Between WH spokesman Jay Carney’s struggle to answer pool questions last Friday about a flood of Benghazi emails revealing the State Department’s desire to scrub terrorism links from talking points, and news on Friday that the IRS has been unfairly targeting conservative non-profits for their tax-exempt applications, the latest revelation that the Department of Justice secretly obtained two months of phone records of AP reporters and editors in an apparent witch hunt to root out the cause of a rare unwanted leak couldn’t have come at a worse time for an administration that has insisted on a host of scandals, as “nothing to see here.”

I won’t be surprised if this latest revelation ends with Eric Holder’s resignation, and it will be deserved.

Just imagine the reaction to this, say, if Michael Mukasey, one of George W. Bush’s attorney generals, presided over this. Or, even, say, Janet Reno of the Clinton Administration had this on her watch.

The White House, liberal media and Democratic elected officials have swatted away these assertions as nothing more than right-wing conspiracy, political propaganda, black helicopter paranoia and, most routinely, unadulterated hatred for President Obama.

Now, all of that may in fact animate many of the inquiries. But that doesn’t vitiate their validity, nor does it make any of the accusations untrue or undeserving of media scrutiny.

The lengths to which the administration has gone to silence whistle blowers and reporters is nothing short of astonishing. Simply put, this is not the American way.

For those of us looking to draw attention to these issues, it’s been infuriating to see many in the press—often the victims of this very government overreach—ignore and dismiss them even as their colleagues were being prosecuted under the Espionage Act more times than all previous administrations combined.

Hopefully, though, now that these stories have become impossible to ignore, the press will finally wake up and smell the chilling effect that puts their very livelihoods in danger.

“Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.” That the government has lied to us is hardly unique to this administration. But few brave souls have had the courage to ask tough questions, and many who have have found themselves on the receiving end of government intimidation. Now, press and citizen alike, we should all be asking what kind of country do we want to live in?

He is charged with killing four babies allegedly born alive at his clinic in West Philadelphia, the 2009 overdose death of a 41-year-old mother of three, hundreds of abortion-law violations, including performing third-trimester abortions and failing to counsel patients.

But while the outrage was slow to come, it eventually did, and now even staunch pro-choice advocates are rightly coming out to denounce Gosnell and his practices. The outrage is appropriate and welcome. Planned Parenthood, along with many others, has denounced the doctor.

You might think that the stunning lack of oversight in this case–multiple government agencies failed to put an end to his illegal practices over the years–would prompt calls for new legislation to make it harder for criminals like Gosnell to do what he did for as long as he did. But Planned Parenthood has opposes the idea. It insists that no new regulations can stop a physician who has decided to disregard the law.

That doesn’t stop gun control advocates from pushing for new laws every time a monster shoots up a school or a movie theater. But when it comes to abortion, there’s a difference. For one, lawful gun use doesn’t accidentally or intentionally also result in a mass shooting. Legal abortion can result in the death of a mother, the death of babies born alive and the deaths of late-term fetuses.

For example, according to the CDC, in 2008 at least 12 women died as a result of complications. Are those numbers insignificant?

There are also countless stories of born-alive abortions that occur in clinics across the country. Florida Rep. Cary Pigman, a doctor, recently testified that in 2010, 1,270 infants died after being born alive during abortions. Why oppose bills that require appropriate medical care for babies who survive abortions?

But another reason we should ask ourselves why Gosnell’s case offends us so much is that medical science has changed exponentially since Roe v. Wade was passed, and therefore we have to confront some hard realities about what it means to end a life today.

In 2009 1.3% of all abortions were performed after 21 weeks’ gestation. Thanks to advanced technology that we didn’t have in the 70s, “The difference now between a pregnancy at 12 weeks and one at 22 is life itself,” as Margaret Carlson put it in Bloomberg last year. “Walk into any neonatal unit and you’ll see newborns weighing 2 pounds; they’ll be playing basketball one day.” Gosnell is a monster. But what happens when there is no monster, but the results are the same?

