The AP has been violated by its beloved Barack Obama and his gang-bangers. The news agency has gone from sexting, so to speak, with the president, to being snooped on by him.

Politico offered readers an endearingly intimate glimpse, “Inside the AP,” where the flaccid folks were overcome by feelings of “fear” and “determination.” Nevertheless, they had not lost their resolve and were proceeding with “heads-down determination.”

What made The Beloved and his dream team turn to rough play?

According to the (idiomatic) mainstream, Obama’s Justice Department had been monitoring AP phone lines in D.C., in the Hartford and New York bureaus, and in Congress. Subpoenaed too were the phone logs, “credit card receipts, airplane records and other digital information” belonging to individual AP editors and reporters. All this in violation of Fourth Amendment protections; without presenting a judge with evidence of probable cause and absent a search warrant (all SOP, or standard operating procedure, at the Transportation Security Administration).

The Justice Department in the person of Attorney General Eric Holder has claimed, comically, to have been looking to plug a “very, very, very, serious leak.” Perhaps “the most serious” since the AG started his prosecutorial career in 1976.

A pesky detail has eluded all those invincibly stupid special interests who’re piping up for the privacy of the press, as opposed to fighting for the privacy of all Americans.

Have the various tele-lawyers, the director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and protesting members of the House Judiciary Committee forgotten the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, whose provisions were extended until Dec. 31, 2017, by the people’s representatives?

There is nothing new about warrantless wiretapping – other than that the American people haven’t been particularly exercised about them. They’ve trusted Uncle Sam to go about this activity judiciously.

Order lIana Mercer’s brilliant polemical work, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”

Peeping Sam had promised, after all, that covert surveillance would never be executed against “United States persons.” Were a “United States person” to fall under suspicion, he or she would not be subjected to surveillance without “judicial and congressional oversight,” puled the same perverts.

It’s not as if the National Security Agency (NSA) under George W. Bush was not accused of bypassing the courts to spy on the 43rd president’s many critics. It was! Sideshow “O,” however, has done Bush one better. Obama is using the FISA provisions against “friendlies.”

George Bush, you’ll recall (or maybe not), also authorized the President’s Surveillance Program (PSP). Subsumed within the PSP are activities whose scope has yet to be disclosed. Attorney General Holder – at the behest of President Obama, no doubt – is expanding the remits of the Surveillance State, as did “W” before him.

The incontinent coverage of the AP outrage has a delusional quality. Contra those whose job it is to feign indignation on TV – America is not a free country. Media convulsions notwithstanding, the government is reading over your shoulder – has been doing so for some time. It can spy on Americans without breaking the law.

It is perfectly permissible for the state to monitor you, me or The Other Guy, without a “perfunctory nod to due process and legal restraint.” In other words, without a court order.

National Journal is agreed, writing that “the Obama administration technically broke no rules.” Companies that give up this information to the government have “immunity,” which has been “built into a 2008 revision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.”

Here’s the other rub: FISA permits surveillance sans court order, explains Wikipedia, for “the period of one year provided it is only for foreign intelligence.”

And provided the president has authorized the fishing expedition.

In my understanding of the impossibly complex and cancerous Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Obama has to have authorized the dragnet that was cast at the Associated Press.

This is what Stefan, proprietor of Graham Putnam and Mahoney Funeral Parlor, told Fox News:

“They [Bostonians] can protest, but what do you do? In this country, we bury the dead. … everybody deserves a dignified burial service no matter the circumstances of their death. …”

Who knows what lucre the administration of Deval Patrick dangled before our all-American undertaker for solving the problem of Tsarnaev’s putrefying corpse? The government, state and federal, had, after all, diligently provided both the Tsarnaevs with the accoutrements of a comfortable living. Winding up the terrorists’ affairs is sure to keep that gravy train chugging along.

In anticipation, we presume, of spoils divvied by the traitor class, Stefan went on to wax fat about the arrangements with which he was busying his principled self, stressing that “finding a final resting plot for the body” had to take into account that Islamic law enjoins against cremation.

The great Roman statesman Cicero observed that, “Not to know what happened before one was born is to be always a child.” In our ignorance of the values that form part of our history and heritage, we Americans have become perpetual children.

Not quite the child, but definitely unevolved, The Shrub suggested last month that American values must include a commitment to “strive to expand the reach of freedom.” President George W. Bush was speaking at the dedication ceremony of his library, at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Those were the values “Dubya” claimed for what he termed “The administration.” Conservatives (led by beaming ditto-head Dana Perino) applauded wildly, and kept it up for days.

The dome of drones with which Barack Obama has blanketed the world and this president’s more modest forays abroad – these have only convinced conservatives of the righteousness of Genghis Bush’s faith-based initiative to Iraq and beyond.

True, an honest (or even dishonest) gravedigger such as Peter Stefan is far more likely to know a thing or two about American “values” than the country’s 43rd and 44th presidents. Still, that’s not saying much.

While dhimmis contemplate what to do with the decaying corpse of a Muslim mass murderer, consider what Gen. Sir Charles James Napier counseled about the valiant defense of Western values. The general (on an admittedly imperial mission to India) was confronted with the local Hindu practice of Sati, “the custom of burning a widow alive on the funeral pyre of her husband.”

When “Hindu priests complained to him,” as Wikipedia tells it, “about the prohibition of Sati by British authorities,” Napier replied:

“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”

In the West, we do not dispose of the dead on open-air funeral pyres, as is still done in India, Bali, south of Indonesia and Nepal. But we do cremate. Cremating Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s remains is commensurate with what ought to be American values: It conserves resources and leaves (almost) nothing behind.

Incinerate Tsarnaev’s corpse. It’s the moral thing to do.

It matters not that “Islam strictly forbids cremation.” True Christians and Jews forbid the murder of innocents. Those are the values that trump Islam.

Besides, Islam is a highly derivative (and distorted) belief system. Tamerlan believed that “the Bible was a cheap copy of the Quran.” However confused Muslims like him are about historical chronology, they do claim to accept the Ten Commandments, bequeathed in the Hebrew Bible’s Exodus and Deuteronomy, centuries before Muhammad. If so, the Sixth Commandment is unequivocally clear: “Thou shalt not kill.”

He who kills innocents has forfeited his right to religious burial rites – especially if these are to be administered by the killer’s victims.

Order lIana Mercer’s brilliant polemical work, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”

“[The] Tsarnaevs … were raised in the United States, and their attitudes and beliefs were formed there. It is necessary to seek the roots of this evil in America.”

The man makes a profound point. Here, and not in Chechnya, did the Tsarnaevs receive a liberal, lax, progressive education, emphasizing the wicked ways of the West and the righteousness of its “victims.” It is here in America that these invertebrates matured into aggrieved ignoramuses.

“If we Americans cannot even agree on what is right and wrong and moral and immoral, how do we stay together in one national family?” prodded Patrick J. Buchanan, in a recent column.

“A common faith and moral code once held this country together. But if we no longer stand on the same moral ground, after we have made a conscious decision to become the most racially, ethnically, culturally diverse people on earth, what in the world holds us together?

“The Constitution, the Bill of Rights? How can they, when we bitterly disagree on what they say?”

As Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam discovered, reluctantly, diversity in fact immiserates. The greater the diversity in a county or country, the more distrustful and depressed are its inhabitants.

Order lIana Mercer’s brilliant polemical work, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”

America’s practically pornographic rituals of public grief – what are they if not a neurotic symptom of this disconnect? A diverse and distrusting people, lacking in a shared national DNA, are thrust together by the crisis of the day. In the absence of any core value over which to unite, we Americans meet on the only common ground we share: the graveyard. We come together to bury or remember our dead. We unite to grieve over tragedy and misfortune that have befallen us for no other reason than that we exist in the same space in time.

As to America’s ingenious and inspired founding documents aforementioned: The vast majority of the people in this variegated land remain ignorant of them. Or, if familiar with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (or better still, the Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers) – they’ll have been taught contempt for their framers and the philosophy these magnificent men espoused. When he hears parents, pedagogues, politicians and media sycophants pound on about the country’s Founding Fathers as the archetypical pale, patriarchal oppressors, a young man quickly learns to reject his adopted country’s heritage and look elsewhere for roots.

Boys, especially, require strong, moral men in their lives – men who affirm their masculinity. American boys, however, are mired in an estrogen-infused, cloistered world where real men in authority are a threatened minority. The nation’s schools have been, for the most, drained of manliness. Almost to a man are they staffed by feminists (mostly bereft of the Y chromosome).

Newtown shooter Adam Lanza was a product of a freewheeling, fatherless household. The tele-experts have been mum about a mother who was weak and ineffectual. Nancy Lanza was filled with fear. She used a menacing gun collection to overcompensate for her parental inadequacies. A strong, caring male might have taught the troubled Lanza to handle firearms responsibly, might have helped diffuse the lad’s rage. A manifestly weak woman playing at make-believe manhood only added fuel to that fire.

Reflecting this warped reality are America’s revised history textbooks, which are short on heroic figures and long on “history from below.” Physicist Myron Pauli, a featured writer on BarelyABlog.com, recently recounted his surprise at learning from his daughter’s “history” book that “World War II was fought primarily by women, Navahos, Mexicans, blacks, and Japanese-Americans.” The next edition, presumably, will illuminate the “neglected” role of the homosexual, hermaphrodite and transgendered community in winning that war.

Boyhood today means BB guns and “bang-bang you’re dead” are banned. Tykes have a choice: Undergo anger management and anti-bullying instruction or be chemically neutered by way of ADHD meds. Concomitantly, although your kids (boys and girls) desperately need discipline, the rare classroom disciplinarian risks litigation (yours!).

And, as his real nature craves heroic tales about yesteryear’s warriors and explorers, a little boy is required to hack his way through a page-turner like “One Dad Two Dads Brown Dad Blue Dads.” The smashing success of politically incorrect books such as “The Dangerous Book for Boys” proves just how much little boys want to be boys again. The book reintroduced a new generation of youngsters to the joys of catapult-making, knot-tying, stone skimming, astronomy (concocting rocket fuel from saltpeter and sugar is not in the book, but is a lot of fun – or so my husband tells me). In short, more of the stuff of Boy Scouts, before the organization was hounded and hogtied by politicized girls and gays.

This very sexual activism is practiced by the president of the United States. No other than Barack Obama tinkled basketball player Jason Collins to congratulate him on stepping out as the first openly gay player in NBA history. Imagine Vladimir Putin or the president of Chechnya doing the same. Impossible!

“A huge step forward for our country” is how a hugely hyperbolic (and frightfully masculine) first lady tweeted out about Collins’ “accomplishment.” Small mercies, Michelle Obama did not call the festive affair a giant leap for mankind.

In the unmanly (because so undignified) mosaic described so far, pride-of-place must be reserved for the American president. To a boy from a Muslim culture, America’s man-in-chief has to represent a mass of contradictions. This president and those before him lead the lavish and licentious lifestyle of an emperor. This as they bomb and obliterate other people from afar.

Hardly honorable, much less manly.

