Two Good Things In One Day

"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny." — James Madison

It’s not often that two good things happen of the same day but today we had just such a happening.

The first thing was a ruling handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of the Town of Greece, New York v. Galloway et al. The Supreme Court ruled that a town in upstate New York did not violate the Constitution by starting its public meetings with a prayer from a “chaplain of the month” who was almost always Christian. (See Washington Post Report)

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in a 5-to-4 decision that divided the court’s more conservative members from its liberal ones, said the prayers were merely ceremonial. They were neither unduly sectarian nor likely to make members of other faiths feel unwelcome.

“Ceremonial prayer,” he wrote, “is but a recognition that, since this nation was founded and until the present day, many Americans deem that their own existence must be understood by precepts far beyond that authority of government to alter or define.”

In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan said the town’s practices could not be reconciled “with the First Amendment’s promise that every citizen, irrespective of her religion, owns an equal share of her government.” What else would you expect from the four progressive, non-tolerant liberals sitting on the Court?

Town officials in Greece, N.Y., near Rochester, said that members of all faiths, and atheists, were welcome to give the opening prayer. In practice, however, almost all of the chaplains were Christian. Some of their prayers were explicitly sectarian, with references, for instance, to “the saving sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross.”

Two town residents sued, saying the prayers ran afoul of the First Amendment’s prohibition of government establishment of religion. They said the prayers offended them and, in Justice Kennedy’s words, “made them feel excluded and disrespected.” That’s it folks two residents out of a town of 94,000. I guess 93,998 have to bow two the wishes of 2 malcontents that are offended.

But Justice Kennedy said the relevant constitutional question was not whether they were offended. “Adults often encounter speech they find disagreeable,” he wrote.

Justice Kennedy said traditions starting with the first Congress supported the constitutionality of ceremonial prayers at the start of legislative sessions. He added that it would be perilous for courts to decide when those prayers crossed a constitutional line and became impermissibly sectarian.

“To hold that invocations must be nonsectarian,” he wrote, “would force the legislatures that sponsor prayers and the courts that are asked to decide these cases to act as supervisors and censors of religious speech, a rule that would involve government in religious matters to a far greater degree than is the case under the town’s current practice of neither editing or approving prayers in advance nor criticizing their content after the fact.”

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined all of Justice Kennedy’s opinion, and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas most of it.

Justice Kennedy did suggest that some prayers may be unacceptable if offered consistently over time, including ones that “denigrate nonbelievers or religious minorities, threaten damnation or preach conversion.”

Town officials had tried, he said, to recruit members of various faiths to offer prayers.

In dissent, Justice Kagan said they had not tried hard enough. “So month in and month out for over a decade,” she wrote, “prayers steeped in only one faith, addressed toward members of the public, commenced meetings to discuss local affairs and distribute government benefits.” How hard were they supposed to try? Perhaps they should have scoured the state and nation for volunteers. Ridiculous!

In 1983, in Marsh v. Chambers, the Supreme Court upheld the Nebraska Legislature’s practice of opening its legislative sessions with an invocation from a paid Presbyterian minister, saying that such ceremonies were “deeply embedded in the history and tradition of this country.”

Justice Kagan, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, said the case from Greece was different. The prayers at the town board meetings were often explicitly sectarian, they said, and residents were forced to listen to them in order to participate in local government.

“No one can fairly read the prayers from Greece’s town meetings as anything other than explicitly Christian – constantly and exclusively so,” she wrote in her dissent in the case, Town of Greece v. Galloway, No. 12-696.

Moreover, she said, the clergy “put some residents to the unenviable choice of either pretending to pray like the majority or declining to join its communal activity, at the very moment of petitioning their elected leaders.”

These 4 liberal progressive justices will go to any length to disrespect the intent of our Founders when it comes to religion and the First Amendment.

As I drive east along SR 91 in Orange County there is a cross high upon a hill surrounded by a chain link fence that is clearly visible from the freeway. There is an even larger cross visible from the northbound I-215 in Riverside County near Murrieta. Both crosses are on private property, but very visible to and motorist driving east or north past the respective Christian symbols. I am waiting for the day when some bone-headed person brings an atheist group to town to bring a suit for the removal of these crosses on the grounds that they are “offensive” to them and cause such a distraction that they could cause a traffic mishap. To paraphrase Justice Kennedy’s comment on offensive speech; there are things I see and hear that I don’t like, but I just ignore the moron who said it and go one with my life. I used to live in the neighborhood where a mosque was located and I drove by every day. In fact I drove by it so often I no longer saw it. All I have to say to those who supported the two malcontents in the Town of Greece is “get a life.”

The second good thing that happened is Speaker of the House John Boehner finally after 601 days of spinning, obfuscating, lying, cover-up, political posturing, and Congressional hearings appointed a select committee to get to the bottom of what happened in Benghazi on the night of September 11, 2012 when terrorist carried out a planned attack on our consulate and left the ambassador and three others dead. No more “what does it matter” Mrs. Clinton, now, hopefully we will get to the truth.

To head this committee Boehner selected a very good congressman. His name is Trey Gowdy from South Carolina. He’s got fifteen years of prosecutorial experience at both the federal and state levels. (Fun fact: I was watching an old episode of “Forensic Files” on HLN a week or two ago and who popped up onscreen but a young, dark-haired Trey Gowdy, discussing a murder case he’d won in South Carolina.) He’s also been out in front of the caucus in accusing the White House of Benghazi cover-ups: He’s the man who claimed last summer that they’d been giving CIA agents linked to the incident new identities to hide them from House investigators, and he told Greta Van Susteren just a few days ago that he has evidence that the White House is deliberately withholding documents related to the attack.

Boehner’s statement in appointing Gowdy.

“With four of our countrymen killed at the hands of terrorists, the American people want answers, accountability, and justice. Trey Gowdy is as dogged, focused, and serious-minded as they come. His background as a federal prosecutor and his zeal for the truth make him the ideal person to lead this panel. I know he shares my commitment to get to the bottom of this tragedy and will not tolerate any stonewalling from the Obama administration. I plan to ensure he and his committee has the strongest authority possible to root out all the facts. This is a big job, but Rep. Gowdy has the confidence of this conference, and I know his professionalism and grit will earn him the respect of the American people.”

Gowdy may not be a Sam Ervin of Watergate fame but he is damn close. According to Hot Air:

“Smart politics twice over. Part of the reason Boehner agreed to the select committee was to unify the party ahead of the midterms; after Ben Rhodes’s e-mail became public, refusing to form a committee would have been another flashpoint between the party establishment and the grassroots to go along with amnesty and increasingly tepid opposition to ObamaCare. It stands to reason that if you’re going to do something to placate your base, you might as well choose a conservative in good standing for chairman too. If he’d appointed a centrist and the committee came up with nothing, righties would have accused him of a whitewash. They can’t do that with Gowdy in charge, and if Gowdy comes up with nothing too, then Boehner can distance himself from it by saying it was largely a tea-party production all along.

The other reason it’s smart politics is that not only is Gowdy a respected prosecutor, he’s consistently one of the most dynamic members at House hearings. (You’ve watched enough clips of him on this site to know that.) Boehner doesn’t know what he’s going to get by way of evidence but he will insist on some political payoff from this ahead of the midterms, and Gowdy’s just the guy to deliver that. You want clips of John Kerry or Hillary Clinton sweating under a tough cross-examination to dominate the day’s news cycle on cable? He’ll do that for you better than virtually anyone else.

