REMEMBER THOSE CLAIRVOYANT COPS IN THE TOM CRUISE MOVIE MINORITY REPORT? THEY JUST MIGHT BE AROUND THE CORNER.

Nat Hentoff

President Obama’s ever-suspicious Department of Homeland Security is, of course, “renowned” for earnestly probing the private parts of travelers at U.S. airports. But the range of its inquiries into likely disloyal Americans is growing wider and deeper. Dig this header for a dispatch from the international news agency Reuters: “Homeland Security watches Twitter, social media.” That’s just to start with.

Journalist Mark Hosenball reported that since June 2010, Secretary Janet Napolitano and her insatiable Homeland Security colleagues have been “operating a ‘Social Networking/Media Capability,’ which involves regular monitoring of ‘publicly available online forums, blogs, public Web sites and message boards.’”

Hosenball also wrote that “such monitoring is designed to help DHS and its numerous agencies,” including the Secret Service and Federal Emergency Management Agency.

They may be looking at some of you on such Internet targets as YouTube and Facebook. And if you express opinions via Twitter or popular blogs, you may be databased for what you leave there. If you believe your government, then you’ll believe the DHS official who pledged that “the department would not keep permanent copies of the Internet traffic it monitors.” The DHS vows to hold it only “for no more than five years.” But whom will the Department of Homeland Security give it to then? The FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency? That’s not for citizens to know. Aren’t you aware there’s a war on?

This rampant tracking of us, which is funded by our tax money, is conducted at the DHS’s National Operations Center (NOC).What is surely going to more than casually interest many journalists looking into this massive surveillance operation is that they too are being monitored and cataloged even though there is barely a shred of evidence that those winding up in this dragnet have done anything illegal.

On January 7, 2012, RT (formerly Russia Today ) reported on a Department of Homeland Security announcement that the NOC’s Office of Operations Coordination “can collect personal information from news anchors, journalists, reporters or anyone who may use ‘traditional and/or social media in real time to keep their audience situationally aware and informed.’”

On what Constitutional grounds is the government digging into the personal lives of journalists doing their job? Now that I’ve asked this hostile question, I guess the Department of Homeland Security and its Big Brother cohorts will eventually find out I have an FBI file starting with my long and irreverent disrespect for J. Edgar Hoover. On one page, an FBI official instructed his field hands: “Watch Hentoff!” My favorite insertion in that file was a footnote in a report to Hoover about something I’d written questioning whether the bureau’s longtime director had ever read the Constitution.

Said footnote went beyond characterizing me as “a person of interest.” It also mentioned: “Besides, he’s a lousy writer.” I figured that if I were to ever sue that FBI agent for defamation and lose, the upholding of the FBI’s judgment on what I do for a living could have hurt my career. Meanwhile, Robert Mueller’s FBI—I guess he has that lifetime director job now—is going much further to discover not only what citizens have allegedly done to threaten national security but also what we’re supposedly thinking of doing.

On January 26, 2012, DigitalTrends.com delivered a chilling preview of how the government can track our most speculative thoughts, not even dim intentions:“The FBI is looking into the creation of a new application that would allow them to not only monitor ongoing threats but also predict potential terrorist attacks and other crimes before they even happen. … If that sounds suspiciously like Minority Report, you’re not alone.”

This reference was a reminder that Minority Report , starring Tom Cruise, had scared me when I first viewed it. The 2002 film revolved around special cops in the year 2054 who could actually read the minds of people who looked law-abiding but would soon terrorize.

So what are we to make of today’s snooping? It is painfully clear that everything we post online is being watched. And if the FBI gets its new social media alert application—which seems inevitable— the eyes with which it scrutinizes our tweets and other messages will have superhuman vision. Less obvious is how the government’s quest to “protect” the public good will be abused by technology to further trample legitimate free speech.

Since the 9/11 attacks, Republican and Democratic majorities in Congress, as well as Presidents Bush and Obama, have shredded the U.S. Constitution. Keep and protect a copy of your own lest it be banned eventually.

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Nat Hentoff is a historian of the Constitution, a jazz critic and a columnist for the Village Voice and Free Inquiry. His incisive books include The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America; Living the Bill of Rights ; and the forthcoming Is This Still America?

