Progressives knew shortly after Obama was elected that the country was not as receptive to the Progressive agenda as some had hoped, so they immediately started using parts of the State machine to expand political power. They also devised ways to intimidate, punish and silence their enemies, to marginalize their political opponents. It would be very good if we could find smoking guns and punish those who abuse power, but it's highly unlikely that there's any trail of bread crumbs that lead to the top. That's alright, it's not necessary.

The American people were disgusted with Bush at the end of his second term. Obama is a historical figure who made Americans proud of the progress we've made in race relations, but Obama has turned out to be as crooked as some of our past crooked Presidents, only now information control  and technology allow abuses of power to exceed any abuses that have preceded this administration. What this administration has created is truly dangerous and can change America in fundamental ways if not stopped and rolled back. What this administration has done is build the structure for authoritarian control.

I'm sure Obama and the power elite working to expand State power intend a soft, authoritarian State that doesn't offend Americans accustomed to a certain amount of freedom. These powerful Statists are likely depending on the fact that most Americans will not be directly affected. The Tea Party groups have complained for several years that they've been targeted and abused, so they know the authoritarian nature of this government, but media and a cooperative political class have marginalized the Tea Party, framing them as extremists who generate conspiracy theories and use hyperbole to describe this benevolent group of government servants who are simply trying to keep Americans safe and keep the safety net strong and viable.

This group of powerful Statists  are betting that enough Americans have become submissive in their dependence to maintain a Democratic majority in the Senate and possibly gain a majority in the House in 2014. It appears that so many "scandals" have occured that Obama and the Democratic Senate don't have a chance of expanding their power, but this administration has proven it will use any tactics to change public opinion and divert attention away from their abuses of power -- and the Democratic Party, including liberals in general in the public, apparently, will support Obama no matter what he does. If Congress can push immigration reform through, the Hispanic vote will go completely to the Democrats. If media and the political class can frame Republicans as anti-woman because the GOP is reacting to the Gosnell horrors, then the GOP will have the single female vote. If Democrats/Obama can forgive student loans or do something with Obamacare to gain the youth vote, then they'll move forward with gifts to old people, to environmentalists, to unions, etc, playing the same old political games just 10 times more sophisticated now that they control information and have leverage to scare anyone who dares tell the truth.

In my court, Obama and the Democratic Party are guilty of abuse of power -- there have been Constitutional violations on a grand scale that threaten to permanently change the nation for the worse, if you're a freedom-lover. Republicans, except for Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Mike Lee and a few others, are guilty of capitulation. I don't have an answer, except to vote as many Statists out of government as possible. Do enough Americans understand what's at stake? I don't know.

There are many superficial people in the political class who minimize our problems and say things like, oh, this is just the second term problems all Presidents have, or that Republicans are blocking the Progressive agenda, anything but taking a realistic look at the steady decline in the US over many decades. Our economy is dependent on bubbles created by government manipulation, and this is not sustainable. It has frightened and suppressed small businesses, and the American economy can't survive without small business generation and innovation.

Murray Rothbard and other more recent libertarian writers like Tom Woods, Jr. have shown the systemic failures of statism. Our government was never limited properly, even in the beginning, because the Hamiltonians were able to insert backdoor entrances for statist manipulation and the creation of a Merchant State. The interstate commerce and the general welfare clauses are two that have been debated through the years, but now it's critical to create the systemic limitations necessary to prevent statist expansion.

If we don't place real limits on government power, our interventionist government will create an ever bigger, more powerful and more controlling State machine than the one we're now watching violate our rights and destroy our economy with impunity.

The idea of allowing the global economy and many nations to emerge without interventions is inconceivable to the modern US power elite. I'm not saying the US can't influence and persuade other nations to follow freedom, peace and prosperity, but I am saying our many interventions to makeover nations in our image have failed miserably. I'm also not saying that is a tyrant in some nation is eliminating defenseless people in genocide, that the US should stand by in impotence -- we have agreements with other nations to cover these anomalies. I'm talking about an overall direction of non-interventionism when mass-killing/genocide aren't the issue. Just because a civil war creaks out in a country and both sides are causing deaths doesn't mean the US has to intervene. And just because we bomb a nation that has attacked us doesn't mean we stay there for a decade and waste hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars rebuilding the nation and playing political games.

Will young Paul capitulate to the establishment elite, becoming a realist who ditches principles in order to attain power, or will young Paul explain in a number of speeches why America must embrace a non-interventionist doctrine, then explain the distinction between non-interventionism and isolationism? Foreign policy is where most Republicans with a libertarian streak break down, because they believe election is impossible if they look weak on foreign policy. The trick is to re-assess what is weak and what is strong. America has the capability of developing creative defense systems which would protect us from most major attacks. Then there's the lone, domestic terrorist the State is now building up as the next bogeyman. We've always have lone crazies who kill people, so lone crazies who learn a few Islamist phrases and call themselves soldiers for Allah are still lone crazies who kill people, and we can get better at dealing with them. We don't need a large, never-ending presence in the Mideast.