Nothing much at all, other than that we’re immune to learning.

S–t happens, the country’s self-anointed cognoscenti keep instructing America. Don’t rush to conclusions.

If you’re media, milk Boston for all it’s worth. If you’re an ordinary American with a pulse, follow your leaders. Or their lick-spittles in the theatre of the absurd that is television news.

In short, everyone is said to be flummoxed about the motive for the murder spree.

And, with exceptions on the right, America is marching in lockstep. Evil per se doesn’t exist. Those who do evil must have been brainwashed, been hard done by, or have been afflicted with a mutation on the “moral gene.”

The putative perpetrators of an act that left three dead and many more maimed are the brothers Tsarnaev.

One of these two young Muslim-Americans has already been dispatched. On the lam after the bombings, Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s descent into hell was hastened April 19 during a shoot-out with the Boston police.

You should also know that the two brothers’ path to citizenship and permanent residence here was without obstacles – at least, when compared to my own and that of my spouse.

This is quite understandable, given the priories and preferences established by the U.S. Managerial State.

To no avail did Russian state security twice practically beg the FBI and then the CIA, in 2011, to place Tamerlan Tsarnaev on counterterrorism watch lists. It was pointless. The FBI turned the Russians down (as the Transportation Security Administration intensified its assaults on grandpa and grandma from the prairie).

Correction: By some circuitous route, the National Counterterrorism Center managed to add Tamerlan’s name to the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE. But membership in the TIDE fraternity only got Tamerlan an invitation to a bash at the White House.

Order lIana Mercer’s brilliant polemical work, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”

“Unemployment compensation” for the elder terrorist (who was unable to work on account of vocational training in Dagestan), college aid for junior, cellphones to both courtesy of the feds, attorneys on retainer to field run-ins with the law, housing, hospitalization – you name it, the Tsarnaev brothers got it.

True to type, the government is covering up that the two Tsarnaevs were living off the people they would later boast of killing. “State Protects Terrorists’ Privacy Rights,” blared the headline in the Boston Herald.

And don’t let Republicans tell you they’d do things differently. Former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton, a favorite of Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren, mocked Russian credibility. “When the Russians come to us and give us the information, you take it with a certain grain of salt,” he smirked at Ms. Van Susteren. “The Russians don’t like the Chechens.”

More to the point, American elites, Republicans included, have always sided with the Chechen cause, helping to carve out “an independent, Islamic republic from the Russian Federation.”

Again, there is nothing unusual about the conduct of these individuals and agencies. As members of the treason class, they have a tradition to uphold. Uncle Sam’s stool pigeons have demonstrated time and again how to move swiftly and ruthlessly against law-abiding, patriotic nationals and newcomers (a mission the TSA takes very seriously). But not against the people’s natural enemies.

No other than Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s father warned the FBI in advance about his son, the suspect in the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound plane on Christmas of 2009. The FBI dismissed dad.

Let us not forget how, acting as “W’s” national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice unblushingly defended the criminal negligence with which she and her intelligence apparatus treated the critical mass of information pertaining to the impending terrorist attacks of 9/11. It was not “actionable intelligence,” caviled Condoleezza; it belonged to the realm of analysis.

Out of Phoenix, a lonely FBI agent, Kenneth Williams, bucked the bureaucracy by providing a very specific memorandum about the bin Ladenites who were training in U.S. flight schools. Over and above the standard indifference with which the memo was handled in Washington headquarters, the FBI made it clear that its mandate was to avoid “racial profiling,” not save American lives.

Likewise, your military’s jihadi protection program kicked-in to cover for “Major Nidal,” as he was fondly known. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan of the Army Medical Corps openly proselytized for his faith. But preaching Islam to the traumatized U.S. veterans in his care did not hinder Hasan’s rise through the ranks. Nor did a substandard professional performance undermine Hasan’s employment status, rank, six-figure income and secret security clearance in the military.

“Major Nidal” made the most of the accelerated career track upon which the military had placed him – going on to commit fratricide at Fort Hood, where he murdered 13 people and maimed 31 for “Allah.”

Face the facts: The Tsarnaev family had been welcomed to America. They didn’t fall through the cracks; they cracked the system. Those manning the alphabet soup of immigration and attendant agencies wanted them here.

It mattered not that the family has deep roots in Chechnya, a Shariah-law dominated anarchy whose chief export is terrorism to Russian cities.

It mattered not that the family’s refugee-status application was probably bogus.

Mother Tsarnaev’s stealing imperiled her stay in the U.S. not at all.

Yes, her sons may be “alleged” terrorists, but Zubeidat Tsarnaeva is a bona fide shoplifter and grifter.

Subsequent (and habitual) welfare dependency and brushes with the law did nothing to hinder the Tsarnaevs’ full acceptance into U.S. society, at all levels. (In my experience as an immigrant, Americans themselves are more partial to “exotic” immigrants than to families like mine.)

Brain-dead peers (your kids) who “knew” 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, now in custody, are still gushing over an individual who went on to build pressure-cooker bombs, packed with ball bearings and small nails, and to calmly drop one of two such devices at the feet of 8-year-old Martin Richard. An “easy going and tolerant” teen is how his dense friends unanimously and emphatically describe Dzhokhar.

On the bright side: Whereas (alleged) terrorist Tamerlan was never at risk of losing his coveted Green Card, my daughter was stripped of hers by “brave” U.S. immigration law enforcers. Yeah, that bandita is finally at bay – turned away at the Canadian border in a mighty show of force, on a technicality.

