As I am reading through today’s news, I discovered Hot Air had made a possible prediction as to whom will be replacing Obama’s director of national intelligence.

From the Atlantic, via Hot Air:

The U.S. official said that the White House has interviewed “several strong candidates.” Former Sen. Chuck Hagel, the chairman of the president’s intelligence advisory board, and Gen. James Clapper (Ret.), the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, are seen by other intelligence officials as top candidates. Clapper will face a tough confirmation, and his career profile is similar to Blair’s. Hagel would be feared by the military intelligence establishment, but he gets along with CIA director Leon Panetta, who will not be leaving his job.

Back when Chuck Hagel had principles of at least some sort, my dad and I both worked for his initial campaign for Senate, against first Don Stenberg in the primary, then Ben Nelson in the general election. Ben lost that election to Chuck. But once Chuck got into Washington, he was infected with Beltway-itis, that disease that turns good conservatives into ravening shills for the media just because they want to fit into the intellectual crowd and want their face plastered all over network television. This disease just doomed Arlen Specter to the same fate that would have befallen Hagel if he had run for reelection against Mike Johanns, who replaced him. 

I miss the Chuck Hagel from before he was corrupted. I don’t know if he just gained a hatred of the Bush family, drank the Code Pink kool aid, or what happened but the Chuck Hagel of 2002-2010 is not the same Chuck Hagel of 1996-2001 that I helped to elect.  The chance he ends up as DNI should frighten many American citizens, since Chuck has turned his back on them.

Courtesy of Reason.TV, this little tidbit on the Transportation Security Agency

We’re the TSA and You Can Count on Us! (to overreact to tiny threats and ignore big ones)

Sad, isn’t it, that this is the state of affairs we are in when it comes to the TSA.

Lemme give you a hint, the other agencies under Homeland Security are actually worse. Immigration is the one I’m familiar the most with. Someone try to get the H1B Visa information for the past 10 or 15 years from them. Good luck getting accurate numbers – for years, officials were giving out H1B Visas at a rate 4 times what they should because only 1/4 of the Visas were actually being recorded.

 That’s the kind of incompetence we’re dealing with. Surprisingly, I’m not blaming Obama, Bush, or even Clinton (when I worked there). No…this is a systemic problem with all the Homeland Security subagencies due to their bureaucratic red tape nightmare that ensures their jobs as government union employees.

This is why we cannot allow TSA to fall under union control. Right now, it works the BEST out of all the agencies because it isn’t unionized. Immigration is unionized, and that’s what got us the 9/11 bombers on student visas.