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Time to connect the dots

The president used a version of the word “fail” 9 times in as many minutes – and he was talking about his government failing to adequately protect the American people.

Mr. Obama said that while he accepts intelligence “by its nature is imperfect” that it is clear that the intelligence was “not fully analyzed or fully leveraged,” which the President said is “not acceptable.”

“I will not tolerate it,” he added, “when a suspected terrorist is able to board a plane with explosives on Christmas Day, the system has failed in a potentially disastrous way. And it’s my responsibility to find out why and to correct that failure so that we can prevent such attacks in the future.”

- Obama: Intelligence Community Failed to “Connect the Dots” in a “Potentially Disastrous Way”, ABCNews.go.com, January 5, 2010.

2. The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College [Portland, Oregon] after the first six months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.