One question, though. Will Democrats participate in the committee? Here’s Adam Schiff telling Chris Wallace yesterday on FNS that he thinks the party should boycott. I hate to admit it but that’s sound strategy. They’re taking a risk in doing it: If the GOP turns up compelling evidence of Obama’s or Hillary’s negligence on the night of the attack, the fact that Democrats refused to take part in the investigation will make them look complicit in the cover-up and whitewash. If the GOP doesn’t turn up something compelling, though, the boycott will make it easier for Democrats to argue that it was a kangaroo court all along that the public should either pay no attention to or actively punish Republicans for organizing. In fact, Dems can cite their boycott as a reason for the public to downplay or ignore any evidence that Gowdy does uncover. E.g., “We knew Republicans would be grossly unfair to the administration and blow their findings out of all proportion. That’s why we didn’t participate.” It’s a way to delegitimize the effort, which is the whole ballgame for them right now.”

Be that as it may the Democrats better buckle up during the coming weeks. It’s going to get rough and explosive just like Watergate did. There are too many skeletons that have been stashed away in their closet and it’s up to Gowdy and his staffers to drag them out. It’s also a good time for Gowdy and some of his staffers and investigators to make a name for themselves. Over the past 20 months people have been shuffled around, demoted and promoted. Documents have been uncovered and no doubt some folks are fearful of their political fate. Washington is no bastion of loyalty when things get tough. Ask John Dean of Jeb McGruder.

Recognizing a serious threat, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid blasted the expansion of the House GOP probe of Benghazi as an “election-year stunt.”

Close, but no cigar. The real stunt came during the election of 2012, and it was carried out by Democrats.

That’s when the White House went into full fudge mode to protect President Obama from responsibility over the terrorist attack that killed four Americans, including our ambassador to Libya.

The desperate effort included lying about the attack, a fact that is now undeniable thanks to the release of a secret email written days later.

In it, an Obama aide said (Ben Rhodes) a goal of having U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice do five TV interviews was to “underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy.”

But there was no protest about a video before the Benghazi attack, and CIA analysts said they knew instantly it was a planned terror operation. The date — the 11th anniversary of 9/11 — was one of many telltale signs.

The slaughter came only two months before Election Day in a campaign where Obama insisted that Al Qaeda was on the run. He couldn’t say “never mind,” with Mitt Romney breathing down his neck.

So his campaign and the White House tried to obscure what the president knew and when he knew it, and the question now is whether they committed a crime. The email was released in response to a private group’s lawsuit, after being withheld from congressional subpoenas asking for all Benghazi documents.

In promising a select committee would pursue the case, House Speaker John Boehner used the “O” word, accusing the White House of illegally “obstructing” Congress.

That carries echoes of Watergate and Monicagate, so Hilary and the Democrats buckle up it’s a rough road ahead.

To me this was very good news as I called for such committee in my blog of May 10, 2013.

The mainstream media declared the Benghazi story insignificant long ago. To the extent it is covered, the focus is usually on the horrific and unnecessary deaths of four Americans. The Obama administration dismisses it as a lot of fuss about a few silly talking points. Remember Hilary’s “what does it matter” comment.

But everybody is missing the big-picture story of the Benghazi affair and its cover-up. It’s about the White House using the intelligence community for its own political purposes, and lying to the American public in order to win an election. It’s about abuse of power, and that is a big deal. It always has been about the abuse of power and the cover-up. It always is. Those who abuse that power use their minions in the media to assist in the cover up and then wait while the public just forgets about. Too the relatives of those four dead Americans do not have the luxury of forgetfulness.

That’s why the administration cannot be allowed to investigate itself. That’s why it is time for Congress to appoint a special committee to get to the bottom of the story. Benghazi is no longer just a political issue. It’s not just a partisan witch hunt. It goes to the heart of what our system of government is all about.

If it turns out that Benghazi and the cover-up were just a series of junior level mistakes that’s the end of it. But if it turns out the administration was using the military and intelligence communities for political purposes prior to the attack, during the attack and in a subsequent cover-up, it must be held accountable. Because once the precedent is set, future administrations will feel no reluctance to do the same.

America has the most powerful military and intelligence services in the world, probably in the history of the world. They have an infrastructure that endures separately and beyond any administration or politician.

At the same time, the military-intelligence complex takes its orders from the American people, through their elected/appointed representatives in the White House and Cabinet.

It’s a sacred trust at the heart of our Constitution, as set out in civilian control of the military. But it comes at a price — that our civilian leaders do not abuse that power and bend the military and intelligence communities to do their political dirty work.

The president doesn’t order the military to seize political opponents. He doesn’t order his intelligence community to lie about national security for political purposes. He uses the military or intelligence communities to protect the United States and our citizens, not to help him win elections.

That’s the heart of the Benghazi scandal and cover-up. The White House twisted intelligence to suit its political needs.

It is now incumbent on Rep. Gowdy and his select committee to act and act like a hungry dog digging for his bone. There have been countless hearings into Benghazi by numerous congressional committees, but none have had subpoena power to demand the paper trail, or to force government workers to testify about what they knew and when they knew it.

The questions I see at the heart of the Benghazi scandal and cover-up are specifically:

Did the White House fail to provide adequate security at the Benghazi consulate because it didn’t want to acknowledge that a terrorist threat remained, even though Bin Laden was dead?

Did the White House order the intelligence community to change its analysis so the president could claim his policy was a success, rather than a failure, just a few weeks before an election?

And, finally, what was the relationship between an overzealous White House staff and the president himself? What did the president know, and when did he know it?

This is no longer just a political issue. It’s not just a partisan witch hunt. It goes to the heart of what our system of government is all about. That’s why it’s time for Congress to act and to get to the bottom of this, once and for all.

That’s why Benghazi matters.

I am sure in the coming weeks I will have more to say on this issue.

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 of 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 General 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 call 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 this 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.”

Drip, Drip, Drip

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

Last week when asked about the hearings taking place regarding Benghazi, the IRS and the Justice Department’s wiretapping and e-mail searches of AP and Fox News House Speaker John Boehner replied with the simple statement: “drip, drip, drip.” Boehner was right on target. This past week the drips continued to flow from the congressional committees and various news outlets.

There was Lois Lerner’s taking the Fifth Amendment when called to testify in front of Darrel Issa’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee — something many lawyers like the famed Alan Dershowitz believe she waived her rights to the Fifth with her opening statement. Then on Thursday we learned that Lerner had been placed on “administrative leave” with full pay.

Next we were informed that U.S attorney and Obama ally is taking heat for handling of leak probes. Ronald Machen Jr., the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, was nominated by President Obama in 2009 and now runs the biggest federal prosecutor office in the country. His hundreds of attorneys handle everything from gang violence to corruption.

But in recent years, leak investigations have become a hallmark of his portfolio. And his dogged pursuit of the squeaky wheels in government has led him into the tenuous — and some say unprecedented — territory of lumping in leakers with journalists.

According to a Fox News report:

"What's astonishing here is that never before has the government argued that newsgathering -- in this case, asking a source to provide sensitive information -- is itself illegal," Gabe Rottman, legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, told FoxNews.com.

Machen was an early and frequent campaign donor to Obama during the 2008 election, giving close to the maximum amount allowed by law. He gave $2,300 in the general election and nearly as much during the primary.

Yet Machen was arguably chided this week, though not by name, when Obama announced a review into the Justice Department's guidelines for investigations that involve journalists. He said he was "troubled" by the developments and that journalists should not be "at legal risk" for doing their jobs.

Machen's investigation into accused leaker Stephen Jin-Woo Kim raised exactly that concern. As part of that case, federal officials obtained a search warrant for Fox News reporter James Rosen's personal emails, and seized phone records for various Fox News lines. Officials were able to obtain the warrant on the pretext that Rosen was likely a criminal "co-conspirator" along with Kim. Though Rosen was not charged, media and other watchdog groups have described that step as "chilling."

Aside from his involvement in the Kim case, Machen was one of two federal prosecutors tapped by Holder in June of last year to lead the investigation into a string of high-profile security leaks.

It was presumably that investigation that led his office to seize two months of phone records from the Associated Press. Machen first notified the news service of the seizure earlier this month.

Some worry that not only has Machen gone too far but he may be too close to the White House to remain objective. Machen was an Obama campaign contributor and supporter before being appointed by the president in 2009.

"As a former volunteer for Obama for America, contributor to the president's election campaign, and having assisted with the vetting of vice presidential candidates, Machen is a far cry from the beacon of independence and impartiality that something as sensitive as this investigation demands," Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, told FoxNews.com.”

Then we were told that the DOJ begged the Judge to keep James Rosen in the dark about monitoring his e-mails. According to a report on Newsmax:

“The Justice Department begged a federal judge to not tell Fox News reporter James Rosen that it was tracking his telephone calls and emails in a probe regarding a national security leak.

U.S. Attorney Ron Machen argued in 2010 that the traditional 30-day notice period did not apply to Rosen as Justice secretly monitored his Gmail account, according to new exhibits unsealed this week and disclosed by The Hill.

“Where, as here, the government seeks such contents through a search warrant, no notice to the subscriber or customer of the e-mail account is statutorily required or necessary,” Machen wrote in a June 2010 motion. “Thus, this court's indication on the face of the warrant that delayed notice of 30 days to the customer and subscriber was permissible was unnecessary.”

Machen, through another request granted by the court, stopped Google from telling Rosen that Justice was spying on his e-mail account, the Hill reports.

The prosecutor had demanded to see all of Rosen’s emails — including deleted messages, emails in his trash folder and all attachments sent to and from him.

The original warrant in the Rosen case was signed personally by Attorney General Eric Holder, NBC News reported this week.

Meanwhile, Fox News President Roger Ailes on Thursday blasted Justice for targeting journalists as if they were criminals and said the government's seizure of reporters' emails and phone records would not stand "the test of law."

“The administration’s attempt to intimidate Fox News and its employees will not succeed and their excuses will stand neither the test of law, the test of decency, nor the test of time,” Ailes said. “We will not allow a climate of press intimidation, unseen since the McCarthy era, to frighten any of us away from the truth.”

And finally we learned that Attorney General Eric Holder personally approved the warrant for Fox News’ James Rosen’s e-mail searches. After testifying in front of a Senate Committee that he had recused himself from the AP investigation and could not recall any other warrants he had personally approved. Newsmax reported:

“President Barack Obama's Justice Department is defending the decision by Attorney General Eric Holder to sign off on the search warrant used to gain access to Fox News reporter James Rosen's emails, according to the news organization.

The warrant named Rosen a "possible co-conspirator" in violation of the Espionage Act for obtaining leaked classified information from a Pentagon source. Rosen has not been charged.

"The Department takes seriously the First Amendment right to freedom of the press," the agency said in a written statement to Fox on Friday. "In recognition of this, the Department took great care in deciding that a search warrant was necessary in the Kim matter, vetting the decision at the highest levels of the department, including discussions with the Attorney General."

Officials insisted that they sought an "appropriately tailored search warrant" only after "extensive deliberations and after following all applicable laws, regulations, and policies."

The revelation of Holder's involvement came on the same day Obama said in a speech that he had ordered Holder to review the Justice Department's standards for investigating cases that involve journalists.

"I am troubled by the possibility that leaked investigations may chill the investigative journalism that holds government accountable," Obama said in the speech. "Journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs."

A law enforcement official told NBC News of Holder's personal involvement on Thursday. Holder had previously said that he recused himself from the AP phone records investigation since he had been a witness in the initial probe, but no one had previously indicated Holder's role in the Rosen case.”

Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) stated last week that the dam was about to break on the Benghazi investigations. In an article on Townhall.com Graham is quoted to say:

“I think the dam is about to break on Benghazi. We’re going to find a system failure before, during, and after the attacks. We’re going to find political manipulation seven weeks before an election. We’re going to find people asleep at the switch when it comes to the State Department, including Hillary Clinton. The bond that has been broken between those who serve us in harm’s way and the government they serve is huge — and to me every bit as damaging as Watergate.”

The May 7, Townhall article states:

“Say what you will about Graham's politics, he's been as dogged and tenacious on Benghazi as anyone on the planet. Tomorrow's hearings will contain dramatic, on-the-record testimony from three State Department officials. These men will tell the truth, despite alleged threats of professional reprisals. They'll testify about the unforgivably lax security measures at the US diplomatic compound in Benghazi leading up to the 9/11 attack, the Washington-based chain of command's paralysis and inaction during the raid, and the administration's intentional scrubbing of public talking points describing the massacre. (For previews of these revelations based on existing reports, read this, this and this). As an additional primer, be sure to check out former Marine Bing West's piece at National Review. It's an insightful glimpse into US military leadership's serious shortcomings during the multi-hour siege. A snippet:

The military did nothing, except send a drone to watch the action. Defense Secretary Panetta later offered the excuse, “You can’t willy-nilly send F-16s there and blow the hell out of place. You have to have good intelligence.” As a civilian, Mr. Panetta probably didn’t know that 99 percent of air sorties over Afghanistan never drop a single bomb. General Dempsey, however, knew it was standard procedure to roar menacingly over the heads of mobs, while not “blowing the hell out of them.” A show of air power does have a deterrent effect and is routinely employed. A mortar shell killed two Americans during the tenth hour of the fight. A mortar tube can be detected from the air. The decision whether to then bomb should have resided with a pilot on-station — not back in Washington. As for the alleged lack of “good intelligence,” three U.S. operations centers were watching real-time video and talking by cell phone with those under attack. Surely that comprises “good intelligence.”

The integrity of the Pentagon is not in question. The purpose of an After Action is to perform better the next time. Is the public seriously to believe that in ten hours Dempsey and the $600 billion dollar Defense Department could not dispatch one ad hoc rescue team, as our embassy in Tripoli did, or order one fighter jet to scramble? Have our military’s best and brightest lost the capacity to improvise? Clearly, that merits an assessment. Will General Dempsey ask for a review of his own procedures? Do as I say, or as I do? The chairman of the joint chiefs is the only general who can answer that.”

Let's all hope that Sen. Lindsey Graham's suspicion is correct — not for the sake of politics, but for the sake of Patricia Smith and Charlie Woods. They, and the American people, deserve the truth

The drip, drip, drip will continue unless three things happen and happen soon.

Firstly we need a special prosecutor is appointed to look into the activities of the Justice Department. President Obama said in his speech on last Thursday, as speech intended to obfuscate the three scandals plaguing his administration:

“Journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs. Our focus must be on those who break the law. And that’s why I’ve called on Congress to pass a media shield law to guard against government overreach. And I’ve raised these issues with the Attorney General, who shares my concerns. So he has agreed to review existing Department of Justice guidelines governing investigations that involve reporters, and he’ll convene a group of media organizations to hear their concerns as part of that review. And I’ve directed the Attorney General to report back to me by July 12th.”

In essence Obama is stating that he is calling for the fox to guard the henhouse. Now Senator Lindsey Graham is calling for a “special council” to investigate the doings of the Justice Department and Eric Holder. Fox News reports:

“A top Senate Republican on Sunday called for a special or independent counsel to investigate the Justice Department tracking the phone calls and emails of a Fox News reporter, saying Attorney General Eric Holder was too involved in the process to be objective.

President Obama asked Holder last week to investigate the matter involving Fox reporter James Rosen, who in 2009 was reporting on North Korea’s efforts to acquire a nuclear weapon.

Holder “signed off on the affidavit,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told “Fox News Sunday.” “This would be a good time for a special counsel or independent counsel. This is clearly an overreach.”

