By Robert Parry

President Barack Obama, known for preferring thoughtful accommodation to tough-minded confrontation, finds himself caught in a political quandary that could have dire consequences for the world’s future.

His dangerous dilemma is this: the planet is facing a rising tide of existential threats – from widening income inequality to life-threatening global warming – that require coordinated and aggressive responses from nation states and particularly the United States. But, simultaneously, his support for expanded government surveillance and national security secrecy is undermining trust in government.

President Barack Obama tours tornado damage in Moore, Oklahoma, on May 26, 2013. The giant tornado represented the kind of extreme weather that scientists say the world can expect as human activity continues to heat up the planet. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

So, just when the people need government the most – to literally save the world – government is giving them more reasons to reject government. It is a moment when Obama’s proclivity for careful political calibrations adds to the danger.

If he doesn’t move quickly and decisively to let American citizens in on as many of the government surveillance secrets as reasonably possible – and dial back the dragnet on people’s personal information – he risks playing into the hands of anti-government extremists like the Tea Party who are now casting themselves as the protectors of America’s constitutional rights.

That is as much a masquerade as the Tea Party’s Revolutionary War costumes, since Tea Partiers voted overwhelmingly for George W. Bush and other Republican officeholders who were instrumental in vastly expanding the surveillance state.

It was Bush who presided over the 9/11 intelligence catastrophe and then overreacted by launching ill-conceived wars overseas and authorizing a massive expansion of government surveillance against the U.S. population. Indeed, the current law, which is facing criticism for allowing the storage of huge amounts of data on phone calls, represented an intervention against Bush’s even more breathtaking intrusion on civil liberties, the notion that a President could order wiretaps on electronic communications without a warrant.

Though many Tea Partiers now criticize Bush as a big-government Republican, very few voted for Al Gore or John Kerry, both of whom have a much greater respect for constitutional rights than Bush ever did. The Tea Partiers’ new-found love of American “liberties” arose at a politically convenient moment, after the first African-American president took office.

Since its emergence in 2009 — to demand “our country back” – the Tea Party has represented just the latest branding of the white supremacist wing of U.S. politics, one that traces back to the nation’s Founding when Anti-Federalists feared that the Constitution’s concentration of power in the federal government would ultimately doom the South’s lucrative industry of slavery.

Phases of ‘Confederacy’

The United States has lived with different phases of this white supremacist movement, from the pre-Confederates (opposing federal power from the Constitution’s ratification in 1788 to the start of the Civil War in 1860) to the actual Confederates (during the Civil War) to the post-Confederates (from after the Civil War through the decades of Jim Crow and racial segregation) to today’s neo-Confederates with their racially tinged insults directed at Obama, their attempts to restrict voting rights of minorities and their angry opposition to immigration reform.

The common thread of this movement has been racism and the parallel fear that the federal government, when representing the nobler instincts of the American people, would act against slavery, segregation and white supremacy.

This historic distrust of the federal government also runs parallel to the ideological interests of the libertarians who favor laissez-faire economics, i.e. letting the corporations operate free of government regulation. True libertarians also would eliminate government programs from Social Security and Medicare to environmental protections and mass transit. Some libertarians object as well to laws requiring white restaurant owners to serve blacks as an intrusion on the “liberty” of the white restaurant owners.

While libertarian extremism, if ever made national policy, would lead to economic, environmental and social disasters, libertarians have struck a chord, especially among young Americans, in also opposing government intrusions on personal freedoms. Libertarians reject laws against drug use; they object to national security surveillance; and they criticize excessive U.S. spending on the military and warfare.

Thus, Obama’s failure to significantly roll back Bush’s national security excesses – and indeed his expansion of some such as the use of lethal drones – has played into the hands of his libertarian critics, including Tea Party favorite, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky. Obama may think that he has charted the reasonable middle course between security and privacy, but his moderation is alienating and annoying many voters, especially the idealistic young.

Granted, Obama has faced a difficult set of choices. Even his rather modest steps during his first weeks in office, such as banning torture and releasing some of Bush’s legal memos that had justified torture, drew sharp criticism from Official Washington’s neoconservatives and right-wing pundits who had marched in lock-step with President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney during their “war on terror.”

Obama’s plan to close the Guantanamo Bay prison elicited more vociferous opposition in Congress and on the Right, with the House and the Senate restricting the President’s range of action. Obama also gets blamed whenever a terrorist strike occurs, even if the death toll is a small fraction of the carnage of 9/11, such as the attack in Benghazi, Libya, and the Boston Marathon bombings. Plus, the Right’s sudden ardor for civil liberties only has emerged as those values have achieved some partisan value.

