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Showing posts with label NSA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NSA. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

The Tyranny of our Ever Expanding Government

“Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known and less fixed?” — James Madison, Federalist No. 62 — 1788

When writing about the tyranny of a mutable government and the legislature passing long and complicated laws of which no one could comprehend and obey James Madison raises the very forceful point. He stated that citizens will find it very difficult to obey the law if it is constantly changing (“mutable government”), either by growing enormously in size to be beyond the grasp ordinary people, or by being incoherent, or being repealed or revised before they are promulgated.

Today we have the situation where massive and complicated laws, like ObamaCare (over 3,000 pages) are passed without having been read or debated by the legislators themselves, let alone discussed in the press and by the people. When this sad state has been reached, the law itself, as Madison eloquently says, “poisons the blessings of liberty.” James Madison stated in Federalist No. 62:

“To trace the mischievous effects of a mutable government would fill a volume. I will hint a few only, each of which will be perceived to be a source of innumerable others.

In the first place, it forfeits the respect and confidence of otherJames_Madison nations, and all the advantages connected with national character. An individual who is observed to be inconstant to his plans, or perhaps to carry on his affairs without any plan at all, is marked at once by all prudent people, as a speedy victim to his own unsteadiness and folly. His more friendly neighbors may pity him, but all will decline to connect their fortunes with his: and not a few will seize the opportunity of making their fortunes out of his. One nation is to another, what one individual is to another; with this melancholy distinction perhaps, that the former, with fewer of the benevolent emotions than the latter, are under fewer restraints also from taking undue advantage of the indiscretions of each other. Every nation, consequently, whose affairs betray a want of wisdom and stability, may calculate on every loss which can be sustained from the more systematic policy of its wiser neighbors. But the best instruction on this subject is unhappily conveyed to America by the example of her own situation. She finds that she is held in no respect by her friends; that she is the derision of her enemies; and that she is a prey to every nation which has an interest in speculating on her fluctuating councils and embarrassed affairs.

The internal effects of a mutable policy are still more calamitous. It poisons the blessing of liberty itself. It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?

Another effect of public instability is the unreasonable advantage it gives to the sagacious, the enterprising, and the moneyed few over the industrious and uniformed mass of the people. Every new regulation concerning commerce or revenue, or in any way affecting the value of the different species of property, presents a new harvest to those who watch the change, and can trace its consequences; a harvest, reared not by themselves, but by the toils and cares of the great body of their fellow-citizens. This is a state of things in which it may be said with some truth that laws are made for the FEW, not for the MANY.

In another point of view, great injury results from an unstable government. The want of confidence in the public councils damps every useful undertaking, the success and profit of which may depend on a continuance of existing arrangements. What prudent merchant will hazard his fortunes in any new branch of commerce when he knows not but that his plans may be rendered unlawful before they can be executed? What farmer or manufacturer will lay himself out for the encouragement given to any particular cultivation or establishment, when he can have no assurance that his preparatory labors and advances will not render him a victim to an inconstant government? In a word, no great improvement or laudable enterprise can go forward which requires the auspices of a steady system of national policy.

But the most deplorable effect of all is that diminution of attachment and reverence which steals into the hearts of the people, towards a political system which betrays so many marks of infirmity, and disappoints so many of their flattering hopes. No government, any more than an individual, will long be respected without being truly respectable; nor be truly respectable, without possessing a certain portion of order and stability.”

In Federalist Paper 10, probably the most important of the Federalist Papers, James Madison, writing as Publius, addresses the Tyranny of the Majority trough Factions.

“Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority. However anxiously we may wish that these complaints had no foundation, the evidence of known facts will not permit us to deny that they are in some degree true.”

As I have stated in previous blogs in 2007, Congress enacted 138 public laws, while federal agencies finalized 2,926 rules, including 61 major regulations.” In this context, it is irrelevant who resides in the White House or holds the House speaker’s gavel. America is not a nation of laws, but of rules. Only a renewed cultural will to true reform, coupled with political leadership, can correct that.

Today we are experiences the worst of our Founder’s fears. An unfettered executive branch coupled with a legislative branch that is so encumbered with factions that it no longer serves the will of the people. This combination of ills has formed a fourth branch of government — the administrative state.

I have written numerous times about the history and tyrannical effects of the administrative state and how it is slowly destroying the republic our Founders envisioned. The latest egregious example is the Senate passed 1,200 page immigration bill that contains so much pork a pig farmer would have problems weighing it. It contains cars for immigrants to placate Senator Barry Sanders of New Hampshire and subsidies for the Alaskan fishing industry. It states that the counterfeiting of no more than three U.S. passports is not a crime. While allowing for the hiring of 20,000 additional border patrol agents and building a fence along the entire border it gives the Department of Homeland Security the power to cancel the fence construction at any time at their discretion.

Today a landmark Supreme Court ruling that struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act has set up a stand-off between Republican-led states and the Obama administration over controversial voting laws that until now had been stalled.

The 5-4 ruling on Tuesday addressed a 1960s-era provision that largely singled out states and districts in the South — those with a history of discrimination — and required them to seek federal permission to change their voting laws.

The court ruled that the formula determining which states are affected was unconstitutional.

In doing so, the court potentially opened the door for certain states to proceed with voter ID laws and other efforts that to date had been held up because of the Voting Rights Act. Prominent among those are voter identification laws in Alabama and Mississippi.

Yet Attorney General Eric Holder has claimed that he does not agree with theWas7541345 ruling and will continue to do all he can to force states to abide by his edicts

Attorney General Eric Holder warned states against going too far. He said the Justice Department would not hesitate to take "swift" action against states looking to "take advantage" of the ruling.

He, like President Obama, said he was "deeply disappointed" in the decision, saying discriminatory practices live on and need to be addressed.

"These problems have not been consigned to history," Holder said.

Holder and Obama urged Congress to create a new formula.

"Today's decision invalidating one of its core provisions upsets decades of well-established practices that help make sure voting is fair, especially in places where voting discrimination has been historically prevalent," Obama said.

To read more on this decision click here.

In another example of the power of the administrative state today Obama declared his war on coal even though throughout the 2012 election campaigned he denied such a war on coal or guns.

So much for the denials. An administration that throughout its 2012 election campaign denied it was waging a War on Coal has now come out and publicly declared its intention to shut down coal-fired power plants – putting hundreds of thousands of Americans out of work and sending electricity prices skyrocketing.

This is not what the American people voted for.

Responding to a White House petition to end the War on Coal, the administration said: “The President has made clear that he understands that coal has played a critical role in our country’s energy portfolio for decades and will continue to be an important source of energy in the future.”

Sycophantic liberal media outlets (like The Nation and the Associated Press) went further, repeatedly claiming that the War on Coal was a myth. The Obama campaign even ran a TV ad in Ohio claiming that Mitt Romney would be bad for coal – and trotted out former Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland to deny there was a war on coal and echo the attacks on Romney.

Yet today Obama political consultant David Plouffe took to Twitter to bang his chest: “Today's climate announcement underscores that elections matter greatly” – as if Obama had campaigned on shutting down coal plants instead of on denying his intention to do so.

Such denials are no longer necessary. Today a top Obama global warming adviser told The New York Times the denials were just election-year politics. Daniel Schrag said: “Politically, the White House is hesitant to say they’re having a war on coal. On the other hand, a war on coal is exactly what’s needed.

And Obama delivered. It’s right there on page 19 of his Climate Action Plan: “Going forward, we will promote fuel-switching from coal to gas for electricity production.”

Indeed, Obama made clear in his speech that he intends to impose regulations on existing coal plants that can only be met through carbon capture and storage (technology that doesn’t exist on a commercial scale), switching to natural gas, or shutting down completely.

Coal still produces 37 percent of U.S. electricity. A Heritage Foundation analysis found that implementing Obama’s proposed regulation on existing coal plants would destroy more than 500,000 jobs, slash the income of a typical family of four more than $1,400 a year, and increase electricity prices at least 20 percent. Price spikes could be much higher in states that depend heavily on coal-fired power plants, especially in the Midwest. President Obama once famously explained that he intended to make electricity prices “necessarily skyrocket.”

Obama intends to fight his War on Coal by issuing a PresidentialAP401450731793 Memorandum to the EPA to issue regulations under the 1970 Clean Air Act. This is despite the fact that the law’s principal author, Democrat John Dingell of Michigan, famously said: “This is not what was intended by the Congress and by those of us who wrote the Clean Air Act. We are beginning to look at a wonderfully complex world, which has the potential for shutting down or slowing down virtually all industry and all economic activity and growth.”

