This scares me a hell of a lot more than anti-gov psychos, Al Qaeda or any other country, for that matter.

Gates also predicted North Korea will have a nuclear missile that directly threatens the U.S. within five years.

Sweet.

I would rather never have known her name.

A relatively minor Dem from a Red state far from me. But now I'll remember her forever. I would have been content not to.

And it goes back to the time before she was even elected to the state legislature, back in the late 1990s, when she was a businessperson in the city of Tucson. I knew her then. But, interestingly enough, in the 2000-2003, she was a legislator and we worked on what we can do in Tucson to ensure that the University Medical Center had a very high-tech, functional, world-class trauma center.

She was involved in that process back in 2003. And we have one of the best. And, as I looked down at her, I was reminded of how we worked together to provide the trauma center that is saving her life. And it was -- for me, it was a very moving event.

A good demonstration of how a public good can be of vital self-interest.

Not Ike's Military Industrial Complex

So says one of the authors of "Top Secret America," The Washington Post series about the sprawling defense apparatus that has mushroomed since 9/11.

Kafka could have only dreamed of such bureaucratic inefficiency. Of course, that's absolutely false: he wrote about it. (Actually, just re-reading The Castle; a translation put out in the past decade that is much closer to what he left behind than what was originally published, and finished, after his death by his friend.)

[Lovin' that -do.]

Finally, perhaps, the always-expanding defense complex, which includes the military and all the intelligence agencies, will become part of the deficit debate. It will be interesting to see how the deficit-hawks, typically some of the strongest supporters of defense spending (of course, this crosses the aisle), will react to this indictment of the community, which includes the Congressional role of funding of the whole thing.

This was the thread picked up most by the former head of the 9/11 Commission that recommended the creation of the DNI position, the ostensible head of this ungainly beast, in the first place. On PBS News Hour, he said that no matter how well coordinated the agencies are, redundancies and inefficiencies will remain, if the funding process in Congress remains fragmented. Uh, great.