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Why should anyone pay attention to anything Dick Cheney says?
Archive for the ‘Feeling Safer Yet?’ Category
December 8th, 2008
Category: Energy and Environment, Feeling Safer Yet?
George Bush insisted that the only way to fund the auto companies’ bridge loan was to take it from funds earmarked for enhancing automobile fuel efficiency.
This will help oil prices stay higher, allowing governments like Iran’s to buy off its population with subsidies.
I’m sure that the mullahs in Tehran are delighted.
July 15th, 2008
Category: Feeling Safer Yet?, Terrorism and its control
Only Mark Kleiman could get to the heart of the FBI’s counter-terrorism challenges with a bike and a hair dryer. He’s quite right: the FBI’s “transformation” ain’t pretty. Just last month, a Senate report found that FBI headquarters did not meet security standards to handle classified information. The new head of intelligence [...]
July 14th, 2008
Category: Feeling Safer Yet?
The FBI turns 100 this month. Here are 5 gifts I’d love to get the Bureau:
1. An electronic case file system that actually works.
2. Phone books that stop labeling analysts “support,” the catch-all category for non-agents that lumps analysts with secretaries, janitors, and mechanics.
3. Filling the 38% of international counter-terrorism supervisor positions that are [...]
June 25th, 2007
Category: Feeling Safer Yet?, GWB, the Beloved Leader, Terrorism and its control, The Post-Modern Presidency
Finishing up John Lewis Gaddis’ The Cold War: A New History, a passage on the Marshall Plan resonated with me, in chilling fashion.
Gaddis observes (pp. 103-104) that the exhausted Soviet Union could never have competed with the Americans in resuscitating European economies after the Second World War:
The Americans had another advantage, however, that had nothing [...]
June 18th, 2007
Category: Feeling Safer Yet?
I have just finished reading Stephen Flynn’s wonderful new book, The Edge of Disaster, which is an excellent introduction on homeland security and disaster recovery issues. Three facts about current policy stand out:
1) Under the Bush Administration’s budgets, there is far more money spent by the Pentagon protecting its own domestic military installations [...]
December 26th, 2006
Category: Feeling Safer Yet?
With the Democrats’ acquisition of subpoena power, we will start learning in nauseating detail just how badly the Bush Administration has undermined American national security (thus, the new category). Already, we’ve been getting dribs and drabs, including this overlooked nugget from an excellent piece in TAP by Lawrence Korb and Max Bergmann, pointing out [...]