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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (24084)	11/11/2007 11:12:26 PM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Mort Zuckerman Washington's toughest job newsandopinion.com \| Ambassador John Negroponte, designated as director of national intelligence (DNI), is the single best appointment of President Bush's second term. He brings to the job four decades of foreign policy and national security experience in challenging assignments, from Vietnam to Iraq. He is blessed with a rare quality shared by few— such as former Secretary of State George Shultz and former Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin— of serving in public office not for what it can do for his ego or the accretion of personal power but to find rational and pragmatic answers to the dilemmas facing this country. He will need all these qualities to cope with the vague authority over 15 intelligence agencies bequeathed to him by the congressional meat grinder. He has to slot in a new bureaucracy above existing agencies while not delaying or diminishing the intelligence going to the president. He has to coordinate his office with the directors of the CIA, the FBI, and the other agencies, so that cooperation at that level is translated down to the bureaucracy where the real work is done. Our biggest targets are al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents— elusive, stateless enemies. To penetrate them in foreign cultures, we need more human intelligence. Reorganizing our intelligence system and centralizing control in the DNI are only a start. Here are but some of the problems the new director faces: He is supposed to know of the work of the disparate and sometimes warring agencies but has no direct power to hire and fire; he has authority over the $40 billion intelligence budget but must share it with the defense secretary, whose department controls 80 percent of it; he has a Pentagon focused on intelligence that can help win the next battle instead of spending to prevent the next attack. What role will the DNI have in allocating funds? How will the DNI immerse himself in the details of analysis and analysts, operations and operators, in order to properly inform his dialogue with the president? In the draft resolution, the DNI was given "authority, direction, and control" of the CIA. It was diluted in Congress to say the CIA director will "report" to the DNI. That is too ambiguous. Imagine a CIA station chief somewhere in the world with an opportunity to target a key al Qaeda operative but under the following constraints: The target is in a friendly country whose leadership will be threatened if the operation goes badly; there is no absolute certainty he's a terrorist and the window of opportunity will close within hours. Who will decide? New layers. Typically, such a decision goes to the CIA director, who would most likely confer with the president's national security adviser. Now it must go to DNI for resolution. That will add another level to the decision-making process, but the DNI cannot be merely a waiter serving up food that is prepared by other cooks. At the very least, he must have serious control over the kind of food that is prepared, and the menu, especially when he will be blamed if things go wrong. The CIA is only one can of worms. How will the DNI monitor and control the FBI's counterintelligence operations here at home? Negroponte will not be directly in charge of any operation; nor of covert actions; nor possibly of CIA station chiefs; nor of the army of analysts whose job it is to connect the dots; nor of the operators of high-tech collection systems critical to finding and disrupting terrorist plans; nor of the Defense Department assets such as the satellite-eavesdropping systems. What he will have to do is gain adequate access to the people in the trenches. Negroponte's acute knowledge of how power works in Washington will help him, but he will need the resolute support of the president and the Congress, especially when things go awry. We should have learned by now that an intelligence service dedicated to a mistake-free, risk-averse zone of operations will not protect us. Intelligence is a business that must be prepared to assume risks and to accept the inevitability of some failures. The terrorists are conniving strategists who will fail frequently and be caught before they strike, but once in a while they will be able to get through. To be risk averse means never to be bold enough or creative enough to meet their challenge. George Tenet, former head of the CIA, made lots of progress in bringing the 20th-century intelligence community infrastructure into the 21st century. The new DNI will surely maintain and, let's hope, enhance that tradition of support for services that are so critical to our national well-being in the face of cunning and ruthless enemies. jewishworldreview.com

To: calgal who wrote (24084)	2/9/2009 12:50:50 PM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71588

Three Republican Senators Bring Socialism by Connie Hair 02/09/2009 America’s future in freedom hangs in the balance as three RINO senators on Friday announced they will join Democrats in their scheme to move this country irretrievably down the path to socialism. Senators Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) have indicated they will vote for the $1.3 trillion “stimulus” spending bill that purposes none other than precisely that outcome. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office ruled that less than 20 percent of the bill could in any way be considered stimulative. The vote for cloture in the Senate is scheduled for 5:30 pm today. If cloture is invoked, debate would end on the 778-page bill that was not released to the Senate until 11:00 pm Saturday. At noon on Tuesday the bill will be subject to another 60 vote hurdle by either waiving a budget point of order or achieving 60 votes on final passage. This bill that will ground this country in socialism will have passed the “greatest deliberative body in the world” with only one small window of debate on the bill as actually written on Monday afternoon. These three Republican senators should forever be held accountable for bringing unfettered socialism to bear on the American people. Remember their names -- Specter, Collins, Snowe -- and let this forever be their legacy. On the Senate floor Friday, Specter and Collins tried to justify their move by suggesting they were able to cut some spending out of the bill. It should be noted here that none were able to see their way through to cut the $4.2 billion slated for ACORN and like groups for “community stabilization.” An amendment offered by David Vitter (R-La.) that would bar ACORN from eligibility for these funds was voted down 51-45. ACORN, the group that once employed President Obama as a community organizer, is under federal investigation by the FBI for organized voter registration fraud, among other things. The $820 billion (pre-debt service total) House version of the bill that so outraged Americans would have actually cost $7 billion less than this Senate “compromise” bill being touted by the three Republican sellouts. Democrats are already indicating that the $827 billion was an optimistic number on this “compromise,” yet once the servicing of the debt is added in at $827 billion, the cost is already over $1.3 trillion dollars. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) told reporters last week when the bill goes to conference to be reconciled with the House version, he wanted expenditures cut from the Senate “compromise” bill put back in during the leadership huddle with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca.). Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), co-author of this so-called compromise, released staggering numbers in a chart giving subtotals of each category of spending (The numbers at the link are in thousands. I adjusted the figures below to include all actual zeroes in these massive numbers -- keep in mind this is in addition to the omnibus appropriations bill coming to Congress in the next week or two): Agriculture: $5,109,430,000 Commerce: $21,513,000,000 Defense: $3,746,000,000 Energy & Water: $53,843,000,000 Financial & Gen. Govt: $10,762,000,000 Homeland Security: $5,076,700,000 Interior: $11,643,600,000 Labor, HHS, Education: $169,184,000,000 Military & VA: $7,428,295,000 THUD: $60,580,500,000 Appropriations: $365,629,525,000 Notice Democrats did not break out the over $365 billion labeled “appropriations” for scrutiny when they released these preliminary numbers on Friday. By far, the largest expenditures in the remainder of these slightly more categorized numbers show hundreds of billions of dollars in payoffs to decades-long Democrat constituencies: the left-wingnut global warming loons, government takeover of healthcare, subsidized housing, payoffs to teachers’ unions and building contractors. One can only at this point imagine the hundreds of billions allotted to their pet constituencies in the “appropriations” portion of the bill. Never before in history has there been a $1.3 trillion dollar spending bill; supplemental, stimulus or otherwise. This isn’t yet the actual omnibus spending bill for fiscal year 2009 that was pulled off of last week’s House calendar by Pelosi lest it hurt the chances for passage of this spending orgy. That additional omnibus spending bill is expected to cost taxpayers another half-trillion dollars in borrowed money. None of these spending bills include the expansion of TARP, the coming ask for hundreds of billions of dollars in additional bank bailout funds expected by legislators in the coming week(s). Nor does this include the tens of billions for the Auto Workers’ Union disguised as a bailout for the Big Three auto industry. Democrats over the weekend had the audacity to term this a “bi-partisan” bill. Make no mistake: of the 219 Republican members of both the House and the Senate, Democrats may manage to get a whopping three Republican traitors to vote for this transfer of wealth out of the private sector. That hardly qualifies as bi-partisan, especially given that 11 Democrats voted against it in the House. Lest you believe that my opening statement “America’s future in freedom hangs in the balance,” to be hyperbole, I would remind you that last week we saw President Obama place a limit on how much money an entity who receives bailout money can pay their executives. That was quickly followed by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) proposing legislation that would restrict compensation to executives in all financial institutions and could encompass all U.S. companies. The legislation would give the Federal Reserve, an entity that is unelected and completely unaccountable to the American people, the authority to monitor systemic risk in the economy and, according to Barney Frank, shut down financial institutions that face too much exposure. What we are witnessing is a government takeover -- socialism on the march -- actually now at a full-blown sprint under Democrat leadership. The American people in multiple polls overwhelmingly object to this disastrous spending bill by upwards of 63% on Friday. A grassroots effort has sprung up led by members of the website FreeRepublic.com calling on folks to lobby the three RINO senators in person. They’ve got folks flying in for the effort that begins at 10:00 am on Monday from as far away as California. As Winston Churchill said in a speech in 1941 as he battled the takeover by force of England by National Socialists (Nazis), “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never-in nothing, great or small, large or petty -- never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.” -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Connie Hair is a freelance writer, a former speechwriter for Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) and a former media and coalitions advisor to the Senate Republican Conference. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- humanevents.com