The Justice Department search warrant stated investigators had probable cause to think Rosen had violated the federal Espionage Act and that he might have aided or abetted others or was a co-conspirator.

“James Rosen is a lot of things, but not a criminal co-conspirator,” Graham said.”

…

“Holder has already recused himself from an investigation into the Justice Department looking into the phone records of the Associated Press, related to a May 2012 story that included information about a foiled plot in Yemen to bomb a U.S.-bound airliner.

That Holder approved the Justice Department searches appears to contradict earlier statements before Congress in which he said accessing reporters’ phone logs was “not something I’ve ever been involved in, nor would I think is a wise policy.”

Graham also called for a special counsel to investigate the IRS flagging Tea Party groups and other politically conservative-leaning organizations seeking tax-exempt status.”

The only problem we have with this action is that Holder will be responsible for appointing the special council. This has many problems as we know the partisanship of Holder. Perhaps a special committee would be better, although it would have a different set of problems. For this reason a special committee might serve the American people better. But there must be the threat of criminal penalties if we want the whole truth and to punish the wrong-doers with more than administrative leave.

Secondly we need a special prosecutor to look at the IRS. This one would be a bit different as even though Holder would be involved in the appointment there are a great many Democrats who would pressure Holder for a neutral prosecutor. I don’t believe Issa’s committee will be able to get the bottom of the IRS scandal for the following reasons.

His congressional committee is just too big. Few members, like Trey Gowdy (R-SC), have prosecutorial experience. There are 38 members of Issa’s Oversight and Government Reform Committee and each member is limited to 5 minutes of questioning. This means that an experienced prosecutor like Gowdy is allowed 5 minutes and then has to sit and wait 3 hours for a second round unless another committee members yields their time.

• A Congressional committee does not have the power of criminal sanctions
• A Special prosecutor has all the time in the world to question witnesses
• A Special prosecutor has subpoena and immunity powers. They can demand witnesses testify and grant immunity for that testimony if they believe it will help peel back more layers of the onion
• Special prosecutors work from the bottom up and usually know many of the answers prior to taking the deposition of the next higher witness.
• If you lie to the special prosecutor you go to jail. Just ask Scooter Libby.

Thirdly we need a special committee to investigate what happened in Benghazi. Special committees have much fewer members and they are handpicked by the Speaker of the House and the House Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosi. Special committees are usually staffed with attorneys and investigators experienced in criminal prosecutions. With fewer members committee members will have more time for questions and follow-up questions.

After this long Memorial Day weekend Boehner and Congress need to get back on track with the Benghazi, IRS and Justice Department hearings. They need to get serious and push for either special prosecutors or select committees that would have the ability to query witnesses with greater authority and tools — tools of subpoena power and criminal prosecution. If they do not the drip, drip, drip will continue until it eventually stops and the American people become bored. If this happens the government and the Obama administrations win and we lose.

Will the Democrats be Hurt by Obama’s Scandals?

Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpations; but, on a candid examination of history, we shall find that turbulence, violence, and abuse of power, by the majority trampling on the rights of the minority, have produced factions and commotions, which, in republics, have, more frequently than any other cause, produced despotism. If we go over the whole history of ancient and modern republics, we shall find their destruction to have generally resulted from those causes.”— James Madison, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, 1788.

There have been more revelations in the IRS AP, and Benghazi scandals.

Rosen wasn’t the only Fox News employee to come under intense DOJ scrutiny.

Fox News’ Megyn Kelly said Monday that Fox News correspondent William La Jeunesse and DOJ and national-security senior producer Mike Levine were also targeted by President Obama’s Justice Department. This is a developing story.

According to the AP White House chief of staff Denis McDonough and other senior presidential advisers knew in late April that an upcoming IG report was likely to find that IRS employees had inappropriately targeted conservative political groups.

That disclosure on Monday expanded the known circle of top officials who were aware of the audit beyond those identified earlier by the White House.

The White House says McDonough and the other advisers did not tell President Barack Obama about the impending report, leaving him to learn the results from news reports later.

The White House defended the decision to keep the president in the dark, with press secretary Jay Carney saying Obama was comfortable with the fact that "some matters are not appropriate to convey to him, and this is one of them." In the parlance of Potomac-speak this is plausible deniability.

The outgoing IRS commissioner expressed regret today for a decision to use a planted question to go public with the agency's practice of targeting conservative groups, calling the move "an incredibly bad idea."

Steven Miller, appearing on the Hill for a second hearing in two weeks on the scandal, acknowledged that the agency was trying to get ahead of a damning investigative report at the time. As was confirmed over the weekend, he admitted the agency had a question planted at a conference two Fridays ago — a senior IRS official, in response to the question, then confessed to a long-running program that singled out conservative groups for additional scrutiny.

"Obviously the entire thing was an incredibly bad idea," Miller said.

Fox News reported:

“Miller explained that the agency had been trying to brief lawmakers on the Hill, in advance of the release of the inspector general report. But that "did not work out," he said, so they used the planted question.

"The report was coming, we knew that," he told the Senate Finance Committee.

The issue raised more questions for lawmakers about the way in which the agency addressed public concerns about the screening program. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, criticized the IRS for using the planted question to come forward, suggesting it compounded the problems with the agency's response.

In a tense round of questioning, Hatch also asked why neither Miller nor former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman acknowledged the program before -- Congress had been asking about the allegations since 2012.

Shulman claimed he did not have a "full set of facts," but said he was aware in the spring of 2012 there was an internal list that included the term "Tea Party." That list was used as the basis for singling out some groups applying for tax-exempt status. Shulman also said he did not know how the controversial program started, adding that lower-level officials "should have run up the chain" their knowledge about the program earlier.

"You should have corrected the record, and you should have done it long before today," Hatch said.

He also accused Miller of lying when he didn't acknowledge the program in letters to Congress last year, despite being aware of it.

"That's a lie by omission, there's no question about that in my mind," Hatch said. “

…

“The hearing comes after White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Monday that the president's counsel was told on April 24 about the preliminary findings of an IRS audit that showed tax officials unfairly targeted Tea Party groups. Senior legal counsel Kathryn Ruemmler was told about the audit on April 24, Carney said Monday. She then told Denis McDonough, Obama's chief of staff and other senior officials about the investigation.

"It was the judgment of counsel this is not a matter she should convey to the president," Carney said.

Carney also said while Ruemmler knew the subject of the investigation and potential findings, they were not given a draft of the report and understood details could change.

Ahead of the hearing, Baucus and Hatch sent a letter to the IRS Monday, asking for an explanation. The letter included 41 separate requests for information. They gave the IRS until May 31 to respond.

The two senators said the IRS had not been forthcoming about the issue in the past.”

It was just learned today that, According to ABC News, Lois Lerner, the top IRS official who is at the center of the controversy for the targeting of tea party and other conservative groups, will refuse to answer questions at a congressional hearing Wednesday and invoke her Fifth Amendment rights, ABC News has learned.

She is set to appear before the House Oversight Committee. Congressional aides said today that they received a notice from Lerner’s lawyers that she would not answer their questions because it is now part of a criminal investigation.

A mid-level State Department official sidelined in the aftermath of the Benghazi terror attack is speaking out, publicly accusing his bosses of scapegoating him for the security lapses in eastern Libya. 

Raymond Maxwell, who was deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs, told The Daily Beast he had "no involvement" with decisions on security at the vulnerable diplomatic outpost but was placed on administrative leave anyway along with a few other officials.

He claims he was given little explanation and no opportunity to appeal the status since he wasn't technically fired.

"They just wanted me to go away but I wouldn't just go away," Maxwell said. "I knew (former U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens). Chris was a friend of mine."

