Category Archives: Politics: US

OK, this is hardly breaking news, but it was new to me. I thought that hiding a billion dollars or so to build themselves a marble-plated office building showed bureaucratic smarts; misplacing a couple of billion on the other hand, didn't sound so smart. To hear Dave Thompson, President & CEO, Spectrum Astro tell it at the Space Technology Hall of Fame Dinner in 2002, the National Reconnaissance Agency (NRO), had “posted a sorry decline into mediocrity and aristocracy.”

Among the charges: its satellites cost more and are technologically inferior to other agencies'. They fail too often. The agency makes choices poorly, favoring friendly contractors. And the NRO has no desire to change, or to innovate to help catch Al Qaeda. (Good news for 'Ossama bin Forgotten'?)

the NRO's procurement policy could be better described in three steps. I call this the policy of the smoked filled room. Step one – get all of the graybeards into the smoke filled room. Step two – close the door. Step three – pick the club member contractor who sucked up best.

As a result the “NRO is actually moving backwards, getting less capability and fielding less capable technology for the future. You know the NRO's real slogan should be “Buying Yesterday's Technology at Tomorrow’s Prices.”

And it gets worse:

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Here's a cute use of the Internet by anti-Dean forces: the Club for Growth, the folks with what sounds like a bizzaro anti-Dean TV commercial have a web site with a Dean Tax Calculator which purports to estimate, as they so sweetly put it “how much hard-earned money Howard Dean wants to steal from you.”

Dean may have stolen a march on the use of the net, but this Presidential campaign may work on Internet time….

To this administration, nothing is above political meddling (or is that medaling?): Medals Couple Two Conflicts (washingtonpost.com) reports that not only is the administration trying to lump the Afghanistan and Iraq wars under a single global 'war against terrorism' rubric for the purpose of campaign medals — a break with tradition — but that it also wants the backroom armchair warriors in that 'war' to be able to get the same medal as people who got shot at.

“The decision not to issue separate medals seems to be the work of people who do not appreciate the importance of the values that help form a strong military culture,” added retired Army Col. John Antal, a former tank commander, who edits a magazine devoted to military history. “Politicians should be very careful when they tinker with the system that reinforces the critical values that help make our military the most capable in the world.”

But Pentagon officials say the issue is closed.

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Mark A. R. Kleiman: Anatomy of a fake scandal writes about the creation of what appears (from all we know) to be a totally fake scandal about Howard Dean's $15K in bank stocks.. Kleiman gets it, I'd say, exactly right.

How sad to see the Wall Street Journal reporters, traditionally models of journalism, descend into the gutter with their colleagues on the NY Daily News (and WSJ editorial page…).

Meanwhile, Josh Micah Marshall elegantly and surgically takes apart the attempt by neocons to label their critics as anti-semites (yes, they really do that—truth is stranger than fiction).

Remember, the real anti-semite is here. Yet have any newspapers cancelled his column? Not likely.

“We emitted low chuckles at Zell Miller’s clowning. But why are faux Dems on the march?“

Yes, the incomparable Daily Howler is at last back from vacation.