Category: Evil

In Death, Robert Bork Admits to Rank Hypocrisy

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It turns out that he took a bribe from Richard Nixon to fire Archibald Cox during the Watergate scandal:

Robert Bork says President Richard Nixon promised him the next Supreme Court vacancy after Bork complied with Nixon’s order to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox in 1973.

Bork’s recollection of his role in the Saturday Night Massacre that culminated in Cox’s firing is at the center of his slim memoir, “Saving Justice,” that is being published posthumously by Encounter Books. Bork died in December at age 85.

Bork writes that he didn’t know if Nixon actually, though mistakenly, believed he still had the political clout to get someone confirmed to the Supreme Court or was just trying to secure Bork’s continued loyalty as his administration crumbled in the Watergate scandal.

President Ronald Reagan nominated Bork to the high court in 1987. The nomination failed in the Senate.

Robert Bork, in addition to being f%$# nuts, was a corrupt Cox sacker.

Thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster that he die not make it to the Supreme Court.

Unsurprising

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Click for full size


This screen shot is from 2002!

Someone took a look at the record, and confirmed that the Tea Party was created by the Koch brothers and big tobacco:

A new academic study confirms that front groups with longstanding ties to the tobacco industry and the billionaire Koch brothers planned the formation of the Tea Party movement more than a decade before it exploded onto the U.S. political scene.

Far from a genuine grassroots uprising, this astroturf effort was curated by wealthy industrialists years in advance. Many of the anti-science operatives who defended cigarettes are currently deploying their tobacco-inspired playbook internationally to evade accountability for the fossil fuel industry’s role in driving climate disruption.

The study, funded by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institute of Health, traces the roots of the Tea Party’s anti-tax movement back to the early 1980s when tobacco companies began to invest in third party groups to fight excise taxes on cigarettes, as well as health studies finding a link between cancer and secondhand cigarette smoke.

You can see a link to the old web page at the Wayback machine, but I don’t recommend it. It’s flash hell.

So the Teabaggers are both Koch suckers, and stooges for big tobacco.

Heady brew.

Dick Cheney Pissed off Jon Stewart………

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Daym!

Recently, Dick Cheney was interviewed, and Jon Stewart and his writers had the stomache to listen to listen to him go on and on about how Barack Obama has weakened America.

I now know what that sound I heard earlier, it was the staff of The Daily Show licking their chops.

He notes that Cheney was a sh%$#y vice president, and he was wrong on everything, and followed this by a video medley Grand Moff Cheney’s greatest hits, like, “We’ll be welcomed as liberators”, “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction,” and the ever popular favorite “I think that they are in the last throes of the insurgency.”

Even if Obama wanted to take our standing in the world down a peg, he couldn’t, ’cause the Bush-Cheney administration left him with no peg room… the previous administration had left us in a bit of a cash crunch, and by ‘previous administration,’ I mean these motherf%$#ers.

Ouch.

Why I Call Him the Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever.

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Just in case your wondering how bad Obama’s assertions of the right to kill anyone, at any time, are, note that not only are they dubious constitutionally, they directly conflict with the black letter text of the Magna Carta, meaning that he’s not just ignoring 230 years of law, he’s ignoring 798 years of law:

Two provisions of Magna Carta deserve our attention today, a gift to us from the Barons of 13th century England.

38. No bailiff for the future shall, upon his own unsupported complaint, put anyone to his “law”, without credible witnesses brought for this purposes. {This was replaced by improved legislation in 1863}

39. No freemen shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised {deprived of land} or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor send upon him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. {This remains in force for the people of England, but no longer in the USA}

Our ancestors spent much blood, sweat, and tears between that day at Runnymede and the meeting in 1878 at Philadelphia. The liberties provided by the Constitution were won over those 30 generations, by the unruly Saxons and Normans of Medieval England — and the Founders, jealous of their liberties and willing to fight for them. In the decade since 9-11 we’ve thoughtlessly thrown away political structures that took centuries to build.

This country in general, and the Obama administration in general, is going in a profoundly wrong directions.