This makes perfect perverse sense. My daughter was sponsored by a man – my better half – who is a law-abiding, upstanding recipient of the “extraordinary ability” O-1A Visa.

Genius or grafters? America (and Marco Rubio) has chosen.

Big hair, an overbite, Botox and mind-numbing banalities: These best describe the female hosts on Fox News’ “The Five,” a current-affairs panel, on which Lady Thatcher’s achievements were being claimed for womanhood.

To be fair to the pair from “The Five,” a procession of equally vacuous panelists plonked on other God-awful, dual-perspective chat forums – now multiplying on TV – had all rattled on about Margaret Thatcher qua woman.

The solipsistic sorority known as feminism was alien to Mrs. Thatcher, who was a methodological individualist, if ever there were one. The “Iron Lady” would have had nothing but contempt for the mediocrities claiming her achievements for their communal sisterhood.

The causes of the late Mrs. Thatcher – who served as the United Kingdom’s prime minister from 1979 to 1990, and passed away this week – were those of “individual men and women” and their families.

As Lady Thatcher famously averred, feminism was poison. “No! No! No!” The Lady was not for feminism. Within parliament, Prime Minister Thatcher had disavowed “little sir echo’s” acquiescence to the colossal collective of the European superstate. From without parliament, she would have extended the same scorn to little miss echo’s campaigns for gender-driven sectional interests.

The force of Mrs. Thatcher’s thinking and leadership flowed from a fierce independence of mind that precluded an affinity for the black hole of feminist thought – the collapse of which becomes increasingly likely as its center of gravity grows heavier. (Yes, women – especially feminists – risk vanishing into self-centeredness and self-preoccupation.) A bona fide feminist at the Guardian got it right. Mrs. Thatcher, she fumed, had no empathy for woman-centric whining, preferring the company of men.

Such was Lady Thatcher’s individualism that she even hand-bagged Thomas Jefferson for what she perceived as his flawed expression of the American Mind:

“With all due respect to the drafters of the American Declaration of Independence, all men (and women) are not created equal, at least in regard to their characters, abilities and aptitudes,” she wrote in “Statecraft” (p. 431).

“And if they were, their family and cultural backgrounds – not to mention the effect of mere chance – would soon change that. On one thing nature and nurture agree: we are all different. If this is unjust, then life is unjust. But, though one hears this expression – usually in the form of the complaint that ‘life is unfair’ – it really means nothing. In the same vein, someone once said to Voltaire, ‘Life is hard.’ To which is replied: ‘Compared with what?’” (Via Rightwing News.)

One would be hard pressed to find a feminist – or female, for that matter – who understands as profoundly as Margaret Thatcher did that, “The state has no source of money other than the money people earn themselves.” This via National Review:

“There is no such thing as public money; there is only taxpayers’ money. Prosperity won’t come by inventing more and more lavish public expenditure programs. You don’t grow richer by ordering another checkbook from the bank. How very pleasant it would be – how very popular – to say, ‘Spend more on this, expend more on that.’ But someone has to add up the figures, every business has to do it.”

Few rivaled Mrs. Thatcher in the manly art of the parliamentary joust. By her own words, she loved “argument” and “debate.” Her opponents could not help but delight in the quickness of her retort and the richness of her idiom.

During “Question Time,” in the House of Commons, a member of the Opposition informed the prime minister that he detested “every one of her domestic policies.” To which Mrs. Thatcher replied without flinching, “The honorable gentleman knows that I have the same contempt for his socialist policies as the people of East Europe who’ve experienced it have.”

Not even collectivist Nelson Mandela, the world’s secular saint, escaped Mrs. Thatcher’s astute assessment. A terrorist she called him. And so he was. The Iron Lady ventured, moreover, that grooming the African National Congress as South Africa’s government-in-waiting was tantamount to “living in cloud-cuckoo land.” Public intellectuals thought nothing of delivering South Africa into the hands of professed radical Marxist terrorists. But any one suggesting such folly to the wise Margaret Thatcher risked taking a hand-bagging.

Order lIana Mercer’s brilliant polemical work, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”

One of my favorite Maggie moments came in 1993, as she was being grilled by the pompous Peter Mansbridge of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Mansbridge is a Canadian institution in his own right – a stuffy, if able, left-liberal journalist. Mansbridge saw fit to badger Mrs. Thatcher about “the uncompromising style of Thatcherism.”

In taking this tack with her, Mansbridge was just following his “feelings.” The liberal (feminists included), typically, detests a debate about substance, for it demands an intellectual argument. Rather, he is compelled to score silly points about style, for that sanctions his emotional approach.

Lady Thatcher’s sublime reply as to her failure to court compromise and consensus is especially poignant today, amid current popular demand for bipartisanship. Mrs. Thatcher, a master of rational argument, offered up this exquisite metaphor for the pursuit of truth:

“When you’re starting a journey over the seas, you steer by stars that are always the same in the heavens. If you haven’t any stars to steer by, then it’s a pretty nondescript journey. Consensus doesn’t seem to be a very good star to steer by.”

Baroness Thatcher then “leaned in” (the title of a dog’s breakfast of a book written by Facebook feminist Sheryl Sandberg) for the coup de grâce:

“Why are you so interested in compromise and consensus? Why are you not interested in having clear objectives – and having been elected on clear objectives, knowing full-well that the difficulties would emerge first and the benefits later?”

“Hear, Hear!”

Number 78, yours truly, was sitting in line at the ASC (the Application Support Center), in Washington state. I was there to renew my green card, the much-coveted U.S. permanent residency permit.

The woman to my left was clutching note number 69. Despite having been summoned time and again, she stayed put. She did not understand English. Like her, the room was packed with applicants who were talking in tongues.

