Coming Up on Sunday Kos ...
- If your stereotypical image of a spy is a government agent, either slinking around the back country of Waziristan trying to find somebody who knows where Osama bin Laden is or sitting behind a computer evaluating cryptic cell-phone calls, think again. Spies are doing that all right. And a whole lot more. But they're more likely to be private contractors these days than government employees. As Tim Shorrock writes in Spies for Hire: Inside the Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, 70% of today's $60 billion intelligence budget goes to private contractors, many of whom have left government jobs at the CIA, NSA, DGIA, or one of the other 13 intelligence agencies and walked back in the door as a private contractor for three times the salary. It's all part of what people inside and outside government are calling the "Intelligence- Industrial Complex." Meteor Blades will take a close look at Shorrock's book and the implications of his findings.
- SusanG will review Larry Bartels' Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age.
- DemFromCT has two posts on deck. In one, he will review recent recommendations that will have profound impact on hospital plans for surge capacity in the event of disasters such as pandemics, wildfires and hurricanes (see Doctors debate who would be allowed to die in pandemic), and how that fits in with health reform. In his second post, he'll look ahead to November and preview Barack Obama and John McCain running in The Past And Future Election.
- Plutonium Page will discuss the nuclear posture of the United States, paying particular attention to Hillary Clinton's recent remark about obliterating Iran and her repeated comparisons of today's foreign policy climate with the Cold War.
- mcjoan will explore how deeply AT&T's tentacles have reached in their fight for telecom amnesty.
- BarbinMD will examine John McCain's decades-long history of helping out land developers in his native Arizona--all of whom just happen to be big campaign contributors.
- DHinMI will discuss how US miscalculations may be a factor in the possible eruption of a full-fledged civil war in Lebanon.