Cutting edge
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David Rothkopf at ForeignPolicy.com rolls through an incisive list of WikiLeaks winners and losers. Among the winners: Advocates for intelligence reform.
"Let's see: If a 22-year-old moon-faced Army private with a blank Lady Gaga CD in his hand can download a mountain of classified documents and make them public, I wonder how many other slightly more sophisticated actors have been siphoning out more important secrets more discretely over the past several years.
"The custodians of the U.S. system of document classification and its intelligence knowledge management system has got to be more embarrassed by this fiasco than Muammar Qaddafi's plastic surgeon."
Stephen M. Walt, also at ForeignPolicy.com, wonders if the United States is a little too secure ...
"Being too secure has a downside: It allows U.S. politicians to do and say a lot of stupid things without thinking that they might actually be putting the country at risk. Case in point: the Republican Party's absurd objections to the New START treaty with Russia, which seem to be based solely on the desire to prevent the Obama administration from logging even a modest political success.
"The New START treaty is not a major strategic breakthrough, but that's just the point. It's a modest agreement that will save us some money in the long-term, reduce strategic uncertainty, make it easier to enlist Russian cooperation on other issues and make the United States look a bit less hypocritical when we try to convince other states to forego nuclear weapons themselves.
"But none of that matters to today's Grand Obstructionist Party (GOP) leaders, in sharp contrast to isolated Republic moderates like Richard Lugar, R-Ind., or veteran officials like Henry Kissinger or James Baker, all of whom support the treaty."
Chris Briem at Null Space comments on the Marcellus Shale gas companies' claim that shale drilling is "saving Pennsylvanians millions in home heating costs."
Mr. Briem says "you can look at the data yourself (he provides a link) and see that wholesale natural gas prices in Pennsylvania are some of the highest."
First Published December 5, 2010 12:00 am