Although a longtime champion of American freedoms, I have decided, for now, against accepting U.S. citizenship, for which a green-card holder is illegible after five years.

Uncle Sam’s foot soldiers assault me whenever I take to the unfriendly skies. And should I leave the U.S., after taking the Oath of Citizenship, IRS agents will fulfill their oath of office and hunt me down.

As the chorus lyrics to that haunting rock classic by the Eagles goes, “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave!” In the evocative words to “Hotel California,” Americans who try “running for the door,” soon discover that they “are all just prisoners here. …”

Prisoners of Uncle Sam’s device.

If he can tolerate TSA assaults as he departs the country, a U.S. citizen who chooses to live and work overseas cannot escape the Internal Revenue Service. The United States is perhaps the only country to tax its citizens on income earned while they’re living abroad.

Order lIana Mercer’s brilliant polemical work, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”

Although the government’s citizenship stamp of approval is meaningless, there are risks in rejecting it.

While a U.S. citizen cannot be denied entry whenever he leaves the country and returns home, a green-card holder is essentially asking for permission to re-enter. This, as millions of members in a favored outlaw fraternity stroll across the southern border, giving border patrol the finger (as the other finger dials the ACLU).

Besides, have you ever heard a member of America’s low-brow glitterati and literati advocate for immigrants who are not poor, not brown and not uneducated? I have not – with the exception of Tucker Carlson, a libertarian-leaning rightist.

The scene: “Special Report with Bret Baier,” in a Fox News New York studio.

The participants: The regular “conservative” poseurs competing to craft the most “inspiring” (read schmaltzy) message with which to lure the only immigrants America seems eager to reel in.

Voted “most likely to use U.S. means-tested benefit programs” in their primary school class – poor, unskilled Latinos were being touted by the participants as the GOP’s natural-born constituents, when out of the blue, Tucker Carlson shattered GOP agitprop.

As neoconservative Charles Krauthammer and the banal Nina Easton of Fortune magazine noodled on about their Latino philosophical soul mates – Tucker Carlson averred that screening immigrants [for eligibility] must “begin with a conversation about outcomes.”

“Why is it that immigrants from certain countries have not thrived and immigrants from other countries have thrived?” questioned Carlson. “No one wants to have that conversation because it’s considered mean, but when the future of the country is at stake, it’s worth taking a rational, non-passionate and, by the way, nonpolitical look at outcomes, and asking real questions like, why is it? You’re not attacking anybody. But these are questions that we need to ask because the country is at stake.”

According to the Center for Immigration Studies, 57 percent of Mexican immigrants will go on to use means-tested benefit programs, against only 6 percent of Britons. My experience at the ASC microcosm ought to explain another of the CIS’s findings: Fully “one-fourth of public school students now speak languages other than English at home.”

To flabbergasted glares from his co-panelists, Tucker pressed on:

What is missing in this conversation is the fact that not all immigrants are the same. Immigrants from certain countries go on welfare overwhelmingly. Many Latin American countries send us immigrants who go on welfare. The question is, does the United States need massive new numbers of the low-skilled immigrants in a post-industrial economy? Is that good for the United States? It is not mindless to say all immigrants are good? They are not. Some are, some aren’t. … The Republican Party ought to be courageous enough to draw the distinction between people who add to the sum total of the American economy, who buy [into] the culture, who improve the country, and those who don’t. And there is a difference. Sorry.

Thank you, Mr. Carlson, for doffing the proverbial hat to high-value immigrants; the kind who not only talk about the American creed, but live it; the kind who pay for the largess Republicans seem so eager to dispense.

Alas, from the fact that 23 percent of native-born Americans also use means-tested benefit programs, less-enlightened, open-border libertarians have concluded that it is economically and morally inconsequential to extend taxpayer-funded welfare to millions of unviable non-nationals.

How is this asinine argument different from positing that because a bank has been robbed by one set of bandits (welfare-dependent nationals), repelling or arresting the next gang (welfare-dependent non-nationals) is unnecessary, as the damage has already been done?

It isn’t.

In 2011, Knox’s subsequent 2009 conviction was overturned, due in no small part to a PR blitz mounted by the Knox clan and their Seattle-based publicist. A veritable media mafia thronged to put the Italian judicial system on trial for railroading their cherub.

Agitating for Amanda were mass murderer Hillary Clinton, corrupt King County Superior Court Judge Michael Heavey – he abused his office (my state; my taxes) to petition members of the Italian judiciary on behalf of Knox, in violation of Washington state’s Code of Judicial Conduct—Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell (she misspells her surname), ubiquitous tele-attorney Anne Bremner, public relations adviser David Marriott and “48 Hours” correspondent Peter Van Sant, who had abandoned impartiality for outright advocacy.

Assisting them were our country’s national media, left and right, with the exception of Bill O’Reilly, former homicide prosecutor Kimberly Guilfoyle and Jeanine Pirro. Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, CBS, ABC – all worked tirelessly for the attractive, white kids.

Not that the unthinking Megyn Kelly, Shepard Smith, Wolf Blitzer, Piers Morgan, Dr. Drew, Oprah (on and on), gave the time of day to the victim’s family – but the Kerchers were too classy to partake in the circus created by the ugly Americans and their aides.

A studious disregard for facts saw Knox’s stalwart defenders stateside claiming she had been deprived of due process. In American (positive) law, procedural violations can get evidence of guilt – a bloodied knife or a smoking gun – barred from being presented at trial. More often than not, such procedural defaults are used to suppress immutable physical facts, thus serving to subvert the spirit of the (natural) law and justice.

