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Ever since the first big revelations about the National Security Agency five months ago, Dianne Feinstein has been in overdrive to defend the surveillance state. As chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, she generates an abundance of fog, weasel words, anti-whistleblower slander and bogus notions of reform -- while methodically stabbing civil liberties in the back.

Feinstein’s powerful service to Big Brother, reaching new heights in recent months, is just getting started. She’s hard at work to muddy all the waters of public discourse she can -- striving to protect the NSA from real legislative remedies while serving as a key political enabler for President Obama’s shameless abuse of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments.

Last Sunday, on CBS, when Feinstein told “Face the Nation” viewers that Edward Snowden has done “enormous disservice to our country,” it was one of her more restrained smears. In June, when Snowden first went public as a whistleblower, Feinstein quickly declared that he had committed “an act of treason.” Since then, she has refused to tone down the claim. “I stand by it,” she told The Hill on Oct. 29.

President Dwight Eisenhower is often admired for having avoided huge wars, having declared that every dollar wasted on militarism was food taken out of the mouths of children, and having warned -- albeit on his way out the door -- of the toxic influence of the military industrial complex (albeit in a speech of much more mixed messages than we tend to recall).

But when you oppose war, not because it murders, and not because it assaults the rights of the foreign places attacked, but because it costs too much in U.S. lives and dollars, then your steps tend in the direction of quick and easy warfare -- usually deceptively cheap and easy warfare.

In 1980, after receiving the nomination of his party, Ronald Reagan kicked off his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., at the Neshoba County Fair. Neshoba County is not someplace you just drop into; you have to want to go there. It’s a small town remembered largely for being the site of the horrid 1964 murders of three young civil rights volunteers, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney. Reagan went to Mississippi to give a speech that focused on states’ rights and the dangers of big government. He went to send a message — and it was heard clearly across the South.

States are rightly hailed as laboratories of democracy, places that can experiment and try out programs and ideas that, if successful, spread across the country. But from the earliest days of the Republic, states’ rights has always been the doctrine of reaction. It has been invoked to stop national reform and to protect local privilege.

According to a leaked draft of the upcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC), the world as we know it is over. The report presents substantial and well documented predictions of global suffering and massive social disruption resulting from the impact climate change on the water supply, food, and natural resources, and successively mounting human loss.

Oddly enough, the recipient of the leak, the New York Times, acted like it was a story about the “food supply.” In fact, the totality of the draft makes it clear that we’ve gone too far for too long to avoid the dire consequences of man made climate change.

The documented risks presented include (Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptations, Vulnerability, IPCC, here or here, pp. 6 & 7):

✓ Food insecurity linked to warming, drought, and precipitation variability;

✓ Death injury and disrupted livelihoods in low-lying coastal zones … due to sea level rise, coastal flooding and storm surges;

✓ Severe harm for large urban populations due to inland flooding;

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Police in Saudi Arabia stopped and fined at least 16 women who intentionally drove cars on Saturday (Oct. 26) after the monarchy and Islamist clerics refused to support demands to give drivers' licenses to females.

Police had received an advisory describing how to deal with female drivers, including a suggestion that they should be taken into a side street, issued a warning, made to promise not to drive again, and their car keys should be given to a male guardian, according to the British Broadcasting Corporation.

"Police stopped six women driving in Riyadh, and fined them 300 riyals (about 80 US dollars) each," said the capital's police deputy spokesman, Colonel Fawaz al-Miman, according to Agence France-Presse.

Police stopped six other women in Eastern Province, plus two in Jeddah and two more elsewhere in the kingdom, local media reported.

More than 60 women claimed to have driven on Saturday, activists said.

Aziza Youssef, a Saudi university professor and activist, said 13 videos plus 50 phone messages from women showed or claimed females drove cars that day, Associated Press reported.

As the Syrian crisis continues to play out according to the brackets of a chemical weapons agreement, one thing is certain. Politicians inside the beltway persist in contributing to the discussion. From the Left, the situation in Syria is a tragedy but falls short of a warrant for American intervention. From the Right, the crisis has cried out for U.S. action since protests began two years ago. Amidst this political back-and-forth, however, one salient group remains in the background, if not ignored altogether. This group is defined by academics who have actually studied the matter at hand.

Whereas politicians used to be consulted through the mainstream media in order to gain valuable information, they have now become ends in themselves. A congressman or congresswoman who appears on any news program is now merely offering his or her opinion regarding Syria. Should the United States intervene in Syria? Politicians spent a great deal of time appearing in several venues to offer their perspective on this question.

A common angle from the mainstream U.S. media is that NSA leaker Edward Snowden will regret his asylum in Russia (rather than life in prison in the U.S.). A quote from ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern was used in support of that theme, but he has asked the New York Times to clarify it.

I was quoted in Steven Lee Myers's "In Shadows, Hints of a Life and Even a Job for Snowden," published by the New York Times on Oct. 31, as saying (about former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden), "He's free, but not completely free" in asylum in Russia.

An unfortunate juxtaposition in the text of Mr. Myers's piece has led several acquaintances to misinterpret my words. I trust you will agree that the issue is of some importance; thus, my request that you publish this clarification.