THE AUTHOR OF THE RIPPLE EFFECT DELIVERS A GRIM WARNING ABOUT THE WORLD’S PRECIOUS RESOURCE

Alex Prud’homme interviewed by Maeve Vanessa Scanlon

At a time when we are concerned about the diminishing reserves of petroleum and other fossil fuels, Alex Prud’homme’s book The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Fresh Water in the Twenty-First Century sheds light on a natural resource that is becoming equally as scarce. In the following exclusive interview, Prud’homme discusses the depletion of our water supply, the potential for worldwide “water wars” and how we can all reduce our own ripple effect.

HUSTLER: First and foremost, what is the “ripple effect”?

ALEX PRUD’HOMME: This is essentially a series of consequences that impact water supply in ways most of us don’t understand. Sometimes those ripples are unintentional effects. Even the simplest things like washing your hands, watering your lawn or powering up your computer can have great ramifications that we’re not aware of. If you wash your hands with antibacterial soap, a chemical in there can survive the treatment process and get into waterways and can negatively impact fish. Same with herbicides that we use on our lawns to get rid of dandelions. There’s a substance [in herbicides] that inhibits the fishes’ ability to ward off disease. It may even be causing “intersex,” meaning that male bass fish are developing eggs through their testes.

That’s science fiction stuff.

It’s really spooky. I was down in Chesapeake Bay, near Washington, D.C., studying this with scientists. It’s really troubling because it turns out that the endocrine system in fish is very similar to that in humans.

Humans can be affected by these substances in the same way as fish?

Scientists are very concerned. There’s the potential that it could be turning humans into intersexes at some point in the future. That’s one set of ripple effects [just from] washing our hands or spraying our lawns to keep the weeds away.

[Editor’s Note: Pharmaceutical companies, hospitals and consumers have legally released into this country’s drinking water more than 271 million pounds of drugs and chemicals, including lithium, nitroglycerin, copper, antibiotics, anticonvulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones. At least 51 million Americans are drinking pharmaceutical- tainted water, and the federal government has chosen to turn a blind eye to this.]

You claim that using electrical power, like turning on a computer, can have a similar ripple effect.

That confuses a lot of people. When you leave a light on, you’re using up a lot of energy. Whether it’s nuclear or ethanol or solar or coal or gas, all of those power sources require lots of water. Every energy source has to run on industrial works or giant cooling towers or processing plants of some sort. Not only do they use lots of water in these processes, but they have to dispose of their waste. Often, this seeps into the water supply. We don’t really think about the impact that getting energy to our homes has on the water supply, so we never connect those dots. But power is a huge water user.

It’s a strange dot to connect.

I started looking at this all across the country and started noticing this pattern. There are so many pressures on our limited water supplies—population, climate change, shifting diets, shifting demographics, all these new ways of using water—that we can no longer afford the luxury of being ignorant. We can no longer stick our heads in the sand and say, “Well, we don’t know the impacts.” Now we do know the impacts, and we have to start paying attention to this and start thinking about water in a new way and value it as a limited resource.

You point out in The Ripple Effect that this is becoming a global issue, but you did most of your research in the United States, right?

It’s already a global issue. I focused on the United States because any story that is local is global now. The pollutants that I found were basically in my backyard in Brooklyn, so I wrote about a giant oil spill that has been leaking into Brooklyn—right in the middle of New York, right in the middle of the most densely populated city in North America.

The Greenpoint oil spill has been leaking millions of gallons of crude oil from processing plants into the Newtown Creek over several decades. For over a century only very few people actually knew about it, and, until Deepwater Horizon [the BP oil rig responsible for the 2010 Gulf of Mexico disaster ], it was the largest oil spill in North America. It was even bigger than the [1989] Exxon Valdez spill, and only part of the spill has been cleaned up since the 1970s. I was shocked to find this.

Have the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Clean Water Act helped with water protection?

It’s been 40 years since the creation of the Clean Water Act, and nothing—or at least nothing more—has been done in terms of this problem. We signed a lot of these rules and regulations in the early 1970s, and—in our typical American way—we said, “Great! Okay, that’s done!”

The EPA and Clean Water Act were really good for their time, but that was almost 40 years ago. The world has changed, but [the laws] haven’t, and that’s a problem. The focus has shifted [in the government], so even the regulations that are good aren’t necessarily being enforced as they should be. This was one of the things that I found most shocking once I started looking at this situation closely. Being humans, we don’t do anything until we have hit a total crisis. But when it comes to water, if you wait for the crisis, we aren’t going to be here anymore. We can’t wait.

Why has the EPA been so ineffective?

The EPA itself has been under fire for a number of years. Its budget has been cut, and it has been highly politicized and highly criticized under everyone since Reagan—especially under the Bush Administration. In 2010, [President Barack] Obama gave the EPA its largest budget, but [recently] he’s been forced to cut it back. And now people like Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich are attacking the EPA, saying it’s a job-killing agency. The Republican Congress is attacking it also, trying to defund a lot of their antipollution programs and policies. As well intentioned as the Obama Administration has been on environmental issues in general, the EPA is having a tough time battling these lobbyists and Big Agriculture industries that don’t want to spend money to put in pollution controls.

In your book you mention “water wars.” What are they exactly?

Well, one thing I didn’t realize is that in the United States we don’t have just one set of water laws. The western water laws are based on the Spanish precedent, while the eastern water laws are based on the English precedent. And this has led to all sorts of interesting conflicts. Within that context, some states have their own individual laws and regulations that are unique to just that individual state.

It’s leading to conflicts between neighbors, not just countries, especially in Texas, which has faced such a serious period of drought. In that state, the rights to minerals underground are different from the rights to the land above ground. Essentially, in states like that you can stick a straw into your neighbor’s land and drain their water. It’s perfectly legal. That has led to all sorts of tensions over the years.

T. Boone Pickens is an oil and gas billionaire, and he told me when I went to visit him in Dallas that “the hydrocarbon era is over! Water is the new oil!” Here’s a guy who’s made billions on natural resources, and he understands very well how these things work. He’s focused on water right now. Water can be piped from [aquifers in North America], and then sold to the highest bidder. So he may end up making another billion on water! (Laughs.)

But these “water wars” aren’t just developing in the United States. These controversies over water are global too. Look at China, which has the worst water pollution in the world. Look at the Koreas. The North Koreans have periodically released huge amounts of [polluted] water, which has surged right down a river into South Korea, and it has killed people. Even in Darfur, water has major implications.

It’s very possible that in the coming decades we could have an actual war over water—especially as populations grow and certain parts of the world dry out.

How do we prevent such a crisis?

It begins with the simplest thing: Pay attention to water! Be aware of your own ripple effect. Don’t flush pharmaceuticals down the toilet because—guess what?!—they end up in the water supply. It is much deeper than that though. We have technologies that allow us to use water much more carefully now than before. We can conserve water and be more efficient, so we should be using these new resources and methods. There are dams, desalination methods and sewagewater recycling projects, just to name a few.

Sewage-water recycling? Are you saying we are drinking water that once contained sewage?

(Laughs.) Yes, some people are! This notion of recycling human sewage is very interesting. On the face of it, it’s kind of disgusting. The process is called “ground water replenishment system.” It’s quite amazing. It’s similar to desalination, in that it sucks all the pollutants out of the sewage. [The process] takes all the nasty stuff out of the water, then it pumps the water back into existing natural groundwater supplies. When it comes out of the [recycling] plant, it is so clean, it’s called “ultrapure” water. That means it’s actually cleaner than natural water. They have to add minerals back into it just so it can be used as drinking water.

Where is this sewage recycling being done?

The one I researched is in California. In my research I spoke to someone working at the project in Orange County, and he said to me, “We live in the middle of a desert, and our population is booming. We’re doing this not by choice but out of necessity. We have a growing population, a greater demand for water, and at the same time a rising amount of sewage. So how do we solve these problems with one sort of artful step?” The answer for them was this sewage-recycling project.

What can we do to reduce our own personal ripple?

Today there are all sorts of things like low-flush toilets and low-flow showerheads. We have side-mounted washing machines, which are much more efficient. These methods sound unsexy and basic. But when they are taken in the aggregate, they have this cumulative effect. All the little efficiencies really add up.

We have to start adjusting ourselves to this new reality, whether we like it or not. And whether we caused it or not, the fact is that conditions are changing around us. Let’s say you live in a place like Australia, where for years you have record-breaking drought followed by record-breaking floods. You feel like you’ve been biblically cursed or something. (Laughs.) It sounds funny and extreme, and it sounds like the Bible, but this is the kind of thing that is happening.

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For more about The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Fresh Water in the Twenty-First Century and its author, visit AlexPrudhomme.com

UNRESTRICTED CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS HAVE MADE NATIONAL ELECTIONS A SHAM.

by Robert Scheer

All of my life, I have been hearing how it is my patriotic duty to vote in national elections, and I have dutifully gone along. Not just with voting but also devoting a good chunk of my professional career to interviewing the candidates and writing for major news organizations about their prospects for winning and qualifications for governing, as if those elections really mattered. Suddenly, I no longer feel like going along with what has become an all-too-obvious fraud.

The power of the superrich to buy our elections with their tens of millions in campaign contributions has become so blatant that it makes a mockery of the representative democracy about which we used to be able to proudly boast. For that fatal subversion of the system enshrined in our Constitution, you can thank a Republican packed Supreme Court that, with its Citizens United and other infamous decisions, has destroyed any prospect for an honest expression of the popular will.

As a result, the 2012 Presidential election will hinge on which party’s Super PACs get the most generous bribes from billionaires. The Republicans, long favored by the fat cats, are the main beneficiaries of the new laws. The GOP’s drawn-out primary campaign ended up having nothing to do with the plausibility of the political positions advanced by the various candidates and everything to do with which candidate’s Super PAC could draw the biggest checks from the superrich.

Take Newt Gingrich. Without the pro- Gingrich Super PAC stoked with two “gifts” totaling $21 million from billionaire Las Vegas casino and hotel magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Gingrich would not have existed as a credible candidate. The Adelsons are big supporters of Israel, and soon after that contribution, Gingrich said that as President he would support an Israeli strike on Iran even if it involved the use of nuclear weapons. But the foreign-policy fire sale is chicken feed compared to the domestic tax breaks and hobbling of environmental and banking regulations that most of the superrich donors are after.

Gingrich received another $1 million from Harold Simmons, the billionaire corporate raider who hedged his bet by also giving $7 million to another Super PAC called American Crossroads run by GOP kingmaker Karl Rove. Simmons owns industrial companies accused in the past of lead contamination and uranium emissions. But he makes money both ways, having been blessed by his friends in the government with mega-contracts to clean up hazardous waste sites, including waste created by his own companies.

Simmons claims to be a small-government conservative, but what he really wants is government to work for his interests at the expense of the folks who can’t pony up the big bucks. Toward that end, he had already given $14 million to various Republican Super PACs even before March of this election year.

The biggest beneficiary from the superrich has been Mitt Romney, and top executives from Bain Capital—the hedge fund he once ran—have been generous in support. Julian H. Robertson Jr., considered by the New York Times to be “one of the godfathers of the hedge fund industry,” is another megabucks backer of the pro-Romney Super PAC.

Hedge funds have been at the center of the rot of our economy; they are unregulated and, as Romney’s own tax returns demonstrate, pay a lower percentage in taxes than many ordinary income earners. No matter who wins on the Republican side, don’t expect any serious regulation of hedge fund greed or other accountability.

But the picture on the Democratic Obama side may turn out to be just as corrupt. It wasn’t until February 2012 that the President decided to accept Super PAC funding, previously calling it an assault on democracy. In his State of the Union speech two years ago, Obama called out the Supreme Court justices sitting before him over their decision to free special interests from campaign spending limits. “I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests,” Obama declared then. “They should be decided by the American people.”

But as the GOP billionaires’ fund-raising steamroller threatened to flatten his 2012 reelection prospects, Obama turned the other cheek. He turned to the Wall Street crowd and asked them to hedge their political bets by backing him and not just his Republican opponents.

That is a deal Wall Street will accept because it means the fix is in. Without limits on how much the superrich can spend, they can buy both parties and remove any risk that their unbridled appetite for greed will ever be checked.

Hopefully I will be proven wrong, and an irate public—outraged by this unprecedented excess of political corruption—will rise up and find the will to throw the money changers out of their temples. But don’t count on it. These days, because of the treachery of the GOP-appointed Supreme Court, the charade of what passes for our democracy is reduced to one dollar, one vote.

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Before serving almost 30 years as a Los Angeles Times columnist and editor, Robert Scheer spent the late 1960s as Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts magazine. Now editor of TruthDig.com, Scheer has written such hardhitting books as The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America and his latest, The Great American Stick-Up: Greedy Bankers and the Politicians Who Love Them.

Incredible as it might seem, the Republicans want to turn the clock back to 1937, when contraception was still illegal in this country. That’s what will happen if Personhood USA and several other groups have their way. They are placing—on numerous state ballots—a proposed constitutional amendment declaring that life begins at conception. If passed, this measure not only would likely ban abortions under virtually any circumstances (including rape and incest), but it would also ban birth control methods like the IUD and Plan B emergency contraceptive. Even the Pill could be history.

Worse still, the amendment would prevent married women from conceiving children via in vitro fertilization. The Personhood Amendment will be up for a vote in at least 12 states. Presidential hopefuls Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul have all signed a pledge supporting it. Mitt Romney didn’t sign but has agreed that life begins at conception, the basis of the anti choice measure.

I don’t believe there’s any way the American people will let the GOP get away with this. If the Republicans aren’t careful, they will sow the seeds of their own destruction.

by Brad Friedman

A thank-you card seems like the appropriate response for having reaped a cool $18 billion under the administration of President Barack Obama, especially during the worst economy in nearly a century. But that’s not the Koch brothers’ style. Because Obama, no matter how Republican he acts, is actually a Democrat. And, dammit, being two of the richest people in the entire nation just isn’t rich enough for either of the far-right Republican Koch boys.

Instead, the brothers—worth $25 billion each, tying them for fourth place on the latest Forbes list of the 400 wealthiest Americans— want more. And they’re declaring “war” to get it—not just any war but the “Mother of All Wars,” states Charles Koch, co-owner with brother David of Koch Industries, the massive oil and chemical conglomerate they inherited from their daddy.

You can hear his declaration yourself thanks to covert audiotapes, which I obtained from a source, that recorded the brothers’ secret political-strategy and fundraising powwow held last summer at a ritzy resort near Vail, Colorado. The Kochs—corporate funders of the fake “grassroots” Tea Party and Republican front groups like Americans for Prosperity—have been convening these biannual, ultraexclusive, ultraconfidential soirees for years. You and I aren’t invited. Neither are the workingclass chumps and suckers they’ve hoaxed into calling themselves members of the Tea Party. Those patsies are just doing the dirty work for the very dirty Koch Industries—this country’s second-largest private company, a major polluter and (surprise!) a leading climate change denier.

Over the years, the Kochs have been forced to pay some $400 million in fines, penalties, settlements and judgments; have stolen nearly 2 million barrels of oil from native Americans, according to former Koch Industries officials; and have allegedly bribed their way into at least half a dozen foreign countries.

One is Iran, where the company’s German subsidiary made millions in petrochemical sales despite a long-standing U.S. trade ban. The Kochs are not patriots. They are profiteers. So who exactly was invited to the Kochs’ conclave? Folks like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, all manner of elected officials with Rs after their names—like Governor Rick Perry (R-Texas), Governor Chris Christie (R-New Jersey), Governor John Kasich (R-Ohio), Representative Paul Ryan (R-Minnesota)—and even a pair of U.S. Supreme Court justices, namely Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

You can go to BradBlog.com for the transcripts and audio recorded inside the Kochs’ 2011 Summer Seminar at the Ritz- Carlton Beaver Creek Resort in Bachelor Gulch, Colorado. As usual, the brothers went to extraordinary measures to keep the affair private, going so far as to mount huge speakers to blast static “pink noise” into the surrounding mountains to keep outsiders from listening to their plans.

One theme came up, time and again, by speaker after speaker: the need to collect enough money to fund “the Mother of All Wars we’ve got in the next 18 months,” as Charles Koch explained in his opening remarks, “for the life or death of this country.” He even seemed to compare the President of the United States to the former dictator of Iraq. “We’ve got Saddam Hussein,” Charles Koch proclaimed to the 300 or so corporate barons and political bigwigs in attendance. It was his warm-up for what would be the first of many pleas for still more “war” money over the three-day conference.

After I broke the story, Koch Industries— which refused to respond to my request for an explanation beforehand— claimed Charles wasn’t comparing President Obama to Saddam Hussein. His remarks, according to a statement issued in haste by Koch spokesman Philip Ellender after the story came out, were just “taken out of context” by “far-left groups.”

“Far-left groups” like myself, an independent citizen, journalist and blogger, I guess. For the record, here’s the context: After taking the mic before the first night’s dinner, Charles Koch made a quick joke about Koch Industries leaving him, the CEO, to do the “dirty work that needs to be done.” He then offered the following thoughts: “But we’ve been talking about—we have Saddam Hussein,” Charles said. “This is the Mother of All Wars we’ve got in the next 18 months for the life or death of this country. So I’m not going to do this to put any pressure on anyone here, mind you. This is not pressure. But if this makes your heart feel glad, and you want to be more forthcoming, then so be it.”

Charles then announced he wanted to “recognize not all of our great partners but those partners who have given more than a billion—a mill-, no, billion.” The crowd went wild with hoots and applause at his gaffe. He meant “a million,” but when you’re personally worth $25 billion, it’s an easy mistake to make. That was the context.

What did he mean in his reference to Saddam Hussein? In his ass-covering statement, Ellender struggled to justify it: “To be clear, Mr. Koch was not referring to President Obama in his remarks. The ‘Mother of All Wars’ is a common phrase frequently attributed to Saddam Hussein on the eve of the first Gulf War. Amid record U.S. unemployment, continued economic decline and loss of liberty, the U.S. has been plunged into its own ‘Mother of All Wars.’”

As for the “record U.S. unemployment” Ellender mentioned, let’s not forget to thank the Koch brothers for that as well. Even as their personal fortunes exploded by 40% over the past three years of Obama’s “tyrannical” and “antibusiness” rule, Koch Industries managed to lay off thousands of its own workers.

During his closing remarks, Charles would once again repeat the words of the Iraqi dictator. “We’ve had a lot of tough battles,” he stated. “We’ve lost a lot over the years, and we’ve won some recently. Set the stage for, as I’ve said, the mother of all battles coming up a year from [last] November.” Those remarks are also posted verbatim at BradBlog.com. Nothing is “taken out of context.”

Regarding “some” victories, Charles is most likely referring to the U.S. Supreme Court’s infamous 2010 Citizens United decision allowing for unlimited, secret spending on political campaigns by guys like Charles and David Koch, who have already spent some $100 million in support of their political causes. These include, among other things, buying Republican lawmakers ($11 million since 1989), creating an imaginary uprising after 2008 called the “Tea Party” (since “Sore Loser Party” doesn’t sound as good) and funding right-wing think tanks (Cato Institute, Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks) to the tune of $200 million since 1998.

They also spent $33 million just in 2008 and 2009 on studies and front groups to create the impression that thousands of climate scientists who all agree about global warming don’t actually know anything about the phenomenon. (The University of Massachusetts dubbed Koch Industries the tenth-worst U.S. corporate air polluter.)

It wasn’t only the Kochs who spoke of the “war…for the life or death of this country.” The opening-night keynote speaker, Chris Christie (who kept the trip a complete secret from the press and his constituents alike), offered similar ideas. “Under this administration,” the New Jersey governor explained during his stemwinder of a speech, the future of this country “is at greater risk than it has been in my lifetime.” “Their ideas are wrong, and our ideas are right,” Christie declared.

“If we’re going to win this fight, it’s the people in this room that are gonna win it,” he went on to tell the collected billionaires. “It’s the people in this room who have enjoyed all the greatness that America gives us the opportunity to enjoy. They’re going to be the 21st-century patriots who are going to preserve liberty and freedom and opportunity for the next generation. … We’ve got to stand up and fight for the country we’ve inherited.”

Christie continued, “That’s why I’m here tonight. I’m here because it will be you, the people in this room, that are the modern-day patriots who will save this country or let it go by the wayside. It’s up to us. … We cannot let our children down. We cannot let our country down. We cannot let the world down.” After a Q&A session, the tough-talking Jersey governor finished with similar thoughts: “This is a huge moment of crisis and opportunity for our country. All of you are the people who are going to lead us back to American greatness— if you care enough to do it. I can tell you, if you do, you’ve got a friend in that fight.”

To be clear, Christie and the other speakers were warning that those in that room—many of them among the 400 richest Americans, with more combined wealth than the poorest 140 million citizens of this nation—need to take back control of the country in order to save it. These folks are not big believers in democracy— unless they can buy it away from all us poor saps who thought “one man, one vote” actually still applied in the good old U.S. of A.

The closing night’s featured speaker, Judge Andrew Napolitano of Fox News, rallied the assemblage with more of the same ideas but brought them up a notch. He explained how the Second Amendment had been adopted to ensure “the right to shoot at the government.” Really? That might be news to the Secret Service.

“If anybody tells you the Second Amendment is here to protect hunters,” the former federal judge instructed, “they are intentionally distorting history. It was written to let us attack tyrants!” A disturbing suggestion, given all of the rhetoric characterizing the Obama Administration as “tyrannical.”

Napolitano went on to let the “poor” billionaires and millionaires on hand know that they’d really be up against it if the dastardly Barack Obama continued his ways. (Ya know, his ways of extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich, continuing to allow record expansion of oil drilling, not to mention watching as corporate profits reached all-time historic highs while folks like the Kochs laid off thousands of American workers at the very same time.)

“So what do we do?” Napolitano asked. “We do what you’re doing here. We wage a lawful battle against the government. We amass the wealth that is necessary to take the government on.” In other words, the wealth necessary to flood the airwaves with right-wing propaganda.

“What does the government fear the most?” Napolitano said near the end of his speech, ratcheting up the fear and loathing to its scariest crescendo. “I think the government fears fear. I’m afraid the government is going to take the property and the freedom of everybody in this room.”

The titans fell silent. Not that! Not our property and freedom! Of course, for these people, “freedom” is the license to keep ripping off workingclass Americans with tax loopholes nobody else gets, offshore banking, outsourced jobs and Wall Street “capitalism” (privatize the profits and socialize the losses by making us bail them out).

“The government should fear that we will take its power away from it and put it into the hands of worthy custodians of our freedom,” Napolitano added as he finished with a quote by antisocialist John Basil Barnhill—one often misattributed to Thomas Jefferson, as the ex-judge once again did that night. (Hey, he works at Fox “News”; accuracy isn’t a high priority there!)

“Jefferson articulated this,” Napolitano uttered to the hushed room, “when he said, ‘When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty.’” The crowd at the Beaver Creek Resort went wild. It was still abuzz as Charles Koch retook the stage to rally the troops for the final time, once again reminding them of the “Mother of All Wars” ahead. “We’re overwhelmed in a number of areas,” he said, “and one of those areas, of course, is the media—and we’re overwhelmed. The media’s 90- plus percent against us.”

Of course, many of these billionaires own the media, if not outright, then certainly through their ability to withhold advertising dollars.

Reminding his listeners what all of this is really about, Charles Koch asked them one last time to open their wallets. “I’ve pledged to all of you who’ve stepped forward and are partnering with us that we are absolutely going to do our utmost to invest this money wisely and get the best possible payoff for you in the future of our country.”

It may be war, but it’s all about the payoff. Theirs, not ours. As far as they’re concerned, you and I, the working class of this country—who’ve experienced the real pain over the past decade, who’ve died in the real shooting wars (as opposed to the Kochs’ pretend wars), who’ve seen our homes illegally foreclosed, our pensions wiped out, our jobs outsourced—can go straight to hell. Meanwhile, the very men in that pavilion at Bachelor Gulch have seen their own fortunes skyrocket to all-time historic highs.

But then again, as it’s said, war is hell. For us, not them. They just play toy soldier—at least when they think the rest of us aren’t actually aware of what they are up to. Brad Friedman is a Los Angeles-based investigative journalist and political commentator. Besides cohosting radio’s nationally syndicated Green News Report, he is the executive editor and publisher of The Brad Blog (BradBlog.com).

