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Jennifer Rubin tells us what the GOP got from the START treaty.
… All of that, along with reporting requirements concerning efforts to modernize our nuclear weapons, is quite a reversal for a president who pledge to “rid the world” of nuclear weapons.
It took a poorly negotiated treaty, a tenacious Jon Kyl and the efforts of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to coax Obama into a reasonable position on nuclear weapons and defense. And if the Russians cheat or withdraw, we will still, if Congress holds the president’s feet to the fire, have a modern nuclear weapons system and a robust missile defense. That’s not nothing.
NY Post editors comment on the Clapper flap.
…. On Monday, Diane Sawyer asked the White House’s top anti-terrorism brains about the fallout from the sweeping arrests of 12 men in the UK early that morning.
Clapper’s response: Silence. Crickets. The sound of one career, well, imploding. Pressed by Sawyer, he admitted he simply hadn’t heard of the matter.
It was a mortifying lapse given Clapper’s position: As DNI, he oversees all 16 US intelligence agencies and serves as chief intel adviser to the president. …
IBD editors too.
James Clapper’s ignorance of a major counter-terrorist success is less distressing than why he got his job as director of national intelligence: to “Obamacize” America’s spy operations.
Why was the nation’s top intelligence official unaware in an ABC News interview this week that Britain had, many hours earlier, foiled an al-Qaida-related plot of multiple suicide bombings targeting Christmas shoppers?
The White House at first claimed Director Clapper was busy all day preventing another Korean War and getting the New START treaty ratified. It was eventually admitted he hadn’t been briefed.
Could the truth be that Clapper is too busy as mega-bureaucrat? Science fiction novelist Jerry Pournelle has an “Iron Law of Bureaucracy”: “In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself.”
Worst of all, “The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization.” …
Jennifer Rubin draws important conclusions from the event.
… Putting aside the hapless Clapper, this should raise a more fundamental question: Do we need the DNI post at all? The elaborate reworking of our intelligence structure after Sept. 11 has made the system more cumbersome. But has it made us safer? Well, if it’s no big deal that the DNI missed a significant terror incident, then maybe his job and many layers of bureaucracy can be eliminated.
Michael Barone takes a quick glance at the meaning of new census numbers.
For those of us who are demographic buffs, Christmas came four days early when Census Bureau director Robert Groves announced on Tuesday the first results of the 2010 census and the reapportionment of House seats (and therefore electoral votes) among the states.
The resident population of the United States, he told us in a webcast, was 308,745,538. That’s an increase of 9.7 percent from the 281,421,906 in the 2000 census — the smallest proportional increase than in any decade other than the Depression 1930s but a pretty robust increase for an advanced nation. It’s hard to get a grasp on such large numbers. So let me share a few observations on what they mean.
First, the great engine of growth in America is not the Northeast Megalopolis, which was growing faster than average in the mid-20th century, or California, which grew lustily in the succeeding half-century. It is Texas. …
You may remember in December 16th Pickings the essay by Brooks and Wehner about competing human nature narratives when time was spent debunking the “noble savage” fairy tale from Rousseau and the Marxists. We have a couple of items that perfectly illustrate “nasty, brutish and short” – the concept of natural human life of Thomas Hobbs. First a NY Times story from Northern Spain where the examination of the bones of a Neanderthal family discovers they were cannibalized.
Deep in a cave in the forests of northern Spain are the remains of a gruesome massacre. The first clues came to light in 1994, when explorers came across a pair of what they thought were human jawbones in the cave, called El Sidrón. At first, the bones were believed to date to the Spanish Civil War. Back then, Republican fighters used the cave as a hide-out. The police discovered more bone fragments in El Sidrón, which they sent to forensic scientists, who determined that the bones did not belong to soldiers, or even to modern humans. They were the remains of Neanderthals who died 50,000 years ago.
Today, El Sidrón is one of the most important sites on Earth for learning about Neanderthals, who thrived across Europe and Asia from about 240,000 to 30,000 years ago. Scientists have found 1,800 more Neanderthal bone fragments in the cave, some of which have yielded snippets of DNA.
But the mystery has lingered on for 16 years. What happened to the El Sidrón victims? In a paper this week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Spanish scientists who analyzed the bones and DNA report the gruesome answer. The victims were a dozen members of an extended family, slaughtered by cannibals. …
Next item making the “noble savage” advocates look like fools comes from Google. Turns out 45 people have been lynched in Haiti over the past few weeks. They were suspected of being sorcerers who spread cholera. “Nasty, brutish and short”, and ruled by superstition says Pickerhead.
Angry Haitian mobs have lynched at least 45 people in recent weeks, accusing them of spreading a cholera outbreak that has killed over 2,500 people across the country, officials said Wednesday.
The number included at least 14 suspected sorcerers previously known to have been lynched in the far southwestern region of Grand’Anse as local people feared they were spreading cholera with a magical substance. The area has been largely spared by the outbreak. …
Interesting WaPo story about Michael Jordan’s two sons who play for U of Central Florida. UCF was 10-0 at press time and broke into the top 25 rankings for the first time ever.
After sophomore guard Marcus Jordan misfired on a jump shot minutes into a Central Florida game against Miami last Saturday, a fan sitting a few rows from the court taunted gleefully.
“You’re not your father!” the man said. “Did you get a DNA test? Are you sure?”
Heckling rains every time the Knights hit the road, and Jordan’s expression never changes. His head never turns. He knows he lacks his famous father’s size and ability to hover by the rim. He wears silver Air Jordan shoes and a black Air Jordan headband, but this heir Jordan did not get all of his father’s gifts.
In many ways, Jordan isn’t like Mike at all. He sports black-rimmed glasses, a goatee and mustache, and tattoos up and down both arms. …