The CIA has become a bloated bureaucracy where senior bureaucrats are more interested in protecting their jobs than in gathering intelligence.  A sign of how bad things are is that more than 90 percent of all CIA employees work within the United States. This is curious for an organization whose purpose is to collect foreign intelligence, and it's against U.S. law. In every organization, bureaucracy boosts costs, stifles initiative, slows action.  Bureaucratization is especially pernicious in an intelligence agency, because intelligence is perishable, and risk taking and out-of-the-box thinking are required to gather and interpret it. The massive intelligence failure that led to 9/11 should have sparked reform.  It led to anti-reform, instead.  The CIA is such a mess now that only chopping it up into its constituent parts and assigning those parts to other agencies can lead to real improvement.  Thus concludes a top CIA operative of many years, "Ishmael Jones."  He's written a book you have to read.

Let's start the HFR this week by my asking you to stop reading it.  What I suggest you do right now, this very moment is to pick up the phone and call the local offices of both US Senators in your state. Ask to speak to the staffer who handles foreign policy/national security issues for the Senator.  Tell him or her that as a voting constituent, you respectfully request that the Senator vote NO on Senate Ratification on the nuclear arms control treaty - mislabeled "START II" as that was a treaty back in January 1993 - with Russia signed by Mr. Obama in Prague on April 8th. Explain that you consider this treaty to be dangerous to America in the extreme, as it requires the US to freeze its nuclear weapons technology, but not Russia.  This is, as critics are putting it, an open invitation to Russia to modernize its way to nuclear dominance. Do not get into a discussion with the staffer and avoid a debate with him.  Make it quick and polite.  Simply state your request, the reason for your request, and conclude with saying that how the Senator votes on this critical issue of US national security will determine how you vote when he or she is up for re-election. OK - make the calls (that's plural for you have two Senators) and I'll wait ‘till you get back....

It is, of course, true that no one loves the tax collector and that taxes are the price we pay for a civil society. But, as with anything else, there are proper and improper taxes and tax collection procedures and methods. According to news accounts, attacks and threats against IRS personnel are rising, and unfortunately, this trend is likely to continue until there is a fundamental change in our tax laws and collection methods. People who do not have access to the media and cannot afford expensive tax lawyers sometimes reach such a level of frustration with the IRS that they resort to violent or irrational behavior. IRS officials and workers will say the tax code is not their fault - it is the fault of Congress - and they are only doing their jobs. It is unambiguously true that the tax code and IRS are creatures of Congress, with all of its self-dealing, corruption, ignorance and incompetence. But this also is true: as was made explicit at the Nuremberg trials, those who carry out orders that they know to be wrong or should know to be wrong are not absolved of personal responsibility.

President Barack Hussein Obama reminded us this week that before he drives us into bankruptcy, he might get us all killed. On Tuesday (4/06), the president released his nuclear posture review (NPR).  Today in Prague (4/08), he signed a new nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia called START II. The NPR is the more significant, because treaties must be ratified by a two-thirds vote of the Senate, and the START II treaty is so manifestly harmful to the security interests of the United States that it is unlikely to obtain the 67 votes needed. The president listed five priorities in the NPR, noted James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation, a retired Army lieutenant colonel.  Defending the United States wasn't among them.  It's turning out that the greatest national security threat to America is America's own president.

It's a sign of how bad things are at CNN that management there thought David Shuster might help. Mr. Shuster is the MSNBC "reporter" notorious for his rants about what he perceives to be the intellectual and moral shortcomings of conservatives.  Mr. Shuster was suspended Friday (4/02) after MSNBC's management learned he had taped a pilot for a show with CNN. It is, of course, bad form to do such a thing for a rival without first getting permission from your own bosses.  But it is more Mr. Shuster's judgment than Mr. Shuster's morals that has me ROTFLMAO. Mr. Shuster is in the final year of his contract, and MSNBC's ratings have been nothing to write home about.  They were down 15 percent in prime time in the first quarter of 2010 from the first quarter of 2009; down 22 percent in all day programming. But looking for a job at CNN these days is like signing on to the crew of the Titanic after it struck the iceberg.