According to the Daily Beast report:

“The decision to place Maxwell on administrative leave was made by Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, according to three State Department officials with direct knowledge of the events. On the day after the unclassified version of the ARB’s report was released in December, Mills called Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Beth Jones and directed her to have Maxwell leave his job immediately.

"Cheryl Mills directed me to remove you immediately from the [deputy assistant secretary] position," Jones told Maxwell, according to Maxwell.

The decision to remove Maxwell and not Jones seems to conflict with the finding of the ARB that responsibility for the security failures leading up to the September 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi should fall on more senior officials.

“We fixed [the responsibility] at the assistant-secretary level, which is in our view the appropriate place to look, where the decision making in fact takes place, where, if you like, the rubber hits the road," Pickering said when releasing the ARB report. (to see Pickering’s comments at Foreign Policy you may have to sign-up for an account. It’s free and worth it)

The report found “systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels within two bureaus of the State Department,” namely the Diplomatic Security (DS) and Near East bureaus. Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns testified in December that requests for more security in Libya, denied by the State Department, did reach the assistant secretaries, and “it may be that some of my colleagues on the seventh floor saw them as well."

But Jones was not disciplined in any way following the release of the report, nor was the principal deputy assistant secretary of State at NEA, Liz Dibble, who is slated to receive a plush post as the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in London this summer. In the DS bureau, the assistant secretary, the principal deputy, and the deputy assistant all lost their jobs. In the NEA bureau, only Maxwell was asked to leave.

Jones and Dibble were responsible for security in Libya, Maxwell and three State Department officials said. What’s more, when Maxwell was promoted to his DAS position in August 2011, most responsibility for Libya was carved out of his portfolio, which also included Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Although Maxwell did some work on Libya, all security-related decisions were handled by Dibble and Jones, according to the three officials.

One State Department official close to the issue told The Daily Beast that Clinton’s people told the leadership of the NEA bureau that Maxwell would be given another job at State when the Benghazi scandal blew over. Maxwell said Jones assured him he would eventually be brought back to NEA as a “senior adviser,” but that Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff, reneged.

“The deal that NEA made with Cheryl Mills and the seventh floor was to keep Ray within NEA and just give him another portfolio. For whatever reason, it didn’t go down like that, and that was a complete shock to Beth [Jones], because that was the deal that Beth made with Cheryl,” the official said. “Behind Beth’s back, Maxwell ended up being put on administrative leave.”

Jones and Mills both declined to comment for this article, but a source close to Mills denied that any kind of deal was made or reneged on regarding Maxwell’s future employment. The decision to place Maxwell on administrative leave was based on the classified portion of the ARB’s report, which named Maxwell specifically, the source said, but since the ARB didn’t say that Maxwell had committed a “breach of duty,” he couldn’t be outright fired.”

…

“Maxwell just wants his day in court. He wrote a poem on his personal blog in April which referred to the State Department’s treatment of the four officials removed from their jobs after Benghazi as a “lynching.”

Last week, he posted another poem about the growing Benghazi scandal.

“The web of lies they weave gets tighter and tighter in its deceit until it bottoms out -at a very low frequency – and implodes,” he wrote. “Yet all the while, the more they talk, the more they lie, and the deeper down the hole they go.”

Last week, the Obama administration tried to stem the controversy by releasing 100 pages of emails and notes from the days following the attack. The documents, as previously reported, showed State Department and other officials trying to edit the internal story-line to remove references to prior security incidents and the possible involvement of Islamic extremist groups.

Last week I wrote about the memo issued by Doug Sosnik, the political director in Bill Clinton’s White House, in my “Can the Democratic Party Survive Barack Obama?” blog.

As I noted in the blog Sosnik issued his memo in advance of the House Benghazi hearings and the latest revelations and hearings regarding the IRS and DOJ scandals.

Two top-tier Democratic prospects recently bypassed running for Senate seats in Georgia and South Dakota — showing that Republicans aren't the only ones with internal jostling and recruiting hiccups ahead of next year's midterm elections.

The prospects’ decisions also show divisions within the Democratic Party and its challenge of finding candidates whose ideologies line up with voters in Republican-leaning states.

Democrats say they'll be fine even though Rep. John Barrow in Georgia and former Rep. Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin in South Dakota declined to seek seats left open by retirements. Both are moderate-to-conservative Democrats, whose views would seemingly play well in their states, giving the party a chance to win on GOP turf as Democrats look to hang onto power in the Senate. But without them running, Democrats probably will be forced to back more liberal, less-tested nominees who would likely have tougher races.

The circumstances underscore a particular challenge for Democrats: They have a five-seat cushion requiring that Republicans nearly sweep the most competitive races to gain enough seats for control. But many contests are in states where President Barack Obama never won and remains unpopular. Another hurdle for Democrats: Midterm electorates are generally older, whiter and more Republican than in presidential years.

Georgia Democrats are hoping to recruit Michelle Nunn, daughter of former Sen. Sam Nunn and a nonprofit executive in Atlanta. She's expected to announce a decision soon in the race to succeed retiring Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss.

In the contest for retiring Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson's South Dakota seat, Democrats' preferred candidate now appears to be Rick Weiland, once a top aide to former Sen. Tom Daschle and twice an unsuccessful candidate for Congress. Weiland launched his bid, with Daschle's backing, amid clamoring about Herseth-Sandlin and Johnson's son, Brendan, a U.S. attorney. State Democrats now say the younger Johnson likely won't run.

"It's a recipe for a challenging campaign," said Steve Dick, a former Daschle aide. "It's a tough race, without a doubt. And it's getting more difficult. We're a red state. We just don't have these opportunities that often."

South Dakota is one of three states where a Democratic senator is retiring in a state Obama lost last November; the others are Montana and West Virginia. There also are Democratic retirements in the swing-voting states of Iowa and Michigan, which Obama won.

Republicans also are aiming at four Democratic incumbents in states Republican Mitt Romney won: Mark Begich of Alaska, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Mark Pryor of Arkansas. Georgia, which went for Romney by 8 percentage points over Obama, has one of two GOP seats opened by retirements; the other is in Nebraska, a virtual lock for Republicans.

Democrats say they can challenge Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in Kentucky, but they haven't yet recruited a top-tier candidate even though the Republican is unpopular at home.

At the National Republican Senatorial Committee, spokesman Brad Dayspring mocked Democrats for failing at a strategy he says was clear: Get conservative Democrats in Republican-leaning states. But Justin Barasky, spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, dismissed the notion of an internal Democratic struggle or recruiting woes, and pointed to divisive primaries shaping up for Republicans in several states.

Clearly, Democrats are left with a tricky balance as they look for candidates with this criteria: Satisfy core Democratic voters, ensure successful fundraising and reach independents who voted for Romney and, before him, John McCain and George W. Bush.

Some Democrats thought Barrow and Herseth-Sandlin satisfied those standards.

Barrow is the Deep South's last white Democrat in the House, and he's beaten well-financed GOP nominees in a House district drawn to ensure his defeat. He's a gun owner who voted against the 2010 health care overhaul and voted to hold Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder, in contempt of Congress. He supported the so-called fiscal cliff deal between Obama and congressional Republicans, and successfully wooed thousands of Romney supporters in his last campaign.

But the way Barrow keeps his job could explain why he abandoned the possibility of a promotion. He may keep his district seat, but a state-wide race is a horse of a different color.

Some Democrats had feared that Barrow would have drawn a primary opponent, and both national and state Democrats concede that the party's best chance for a Georgia upset is to avoid a divisive primary, while leaving a crowded GOP field to spend money and throw punches.

Fort said Nunn would be a compelling candidate. And Democrats, eager to dispute the notion that losing Barrow is a disappointment, point to polling commissioned by Senate Democrats that suggests Nunn would be the better candidate in a general election.