And there is zero global warming benefit to go with all the economic costs, because even if all United States greenhouse gas emissions were shut down to zero tomorrow, the rest of the world would keep on puffing. Paul Knappenberger recently calculated, based on standard assumptions, that getting to zero emissions in the U.S. immediately would only reduce global average temperatures an imperceptible 0.08 degrees Celsius by 2050. Moreover, the rest of the world would replace all U.S. emissions within seven years.

So it’s all pain and no gain — by legally dubious means — to accomplish the opposite of what Obama promised on the campaign trail. Congress should take exception to being circumvented and step in to stop Obama’s (now-declared) War on Coal.

Once again it is plain to see that complex laws passed by a willing legislature leave the door open for the executive branch to do just about anything it wants under the color of law. This is truly a feature of the administrative state where the masterminds call the shots and self-government is a thing of the past. So much for the Republic Mr. Franklin.

On the other hand 62 Tea Party representatives dealt a blow to the Republican leadership of the House of Representatives when they gather enough support to defeat an overblown Farm Bill on June 20th.

The GOP leadership suffered a stunning defeat as 62 Republicans voted against the 5-year farm bill (H.R. 1947), which locks in the record baseline of food stamp spending and creates multiple new agriculture subsidy programs. A handful of them voted against it because it cut too much spending, and others like Bill Shuster voted no because they are facing potential primary challenges (Shuster voted for the 2008 bill). But this is a strong showing, as it is a dynamic none of us would have ever predicted several years ago.

Some Republicans are complaining that because of the conservative revolt we will now continue on the status quo with direct farm subsidies. But they fail to understand that the new price support programs and shallow loss coverage that were created by this bill would have been more expensive and represent worse market distortions than direct subsidies. It’s better to reauthorize the status quo than to pass a long-term bill that creates even more problems and precludes real reforms for another 5 years.

Other Republicans complain that now we will face the so-called milk cliff. Pursuant to a silly 1949 act of Congress, every time we fail to renew expiring farm programs, the government must begin imposing Soviet-style price controls on milk by decreasing supplies through massive purchases of milk, butter, cheese, and other dairy products. Under permanent law, the USDA would begin purchasing dairy products at a rate of $38.54 per hundredweight; more than double the current price ($18 per hundredweight). This market manipulation could double the price of milk, dairy products, and everything else up the food chain.

clip_image001But instead of avoiding the deleterious effects of the Agriculture Act of 1949 by growing government, why don’t we just repeal the damn law?

In a sane world, both houses of Congress would convene and repeal this inane and outdated law within a few minutes by unanimous consent. That way we could debate a long-term farm bill without having the sword of the 1949 law brandished over our necks and forcing Congress to rush through bad legislation.

However, Congress is not sane, and they have no plans to repeal the law. In fact, Paul Broun introduced an amendment to do just that, but all the Democrats and more than half of Republicans voted it down.

The latest ephemeral trend in Washington is to create a contrived crisis for the purpose of growing government, increasing spending, or raising taxes. The new “milk cliff” is just the latest in the bag of tricks held by the permanent statist class.

Moving forward, we must split up the farm bill into two components; food stamps and agriculture programs. Food stamps must be devolved to the states and most agricultural subsidies need to be means-tested and charted on a gradual course towards elimination. And most of all, the dairy supply control system must be repealed once and for all in a standalone piece of legislation.

That would represent responsible conservative reform that is becoming of a GOP-controlled House. Working harder to buy off Democrats with more spending increases is not the way forward. If Kevin McCarthy and Eric Cantor desire to grow government with Democrat support, maybe they should run for the Pelosi whip team.

The American people elected a Republican House to provide a bold contrast to the Obama-Pelosi agenda, not to work behind the scenes to help grow government with their support.

You can read more about the defeat of the trillion dollar food stamp and farm bill by clicking here.

One of the things all tyrannical regimes such as the administrative state does is to compile a list of enemies. These enemies are defined as those who do not agree with their policies and could pose a threat to their agenda.

The vast majority of the annual shooting homicides are committed by inner-city and minority youths below the age of 30. Handguns are involved in 80% of all murders. Rifles and shotguns account for less than 10% of homicides.

No matter; the National Rifle Association is now blamed for generic gun violence, especially the mass shootings at schools, even though usually no one knows of any proposed gun law — barring outright confiscation of previously purchased firearms, bullets, and clips — that would have prevented the shooters at Sandy Hook and Columbine. Gun merchants are blamed by the president while in Mexico for selling lethal semi-automatic weapons to drug cartels. But so far, the only identifiable purveyor of illegal weaponry is the president’s own attorney general, whose subordinates in the Fast and Furious operation sold hundreds of guns illegally to Mexican drug lords.

Suggestions to encourage greater incarceration of the mentally unstable, to jawbone Hollywood about its profitable (and gratuitous) gun violence, to regulate extremely violent — and extremely well-selling — video games usually fall on deaf liberal ears. In short, the stereotyped camouflaged, weekend gun enthusiast is not the problem that leads to Columbine, or the nearly 532 murders last year in Chicago. But because we can’t or won’t address the causes of the latter, we go after the former. He is not the unhinged sort that shoots a Gabby Giffords or innocents in an Aurora, Colorado, theater; but somehow is the supposed red-neck yokel that a journalist like ABC’s Brian Ross assumes does.

If the Department of Homeland Security, as is rumored, really did wish to stockpile hundreds of millions of rounds of ammunition, then why did it begin such repository buying right in the middle of a hysterical national debate about limiting access to various rifles and semi-automatic weapons? Was it not to create a climate of fear and panic buying that has emptied America’s shelves of the most popular types of ammunition? If the homicide rate in Philadelphia and Chicago is any indication, murderers still have plenty of access to bullets. Those who want to target practice or shoot a varmint on their property do not.

The CIA and FBI knew of the suspicious activity of the Boston bombers, of Major Hasan, and of Anwar al-Awlaki. And they did nothing to preempt their violence. The FBI is said to be carefully avoiding monitoring mosques, although all of the above terrorists were known by many fellow Muslim worshipers to be either disturbed or extremist or both. In contrast, the NSA monitors, we are told, nearly everyone’s communications rather than focusing on Middle Eastern male Muslims, even though Middle Eastern male Muslims have been involved in the vast majority of post-9/11 terrorist plots. The NSA is the electronic version of the TSA, which feels it is noble and liberal to stop an octogenarian in a wheel chair for special frisking as proper compensation for every focused look at a West Bank resident or Pakistani visitor on his way into the United States.

The words “Tea Party” and “patriot” in a non-profit’s name would more likely earn a negative appraisal from the IRS than would “Islam” or “Muslim.” One wonders how Lois Lerner’s IRS division would treat a hypothetical “Sarah Palin Foundation” versus “The Dr. Zawahiri Charity.”

The IRS is not worried at all about 47% of the nation who pay no federal income taxes. The vast majority of those whom it focuses on are instead the 10% who pay over 70% of all taxes. These are the would-be proverbial “fat cats” who did not build their own businesses. They are reluctant to spread their wealth. They certainly did not know either when to stop making money or when the age of profit altogether had passed. Sometime around 2009 success was deemed failure, and failure success — at least if we collate the president fat-cat rhetoric with the vast expansion in the disability, food-stamp, and unemployment-insurance rolls.

Note that the IRS is not interested in leaking to Democrat senators or former administration official rumors about George Soros’s income or the details of the tax returns of Warren Buffett, Steven Spielberg, or Bill Gates. Instead, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate bragged that he knew (falsely as it turned out) that Mitt Romney paid no income taxes. And former high administration official Austan Goolsbee claimed (also falsely as it turned out) that he too knew that the Koch brothers were shorting the IRS.

Note that only liberal groups like ProPublica leak information about the confidential donor lists of conservative activists, apparently given their familiar arrangement with the IRS. So far IRS chiefs are not looking at prominent Democrat politicians for tax violations, although for a time — cf. Tim Geithner, Tom Daschle, Hilda Solis — that might have been a fruitful profile for inquiry. (One encouraging side note: if you are a suspect white, mature, well-off, conservative, heterosexual, Christian male, you can still obtain exemption from federal suspicion by loudly announcing that you also are enthralled by Barack Obama.)

We know who was not an administration suspect in the killing of four Americans in Benghazi — hard-core, al Qaeda-related Islamic terrorists. Instead a supposedly right-wing unhinged video-maker was the object of vitriol from the secretary of state, the UN ambassador, and the president of the United States. He currently sits in jail. The known perpetrators of the murders walk free. In contrast, Lisa Jackson, the former EPA director, just got a fat inside job from Apple, despite creating not just a fictitious name (e.g., “Richard Windsor”) to avoid scrutiny when she communicated official business, but also an entirely made-up alter ego: “Richard Windsor” became an ideal employee lauded by the unethical EPA for his supposedly “ethical behavior.”