Jeffersonian Hypocrisy

Historically, there are some similarities between how today’s neo-Confederates are exploiting the public’s concerns about intrusions on liberties and how one of the earliest “pre-Confederates,” Thomas Jefferson, advanced his political fortunes by attacking the Alien and Sedition Acts passed in 1798 by the Federalists under President John Adams.

The acts were a response to radical domestic unrest inspired by the French Revolution and to the growing resistance – privately encouraged by Vice President Jefferson – to the centralized powers contained in the U.S. Constitution. Those powers were a bane to Jefferson and other Southern plantation owners who feared that a strong central government would lead inexorably to the abolition of slavery.

Jefferson went so far as to secretly collaborate in a threat from Kentucky to secede from the Union, what some historians have called a possible act of treason, though Jefferson’s hand was not publicly revealed at the time. Then, after Jefferson gained the presidency in 1801 – in part by campaigning against the Alien and Sedition Acts – he turned around and prosecuted some of his critics under the acts before they expired.

In a similar display of hypocrisy, Jefferson called for restricting federal powers to only those specifically “enumerated” in the Constitution, but he violated that principle in purchasing the Louisiana Territories from France, a power not enumerated in the Constitution. He also expanded the executive power to make war by dispatching the Navy against the Barbary pirates without prior congressional authorization.

After leaving office, Jefferson corresponded with his successor and ally James Madison about what to do with Federalists who objected to the Jefferson-Madison desire to go to war with Great Britain in 1812.

As historians Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg write in Madison and Jefferson, “Jefferson called for different measures in different parts of the country: ‘A barrel of tar to each state South of the Potomac will keep all in order,’ he ventured in August [1812]. ‘To the North they will give you more trouble. You may have to apply the rougher drastic of … hemp and confiscation’ – by which he meant the hangman’s noose and the confiscation of property.”

In other words, Jefferson, who has gone down in school history books as a great defender of freedom of speech, urged the sitting President of the United States to “tar” war dissenters in the South and to hang and dispossess dissenters in the North.

Other of Jefferson’s policies, particularly his advocacy of state “nullification” of federal law, encouraged Southern states to resist federal power that they feared would eventually doom slavery. In doing so, Jefferson did more than almost any other Founder to set the young Republic on its course toward a devastating Civil War.

So, while Jefferson – the “pre-Confederate” – hypocritically lambasted intrusions upon “liberty” by the Federalists in the 1790s, he was more than happy to violate the liberties of both his white political rivals and the black slaves who lived on his and other Southern plantations. [For more details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Racism and the American Right.”]

Bush’s Loyalists

Similarly, today’s Tea Partiers were mostly George W. Bush loyalists during his presidency in the first decade of the Twenty-first Century. Many were quick to accuse liberals and civil libertarians of being “soft on terror” when they raised objections to Bush’s counterterrorism policies, from torture to warrantless wiretaps.

Then, the Right’s mantra was that the government needed to do whatever Bush thought necessary to protect the American people. There was particular enthusiasm for “profiling” Arabs and other Muslims for special security attention.

Even today, as the Right has grown more critical of the surveillance state – now that an African-American Democrat is in office – some prominent conservatives, the likes of Sen. John McCain and House Speaker John Boehner, continue to endorse the aggressive use of data mining to detect possible “terrorists.”

However, the insurgent elements of the GOP and the Tea Party – especially the libertarians rallying around Sen. Rand Paul – have gained supporters among the ranks of the disaffected young by appealing to a growing resistance to the national security bureaucracy and the surveillance state.

Repugnance over lethal drone attacks have merged with anger over the National Security Agency’s data collection of phone records and other personal information. Though President Obama can argue that he has reined in some of the abuses of President Bush – overall reducing the levels of violence abroad and operating with more legal safeguards at home – Obama finds himself viewed more as an avatar of this increasingly despised “Big Brother” apparatus than as a champion of the U.S. Constitution.

That may become a big political problem for Obama and the Democrats as they head into a challenging congressional election in 2014. Indeed, they could be facing a repeat of the “shellacking” they took in 2010 when many progressives sat on their hands to show displeasure with Obama’s failure to enact “single-payer” health insurance and his slow pace in ending Bush’s wars.

But an even greater danger for the world is that Obama’s continuation of violent counterterrorism polices (like drone strikes) and his embrace of surveillance-state secrecy (including harsh prosecution of leakers) make any arguments for a strong government response to such pressing issues as income inequality and global warming a much harder sell with many American voters.

Especially many of the young appear likely to fall prey to the libertarian argument that any expansion of government inevitably deprives you of your freedoms. Thus, the Right may gain the high ground in making the argument that Big Brother surveillance goes hand in hand with, say, environmental regulation to slow or reverse global warming. And that could mean the next Congress will have more climate-change deniers, fewer supporters for government spending on infrastructure, and more advocates for letting powerful corporations regulate themselves.

If President Obama hopes to avert that result, he must go beyond rhetorically welcoming a vibrant debate on the super-secret counterterrorism programs and actually give the public enough information so a viable debate is possible. He also would do well to lighten up on punishing whistleblowers.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). For a limited time, you also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.

(Originally posted at Consortium News)

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Andrew Sullivan on the bizarre political alliances emerging over the NSA leaks scandal:

What has emerged in the past few days is a fascinating snapshot of a shifting political landscape. On the one side, we have a libertarian-civil liberties left alliance. On the other, a strange world where Bill Kristol and Joe Klein are on the same page. Personally, I think it’s a shame that this alliance has emerged over PRISM because it seems to me to be one of the less worrisome anti-terrorism policies. My general inclination is to back the liberaltarians on these questions, but I have never been a purist, appreciate the political balances required and wish this debate were not also wrapped in accusations of treason and heroism.

I’m with Sullivan on this – the traitor/hero debate is getting a little tiring given both sides are unwilling to move an inch and accept the other has a legitimate point. To me, Snowden did what he thought was right, and genuinely believed he was acting in the best interests of the citizenry. Those who believed he committed a crime are not wrong either – he technically did, and whether or not you agree with it, he broke laws designed to protect Americans. Of course the legitimacy of those laws are highly debatable, but they were passed by Congress and the White House is obliged to follow them.

There is a wider debate to be had over wiretapping and privacy, and sadly it is getting drowned out by hardening positions that make no room for compromise and are in many cases, driven by agenda. As Sullivan says:

I’m not shocked by PRISM. But if the president began to argue that he thinks it may be time to retire such and similar programs – and he already has – then he could leave a civil liberties legacy much better than the one that now seems likely. So while defending his past practice as justifiable, I have two words for those on the right and the left who want to unwind our overweening security state: Make him.

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It’s true.  President Obama has all the time in the world to read your email.  Here’s proof!

This was posted on 9 June, by 11 June, it had 342 comments. Which is worse, Obama looking at that screen or the girl trying to melt into that wall?

Politico has this story about how photos of the president looking over people’s shoulders has gone viral, you know, he wasn’t getting enough intel on you from your phone records.  And if you think you have lived without knowing how celebrities are dealing with the NSA story, well, you should check this out.

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It was F. Scott Fitzgerald who famously said that the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing thoughts in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. Applied here, it would work something like this: Fox News isn’t a legitimate news organization and it should in no way be afforded any of the benefits or considerations normally given to legitimate news organizations, up to and including the umbrella of unequivocal constitutional protection real journalism outlets can expect; that said, the Department of Justice and the White House are 100% wrong in their seizing of Fox News phone records, monitoring of Fox correspondent James Rosen’s comings and goings, and their naming of him as a potential co-conspirator in the leaking of national security information.

Of all the horseshit scandals President Obama’s enemies on the right have attempted to float since he took office four years ago, the persecution and threatened prosecution of newspeople allegedly involved in reporting on state secrets is the only one that has any actual merit. Drones are nonsense; Benghazi is the most ado about a non-story in recent Republican memory; the IRS looking into conservative political groups potentially trying to scam the government shouldn’t surprise a soul; and of course birth certificates, teleprompters, and Marines-holding-umbrellas are just fucking laughable. But the notion of the U.S. government monitoring journalists for doing the very jobs that make them who and what they are is frightening and it should anger just about everyone, regardless of his or her political affiliations.

It’s ironically no big secret that Fox News will do anything to bring down the Obama administration and prop up its confederates in the Republican party proper, to the point of even creating stories and scandals out of thin air; it’s for this reason that no one with a brain ever should have had a problem with Obama refusing to treat Fox as if it were just like any other news operation. But that doesn’t mean the DOJ should have wide latitude to make a reporter — any reporter — worry about being prosecuted for treason and doing prison time simply for being a reporter. Obviously, it’s important that even journalists understand that they have to behave responsibly, particularly when they’re reporting on sensitive subjects — however, it’s impossible to overstate how unwise it is for the U.S. government and the Obama administration in particular to make threats against the messengers in their quest to stamp out what they claim is an illegal message.

Collecting phone logs from the AP and closely watching James Rosen at Fox, all without contacting either outlet during the respective investigations, is something entirely new for the government, and something undeniably chilling. While national security is important and that shouldn’t be diminished, journalists do generally have special dispensation simply by virtue of their constitutional protection and what’s supposed to be their often adversarial relationship with those in power. Sure, the White House can behave as if that adversarial relationship works both ways and can treat journalists as hostile, but it had better be prepared to face the consequences of that tack. Fox News’s audience and its stable of frothing-at-the-mouth contributors don’t need a legitimate reason to loudly proclaim that the right is being persecuted by the Obama administration, but likewise the White House should be smart enough to understand that it doesn’t need the image of real journalists suddenly siding with Fox News and coming to the network’s defense. Just because Glenn Greenwald and his insufferable ilk are going to be claiming villainy at every turn regardless doesn’t mean Obama should give them any ammo.

On that note, another dichotomy at work here is the outrage from Obama’s enemies over what the White House and the Justice Department have been doing with regard to plugging leaks. Again, the White House is wrong here and has no viable excuse, but it’s laughable to watch the very same people who took state security so seriously during the Bush years that they engaged in the despicable politics of personal vendetta — outing Valerie Plame, leaving any journalist not willing to get onboard the Iraq crazy train out in the cold — now railing with righteous indignation against some of the very tactics they would’ve once applauded. Fox News, in fact, played right along with the Bush-era policy of manipulating and demonizing the legitimate media. Conservatives as a whole, meanwhile, would’ve happily strung up, say, Julian Assange and absolutely considered Daniel Ellsberg an enemy of the state, but the government sets its sites on the official news service of Red State America and suddenly there’s hell to pay.

The problem is, this time those coming to the defense of Fox News — be they conservative or liberal or none-of-the-above — are right. James Rosen’s a sniveling little turd and he works for a news outlet that’s anything but. Still, he needs to be free to report the word of whistleblowers because it’s not simply his freedom that’s at stake.

It’s the freedom of all journalists to do their jobs. And when those jobs are done correctly, it serves the freedom of all of us.

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Call me a hopeless dreamer, but there ought to be a rule in politics banning anyone who caused a crisis from later bitching about the crisis. For the last four years, we’ve witnessed the Republicans, who voted for every Bush-era spending bill and irresponsible tax cut, crapping their cages over the size of the resulting deficit and debt — again, a deficit and debt that they themselves created without uttering even a shrug of protest during eight years in which a surplus transformed into a record deficit. Not a word — except to condemn the Democratic president who was unfortunate enough to inherit the chaos.

Likewise, as we observe the mayhem surrounding the dueling “scandals” of Benghazi, the IRS and the Associated Press phone records subpoena, the Republicans, true to form, are tripping over each other in a mad dash to scream “Impeach!” into the next nearest cable news video camera. There’s only one problem: when it comes to the IRS situation and the AP phone debacle, the Republicans created the chain-reactions that led to these scandals.

Let’s begin with the IRS scandal first.

While it looks really, really bad for one of the most feared agencies within the Democratically-controlled executive branch to have been exclusively scrutinizing conservative groups, we only need to rewind to the Supreme Court’s reprehensible Citizens United decision to figure out why all of this is going on. The conservative Roberts court not only opened the floodgates allowing unlimited and unregulated corporate money to flow into campaigns, but it also blurred the line between independent 527 political groups and non-profit social welfare groups, which are classified with the designation 501(c)(4). These social welfare groups can also apply for tax-exempt status from the IRS, a designation that used to be the strict privilege of groups that didn’t engage in political speech. But since Citizens United, it’s much more challenging to determine which social welfare groups are dealing in predominantly political speech.

So the IRS is faced with the unenviable challenge of filtering out groups that are stepping over the line and flagrantly abusing the social welfare moniker.

Now, yes, I get it. The IRS staffers shouldn’t have used exclusively right-wing search terms to weed through the applications. They should’ve broadened the criteria to include terms across the political spectrum. But without the conservative, pro-Republican movie created by the infamous Citizens United group in 2008, not to mention the conservative, Republican-affiliated Supreme Court deciding in its favor, we might not be talking about this right now. Furthermore, the Republican-created deficit and the subsequent histrionic demand for austerity led to government cut-backs, including at the IRS where, within the Exempt Organizations Division, the staff has been significantly reduced, thus increasing workloads. Toss into the mix a considerable rise in tax exempt applications and there it is: a formula for negligence. Thanks, Republicans.

On to the AP scandal.

Right off the bat, it might surprise you to learn that it was a cabal of 31 Republican senators who demanded the investigation that eventually led to the subpoena of the AP’s phone records. So there’s that.

In a broader sense, however, I can’t help but to laugh whenever I hear a Republican scream about government overreach on national security and civil liberties. For eight years, the Republicans established an infrastructure under the banner of fighting evildoers at home and abroad — an infrastructure that included a wide variety of trespasses against civil liberties.

