It all started on March 15, 2011, when groups of the Syrian people took to the streets of Damascus to protest what they considered to be the government's unfavorable social and economic policies. The Western powers tried to portray the scattered demonstrations as a continuation of the revolutionary wave in the Arab states of the Middle East and North Africa known as the Arab Spring. However, there was a major difference, that Syria was simply dissimilar to all the other countries where the people had taken to streets to demand a regime change: Syria was not a U.S. puppet regime!

Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain and Yemen where the core of the "Arab Spring" had taken shape and come to existence were all countries which were in some ways politically allied with the United States and ruled by quisling politicians ready to sacrifice the rights and interests of their own people at the expense of the satisfaction of their American lords.

President Obama tried a new tack Wednesday as he fought back against criticism of his Obamacare claims.

Fact-checkers and journalists have ruled that Obama wasn't being truthful when he claimed that people who liked their insurance could keep it. Obama during a speech in Boston sought to cast the issue Wednesday as trying to weed out "bad apple insurers" who don't provide enough coverage.

"One of the things health reform was designed to do was to help not only the uninsured but also the under-insured," Obama said. "And there are a number of Americans, fewer than 5 percent of Americans, who've got cut-rate plans that don't offer real financial protection in the event of a serious illness or an accident.

"Remember, before the Affordable Care Act, these bad apple insurers had free rein every single year to limit the care that you received or used minor pre-existing conditions to jack up your premiums or bill you into bankruptcy."

The U.S. government seems outraged that people are leaking classified materials about its less attractive behavior. It certainly acts that way: three years ago, after Chelsea Manning, an army private then known as Bradley Manning, turned over hundreds of thousands of classified cables to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, U.S. authorities imprisoned the soldier under conditions that the UN special rapporteur on torture deemed cruel and inhumane. The Senate's top Republican, Mitch McConnell, appearing on Meet the Press shortly thereafter, called WikiLeaks' founder, Julian Assange, "a high-tech terrorist."

More recently, following the disclosures about U.S. spying programs by Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency analyst, U.S. officials spent a great deal of diplomatic capital trying to convince other countries to deny Snowden refuge. And U.S. President Barack Obama canceled a long-anticipated summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin when he refused to comply.

Despite such efforts, however, the U.S. establishment has often struggled to explain exactly why these leakers pose such an enormous threat. Indeed, nothing in the Manning and Snowden leaks should have shocked those who were paying attention. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who dissented from the WikiLeaks panic, suggested as much when he told reporters in 2010 that the leaked information had had only a "fairly modest" impact and had not compromised intelligence sources or methods. Snowden has most certainly compromised sources and methods, but he has revealed nothing that was really unexpected. Before his disclosures, most experts already assumed that the United States conducted cyberattacks against China, bugged European institutions, and monitored global Internet communications. Even his most explosive revelation -- that the United States and the United Kingdom have compromised key communications software and encryption systems designed to protect online privacy and security -- merely confirmed what knowledgeable observers have long suspected.

The United States has likely reached a grim but historic milestone in the war on terror: 1 million veterans injured from the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. But you haven't heard this reported anywhere else. Why? Because the government is no longer sharing this information with the public.

All that can be said with any certainty is that as of last December more than 900,000 service men and women had been treated at Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals and clinics since returning from war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that the monthly rate of new patients to these facilities as of the end of 2012 was around 10,000. Beyond that, the picture gets murky. In March, VA abruptly stopped releasing statistics on non-fatal war casualties to the public. However, experts say that there is no reason to suspect the monthly rate of new patients has changed.

VA ceased to disclose this data despite President Obama's second-term campaign pledge that his administration would be open and transparent. Absent information about the number of soldiers that have sought government medical help and about the types of injuries they had, policymakers, Capitol Hill and health care professionals may be hamstrung in making decisions about funding for crucial veterans' health programs and the treatments and diagnostic tools that should be researched and targeted. The reliability of future military strategies could be in jeopardy as well.

VA's actions are "a gross injustice to veterans and the taxpaying public," says Anthony Hardie, a Gulf War veteran and veterans' advocate who has testified before the House Veterans' Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. Hardie suggests that Congress should tackle the problem, perhaps even legislatively, noting that withholding the data "reflects a VA pattern of abuse and lack of transparency."

Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., the chairman of the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs, stopped short of making such a harsh assessment, but just barely. VA's records on veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq, he says, "were a valuable resource for the committee, and it's unfortunate that VA has decided to discontinue them for now. We have asked VA to explain what security concerns led to its decision and provide an estimate as to when it will resume production of the reports."

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.

President Obama and his subordinates are well aware that much of the world is outraged by the use of drones to kill. The warnings of likely blowback and long-term damage to U.S. interests and human interests and the rule of law are not hard to find. But our current warriors don't see a choice between murdering people with drones and using negotiations and courts of law to settle differences. They see a choice between murdering people with drones and murdering people with ground troops on a massive scale. The preference between these two options is so obvious to them as to require little thought.

