Word: things
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...guess the main thing is that we’re not trying to tweak it all the time, but we’re not afraid to change it if it’s not working,” Stone said...
...Maybe not, but what comes out of Elmendorf's office is just about the closest thing there is to holy writ in Washington these days. In a nondescript building across a freeway from the Capitol, on a floor where J. Edgar Hoover once housed the FBI's fingerprint files, the CBO has for decades been regarded as the unbiased scorekeeper in the capital's never-ending budget battles, which alone gets to judge whether legislation will add to or lighten the national debt. A bumper sticker posted on a billboard in the hallway gives you an idea of what passes...
...boots, ready to fly to Kandahar to visit the Stryker brigade that has been devastated by unrelenting Taliban IED attacks. Since their deployment in July, more than 30 soldiers from that brigade have been killed by roadside bombs. Gates had a message for them: "We're in this thing to win." Obama had said nothing of victory during his speech to the West Point cadets. "You can't tell soldiers to fight for a draw," says one of Gates' staff aides. But Gates never got to give his pep talk. There would be no trip to Kandahar, or anywhere...
...House is shifting from expanding government to shrinking it. Lawmakers will again turn to the CBO for an honest assessment of what actually cuts the deficit and what merely pretends to. Elmendorf is the first to concede that even the most sophisticated CBO microsimulation model is not the same thing as a crystal ball. "We tell people all the time that our results are very uncertain," he says. "Every number that we give needs to be viewed as the middle of a fairly wide distribution of possible actual outcomes...
...same thing happened in Afghanistan. The absurdities of the NATO campaign, in which each country's forces operate according to their own particular caveats - many of which include no fighting - shocked Gates during his visit a year and a half ago. "He heard that we had a soldier who was shot and was in Spain's AOR [area of responsibility]. The Spanish troops had to call back to Madrid to seek permission to medevac him," a Pentagon aide told me. "The soldier lived. But Gates was furious." He also heard that while wounded soldiers in Iraq were guaranteed a medevac...