Free Republic

WASHINGTON (AP) — As then-Vice President Joe Biden left the West Wing each evening to head home, he often popped his head into national security adviser Susan Rice’s nearby suite of offices to check in — sometimes on pressing foreign policy matters, sometimes just to shoot the breeze. “My favorite unannounced visitor was Vice President Joe Biden,” Rice wrote in her book “Tough Love.” In those casual visits, as well as in daily national security briefings, Biden and Rice forged an easy working relationship, according to people who worked alongside them during their eight years in the Obama administration. It’s...

The fundamental problem with our national intelligence system is that it assumes that quantity can substitute for quality. The result is a vast, expensive network that's far less than the sum of its parts. It's as if the Yankees, stung by a string of losing seasons, avoided seeking out talented ballplayers in favor of hiring a thousand Little Leaguers (at major-league salaries). This week, The Washington Post has done something of a service with a series of articles, "Top Secret America," chronicling the lack of accountability in our intelligence community. The analysis is a bit superficial, but diligent reporting drives...

After thinking about what is the battle between creationism and evolution, I see it boiling down to whether we live in a qualitative universe or a quantative universe. In a quantative universe, change takes a long time to occur while a qualatative universe, dramatic change can occur quite rapidly. Quantative starts with building blocks where qualatative starts with a finished product. With quantative, circumstances continue as a long series of events, while qulatative works on the principle of sudden and even violent change. We see with war where B-52 would carpet bomb places but compare that to one lone B-29...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 23, 2006 – Iraq now has 123,000 trained and equipped police officers, but numbers don't tell the whole story, a Multinational Force Iraq spokesman said during a briefing from Baghdad today. "What we're seeing across Iraq is that the police forces are indeed gaining capability and gaining public confidence," Army Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch told reporters, adding that police forces are the coalition's focus this year. "They continue to grow in not just quantity, but in quality and capability." The capability of all 232,000 trained and equipped Iraqi security forces -- including soldiers, border guards and police --...