President Eisenhower had his own cheap and easy tool for better warfare. It was called the Delightfully Deluded Dulles Brothers, and -- in terms of how much thought this pair of brothers gave to the possible outcomes of their reckless assault on the world -- it's fair to call them a couple of drones in a literal as well as an analogous sense.

On Wednesday morning, CNN anchor Carol Costello made a shocking statement on air.

She said that the Obama administration threatens the jobs of reporters who make the president look bad.

During a discussion about the firing of national security official Jofi Joseph, panelist Jason Johnson said, "The Obama administration is very thin-skinned."

Later in the panel, CNN contributor Will Cain said, "There's a consistency in the Obama administration of going after people who embarrass the administration. But not those that cover for the administration."

Turkey may be on the verge of resuming talks with the EU after a three-year hiatus, but it's the country's deteriorating relationship with the US that is hogging the headlines.

Brussels announced on October 22 that it will reopen accession talks via an inter-governmental conference on November 5, after a long hiatus. However, a day earlier, daily Taraf reported that the US Congress has cancelled a delivery of 10 Predator drones to Turkey - which had been agreed in 2011.

The US was keen to involve Ankara in its anti-terrorism efforts of targeting militants, but Congress (probably the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee, UPI reports) decided not to approve the drone sale to its Nato ally. That change of heart comes on the back of intelligence suggesting ties between Turkey's Milli Istihbarat Teskilati (MIT) intelligence agency and Iran's intelligence service are growing.

Those ties exploded onto the front pages after the Washington Post's David Ignatius on October 17 quoted "knowledgeable sources" as saying that the Turkish-Israeli relationship deteriorated to such a point last year that Ankara disclosed to Tehran the identity of up to 10 Iranians who had been meeting inside Turkey with their Mossad case officers.

While the alliance between the US and Israel is largely supported across the American political spectrum - one of the few things on which the left and right wings can actually seem to agree - this support is far from universal. Given the importance of the of the alliance with the US to the state of Israel, both Israelis as well as American Jews and non-Jews alike who support Israel should have some sense of who the opposition is, and what they are saying. Note here that I am not talking about the crackpots and obvious anti-Semites, but rather those who would be considered inside a broadly defined "acceptable mainstream".

One example of policy-based opposition to the US alliance with Israel was on display yesterday afternoon in Washington, DC at a Congressional hearing on the Middle East and al-Qaeda. One of the witnesses was an ex-CIA analyst and operations officer Michael Scheuer.

For many years Scheuer was head of the team at the CIA studying and tracking Osama Bin Laden. Scheuer is perhaps best known for a book he wrote after retiring from the CIA called Imperial Hubris, which he initially published under the pseudonym "Anonymous." Since then, Scheuer has published a number of other books and made a name for himself as an outside the box thinker.

With drone strikes and kill lists, the president set a dangerous precedent.

The foreign leaders are dropping like flies -- to American surveillance. I'm talking about serial revelations that the National Security Agency has been spying on Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, two Mexican presidents, Felipe Calderón (whose office the NSA called "a lucrative source") and his successor Enrique Peña Nieto, at least while still a candidate, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. It's now evidently part of the weekly news cycle to discover that the NSA has hacked into the emails or listened into the phone conversations of yet another allied leader.

Reportedly, that agency has been listening in on the phone calls of at least 35 world leaders. Within 48 hours last week, President Obama was obliged to call an irritated President François Hollande, after Le Monde reported that the NSA was massively collecting French phone calls and emails, including those of politicians and business people, and received a call from an outraged Merkel, whose cell phone conversations were reportedly monitored by the NSA. Of course, when you build a global surveillance state and your activities, thanks to a massive leak of documents, become common knowledge, you have to expect global anger to rise and spread. With 196 countries on the planet, there are a lot of calls assumedly still to come in, even as the president and top Washington officials hem and haw about the necessity of maintaining the security of Americans while respecting the privacy of citizens and allies, refuse to directly apologize, claim that an "exhaustive" review of surveillance practices is underway, and hope that this, too, shall pass.

In the meantime, on a second front, the news is again bad for Washington, as upset and dismay once largely restricted to the tribal backlands of the planet seem to be spreading. I'm talking here about the global assassination campaigns being conducted from the White House, based in part on a "kill list" of terrorist suspects and using the president's private air force, the growing drone fleets of the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command. In the last week, both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have come out with reports on the U.S. drone campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen debunking White House claims that few civilians are dying in those strikes and raising serious questions about their legality.

Didn't any Obama geniuses read the newspaper? The US is a high tech/software/eCommerce powerhouse. We're really good at this stuff.

So why did the Obama administration give a $1 billion plus ObamaCare website contract to a UK company that is already under investigation for everything from gross incompetence to government fraud to sexual assault?

Follow the money. The corporate felons spent $1 million on lobbying (read that "legalized bribery to dirtbag politicians.")

That's a 1,000 to 1 return on their investment (bribe to contract size.)

Why can't every American get in on this corporate gravy train? Think of the good it would do the country.

I'd be happy to give Obama $1,000 to get a million dollar contract to create a web site. I'd even make sure it works. Which government punk do I give the money to?