Stephen Hayes thinks that Porter Goss’s resignation as CIA Director and the pending appointment of Stephen Kappes, a prominent member of William Safire’s “flock of pouting spooks” that exited Langley in the aftermath of George W. Bush’s defeat of John Kerry in November of 2004, as Deputy Director signals the Bush Administration’s defeat by liberal mandarins in the CIA establishment.

PORTER GOSS’S TENURE as director of central intelligence began with a public spat between the new reform-minded CIA leadership and an intransigent bureaucracy. Now, 18 months later, it is ending in a cloud of confusion. Goss is gone and so are his agents of change. Two of the CIA officials at the heart of that opening battle–Mary Margaret Graham and Stephen Kappes–have been promoted. And the old guard is happy.

“The move was seen as a direct repudiation of Goss’s leadership and as an olive branch to CIA veterans disaffected by his 18-month tenure,” wrote Peter Baker and Charles Babington in the Washington Post. Yet Goss had taken to the CIA the high expectations of many top Washington policymakers who work on intelligence issues.

“Porter Goss’s confirmation . . . represents perhaps the most important changing of the guard for our intelligence community since 1947,” the year the CIA was created, said Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who chairs the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, on the day Goss was confirmed. “He will be the first director of central intelligence in a new, and hopefully better, intelligence community.”

And now he’s gone. So what happened?…

The White House took on the Agency. And the Agency won.

I used to do this with Sodium and Potassium in high school too, but I never had… Cesium! Fun, fun, fun.

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The Never Yet Melted blog has been out of action since Thursday afternoon, when a SQL database error occurred.

Unfortunately, tools for repairing the SQL database at my host service are not accessible by customers, and are managed remotely by a subdivision or subcontractor of the hosting company, who is roughly as accessible as your average divinity. You can pray (i.e., send an email), but that doesn’t mean God answers.

I have learned a few things, and will try to avoid a recurrence. My apologies to readers who came here only to meet the dreaded SQL Error 127.

Red-backed Jumping Spider (Phidippus johnsoni)

Yesterday, I was working at my desk, when a large spider, sporting impressively bright-colored markings, descended down a filament of web, and landed with a noticeable thud on top of a television remote control, languishing unused at the far left corner of my monitor stand.

I debated for an instant between hand-to-hand combat, with me employing a handy ruler; or chemical warfare, involving a nearby can of Raid House and Garden. I decided to go for the high tech approach, and reached for the can of Raid. My alert opponent, however, cleverly divined my arachnocidal intentions, and dashed over the edge to the preferred refuge of all outlaws: the terra incognita between desk and wall. My hunting instincts were aroused. I had no intention of letting the quarry get away, but my search was unavailing.

I couldn’t nail the spider, so I figured I could at least entertain the wife a bit, so I sent the little woman (who is out of town on a business trip) an email, informing her that we had acquired a new roommate, and urging her to say hello for me, when she found the same spider on her desk some day(we share an office). My wife was not amused.

Well, Karen actually does get to come home, after all.

At pretty much the same time of day today, clearly the same uppity spider landed directly in the center of my desk with an even louder thump, erected its feelers, and advanced rapidly and purposefully in my direction. I could practically hear its thoughts: “Dare spraying bug spray at me, will you, villain? I see that can of Raid is out of reach, so let’s settle things here and now.” Further threats, and the arachnid’s further advance were prevented, however, by the rapid descent of a Paulownia wood Japanese box, containing a very nice Kaneiye sword guard.

I, of course, then proceeded to identify the specimen.

So perish all our enemies.

The Anti-Bush Intel Community captured today’s news lead with its latest leak in USA Today. Despite all the traction the story is getting in the Blogosphere, we are clearly really just dealing with a repackaging and reissue (“old wine in new bottes”) of the same old NSA communications data-mining story originally leaked to Eric Lichtblau and James Risen in the New York Times last December.

Today’s leak goes:

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews…

“It’s the largest database ever assembled in the world,” said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA’s activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency’s goal is “to create a database of every call ever made” within the nation’s borders, this person added.

Leslie Cauley, author of the USA Today article, adds (curiously overlooking the fact that she and her employers are also breaking the law, and her name is right there at the top of the article):

The sources would talk only under a guarantee of anonymity because the NSA program is secret.

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So, as you may well imagine, the left is, this morning, again indulging in another of its little psychodramas involving George W. Bush poring over each leftist blogger’s phone bill to see how any times he/she spoke to Aunt Tillie last month.

The Mahablog, which styles itself (tin trumpet call) as “Home blog of the American Resistance,” grabs today’s headlined leak, and runs with it, demanding indignantly:Let’s See the “Libertarian” Righties Defend This One.

Why, sure, always glad to oblige a moonbat.

The United States is at war. Foreign enemies are actively engaged in efforts to carry out attacks on civilian population centers in the United States. Enemy agents are undoubtedly resident in the United States and operating off US soil. Can the president of the United States, in such circumstances, authorize the intelligence services of the United States to intercept and open mail addressed to, or sent by, US residents, including citizens? Of course, he can. As Justice Robert Jackson remarked, “The US Constitution is not a suicide pact.”

