With people going around saying “These are scary times”, what does a person do?

Ignore them or follow their lead. I say neither but try to set aside a small part of your time to check out the potential threats. This being observant will not cut it.

Just today outgoing Homeland Security Adviser Frances Townsend told CNN that al Qaeda may target the presidential elections. She said that while there is currently no “specific information,” “we know that Al Qaeda views these periods as being a particularly vulnerable period.” What good is this vague information?

Another example In this morning’s White House gaggle, spokeswoman Dana Perino admitted they’re making civilian employees fear for their jobs as a way to “remind Congress” to pass a bill, despite the fact the funding has passed the house and is being blocked by Republicans in the Senate. Why, the Dem’s do not have the 60 votes to pass their legislation. Upsetting the civilian employees over the Thanksgiving holiday is absurd.

Now the Democrats are not without blame, because they are saying that the president does not want poor children to have health insurance when this bill has bipartisan support and will eventually pass. In the past they have told the elderly that the GOP wanted to take their social security away.

I do fear an administration that wields too much power, just because it can. For example this administration wanted to rewrite the Geneva Convention, legalize torture, bypassed the FISA court and conducted warrant-less surveillance on its citizens.

Some might say I am paranoid but several have left this White house as dissenters. For example former white house press secretary Scott McClellan reveled this from a forthcoming book. ““I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the seniormost aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby,” McClellan wrote.

“There was one problem. It was not true.”

McClellan then absolves himself and makes an inflammatory — and potentially lucrative for his publisher — charge.

“I had unknowingly passed along false information,” McClellan wrote.

“And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president’s chief of staff and the president himself.”

McClellan says he was in that position because he trusted the president: “The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.” Remember what the president said what he would do if he caught someone who leaked?