first one is a ‘dad’ lesson, when teaching me to keep my cool. i was around 11. rarely did lose my cool, but i would stew and then blow..said that when i lose my temper or try to ‘make’ someone do somehting, it’s my own skills that are lacking or not not being used. never forgot it and taught me to recognize it for what it is, in myself and others.

the second one is mine.

I think this post is spot on. CIA’s covert ops branch has always been given more credit for shadowy omnipotence than it deserves–especially by the Left. Bureaucracies are always inefficient and self-serving to some extent. Secret bureaucracies never have to be embarrassed enough to keep the idiocy in check.

Real intelligence gathering is what interrogators like Mr. Soufan and analysts like Empty Wheel do. It is hard, mentally challenging work–lots of reading, collating, and comparing. It is productive, but not much fun and not good for the budget. The CIA analysts told Reagan that the USSR was on its last legs just as he was trying to drive up the defense budget to astronomical levels and letting the covert ops people send Stinger missiles to Al Qaeda for use in Afghanistan. Bush ran into the same problem with analysis when it came to Al Qaeda, Iraq, and WMDs–boring people who come up with what you do not want to hear and spend way too little money doing it.

The jocks and Skull and Bones frat boys who fill the upper ranks of the CIA’s covert operations branch are thus much more popular with the politicians than the analysts who produce real intelligence. The ops types find research and painstaking interrogation boring. They get the desired answers, spend money, and, in Porter Goss’ case at least, can get you into a poker game or a hooker.

If half of what we suspect about the CIA’s conduct of late is true, we should disband it and reorganize the actual professionals into a new, more functional intelligence agency.

From the CQ piece:
“If a single FBI agent, with full security clearances and a contact number, were assigned to the CIA with the ability to investigate reports of fraud and waste provided by CIA employees,” he added, “it would set off a chain reaction of accountability.”

Just be sure to keep him/her out of the hands of the Dallas PD and away from Jack Ruby!

See, in this case, this fact is not pertinent to the story. This kind of RW bias is the reason why everyone knows about Elliot Spitzer’s hooker hijinx and so few are familar with Diaper Dave Vitter.

==thanks for the burris msnbc h/up…
when a battle is going on, i always watch the enemy, no need to watch an ally unless you’re looking for a traitor. which i guess we are.