Yes, another of our media’s collective moos was that, not being American, Italian justice was simply backward.

Granted, when Wendy Murphy gets something right it is only by accident. Remarkably, however, Murphy stumbled upon the truth here, by parroting the powerful forensic and circumstantial evidence in the Knox case, as reported by the brave Barbie Latza Nadeau, a Newsweek and Daily Beast correspondent based in Rome, and the Times of London.

As to Murphy’s aforementioned evidential number “five”: Five spots of blood were harvested from the apartment where Meredith Kircher was murdered. More key forensic evidence against Knox included her footprint in blood outside Kercher’s room. Traces of Knox’s DNA and Kercher’s blood commingled on the fixtures in the bathroom the girls shared, “on doorjambs and walls,” to be precise. And a knife found in Sollecito’s apartment bore Knox’s DNA on the handle and Kercher’s DNA in a groove on the blade.

“You cannot explain that away innocently,” protested Murphy, who was one of the few expert bobble-heads on American TV not cheering for the butcher of Perugia. Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, the accomplice-cum-lover, had not lived at the scene of the crime for weeks. “No blood had been there [prior]. No mixture has an innocent explanation.”

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As to evidential number “three”: Three different stories about her whereabouts on the night of the murder were spun by Knox, whom a professor of criminology at Birmingham City University – a top expert on sociopathic killers – had characterized as “vulgar and vain to the point of narcissism,” a woman “disturbingly self- and sex obsessed.”

But No. 1, in Murphy’s book, or so she told CNN’s Erin Burnett, was the following:

[Knox] falsely accused Patrick Lumumba, an innocent black man she had worked for. She knew he was innocent. She let him rot in jail, falsely accusing him of the crime until he could prove he wasn’t even there. That’s the kind of person [Knox] is. … What kind of person does that? The same kind of person who could kill a human being.

Actually, after attempting in vain to implicate Lumumba, Knox went on to perjure herself and frame the smitten Sollecito in the murder. As did she scream police brutality. She had been coerced into incriminating admissions, crowed Knox. When asked to identify the Italian tormentor who, allegedly, had slapped her during the interrogation, Knox fell silent.

America’s angelic O.J. was freed in 2011. Knox returned to Washington State to a hero’s welcome and has since committed her vomitus prose to a book. Considering public philistinism, the book should be a hit.

This Tuesday came good news, courtesy of the Italian Supreme Court. Knox will be retried in an appellate court, in Florence, likely in absentia.

You’ve seen Jodi Arias – another American female sociopath currently on trial for butchering a boyfriend – sing, do tantric yoga, giggle and chant to herself sotto voce, alone in the interrogation room.

Arias’s moral solipsism and self-adoration are nothing as compared to the kinky canoodling Knox and her paramour commenced, outside the house of horrors in which Meredith’s body lay on that fateful day. The English girl, whose throat had been slit, expired in slow agony.

Oblivious to the cameras – or perhaps for them – Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito exchanged a slow, sensual kiss in full view of world media.

The sickening scene conjured the climactic moment in the film noir “The Comfort of Strangers.”

Christopher Walken and Helen Mirren play an older couple (Robert and Caroline) who live in a palazzo in Venice. They gain the trust of the vacationing Mary and Colin (played by the late Natasha Richardson and Rupert Everett), a young English couple. As Colin sips a cocktail with Robert at the latter’s Venetian residence, Robert suddenly and swiftly (as planned) moves to cut Colin’s throat. He then steps over his gurgling victim and the gushing blood to engage in frenzied sex with his eager wife, Caroline.

The two had fulfilled a shared fantasy.

It’s time for Amanda, America’s Janus-faced Jezebel, to face justice for acting out her fantasy.

This production may well work as a proselytizing device for the average reality-TV consumer. Pop-productions, courtesy of the star of “Touched by an Angel,” however, are less effective with those who’ve studied the Hebrew Bible – perhaps the greatest literary work ever – in the language in which it was written.

Interesting, though, are the recognizable facial features of the actor who plays the antagonist in the series.

James Poniewozik of Time magazine has pointed out, sarcastically, that “a raft of viewers – including noted biblical scholar Glenn Beck – claimed that the show’s version of Satan bore a striking resemblance to” Barack Obama.

Their dark foreboding excepted, the facial features of the actor who plays Satan in “The Bible” do resemble Obama’s.

Moroccan actor Mohamen Mehdi Ouazanni is well cast in the role of “The Bible’s” Prince of Darkness. As expected, Mehdi Ouazanni as Satan looks sinister. However, while the contours of Ouazanni’s face bear a striking likeness to Obama’s, the president usually takes care to face Americans – a people who take everything at face value – sunny side up only.

He may be a man of many masks, but President Obama’s face is generally bereft of the pall of evil that blankets Beelzebub’s face in “The Bible.”

There was an exception big media failed to notice, because of the providential prism through which they view (and filter) Barack Obama.

Quite recently, Obama let the very darkness that blackens Ouazanni’s face in “The Bible” deform his own features. This happened during the National Prayer Breakfast, in the course of Dr. Ben Carson’s keynote address.

The breakfast took place before the Republicans commenced a “slobbering love affair” with Dr. Carson, an accomplished and affable African-American, who serves as director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

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The “Shock Doc,” as Ben Carson has since been dubbed by media, launched his Republican political career by “diagnosing the spiritual condition of the country,” his words, at the National Prayer Breakfast, with an unsuspecting President Obama in attendance.

