Maggie's Farm

re Rep. DeLauro: Tax Every Teaspoon of Sugar

While I am sure DeLauro never met a tax she didn't like, I would speculate that it is controlling people's behavior that really gives her an ego boosting rush. My guess is that she would much prefer rationing sugar to the little people. For our own good and for the god of our children you know. She is just not smart enough to figure out a way to do it.

re Reynolds: Public servants acting as public masters

From his column:

"Congress can, of course, charge Brennan with contempt of Congress, or refer him for prosecution under the False Statements Act. But in both cases, the decision to prosecute would be made by Attorney General Eric Holder, who seems to see his role not as administering justice, but as running interference for the Obama administration and protecting its officials from consequences. (Holder himself has already been held in contempt of Congress for stonewalling an investigation into ATF gun-running to Mexican drug gangs). Likewise, Sen. Udall's call for a criminal investigation of the CIA will go nowhere so long as Holder continues to play scandal-goalie."

This is the truly worrisome part of the story. What happens when the watchers side with, and protect, the criminally corrupt? And what if the people we elect are good with all this?

The Rise to Power of the National Security State

From the article:

Think of Edward Snowden, the former CIA employee who went over to the corporate side of the developing national security economy, as the first blowback figure from and on the world of "capitalist intelligence." Thanks to him, we have an insider’s view of the magnitude of the ambitions and operations of the National Security Agency. The scope of that agency’s surveillance operations and the range of global and domestic communications it now collects have proven breathtaking – with more information on its reach still coming out. And keep in mind that it’s only one agency.

We know as well that the secret world has developed its own secret body of law and its own secret judiciary, largely on the principle of legalizing whatever it wanted to do. As the New York Times’s Eric Lichtblau has reported, it even has its own Supreme Court equivalent in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. And about all this, the other branches of government know only limited amounts and American citizens know next to nothing.

From the Pentagon to the Department of Homeland Security to the labyrinthine world of intelligence, the rise to power of the national security state has been a spectacle of our time. Whenever news of its secret operations begins to ooze out, threatening to unnerve the public, the White House and Congress discuss "reforms" which will, at best, modestly impede the expansive powers of that state within a state. Generally speaking, its powers and prerogatives remain beyond constraint by that third branch of government, the non-secret judiciary. It is deferred to with remarkable frequency by the executive branch and, with the rarest of exceptions, it has been supported handsomely with much obeisance and few doubts by Congress.

http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2014/08/03/the-rise-to-power-of-the-national-security-state/