We also know who in the media is not a target. Not the CBS or ABC News presidents who have siblings working in the White House. Not ABC’s Good Morning America, given that one of its stalwarts is married to Press Secretary Jay Carney. Instead, there are two sorts of suspicious reporters that are considered hostile to the administration and worthy of having their communications monitored. One group are those journalists who leak information that the administration wished to preempt and leak first or who refuse to only leak favorable classified information — the bin Laden trove, the cyber war against Iran, the drone targeting protocol — that makes the president look as if he were a competent commander in chief.

The other target, of course, is Fox News, whose staff, in a variety of ways and on a number of occasions, the Obama administration has previously attacked as in some way illegitimate.

Again, who fits these profiles that our current, vastly expanding big government does not like? If you are an operator of a coal plant that creates needed energy at a profit, then beware that the EPA is after you. If you are a shady insider who wants tens of millions of government dollars to subsidize a money-losing wind and solar plant, you hit the jackpot. Ditto the suspect people who build guitars, loan money to Chrysler, or wish to locate a jet airliner plant in South Carolina. Profits create suspicion; failures earn subsidies.

Then there are the clingers, whom the president long ago blasted as religious zealots and gun-toting xenophobes. These are the sorts whom the attorney general calls “cowards” (not “my people”) — the “enemies” whom the president advises Latino activists to “punish” at the polls, the sorts that the president apologizes for abroad as guilty of sundry sorts of past class, race, and gender oppression.

In contrast, who is not so worried about government surveillance or audit? The New Black Panthers who turned up at a polling station in Philadelphia to intimidate voters; the “farmers” who, according to the New York Times, filed bogus claims to cash in on the government’s ill-advised and poorly administered Pigford settlement; the Secret Service agents who routinely visited prostitutes while on duty protecting high government officials abroad; and the assistant to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who used her office to enhance her private consulting business.

Americans wonder whom would the immigration services more likely wish to deport: the German Romeike family that was “guilty” of homeschooling their children; Obama’s aunt Zeituni, who lied about her immigration status to illegally obtain state and federal subsidies; or Onyango Obama, who likewise is here illegally (for 21 years) and was recently charged with ramming a police car while driving intoxicated? Is the U.S. so short of DUI offenders and frauds that we must deport homeschoolers to make room for them?

There is currently a climate of fear growing throughout the United States. Millions of Americans are terrified of the IRS, the Department of Justice, the EPA, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and even perhaps the FBI, CIA, and State Department.

Why?

These government agencies have never been bigger, more powerful, and more ideologically driven. Citizens fear them for understandable reasons: those who do nothing wrong, whether in filing tax forms or trying to buy a rifle, are considered suspect and deserving to be the target of either federal scrutiny or presidential slurs. But those who do a great deal of wrong, either by illegally entering the country, disrupting polling, trafficking in weapons in Mexico, eavesdropping on American citizens, pulling tax information for partisan purposes, subverting a government agency, or lying to the public about government activity, seem exempt from punishment — and, more chillingly, sense that they are so exempt.

Ask who now is sitting in prison — a shyster video-maker who had nothing to do with the deaths of four Americans, or their five known terrorist killers lounging about in North Africa? Apparently, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, like EPA director Lisa Jackson, was guilty of creating a fake persona. Like Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, he had a lien on her business. Like former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, he had some unpaid taxes. Like Tamerlan Tsarnaev, he had been visited by government investigators. Like Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, he lied to federal authorities — although they were not quite as high as those in the U.S. Congress. And unlike all of the above, he was therefore jailed.

Of all the legacies of Barack Obama, the most pernicious will be the creation of a rogue government that has cut off and terrified half the population — and for no other reason than that they seem to represent things that Mr. Obama simply does not seem to understand.

The truth is that governments are always like pitchers trying to pitch out of a jam with all the bases loaded. We the people want a little free stuff. The ruling class wants to seize and hold political power. Promising free stuff is how you get elected. This what James Madison knew when he authored Federalist No. 10.

Usually, those vote-buying promises result in policies that damage the economy. President Obama has been worse than most. The result is that politicians and their officials are always involved in trying to Band-Aid over the distortions and the wounds they have inflicted on the economy and our freedoms in their crude bid for power.

Friday, June 14, 2013

Obama, The Liar In Chief

“The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.” — Winston Churchill

President Obama and his people deserve at least one accolade: they have perfected lying into an art form.

Is anyone in Obama's closest orbit a truth-teller?

Jay Carney, press secretary, lied about the Benghazi talking points, the effects of the federal budget sequestration, and Eric Holder;

Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State, a "congenital liar" according to the late William Safire in a 1996 NY Times column, lied to Congress about her role in the Benghazi security breach, and subsequent cover-up;

Susan Rice, US Ambassador to the UN, lied to the American people on five successive TV news-interview shows about a video provoking the Benghazi attacks; Eric Holder, Attorney General, lied to Congress and to federal judges about his role and intentions in obtaining the surveillance and wiretapping authorization for journalist James Rosen;

Douglas Schulman, IRS Commissioner, lied to Congress about the IRS not targeting opponents and political enemies of the Obama administration;

James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, lied to Congress about NSA not eavesdropping and collecting phone records and emails from millions of Americans;

Lisa Jackson, EPA Administrator, used at least one alias to avoid scrutiny by Congress;

Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services lied about her secret government email accounts, and lied about her soliciting health insurance companies for illegal fund-raising, (and has lied about nearly every major provision in ObamaCare);

Arnie Duncan Secretary of Education, lied about the federal budget sequestration causing mass layoffs of teachers;

Janet Napolitano Director of Homeland Security and Ray LaHood, Secretary of Transportation both lied about sequestration causing massive air travel delays;

Nancy Pelosi, previous Speaker of the House, lied about provisions in ObamaCare and about whether she was briefed about water boarding;

Harry Reid, US Senate Majority Leader, lied about deficit reduction provisions embedded in non-existent budget resolutions and about Mitt Romney's tax returns.

Ken Salazar, Secretary of the Interior and his Energy Czar Carol Browner lied about and used fraudulent claims to impose an offshore drilling ban in the wake of the BP oil spill, then were rebuked by a federal judge.

If others in Obama's cabinet or inner circle haven't been caught lying, it may be only because they've kept their mouths shut.

Yet none of Obama's apprentices can match the master. Obama is an incontinent bladder of lies, deceptions, and red herrings gushing virtually non-stop whether in press conferences, campaign speeches, the State of the Union addresses, or remarks to foreign dignitaries.

Stig Severinsen, who holds the world record for holding his breath under water for 22 minutes, couldn't endure long enough for the time needed to recite all of Obama's lies. Obama's catalog of lies is truly astonishing:

Obama's lying about the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United , about Al Qaeda "on the run," about "deficits shrinking," about Republicans initiating sequestration, about the Benghazi attacks incited by a video, about "you can keep your health plan and your doctor," about private sales of hand guns, and the latest about "we believe in the free market; we believe in a light touch when it comes to regulations," is more than political rhetoric or partisan posturing. Lying is a way of life; truth seems untouchable, toxic, red hot radioactive to Obama and his minions.

Do you remember in 2009 when South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson shouted "You lie!" as Obama declared in a major address to Congress that illegal aliens wouldn't get government paid health care? When in modern history has a president's lying provoked such a spontaneous outburst in real time? And barely months into his first term?

Lying has many shades; Obama has perfected the bald-faced type, the most jarring, with a repetition that files down the senses, grinds away at outrage.

Obama isn't the only occupant of the White House to have incorporated brazen lying into his daily habits. Bill Clinton was an accomplished liar, notably in denial of his own personal transgressions. For Clinton lying to a grand jury was just like any other conversation. LBJ lied about Vietnam; yet Johnson the ultimate political manipulator knew he had misled the American people thus stood down from re-election.

No one likes to be called a liar; it is such a crude Saxon label, and so dispositive; dissembler only a slightly more graceful epithet. Instead, being called an artful dodger would be far more becoming; even better to acquire a more sophisticated Latinate derivative, prevaricator.

More elusive variations on the straight-up unadorned and unvarnished lie have now become the norm, from subtle inflections to translucent mutations. Untruths, partial truths, prevarications, sleights-of-hand, obfuscations, fabrications, distortions, misrepresentations, mistaken attributions, convenient amnesia, and contingent truths, all forms of dishonesty that seem to be accepted political discourse. They all define Obama's culture of deceit and betrayal of the American people.

I suppose serial lying, the pathological sort, is a form of sustained self-deception and insecurity sometimes accompanied by identity theft and fabrication of one's resume. When lying becomes commonplace, truth telling is hard to recognize, and then so exceptional as impossible to be authentic. And when lying is the norm, greeted not only with impunity, but affection, why tell the truth?

