Maddow on Sarah Palin accepting Fed money after all: "You can see cake from her house, and you can eat it from there too." - Rachel Maddow

I had turned over a log and exposed to the light a scurrying colony of unpleasant creatures whose only reaction was one of annoyance that I had been so crass as to disturb their settled way of life. (Elliot Richardson)

The umbrella assertion made by Team B — and the most inflammatory — was that the previous National Intelligence Estimates “substantially misperceived the motivations behind Soviet strategic programs, and thereby tended consistently to underestimate their intensity, scope, and implicit threat.” Soviet military leaders weren’t simply trying to defend their territory and their people; they were readying a First Strike option, and the US intelligence community had missed it. What led to this “grave and dangerous flaw” in threat assessment, according to Team B, was an overreliance on hard technical facts, and a lamentable tendency to downplay “the large body of soft data.” This “soft” data, the ideological leader of Team B, Richard Pipes, would later say, included “his deep knowledge of the Russian soul.

In the 1991 Gulf War, the United States employed one private contract worker for every one hundred American soldiers on the ground; in the Clinton-era Balkans, it neared one to one — about 20,000 privateers tops. In early 2011, there were 45,000 US soldiers stationed inside Iraq, and 65,000 private contract workers there.