Found this in a “letters to the editor” section and saw about the best and easiest read on who’s to blame.
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Commentators have indicated that the recent failures of financial institutions are the fault of consumers purchasing homes they could not afford.

These buyers (“nothing down,” and “cheaper than rent”) apparently forced bankers to provide subprime (“exorbitant interest rates”) loans, with mortgage origination fees and high late charges.

The buyers then apparently demanded that investment bankers bundle these high-risk mortgages with lower-risk mortgages into securities. They then urged bond-rating firms (remunerated by the bankers) to ignore the buyers’ inability to pay and pronounced the securities “market grade.”

The homebuyers then cajoled reluctant high-commission stockbrokers to persuade investors to include these securities in their portfolios.

But, most impressively, these unsophisticated buyers convinced insurance giants like AIG to sell “credit default swaps” (insurance policies) in case the whole thing came tumbling down.

Commentators failed to note that the ability to service homeowners’ mortgages might have improved had the real wages of working Americans not shrunk during these years of “trickle down” economic prosperity.

Nevertheless, if the poor are to be blamed for Wall Street’s pains, there remains in this world, ironically, a measure of justice.
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but I digress

I would say that for decades the defense budget was predicated on being able to fight two wars simultaneously, one being full out high level conflict and the other a lower level conflict with the intent on winning both. Since DoD has been more than fully funded and we’re involved in two low level conflicts and can’t seem to get the results promised, that it looks to me like the citizens of the USA have been fleeced into throwing huge sums of money at a dog that won’t hunt.

I agree completely that until the security issues are resolved at the labs involved, we must refrain from moving forward on RRW.

On a more general note the government programs that constantly threaten the DOD budget like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are all Dem created. Although the Part D presciption drug plan is clearly a Bush budget buster

Providing for the common defense is clearly enumerated in the Constitution while 90% of the rest of what the Feds do is not.

It won’t matter which party is in office, this program is pretty much dead. The nuclear labs have been woefully mismanaged. They’ve turned into bureaucratic morasses that leak nuclear weapons secrets like a sieve.

The Chinese will steal the secret anyway if they don’t already have it. Not that anybody cares.

We need to bring back SAC to manage what we have. These MBAs have too many loose nukes to get a new one. It won’t happen.