With the Obama administration grappling with a crisis in Ukraine, former United Nations ambassador John Bolton took the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday and declared that the country's "biggest national-security problem is Barack Obama."

Bolton honed in on the terror attack in Benghazi, Libya, which he described as paradigm of President Obama's foreign-policy failures because the president "has done nothing to avenge Chris Stevens's death."

"That is a terrible lesson for our adversaries," Bolton said. "Under Barack Obama you can murder his personal representative and get away scot-free."

He also warned that the matter will come back to haunt Hillary Clinton if, as most suspect, she launches a presidential bid in 2016. "We will be happy to tell Hillary Clinton in unmistakable terms, 'We know what difference it makes, even if you don't,'" he said.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday cited treaty violations by Russian President Vladimir Putin as a reason that the U.S. should consider "military options" in response to the invasion of Ukraine.

"I worry when we begin to address a crisis, the first thing we do is we take options off the table," Cheney told CBS host Charlie Rose. "I don't think the administration should do that."

"In a sense, [the Obama administration said] no military," he continued. "He seemed to operate that way most of the time. There are military options that don't involve putting troops on the ground in Crimea. We could go back and reinstate the ballistic missile defense program."

Cheney pointed out that Putin had violated commitments "like the Budapest Memorandum, when Russia, the U.S. and Britain guaranteed the borders of Ukraine in return for Ukraine giving up their nuclear weapons. Very important. And Putin is just blowing that off."

Sen. John McCain is the least popular senator in the country of those surveyed by Public Policy Polling, with low marks from members of his own party, independents and Democrats.

Just 30 percent of Arizona voters approve of the job the Republican senator is doing, while 54 percent disapprove, according to a PPP release Thursday. That is the worst of any senator's polling in the nation that PPP has found.

Among members of his own party, McCain is at 35 percent approval to 55 percent disapproval; the comparable figures among Democrats are 29 percent to 53 percent, and among independents, 25 percent to 55 percent.

McCain also trails most potential challengers if he chooses to run again in 2016. Former Rep. Gabby Giffords led McCain 42 percent to 35 percent in a hypothetical matchup, and former Surgeon General Richard Carmona led McCain 41 percent to 35 percent.

Ted Cruz, the rock-ribbed conservative Texas senator who figures to be a factor in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, told thousands of conservatives Thursday morning that the IRS should go the way of the dodo.

'We need to abolish the IRS,' he said, calling instead for a flat income tax rate and a user-friendly tax return that can be filed on a postcard.

That verbal gauntlet, thrown as much at a near-century of tax collection as at the Obama administration, was Cruz's biggest applause line.

'By virtue of your being here today,' he jokingly cautioned the nation's largest annual gathering of politically conservative activists, 'tomorrow each and every one of you is going to be audited by the IRS.'

On Wednesday the former IRS official in charge of vetting nonprofit groups that seek tax-exempt charitable status refused, for the second time, to tell a congressional committee what she knew about the scandal.

Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni on Thursday launched legal action to prevent further publication of conversations secretly taped during his 2007-12 term as French president.

In a move that will inevitably fuel speculation the tapes could contain a seriously compromising "smoking gun", the couple's lawyers said they would ask a Paris court to issue an emergency injunction against further distribution or publication.

The tapes contain hours of Sarkozy's private conversations with Bruni and close aides.

They were recorded by a political advisor, Patrick Buisson, without the knowledge of anyone in Sarkozy's inner circle.

Some extracts -- without any really explosive content -- have already been published, by satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaine and news website Atlantico.

The revelation of what Buisson was doing whilst working as a close confidante of the centre-right president has sent shockwaves through the French political class.

This week we interviewed John Perkins, author, public speaker, and founder of two non-profit organizations, Dream Change and The Pachamama Alliance.

While working as Chief Economist for a consulting firm in the 1970s, Perkins advised the World Bank, United Nations, International Monetary Fund (IMF), U.S. Treasury Department, Fortune 500 corporations, and governments in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. When he realized he had become an 'economic hit man' playing a dishonorable role in the economic colonization of the world on behalf of elite multinational corporations, banks and the United States government, Perkins decided he wanted to become part of the solution, not the problem.

Perkins' book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man - published in over 30 languages, and selling over 1.2 million copies worldwide - is a startling first-hand exposé of international corruption on a gargantuan scale, while his Secret History of the American Empire, another New York Times bestseller, details the clandestine operations that created the world's first truly global empire.

