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In closely related news, a Pentagon spokesman announced that soldiers of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Brigade and 22nd and 26th Marine Expeditionary Units were in the "mopping up stage" of routing terrorists who had captured the city of Reykjavík, Iceland in an April 7, 2015 surpise attack. According to knowledgeable sources in the White House, the terrorist invasion was reported by an unidentified official of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, who had received urgent telephone calls from counterparts in Iceland's central bank. "We're still assessing the situation, but it looks like all members of the Icelandic government were brutally executed by the terrorists just before they retreated," Rear Adm. John Kirby said. Asked for the name of the terrorist organization that carried out the attack, Adm. Kirby said that the name had not yet been declassified, but said that he hoped to be able to announce that information soon.     

Note the error in the last quoted paragraph: Obama has said he supports declassification of the Senate report's *findings," not the entire report. That's likely over a 6,000-page difference.

The Constitution gives Congress power over the national purse, permitting it to tax, to spend and "to borrow money on the credit of the United States." From the time of the founding until the passage of the First Liberty Bond Act in 1917, Congress itself voted on each and every new government bond issue, specifying the amount to be borrowed and the terms involved. Today, exercise of this power has been delegated to the Treasury Department, which generally can borrow up to the debt limit. Yet this practice can easily be changed. It wouldn't even be necessary to repeal the existing "debt ceiling" statutory framework, an action that President Obama might well veto. Congress can simply refuse to use it. In other words, Congress cannot renege on debt already incurred, but it can condition, decrease and even stop issuance of new U.S. debt. This strategy would put Congress's fiscal conservatives very much back in the driver's seat. The need for new government borrowing is constant; currently nearly 40 cents of every dollar the government spends is borrowed. Anytime Congress and the president cannot agree on how new borrowing should be accomplished (and for what purposes), and what additional spending cuts should be implemented to avoid increasing the nation's overall debt burden, spending will simply be cut across the board by 40%. That is one very big incentive for agreement. Of course, were Congress to reclaim this authority and separately approve each new U.S. debt issue, it would once again be directly responsible for government borrowing in a way that it has avoided for nearly 100 years. With political power comes political accountability.

If Goldberg and Stephens have it right, a U.S./Israel divorce might just spell the end of the appartheid state of Israel. It is only the U.S. veto on the U.N. Security Council that has enabled Israel to continue to treat Palestinians with impunity and to retain control of and colonize the territory it seized in the 1967 war that it launched. (The right to acquire territory by conquest was abolished by the U.N. Charter and the Fourth Geneva Convention in the late 1940s.)  Israel is now a pariah state internationally, with only the U.S., Canada, and a few minor island nations dependent on the U.S. still voting for Israel even in the U.N. General Council. Moreover, the U.S. public is fed up with the foreign wars the U.S. has been waging in the Mideast in aid of Israel's empirical goal of destabilizing and Balkanizing Israel's Arab neighbors. A U.S./Israel divorce would almost certainly bring down Netanyahu's government. On the other hand, the Obama Administration's relationship with Israel has been a departure from the historical norm in the U.S. and Obama's likely successor, Hillary Clinton, has long been much more friendly with the Israel Lobby than Obama.  Many close observers believe that Netanyahu's strategy with Obama has been to wait until Obama is out of office, betting that his successor will be much more amenable to Bibi's desires. But with Bernie Sanders hat in the ring for Auction 2016 and possibly Elizabeth Warren as well, it's conceivable that issues they raise might push Hillary to adopt a less Israel-friendly stance. But on yet another hand, Obama's stance on ISIL is entirely consistent with Israel's longstanding goal of regime change in Syria and Balkanization of Iraq into three nations along ethnic/religious lines, an independent  Kurdistan in the north, a Shia-stan in the South, and a Sunni state in the middle. Note in this regard Obama's strategy of arming "moderate" Syrians only to defend territory ISIL has not yet seized, then to bring down t

Let's be clear. Feinstein properly raised the Separation of Powers issue but did not raise the even more clear violation of criminal law prohibiting unauthorized hacking into a computer system. The CIA is expressly prohited from engaging in domestic surveillance, so the criminal violation is exceedingly clear.

"The Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the United States of America.[1] Check out that footnote!!! excerpt: The Constitution originally consisted of seven Articles. The first three Articles embody the doctrine of the separation of powers, whereby the federal government is divided into three branches: the legislature, consisting of the bicameral Congress; the executive, consisting of the President; and the judiciary, consisting of the Supreme Court and other federal courts. The fourth and sixth Articles frame the doctrine of federalism, describing the relationship between State and State, and between the several States and the federal government. The fifth Article provides the procedure for amending the Constitution. The seventh Article provides the procedure for ratifying the Constitution. The Constitution was adopted on September 17, 1787, by the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and ratified by conventions in eleven States. It went into effect on March 4, 1789.[2] Since the Constitution was adopted, it has been amended twenty-seven times. The first ten amendments (along with two others that were not ratified at the time) were proposed by Congress on September 25, 1789, and were ratified by the necessary three-fourths of the States on December 15, 1791.[3] These first ten amendments are known as the Bill of Rights. The Constitution is interpreted, supplemented, and implemented by a large body of constitutional law. The Constitution of the United States was the first constitution of its kind, and has influenced the constitutions of many other nations."

This is a must-read. We are at a perilous moment in history.

Sounds like no Grexit before the Greek far left reorganizes in a new party separate from Syrisa. And it may be the Communist Party that leads Greece out from under the tyranny of the Eurozone. That would have an anti-communists in the U.S. State Dept. in a true tizzy and might result in NATO intervention. 