Former Rep. George "Buddy" Darden said Nunn's lack of experience could be an asset. She doesn't have a record to parse and can run as an outsider, he said, a particular upside if Republicans nominate one of the three sitting congressmen who are running.

In South Dakota, Herseth-Sandlin had been seen by national Democrats as a top-tier prospect because her profile fit the state, and they were aggressively courting her behind the scenes. The 42-year-old Sioux Falls lawyer was taking steps toward running, hoping to avoid a divisive primary in which her opposition to the health care bill in 2010 and support for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in 2004 would be used against her.

Weiland, meanwhile, quickly entered the race, in part to keep Herseth-Sandlin out, a sign of tension between the moderate and liberal wings. Weiland, who lost to Herseth-Sandlin in the 2004 House primary, is a close Daschle ally.

That scenario becomes more probable should the race for the Republican nomination become contested, South Dakota Democrats said.

Former Gov. Mike Rounds is running and his fellow Republicans view him as a solid candidate. Yet popular GOP newcomer Kristi Noem, elected to the House in 2010, hasn't ruled out a candidacy. She's popular with the tea party and is seen as a better fundraiser than Rounds.

If these scandals continue to grow there is a distinct possibility more and more Democrats, especially in red or swing states will jump the Obama ship as Republicans did with Nixon. Nixon was reelected 1972 carrying 49 states but had a Democratic controlled Congress. By 1974 he had resigned the presidency under the cloud of impeachment.

For the next year Obama’s administration will be embroiled in continued and developing scandals of abuse of government powers and cover-up of foreign policy blunders. By the beginning of 2014, when the campaigns for the congressional elections begin it will be a very hot climate for Democratic candidates — especially in the areas of fund raising. Also Obama will be hamstrung in pushing his agenda forward. He already has lost a half year of his second term and will probably lose the remainder of the year.

If history plays out and the Republicans hold their majority in the House picking up three or four more seats and gain control of the Senate by picking up 6 seats the composition of the 114^th Congress would be Republicans 51, Democrats 49 and one Independent — Bernie Sanders the socialist from Vermont who was reelected in 2012 with 71% of the vote. Sanders, usually voting with the Democrats could throw the Senate into a tie leaving the deciding vote to Joe Biden, but the Republicans would control all committee chairs and Harry Reid could join Nancy Pelosi at a Del Webb retirement community.

This may sound like wishful thinking but political scandals have a way of influencing state-wide elections and there are enough red states Obama won that could make a difference in 2014.

Obama Administration Gives Lip Service to the Bill of Rights

“Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions.” — James Madison, Essay on Property, National Gazette, 1792

The founding fathers understood that every right we have emanates from our right to private property. In this sense, “private property” means not only the right to one’s home and land, but also the right to own the product of one’s labor. James Madison, the father of the U.S. Constitution, wrote in 1792, “A man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights. Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions.”

Every right we have stems from government’s recognition that we, the people, are born with our rights intact. We own them. We have property in them. We voluntarily forfeit some of these rights to government, in exchange for protection from outside threats, the administration of justice, and the rule of law. The purpose of the U.S. Constitution, then, is not to tell us what rights we have. We’re born with the right to do as we please, so long as we don’t harm others. The Constitution’s purpose is to outline what rights we give to the government, and to firmly define the limits of government power.

Unfortunately, this isn’t widely understood. Commonly, we hear people say things like, “where in the Constitution does it say you have the right to smoke a cigarette?” Or, “where in the Constitution does it say you’re allowed to look at pornography?” James Madison worried about questions like these. He feared that if we included a Bill of Rights in the Constitution, people would eventually come to assume the rights it listed would be the only rights we have. Others, like James Mason, felt some rights — speech, arms, etc. — were so vital as to merit explicit mention. As a compromise, they included the Ninth Amendment, which says that the enumeration of some rights should not be construed to exclude rights not enumerated. So to answer the questions above, your rights to smoke a cigarette or consume pornography are both in the Ninth Amendment.

Today both the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution are under attack. In fact every Amendment in the Bill of Rights, with the exception of the Third, has been under attack for quite a while.

Progressives and statists say that to stop gun violence we need to rethink the Second Amendment. According to a May 7, 2013 Pew Research Report; national rates of gun homicide and other violent gun crimes are strikingly lower now than during their peak in the mid-1990s, paralleling a general decline in violent crime, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of government data. According to the latest findings by Pew Research:

“Compared with 1993, the peak of U.S. gun homicides, the firearm homicide rate was 49% lower in 2010, and there were fewer deaths, even though the nation’s population grew. The victimization rate for other violent crimes with a firearm—assaults, robberies and sex crimes—was 75% lower in 2011 than in 1993. Violent non-fatal crime victimization overall (with or without a firearm) also is down markedly (72%) over two decades.

Nearly all the decline in the firearm homicide rate took place in the 1990s; the downward trend stopped in 2001 and resumed slowly in 2007. The victimization rate for other gun crimes plunged in the 1990s, then declined more slowly from 2000 to 2008. The rate appears to be higher in 2011 compared with 2008, but the increase is not statistically significant. Violent non-fatal crime victimization overall also dropped in the 1990s before declining more slowly from 2000 to 2010, then ticked up in 2011.

Despite national attention to the issue of firearm violence, most Americans are unaware that gun crime is lower today than it was two decades ago. According to a new Pew Research Center survey, today 56% of Americans believe gun crime is higher than 20 years ago and only 12% think it is lower.”

The latest attack has been on the First Amendment:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

The revelations of the past month have shown how the Obama administration has been constantly violating the First Amendment with through the actions of the IRS and Department of Justice.

Last week we learned of the DOJ’s chilling actions of data mining the phone records of AP reporters over a report on a terrorist action in Yemen — a report AP sat on for five days at the request of the CIA.

According to a report in the Washington Post:

“For five days, reporters at the Associated Press had been sitting on a big scoop about a foiled al-Qaeda plot at the request of CIA officials. Then, in a hastily scheduled Monday morning meeting, the journalists were asked by agency officials to hold off on publishing the story for just one more day.

The CIA officials, who had initially cited national security concerns in an attempt to delay publication, no longer had those worries, according to individuals familiar with the exchange. Instead, the Obama administration was planning to announce the successful counterterrorism operation that Tuesday.

AP balked and proceeded to publish that Monday afternoon. Its May 2012 report is now at the center of a controversial and broad seizure of phone records of AP reporters’ home, office and cellphone lines. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said the unauthorized disclosure about an intelligence operation to stop al-Qaeda from detonating explosives aboard a U.S. airliner was among the most serious leaks he could remember, and justified secretly obtaining records from a handful of reporters and editors over a span of two months.

Now, some members of Congress and media advocates are questioning why the administration viewed the leak that led to the May 7 AP story as so grave.

The president’s top counterterrorism adviser at the time, John O. Brennan, had appeared on “Good Morning America” the following day to trumpet the successful operation. He said that because of the work of U.S. intelligence, the plot did not pose an active threat to the American public.”

Brennan himself said there was no threat, yet it was cited as an excuse to seize the AP’s phone records. So why was this spun as a grave threat to target the media, yet the bin Laden leak was not and the identification of SEAL Team 6 as the unit that got bin Laden by VP Joe Biden was not?

The latest exposé is the targeting of James Rosen and Fox News by the DOJ. The DOJ calls James Rosen “criminal” for reporting on an evergreen and non-secret “North Korea is going to conduct a nuke test?” The AP is targeted because it was going to scoop the White House? We have passed through the looking glass.