When the name Ann Coulter is mentioned, a flood of words comes to mind: mean, angry, extremist, conservative, inflammatory, hideous, arrogant, male. Regarding that last adjective, we are speaking specifically of a male who is angry because he looks like a woman—sort of. You could throw the adjective ugly into the mix, but that’s probably redundant. Seriously, how many men have you seen in a dress who are good-looking?

What we’ve just said about the author and pundit would be out of bounds were it not for the fact that everything Ann Coulter says is out of bounds. Here are some examples:

“If I’m going to say anything about John Edwards in the future, I’ll just wish he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot.”

“We should invade their [Islamic] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” “I think [women] should be armed but should not vote. … Women have no capacity to understand how money is earned. They have a lot of ideas on how to spend it…it’s always more money on education, more money on child care, more money on day care.’’

In the last quote, Coulter actually seems to acknowledge she’s not a woman. We presume the neocon believes she should have the right to vote. And her words make it crystal clear that Coulter knows she does not think the way women do.

It has long been postulated—by HUSTLER and others—that Ann Coulter is a hermaphrodite or is intersexed with scrambled genes. One disorder linked to intersexing is Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, which can cause males to be born with underdeveloped genitals or even female sex organs, including a vagina. Screwed up chromosomes could explain 6-foot-tall Ann’s boyish figure and Adam’s apple.

It’s worth noting that investigative reporter Brad Friedman, writing for this magazine in April 2008, stated that on June 15, 2005, when Coulter filled out an application to become a Florida voter, she left blank the section specifying sex. Supplying false information on such a document is a third-degree felony that could result in a $5,000 fine and/or five years in prison. But enough about Coulter’s mutant sexuality. The reason she appears here has more to do with her stated political beliefs. Let’s take a look at them.

Taxes: Coulter is against raising taxes on millionaires but is in favor of raising taxes on the poor. Specifically, she wants the 47% of American citizens who don’t pay taxes to start ponying up. Those are the people at or below the poverty line; they can’t afford to pay taxes.

Social Security: Coulter wants to end the FDR legacy—immediately. She’s said “there are the 39 million greedy geezers collecting Social Security. The Greatest Generation rewarded itself with a pretty big meal.” According to Ann, Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme” that she wants to “destroy…root and branch.” Of course, it’s not a Ponzi scheme. Social Security is a retirement program paid for by working people and their employers. What’s despicable is that the Republicans, including Coulter, would love to steal that massive trove of money to help pay down the national debt. It won’t bother Ann to see our streets clogged with senior citizens living under bridges and begging for food.

Afghanistan: Coulter wants the United States out of there the day after tomorrow if not sooner. Sounds good, right? But that’s only her position because President Barack Obama is for a slower withdrawal of troops. As recently as 2010, Coulter was saying “bombs are the answer.” Going back farther still, she said the war in Afghanistan was going “swimmingly,” and before that she justified the war because it was “against fundamentalism”— Islamic fundamentalism, not Christian.

Health insurance: Coulter wants insurers to be able to sell policies across state lines. Her thinking is that the resulting competition would drive down insurance rates. However, according to the Congressional Budget Office, while young people who are healthy would, in fact, pay less for their health insurance, older people—those most likely to get sick—would pay more. But the real problem is that health insurance providers would all flock to the state with the most favorable regulations. To put it another way, these companies would relocate to the state where they could most easily screw the people they insure.

We saw this with the credit card industry. Citibank literally wrote the regulations for the state of South Dakota as a requisite for basing its credit card operations there. No surprise: Other credit card issuers quickly set up shop in South Dakota as well. That’s why your credit card company is able to screw you with astronomical interest rates and hidden fees.

Regardless of her sex, Ann Coulter is a pig. She has absolutely no empathy and no concern for average working people. We annoy her. That’s largely because she was born into a life of privilege. Her father was an attorney for Phelps Dodge Corporation, a mining company believed to be responsible for as many as 13 toxic waste sites in violation of federal environmental regulations. (Ann’s dad was a pig as well.)

It’s not a big leap to say his daughter was raised to view all but the top 1% as worthless peasants. Looking at Ann through that lens, all of her positions and pronouncements finally come into focus.

Message to Ann Coulter: Blow yourself. Seriously. Put that thing between your legs into your mouth and suck on it until you come. It’s up to you if you want to swallow.