They seized phone records from reporters without subpoenas, they spied on liberal groups, they established the usage of body scanners and heightened security measures at airports, they loudly and in some cases tearfully demanded the ability to wiretap American citizens without warrants, they passed the USA PATRIOT Act and ultimately created the modern American surveillance state. The Bush era gave us this counter-terrorism Frankenstein, and now they’re suddenly alarmed about it.

But now that they’re not longer in charge, they melodramatically collapse onto their group fainting couch every time the Justice Department or the president ventures into the same territory — or, ironically enough, whenever the president doesn’t do enough along those lines. Whatever the Obama administration does, they’re against it. And so it is with the AP phone records situation. Once again, as with the IRS scandal, the cries for investigations and even impeachment are loud and plentiful.

For example, Bush’s former attorney general Michael Mukasey described the AP phone records situation by saying, “It’s reprehensible conduct.” This is the same attorney general who took over a Justice Department that had seized phone records from four journalists — without subpoenas — without even flinching. Mukasey was also directly involved with warrantless wiretapping of Americans citizens. And when it appeared as if Congress might pass legislation preventing this egregious activity from continuing, Mukasey literally burst into tears during a speech in which he demanded the power to continue the eavesdropping program or else there would surely be another 9/11. I’m not making that up.

It’s not a stretch to suggest that the post-9/11 fear-mongering and massively exaggerated counter-terrorism hysteria manufactured an atmosphere of capitulation and resignation to flagrant government overreach and violations of privacy and personal dignity.

And who’s to blame for the fear-mongering? People like Matt Drudge, of course, who aided in the effort to scare the crapola out of us about the so-called “terrorist threat” and yet ran a screamer headline on his front page in which he cleverly conflated the AP story with wiretapping: “GOVT TAPS PRESS PHONE RECORDS FOR MONTHS.”

But during the Bush years, Drudge, along with Rush Limbaugh, Fox News Channel and the highest ranking Republican officials in Congress, demanded that all of Washington buy into the notion that you can’t have a Constitution if you’re dead. How do we know this? Well, because they actually said it. Over and over. A few examples for the record:

“You have no civil liberties if you are dead.” Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS)

“Over 3,000 Americans have no civil rights because they are no longer with us.” Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL)

“None of your civil liberties matter much after you’re dead.” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX)

“Our civil liberties are worthless if we are dead! If you are dead and pushing up daisies, if you’re sucking dirt inside a casket, do you know what your civil liberties are worth? Zilch, zero, nada.” Rush Limbaugh

Now, years later, these very same Republicans insist that “Big Sis” (Drudge’s nickname for Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano) and the “little black man-child” are forcing us to “grab the ankles” and submit to fascist authoritarian policies. Never mind that all of these policies were invented by Republicans and ballyhooed by Drudge in an atmosphere of manufactured fear during conservative control of, well, everything.

Throughout the duration of the Bush years, any and all opponents of these policies were shouted down as being with the terrorists — undermining American security and endangering the troops, while evildoers were lurking under our beds ready to spring forth and crash airplanes into everything. In those years, patriotism was defined by the speed and vigor by which we gave up our civil liberties in lieu of a lot of extra security. This mantra was defined, branded and codified by the Republican Party.

The post-9/11 maxim “either you’re with us, or you are with the terrorists” wasn’t the concoction of Michael Moore or Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or Janet Napolitano. It was entirely the purview of the Drudge-ruled authoritarian universe of fear and cowardice. And make no mistake: cowardice is precisely what it was — cry-baby cowardice masked by flag-waving machismo in support of a military-industrial-security complex that earned billions in profits on investments ranging from the invasion and occupation of Iraq to the production and deployment of body scanners. Rather than standing firm and upholding American values, the far-right embraced cowardice and set us on a course that’s become so deeply embedded into our political culture that it’s going to take many more years to unravel.

So as you observe the coming months and years of brain-melting scandal coverage surrounding these topics, blame a Republican. It’s okay. They deserve it.

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In any given episode of a Glenn Beck show, you can be assured of hearing something hilarious. Lately, Beck has been jumping up and down about non-existent Boston Bombing conspiracies, comparing New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to a Nazi, and claiming the suicide of a potential mass shooter at Houston airport was akin to the fire at the German Reichstag in 1933.

Sure, that’s pretty crazy, but it’s nothing compared to some of the other stuff he’s said over the years. Beck specializes in a unique brand of creative thinking where completely unrelated events can be strung together to form a completely alternative reality that only he understands.

In homage to Beck’s madness, we went back in history to find the craziest stuff he’s ever said. There were many, many other quotes that could have made the top 5, but the following 5 nuggets of sheer lunacy were, in our opinion, the very best:

1. “I’m thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I’m wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. … No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out. Is this wrong? I stopped wearing my What Would Jesus — band — Do, and I’ve lost all sense of right and wrong now. I used to be able to say, ‘Yeah, I’d kill Michael Moore,’ and then I’d see the little band: What Would Jesus Do? And then I’d realize, ‘Oh, you wouldn’t kill Michael Moore. Or at least you wouldn’t choke him to death.’ And you know, well, I’m not sure.” –responding to the question “What would people do for $50 million?”, The Glenn Beck Program, May 17, 2005

2. “Al Gore’s not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them. It is the same tactic, however. The goal is different. The goal is globalization…And you must silence all dissenting voices. That’s what Hitler did. That’s what Al Gore, the U.N., and everybody on the global warming bandwagon [are doing].” – The Glenn Beck Program, May 1, 2007

3. ”You know, we all have our inner demons. I, for one – I can’t speak for you, but I’m on the verge of moral collapse at any time. It can happen by the end of the show.” – The Glenn Beck Program,  Nov. 6, 2006

4. “The violent left is coming to our streets, all of our streets, to smash, to tear down, to kill, to bankrupt, to destroy. It is will be global in its nature and global in its scope” - Values Voter Summit, Novemer 10 2008 

5. When you watch Barack Obama, you can just see he is angry….No matter how much power he has amassed, no matter how many friends in the media he has, Americans know. And if they reject it this time, if they’re so dead inside – that’s a possibility – if they’re so dead inside that they can no longer see the difference between good and evil, we have to be destroyed because we will be a remarkable evil on this planet.” - The Glenn Beck Program, 5 November 2012

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If you lie to Congress, it is a crime.  It’s called perjury.  You may remember that when Roger Clemens did it, he barely escaped two counts of it.  And you should remember that the official reason President Bill Clinton was impeached was because of perjury (you know, it had nothing to do with the rabid hatred the GOP had of him, then Congressman Bob Barr, R-GA, asked aloud, If we can’t get rid of him with impeachment what else can we do?  Uh, win an election.)

So if it is illegal for citizens to lie TO Congress, why is is legal for them to lie to us?

First case of lying: Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA)

Issa has made some wild claims about Benghazi.  One that he has repeated is that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton personally signed a cable about Benghazi.  This has been refuted by all of the whistleblowers and a Washington Post fact checker called that assertion “a whopper” (from Congressman Elijah Cummings’, D-MD testimony at the hearing on the subject on May 8, 2013 — you can watch it online).  All State Department cables have the Secretary’s name.

Yet, Issa repeats this claim over and over and over.  The goal, of course, is to weaken Secretary Clinton because she is the front runner for the Democratic Party and is popular among Republicans.  The only thing they can find to hurt her is this.  Truthfully, that we had people in such a dangerous place left so far away from military support seems really upsetting.  I am torn from thinking this is Libya, this was September 11th, how could we leave our ambassador so unprotected? The Accountability Review Board (ARB) investigated and released this report.   They found that mistakes were made and offered suggestions to prevent this from happening ever again.  They were not wimpy as they have been called by some on the right. They were thorough and pretty scathing.  There is no question that this should not have happened.

What we know is that when the idea of increasing funding for diplomatic security came up, many of these Republicans who are so unhappy with what happened now, said “no.”

(Disclaimer: I worked for the Clinton Administration on and off for most of it.  I also worked for Secretary Clinton’s presidential campaign and support the idea of her running in 2016.)

Liar number 2: Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH)

Senator Ayotte has been questioned about her vote against the recent gun control bill.  Her response has been — more than once — that she opposed it because she doesn’t want there to be a national registry of gun owners.  I support gun control and I don’t want that either.  I voted against former DC Mayor Adrian Fenty because, at least partially, he almost went through with a policy to send DC police door-to-door to request residents turn over any guns they didn’t want in their home.  If said guns could be tied to a crime, the people who turned them over could be charged with that crime.  That is ridiculous.

The bill Senator Ayotte voted against had no such provision.  Senators Pat Toomey (R-PA) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) put a provision in the bill making it a felony to keep information on people who had bought a gun past a certain amount of time.  No one wants to see such a registry.

I don’t know what her real reason was and would like to hear it because I feel like every other five minutes I hear someone on the right whining that “No one read the bill!”  Read the damn bill.  And if you have a real reason for going against this common sense bill, please share it.  I might even agree with the real reason, if I knew what it was.

And the liars that love them.

Could the right be happier about anything than Benghazi?  Were they this upset with President Bush for letting 9/11 happened? (Didn’t he get a report entitled Bin laden determined to attack the US within the US?  Did he not have intelligence that al Qaeda was looking at using airplanes?  Yes on both.  You may remember how I was jumping up and down begging for hearings?  Oh, you don’t?  This isn’t just because I am not a major TV network but because I am not a truther nor do I see politics in every event on earth).

Second problem I have with the right’s response is their comparison to Watergate.  They say “when Obama lied, people died.”  I have two problems with that statement.  The first issue I have is substantive.  President Obama has not lied.  This is not a cover-up.  This is a tragedy and shows some real holes in the way we do business that need to be fixed.  Secondly, it implies that these lies caused deaths.  Even if this was true, they happened after the event in question so any attempts at finding a causality are just ridiculous.

On the gun control thing, the National Rifle Association and American Future Fund have some to Senator Ayotte’s defense.  The latter has sponsored ads that compound her lie with one of their own.  They claim she has voted for increased background checks when she did the opposite.  Read that here (and see the ad).

One thing that gets under my skin more than many things is when people put up with politicians who lie because that’s just how it’s done.  We get the government we settle for, we need to expect better.

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Few things are more irritating than stupidity.  What makes this even more annoying is knowing you are paying for it.  Congressman Eric Cantor has scheduled a vote this week repealing “Obamacare.”  His proposal’s chances of passing the Senate and/or being signed into law by President Obama are pretty much the same. Talk about exercises in futility.

The House cut its operating budget in 2011 by five percent.  More info on that can be found here.   That amounts to nearly $33 million a year.  Legistorm has information on how much each office spends on salaries for members and staffers.  One sure thing cam be said of all the offices from the big spenders to the most frugal is the source of the funding.  Paying for Eric Cantor to drag te House through this flight of fancy/political posturing at its most absurd.  No one — even Cantor himself, sees this as becoming law — at least not with the current Senate and White House.

This is shameful and not our founding fathers had in mind when they crafted our constitution.

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Barack Obama shakes hands with drug czar Gil Kerlikowske, as Attorney General Eric Holder looks on, after signing the Fair Sentencing Act. (Michael Reynolds-Pool/Getty Images)

By Christie Thompson

When the Obama administration released its 2013 Drug Control Strategy recently, drug czar Gil Kerlikowske called it a “21^st century” approach to drug policy. “It should be a public health issue, not just a criminal justice issue,” he said.

The latest plan builds on Obama’s initial strategy outlined in 2010. Obama said then the U.S. needed “a new direction in drug policy,” and that “a well-crafted strategy is only as successful as its implementation.” Many reform advocates were hopeful the appointment of former Seattle Police Chief Kerlikowske as head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy signaled a shift in the long-lasting “war on drugs.”

But a government report released a day after the latest proposal questioned the office’s impact so far.

“As of March 2013, GAO’s analysis showed that of the five goals for which primary data on results are available, one shows progress and four show no progress,” the report by the Government Accountability Office found. For instance, the GAO noted that there’s actually been an increase in HIV transmissions among drug users and drug-related deaths, as well as no difference in the prevalence of drug use among teens.

Many public health experts say the administration deserves credit for increasing access to drug treatment. But others say despite an increase in funding for rehab, the administration has continued to push programs and policies built to punish drug users.

As the administration lays out its latest plan on a new approach to drugs, here’s look at what’s in it, and what they’ve done so far.

“Break the cycle of drug use, crime, delinquency and incarceration”

“While smart law enforcement efforts will always play a vital role in protecting communities from drug-related crime and violence,” the latest strategy says, “we cannot arrest our way out of the drug problem.”

FBI records indeed show a drop in drug arrests, from 1.8 million in 2007 to 1.5 million in 2011.

But overall, the government spends roughly the same proportion of the drug policy budget on law enforcement now as was spent during Bush’s final years in office. In Obama’s 2014 budget proposal, 38 percent is allocated for domestic drug law enforcement, while another 20 percent would be spent to crack down on drugs along U.S. borders and abroad.

The Obama administration has also renewed funding for controversial programs like the Justice Assistance Grant program, formerly known as Byrne Grants, which had been cut under President Bush. The funding created local drug task forces, which critics say were quota-driven and increased corruption and misconduct. Budget-minded conservatives like the Heritage Foundation also argued the grants hadn’t led to a decrease in crime. States like California and New York have used some funding from the program for treatment instead of enforcement.

The administration has made progress when it comes to overcrowding in prisons: One Department of Justice program gives states money to support research toward policymaking that reduces recidivism. Several state legislatures have independently lessened mandatory minimums, reformed parole policies, and passed other laws aimed at cutting the high cost of incarceration.

