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In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings, Sen. Lindsey Graham told Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer that “We need to revisit our laws" and potentially give the FBI more power to track terrorism suspects, because lord knows we haven't shredded quite enough of our civil rights already.

No amount of deaths are ever enough for Graham to want to infringe on the Constitutional rights of gun owning Americans, but as soon as the word terrorism is involved, all bets are out the window.

Graham warns intel agencies ‘going back to pre-9/11 stove-piping’:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said “information sharing failed” ahead of the Boston Marathon bombings and warned that stove-piping between intelligence agencies remained a problem.

“This is a failure to share information and missing obvious warning signs,” said Graham Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “We are going back to pre-9/11 stove-piping,” he warned.

Graham called for a “post-mortem” to examine the intelligence failures and see if such missteps could be prevented in the future, citing reports that the FBI failed to interview suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev after a trip to Russia, where authorities believe he was partly radicalized and the failure of the agency to notify agents in Boston to watch him more closely.

“How could you miss that the guy you were informed about by a foreign intelligence service, you got a radical in your midst, we can’t track him to Russia, we lose him going to Russia and coming back,” asked Graham. “And when he goes on the internet for the whole world to see, to interact with a radical Islamic websites how do we miss that?

“We’re going to have to up our game,” said the South Carolina senator. [...]

Graham’s comments are the latest from GOP lawmakers frustrated that intelligence system reforms made after the September 11, 2001 attacks have failed to work. Lawmakers fear that the same intelligence sharing issues before that incident are again playing a role in the Boston attack.

Graham last week suggested that the FBI may need more powers to track terror suspects.

“We need to revisit our laws,” he said.

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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell drew the ire of The Daily Show's Jon Stewart this Thursday evening after he decided to briefly join Sen. Rand Paul's thirteen hour filibuster of John Brennan's nomination to head the CIA. As Stewart rightfully pointed out, any of these members of Congress who sat silent during the Bush years pretty well forfeited their right to feign concern over the civil liberties of Americans now.

STEWART: Those other senators are recent additions to the Senate, so I don't mind them jumping into Paul's filibuster, but you don't get to jump in on the concern the executive branch might be trampling the Constitution train. If I remember correctly during the Bush torture, suspended habeas corpus, see if you can get the Attorney General to sign off wireless wiretapping while he's in a coma years, I believe your response to that was... yeah.

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In his New Rules segment this Friday, Bill Maher took a shot at all of the "gun nuts" out there who are so worried about their 2nd Amendment rights being stripped away, but who, along with a lot of liberals, haven't said anything about the National Defense Authorization Act quietly being passed by Congress, which actually is a threat to our civil liberties in this country.

Maher's right that this is a bi-partisan political problem, but I think the bigger problem with the complacency is that we've got a corporate media out there which for the most part is completely ignoring the problem. It's a shame we'll see it discussed on a comedy show like his but ignored on the "news."

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While discussing whether our so-called national security apparatus has grown too large and unwieldy in the aftermath of 9-11 on Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace asks Brit Hume if he thinks Americans' civil liberties are in jeopardy. Naturally, Hume says he's not concerned and actually goes so far as to say that we've responded really reasonably to the attacks on 9-11 because hey, at least we're not locking people up in Japanese internment camps like we did during World War II.

I think Hume might feel a bit differently if he were say, a member of a Muslim mosque, an ACLU lawyer representing a terrorism suspect, someone who found themselves placed on the no-fly list for no good reason, or perhaps one of the people who were unfortunate enough to find themselves swooped up without a trial and thrown into Gitmo and tortured. But Hume is no Maher Arar. As a resident hack at Fox "News", he doesn't feel he's got anything to worry about, so it's all good, people. Just go about your business and don't worry about that pesky data mining they're doing or how much of your personal information they're collecting. Nothing to see here. Move along.

WALLACE: Brit, in the wake of 9-11 with some of the legal structure, the counter-terrorism architecture that was created with warrantless wiretaps and Patriot Act, there were critics who said that our civil liberties were in jeopardy. Do you see any sign of that's happened?

HUME: Well, I think there's always... you have to be vigilant about that, but what I think is striking about it is how... you know, I don't think any, very many Americans to speak of have any worry about their civil liberties. I mean we're... speech is as free as it's ever been, except for political correctness and that's not a function of the war on terror. Debates are as robust as ever.

I have no worries about my multitudeness (sic) communications on the Internet or anywhere else being supervised by some government official somewhere. I just don't worry about that very much and I don't think most Americans do. I think vigilance is reasonable about such things, but what's striking about this is how little we've done.

When you think about World War II and we were, you know, we locked up Japanese in prison camps. Nothing like that has happened. Nothing on that scale, nothing of that kind.