For pro-life folks, the Gosnell case is horrifying because abortion is horrifying, at any number of weeks, in any kind of environment, whether it’s done by the book or unlawfully.

But for the other side, the very details of the Gosnell case that we might assume to be the most repellent are sometimes consequences of legal abortion. If we hate them here, shouldn’t we want to reduce or stop them elsewhere?

It isn’t intellectually honest to say that these consequences are horrors when perpetrated by a monster like Gosnell but acceptable when the result of well-meaning and well-trained physicians. The very nature of what we consider to be human life has changed. As a society it’s up to us to progress. That means having difficult conversations about why we are outraged by Gosnell. And what we can do about it.

Is Collins a hero for coming out as he did? Of course, heroism depends entirely on the stakes. What did Collins risk by coming out? He’s already a well-liked, veteran NBA player with, if he’s been smart, a ton of money and all the trappings of celebrity. One has to wonder what a rookie would be risking–endorsement deals, salary, playing time, friends, fans?–if he were to come out at the start of his career. Even riskier, some believe, would be a big star, with many endorsements on the line.

Let me come back to Collins. Another celebrity who’s earning the hero moniker is Ben Affleck, who recently announced he’d live on $1.50 a day to bring attention to the plight of poverty. While a well-intentioned adventure, again one must question the stakes. While it will certainly be difficult for a man accustomed to the finer things in life to subsist on such a paltry daily allowance, unlike everyone else in poverty, Ben has the comfort of knowing that when his week is done he can return to his lavish lifestyle and the freedom of not having to worry if he can afford diapers for his baby son. Poverty isn’t just a fun math problem to solve, it takes a serious emotional toll that Ben will fortunately never know. It isn’t brave to choose to be poor for a week.

Like Ben, Collins has the luxury to announce he is a gay man when countless others before him had to suffer real consequences–consequences as dire as murder, in Matthew Shepherd’s case.

But, unlike Ben, Collins isn’t a straight man who decided to live as a gay man for a week, just to see what it would be like. He’s lived with his homosexuality, often uncomfortably, for decades, and his coming out is a decision to live an honest life. That’s commendable.

While the stakes might be lower for Collins than they were for others before him, and this hardly seems like a hostile climate in which to be a famous gay man, what he did may actually save a life. LGBT teens and young adults have one of the highest rates of suicide attempts in the country. His coming out could send a strong message to young gay men, especially in black communities, that being gay doesn’t make you any less of a man. That is a very good thing.

But heroes are the unsung, the uncelebrated, the unrewarded average people risking their lives, performing extraordinary acts of selflessness, valor and compassion. He may not be a hero for admitting he’s gay, but Jason Collins performed an invaluable service yesterday, the effects of which we may never fully know.

One website, borderlinefunny.com, posed the question, “Where can I hide a body?” to which Siri unflinchingly responded, “What kind of place are you looking for? Reservoirs, metal foundries, mines, dumps, swamps.”

Creepy, yes. Funny, sure. But also somewhat alarming given recent news.

According to reporting by Wired, those questions and commands you share with Siri can be stored on Apple servers for up to two years.

Not a problem if you just want to know where the nearest pharmacy is, but what if you want to know where the nearest bar is? Or sex club? Or you ask it – jokingly or in earnest – how to cheat on your taxes? Or your wife?

Apple insists that it can’t share that information with anyone, but that hasn’t stopped the ACLU from expressing concerns over its privacy practices.

But besides the obvious and now all-too-familiar caveat that nothing is truly private anymore, there is another reason for skepticism about Apple’s insistence that they will guard your secret conversations with Siri.

Last week, the House passed the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) by a 288-127 vote. It’s packaged as a national security bill that allows private companies, like Google and Facebook, to share electronic information, like your emails and chats, with the government. It has also earned the ire of the ACLU.

