"So why does this liberal fascist p.o.s. still have a job? " Probably because she's done this kind of thing many times and gotten away with it.

"Who can take anything these people say seriously?" Anyone who wants to function in this country. We have to take them seriously because they can destroy businesses, reputations, and lives pretty much on whim. We have to take what they say seriously because it's the closest thing to official policy that we have. It may have nothing to do with the law, but who can tell? The tax code and associated publications and rulings might as well be in Sumerian. Not even tax lawyers understand this rubbish. The babble of IRS bureaucrats may be just that, babble, but in many cases it's clearer than any statute or regulation. For example, left wing good, right wing bad. That's unfair, unconscionable, and unconstitutional; but it's the current law of the land, and it's incapable of misinterpretation.

You may want to add a third category: tying money up. Governments do this in a variety of ways. For example, by keeping the federal funds rate low (it's 0.25% today), the Federal Reserve encourages lenders to sit on their money. By borrowing 45% of what it spends, the government vacuums up a great deal of what money there is, making sure that it won't be available for productive use in the private sector. And by appropriating much faster than it can spend, the government makes sure that a great deal of money won't be used anytime soon even on its own ridiculous projects. (Hundreds of millions from the stimulus packages have just dropped off radar. If they're not in some official's offshore account, those dollars are probably sitting in the same bin as other unspent appropriations going back to the administrations of Clinton and even Bush 41. We're paying interest on it, but it's not doing anything.)

Good point. Well, maybe they can sublet some of the excess to Planned Parenthood or ACORN's current reincarnation.

At the rate the federal government is growing, it'll fill those vacant buildings quickly.

Wisdom from up north. Yeah, a few pro-Western secularists oppose the Assad regime, but so do Al Qaeda, Saudi Arabia, and a host of itinerant jihadists. The evil ophthalmologist gets support mainly from Russia and Iran. In short, there are no good guys in this fight. Although we probably should keep it from expanding to a regional conflagration, we have nothing to lose by letting the bad guys kill one another on Syrian soil till none is left.

So would feeding their remains to unclean animals.

Excellent post, especially the last paragraph. A lot of officials with feet near the fire would love to change the subject to Edward Swowden. We must not let them. How the government turned us into a nation of suspects under continuous surveillance and how we can get the government back under control are topics too important to lose sight of. We can figure out Mr. Snowden later. At this point I don't give a gold-plated damn whether he's an idealist or ideologue, a patriot or a traitor, a hero or a villain. He's done the country a great service, and we'd better make the best of it.

"Thank God Jeff Sessions is there to ask that question, because Marco Rubio hasn’t." But it's a rhetorical question. Of course people have considered whether another amnesty will produce more unemployment and government dependency. They're called Democrats, and they're COUNTING on those very results to make them a permanent majority.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler just spilled some of what he'd learned in a secret briefing on NSA capabilities—that any NSA analyst can probably tap any phone he pleases without a lot of oversight. See, for example, http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/NSA-Phone-Calls-Surveillance/2013/06/15/id/510137 This confirms some of what Snowden has said, and it suggests Obama's reassurance that “nobody is listening to your telephone calls” is either uninformed or dishonest. Is Nadler, an oily leftist with few redeeming characteristics, a traitor or a hero? I submit that such considerations are a distraction that benefits officials who should be subjected to intense, unrelenting scrutiny. The public needs to know such things. How it finds out and from whom are secondary issues. It is possible to be both a traitor and a hero. When the government has betrayed its trust, it is possible to betray the government without betraying the country. But all this is beside the main points. Whether Snowden is a traitor or a hero is relevant to the matter of domestic spying only to the extent that his assertions may be Chinese disinformation, which seems not to be the case. His motives are largely irrelevant. The legality of his acts is largely irrelevant, more so if the laws he broke are unconstitutional. For now it is imperative that we focus on whether his revelations are true, what they suggest about spying we don't know about, what practices are constitutional, what practices are useful and to what degree, and how much surveillance we can tolerate from the government that we empower and pay for. We can sort out the rest later.