When Obama or any of his minions speak, do you expect impartial information, an honest appraisal, or objective analysis? No, when Obama speaks, fact-checkers are forced into overdrive.

As lying becomes the default font, the most egregious practitioners collect the highest rewards. To wit: Susan Rice, a spectacular fivefold liar as US Ambassador to the UN, has now been rewarded by the president to be National Security Advisor, for her laying down the scent to divert the beagles and hounds in hot pursuit of the truth about Benghazi.

One explanation for Obama's compulsive lying comes from the accounts of military deception in WWII written in 1975 by Anthony Cave Brown about Winston Churchill, who remarked to Stalin at Yalta: "In wartime, truth is so precious, she should be attended by a bodyguard of lies." Obama, the reparations crusader, sees himself at war. At war with a litany of oppressors in his own nation who have seized his imagination since he was a small boy. Yet what core of truth is he protecting? Well, it is the truth about himself and his agenda that dare not be exposed, much less admitted.

Enablers and apologists have enthusiastically embraced Obama's culture of deceit. Yet when they realize that they too are the enemy, will they discover a bodyguard of lies protects no one?

The Obama Administration has presented such an array of botched domestic and foreign policies that an observer can become disoriented. Seeing a blur of so many negative events is like watching a Jason Bourne movie, with the camera on high speed. Each alleged malfeasance or scandal is worthy in itself of deliberate scrutiny, yet as we start to examine each one, others suddenly compete for our attention. It is a dazzling tapestry of mismanagement at best. But there is one theme that connects it all: contempt.

First, we have a rogue agency named the Internal Revenue Service interfering in the lives of ordinary folks with views that are conservative or at odds with the Administration. This contemptuous act against Americans who have committed no apparent wrongdoing or financial legerdemain is heavy-handedness reminiscent of banana republics or authoritarian regimes of yesteryear.

Testifying on Capitol Hill about his reportedly 157 visits to the White House, former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman dismissively cited “the Easter Egg roll with my kids” among the reasons for such an astonishing number of169246665 meetings. Lois Lerner, Director of the IRS Exempt Organizations pleaded the Fifth Amendment, and Steven Miller, Acting Commissioner referred to the debacle as “horrible customer service” in his apology. To make it worse, the IRS will judge whether Americans are in compliance with ObamaCare, not supported by a majority of the American people and railroaded into existence by the President. And it is the same IRS, which investigates U.S. companies for excessive corporate entertainment expenses that are reported as income tax deductions, that spent $50 million on conferences over a recent three-year period, with certain IRS officials staying in $3,500 hotel suites, according to findings of the Treasury Department’s inspector general. Indeed, the IRS has shown itself to be unworthy in its principal role as the instrument of revenue collection from American people and companies.

Further, the Department of Justice that has shown contempt for the First Amendment through highly unusual surveillance of journalists of the AP who like those harassed by the IRS, are seen to be a threat to the Administration’s narratives. In a disingenuous and cynical act, Attorney Justice HolderGeneral Eric Holder invited journalists to an “off the record meeting,” again evidencing contempt for openness and the principle of transparency which the Administration has piously affirmed. All this comes from an Attorney General already held in contempt by the House of Representatives for not presenting documents relating to the mismanaged Mexican Fast and Furious gun tracking operation, the first such a sanction of a Cabinet official in American history. Moreover, it has been revealed that an anti-abortion group in Iowa was directed to commit to the IRS that it would not demonstrate in front of Planned Parenthood, a crudely repressive action by the Department of Justice that seems at odds with the First Amendment.

The same contempt prevails in foreign policy. Benghazi is enshrouded in fog and allegations of deception by the Obama Administration, which before the November election desperately put out the story that the massacre of U.S. foreign service staff was the result of a video offensive to Muslims produced in California, and not a concerted ambush by Al Qaeda or its affiliates — to avoid the inference that America had not successfully broken the back of Islamist jihadism.

To this day, we do not know who denied requests for security at the American mission; who ordered a Special Forces unit in Tripoli to stand down, as charged by Gregory Hicks, formerly deputy chief of mission; who directed Susan Rice, ambassador to the United Nations, to take to the air waves and Hillary-Clinton-at-senate-015call it a reaction to a video offensive to Muslims; and who ordered that this misrepresentation be maintained for seventeen days until President Obama finally acknowledged that it was a terrorist attack. Further, we do not know exactly what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama were doing during all seven hours of the siege of the U.S. consulate. And now, the controversial and highly criticized Susan Rice has been named national security advisor.

Perhaps the Administration hopes that Americans have attention deficit disorder — absorbed with buying and selling, family problems, and the distractions of a consumer economy — making them unable to assimilate and concentrate on so many issues of incompetence, or worse, illegality if proved.

What we have is a matrix of contempt — contempt for the American people, or at least about half of them; contempt for the principles of transparency and stewardship; and contempt for the pursuit of truth. Let us hope the electorate will speak out and make its will known; resignations of shameless senior U.S. officials could be too much to hope for.

Who knows — we might even get to hear Jay Carney, White House Press Secretary, state that in an era of moral relativism, we must make allowances for our government.

No administration in the history of this Republic has spread so many lies and half-truths as the Obama administration and his minions in Congress. What makes this situation worse is the enabling of these lies by the media so anxious to see their anointed one to be successful.

Each day new polls shows show a growing distrust of government. Even though the mainstream media and Obama sycophants keep trying to insulate Obama from the egregious untruthfulness and outright criminality of his administration the truth is slowly trickling its way out each day. It’s like a faulty dam in one of those earthquake disaster films when you see a trickle of water begin seeping out of the face of the dam. Then as the film progresses the trickle becomes a stream and finally the dam bursts sending a wall of water destroying everything in the valley.

Obama in his incompetence and lack of any leadership skills has allowed thisFrowrning Obama condition to grow in the past five years. He is great at making speeches reading words from a teleprompter that one of his subordinates have written for him. He smiles a lot as he turns his head from the teleprompter on the right to one on he left. He uses hand gestures to emphasize the points he wants to make — all of this against a background of avid followers that have been carefully selected to surround him. It’s pure Mussolinian.

Yet 52% of the American public has bought into Obama’s lies because they want to believe him. They are dazzled by his charismatic appearance and the words they want to hear — especially when he espouses things they want to hear like tax the rich and his doctrine of “fairness” and class warfare. Just look what he told the people in the Texas town of West when he made one of his photo-op visits telling the assembled crowd that they would not be forgotten. Then after he flies away on Air Force One FEMA denies any help for the beleaguered town. Obama didn’t give a tinker’s damn about the town of West. It was in Texas — a red state. Obama’s comments were not intended for the citizens of West, they were put forth for the national media where he could show his faux compassion. In essence he lied for political gain.

While I am not a fan of FEMA and the vast amounts of federal aid it hands out each year I use this issue to point out the duplicity of our liar-in-chief.

As Winston Churchill said: “The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.”

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Too Many Scandals

"Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness." — George Washington

With all the scandals it’s getting hard for the average American to keep up. First we had Benghazi. Then the Justice Department’s snooping into the e-mails of the AP and James Rosen of Fox News. Then came the IRS’ overt bias against conservative groups requesting 501c(3) tax exempt status. Now we have the bombshell of the National Security Agency’s data mining of millions of Americans. And we will soon have the exposé of the EPA’s illegal actions of going after conservative groups by loading them with onerous regulations and the looming sex scandal involving the State Department.

Most Americans spend their time working and supporting their families. They don’t have much time to focus on all of these scandals every day. Most get their news from the nightly TV news shows or the late night comedians. Unless they are dedicated listeners to talk radio of the cable news channels they just can’t keep up.

The beauty of the 1973 Watergate Scandal is that it was the only scandal to focus on. The American people were able to watch replays of the hearings each night on the three major TV networks. Most of the anchors on these networks were fairly unbiased reporters who did a reasonable job of reporting the news and not getting into opinions. That was left to the Sunday shows like Meet the Press and Face the Nation.

This overload of scandals is in a way a blessing for the Obama administration. It creates a cloud of obfuscation over all of the scandals with the exception of the most current one. In this case it’s the NSA and Edward250px-Elijahcummings Snowden. The Benghazi attack of 9/11/2012 and the issue of gun-running to Syria has taken the rear most seat in the media. The DOJ’s illegal snooping is growing dim. The IRS scandal according to Representative Elijah Cummings (D MD) is over and the case is closed yet the reports and law suits continue to mount. Now it’s all about the NSA.

It’s difficult for the mainstream media to walk and chew gum at the same time. In fact it’s difficult for some of the MSM’s publications and outlets to walk at all. This is good news for President Obama and the worst Attorney General since Congress passed the Judiciary Act of 1789 and the Federalist and former Secretary of State Edmund Jennings Randolph was appointed as the first Attorney General.

The United States Attorney General (AG) is the head of the United States Department of Justice (see 28 U.S.C. § 503) concerned with legal affairs and is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States government. The attorney general is considered to be the chief lawyer of the U.S. government. The attorney general serves as a member of the president's cabinet, and is the only cabinet department head who is not given the title secretary.

The attorney general is nominated by the President of the United States and takes office after confirmation by the United States Senate. He or she serves at the pleasure of the president and can be removed by the president at any time; the attorney general is also subject to impeachment by the House of Representatives and trial in the Senate for "treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors."

The original duties of this officer were "to prosecute and conduct all suits in the Supreme Court in which the United States shall be concerned, and to give his advice and opinion upon questions of law when required by the president of the United States, or when requested by the heads of any of the departments." Only in 1870 was the Department of Justice established to support the attorney general in the discharge of his responsibilities.

Since AG Randolph was appointed we have had 81 Attorney Generals — some good, some bad, some charismatic, but most unknown to most of us today. If I were to ask who Edward Bates or Richard Olney were I would venture you would not know. On the other hand if I asked if you knew who Edwin M. Stanton, Alexander Mitchell Palmer, Francis Biddle, Robert F. Kennedy, or John Mitchel were most educated Americans would get that question correct of Jeopardy.

Three of the worst AGs in American history come to mind: Alexander Palmer (Wilson), Janet Reno (Clinton), and the worst being our current Attorney General Eric Holder.

Prominent voices from both sides of the aisle are calling for embattledturleyjfisa Attorney General Eric Holder to resign as America’s chief law enforcement officer. Even those on the left have abandoned him. Holder has presided over a “comprehensive erosion of privacy rights, press freedom and due process,” according to liberal professor Jonathan Turley

In his May 29th column in USA Today Turley said:

“Recently, Attorney General Eric Holder appeared before the House Judiciary Committee to answer questions about the administration's sweeping surveillance of journalists with the Associated Press. In the greatest attack on the free press in decades, the Justice Department seized phone records for reporters and editors in at least three AP offices as well as its office in the House of Representatives. Holder, however, proceeded to claim absolute and blissful ignorance of the investigation, even failing to recall when or how he recused himself.

Yet, this was only the latest attack on the news media under Holder's leadership. Despite his record, he expressed surprise at the hearing that the head of the Republican National Committee had called for his resignation. After all, Holder pointed out, he did nothing. That is, of course, precisely the point. Unlike the head of the RNC, I am neither a Republican nor conservative, and I believe Holder should be fired.”

While Prof. Turley makes a case for Obama firing Holder I think it’s a liberal’s way of brushing the issue of government overreach and abuse of power under the rug in the Oval Office and a way for Holder to eat Obama’s sins.

Here are a few reasons why Holder should not be fired:

(1) If Holder is culpable, let him face investigation and the legal consequences for his actions. If he is not, let him keep his job. Resignation is an unsatisfying compromise that leaves the American public without the answers we deserve.

(2) This is no time for him to ride off into the sunset. Resignation wouldJustice Holder allow him to disappear over the horizon and return to private life. The press will move on to the next kerfuffle du jour, and the American people will lose interest in what he may or may not have done while serving as attorney general.

(3) Resigning would immediately reduce his accountability. Resignation would make it easier for Holder to claim he no longer has access to key information. When congressional committees seek answers to the many unanswered questions, Holder can claim that he doesn’t know and that he no longer has access to relevant information.

4) We don’t need any more obfuscation. Holder’s resignation would give political cover to the administration’s erosion of privacy rights, press freedom and due process. The federal leviathan now has unprecedented access to health information, thanks to the behemoth of bad legislation known as ObamaCare.

Freedom of the press goes the way of individual privacy. Outrageous incursions — obtaining phone records of editors and reporters at The Associated Press, the electronic monitoring of Fox News reporter James Rosen — together with Holder’s denials before the House Judiciary Committee that he was not involved in either incident prompted Obama to ask Holder to investigate himself.

And remember that bit in the Fifth Amendment about no person being “deprived of life” without “due process of law”? I missed the part where it says “except in the case of drone strikes.” Waterboarding non-citizen, enemy-combatant Jihadis makes the president evil, whereas vaporizing U.S. citizens from the sky makes the president a hero.

5) Atonement requires more than just a sacrificial lamb. Holder should not resign because that will allow the left to claim that he was a rogue attorney general and that his boss bears no responsibility for his misdeeds. It will allow Obama to escape making the tough public decision to fire him for cause, and it would give Obama an easy way out.

Obama faces a watershed moment in his presidency. From Benghazi to the IRS scandal to the AP and James Rosen investigations to the NSA’s surveillance of the entire population, the American people have innumerable unanswered questions about this administration’s approach to the rule of law.

Obama promised the most transparent administration ever. He claimed he would bring “an unprecedented level of openness in government” that would “work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency.”

He promised transparency. He delivers opacity, blocking investigations of wrongdoing. He promised “a review of government regulations” to find and “fix” rules unnecessarily burdening business. He delivers a one-way ratchet on federal governmental expansion at the inevitable expense of individual freedom.

The issues posed by the current epidemic of current and developing scandals cannot be solved by the resignation of Eric Holder, Lois Lerner, Cheryl Mills, Michael Morell or anyone else. We need to keep the public spotlight shinning on these dark corners of our administrative state.

Barack Obama wasn't an average citizen before moving into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. He was a senator. He was on the Foreign Relations Committee and had access to classified information — all the more reason to believe that he knew that the terror threat was not cynical “fear mongering' by President Bush. When Bush engaged in data mining, he was “undermining our constitution and our freedoms.” When Obama does it, he is “striking the right balance” between security and freedom.

The president assures us that “no one is listening to our phone calls,” and that may be true. But this administration also assured us that no sweeping data collection on American citizens was going on, that the IRS was not unfairly singling out conservatives, that the Justice Department had not attempted to prosecute journalists, and that the Benghazi attack was the response to a video.

According to the latest Fox News poll two-thirds of American voters (66 percent) think the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative groups as part of a high-level operation to punish political opponents. Far fewer — 23 percent — think it was a mistake by a handful of lower-level IRS employees.

More than three-quarters of voters (78 percent) want Congress to continue to investigate the IRS. That’s a bit higher than the number that thinks Congress should continue to investigate the Justice Department seizing journalists’ records (76 percent) and the Obama administration handling of the attacks in Benghazi (73 percent).

Holder’s resignation would make things easier on this administration. And that’s the last thing we need if we want to return to constitutional government.

Monday, June 10, 2013

Has The Dam Finally Burst

"You can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” he said. “We're going to have to make some choices as a society." — Barack Hussein Obama, June 7, 2013

Until last week there was a steady drip, drip, drip of reports in the press about the scandals revolving about the Obama administration. It seemed as though each day a new report was coming forth about the Benghazi, DOJ, and IRS scandals.

Then we had the NSA bombshell dropped on our head. Last Wednesday a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the Central Intelligence Agency told the Guardian about the National Security Agency’s super-secret PRSIM program’s collection of huge amounts of private Internet and telephone data

Subsequently on Sunday the Guardian identified the source as Edward Snowden, who has worked at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee for various defense contractors. He has most recently worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, a defense contractor, the newspaper said.

The Guardian said it was revealing Mr. Snowden’s identity at his own request. In an interview with the newspaper, Mr. Snowden, who is currently staying in a hotel in Hong Kong, said he expected that the American government would seek to prosecute him for disclosing top-secret documents detailing the Obama administration’s extensive surveillance program.

“I have no intention of hiding who I am,” he was quoted as saying, “because I know I have done nothing wrong.”

Mr. Snowden’s disclosures to The Guardian and The Washington Post over10leak2-articleLarge the last week have reignited the long-smoldering controversy over the scope of government surveillance of American citizens, which appears to have expanded substantially since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In recent days, the Obama administration and other proponents have defended the surveillance program, revealing that it had helped to thwart terrorist plots, in order to bolster assertions that such data collection was necessary to keep Americans safe.

In a video accompanying the Guardian article, Mr. Snowden seemed slightly tense but articulate and well spoken. He wore glasses, a dark gray shirt open at the neck, and had a slight growth on his chin and upper lip.

Asked what fears he might have about his future, he said, “I could be rendered by the C.I.A., I could have people come after me.”

“We’ve got a C.I.A. station just up the road in the consulate here in Hong Kong, and I’m sure,” he said with a nervous laugh, “that they’re going to be very busy for the next week, and that’s a fear I’ll live under for the rest of my life.”

He said he came to Hong Kong, an autonomous Chinese territory, because he believed it was independent and had “a strong tradition of free speech.”