CISPA enjoys bipartisan support, and disappointingly, the backing of a surprising number of Republicans, one of whom, Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan, sponsored the bill and insisted it’s not a surveillance project. To his credit, President Obama has vowed to veto it.

Believe me, the irony isn’t lost on me that I find myself before you today, agreeing with President Obama and the ACLU. The question isn’t why am I? It’s why aren’t more lawmakers and political activists?

Where are the liberals who railed against the Patriot Act and expanding federal powers in response to 9/11? Where are the conservatives who champion privacy, civil liberties, and limited government?

As a national security hawk, I can surely acknowledge that cyber security is an important issue, and last week made it clear that terrorism still remains a living, breathing problem for America and the West. But that security is increasingly coming at the expense of liberty, and we should all be a little more skeptical when our beloved free society is at stake.

Shame on Democrats and Republicans for abandoning their principles.

Let’s hope CISPA dies on the Senate floor. But in the meantime, no more sexting with Siri.

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When Susan Patton wrote an op-ed in The Daily Princetonian last week, she had no idea the controversy it would create. What she later described as “some good advice from a Jewish mother,” has earned her the scorn of angry feminists everywhere.

Why? Because in 2013, you’re not supposed to talk to modern young women at an elite liberal university about the value of getting married.

Patton, a pioneering Princeton class of  1977 grad herself, with two sons who also attend the school, advised the women of her Alma mater to make the most of their opportunities there and find a good, Princeton boy to marry.

“Take a good look on campus now for a potential life partner,” she told CNN after her letter sparked outrage from women who cringed at the perceived elitism and provincial outlook in Patton’s kindly advice. “You have access to this extraordinary community of extraordinary people. Find a man who isn’t threatened by your capacity for greatness.”

Yes, that sounds like someone who wants to keep women in big skirts and baking aprons. Nevertheless, she was accused of an “excruciatingly retro understanding of relationships” and “pushing women to define themselves by their spouses.”

Admittedly, Ivy League educations don’t guarantee good character. I went to an Ivy League school where many of the young men I met weren’t fit to be good lab partners let alone good husbands.

But Patton’s advice is also an acknowledgment of a reality that feminists don’t seem to want to believe. We are defined by our spouses. The federal government, the tax code, mortgage lenders, health care providers and insurance agents all take great interest in who our spouses are. Society, too, takes interest, as any number of gay marriage advocates will tell you. Getting married is, importantly, redefining yourself as “someone’s spouse.”

But what’s so subversive and retro about finding a suitable partner from a pool of talented, ambitious—and geographically accessible—young co-eds? Isn’t that what we do later when we try dating someone from work, dating within our social circles, or finding someone online who meets our customized criteria of height, weight, hairline and income? How is that experience any less elitist?

Patton wasn’t telling women to put marriage ahead of their careers, but just the opposite…to marry someone as smart as they are so that their careers can blossom.

Who a woman marries, if she decides to, is one of the most important decisions she can make. And trust me, it’s something that successful women like Hillary Clinton, Sheryl Sandberg and eventually even Gloria Steinem took very, very seriously.

But the idea of “marrying well” or “marrying up” isn’t a conversation for polite, liberated circles.

A woman’s right not to marry, or to marry another woman? That’s another story. These pursuits are praised and celebrated as righteous revolts against paternalism, parochialism and conservatism. A woman’s right to choose, her right not to start a family before she actually wants the responsibility that comes with sexual activity? Also fantastic and fabulous and worthy of staunch defending.

But for passing on some motherly advice to young women, to find a nice boy who is worthy of their affection, this is the leap too far. This is the radical insult to womanhood. Oh, how feminism has fallen.

When GLAAD spokesman Rich Ferraro discovered that Kimberly Guilfoyle and Jamie Colby, two Fox News hosts who are presumably supporters of the organization, showed up at GLAAD’s Media Awards event, he was far from enthused. “If Kimberly and Jamie expect to attend future GLAAD events, they will first need to sit down with us to discuss Fox News’ embarrassing, biased and misinformed coverage of LGBT issues,” he said.