Maybe Rand Paul will stand against the current Progressive hawks on the Left and the Neo-Cons on the Right to find the original American path of non-interventionism, and perhaps public opinion will change so that we can get back to living in freedom, unfettered by the heavy chains the State justifies through national security. We can fight our enemies and defend ourselves from attacks without becoming chained, submissive subjects of a powerful, authoritative State. Someone has to re-explain the concept of non-interventionism.

What's being drowned out by one scanadalous, statist consequence after another is that progressive interventions have shut down our economy, created more poverty and stopped all middle class progress. We've wasted lives and resources in the Middle East, and now political class war-mongers are beating war-drums once again over Syria and Iran. If we continue down this Progressive path to collapse, we'll have thrown away what has made America successful. Progressivism might be the most egregious political misnomer in centuries.

Moving along the path laid out by world powers designing a new order is suicide for politically disconnected Americans, which is the great majority of Americans. Americans have to insist on non-intervention along with a 21st Century remaking of defense. Yes, we live in a dangerous world because of technological advancements, but it's technology that can move us forward in peace. Obama has shut down all missile defense initiatives, so, for that and many other reasons, we need new representatives and a President who understand the need for innovative, defense initiatives that make all large threats basically impotent.

We can share these defense innovations with other nations who agree to a new era of peace and prosperity -- production, peace and creativity not war and destruction. It's sort of like the immigration deal now being considered -- if border security is not done first, all immmigration plans will make matters worse. If we're going to enjoy peace and prosperity, we need to innovate in defense and we need to reject Progressivism. We need a revival of liberty, economic freedom, global free trade, universal cooperation rather than universal spying and gamesmanship that helps no one. The war and spy games of the past have got to end so that civilized human beings can go about the process of providing the opportunities necessary to end poverty and stop repressive regimes and unscrupulous, corporate crooks from rigging the game.

It's ludricrous for the US to entangle itself in the Mideast, to waste money on cronyistic defense contractor relationships building useless and redundant weapons, to put up obstacles to energy production, to allow radical environmentalists to have their way with EPA regulations, to create montrous subsidies like the recent Farm Bill, to hammer small companies with government controlled healthcare regulations and costs, to tax businesses at uncompetitive rates, on and on. The US economy is victim to government regulations and inventionist stupidity from all sides.

It can be a lot better. Our brightest minds in defense can build the defense systems necessary for peace of mind, and we can share this technology with other peace-loving nations -- we can announce to the world that America is retiring as Global Police, but that we won't allow mindless brutality and senseless terrorist attacks. We can make it clear that if our security is truly threatened, we'll neutralize or destroy all such threats, and we won't stay for years to rebuild what we destroy. We can announce that government priority is to create a free environment that allows production and creativity, peace and prosperity, and that we beg the world the join us. Isolationism? Hardly -- what this is about is global liberty, human interactions and mobility on the grandest scale the world has ever known.

Neo-cons and Progressive hawks believe the US can back the right faction of "democratic" rebels, but this is delusional. "Democracy" is not going to prevail in Syria -- it's not prevailing even in Turkey.

Obama now claims a red line has been crossed, that Assad has used chemical weapons to kill 150 people. What about the reports earlier that the rebels used chemical weapons -- what color was that line? Assad has no reason to use chemical weapons and draw NATO into the fight -- Assad is winning the fight at this point, so why risk chemical weapons? And if both sides have used chemical weapons, then why would Obama choose one side over the other?

This appears to be more of a diversion to take the American people's attention off scandals than a well planned, strategic, or even humanitarian, intervention. I'm sure Susan Rice and Samantha Power have a lot to do with this, also. Progressives know that their road to complete control is though foreign interventions and national security propaganda.

The critics miss the forest for the trees. Yes, government officials might conceivably misuse some of the trillions of bits of metadata they examine using sophisticated algorithms. But one abuse is no pattern of abuses. And even one abuse is not likely to happen given the safeguards in place. The cumulative weight of the evidence attests to the soundness of the program. The critics would be more credible if they could identify a pattern of government abuses. But after 12 years of continuous practice, they can’t cite even a single case. We should be thankful that here, at least, government has done its job and done it well.

We miss the forest for the trees? Epstein misses a libertarian priciple as old as libertarianism itself. How many times have libertarians warned that going beyond Constitutional limits is dangerous, and even if you make it a law with built-in safeguards, it's a bad law, because limits were designed for a purpose. When Epstein says that he knows of no abuses as a result of all the information being gathered on Americans, did Epstein not hear in his head libertarians past screaming that it doesn't matter if the present regime or the last few regimes have abused extra-Constitutional creations by an over-reaching government, the next regime could abuse the power that's been given to them? The more we strip away limits, the more temptations there are for power-mongers to take control and abuse power. Epstein knows this, so why is he sounding like a sophomore progressive in a debate club?