Needless to say, political sermonizing crept into Carson’s splendidly accessible narrative. The good doctor spoke stirringly against unanimity of speech and thought (political correctness) and for a return to a unity of purpose to be found in the country’s founding principles.

Was anyone watching the president’s face during The Other Brother’s Prayer-Breakfast remarks? Well before Dr. Carson addressed the collapse of other “pinnacle nations” before America, through “moral decay” and “fiscal irresponsibility,” an ugly expression enveloped the president’s features, Dorian-Gray style. See for yourself.

The more uplifting, inspiring and inclusive Dr. Carson’s message grew, the more ominous Obama’s face became.

Adjacent to the president, two manicured hands applauded wildly throughout the first 18 minutes of Dr. Carson’s remarks. Those slender fingers belonged to first lady Michelle Obama, who had not been caught in the beam of the camera.

Abruptly, Mrs. Obama ceased clapping – washing her hands of the rapt Dr. Carson – when he evoked Jesus Christ as his role model.

Indisposed as I am to superstition or conspiracy, the dynamics at that National Prayer Breakfast were nevertheless intriguing.

For all his faults, Martin Luther King – no hero of mine – was nothing like the bent and brutally divisive Mr. Obama and the black community’s other corrupt race agitators and hustlers.

Said Martin Luther King: “It is a simple matter of justice that America, in dealing creatively with the task of raising the Negro [MLK's words] from backwardness [MLK's words], should also be rescuing a large stratum of the forgotten white poor.”

Said Dr. Ben Carson on America’s system of racial subsidies and subventions: “If we’re talking about applying to Yale University and, you know, my son is applying and, you know, the son of coal miner who got killed in a mine, who’s been working since he was 12 to help support for the family, is applying, and they have similar academic records, I’m going to give the edge to the coal miner’s son because he’s had a much harder road. … It should not be attached to any ethnicity.”

So what was it that bedeviled Barack Obama during the 2013 National Prayer Breakfast? What, do you suppose, accounted for the president’s splenetic expression on that day?

Perhaps Barack Obama recognized in Dr. Carson a certain fairness and goodness he is without.

Out of the papal conclave and into the limelight charged the vainglorious Dolan (who, it has to be said, harbored hopes of becoming pope). He then suctioned himself to the television cameras, American style. No other cardinal elector granted interviews on emerging from the Sistine Chapel; they were enjoined to secrecy.

Not the American cardinals. According to the Associated Press, these prolix self-promoters held daily press briefings near the Vatican to a room packed with reporters and television crews.

This was vulgarity, not transparency.

Not for nothing was the vow of silence once considered a test of character and spirituality in Christianity and in other faiths. This universal value has been inverted by American pop culture and pop religion. In the U.S., a deeply private person is considered defective; a blabbermouth who does and says anything on camera is canonized.

Dolan, by CBS’ telling, “broadcasts a weekly radio show” and “was hardly silent during the cardinals’ self-imposed hush order.” For his vulgar electioneering, the archbishop of New York was dubbed by Kean University historian Christopher Bellitto “The Ed Koch of Catholicism.” Having gigged with liberal comedian Stephen Colbert, Dolan’s showman credentials are “better” than Koch’s.

American public life is such that even our pick for pope (Dolan) struts his stuff like a “Jersey Shore” reality star.

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The two-day-long conclave gave us a glimpse of the sublime. The elevated atmosphere was sustained by the crowds in St. Peter’s Square. Dolan shattered the majesty and solemnity of that event at a press conference where he alone was in attendance. There, Dolan disgorged the obligatory niceties about Pope Francis I. Cardinal Bergoglio was an “inspired choice.” May he persevere for years to come (“Ad Multos Annos”).

Then, like most Americans in public life, the man nicknamed “America’s pope,” “a happy warrior” and “the bear-hug bishop,” brought the discussion back to … himself. Out of the blue, Cardinal Dolan announced to the world that his “niece Kelly” had given birth.

How inappropriate.

To the girls at CNN – Anderson Cooper, Wolf Blitzer and their dominatrices – vulgarity equals “charisma.” “Isn’t Dolan wonderful?” they gushed. Despite his pesky attachment to Catholic doctrine – in demeanor, Dolan was clearly everything the dignified and modest Mitt Romney was not.

At CNN, the new vicar of Christ quickly became the first Latino-American pontiff and was bestowed with the ultimate honorific. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Italian parents, the cable-news crazies hailed Pope Francis I as their first “non-European pope.”

Let us give thanks that the world was spared the self-promoting sins of a “superpower pope” and his entourage.

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IS ON THE RACK. That is the meme sounded by all big media covering the conclave. This the brilliant Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI knew all too well.

After “asbestos, tobacco, guns and lead paint, the next jackpot for tort lawyers was … sex,” explained Daniel Lyons of Forbes Magazine. In 2003, Lyons hashed out all there is to say about the $5 billion sexual-abuse shakedown to which the Catholic Church has been subjected. Many of these class-action claims are bogus, backed by the discredited excavation of false memories.

Sexual-abuse litigation is big business, a racket facilitated by courts that are conduits to theft. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI knew that the Church was on the rack; that the victim movement had found a way to bleed the Church dry and rob it of its moral authority.

Prescient man that he is, Benedict XVI likely quit because he realized that the Church was no longer a haven from the toxic tides of populism and liberalism, and that he was powerless to halt this momentum.

Although the breakdown of boundaries in society is the source of all the rot around us, the Roman Church will not be permitted to survive in the only way it was intended to function since antiquity: as a hierarchical organization.