New revelations emerged yesterday in the Washington Post that are perhaps the most extreme yet when it comes to the DOJ's attacks on press freedoms. It involves the prosecution of State Department adviser Stephen Kim, a naturalized citizen from South Korea who was indicted in 2009 for allegedly telling Fox News' chief Washington correspondent, James Rosen, that US intelligence believed North Korea would respond to additional UN sanctions with more nuclear tests — something Rosen then reported. Kim did not obtain unauthorized access to classified information, nor steal documents, nor sell secrets, nor pass them to an enemy of the US. Instead, the DOJ alleges that he merely communicated this innocuous information to a journalist — something done every day in Washington — and, for that, this arms expert and long-time government employee faces more than a decade in prison for "espionage".

The focus of the Post's report yesterday is that the DOJ's surveillance of Rosen, the reporter, extended far beyond even what they did to AP reporters. The FBI tracked Rosen's movements in and out of the State Department, traced the timing of his calls, and - most amazingly - obtained a search warrant to read two days’ worth of his emails, as well as all of his emails with Kim. In this case, said the Post, "investigators did more than obtain telephone records of a working journalist suspected of receiving the secret material." It added that "court documents in the Kim case reveal how deeply investigators explored the private communications of a working journalist".

But what makes this revelation particularly disturbing is that the DOJ, in order to get this search warrant, insisted that not only Kim, but also Rosen — the journalist — committed serious crimes. The DOJ specifically argued that by encouraging his source to disclose classified information — something investigative journalists do every day — Rosen himself broke the law. Describing an affidavit from FBI agent Reginald Reyes filed by the DOJ, the Post reports:

"Reyes wrote that there was evidence Rosen had broken the law, 'at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator'. That fact distinguishes his case from the probe of the AP, in which the news organization is not the likely target. Using italics for emphasis, Reyes explained how Rosen allegedly used a 'covert communications plan' and quoted from an e-mail exchange between Rosen and Kim that seems to describe a secret system for passing along information. . . . However, it remains an open question whether it's ever illegal, given the First Amendment's protection of press freedom, for a reporter to solicit information. No reporter, including Rosen, has been prosecuted for doing so."

Under U.S. law, it is not illegal to publish classified information. That fact, along with the First Amendment's guarantee of press freedoms, is what has prevented the U.S. government from ever prosecuting journalists for reporting on what the U.S. government does in secret. This newfound theory of the Obama DOJ — that a journalist can be guilty of crimes for "soliciting" the disclosure of classified information — is a means for circumventing those safeguards and criminalizing the act of investigative journalism itself. These latest revelations show that this is not just a theory but one put into practice, as the Obama DOJ submitted court documents accusing a journalist of committing crimes by doing this.

That same solicitation" theory, as the New York Times reported back in 2011, is the one the Obama DOJ has been using to justify its ongoing criminal investigation of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange: that because Assange solicited or encouraged Manning to leak classified information, the U.S. government can charge Assange as a conspirator in the leak, not just as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them.

The naming of a journalist as a possible co-conspirator in a criminal case of leaked classified information is "chilling," Judge Andrew Napolitano says.

"The Supreme Court has ruled that when the government makes it difficult for you to do your job as a journalist by scaring off your sources or watching your every move, that’s called 'chilling.'" Napolitano said Monday on Fox News Channel. "Chilling is a constitutional phrase meaning the government hasn't directly silenced me, but it's made it more difficult for me to speak."

Napolitano, a former New Jersey Superior Court judge and analyst for Fox News Channel, said it was not a crime for a journalist to ask for, receive, or publish classified information. Nothing in the affidavit claims Rosen did anything more than what journalists are legally allowed to do as part of their jobs, he said.

"James, like all of us who are professionals in this business, have an absolute, constitutionally protected right to seek news of material interest to the public wherever that news may be," Napolitano said.

Though it is a crime for someone to give classified material to a person who does not have clearance to see it, it is not a crime for the person to receive it if that person is a journalist, he said. "It’s just terribly wrong to tell a federal judge that that journalist engaged in criminal activity, when we know from Supreme Court opinions from the Pentagon Papers to the present, James's activity is absolutely protected by the First Amendment."

Napolitano said that when a search warrant is issued, the person who is the target must be told. Rosen and Fox News did not learn of the subpoena of his emails until they read about it Monday in The Washington Post. The request for a search warrant was issued on May 28, 2010.

"The government has an obligation to report this to the target, James, and to anybody else involved — Fox, the computer server, whoever else might be involved – within a reasonable period of time," Napolitano said.

Depending upon which statute the government used, when the information is in the hands of a third party, such as a computer server, investigators have an obligation to tell the subject of the probe beforehand so it can be challenged, he said. "They didn’t tell anybody."

In a related case the former U.S. Attorney for Arizona could be disbarred, after an investigation found he lied to the Justice Department about his role in trying to discredit the federal whistle-blower who exposed the botched gun-running scheme known as Fast and Furious.

An Office of Inspector General report showed that Dennis Burke — the former chief of staff for Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano appointed as U.S. Attorney for Arizona by President Obama in September 2009 — lied when asked if he leaked sensitive documents to the press meant to undermine the credibility of ATF whistle-blower John Dodson.

The IG report also said Burke likely leaked the memo in retaliation for Dodson's whistle-blowing, and challenged the credibility of statements he made to congressional investigators. Dodson first went to Congress in 2010 after his own agency and the Justice Department refused to investigate his complaints that Operation Fast and Furious, an anti-gun-trafficking effort, was out of control.

"We also concluded that Burke's disclosure of the Dodson memorandum was likely motivated by a desire to undermine Dodson's public criticisms of Operation Fast and Furious. Although Burke denied to congressional investigators that he had any retaliatory motive for his actions, we found substantial evidence to the contrary," the IG report, released Monday, stated.

Fox News reported on May 20, 2013

“Dodson appeared before Congress in June 2011. At the time, the Department of Justice denied his claim that the federal government approved a plan to knowingly assist criminals in smuggling thousands of guns to the Mexican drug cartels.

Dodson's credibility was crucial since nearly everyone above him denied the allegation. The report found that Burke leaked information that sought to undermine Dodson's story to a Fox News producer.

"The report brings into question, yet again, the treatment that whistle-blowers receive from this administration," Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said Monday. "Instead of examining the allegations that came forward, the Justice Department almost immediately began to attack the credibility and good name of a dedicated federal agent upset with what he was ordered to do."

Burke used his private email account to leak the information to a friend in Washington who then hand-delivered the information to the Fox producer. The IG said in its report it used an "administrative subpoena" to identify the personal email of relevant Department employees to confirm the leak.

Once contacted by IG staff, Burke admitted he was the source. The IG's office had asked 150 Justice Department employees to affirm they were not the leak.

But the report said he gave misleading information to congressional investigators. Asked about the issue by congressional investigators, Burke said: "I was under the impression that (the Dodson memo) had gone to the Hill and that I was basically giving (the Fox producer) a time advantage."

He also allegedly misled his own superior in Washington, Assistant Attorney General James Cole.

At the time, Cole had seen a New York Times story about Fast and Furious. In it, the paper published a picture which showed the document had been faxed from the U.S. attorney's office in Arizona. When confronted, the report said Burke told Cole, "I don't think we have a fax machine."

The IG report claims Burke was "admonished by Deputy Attorney General Cole for lying to him ... and had been put on notice such disclosures should not occur."

After speaking with Burke, Cole wrote "another horrible incident of bad judgment." The following day, Aug. 13, Burke resigned.

Fox News tried unsuccessfully to contact Burke, who recently formed a security and lobbying firm with former Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan, Chicago White Sox and Chicago Bulls Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf and Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano's Chief of Staff Noah Kroloff.

The Office of Inspector General is an investigative arm that monitors the Justice Department. It tried to interview Burke, but he resigned.

The IG said Burke violated numerous federal and professional rules of conduct and it would forward a copy of its report to the Arizona State Bar Association for disciplinary conduct.”