Obama also signed the Fair Sentencing Act in 2010, which ended a five-year mandatory minimum sentence for crack possession at the federal level, and lessened the sentencing disparity between crack and cocaine.  

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the number of inmates in state prisons dropped roughly two percent from 2010 to 2011. Seventy percent of that is from a decrease in California’s prison population, after the Supreme Court upheld an order for the state to reduce overcrowding.

But as a recent Congressional Research report highlights, the number of inmates in federal prisons continues to rise, increasing over three percent from 2010 to 2011. Over half the current federal prison population is drug offenders.

“Support alternatives to incarceration”

In his latest budget, the president is requesting $85 million to go toward drug courts, which some have pushed as an alternative to criminal trials. Since 1999, the number of drug courts has grown from just under 500 to 2,734 today. Drug courts allow for non-violent offenders to avoid being charged, or to have their convictions expunged and sentences waived after completion of a rehab program and passing regular drug tests. Proponents of the system say it allows non-violent drug offenders to serve their time in treatment, instead of in prison.

A 2011 GAO report found statistics suggest drug courts reduce recidivism, but there’s not enough data to fully assess their effectiveness.

Some critics argue drug courts still fall short, by taking a criminal justice approach to a public health problem.

“Increase addiction treatment services”

Obama has indeed repeatedly increased funding for addiction treatment. He proposed $9 billion in his latest budget, up 18 percent from 2012.

Despite that, only 1 in 10 of the 21.6 million Americans in need of drug or alcohol addiction treatment received it in 2011. The number of people receiving treatment has stayed roughly the same since 2002.

The treatment gap should narrow as Obamacare goes into effect: Roughly five million more Americans currently facing drug addictions will soon have insurance coverage for treatment. “That’s the biggest expansion of treatment in 40 years, and maybe in the history of the U.S., ” said public health professor Keith Humphreys, who has served as a policy advisor to the ONDCP.

But a recent Associated Press analysis said current clinics will be overwhelmed by the new demand for treatment. State-level budget cuts have hit organizations hard, and treatment centers in over two-thirds of states are at or close to 100 percent capacity.

ONDCP spokesperson Rafael Lematire said the administration’s latest plan calls for an increase in the number of health care workers to treat newly insured patients.

“Review laws and regulations that impede recovery from addiction”

The latest drug strategy highlights the need to reduce “collateral consequences” (barriers to public benefits, employment and other opportunities) for those convicted of drug crimes. But Obama has little leverage on those issues, which are mostly decided on the state and local levels. For example, while HUD has encouraged public housing authorities to not disqualify former drug offenders from receiving public housing or Section 8 vouchers, it’s up to each city housing authority to determine their own rules.

“While we encourage housing authorities to give ex-offenders a second chance, the decision to admit or deny to public housing remains with the housing authorities,” said HUD spokeswoman Donna White.

Obama’s administration has not announced any plans to address the 1996 federal ban on food stamps or cash assistance for those convicted of drug felonies. Most states have opted out of or amended the law.

“Reduce drug-induced deaths”

The GAO noted that drug-induced deaths and emergency room visits increased from 2009 to 2010. Much of that is likely due to pharmaceutical abuse, which contributes to more accidental overdose deaths than illegal drugs or alcohol.

In 2011, the government released a plan to crack down on the abuse of prescription drugs. There’s little current data on overdose deaths, but recent studies have indeed noted a drop in prescription drug abuse.

Advocates have praised Obama‘s decision to endorse increasing access to emergency drug Naloxone, which can reverse opioid overdoses. Some lawmakers have criticized that position, saying it essentially encourages drug abuse.

In 2009, Obama also attempted to end the federal ban on funding for clean needle exchange programs, but Congress reversed the decision.

“Curtail illicit drug consumption in America”

The GAO report notes that the prevalence of drug use among teens and young adults has stayed the same since 2009. “With the exception of marijuana use, illicit drug use is trending down, specially prescription drug abuse and use of cocaine, hallucinogens, inhalants, and methamphetamine,” said ONDCP spokesperson Lemaitre. Research cited in the GAO report suggests the increase in marijuana use is tied to a decreased perception of risk.

Obama remains staunchly opposed to legalization, but it’s unclear how hard the administration plans to come down on states loosening marijuana laws. Obama has overseen far more medical marijuana raids than under the Bush administration. For states that have legalized pot, Attorney General Eric Holder said he intends to “enforce federal law“, though Obama said he had “bigger fish to fry.” The Department of Justice said it is still reviewing the latest laws. 

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