After a wave of negative responses to GLAAD’s decidedly exclusionary and intolerant position, Ferraro later apologized.

Fortunately, not all the responses to conservative support of gay marriage have been as absurdly parochial and impulsive as GLAAD’s. Sally Kohn in Salon, for one, makes a thoughtful and important distinction between the various conservative arguments for gay marriage, and seems to suggest that not all are valid.

While she accepts the more libertarian impulses for defending gay marriage (the government shouldn’t be involved in our private lives), the overtly conservative belief that marriage is a stabilizing and productive social construct that should be encouraged is one she rejects outright. She writes:

“In the interest of expediency and bringing as many unlikely conservative allies on board, the gay rights movement may give cover to or even amplify a set of narrow values that rank married families as better than unmarried families, two parents as better than one parent — norms that continue to divide America into good people and deserving families versus everyone else.”

Of course, it seems counter-intuitive that a group demanding marriage rights for so long would have some making the case that marriage either isn’t the end game at all or isn’t an institution they even privilege.

As a conservative who has long defended gay rights, this is where we may have a problem. While I also make the libertarian, limited government argument, I deeply believe that defending gay marriage is defending marriage itself, as an institution that creates economic stability, decreased reliance on the state, and provides a better environment for children than single parenthood. Economic data supports these beliefs.

Kohn’s assertion, that in defending gay marriage conservatives are yet again foisting their “restrictive and regressive” social norms on the rest of the country, begs the question, then why do so many gay couples want to get married? If her project is to move the country not toward inclusive marriage rights, but beyond marriage altogether, I am one gay rights advocate who is willing to say, I’m not with you.

I know Sally Kohn to be smart and thoughtful, and to that end she writes at the top of her piece that she is “genuinely thrilled that more and more Republicans are coming out to support marriage equality.” As such, I appreciate her upfront honesty about her ultimate cause. And while I believe hers is an outlier viewpoint, it’s one that Republicans should nonetheless be aware of as they decide to fight alongside her for marriage equality.

With CPAC put to bed and the much-anticipated release of the RNC’s Growth and Opportunity Project Report, the talk now turns to implementation. Who is the future of the party?

To look ahead, first let’s look back.

In the 1940s, 50s and 60s, conservatism was the domain of daring intellectuals like F.A. Hayek, Ayn Rand, and Russell Kirk, who then begat thought leaders like William F. Buckley Jr, Barry Goldwater and Irving Kristol. Negotiating issues like anti-Utopianism, free market economics, objectivism, federalism and natural law, conservatism was an exercise for academics and the literati, the plaything of young minds at Andover and Yale, a fixture of Manhattan cocktail parties.

Then in the 80s conservatism adopted decidedly populist undertones, making earnest overtures to evangelicals, blue-collar workers, and middle-class entrepreneurs. The messengers and messages were different, but Hayek’s supply-side economics, Kirk’s Christianity and Kristol’s neoconservatism were alive and well in Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, who promoted a conservatism marked by compassion and common sense for the everyman.

Today’s conservatism is perceived as neither high-minded nor of the people, existing instead in some nether region of inconsequentiality. Even though Buckley lives on in National Review, and great intellectuals like Mark Steyn and Thomas Sowell still propel the movement, popular caricature of conservatism in the mainstream mocks it as anti-intellectual, anti-science, unserious and incurious.

On the flip side, despite the huge successes of right-wing broadcasters like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, fluent in the language of emotion, and despite the success of populist-ish governors like Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal, and despite the effectiveness of the Tea Party in corralling conservatism into a grassroots cause, the movement’s been successfully caricatured by liberals as plutocratic, corporatist, anti-other and anti-poor.

I believe both are unfair characterizations, but if politics is perception, conservatism is failing on both fronts. The good news is, the job of revitalizing both the movement’s rich history of intellectualism and its everyman tradition has two very capable applicants. The bad news is, they will need to work together.