Good Guardian article on how the American Freedom Act as reported out of House committees was gutted in secret meetings between key representatives and NSA (and other Executive Branch) officials. The House of Representatives kisses the feet of Dark Government. 

So according to Bloomberg, JPMorgan's commercial bank was the recipient of 99 percent of JPMorgan's $79 trillion (face value of derivatives) in bad bets. So adding JPMorgan's $78 trillion or so to the $75 trillion in bad bets Bank of America unloaded on its FDIC insured subsidiary, we arrive at $153 trillion in bad bets moved by two investment banks alone under the FDIC umbrella. Meanwhile, FDIC has authority under Dodd-Frank to liquidate these insolvent banks but doesn't, despite several successful lawsuits to recover the value of toxic derivatives that they sold to smaller banks that failed (which implies that FDIC could tell JPMorgan and BoA's investment banksters that they've got to pay off the toxic assets they transferred to their commercial banks, rather than diluting the insurance for normal depositors. Problem: the two big investment banks don't have sufficient assets to absorb those losses, so the too-politically-connected-to-fail factor kicks in. Note that I have not done any legal research in regard to these issues and am basing these observations on what has been stated about legal requirements in various media articles.

Excellent review of Charles Murray's new book on Class Warfare, "Coming Apart".  Excellent libertarian commentary hits hard on solutions pouring out of the both the left and the right advocating the use of big government force and power to level the class divide.  Whatever happened to individual liberty and the Constitution? excerpt: This is what the debate is about. To the left, the answer about what to do is completely obvious. We need massive government programs to boost the lowers, and we need new taxes and punishments to whack the uppers good and hard. Never mind that the programs for the lowers don't work and the punishments on the rich end up only bolstering a new government elite that lords it over everyone. The right has a different solution. Well, not everyone on the right, but those neoconservatives who take it as a given that every coherent nation needs a unified national culture. To quote David Brooks: "We need a program that would force members of the upper tribe and the lower tribe to live together, if only for a few years. We need a program in which people from both tribes work together to spread out the values, practices and institutions that lead to achievement. If we could jam the tribes together, we'd have a better elite and a better mass." No thanks on this Stalinist plan. The right is just like the left in this sense: If there is a national problem, it needs a solution imposed by force. The left favors looting people, whereas the right favors Tasing people. Either way, it is all about increasing the police powers of the state. On the extremes, the left wants total expropriation to make everyone equally poor, whereas the right wants total war to unify us all in a grand project of killing and being killed. This is what worries me most about the Murray thesis. No matter where you look for answers, the solutions actually seem worse than the problem itself. More fundamentally, we have to ask: What is the problem we are actually tryin

Solid libertarian thinking applied to a problem that continues to confound democrat socialists and republican statists. One thing missing from this excellent analysis; "follow the money". There are reasons for the madness of the left and the right. Follow the money and follow the power of government. excerpt: "Gang violence is afflicting some of our major cities, Chicago chief amongst them. As I write, there are reports coming in regarding a shooting of 13 people at a basketball court in the Second City. Fortunately, no one was killed in this episode. But a three year old boy is now in critical condition as a result of being shot, and the not unreasonable expectation is that retaliation from the aggrieved gang toward the perpetrators of this particular act will soon follow. According to USA Today, this bout of gunfire was due to a dispute between the Gangster Disciples and the Black P Stone Nation gang.  Neither is likely to sue the other in a court of law to settle their grievances with each other. The purpose of the present essay is to offer the libertarian solution to this problem of inner city gangs, shootings, violence. How can we radically reduce if not entirely eliminate these acts of barbarism? But before we offer the correct (e.g., libertarian) analysis of this situation, let us consider those offered, and now often implemented, by our friends on the left and the right. (We libertarians fit into neither of these categories. We are neither "liberals" nor "progressives" nor "socialists" nor "communists" nor "neighborhood organizers" nor "left-wingers" nor "Democrats."  Nor are we "conservatives" or "right-wingers" or "fascists" or "constitutionalists" or "Republicans." We are something apart and separate from both of them. We are libertarians. Hear us ROAR! )"

As the hostilities between the current government and the Tea Party movement have become increasingly rancorous, the division of American society into two cultures holding thoroughly incompatible worldviews has become obvious. In fact, the two forces are clearly on an unavoidable collision course. Although many people may understandably be most interested in knowing which side will prevail, I think an equally important and troubling question is precisely by what means the matter will be resolved. Will reason prevail and the people in power either have their agenda confirmed or step aside gracefully? Or will there be intransigence, increasing conflict, and even violence? I do not believe that the answer to that question is by any means obvious. In his excellent American Spectator article on "America's Ruling Class and the Perils of Revolution," Angelo Codevilla calls these two antagonistic and irreconcilable groups the ruling class and the country party. Although I agree with Codevilla's outline of the two groups, I prefer to characterize them as the progressive aristocracy and the productive class. In fact, I think that it's vitally important for those in the productive class to understand that what Codevilla calls the ruling party is an aristocracy, albeit a corrupt one. Differences in nomenclature notwithstanding, Codevilla's article is particularly useful in its lengthy descriptions of the two parties to the conflict, for they are more than just political movements and are in fact separate cultures. The culture of the progressive aristocracy is devoted to statism, whereas the productive class tends to hold classical liberal values.

Looks like John Kerry may be about to get caught in another major lie.