“The people of Hong Kong have a long tradition of protesting in the streets, of making their views known”, he said in a video interview. “The Internet is not filtered here, no more so than in any other Western government.”

The National Security Agency is collecting records of every domestic and cross-border Verizon phone call between now and July 19th. The secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over these records has been leaked to the Guardian.

You may find that outrageous. 1984 has arrived. Big Brother is watching you.

But the author of this story is not George Orwell. It’s Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, Senator Diane Feinstein of California, and you.

Here’s what I mean: In June of last year, Representative Smith (R) introduced H.R. 5949, the FISA Amendments Act Reauthorization Act of 2012. Its purpose was to extend the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 for five years, continuing the government’s authority to collect data like this under secret court orders. The House Judiciary Committee reported the bill to the full House a few days later. The House Intelligence Committee, having joint jurisdiction over the bill, reported it at the beginning of August. And in mid-September, the House passed the bill by a vote of 301 to 118.

Sent to the Senate, the bill languished until very late in the year. But with the government’s secret wiretapping authority set to expire, the Senate took up the bill on December 27th. Whether by plan or coincidence, the Senate debated secret surveillance of Americans’ communications during the lazy, distracted period between Christmas and the New Year.

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D) was the bill’s chief defender on the Senate floor. She parried arguments doggedly advanced by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) that the surveillance law lacks sufficient oversight. Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez reported at the time that modest amendments proposed by Wyden and others would improve oversight and in no way compromise security. But false urgency created by the Senate’s schedule won the day, and on December 28th of last year, the Senate passed the bill, sending it to the president, who signed it on December 30th with little coverage in the press. This bill consisting of over 300 pages was given to the senators on the same day that the vote was called. There was no possible way they could have read and digested the entire bill.

The news that every Verizon call is going to the NSA not only vindicates Senator Wyden’s argument that oversight in this area is lacking. It reveals the upshot of that failed oversight: The secret FISA court has been issuing general warrants for communications surveillance.

That is contrary to the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which requires warrants to issue “particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” When a court requires “all call detail records” to be handed over “on an ongoing daily basis,” this is in no sense particular. Data about millions of our phone calls are now housed at the NSA’s super-secret billion dollar facility in Utah. Data about calls you make and receive today will be housed at the NSA.

The reason given for secret mass surveillance of all our phone calls, according to an unofficial comment from the Obama administration, is that it is a “critical tool” against terrorism. These arguments should be put to public proof. For too long, government officials have waved off the rule of law and privacy using “terrorism” as their shibboleth. This time, show us exactly how gathering data about every domestic call on one of the largest telecommunications networks roots out the tiny number of stray-dog terrorists in the country. If the argument is based on data mining, it has a lot to overcome.

The ultimate author of the American surveillance state is you. If you’re like most Americans, you allowed yourself to remain mostly ignorant of the late-December debate over FISA reauthorization. You may not have finished digesting your Christmas turkey until May, when it was revealed that IRS agents had targeted groups applying for tax exempt status for closer scrutiny based on their names or political themes.

Privacy advocates and surveillance experts have suspected for years that the government was using an expansive interpretation of the Patriot Act’s §215 “business record” authority to collect bulk communications records indiscriminately. We now have confirmation in the form of a secret order from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to Verizon — and legislators are saying that such orders have been routinely served on phone carriers for at least seven years. (It seems likely that similar requests are being served on Internet providers — increasingly the same companies that provide us with wireless phone services).

Some stress that what is being collected is “just metadata” — a phrase I’m confident you’ll never see a computer scientist or data analyst use. Metadata — the transactional records of information about phone and Internet communications, as opposed to their content — can be incredibly revealing, as the recent story about the acquisition of Associated Press phone logs underscores. Those records, as AP head Gary Pruitt complained, provide a comprehensive map of reporters’ activities, telling those who know how to look what stories journalists are working on and who their confidential sources are. Metadata can reveal what Websites you read, who you communicate with, which political or religious groups you’re affiliated with, even your physical location. In essence metadata is the family tree of the contained data.

In a way, the ground was prepared for this indiscriminate collection of Americans’ data way back in the 1970s, when the Supreme Court held, implausibly, that we surrender our expectation of privacy — and with it, the protection of the Fourth Amendment — just by using modern technology that leaves traces of our activity on someone else’s computers. But Americans were also sold a false bill of goods when Congress passed and reauthorized the Patriot Act powers used here — which we were repeatedly assured were only intended to be used to track “bad guys.” What we weren’t told was that, if the government thinks data mining ALL our records might help identify “bad guys,” then that information too is “relevant” to an investigation. A relevant example might be if there was a burglary in your home town and the police rounded up every one living in the town as “persons of interest.”

This collection is probably well enough intentioned. The problem is that these records are likely to be retained in databases indefinitely. Which means we don’t just need to worry about whether the government’s motives are pure when they collect the information. Even if they are, someone with access to that data, maybe in five or ten years, may be unable to resist the temptation to use that information for other purposes. Just look at what has happened to Sarah Palin. That could mean investigating ordinary crimes: If you can data mine for suspicious terrorist activity patterns, which is likely to be extremely difficult — you can plug in “suspicious patterns” that may identify drug dealers and tax cheats as well. Still more disturbing is the possibility that, the intelligence community has repeatedly done historically, those records could be exploited for illegitimate political purposes, or even simple greed. (Imagine probing communications for signs of an impending corporate merger, product launch, or lawsuit.)

We are, predictably, being told that this program is essential to protecting us from terrorist attacks. But the track record of such claims is unimpressive: They were made about fusion centers, and the original NSA warrantless wiretap program, and in each case collapsed under scrutiny. No doubt some of these phone records have proven useful in some investigation, but it doesn’t follow that the indiscriminate collection of such records is necessary for investigations, any more than general warrants to search homes are necessary just because sometimes searches of homes are useful to police.

In the short term, we should hope for an Inspector General audit of this program, both to look for abuses — as a similar audit of National Security Letters uncovered “widespread and serious” misuse of authority—and to skeptically interrogate the claim that such sweeping collection is somehow indispensable to national security. In the longer term, we need to follow the suggestion of Justice Sotomayor in United States v. Jones, (regarding the attachment of a GPS device to your car), and think hard about the “third party doctrine,” which leaves all this increasingly voluminous and revealing metadata stripped of constitutional protection.

The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, spurred extraordinary efforts intended to protect America from the newly highlighted scourge of international terrorism. Among the efforts was the consideration and possible use of “data mining” as a way to discover planning and preparation for terrorism. Data mining is the process of searching data for previously unknown patterns and using those patterns to predict future outcomes.

Information about key members of the 9/11 plot was available to the U.S. government prior to the attacks, and the 9/11 terrorists were closely connected to one another in a multitude of ways. The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (9/11 Commission) concluded that, by pursuing the leads available to it at the time, the government might have derailed the plan. Its primary conclusion was that the failures of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation permitted the terrorist attacks to occur and that had these agencies acted more wisely and more aggressively, the attacks could potentially have been prevented. A lack of intelligence was not the problem it was the compartmentalization, risk within the bureaucracy, and failure to act on the intelligence by the Clinton administration that was the problem

Though data mining has many valuable uses, it is not well suited to the terrorist discovery problem. It would be unfortunate if data mining for terrorism discovery had currency within national security, law enforcement, and technology circles because pursuing this use of data mining would waste taxpayer dollars, needlessly infringe on privacy and civil liberties, and misdirect the valuable time and energy of the men and women in the national security community.

What the 9/11 story most clearly calls for is a sharper focus on the part of our national security agencies — their focus had undoubtedly sharpened by the end of the day on September 11, 2001 — along with the ability to efficiently locate, access, and aggregate information about specific suspects.

Asked point-blank last July whether the National Security Agency’s new, billion-dollar Utah installation would hold the data of American citizens, General Keith Alexander, the head of the NSA, responded flatly: “No.”

“While I can’t go into all the details of the Utah Data Center,” he said at the American Enterprise Institute, “we don’t hold data on U.S. citizens.”

But the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Mike Rogers (R-MI), tells a different story. “Within the last few years, this program was used to stop a terrorist attack in the United States,” he says.

However, civil libertarians and some members of Congress say the National Security Agency surveillance programs to hunt terrorists were too broad and collected too much information about innocent Americans.

As to Rodger’s claim I cannot help but harken back to an incident that happened in Berlin in 1933 — the Reichstag fire. The fire was used as evidence by the Nazis that the Communists were beginning a plot against the German government. Van der Lubbe and four Communist leaders were subsequently arrested. Adolf Hitler, who was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany four weeks before urged President Paul von Hindenburg to pass an emergency decree to counter the "ruthless confrontation of the Communist Party of Germany". With civil liberties suspended, the government instituted mass arrests of Communists, including all of the Communist parliamentary delegates. With their bitter rival Communists gone and their seats empty, the National Socialist German Workers Party went from being a plurality party to the majority; subsequent elections confirmed this position and thus allowed Hitler to consolidate his power. I am not comparing the Bush or Obama administrations with the Nazis, but excuses for government overreach due to a particular incident is legend — just ask the Christians when Nero set Rome alight.

The government is accessing “meta data” about millions of our phone calls. Don’t let the technical-sounding term confuse you. That’s information about who called you, and who you called. It’s what time your conversations happened, and how long your conversations continued. If you’ve made a call in the last few months, if you called a lost love, a counselor, a doctor, psychologist, or psychiatrist, the National Security Agency probably has that information.

The IRS scandal reminds us that government agents don’t always have our interests at heart. IRS agents investigated hopeful non-profit groups aiming to weed out those that might challenge government orthodoxy and power. Who’s to say that there isn’t someone in the NSA — or an entire program in NSA — with these same motives?

General Alexander might say his agency is unlike the IRS. So might Chairman Rogers. But who should we believe?

If General Alexander’s statement about not having American citizens’ data is true, how can Rogers’s be? And if Rogers’s statement about this program preventing an attack is true, General Alexander’s statement must be false.

Most likely, General Alexander is equivocating on language. Being Orwellian, in a word.

When General Alexander denied having data about American citizens — or appeared to — he said “we don’t hold data on U.S. citizens.” That preposition, “on,” is perfectly ambiguous, and it exploits gaps in the way we talk about personal data.

General Alexander might argue that all he has are phone numbers. That’s not information about people — just millions of phone numbers and the relationships among them.

It’s time to come clean as to whether the National Security Agency holds data about American citizens.”

But people who understand communications and information technology know that a phone number is an identifier. In fact, your cell phone number more directly identifies you than your name, which probably refers to a number of people in this big world. When the NSA analyzes information about our calls, it is just one, short inferential step from reaching us directly, by name, address, and the other identifiers we’re familiar with. In the modern world, phone numbers are better than names for identifying people.

Clearing up Chairman Rogers’s claims is a different ball of wax. Chairman Rogers should put his claims about security successes to public proof. How do millions of telephone records revealing the relationships of law-abiding citizens across the nation help with law enforcement and counterterrorism? Why can’t the same results be achieved with targeted investigation of genuine leads?

The only reason one might want access to the vast quantity of data collected in this program is for “data mining” — discovering the patterns that appear in data that are indicative of terrorism.

Data mining works with credit card fraud. There are thousands of examples per year from which to build models of what credit card fraud looks like in data. And the cost of getting it wrong is low. Credit card companies may call a customer or cause them a modest inconvenience by cancelling a card.

Data mining won’t work for terrorism because terrorism is too rare. There2013-06-10-brief-cartoon aren’t patterns reflecting terrorism planning or execution. Each plan and each attack, successful or unsuccessful, has been very different from the others. And the cost of false positives is high. Law enforcement personnel waste their time chasing false leads. Wrongly accused people are investigated, questioned, placed on no-fly lists or other derogatory lists, and sometimes people are wrongly arrested.

If Chairman Rogers can show otherwise, now is the time to do so. Language is important and too easy to exploit, so let’s make clear at the outset that “telling” isn’t “showing.”

And it’s time for General Alexander to come clean as to whether the National Security Agency holds data about American citizens. Along with “on” and “about,” one hopes that everyone knows what the meaning of the word “is” is.

In a June 7th report from TheBlaze, NSA Whistleblower: The Government Is Still Telling You an ‘Outright Lie’ About Its Spying Programs:

“The federal government’s “totalitarian”-like surveillance of American citizens has been going on for more than a decade — you’re just now hearing about it, NSA whistleblower William Binney told Glenn Beck on his radio program Friday.

Binney, who was with the NSA for almost four decades, said it was “unfortunate” that he had been proven 100 percent correct on the spy agency’s surveillance capability. He has been blowing the whistle for some time, however, his warnings had been dubbed “conspiracy theories” by some.

Binney said the feds’ spying program began in mid-to-late October 2001. It started by pulling in phone records of various U.S. citizens across the country. He estimates the NSA is collecting data on 3 billion phone calls every single day.

And when the Obama administration says it is only collecting bare data, not the content of your phone calls or emails for example, that’s an “outright lie,” according to Binney.

“Their statement about, ‘we don’t have content’ is an outright lie,” he explained, adding that emails, videos and other type of content are also covered under NSA and FBI’s secret “PRISM” program.

To those who argue they don’t mind the government compiling all their data because they aren’t doing anything wrong, Binney reminded Beck’s audience that total surveillance is how “totalitarian states” have started throughout history. But no country has ever had the massive amount of surveillance capability that the U.S. is currently implementing.

“There wouldn’t be a Jew alive on the planet today if they had this information,” Beck said, referring to Nazi Germany.

Binney went on to say that the spy program could easily be used to target political opposition, just as the IRS targeted conservative groups.

“If you wanted to know who was involved in the Tea Party, this kind of activity would lay our their entire structure and everyone who is involved in it, no matter where they are inside the country,” he said. “That information could then be passed to the IRS to target people.”

Congressional intelligence briefing sessions have not included details about President Barack Obama’s data-gathering programs, despite claims by the president that Congress approved the measures and “every member” knew about them, Republican Rep. Aaron Schock said.

“I can assure you the phone number tracking of non-criminal, non-terrorist suspects was not discussed,” the Illinois lawmaker told Politico. “Most members have stopped going to their classified briefings because they rarely tell us anything we don’t already know in the news. It really has become a charade.”

Responding to the furor over the National Security Agency’s data monitoring programs, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky introduced legislation Friday that requires a warrant be issued before any government agency can search phone records of Americans.

Paul calls the revelation of the program to collect phone records of millions of Verizon customers “an astounding assault on the Constitution.”

But meanwhile, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle deny Obama’s claims that they knew about plans to monitor cell phone and Internet use of Americans, and many said they either learned of the programs through the news or after asking specifically to be briefed.

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said that the average member of Congress doesn’t receive such briefings, and would not have know about programs to monitor cell phone records and Internet use unless they were on an intelligence committee, like Schock, were in special sessions in 2011 or asked to be briefed.

Durbin said he only learned about the two programs after asking for a briefing after being urged by Democratic Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR).

And while Obama said members of Congress “could raise those issues very aggressively,” Democratic Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland told Attorney General Eric Holder Thursday that the news that Congress was “fully briefed” came as a surprise to her and other lawmakers.

“This ‘fully briefed’ is something that drives us up the wall, because often ‘fully briefed’ means a group of eight leadership; it does not necessarily mean relevant committees,” Mikulski said.

In addition, nine senators and 61 congressmen have taken office after the 2010 and 2011 briefings, and new members like Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas say they were not informed of either program without asking about it.

“Americans trusted President Obama when he came to office promising the most transparent administration in history,” Cruz said Friday. “But that trust has been broken and the only way to earn it back is to tell the truth.”

"The Department of Justice is in the initial stages of an investigation into the unauthorized disclosure of classified information by an individual with authorized access," Justice Dept. spokeswoman Nanda Chitre said in a statement late Sunday.

New York Republican Representative Peter King, chairman of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counterintelligence and Terrorism and a member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, said: "If Edward Snowden did in fact leak the NSA data as he claims, the United States government must prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law and begin extradition proceedings at the earliest date. The United States must make it clear that no country should be granting this individual asylum. This is a matter of extraordinary consequence to American intelligence."

Snowden told The Post Hong Kong that he now intends to ask for asylum from "any countries that believe in free speech and oppose the victimization of global privacy.”

Hong Kong has an extradition treaty with the United States that took force in 1998, according to the U.S. State Department website.

"The government could subject him to a 10 or 20 year penalty for each count," with each document leaked considered a separate charge, Mark Zaid, a national security lawyer who represents whistleblowers told the Associated Press.

Snowden told the Guardian he believes the government could try to charge him with treason under the Espionage Act, but Zaid said that would require the government to prove he had intent to betray the United States, whereas he publicly made it clear he did this to spur debate. The difference between Bradley Manning, now on trial before a military court for leaking classified documents to Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, is that Manning leaked information about specific actions while Snowden released information about a government program.

Snowden, a 29-year old high school dropout, is quoted as saying he hopes the publicity of the leaks will provide him some protection and that he sees asylum, perhaps in Iceland, as a possibility. It is reported that Snowden earned $200,000 per year at Booz-Allen-Hamilton

"I feel satisfied that this was all worth it. I have no regrets," Snowden told the Guardian

Whether Snowden is a hero or a traitor is yet to be determined. No doubt he will be somehow taken into custody by U.S. law enforcement agents and somehow extradited to the United States. He will probably be charged with a multitude of crimes against the United States. No doubt there will be cadre of civil libertarian lawyers chaffing at the bit to take on his case. The nation will be divided on Snowden’s actions as the case unfolds and politics may trump justice. In any event what has Snowden done is burst the dam on the Obama administration and now we can add the NSA to the scandals surrounding the State Department, IRS, and Justice Department.