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During an interview with George W. Bush which aired on C-SPAN's Q&A discussing his book Decision Points at the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, the former president was asked if he was "concerned that legislation that you passed such as the Patriot Act opens the door for potential abuse by future presidencies?". Never mind the abuses during his presidency that failed soundly.

He followed it up by saying that he was glad the Congress decided to pass The Patriot Act and renew it again no matter which party was in the majority and defended his administration's spying and torture, or as he called it "enhanced interrogation" that he claimed was necessary to keep us safe from terrorism. He also claimed that The Patriot Act assured that civil liberties were not undermined.

Nothing like some major revisionist history from Bush with no one there to push back during this softball forum from C-SPAN.

CAMERATO: Good morning Mr. President. My name is C.J. Camerato and I’m from Boston Massachusetts and I’m curious, were or are you concerned that legislation that you passed such as the Patriot Act opens the door for potential abuse by future presidencies?

BUSH: Great question. The law that was passed twice by the Congress, once when Republicans controlled the Congress, when we controlled the Congress and once after the ’06 election when we got soundly thumped, guarantee civil liberties and there’s a lot of safeguards in the law. And I don’t think a president can… can, through executive order preempt the safeguards in the Patriot Act. There are plenty of checks and balances in our system and throughout the book and historians will note throughout my presidency that I worked assiduously to make sure that civil liberties were not undermined.

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During the "Tell me something I don't know" segment of The Chris Matthews Show, conservative columnist Reihan Salam suggests that after this dust up over the TSA's invasive searches, the right is suddenly going to start caring about Americans' civil liberties being violated.

SALAM: The conservative backlash against the TSA is just part of a bigger revival of civil liberties talk on the right. We’re going to see a lot more of it in the next year or two.

I'm sure those concerns will end again just exactly as soon as another Republican gets elected president. I'd like to know where their concerns were when the Bush administration was still in power.

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I'm with E.J. Dionne who made a great point on Meet the Press that we don't hear often enough on these bobble head shows. I'm sick to death of it too and these jokers who are more than happy to toss someone else's civil rights away would be the first ones demanding lawyers for themselves if they were accused of a crime. Katy Kay made a good point as well. This is all about politics because none of these people were harping about the terrorists who were tried in civilian courts when George Bush was still president.

MR. DIONNE: I just want to say, I just want to say I, I just hate this term "lawyered up." Because if you are accused of a crime and you are innocent, you want a lawyer to defend your innocence. And we totally forget that we have civil liberties protections not only to protect the guilty but to protect innocent people. And this is...

GREGORY: But E.J., this is not just an ideological argument. There is a reality that...

DIONNE: Well, I'm not making an ideological argument. I'm making an argument about...

GREGORY: No, no, but you're saying you don't like the term "lawyered up."

DIONNE: ...what a term that's...

GREGORY: There is--even the attorney general is making the point--it's not a question just of civil liberties, it's an issue of there are intelligence values, there are--there is valuable intelligence that you get from people who are true enemies of the United States who are not just, you know, suspects in a criminal trial. Even the attorney general recognized back in 2002 in the--for the purpose of interrogation, sometimes lawyers are an impediment. He's acknowledging here that Miranda is sometimes an impediment to ultimately making the, the best case and also getting the intelligence information you need.

DIONNE: And what I objected to is a term, "lawyered up," which is used over and over again to imply that any kind of use of normal judicial process, which is designed to protect innocence, sort of pushes us so far down the line that we forget why we have these protections in the first place.

BROOKS: Yeah, but I, I wasn't being...

DIONNE: Yes, this is a--this is--I said right at the outset, protecting liberty and protecting ourselves, this is a tough matter when it comes to terrorism. But we should not throw out our rights with sort of the, the--blithely, which is the way a term like "lawyered up," I think that's imposed.

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Thom Hartmann talks to the ACLU's Michael German about the knee jerk reaction to the Christmas Underwear Bomber and airport security and whether these scanners that will invade our privacy are not meant to keep anyone safer when flying but make someone money instead.

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The CBS affiliate in San Diego is reporting that businesses that have contributed money to oppose the a ban on gay marriage in California are being blackmailed to contribute to a group that is fighting for the ban.

A threatening letter has sparked a new controversy here in San Diego surrounding the gay marriage debate. Donors who gave money to the No on Prop 8 campaign say they received blackmail letters demanding money, and the Yes on 8 campaign now says the letters were sent by their employees.

The letter from Yes on 8 came by certified mail, demanding at least $10,000. Jim Abbot knows exactly why he's being targeted - his business gave $10,000 to a group called Equality California, which supports No on Prop 9.

The letter says if Jim doesn't give an equal donation to Yes on 8, the name of his company will be published. It reads in part, "It is only fair for Proposition 8 supporters to know which companies and organizations oppose traditional marriage.

'I feel like it's blackmail, and as you can imagine, real estate business has been tough lately and to have someone come at you like this... it's very distressing,' he said.