My family doesn’t go to the theater often; the kids might go to a movie with friends a couple times a year, and a parent might go with a child if there’s something they both want to see. But a family outing happens maybe twice a year in a good year, and only if there’s a decent movie. More often than not we go during spring holiday or over the Thanksgiving/Christmas holiday.

And yesterday was that day; we took off on the spur of the moment to see the seventh and penultimate installment of the Harry Potter series. As expected, their dad fell asleep about half way through the movie as he usually does; I can’t think of a movie we’ve seen as a family when he didn’t doze off, so it’s not a critique on the movie. It’s probably the only time he’s sitting still in the dark during the afternoon, and with his belly full of popcorn head bobbing is inevitable.

But the kids were rapt with attention, even though this particular movie was more mature thematically just as the characters were more mature. And I guess that’s why I found this movie bittersweet.

My kids have been growing up right along with Harry, Ron and Hermione, and like these young adults beginning to fledge and face risks on their own, so are my kids.

It didn’t hit me until we saw the portion of the movie in the trailer I’ve embedded here, which is one of the nicest pieces of editing in the entire movie. My daughter would fit right in with the three characters sitting at the table in the diner; my son could just as easily be zoned out listening to his iPod just as the waitress is in this clip.  . . .

photo: What What via Flickr

“What Can President Ali Abdullah Saleh Do About His Failed State?”

[Picture of a confused-looked Saleh with his right hand tucked behind the nape of his neck]

“Yeah, Keep Scratching Your Head.”

And then the attribution: “This ad is brought to you by A Cold Diss.”

That’s the twelfth PDF’d page of the third issue of Inspire, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s third issue. Inspire is a publication whose themes can pinball wildly. The first issue offered romantic stories of what young men can expect when they go to fight for religious-based conspiracy theories, with a sub-feature on how to “make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom.” The second issue potted up the first issue’s subordinate theme: this time, O American Believer, you shouldn’t go to Mirim Shah or Yemen to fight; you should stay home in the U.S. and pull off small-scale attacks, like shooting up a D.C. sandwich place or ramming a Ford F-150 up on a pedestrian-packed sidewalk.

The third is about bragging on last month’s printer-bomb plot. Much shorter than the others, and coming less than two months after the last issue, it’s a rush job. Its cover shows a UPS plane taking off in front of the legend $4,200 — in other words, the success of the plot isn’t in its ability to kill people, it’s in demonstrating the disproportionate economic and psychological impact that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula can cause even when it fails.

Guess what: that’s Terrorism 101. Make a virtue out of being on the short end of a strategic asymmetry. Now, the varying themes of Inspire reveals an objective confusion: AQAP doesn’t know where its next success will come from (Yemen? Inside the U.S.?), so it’ll plant the rhetorical seeds to portray the failed ones as advancing stages of a Cunning Plan. That’s why they call the cargo-bomb plot “Operation Hemorrhage.” Consider . . .

(X) photo: chalo84 via Flickr

I wasn’t going to write a post debunking this Nation article on the opposition to gate grope. Sure, it was a specious hit on John Tyner, the “Don’t touch my junk” dude. But I figured as soon as anyone read this passage:

Tyner attended private Christian schools in Southern California and lives in Oceanside, a Republican stronghold next to Camp Pendleton, the largest Marine Corps base on the West Coast.

Readers would just dismiss the entire article as so sloppy to be embarrassing. I mean, did the Nation really insinuate that everyone who goes to a private Christian school and everyone who lives in Oceanside, CA, including the thousands of Marines stationed at Pendleton, have suspect political opinions? Hey, I live in an even stronger Republican stronghold next to these guys, who just got listed as a hate group. I guess that means all my political beliefs should be assumed to be hateful, huh? Serves me right for living close to my husband’s job.

But after reading the authors’ response to Glenn Greenwald’s critique of the article, I thought a more detailed response was worth doing.

You see, Mark Ames and Yasha Levine claim their only mistake in the first article–one they don’t find all that egregious–was in insinuating certain things about Tyner. But they suggest their underlying point–that we should question “the official narrative” about the opposition to gate grope–is still valid: