historian said:

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Jack Bauer said:

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This....person..Just won Delaware's only congressional seat.

3/ McBride even wants boys to be able to compete against girls in sports. When a lawmaker brought up the unfairness faced by @Riley_Gaines_ against Will “Lia” Thomas, Tim evaded the obvious injustice by complaining that the Republican didn’t respect Thomas’s preferred pronouns. pic.twitter.com/bosMpXLuFa

— Michael Knowles (@michaeljknowles) November 14, 2024

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Mental illness should disqualify him from serving in Congress. His misogyny and support for child abuse are also disqualifying. Naturally, this level of perversion and disconnect from reality belongs to a "Democrat".

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His argument is that if one female professional athlete can beat just one male in the general population then that proves men dont have any biolofical advantage to women. Utterly cuckoos!

Yep. The fascists are trying to normalize mental illness just like their efforts to normalize every form of perversion, including pedophilia. They are evil.

Their entire agenda is to abuse power, & waste our money, for their evil ends.

FLBear5630 said:

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whiterock said:

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FLBear5630 said:

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whiterock said:

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Realitybites said:

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FLBear, you forget that Americans don't form their opinions about government workers in a vacuum. We form our opinions about government workers by dealing with government workers.

When you say that 99% are pros who do their jobs very well, our day to day experience knows it is an incorrect statement.

Every dedicated public servant in the burearucracy is vastly outnumbered by a legion of squirrel killers.

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very few bureaucrats are technocrats at anything other than exploring the boundaries of bureaucratic power.

it's just how the organism works. bureaucrats very, very rarely think of themselves as servants of the public. Very, very few ask themselves when they have latitude for judgement...."what is fair?"...."How would I want to be treated here." The nature of the job is to look at the law and serve the law, as far as the law allows.

That's how you get bureaucratic reinterpretations inverting law inside-out. That's how you have the plain wording of immigration statute citing "public charge" as an exclusion for entry or presence in the USA being interpreted to mean that someone on welfare benefits, food stamp benefits, unemployment benefits, etc....is not a public charge. It's how you get Title IX, a law written to carve out funding for women to have guaranteed opportunities for the same life lessons that men receive from engaging competitive sports....being used to force women to compete against biological males, having the share showers with biological males, etc....

There is no culture fix there. It is what it is. The only practical way to control it is to prune it back severely from time to time.

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My experience is on the infrastructure side. Just like some in the Defense or Maritime Industry, I doubt there are people building Chinooks or operating Ports that want it to fail. The disconnect may be that I am thinking of "Bureaucrats" in the physical world, not the administrative. I have no experience with Labor or Intel, but I can tell you from 30 years of experience NOBODY at USDOT wants a bridge to fail. Engineers have licenses on the line and potential criminal charges (yes, a bridge collapses because of a screw up or oversight manslaughter charges are possible).

Now the bean counters, that is a different story. I have no love for attorneys, accountants or risk managers! My experience the issue is the Private sector, embedding on projects and sucking it dry. They play a political game and have decisions be made on stuff other than quality and budget. You gut the Fed, you will have 5 times the private sector consultants taking over. Just like Iraq...

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Nobody is complaining about DOT engineers inspecting job sites or DOA meat inspectors swabbing beef carcasses. We're talking about the swamp in Washington and more specifically the use of intel and lawfare against political opponents.

Same for CIA. Its core mission is collection abroad, so most of the anger directed at CIA is misguided. But all those signatures on that letter citing the Biden laptop as Russian disinformation was indeed an egregious abuse of, at minimum, access to classified information. Those nutjobs tried to play politics and did grievous harm to the institution by calling its objectivity into question.

We've seen waaay too many abuses of power under Democrat administrations. Time to prune branches. Time for a few perp walks. Time for a few plea agreements that involve sacrificing pensions to stay out of jail. We simply MUST instill fear into the Senior Executive Service that engaging in partisan activity is not worth the risk. There is no firewall there at the moment. Must be rebuilt.

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As I said, I do not have any Intel experience and can't really weigh in. I defer to you, as you were in it. I do know that when the Private Sector filled the gap firms like Black Rock and others went hogwild. It was not any better, maybe better run? But they fed at the trough just as much. Private sector is not necessarily better.

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well, the contractors were para-military (PM) types, not collectors, so there's an apples/oranges thing there. We did Blackrock to keep US Military out of certain roles. CIA is better structured for that type of contracting, so that's who usually takes the lead.

Vast majority of CIA collectors (like high 90-percentiles) are straight up human source recruiters/handlers (or support) to penetrate identified FOREIGN targets of interest for policymaker consumption...Foreign Intelligence (FI) collection. The career para-military types are a different career category, and a very small percentage of the total. They spend most of their careers doing FI collection alongside FI Case Officers. They are properly considered "cadre" for the moments when a PM requirement erupts. Then, PM types get diverted to build unconventional warfare programs.....contractors, insurgent armies, etc..... When the requirement ends, the contracts end and the PM guys come back to FI to earn their keep until the next bush war somewhere. It's a sound construction based on experience. It's madness to build great unconventional warfare capabilities then flush it all & have to start over a few years later. Keep the best cadre around and you can be pretty nimble on short notice.

My best friend in my CT class was a E6 sniper going the PM route. we car-pooled from DC to the Farm. Wives were best buds. Daughters the same age, etc..... Favorite DCOS was a PM type. Had no military experience, really. Had a forestry degree and was recruited to do photo interpretation in Vietnam, to help identify strike targets and do BDA. He got noticed & picked up. Never got called back to a PM job, in no small part because of his talent in the FI realm = COS, C/Farm, Deputy Division Chief.....almost to the level where things get political. But not quite. Both were super human beings.

The number of politically involved jobs on the ops side at CIA is exceedingly small. It's the analytical side where that stuff happens. The analysts from all the various community agencies are a great big eco-system. They have to meet & coordinate finished intel analysis all day every day. A good player there can make waves. And the creation of NIA made that worse. It just created a whole bunch of beltway bandits with no real connection to intel connection, and sited them in immediate proximity to the policy world, creating a clear pathway for a politically ambitious intel type to make it into the policy realm.

The bright line in FI collection is "we write reports; we do not recommend policy." That's a pretty easy line to avoid when you're handling agents abroad. But when you're rubbing elbows with policymakers and their assistants all day/every day, the lines get smudged pretty badly in a day or two.

Jack Bauer said:

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Let me check with Bill Kristol....ok, Trump is doing a great job.

IT IS AS BAD AS WE THOUGHT IT MIGHT BE. ACTUALLY, WORSE.

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) November 14, 2024

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LOL I follow Bill. Occasionally reply, just to make fun of him.

whiterock said:

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historian said:

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We know that Hegseth is a great pick for DoD by the insane reactions by woke crazies:

https://notthebee.com/article/check-out-the-very-sane-liberal-reactions-to-trumps-pick-for-defense-secretary

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any selection which does not invite howls of outrage is a poor one.

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No issue, but t they need to go through confirmation. None of this recess ****, answer the questions and vote party line. Appoint who he wants, but they don't get a pass. They go through what everyone else has. Most will be fine on a straight GOP vote, some will have problems from both sides. That is a red flag.

“Government-funded non-governmental organizations” is obviously a contradiction in terms 😂

They are just an illegal arm of the government. https://t.co/j5CRlWK388

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 13, 2024

"All options are on the table, including recess appointments" -- John Thune pic.twitter.com/ofd1QOIruw

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 14, 2024

whiterock said:

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historian said:

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We know that Hegseth is a great pick for DoD by the insane reactions by woke crazies:

https://notthebee.com/article/check-out-the-very-sane-liberal-reactions-to-trumps-pick-for-defense-secretary

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any selection which does not invite howls of outrage is a poor one.

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Exactly.

Marco Rubio as secretary of state was a poor choice.

He should have gone with Rand Paul or Thomas Massie.