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"The media may or may not report on these individual occurrences, but what they will never do is provide the American people with the full context and scope of Obama's shrill pettiness. Below is a list of illogical, unnecessary, and shockingly spiteful moves our government is making in the name of essential and non-essential. This list will be regularly updated, and if you have something you feel should be added, please email me at jnolte@breitbart.com or tweet me @NolteNC.Please include a link to the news source. -- 1. Treatments for Children Suffering From Cancer - The GOP have agreed to a compromise by funding part of the government, including the National Institutes of Health, which offers children with cancer last-chance experimental treatment. Obama has threatened to veto this funding. 2. The World War II Memorial - The WWII memorial on the DC Mall is a 24/7 open-air memorial that is not regularly staffed. Although the White House must have known that WWII veterans in their eighties and nineties had already booked flights to visit this memorial, the White House still found the resources to spitefully barricade the attraction.  The Republican National Committee has offered to cover any costs required to keep the memorial open. The White House refused. Moreover, like the NIH, the GOP will pass a compromise bill that would fund America's national parks. Obama has threatened to veto that bill. 3. Furloughed Military Chaplains Not Allowed to Work for Free - Furloughed military chaplains willing to celebrate Mass and baptisms for free have been told they will be punished for doing so. 4. Business Stops In Florida Keys - Although the GOP have agreed to compromise in the ongoing budget stalemate and fund the parks, Obama has threatened to veto that funding. As a result, small businesses, hunters, and commercial fisherman can't practice their trade. While the feds have deemed the personnel necessary to keep this area open "non-essential," the "enforcement office

Author James Petras is a respected investigative journalist. This entire article is well worth reading. But I thought well worth highlighting his report that Trump doesn't trust the Secret Service and has hired private security guards.

Jeffrey Tucker at The Daily Reckoning wonders about all those Presidential Executive Orders that make Law while by-passing the Congressional process and making mockery of the USA Constitution.  He ends up referencing the great libertarian, Frederick Bastiat's seminal work, The Law - written in 1849.    
excerpt: One party gets annoyed when the other party's president enacts laws without regard to any constitutional conventions.
But what is the law, and what should it be? These are the bigger questions that are not part of public consciousness.
The same was true in the time of Frédéric Bastiat (1801-50). At the very end of his life, he wrote an impassioned plea on the topic. He tried to get people to think hard about what was happening and how law had become an instrument of plunder, rather than a protector of property.
He writes:
...... "It is not true that the function of law is to regulate our consciences, our ideas, our wills, our education, our opinions, our work, our trade, our talents or our pleasures. The function of law is to protect the free exercise of these rights, and to prevent any person from interfering with the free exercise of these same rights by any other person." .......
This is from Bastiat's The Law, one of the great political essays to emerge from the whole Continental world of the 19th century. It vanished into obscurity in France, was resurrected in late 19th century English, and then disappeared again, only to reappear in the United States in the 1950s, thanks to the efforts of the Foundation of Economic Education.
This essay asks fundamental questions that most people go through life never having thought about.
The problem is that most people accept the law as a given, a fundamental fact. As a member of society, you obey or face the consequences. It is not safe to question why. This is because the enforcement arm of the law is the state, that peculiar agency with a unique power in society to

Lengthy article, lots of new information on NSA decryption capabilities, none of it good for those who value their data privacy.

Thanks Paul - nice job cutting this monster down to size :)

The video, "The Beholden State", has become a sensation among California taxpayer groups for its vivid depiction of the audacious power that public-sector unions wield in their state. The unions' political triumphs have molded a California in which government workers thrive at the expense of a struggling private sector. The state's public school teachers are the highest-paid in the nation. Its prison guards can easily earn six-figure salaries. State workers routinely retire at 55 with pensions higher than their base pay for most of their working life. Meanwhile, what was once the most prosperous state now suffers from an unemployment rate far steeper than the nation's and a flood of firms and jobs escaping high taxes and stifling regulations. This toxic combination-high public-sector employee costs and sagging economic fortunes-has produced recurring budget crises in Sacramento and in virtually every municipality in the state. How public employees became members of the elite class in a declining California offers a cautionary tale to the rest of the country, where the same process is happening in slower motion. The story starts half a century ago, when California public workers won bargaining rights and quickly learned how to elect their own bosses-that is, sympathetic politicians who would grant them outsize pay and benefits in exchange for their support. Over time, the unions have turned the state's politics completely in their favor. The result: unaffordable benefits for civil servants; fiscal chaos in Sacramento and in cities and towns across the state; and angry taxpayers finally confronting the unionized masters of California's unsustainable government.

The Saudis did request that Pakistan send in ground troops. The Pakistan Parliament is in its fourth day of debating the issue, with very strong opposition to the Saudi request. Still, the Saudis have sent Parkistan so much financial aid that fears of not acceding to the request might prevail. But another factor is that Pakistan has its domestic unrest to fight along the Afghan border where U.S. drones keep the kettle aboil; it may be reluctant to dilute its strength to send sufficient troops to Yemen to do the job.   Although the Saudi Army is ridiculously well-armed, it has no experience in fighting wars. The Saudis have preferred to work through mercenaries instead. If forced to send in its own troops, Yemen could indeed become the House of Saud's Afghanisatan.   The Houthi are battle-hardened and well organized along Hezbollah guerrilla lines with a Hezbollah advisory force in attendance. The Houthis took Yemen and no one should forget that Hezbollah has repelled the best that Israel could throw at them in Lebanon at least twice. (Hezbollah was originally trained by Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces in the early 1990s.) There is also the enormous home court advantage for the Houthis, even more pronounced if the Saudis send in their own troops; the Houthis would then be fighting Salafists for their very survival as a culture.  

Don't miss the slide with the names of the NSA-partner nations. Lots of E.U. member nations.

Not mentioned in the article: the Knesset's Regulation Bill formally annexed territory inside the West Bank and holds that Israeli law, rather than military law, will now govern the annexed portions. That is the fact that establishes a clean break with the 2-state solution and flies in the face of international law including the Fourth Geneva Convention, which strictly prohibits annexation and requires the immediate withdrawal of invading military forces from occupied territories immediately upon cessation of hostilities, which occurred in 1967. The two-state solution is dead, although the Regulation Bill will likely be overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court. Trump gave Israel's ultra-right wing leaders way too much encouragement.

NSA as the cause of the next major disruption in the social networking service industry?  Grief ahead for Google? Note the point made that: "It's impossible to do a cloud-based ad supported service" where the encryption/decryption takes place on the client side. 

Well written and researched article describing what it means to live in a post-Constitutional America.  Chilling facts with a cold but obvious conclusion.