As Lloyd Marcus stated in American Thinker:

“If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, does it make a sound? If the Obama administration breaks the law at will, lies to the American people, uses every government agency at its disposal to punish its conservative/Republican enemies and no one does anything about it, does the administration make a sound? Yes it does -- resulting in devastating consequences for the American people.

Despite a trifecta of scandals, Obama and company continue to stonewall, lie, or refuse to answer questions -- in essence, giving Congress and the American people the finger. Pundits are shocked and taken aback by the unprecedented arrogance of the Obama administration.

Such pundits are a bit late coming to the dance, as we in the Tea Party have been well aware for years of the lawlessness and arrogance of this bunch of thugs from Chicago. Have these surprised pundits forgotten Obama's unprecedented overreaches into the private sector -- nationalizing General Motors, bullying banks, ignoring the ruling of federal judges, trashing the Constitution, and more?

Still, pundits are missing the much greater horrifying picture. My fellow Americans, we are in deep, deep trouble. The cold reality is that until someone steps forward in real opposition to Obama governing according to his will while ignoring all the laws, checks, and balances, we are defenseless, expendable supplicants of a tyrannical dictator.

Remarkably, the mainstream media is complaisant with Obama acting like our king rather than our president because he is liberal, he is black, and his presidency is historic. Obama's agenda fits neatly with the mainstream media's socialist/progressive agenda. So they are elated to have a Teflon liberal black guy in the White House furthering their cause.

The people in the Obama administration are emboldened to do whatever they please: bully conservative groups and individuals, secretly invade our privacy, target reporters, and thumb their noses when they get caught -- all without any real political push-back or consequences. We the American people are in deep excrement.

Ponder that, folks. As long as the mainstream media provides cover for Obama and keeps his poll numbers high by making sure no bad news is linked to Obama (Limbaugh Theorem), our president is empowered to function as a supreme ruler, free to do whatever he pleases to us. Dear God, help us!”

My concern is not so much about this President who spends more time on the golf course and in Air Force One, but about those minions under him. UnderOBAMA-WIRETAPS/VERIZON President Obama, we have seen an Internal Revenue Service harass conservative, Jewish, and Christian groups. We have seen the Department of Homeland Security label tea party activists, evangelicals, and veterans returning from abroad as threats. We have seen the Environmental Protection Agency show favoritism to liberal groups and obstruct conservative groups. We have seen a Department of Justice sell arms to Mexican drug cartels, turn a blind eye to the New Black Panthers, and target journalists. We have seen a State Department bungle its handling of Benghazi and engage in a cover-up of the details of just how badly they screwed up. We have seen the Department of Agriculture frivolously dole out taxpayer dollars in the scandalous Pigford program. And this is not a complete list.

The President has maintained for five years that the buck does not stop with him. He routinely promotes, praises, or otherwise gives a pass to those who have screwed up, abused the rights of American citizens, and squandered American tax dollars. If not the President — and most Americans do still hold him in high regard — his administration has abused the trust of the American people.

Further, for the last several years the President has been telling the American public not to worry. Terror incidents like the Ft. Hood shooting have been classified as “work place violence.” The War of Terror is over. Terrorism is now man-made disaster. The rhetoric of this Administration for the last several years has routinely downplayed threats, trumpeted the lack of attacks, and suggested that the dark clouds of devastation have blown by — Boston bombing aside (and this program does not seem to have helped prevent that).

Is the PRISM program working as intended and, if so, how does it really work. Or is it security theater like the TSA screenings at airports. We have yet to learn that the TSA, for all its theater and prostate exams of passengers, has actually obstructed something harmful. What of the NSA? If we have compromised our privacy, to what end and result have we done so that makes such a compromise necessary and worthwhile? I venture to say for all the elaborate burdens of the TSA, all we have done is make air travel more of a burden.

Why should we trust the National Security Agency? How can we be sure that this one department, unlike the largely nonpartisan IRS, is not engaging in an abuse of data? How can we be sure the NSA will not leak the private details of American citizens to political groups as the IRS did? With the government expanding its reach into the lives of every American with the implementation of ObamaCare, how can we be sure that the metadata that suggests someone may be having a medical issue is not flagged, leaked, or otherwise abused? For now that’s a reach. But a year ago most Americans thought it was a reach to claim the IRS was willfully and maliciously targeting conservative groups.

We cannot trust the government. This Administration has lost the respect of the American people. Compounding the problem, the Congress, which has been overseeing the program, has neither the trust nor respect of the American people. Neither party cares much for its own or the other party in Congress. Diane Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss telling the American people to trust them should be a big red flag that we should not trust them. They do not have our trust.

The coming year will see Republicans and Democrats alike fight over this issue. Rand Paul will make it a campaign issue for his Presidential race. How to balance national security and privacy is no easy thing. While we should all be willing to show some sympathy, if disagreement, with Presidents Bush and Obama and the difficult balancing act they have faced and continue to face, we would not be in such a spot at this time had the present administration not so badly let its own bureaucrats misbehave.

Even those of us who might err on the side of security over privacy must now concede it is time to consider recalibrating the balance. The constitutional rights of American citizens in the United States should be abridged only ever so carefully.

For conservatives, there must be one last note — the Guardian, Glenn Greenwald, and Edward Snowden should not be made heroes. Glenn Greenwald is not “anti anti-terror” as the New York Times portrays him. He is deeply hostile to the United States and routinely sides with every bad actor on the planet when their interests conflict with the United States. The left-wing Guardian is no better.

And Edward Snowden, who fled to communist China after leaking, like Bradley Manning before him, shows Millennials probably cannot be trusted with the mature responsibility of supporting and defending our nation. He has said that China is not a threat, but is our friend as we trade with them. He has also been quoted as say our largest threat was from global climate change — something the Chinese don’t give a damn about.

His was not a courageous act. His was an act of sabotage and ego whereby he decided to be judge, jury, and executioner of an intelligence program that violated his sensibilities, but maybe not the constitution. Then he leaked it to a man and organization deeply hostile to the United States before himself fleeing to a communist nation, praising that nation’s support for free speech.

Just as we cannot trust this administration’s honesty and candor, we surely cannot trust the Guardian, Glenn Greenwald, and Edward Snowden. That leaves American citizens in a frustrating place in need of many more answers than we have at present or are likely to get from those peddling an anti-American agenda or, quite frankly, from the Obama Administration.

America is built on the principle of “ordered liberty”, which seeks to maximize both security and freedom at the same time. The art of governance, then, is to establish rules that let the good guys get the bad guys without infringing on the freedom of the people. The Constitution doesn't give us a rule book toScales of Justice do that. Instead, it sets up security and freedom to fight it out with each other, constantly, like two indefatigable pit bulls. The struggle is intentional, so neither side wins out, but neither gets compromised. Freedom and security tear at each other until we get answers that reasonably address both. So, if people stop raising objections every time security might look like it's winning out, the system will fail. In short, neither full transparency nor just eschewing big data will work to secure both security and freedom. We don't and shouldn't trust government to follow its own rules on its own, but we need government to do its job right and find means to assure us it's doing its job in compliance with the law. That is a hard task, and sadly we have an administration with a mediocre track record of getting it right.

President Obama said Friday that the programs have made a difference in tracking terrorists and are not tantamount to "Big Brother."

"You can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” he said. “We're going to have to make some choices as a society."

The question is what will those choices be — liberty or tyranny?

If the question is should Snowden have leaked such closely held secrets, I would reluctantly answer "yes." But if you are going to deliberately break the law in a civil society, you must be prepared to accept the consequences. Snowden ran away from those consequences. That does not make him a hero in my book. It makes him a criminal. Why didn't Snowden leak the information and then turn himself in? That would have been heroic. Instead, despite his protestations that he doesn't want the story to be about him, he comes off as a glory hound, an attention getter.

If you believe the ends justifies the means, then the rule of law is meaningless. We've had administrations in the past use that excuse, as well as intelligence agencies and the military. Whatever good we think may flow from his criminal acts, we cannot justify them or applaud them — especially since we don't know if these revelations will prove to be catastrophic in the sense that they might facilitate a terrorist attack that may otherwise have been thwarted.

No easy answers. And the questions raised by Snowden's actions aren't a cakewalk either. But what's done is done — whatever his reasons and motivations. Let the law deal with Snowden while we debate what he has revealed and try to salvage a proper balance between surveillance and privacy.