Random, occasionally rambling thoughts with links to interesting, scandalous, or partisan news of the day.

Fair and Balanced

Dead Heroes
• Thomas Paine
• Thomas Jefferson
• Benjamin Franklin
  

Living Heroes
We owe the liberty and freedom we take for granted to the enlisted men and women in the armed forces. They sacrifice family, ease, and even life laboring in service to all of us. The least we can do for them is honor their devotion with dignified pay scales, decent education for themselves and their children, and reasonable compensation for service away from their families and death on the battlefield. Flag waving politicians who praise the troops on one hand and cut their pay and benefits with the other should be deeply ashamed of themselves.

Blogs I Read Often
• Talking Points Memo
• Atrios
• FireDogLake
• Brad DeLong
• The Daily Howler
• Daily Kos
• Glenn Greenwald
• MyDD
• The News Blog
• Oliver Willis
• Political Wire
• The Volokh Conspiracy
  

FBI? An introductory article to the issues raised by FBI failures in recent years. As Glenn Reynold at Instapundit and many others have been saying, it's time for a hard look at this crime fighting bureau to see if it is up to the assignments it has been given. I'm not optimistic. The string of failures of intelligence go back far beyond 9/11. This is an agency with some incredible talent, wonderful investigators, and world class science. Sadly, it's hobbled by its own culture and a decades long resistance to technology. The final indignity it faces is a bureaucratic pecking order so entrenched that presidents can be ignored with impunity and without impact on career trajectory as long as institutional allegiance has been solid. All solutions to a rebirth with existing talent will involve some form of organizational sepuku. It won't be easy.
posted by Dave on 8:49 AM | 0 comments link

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