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On Dec. 16 I will join Daniel Ellsberg, Medea Benjamin, Ray McGovern and several military veteran activists outside the White House to protest the futile and endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of us will, after our rally in Lafayette Park, attempt to chain ourselves to the fence outside the White House. It is a pretty good bet we will all spend a night in jail. Hope, from now on, will look like this.

The forced "resignation" of State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley -- for the mortal sin of denouncing the abusive detention of Bradley Manning -- has apparently proven to be a clarifying moment for many commentators about what the President is and how he functions in these areas.  Writing at Time's Swampland, Mark Benjamin identifies the real crux of the controversy:

But what makes Cardin's conduct special is that he wasn't merely condemning exactly that which he does; that would just be garden-variety nationalistic hypocrisy.  It's that he went a step further by specifically denouncing those who hypocritically defend values they simultaneously subvert: it's a double, meta form of hypocrisy that is really difficult to construct.  That's what makes it impressive.

A deportation program that is central to the Obama administration's immigration enforcement strategy has led disproportionately to the removal of Latino immigrants and to arrests by immigration authorities of hundreds of United States citizens, according to a report by two law schools using new, in-depth official data on deportation cases. The report also found that about a third of around 226,000 immigrants who have been deported under the program, known as Secure Communities, had spouses or children who were United States citizens, suggesting a broad impact from those removals on Americans in Latino communities. The report, to be released Wednesday, is the first analysis of deportations under the Secure Communities program based on data about individual cases, which was obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the University of California, Berkeley, law school and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York.