It's looking more and more like we had some big-time failures in intelligence in the matter of Major Nidal Hasan.  He's the Islamic goon who murdered 13 of our soldiers and injured 27 others at Ft. Hood, Texas. 

 

Today's big revelation would be that our intelligence folks new that Major Nidal Hasan was communicating with Al Qaeda.  This would include the counter-intelligence division of the U.S. Army.  They knew it .. but did essentially nothing.   Now we're wondering how the people charged with keeping us safe could know that this Islamic thug was trying to contact Al Qaeda, and then surmise that iut was all part of his academic research.

 

Now we have all kinds of internal probes going on.  Internal probes don't bring back fathers, mothers, sons and daughters.  Internal probes aren't a salve for grief. 

 

Our intelligence agencies work under which branch of government?  That would be the executive branch.  The boss would be Barack Obama.  Now ... do you think we're getting the full story on Nidal Hasan from the Obama administration?  Sorry, but I certainly don't.  No ... I'm not saying that Obama is responsible for the intelligence failure here.  I'm just suggesting that I don't really expect to get the full story with The Community Organizer at the helm.

For Barack Obama, that is - but perhaps not necessarily for America.

I don't know many people who are thrilled with Obama's pick of Leon Panetta to head the CIA. The guy has less experience working in intelligence than our own Washington correspondent Jamie Dupree. Of course I strongly suspect that Dupree is actually working under cover as a journalist. You should see the armament he carries. Anyway ......

One of the first to really speak up was Dianne Feinstein. She got her feelings hurt that Obama didn't consult her before making the selection. Well, she's right. You do talk to the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee about your pick to head the CIA .. but that was quickly corrected with some obsequious fawning by Obama and Biden.

Other thoughts on Panetta run the gamut. Dick Morris thinks he's being sent to Langley to effectively emasculate our premier spy agency. The destruction of the CIA began under Jimmy Carter. Will it become a fait accompli under Obama? There is much liberal angst over this phony torture controversy. Is Panetta the payoff to the left?

Others are saying that Panetta's experiences in the Congress and the Clinton White House qualify him for this position. After all, as the president's Chief of Staff he was a "consumer" of intelligence information. By that reasoning, since I bought a new GM vehicle a few weeks ago I'm now qualified to run GM. Than again, who isn't?

As we get closer and closer to the coronation of Barack Obama, you really ought to keep one thing in mind. Surveys and polls have shown that the people who voted for John McCain knew a whole helluvalot more about our government and current events than did the people who voted for Obama. In other words ... McCain voters were more intelligent than Obama voters. Deal with it.

Here's a little study that came out of Berkeley ... the brains of higher income children function differently than the brains of low-income children. What they did is they tested the brain activity of 9 and 10-year-old kids. They were split into two groups - those who come from evil rich parents and those that come from so-called "less fortunate" households. Then they sat the children down and made them watch sequences of triangles on a screen. Every now and then, a slighted skewed triangle would flash on the screen and the children were instructed to click a button when they saw one. Meanwhile the researchers measured their brain activity in their prefrontal cortex. This is apparently the part of the brain that affects "executive functions" like personality, decision making and social behavior.

You can imagine the results. The children from lower incomes did poorly on the test. Not only did they perform poorly, but in some cases the lower income children responded comparably to "people who have had a portion of their frontal lobe destroyed by a stroke."

What conclusion does this lead us to? The evil rich have highly privileged children not just because of money but because the children are able to develop their brains.

I have at least two guesses here. First, children growing up in wealthy households have their minds challenged more often than children raised in poor households. It simply comes with the territory. If, as an adult, you earn your living (such as it is) with muscle power rather than with mind power .. then it should be no surprise that your children might lag just a bit when it comes to intellectual abilities. By the way .. those who make their livings with their minds are referred to as "privileged," while those who use muscle are referred to as the "working class."

The way to solve this, of course, is to take some of the money away from the "privileged" children who were raised by parents who made their living with their brains, and redistribute it to the children of parents from the so-called "working class."