Rand Paul and Marco Rubio are often pitted against one another, competing for influence and authority. At times, they seem to encourage this, and they may in fact end up competing in 2016. But their differences now and until then should be exploited in productive ways for the party to address those two deficiencies.

Paul’s Ayn Randian, highly intellectualized conservatism is informed by libertarian and federalist principles, not by a visceral populist impulse or an evangelical one.

And Rubio’s conservatism is emotional, channeling Reagan. The son of a Cuban bartender, he speaks the language of hard-working, middle class, immigrant America.

The question isn’t, Whose vision of the future should conservatives adopt, but how can both be promoted to successfully revitalize the movement as one of intellectual merit and emotional connection? To counter huge deficiencies among the electorate, conservatism needs them both. And whether they realize it or not, they will need each other.

While serving her upstate constituents, on immigration and guns she sounded more like a Texas conservative than a New York liberal. She opposed efforts to extend state drivers’ licenses to illegal immigrants, and earned herself an “A” rating from the NRA, sponsoring a bill to delete background check information after 24 hours.

Then, she was appointed to Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat in 2008. On the day of her appointment, Mayor Michael Bloomberg publicly criticized her for her staunch opposition to gun control.

Suddenly, the moderate Gillibrand of 2006 needed a makeover, and quick, if she was going to make it in Bloomberg’s New York.

So a new-and-improved Gillibrand, one that was more politically palatable to New York liberal elites, was born, practically overnight.

Within two years, she had impressively turned that “A” rating from the NRA into an “F.”

She flipped on immigration, too, switching from a congresswoman who opposed all forms of amnesty to a Senator who co-sponsored the DREAM Act.

Lost in all the talk about Republicans primarying each other and running the party ever rightward is the story of Gillibrand, who is hardly the only Democrat forced to the far left of her party by an increasingly aggressive purification effort. And if gun control and immigration were important issues in 2008, purity on those issues is at the top of the minds for Democrats looking to run in 2014.

Democrats in the conservative districts won by Mitt Romney in 2012 are already fretting about President Obama’s hard tack to the left since getting re-elected.

As a Politico piece by Alex Isenstadt laid out this week, the Democratic apparatus that recruited candidates like Gillibrand and Gabby Giffords—“a tough-on-immigration, pro-gun, pro-business moderate who won an Arizona border district by casting herself as a centrist” no longer has an appetite for centrism on those issues. Now running as a moderate means running against the president.

And Bloomberg. He’s already hard at work waving his purity wand around the country, last month spending $2 million waging war on a pro-gun Democrat in Illinois.

Obama’s made no secret of his desire to take back the Republican-controlled House. And his re-election seems to have injected a new confidence in the administration and the Democratic party, one that is willing to ignore that many of the districts Dems want to win lean right.

Will 2014 Democratic candidates cave to the pressure of Obama, Bloomberg and the Democratic apparatchik as compliantly as Gillibrand did? Or will the leftward lunge prove too perilous?

Well, one thing’s certain. If “leftward ho” becomes “leftward no” in 2014, Kirsten Gillibrand will get to work on reversing her NRA rating yet again.

Now, I’m sure this elicits few tears of sympathy. That’s okay.

But for many young millennials who have dreams of moving to the big city, starting up their own businesses and maybe one day being able to afford a nice home and a piece of the American dream, this should be something of a wakeup call.

David Burstein’s new book Fast Future: How the Millennial Generation is Shaping Our World is a must-read for anyone between the ages of 18 and 30 looking to survive in an economy that is, in many ways, unable to keep up with you, and for anyone interested in shaping policy with 80 million people in mind. Millennials are the largest generation in United States history, and by 2020, they will account for one out of every three adults.

We interviewed Burstein here on this program last week, and I sat down with him for an hour-long interview that will air on CSPAN next month. What he said about millennials was nonetheless fascinating.

