Press Briefing

May 23, 2010

Remarks At The Council On Foreign Relations, by James B. Steinberg, Deputy Secretary of State. Washington, DC, May 19, 2010
http://www.state.gov/s/d/2010/142120.htm

Five Questions for Pres. Obama on Fuel Economy Standards
http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/2010/05/21/five-questions-for-pres-obama-on-fuel-economy-standards/

Travel Diary: Secretary Clinton Op-Ed on U.S.-China Achievements Beyond Expo
http://blogs.state.gov/index.php/site/entry/travel_diary_clinton_op-ed_us_china

Gross National Debt: $13 trillion and counting
http://rpc.senate.gov/public/_files/debtchartsv2.pdf

Born to Veto - Christie saves New Jersey from a tax increase
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704852004575258751835748206.html
"New Jersey does not have a tax problem; New Jersey has a spending and size of government problem."

Dennis Blair Departs - Another victim of intelligence reform
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704852004575258382267478018.html

Intelligence disputes are usually murky, though the sacking of Dennis Blair isn't among them. Explanations for the Director of National Intelligence's exit this week range from Mr. Blair's turf wars with the CIA and at the White House to the failure to pre-empt three domestic terror attacks, two of which failed out of blind luck. But Mr. Blair is really a casualty of the failed "intelligence reform" of the last decade.

Mr. Blair's successor will be the fourth DNI in the five years since the office was stood up in 2005, and this unfortunate man or woman will also supposedly integrate and manage the 16 intelligence satraps. As we and other critics predicted at the time, however, the DNI has merely become another bureaucracy layered on top of the other bureaucracies, with some 1,500 employees often doing what others elsewhere also do. In a bureaucratic classic, Mr. Blair and CIA chief Leon Panetta clashed last year over naming intelligence chiefs abroad. Mr. Panetta won.

As good an illustration as any of the dysfunction is the report that nominally precipitated the former Admiral's pink slip. The Senate Intelligence Committee identified 14 gaps that might have prevented Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from boarding his Christmas Day flight, one being that "no one entity within the IC [intelligence community] has sole responsibility nor bears the entire burden of either connecting dots or accountability for failing to do so." Except that isn't a Senate conclusion: It comes from the official statement the National Counterterrorism Center—the only agency Mr. Blair controlled day to day—gave to investigators.

The Senate indictment is damning, though its Senate authors unfairly exempt themselves. The 2004 bill that putatively made the Counterterrorism Center the government's one responsible, accountable entity—a kind of antiterror CEO—passed the House 336-75 and the Senate 89-2, rushed along by the cheerleading of the 9/11 Commission. Mr. Blair is another memento of how pointless if not detrimental this reshuffling of the bureaucratic deck chairs was for the realities of the w— on t——.

Plotting a Democratic Comeback - Pennsylvania's governor, Ed Rendell, says the tea parties will throw up flawed GOP candidates like Rand Paul and that his party should run on the success of the stimulus.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704852004575258261059419530.html

Lessons From a Torpedo - Placating Kim Jong Il doesn't change North Korea's behavior.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703691804575254583245786418.html