cops and more dogs.)

President Obama's press conference is starting on the security review of the alleged attempted terror attack by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on Christmas Day.

You can watch live here.

I'll live blog for a bit, below the fold. [More...]

A senior Yemeni official today in explaining Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's movements, says he got the explosive device during his layover in Lagos, Nigeria when changing planes, not in Yemen. His layover, they have previously said, was 35 minutes.

But the official, Rashad al-Alimi, the deputy prime minister for national security and defense, cited Yemeni investigations and said that the Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, had acquired the explosives used in the failed attack not in Yemen, which he left on Dec. 4, but in Nigeria, where he changed planes at the Lagos airport on Dec. 24, boarding a flight to Amsterdam and then Detroit.

There are some inconsistencies. And where was he between December 4 and December 24? Ghana says he arrived there on December 9, from Ethiopia. They believe he had a 4 hour lay-over in Nigeria. (This can't be too hard to check.)

And more speculation on the role of cleric al Awlaki.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar says he won't run for Governor but will back Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper.

Sources close to Salazar said that Democrats had done quick polling that showed both he and Hickenlooper beating Republican candidate Scott McInnis if the election were held now.

I hope Hickenlooper decides to run. I doubt Salazar would have endorsed him unless he knows he will, so I suspect this is just about a done deal.

The White House is releasing a declassified version of the security review of the alleged attempted terror attack by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on Christmas Day.

President Obama will speak at 4:30 pm, ET. You can watch him live at the White House website here.

Following the report, Obama is expected to unveil new steps aimed at avoiding further attacks. The BBC also reports that Yemen's Deputy Prime Minister Rashad al-Alimi said today that Abdulmutallab met with cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Shabwa, the Yemeni province where he lives and that Abdulmutallab was recruited while a student at the University College London (UCL). The Guardian is reporting Yemen may arrest al Awlaki.

The feds have charged two former Blackwater guards with second degree murder and attempted murder in the Eastern District of Virginia.

They are Justin Cannon, 27, and Chris Drotleff, 29. Both are in custody. The charges arise from a shooting in Kabul in which two Afghans were killed.

Both men have said in recent interviews with The Associated Press that they were justified in opening fire on a car that caused an accident in front of their vehicle, then turned and sped toward them after they got out to help.

Bloomberg:

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, then led by Timothy Geithner, told American International Group Inc. to withhold details from the public about the bailed-out insurer’s payments to banks during the depths of the financial crisis, e-mails between the company and its regulator show.

AIG said in a draft of a regulatory filing that the insurer paid banks, which included Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA, 100 cents on the dollar for credit-default swaps they bought from the firm. The New York Fed crossed out the reference, according to the e-mails, and AIG excluded the language when the filing was made public on Dec. 24, 2008.

(Emphasis supplied.) Is any comment necessary?

Jon Walker fleshes out an argument I made for the entire year - going the 60 vote route in the Senate for "comprehensive" health care reform instead of following the Schumer two bills plan was political malpractice by the Democrats:

By insisting that the bill be passed using regular order, where it would need all 60 votes in the Democratic caucus to break a filibuster, Obama and Harry Reid made many conservative Democrats in the Senate take votes that were not in their political self-interest. The issue had become so partisan, attempts by conservative Democrats like Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln to make the bill more “centrist-y” and lard it up with local pork simply backfired. The conservative constituents are still angry because, in the end, they still voted for something labeled “health care reform,” and the Democratic base in state is now pissed because they ended up crippling the bill for seemingly no reason (let’s not forget Lincoln’s Senate website still claimed she supported a public option even as she was saying on the Senate floor that she would filibuster any bill that had one). Passing the bill using reconciliation with only 50 votes would have allowed several conservative Democrats–like Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, Evan Bayh, and Mary Landrieu–to avoid taking a tough political vote.