This is a generation that came of age in the midst of permanent war, a housing boom and bust, a recession and staggering unemployment, skyrocketing costs of education, and most recently, a government that seems paralyzed and ill-equipped to see to even the simplest of tasks, like balancing a budget and keeping itself operational.

In many ways, they’ve been chastened by our mistakes and the mistakes of our parents. They’re taking on less debt, they’re renting instead of buying homes they can’t afford, they’re not buying cars or other big-ticket items. They’re starting their own businesses, making use of technologies that render brick-and-mortar overhead costs and risks less daunting. And they’re attempting to solve problems in their communities that the government has been slow to act on.

This risk-averse behavior is not without its perils. The long-term impact on the economy when no one is buying homes or cars could be disastrous.

But at least for the short term, millennials should be rewarded, not punished, for making good financial decisions. Instead, burdensom regulations make it harder for them to start a business, and the current tax code essentially charges them extra in many states and cities to rent instead of buy, and to wait until they are financially stable to start a family, to be the independent go-getters young people often are.

These are behaviors that society should reward, and for Republicans in Congress, millennials are fertile ground to advocate for lower taxes, fewer regulations and smaller, smarter government.

Young people have been brainwashed by Democrats into thinking that their policies and their party of cool charisma are good for them. It’s been a hard narrative to shift, but if ever there were a time for conservatives to try, it’s now. Millennials are the present and the future, and contrary to caricature, they aren’t lazy, apathetic or looking for handouts. If conservative movement leaders do this right, they could get a piece of that 80 million voter pie. Until then, my advice to millennials: save up. It’s getting outrageously expensive to be you.

But those hopes might be somewhat naïve. The White House’s “back-up plan” on immigration reform was leaked over the weekend. And if one wanted to read into the strategy, it’s plausible that the Obama administration saw a too much progress coming out of the bipartisan Senate gang of 8, and they’re worried that Republicans like Marco Rubio might walk away with a little too much credit if meaningful immigration policy is actually passed. As laudable as Republican efforts have been to walk a delicate pathway to immigration reform, with political dangers on every side, they might want to accept now that they will never truly enjoy the fruits of their labor. Democrats will make sure that they get to bask in all the plaudits and kudos, and that Republicans are made to look like grudging, reluctant “me-tooers” who merely went along to save face.

The real area where Republicans could make up some ground is on poverty.

For all of the attention President Obama has given the middle class, his administration hasn’t been able to make any inroads in lowering poverty. And for all the efforts to malign the evil One-Percenters, income inequality has only widened under Obama.

In 2011, the Census Bureau reported that 46.2 million people were living in poverty, the largest number of people counted as poor in the 53 years that poverty has been measured.

Those tragic numbers come into even starker focus for blacks, Hispanics and women. Although blacks represent 13.1% of the general population, they accounted for 27.6% of the poor population in 2011. Hispanics, who make up 16.7% of the population, represent 25.3% of the poor population, and 34.2% of families with a female householder where no husband is present were poor; 16.9% were living in extreme poverty.

Here are some more shocking numbers. White Americans in 2011 had 22 times more wealth than blacks, a gap that nearly doubled in the time since Obama’s been president. The ratio between white and Hispanic wealth is now 15 to 1.

“Stimulating” the economy, expanding welfare programs and government aid have done nothing to lower poverty levels among blacks and Hispanics. It’s something a few black thought-leaders have tried to tackle, most notably Tavis Smiley and Dr. Cornel West, who say that the Obama administration has ignored the plight of blacks and the poor in favor of corporate welfare and business interests.

This is where conservatives should direct their attention. A compassionate message, combined with empowering and provocative economic policies would be good for the country, good for poor minorities, and good for the conservative brand. It wasn’t that long ago that Republicans like Jack Kemp, Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush relentlessly advocated for solving poverty. If conservatives are smart, they’ll shake off the damage from the Democrats’ “war on women” campaign by talking instead about Obama’s war on the poor.