As the clamoring demos believe, they are every bit as smart as men like Benedict. The faithful, moreover, no longer see themselves as members of a community of believers, but as members of gay, lesbian, feminist, black, brown and plain angry clans. Unless the Church recognizes and recompenses their brand of identity politics, the masses will bring it down.

Right on cue – and by baring their breasts – “ladies” demonstrated at the outskirts of St. Peter’s Basilica why the ordination of women should be out of the question.

In the fullness of time, however, the Pussy Riot sisterhood will ride roughshod over the Church and its wise old men.

The question is: How long of a reprieve does the Church of Rome have?

“Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government,”

ILANA MERCER: A microscopic decrease in the increase in government spending has sent our overlords in D.C. into apoplexy. A cut in oink-sector spending, they’re claiming, will destroy the chances of an economic recovery. It is the exact opposite. You point this out in the chapter on “The Myth of Government Job Creation”: “Government spending increases unemployment because it crowds out so much private sector job creation” (p. 202). Explain with reference to the zero-sum nature of government spending the cost of a government job and Bastiat’s “What-Is-Seen-and-What-Is-Not-Seen” principle.

THOMAS DILORENZO: Every dollar that the government spends is a dollar that is not spent (or saved) by individuals, families, businesses and entrepreneurs. Therefore, whenever government grows, private enterprise – the sole source of real job creation – shrinks, and unemployment there rises. Each government job destroys several genuine, private-sector jobs because of all the bureaucracy and red tape. For example, government may spend $200,000 to give one person a $30,000/year job. And government “jobs” are usually involved in doing something that no one but a few politicians ever voiced a preference for. Private-sector jobs, by contrast, cannot survive unless they are part of an enterprise that succeeds in satisfying genuine consumer wants.

By contrast, Keynesians like Paul Krugman would have us believe that prosperity is created whenever government takes money out of our bank accounts (with the threat of forcing us to live in a cage for years if we do not pay) and letting government bureaucrats squander the money instead. Part of the Keynesian mantra is that such spending could and should be on “anything” – it doesn’t matter, as long as it is government that is doing the spending. The biggest year of private-sector economic growth in American economic history was 1946 when the nation was in the middle of a two-thirds reduction in federal government spending as the military was demobilized from World War II. This proves that the Keyensians were always dead wrong, but of course, they and their political patrons ignore this reality.

MERCER: You quip: “In Washingtonese, if one proposes a $100 billion spending increase, and actual spending increases by ‘only’ $90 billion, they call it a $10 billion budget cut.” We’re in the grip of exactly this kind of a paradox. How is the “Washington Monument Syndrome” playing out in its “sequesteria” version?

DILORENZO: The “Washington Monument Syndrome” is an old bureaucratic trick that is so named because the head of the National Park Service closed down the Washington Monument – the most popular tourist attraction in Washington, D.C. – in the 1960s after Congress refused to fully fund his pie-in-the-sky spending wish list. Tourists from every state, on their annual vacations, called their congressmen to complain, forcing them to give the Park Service bureaucrat all the money he wanted. State and local governments routinely use this sleazy gimmick by immediately threatening to shut down police protection, garbage collection, ambulance service, school buses and whatever else would impose the maximum pain on the public whenever there is talk of fiscal responsibility. The Obama administration has taken this to buffoonish extremes by threatening to close down airports, etc., if government spending increases by about 1 percentage point less than they wish over the next 10 years. No one in Washington has proposed cutting a single cent out of the federal budget despite the fact that the surest route to economic recovery would be to chop federal spending in half, and then in half again next year.

MERCER: Like tax havens, tax loopholes are ethical and efficient. Your point about efficiencies is especially good: “The time spent by citizens trying to legally avoid taxes is in fact a good investment of their time.” Decode the Orwellian Doublespeak of phrases like, “simplifying the tax laws ” and “revenue neutrality.”

DILORENZO: Politicians and statist economists intentionally confuse the public when they refer to proposed tax increases as “tax reform” and to tax cuts as “wasteful” or “unnecessarily complicated.” I have long agreed with Milton Friedman’s dictum that the cause of freedom and prosperity is always served by any tax cut, of any kind, at any time. One has to realize that the purpose of government is for those who run it to plunder those who do not. Depriving political parasites of revenue is always and everywhere a good idea. The rhetoric of “revenue neutrality” really means that under no circumstances should government – unlike everyone else in society – ever, ever spend a penny less next year than this year. Any tax reform should therefore never, ever, end up putting more money in the pockets of the public at the expense of the political parasite class.

MERCER: Expect the “compassion of the IRS and the efficiency of the post office” from Obama’s health-care plan, you forewarn. But as Obama’s army of harpies at CNN would argue, his politburo of proctologists has involved itself in the insurance industry merely to enhance markets. Or, to “bring down costs.” Dispense with this idiotic notion.

DILORENZO: Government intervention always causes costs to rise and quality to decline. This has always been true; it has especially been true in the field of health care in places like Canada and Great Britain where health care was nationalized long ago. There is no reason to believe that the socialists in the Obama administration are better at socialism than were the Soviets, the Eastern Europeans, the Chinese, the Cuban government, or anyone else. The absence of a market feedback mechanism based on profits and losses guarantees government failure. Public-choice economists refer to a “bureaucratic rule of two” with regard to governmental provision of any type of service, based on hundreds of empirical articles that show that, on average, a government takeover of any function will double the per-unit cost of providing the product or service.

More on Obamacare, GDP and the elusive economic recovery at Barely a Blog, where the conversation with professor DiLorenzo continues.

Are the socialists right? Did America become the most prosperous nation on earth through government intervention? Find out the historical truth in Thomas J. DiLorenzo’s book “How Capitalism Saved America”