This is not a case of attempting to muzzle a whistle-blower it’s another example of how a disgraced federal employee can move from one role to another with impunity. Unlike the military when you receive less than an honorable discharge these federal civil servants, even when discharged, can simply move to greener pastures.

The liberal media are not really "up in arms" with the Obama administration, but are simply having a "lover's quarrel" over the AP scandal in particular, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell told CNBC host Larry Kudlow on his May 16 The Kudlow Report program.

What's more, it won't be that long until "the Bill Clinton syndrome is going to be upon us, where it's time to move on, we've covered it, the media will say, and they're going to turn the fire right on Republicans as being obstructionists. Mark my word," the Media Research Center founder predicted

"Go back to the Clinton years and the alphabet soup of scandals involved with Clinton. Now think about the investigation that went into those scandals. It was virtually non-existent," from the media, Bozell reminded Kudlow.

They would report what they had to report that someone else might investigate. But the zeal of going after Watergate with Woodward and Bernstein hasn't been there in neither the AP, IRS, nor Benghazi scandals, the MRC president noted.

"Why hasn't anyone in the press found anybody" who survived the attack on the Benghazi consulate to interview, Bozell wondered, asking Kudlow, "Do you realize we haven't interviewed anyone that was there during the attack on September 11?"

The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan has correctly characterized the Obama administration’s Benghazi and IRS scandals for what they are: gross failures of leadership that ultimately include a bold—even boastful—policy of criminal activity (my words, not hers).

News media companies can point their fingers at the Obama administration all they want. It’s suddenly all the rage, even among characteristically leftist writers and broadcasters. But to really root out the problem, the news media must point their fingers at themselves — as CBS anchor Scott Pelley said in a speech at Quinnipiac University that journalists "are getting big stories wrong, over and over again."

Before he ran for President, Obama’s short careers as a lawyer and politician were studded with events that clearly indicated a weak character that would be dangerous in the presidency: representing Chicago slumlords and getting poor people—African-Americans, no less—thrown into the street in freezing weather, and winning elections via crony David Axelrod’s underhanded Chicago means. But the news media widely chose to not publicize those events: chose to instead glamorize Obama. He was from Harvard, brilliant, a gifted communicator, even our savior: hail Obama, minus the stiff-armed salute.

Some indications suggest, and were largely ignored by most major news media companies, that even in high school and undergraduate and graduate school, Obama showed a suspect personal morality. By his own admission, he used drugs every day and skipped class in high school. His supporters, including those working for major news media companies, apparently thought this made him cool.

Since becoming president, Obama’s questionable character has shown itself repeatedly: his “green-energy” program, which looks like a means to repay rich, fat-cat campaign donors; his “fast-and-furious” gun scandal, which apparently entailed illegally selling US guns to Mexican drug dealers, so they’d use the guns to kill people and create anti-gun fervor in the US; his continual, and very public, practice of encouraging supporters to aggressively attack those opposing him, so they’d do exactly what his supporters embedded within the IRS have done. Like a common bully, he publicly jeers at and insults his opposition, and his supporters love every word of it. (They love hearing it from Bill Maher, too.) They support Obama for who and what he is; because he divides rather than unites Americans; because he seeks to publicly humiliate half the US population; because he plays dirty; because he talks a smooth line of bologna.

Throughout all of this, most major news media companies have either remained silent or even defended Obama. Thus encouraged, he became bolder. His character, already weak, folded completely, and his arrogance, which has filtered throughout his administration, has run amok: widespread, unmonitored use of drones for killing. some people, we don’t know for sure whom; arming Mexican drug lords; domestic spying and harassment. You name it. He’s even grossly misrepresented his Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, named “ObamaCare” erroneously because he neither conceived of nor wrote it. It doesn’t “provide healthcare for 30 million Americans,” as he’s said. It provides health insurance, and the two are usually opposed to each other; health insurers work to minimize costs by minimizing and/or denying care. The federal government, already deeply into the healthcare business, is now in the health insurance business as well, and our beloved, trustworthy IRS is in charge.

All politicians are quintessentially self-interested. All presidents deny wrong-doing. Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Clinton and the Bushes all “spun” news events that threatened their presidencies. This is what all people of political stripes do; even those who aren’t professional politicians, and regardless of party affiliation. The only protections We, the people have against presidents who put themselves and their power above the law are “the watchdog media,” very deliberately protected by the First Amendment, for reasons that, if some have lost sight of them, are quite obvious now. Even congressional committees are relatively powerless if their investigations don’t get news-media support or, worse, are belittled by news media companies that, themselves, have become politicized.

In some cases — Watergate, Iran-contra, Monica Lewinsky — news media companies did their jobs. They pursued the stories, dug past the presidential “spin,” and protected American citizens from corrupt presidencies, or at least exposed the corruption. (Particularly in the Watergate and Lewinsky scandals, presidential obstruction made the situations a lot worse than they actually were.) But until now, the media have allowed and even encouraged Obama — an obviously dangerous president — to do exactly as he pleases, and that, predictably, is what he’s done.

Now, in Benghazi, Americans, including a U.S. Ambassador, have been murdered. Former Navy SEALs, fighting for their lives, were ordered to stand down: to allow themselves to be murdered. The help they repeatedly requested was available, and it was denied. The denial apparently came from the White House. Now the IRS, to which Americans are supposed to entrust their medical welfare, is out of control. Now Obama’s justice department has been caught tapping AP reporters’ phone lines and digging into Fox News’ computer servers, and Eric Holder, Obama’s hand-picked Attorney General of the United States, won’t take responsibility.

Like Obama, Holder says he doesn’t know what’s going on because, as David Axelrod said, the federal government is just too big: exactly the way Obama, Holder, Axelrod and the political left want it to be. Victory: we are “free at last” from the constraints of limited, controllable, and constitutional federal authority.

Yes: current events — Benghazi, the IRS, and the DOJ phone tapping — are shocking. But tens of millions of Americans, whose voices most major news media companies have both deliberately suppressed and publicly ridiculed, aren’t surprised in the least, except by major news media companies’ firmly-established policy of ignoring, and even applauding, Obama’s well-known wrongs.

The result is that Americans don’t trust or believe in their news media as much, if not more than, Noonan says we now don’t trust our President.

So, to comprehensively address this problem, major news media companies must themselves assume a share of the blame and “clean house.” Print and air-wave news broadcasting companies must rigidly enforce journalistic professionalism, and aggressively rid themselves of reporters, editors, publishers, anchors, program directors and producers who stubbornly put politics above journalistic integrity. Through modified hiring policies, all major news media companies must forcefully create and maintain political equality and balance among their personnel.

To put it simply, news media companies must hire and promote as many from the political right as they hire and promote from the political left, and then work to minimize employees’ political feelings in all news reporting: check, double check, and if the story still smacks of partisanship, throw it out and reassign it. Editors like Cesar’s wife must be above reproach.

They must do this on their own, without government intervention or regulation. They must do it because it is the professionally and morally correct thing to do. They must do it because it is what their nation requires; because they’re good, patriotic Americans. They must do it to live up to the principles of our Founders or the Republic will be lost.

This would’ve saved Dan Rather his job and impressive career. It would’ve saved all Americans from what Obama has now — again, predictably — wrought. It might’ve saved us from the housing foreclosure debacle, crushing federal debt, the ongoing recession, and the stubbornly weak job market and high gas costs that burden all working Americans; if the “watchdog media,” who like to hear themselves characterized as “courageous” and “professional,” had only lived up to their aggrandizements.

That was before it was known that the Obama DOJ read James Rosen's emails by formally labeling him in court an unindicted co-conspirator for the "crime" of reporting on classified information. This all just got a lot more dangerous.