Do you think people in government are more or less honest than those in the private sector? A major function of most regulatory agencies is to keep those in the private sector honest and from abusing power. Yet we know that those in government often abuse the power that has been entrusted to them. The American Founders were well aware of the problem. As Thomas Jefferson warned: "The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first." As the size of government has grown, and particularly the bureaucratic state, the chains of the Constitution have been loosened, and predictably the abuse of power has also grown -- the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) being Exhibit A. Exhibit B is the ways bureaucrats and politicians enrich themselves and their cronies with insider trading -- a criminal offense for anyone outside of government but not within.

The Obamas and the Clintons detest each other, insiders say. Which isn't surprising. Aside from Bill - who's a scoundrel, but an affable one - they aren't very likeable. Even if Barack Hussein Obama were as swell a guy as Barack Hussein Obama thinks he is, he snatched from Hillary the prize she's lusted for most of her life. A better person than she is would harbor some resentment. So when Hillary and Barack "hugged it out" at a party in Martha's Vineyard a few days after she'd criticized his conduct of foreign policy in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic magazine, a new world record for a public display of insincerity was set. Hillary has just begun to hammer Barack, thinks New York Post columnist John Podhoretz. He'll get more unpopular as the tragic consequences of his policies pile up, so she thinks she must run  "as his sadder but wiser replacement - the one who saw it go wrong." Journalists shielding the president now will join the critics after the midterm elections. Preserving the viability of the next Democrat candidate for president will matter more then than whitewashing the record of this one.https://forums.tothepointnews.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=76860&p=78304#p78304

You're probably reading this on your computer, iPad, or smartphone. When we drive somewhere new we get precise directions with real-time traffic information via GPS. We carry music, movies, and truckloads of files in a gizmo no bigger than our thumb. We store thousands of books and read them off of small pads, in an instant. We find any bit of information we desire to know through the Internet. And we can talk by phone to almost anyone from almost anywhere - with live video included if we like. These technological miracles are part of our everyday lives; and such revolutionary inventions as the television, telephone, air travel, microwave ovens, and even rocket ships are so... 20th Century. They're like background noise to us now. But we are aware of them, and when I mention these technological breakthroughs, most readers will recognize and appreciate them immediately. Yet there's a much more revolutionary transformation that we enjoy today that most of us have no awareness of whatsoever... a revolution in our very humanity, a revolution that bodes well for our very existence. The chances are you've never heard of this, in part because of another technological development: television news.

U.S. air strikes have permitted thousands of Yazidi refugees surrounded by the brutal terrorists of the Islamic State (previously known as ISIS or ISIL) to flee, the Pentagon announced late last night (8/13). But military experts say the limited military actions President Barack Hussein Obama has authorized won't stop the relentless advance of IS, which in the last two weeks has seized from the Kurds many towns, two oilfields, the Mosul dam. IS controls "a volume of resources and territory unmatched in the history of extremist organizations," said Janine Davidson of the Council on Foreign Relations. Mr.  Obama likened the IS terrorists to a "jayvee team" in an interview in January. He blames his Mother of All Miscalculations on bad intelligence. That's not true, said the head of the DIA. Underestimating IS was a policy failure, not an intelligence failure, said former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell. "The intelligence community has been trying to warn him about this for well over a year - about the blitzkrieg in Iraq for months - and the White House just shut down," said retired Army LtCol. Ralph Peters, a former intelligence officer. We may not be interested in war, but war may be interested in us. IS says it's planning attacks in America. IS can hurt us much more than al Qaida ever could, says Iraq war vet David French.  The IS is a metastasizing cancer for which Mr. Obama bears considerable responsibility.