Speaker Ryan: "It's better to be safe than to be sorry"

"A total of 30 governors, including one Democrat, so far have expressed opposition to the plan [to bring into the US tens of thousands of Syrian refugees] in the wake of Friday's attacks, executed by at least one suspected Syrian refugee with ties to the Islamic State terror group and who perhaps slipped through Europe’s vetting process."

However, scholars and legal experts acknowledge that governors have little if any power to stop refugees from entering their states, citing the Refugee Act of 1980 which gives the federal government the authority.

“Immigration is a federal responsibility,” James Carafano, a national security and foreign policy analyst with the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., said Tuesday...

Administration officials also reiterated that President Obama's top priority is "the safety of the American people."

"Even as the United States accepts more refugees-including Syrians-we do so only after they undergo the most rigorous screening and security vetting of any category of traveler to the United States," the White House said.

Speaking of "rigorous screening and security"... "Undercover DHS Tests Find Security Failures at US Airports" reported as recent as June of this year.

According to officials briefed on the results of a recent Homeland Security Inspector General’s report, TSA agents failed 67 out of 70 tests, with Red Team members repeatedly able to get potential weapons through checkpoints.

I know, apples and oranges some might say, it will probably be a different agency doing the Syrian refugee screening. But, do we really want to take the chance they wont miss any ISIS sympathizers? People who didn't notice Hillary was handling national secrets from a home brew server, for four years?  

By the way, remember the downed plane the press was focusing on before the Paris attacks?.. Russia says bomb brought down jet in Sinai.

Hang an Admiral once in a while.

Insty link to NYT. Blocked for subscribers. nonewsforyou!  grrrrrrr here.

Where NYT damages itself in my reading. I keep getting more annoyed as I go, mostly because the information is good and because NYT is part of the problem it reports on. It spookily writes about itself. The writer says Bush did not pursue investigations into leaking so much because the administration knew it would face political pressure it did not care to expend political capital to pursue. 153 cases brought, 0 indictments. 

NYT would have be the political pressure that Bush would experience and that Obama would not. Here is where it is annoyingly writing about itself without writing about itself directly. It is very important that NYT does not put the same pressure on Obama that it did on Bush. I believe this to be obvious fact. This is what pisses off neutral observers. This is what is impossible for neutral observers to get Democrat partisans to acknowledge or fully appreciate. They dismiss it offhand, and insist you are a partisan Republican for pointing it out. Never mind your pox on both houses attitude you are honorary Republican if you get anything at all off Fox even muted.  

That is the other thing in the piece. Another investigation mentioned because one of the leaks caused Fox viewers to know about a Kim internal dialogue hours after a high level secret memo mentioned it. Officials are angered because the leak led to Fox viewers learning so fast about Kim's intent to fire a test missile. Better for Fox viewers to be uninformed as everyone else as long as possible or convenient for the administration.  In National security terms I am sure that is so,  but it also sure does stick out. 

If you are for prosecuting leakers of national security secrets, and against prosecuting leakers of political secrets how do you tell the difference when they are intertwined? I'm not sure that is possible.  So prosecute away. It's what we do. It's who we are.  

I read that in a spy novel. Sounded good. Probably John Le Carré, the Russian spy character said that to another, it is what Americans do, investigate each other all the time. I was little kid at the time and I thought, wow, that's very insightful thing for a Russian to make about us, oh wait Le Carré is British. 

These are all important investigations, I do not dismiss any of them, none of them look good and all of them that I know about bear on trust, rapidly alarmingly eroding trust in government so clamping down on leakers as this administration is doing in my view is a good thing and Washington altogether should be nice and squeaky tight by the time the next Republican administration rolls in.  Whereupon BLAM 10,000 immediate spilling leaks will flow directly to NYT and a hostile aggressive media blossom once again and the tensioned balance of Maat restored throughout the land. 

Bush did disappoint in pursuing leakers and it is the usual oddness of reading NYT, the place that would squeal loudest and longest and most persistently, daily, to the ground and to death had he done so.