Our guest's latest book, Hoodwinked: An Economic Hit Man Reveals Why the World Financial Markets Imploded - And How To Fix It, offers a blueprint for a new form of global economics, away from predatory capitalism and into an era more transformative than the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions.

Running Time: 02:12:00

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Here's a handy A to Z guide to U.S.-backed international crime

The U.S. is backing Ukraine's extreme right-wing Svoboda party and violent neo-Nazis whose armed uprising paved the way for a Western-backed coup. Events in the Ukraine are giving us another glimpse through the looking-glass of U.S. propaganda wars against fascism, drugs and terrorism. The ugly reality behind the mirror is that the U.S. government has a long and unbroken record of working with fascists, dictators, druglords and state sponsors of terrorism in every region of the world in its elusive but relentless quest for unchallenged global power.

Behind a firewall of impunity and protection from the State Department and the CIA, U.S. clients and puppets have engaged in the worst crimes known to man, from murder and torture to coups and genocide. The trail of blood from this carnage and chaos leads directly back to the steps of the U.S. Capitol and the White House. As historian Gabriel Kolko observed in 1988, "The notion of an honest puppet is a contradiction Washington has failed to resolve anywhere in the world since 1945." What follows is a brief A to Z guide to the history of that failure.

If the US/EU backed overthrow of the Ukrainian government last month had a face, that face would be Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). McCain is the "Energizer Bunny" of US interventionism: wherever there is a government to subvert, a regime to change, chaos to foment, there you will find McCain in its midst.

He snuck into Syria to highlight the dominance of moderates that the US should support. But the world is now interconnected and soon it was known that McCain's moderates in Syria were in fact radicals and kidnappers. He snuck into Libya to receive an award from the military the same day Sharia law was approved.

But these are small potatoes. Russia has always been the prize for McCain. His International Republican Institute (IRI), a Cold War relic funded by US taxpayers, routinely funded subversive NGOs in Russia to undermine the political system.

Unidentified armed men seen on the streets of Donetsk in east Ukraine

Russian diplomat claims 300 mercenaries had arrived in Kiev this week

Mercenaries in the region could give Putin pretext for military action

Donetsk has been the scene of big pro-Russian demonstrations this week

Speculation was growing last night that American mercenaries had been deployed to Donetsk after videos emerged of unidentified armed men in the streets of the eastern Ukrainian city.

At least two videos published on YouTube earlier this week show burly, heavily armed soldiers with no insignia in the city, which has been gripped by pro-Moscow protests.

In one of the videos onlookers can be heard shouting 'Blackwater! Blackwater!' as the armed men, who wear no insignia, jog through the streets.

Donetsk was this week the scene of civil unrest as pro-Russian elements among its citizens seized control of the regional administration headquarters and another government building.

Yesterday thousands of people gathered in the city centre waving Russian flags and calling for a referendum to determine the status of the strategically important coal-mining region.

Both the videos which purport to show 'Blackwater' mercenaries in Donetsk were uploaded last Monday, with their descriptions written in Russian.

The following is an adapted excerpt from The Battle For Justice In Palestine.

Israel, European and US leaders often insist, is a shining beacon for the world. François Hollande, the Socialist candidate elected France's president in 2012, observed that Israel faced so much criticism precisely because it is a "great democracy." In a similar vein, Matthew Gould, the British ambassador in Tel Aviv, wrote that his country's close cooperation with Israel stemmed from the "principles of freedom, democracy and the rule of law that we work together to protect. These shared principles are the bedrock of our relationship." American leaders, however, are second to none in the intensity of their ardor. In 2008, Senator Barack Obama insisted that "the establishment of Israel was just and necessary" and that "the bond between Israel and the United States is rooted in more than our shared national interests - it's rooted in the shared values and shared stories of our people." It is a theme he has returned to often as president, enumerating, for instance, some of the "shared values" in a 2012 speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC): "A commitment to human dignity. A belief that freedom is a right that is given to all of God's children. An experience that shows us that democracy is the one and only form of government that can truly respond to the aspirations of citizens." Among the "shared stories" is the fact that both the United States and Israel were established by European settler colonists who usurped lands inhabited by indigenous peoples, though this is something Obama did not mention to his AIPAC audience. Another contemporary "shared value" that went unacknowledged is that Israel's practice of "targeted killings" - extrajudicial executions of "terrorist" suspects and bystanders, once condemned by the United States - has become the signature policy of Obama, the only president in history known to keep a "kill list" of US citizens and others. But despite these incongruities, it would appear at first blush that, at least when it comes to officially sanctioned racism and discrimination at home, the United States and Israel diverge sharply.