Obama's "Independent Review Panel"--"Insider Baseball" or "the Stockholm Syndrome"-- Pick One

The President's intelligence review panel, which was supposed to be made up of "outsiders" will be made up of people who worked in the White House or former intelligence staffers.

"Most Transparent and Open Administration in History", my ass.

There is not a single outsider on that panel. There is nobody who is versed in the issues of privacy. It's like Boss Tweed appointed a panel of his cronies to investigate his administration: You're not exactly going to be on tenterhooks wondering about the outcome of the panel's "investigation" and "deliberation".

Yep, this cake is going to be baked as predictably as if they bought a box mix from Duncan Hines.

Keep spitting in our face, Barry. Keep it up. Keep lying to us in ways that are discovered to be lies within a handful of days. We are getting to the point where more and more people are, to paraphrase Mary McCarthy, coming to regard every word you say to be a lie, including the words "the" and "and".

You need to throw your rudder over, come about and get back to the position that you took in 2007, when you were in favor or reining in the national security state, not expanding it. You need to go back to showing some deference to the Bill of Rights, instead of regarding the Fourth Amendment as a dead letter.

You are losing the trust of those who voted for you.

Sooner or later, the GOP is going to really come after you hard and you know something, Mr. President? We're not going to lay down on the rails for you when it happens. Maybe your advisers inside the White House Bubble and inside the Beltway are telling you that this issue of the Federal government photographing our mail and collecting our phone calls and emails and Internet searches will blow over, but guess what, sir?

That's not going to happen.

You've been the president now for four and a half years. This one can't be blamed on Chimpy and Darth. This one is on you. You are the Wiretapper in Chief. You are becoming a modern mixture of J.Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon-- secretive, paranoid and a threat to the idea of freedom and privacy.

For the two go hand in hand. If there is no privacy, there is no personal freedom. If there is no privacy, there is no economic freedom. People have their secrets. Companies have theirs. Nobody wants the default to be that everything is shared with the government.

Oh, hell. What this guy said.

This issue isn't going to go away.

As the editor of the Guardian said, we are bloody well not finished writing about it.

Not by a long shot.

UPDATE: More here, from the Atlantic, which points out that the goal of Obama's little panel is not to fix the NSA, but to get us to stop talking about it.