Some of the Left's justification for NSA snooping is incomprehensible, like when they say we've already given up privacy when we use Google email, for instance. The apologists say that Google uses the content of our emails for marketing purposes. These Leftists surely understand that people choose to use Google, and that marketing tennis shoes is different from government gathering information that could potentially be used to silence dissent or destroy political oppponents. Government secretly gathering information is not the same as voluntarily allowing Google to use personal information to send us ads regarding stuff we're likely going to buy.

So, these smart intellectuals on the Left making these arguments surely know the difference -- they just hope we don't know the difference. The Leftist apologists for abuse of Americans' personal information is nothing but an apology for a powerful surveillance State that's able to control beyond Constitutional limits. The Left is using government power under the guise of fighting terrorism to attain permanent power and transform our system of government to meet the demands of the Progressive agenda.

In order to systemically create redistribution of wealth in an attempt to counter income equality and offset the power of large corporations, Progressives are creating a powerful State machine that manipulates information against opposition. Strategically, the Democratic Party is using large corporations, favoring them, to suppress true capitalism in order to later turn on and drain these corporations when payback is demanded. Some of America's largest corporations are selling themselves to the government for protection, just like Americans are selling freedom for protection. We'll all lose soon. The Republican Party is weak, because for years the GOP has enjoyed State power far too much. Now when Old Style Republicans talk about "small" government, it's laughable. The Left points to Bush's expansion of entitlements and government power and it defuses any anti-statist approach.

A new Republican Party has to emerge, but from the looks of the immigration bill and the weak opposition to Obamacare, it appears the GOP is impotent, although Republicans like Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Mike Lee are making progress. The Constitution is under attack, because Constitutional limits thwart the Progressive agenda. The Progressive agenda hasn't been hidden -- if you've followed the thought of leading intellectuals on the Left and the leaders of movements like Occupy Wallstreet or the founders of Moveon and other Leftist organizations, they've told us what they plan to do.

Republicans aren't natural political activists, so the Left has a huge advantage as they work 24/7 toward expansion of State power.  Obama can do anything in the Mideast to creat diversions, and Obama can violate the 4th amendment, and Obama can lie over and over, and Obama can allow politics to prevent saving 4 Americans, and Obama can do pretty much anything he wants, and once the obligatory soft resistance from civil libertarians on the Left has faded, the support on the Left remains and the desire for more power drives them forward.

Do Perino and Gutfeld really think that terrorists were calling and using the internet willy-nilly unaware that NSA is snooping? What Snowden has revealed is nothing that terrorists didn't know -- most Americans also assumed that terrorists were being snooped on. When US intelligence got a piece of information that raised a red flag, then we all expected that NSA and other intelligence agencies were following that information to prevent terrorist plots.

What Snowden revealed is that a huge amount of information is being gathered on innocent Americans from phone companies and internet companies and any company, it appears, which has information on the American people. It doesn't help the terrorists to know that information is being gathered on American people, but it hurts the administration because the American people weren't informed.

Gutfeld and Perino can't seem to admit that it's not good that we didn't know. Terrorists probably knew more about US intelligence snooping than the American people knew. That's a big problem, but the other problem is that we can't trust government to collect and keep this information without abusing the information. They might be able to determine patterns, but they can do their snooping on terrorists without keeping my information -- not that I think they'll use my information against me, but they could. It does no good either to say they have to go through levels of checks and balances to get the information. The IRS has already targeted Americans for political purposes, so I have no doubt the NSA would use this information to target political enemies. Gutfeld and Perino might trust a government without limits, but our forefathers created limits because they knew government can't be trusted when it comes to expansion of power.

Perino says we don't know enough to make judgements about trustis government. I know enough to not trust government -- it's a principle that applies to all governments, and it makes no difference that limits are removed to catch terrorists -- if limits are removed we lose liberty. We have to find other ways to catch terrorists.

Those in the political class who support interventionism and an ever-stronger welfare/warfare State are busily recruiting voters, and it's paid off in recent elections, with 2010 being the exception. After Tea Party success in 2010, however, we now know that the State machine pushed by nervous statists used government agencies and media to squash the growth of Tea Party influence. There are still anti-statist elements in the House of Representatives, a few in the Senate, but, for the main part, statists are winning. But what are they winning?

We've had long term unemployment which shows no signs of changing any time soon. We're bogged down in Mideast interventions that are streadily unravelling and generating unintended consequences which will haunt us for decades to come. Small business have been shut out of the market by Big Business with political connections. Energy prices are at least double what they should be. The US economy is dependent on the Fed pumping in 80 something billion dollars a month. There are reports each week now of government abuses of power. Four American government servants were left to die in Benghazi for political reasons. Government officials right on up to the POTUS lie to the American people on a regular basis with impunity. Poverty is increasing. Middle class wages are falling. Food stamps are at record highs. Entitlements are underfunded by 60 or so trillion dollars. Obamacare is coming online in fits and starts among confusion regarding how implementation will come about, thus creating lack of confidence in the business community regarding long term planning and hiring. And now we know that the State is collecting information on all Americans under a veil of secrecy regarding methods and how the information is being used or misused. There's a lot more -- just read the news minute by minute.

If this is winning, I sure hope we start losing soon.