Words Cannot Express My Disgust

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Israel has been administering the Depo-Provera contraceptive to Ethiopian Women without their knowledge:

It isn’t an apology or an acceptance of responsibility. But for the first time, an Israeli government official has admitted what thousands of Ethiopian Jewish women have allegedly known for years – doctors in Israel have been injecting Ethiopian women with long-acting birth control medication known as Depo-Provera without the informed consent of the women. The effect of the shots lasts for months and the practice effectively sterilizes women for that period of time. Many Ethiopian women have reportedly received these shots for years with little or no say in the decision to receive them.

This is bigoted, and this is contemptible.

Whoever was behind this needs to be drummed out of the medical profession.

At least they have put an end to the practice:

Health Ministry Director General Prof. Ron Gamzu has instructed the four health maintenance organizations to stop the practice as a matter of course.

 The ministry and other state agencies had previously denied knowledge or responsibility for the practice, which was first reported five years ago.

 Gamzu’s letter instructs all gynecologists in the HMOs “not to renew prescriptions for Depo-Provera for women of Ethiopian origin if for any reason there is concern that they might not understand the ramifications of the treatment.

This is quite literally the least they could once this came to light.

In addition to being racist, it’s bad medicine. Depo-Provera has a lot of nasty side effects.

Contemptible

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Biotech firms are aggressively lobbying to ban the use of generic alternatives to their ruinously expensive drugs:

In statehouses around the country, some of the nation’s biggest biotechnology companies are lobbying intensively to limit generic competition to their blockbuster drugs, potentially cutting into the billions of dollars in savings on drug costs contemplated in the federal health care overhaul law.

The complex drugs, made in living cells instead of chemical factories, account for roughly one-quarter of the nation’s $320 billion in spending on drugs, according to IMS Health. And that percentage is growing. They include some of the world’s best-selling drugs, like the rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis drugs Humira and Enbrel and the cancer treatments Herceptin, Avastin and Rituxan. The drugs now cost patients — or their insurers — tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Two companies, Amgen and Genentech, are proposing bills that would restrict the ability of pharmacists to substitute generic versions of biological drugs for brand name products.

Bills have been introduced in at least eight states since the new legislative sessions began this month. Others are pending.

Seriously. We need to move away from proprietary IP licensed drug development leveraging government research to another model.

The current one is not working.

They use monopoly rents to further expand their monopoly rents by capturing the political process, and we all pay, over, and over, and over, and over again.

Geithner As Sociopath: The Interview

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In an interview with Liaquat Ahamed at The New Republic Timothy Geithner reveals his good German.

In response to the idea of justice, his response was that it, “wasn’t his thing.”

LA: One of the ways that people have figured out in the past to reconcile the politics was to go populist. That was what Roosevelt did. You, on the other hand, had been resolutely against that. You refer to it as Old Testament justice, implying that while it may be emotionally satisfying, it doesn’t serve any purpose.

 TG: I never used that phrase as a pejorative description. I just used it as a simple shorthand to refer to the understandable need people had for justice. But the President didn’t ask me to come do this to be the architect of a political strategy. I never felt that was my thing. I had some views on the issue, but I didn’t give them much weight. I thought my job was to figure out the financial parts.

(emphasis mine)

Justice doesn’t matter, and notwithstanding his protestations, he ridiculed it as, “Old Testament justice”.

He knows that his job is to be the lick-spittle watchdog for the banksters.

Note however that the Cossacks work for the Czar

Just When You Think that Republicans Get Any More Contemptible………

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A state legislator in New Mexico proposed legislation to make a rape victim who has an abortion guilty of felony destruction of evidence:

A bill introduced by a Republican state Representative would make it a third-degree felony for a woman who was impregnated as the result of a rape or incest to have an abortion.

House Bill 206, brought by Rep. Cathrynn Brown, R-Carlsbad, is sure to be one of the most controversial bills of the session. While other bills do all they can to discourage women from having abortions by delaying the process, this bill would actually make it a third degree felony to not carry to term a pregnancy that is the result of rape or incest.

ProgressNow New Mexico executive director Pat Davis calls the bill “blatantly unconstitutional” and opposes the bill.

“The bill turns victims of rape and incest, who have just been through a horrible sexual assault, into felons and forces them to become incubators of evidence for the state,” David said in a statement. “According to Republican philosophy, victims who are ‘legitimately raped’ will now have to carry the fetus to term in order to prove their case.”

It in net, and blew up in her face, and suddenly, she is saying that she will rewrite the bill so that it would only apply to the rapist if they coerce an abortion.

If that had been her goal in the first place, she would have put it in in the first place.

Seriously, how do evil f%$#s like this get elected?

This is Why You Cannot Trust Republicans

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The Virginia state senate is evenly divided by party, but yesterday, when a Democratic member of the institution was at the inauguration, they passed a Gerrymandered redistricting of the senate:

An ambush reapportionment effort by Virginia Senate Republicans spilled into partisan conflict tinged with racial resentment Tuesday, raising fears of a legislative train wreck that would derail the Republican governor’s final bid for a legacy.

 Black Senate Democrats referred to the GOP’s party-line power play Monday as “plantation politics,” reprising the specter of the same spiteful partisan gridlock that paralyzed the Senate last year.

 A scowling Gov. Bob McDonnell delivered a clear rebuke while most Republicans in the House maintained a cold, dismayed silence over the Senate move that caught them off guard.

 “Obviously the tactics used yesterday were a surprise and don’t think that’s the way business should be done,” McDonnell said. “I’m not happy about the things that have happened.”

 “What I’ve said is that this session should be about education and transportation, not redistricting and other things,” he said.

 Despair over the partisan rift was so deep that many lawmakers of both parties compared the damage to the 2001 session, the only one in modern Virginia history to adjourn without finishing work on the state budget.

 Ignoring ancient legislative traditions and even a just 2004 amendment to the Virginia Constitution that limits redistricting to once a decade, the Senate’s 20 Republicans shocked Capitol Square by their actions Monday. They abruptly amended a House bill that previously made minor technical boundary adjustments into a total revision of all 40 Senate districts passed in 2011.

 With Democratic Sen. Henry Marsh away at President Barack Obama’s inaugural Monday, Senate Republicans caught the 20 Senate Democrats one vote short and muscled Sen. John Watkins’ surreptitious floor amendment to passage on a 20-19 vote with little debate in just 30 minutes.

(emphasis mine)

As to “Governor Ultrasound’s” disapproval, I would not expect a veto.

After all, he disapproved of the transvaginal ultrasound bill, and signed that into law.

Even if he were inclined to veto the bill, McDonnell wants to be the Republican Presidential or Vice-Presidential pick in 2016, and dirty tricks and voter suppression has become a core value of today’s Republican Party.

Now Roll Up the Co-Conspirators

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Nechemya Weberman has been convicted of child sexual abuse and sentenced to 103 years:

An unlicensed therapist and respected member of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn was sentenced on Tuesday to 103 years in prison for repeatedly sexually abusing a young woman, beginning the attacks when she was 12.

The therapist, Nechemya Weberman, 54, a member of the Satmar Hasidic community of Williamsburg, did not react as the judge sentenced him. The victim, now 18, who delivered an impassioned statement asking for the maximum sentence to be imposed, dabbed away tears.

“The message should go out to all victims of sexual abuse that your cries will be heard and justice will be done,” Justice John G. Ingram of State Supreme Court said before imposing the sentence, which was close to the longest the law allows. Justice Ingram praised the young victim’s “courage and bravery in coming forward.”

The proceedings were closely watched, as this was the first high-profile case against child sexual abuse that the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, had brought against a member of the politically powerful Satmar ultra-Orthodox community during his more than two decades in office. This sentence is the longest a Brooklyn court has imposed on a member of the ultra-Orthodox community for sexual abuse of a child.

More significant, they managed to get some of the Satmar Jewish community who attempted to intimidate witnesses:

Critics have charged Mr. Hynes with not being aggressive enough in going after molesters in the politically well-connected community. But Mr. Hynes has attributed the lack of prosecutions on the intimidation to stay silent that ultra-Orthodox sexual-abuse victims and their families often face from their own community leaders.

Support for Mr. Weberman was strong in powerful circles of the Satmar community after his arrest in 2011, with hundreds turning out for a fund-raiser for his defense. But the courtroom on Tuesday was about equally divided between supporters for him and for his victim.

Mr. Hynes has said he believes the case may be a turning point for ultra-Orthodox victims of sexual abuse. In addition to convicting Mr. Weberman, his office also charged seven Hasidic men with bribery and intimidation of Mr. Weberman’s victim, who testified over four days. Prosecutors say they know of more victims who were too afraid to testify.

Hopefully, this won’t stop here.

The harassment and coverups within the ultra-Orthodox community on this matter is endemic, and it will not stop until prosecutors go after people who do this.

Ralph Nader Has Become a Repulsive Figure in American Public Live

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In his latest bon mot, he comes out against gun control and suggests that government abrogate the 1st amendment to ban video games:

Not one to keep his opinion to himself, former presidential candidate Ralph Nader has come down hard on video games. In fact, he has gone as far as to call the companies that make them “electronic child molesters.”

 In an interview with Politico yesterday, Nader blasted President Obama’s gun control package that was unveiled last week. The two-time Green Party presidential candidate said that the president’s plan needs to go further in regulating video game creators that add violence to their games.

 ………

 “All this is fine with the companies — these boys and girls spent more than $25 billion last year, and what they got in return is violent, addictive, and tawdry sensuality,” Nader wrote in his blog at the time. “These electronic child molesters have little sense of restraint or boundaries. Their odious fare is becoming more coarse, more violent, and more interactive to seduce these youngsters into an addiction of direct video game involvement in the mayhem.”

(emphasis mine)

Tawdry sensuality?

Just how f%$#ed up is this man?

Nader made contributions to the public space on consumer safety and the environment in the 1960s and 1970s, but then in the 1960s and 1970s, Fred Phelps was a fierce fighter for civil rights in Kansas.

Neither of their actions in the past reflect who they are today.

The 2016 Coup Attempt Begins

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The Republicans are looking to change electoral vote allocation to favor Republicans in 2016:

Earlier this week, Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus endorsed a Republican plan to rig the next presidential election to make it nearly impossible for the Democratic candidate to win the White House, no matter who the American people vote for. The election-rigging plan, which would allocate electoral votes by congressional district rather than by states as a whole in a handful of states that consistently vote for Democratic presidential candidates, would have allowed Mitt Romney to narrowly win the Electoral College last November despite losing the popular vote by nearly four points.

On Monday, seven Pennsylvania Republican state representatives introduced a bill to make this vote-rigging scheme a reality in their state. Under their bill, the winner of Pennsylvania as a whole will receive only 2 of the state’s 20 electoral votes, while “[e]ach of the remaining presidential electors shall be elected in the presidential elector’s congressional district.”

Under this scheme, Obama would have only gotten 7 electoral votes from Pennsylvania.

There would have been similar losses of electoral votes in Ohio, and Wisconsin, Florida, and Virginia.

This is part 94 of why the Electoral College sucks wet farts from dead pigeons.

This also explains why Republicans accuse people of acting like Stalin so often, they are projecting:  Because they try to act like Stalin, they think that everyone else does so too.

The NRA are Contemptible Slime

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Yes, I know, and the sky is blue, but the just took out an ad going after Obama’s kids. I (for once) agree with WH spokesman Jay Carney:

Most Americans agree that a president’s children should not be used as pawns in a political fight. But to go so far as to make the safety of the President’s children the subject of an attack ad is repugnant and cowardly.

The NRA may be the most repulsive lobby in Washington.

Republicans: Personal Responsibility for Thee, But Not for Mew

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A Republican Maryland Delegate Don Dwyer got drunk, and crashed his boat, fracturing the skull of a 5-year old girl.

His excuse was that gay marriage made him do it:

It is not funny that Maryland Delegate Don Dwyer drunkenly crashed his boat last year, fracturing the skull of a five-year-old girl. But it is funny that he is blaming gay marriage for the alcoholism that made him drunkenly crash his boat last year, fracturing the skull of a five-year-old girl! Oh, did we say “funny”? Well, seems like everything is funny to us! First, congratulations to Del. Dwyer for sitting down with the Capitol Gazette and making a searching and fearless moral inventory of himself. Second, the opposite of congratulations to Del. Dwyer for coming up with the positively Gingrichian “I was working too hard to protect the sanctity of marriage and that’s why I f%$#ed my aide drunkenly crashed a boat, fracturing the skull of a five-year-old girl.”

(%$# mine)

Seriously, do you have to be a self-involved psychopath to be a Republicans these days?  Because I don’t see any Republicans out there who don’t appear to have something missing in their basic humanity.

h/t Atrios.

Ooh, Baby, You Are So Talented!

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And They Are So Dumb!

You remember how Dick “Army of Dicks” Armey spilled the beans on how he and the rest of FreedomWorks was basically grifting?

Well, it appears that he confused the conservative Media Research Center, and the liberal Media Matters when he spilled the beans:

There’s been a remarkable amount of drama surrounding Dick Armey’s departure from FreedomWorks, culminating Friday with a stunning report from Media Matters, who interviewed the former House Majority Leader directly. Armey had all kinds of interesting insights to share with the progressive group, including tidbits on pay-for-play agreements with Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, and the FreedomWorks’ practice of charging activists to attend free events.

 Though many of Armey’s revelations should probably be taken with a grain of salt — the former GOP leader seemed confused about some of the details he shared — there was a larger question that puzzled nearly everyone: why in the world was Dick Armey dishing dirt to Media Matters?

 The Daily Caller, a conservative outlet, tracked down the answer.

Dick Armey had no idea he was speaking to the left-wing Media Matters organization during an interview last week, he told The Daily Caller Tuesday. Instead, Armey thought he was chatting with the conservative Media Research Center. […]


 As for who he thought he was speaking to, Armey asked the Daily Caller, “Who’s the guy with the red beard that always does the show where he points out how biased the press is?” Told he seemed to be referring to the Media Research Center’s Brent Bozell, who does a weekly “Media Mash” segment on Fox News, Armey said, “Yeah, I thought it was Brent Bozell.”

As the saying goes, “ない愚かさはない薬です”.*

If these guys had half a brain, we’d be in trouble.  Of course, if they had half a brain. they would not be movement conservatives.

H/t Crooks and Liars.

*Pronounced in Japanese, “baka ni tsukeru kusuri wanai”, which means, “There is no medicine for stupidity.” Apologies for any inaccuracies in the text, I do not know Japanese.

Quote of the Day

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The only problem is, the suit is being filed by maybe the biggest douchebag of all time, Hank Greenberg (and his company, Starr International), a man who has not only been proven to be corrupt and a fraud, but who perhaps more than anyone else was responsible for the galactic balance-sheet goat-f%$# that caused AIG’s implosion in the first place. If there is such a person as an innocent AIG shareholder who was harmed by the government’s conduct, it sure as hell isn’t Hank Greenberg.

—Matt Taibbi, on Greenberg’s suit against the US because he did not get well paid enough for running AIG into the ground.

(%$# mine)

FWIW, In an unexpected outbreak of sanity AIG has decided not to join Greenberg’s lawauit.

Still, “Galactic Balance Sheet goat f%$#,”  that is good, even by Matt’s high standards.

Go read.

A Big F%$# You to Torture Opponents

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After the idea got shot down by opponents of torture in 2009, Obama is nominating highly vocal torture supporter John Brennan:

President Obama plans to nominate top counter-terrorism advisor John Brennan to lead the CIA, a senior administration official said today.

Brennan, a 25-year veteran of the agency, would take the helm of the CIA in the wake of the resignation of former Army Gen. David Petraeus.

I will be calling my Senators (both Democrats) and asking that both of them to filibuster him. (they won’t, but I am asking)

It is very likely, though it is not certain given the veil of secrecy surrounding this matter that Brennan was an active participant in torture.

The most depressing commentary on this is Glen Greenwald’s observation that there is Obama has succeeded in making opposition to torture a fringe political position:

It is a perfect illustration of the Obama legacy that a person who was untouchable as CIA chief in 2008 because of his support for Bush’s most radical policies is not only Obama’s choice for the same position now, but will encounter very little resistance. Within this change one finds one of the most significant aspects of the Obama presidency: his conversion of what were once highly contentious right-wing policies into harmonious dogma of the DC bipartisan consensus. Then again, given how the CIA operates, one could fairly argue that Brennan’s eagerness to deceive and his long record of supporting radical and unaccountable powers make him the perfect person to run that agency. It seems clear that this is Obama’s calculus.

I can only conclude that Barack Obama, aka the Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever™, is objectively pro torture.

And the morons in Sweden gave him a Nobel Peace Prize.

God Bless America

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The US Treasury is now freezing the accounts of cartoonists of mass destruction:

I went to Congo to write a comic book about a terror group — and ended up being labelled a terror supporter myself by the Treasury Department.

The bizarre tale of my graphic novel Army of God, the Lord’s Resistance Army in Congo and Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is a window inside a little-known counter-terrorism campaign that captures more than a few innocents in its wide net.

Nearly 12 years since the massive expansion of federal powers in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, OFAC’s collateral damage — myself included — is a reminder that defeating terrorists can come at the cost of our freedom.

It began two years ago. In the fall of 2010 I spent a month in the Democratic Republic of Congo reporting on the Lord’s Resistance Army, a brutal Ugandan rebel group that was chased from its homeland and has spent the last decade hiding out in the forests of eastern Congo. Led by charismatic madman Joseph Kony, the LRA pillages farming villages for supplies, kills or mutilates the adults and enslaves the children.

………

In early December our agent wired [artist Tim] Hamilton his share of the advance, but the money never reached the artist’s account. After a few weeks the agent made some calls. “He was told that the party holding the funds was the federal wire fraud unit which suspected that they were laundering funds for a terrorist organization,” Hamilton says.

On one level, it may seem as if it is not a big deal, but it is.  

Basically, this means that they can take everything you have with out any recourse at any time, and if they are wrong, or if they are malicious, it does not matter, because they are above the law, because if anything goes wrong, all they need to do is go, “Yadda, yadda, terrorism.”

We have deliberately created a lawless national security state.

But of Course

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The very first person goes to jail over CIA torture, and it’s the whistle-blower:

Looking back, John C. Kiriakou admits he should have known better. But when the F.B.I. called him a year ago and invited him to stop by and “help us with a case,” he did not hesitate.

In his years as a C.I.A. operative, after all, Mr. Kiriakou had worked closely with F.B.I. agents overseas. Just months earlier, he had reported to the bureau a recruiting attempt by someone he believed to be an Asian spy.

“Anything for the F.B.I.,” Mr. Kiriakou replied.

Only an hour into what began as a relaxed chat with the two agents — the younger one who traded Pittsburgh Steelers talk with him and the senior investigator with the droopy eye — did he begin to realize just who was the target of their investigation.

Finally, the older agent leaned in close and said, by Mr. Kiriakou’s recollection, “In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that right now we’re executing a search warrant at your house and seizing your electronic devices.”

On Jan. 25, Mr. Kiriakou is scheduled to be sentenced to 30 months in prison as part of a plea deal in which he admitted violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by e-mailing the name of a covert C.I.A. officer to a freelance reporter, who did not publish it. The law was passed in 1982, aimed at radical publications that deliberately sought to out undercover agents, exposing their secret work and endangering their lives.

In more than six decades of fraught interaction between the agency and the news media, John Kiriakou is the first current or former C.I.A. officer to be convicted of disclosing classified information to a reporter.

This is about scaring people out of being whistle-blowers.

This is about the “most open administration in history” doing its level best to create a completely secret and unaccountable executive.

This is why I call Barack Obama the worst constitutional law professor ever.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, Richard Nixon was the worst president the US had from 1933 to 1973 1974, and the best president the US had from 1969 through 2013.

If that does not make you depressed, then I want whatever it is that you are smoking.