The caterwauling of the left over the NSA’s communications data-mining activity is nothing more than narcissistic fantasy. Are there any adults on the left? You people all read like adolescent teenagers. The world revolves around little you.

In reality, no one is actually listening to your phone calls, or reading your phone bills. Some very very large computers are crunching through databases which include your phone records, my phone records, and another few hundred million phone records mechanically and indifferently, searching for various kinds of incriminating clues. If you haven’t been placing a lot of calls to suspicious numbers in Waziristan, if your favorite phone buddy is not on a list of terrorists, there is absolutely nothing to be concerned about.

Speaking frankly, guys, if they haven’t arrested Dana Priest, Lichtblau and Risen, Leslie Cauley, and most of their informants yet, there isn’t a lot of chance that anybody is coming looking for you.

Newsmax, anticipating the democrat capture of the House in November, is warning that John Conyers will become Judiciary Committtee Chairman, and John Conyers is proposing a bill leading to the payment of reparations for pre-1865 Slavery to persons of Afro-American descent.

I agree with Rupert Birkin:

If,’ said Hermione at last, `we could only realise, that in the spirit we are all one, all equal in the spirit, all brothers there — the rest wouldn’t matter, there would be no more of this carping and envy and this struggle for power, which destroys, only destroys.’

This speech was received in silence, and almost immediately the party rose from the table. But when the others had gone, Birkin turned round in bitter declamation, saying:

`It is just the opposite, just the contrary, Hermione. We are all different and unequal in spirit — it is only the social differences that are based on accidental material conditions. We are all abstractly or mathematically equal, if you like. Every man has hunger and thirst, two eyes, one nose and two legs. We’re all the same in point of number. But spiritually, there is pure difference and neither equality nor inequality counts. It is upon these two bits of knowledge that you must found a state. Your democracy is an absolute lie — your brotherhood of man is a pure falsity, if you apply it further than the mathematical abstraction. We all drank milk first, we all eat bread and meat, we all want to ride in motor-cars — therein lies the beginning and the end of the brotherhood of man. But no equality.

`But I, myself, who am myself, what have I to do with equality with any other man or woman? In the spirit, I am as separate as one star is from another, as different in quality and quantity. Establish a state on that. One man isn’t any better than another, not because they are equal, but because they are intrinsically other, that there is no term of comparison. The minute you begin to compare, one man is seen to be far better than another, all the inequality you can imagine is there by nature. I want every man to have his share in the world’s goods, so that I am rid of his importunity, so that I can tell him: “Now you’ve got what you want — you’ve got your fair share of the world’s gear. Now, you one-mouthed fool, mind yourself and don’t obstruct me.’

–D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love, Chapter 8:16-17.

Why not take Birkin’s suggestion?

Pay Slavery reparations. Whatever they want. $100,000 per person. $500,000 per person. But, along with it, we abolish welfare, repeal the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, and end Affirmative Action. Everyone is equal. No one any longer has anything to complain about. And everyone has full use of his property, the choice of whom to serve or not serve, hire or not hire, rent to or not rent to. Complete freedom of association, and the right of private persons to discriminate, is restored. The Civil Rights Era, the Cuture of Complaint, is over and done with forever.

China, Cuba, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan were elected yesterday to seats on the United Nations’ Human Rights Council.

Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said: “The good news is that we did better than expected in the voting because Iran and Venezuela both lost. Venezuela’s losing shows that bluster and anti-Americanism isn’t enough to get elected.”

Nations running for the council had to meet more demanding standards than in the past.

The previous commission was long a public embarrassment to the United Nations because countries like Sudan, Libya and Zimbabwe became members and thereby thwarted the investigation of their own human rights records.

Prominent Appeals Court Judge J. Michael Luttig has resigned his $171,800 per annum judicial position, and accepted the position of senior vice president and general counsel of Boeing.

Judge Luttig’s new job will probably feature compensation including both an annual salary in seven figures range and substantial stock options.

Some judges do willingly sacrifice their family’s financial well being in order to pursue public service, but the astonishing gap between what state and federal judges are paid in the United States and the kind of money attorneys of equivalent calibre can command in the private sector really ought to provoke reflection.

Do we want the best qualified people on the bench? Or is it more important to limit the compensation of public officials to figures easily defensible to the general public?

These days, one has only to enter an ordinary state court to see talented attorneys, the partners of major firms, and distinguished graduates of top national law schools, strugging to explain cases and the law to much less well-informed judges, the graduates of the humblest law schools, to whom the meagre judicial salaries are actually attractive. When lawyers are normally conspicuously better qualified than judges, we are clearly not paying judges enough.

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Iranian mullahs in the city of Qum have invited Cuban dictator Fidel Castro to convert to Islam.

Why not? His Communism was only ever an opportunistic justification for him to operate as a brigand. And he’s already got the beard.

The New York Times reports one of the more dubious psychological studies I’ve heard about to date, purportedly demonstrating that merely handling a gun increased aggressiveness. It seems actually to show that people who handle guns wind up preferring spicy foods.

Eric wants to restore Western values, and he doesn’t mean Judeo-Christian values.

H/T to Glenn Reynolds.