The event, held in Daytona Beach Nov. 4-6, will feature G. Edward Griffin, billed as the “author of The Creature from Jekyll Island.” Griffin is an anti-Federal Reserve, anti-United Nations and anti-communist conspiracy theorist who describes himself as a “life member” of the John Birch Society.

The John Birch Society is an infamous radical anti-communist group. Griffin defended his membership in the group in a 2007 post featured on the website of an organization called Freedom Force International. According to the site, Freedom Force is “a network of men and women from all parts of the world who are concerned over loss of personal liberty and expansion of government power.”

“I can understand how mention of my association with The John Birch Society may cause some people to raise an eyebrow,” Griffin wrote, adding:

The general impression among many is that the Society is an extremist organization made up of kooks, McCarthyites, and racists. So let me jump to the bottom line.

I am a life member of The John Birch Society and, for several years in the 1960s, served on the Society’s staff as a Major Coordinator and official spokesman. From over forty years of personal contact with its members and leadership, I can say with authority that the Society is an excellent educational organization promoting limited government and opposing collectivism in all of its forms. There is nothing about it that is contrary to the highest standards of morality and ethical conduct.

Griffin wrote that “the John Birch Society is composed of some of the finest men and women you will ever hope to meet.”

“The charges of extremism, racism, anti-Semitism, and all the rest are pure hogwash,” he wrote. “But there is an important lesson in this story. The treatment given to the Birch Society is exactly the kind of treatment we can expect for ourselves when we become strong enough to challenge the collectivist stranglehold over the power centers of society.”

In 2010, the decision by organizers of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference to allow the John Birch Society to co-sponsor the event generated headlines. The New York Times reported in 2009 on the Society’s attempt to rebrand itself:

[For some], the John Birch Society is urgently relevant to the matters of today, in its support of secure borders and limited government, its distrust of the Federal Reserve and the United Nations, and its belief in a conspiracy to merge Mexico, Canada and the United States.

This so-called North American Union, it asserts, is part of a larger plot by an amorphous, amoral group of powerful elite — including but not limited to the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission and the Rockefellers — to take over planet Earth. Call it the New World Order.

Some of these theories may sound like cable television chatter, or the synopsis of a Dan Brown bestseller. But Birch leaders say this plot is real, with roots going back more than 200 years to a secret, insidious brotherhood called the Illuminati, and with most American presidents among its many dupes and abettors.

On the agenda for later in the convention are Franz Kebreau and “Sherriff Mack.” Mack believes the government push to require people to wear seat belts is not because the government “wants us to be safe.” ”We have seat belt laws simply because people with money wanted us to have seat belt laws,” he writes, adding that he is “proud” to say he never issued a seat belt citation as a sheriff.

In June, Bondi told The Florida Independent she could not confirm whether she was attending the tea party convention. Bondi’s office did not respond to new requests about whether she plans to attend.

A spokesman for Scott tells the Independent that the governor’s schedule has not been finalized for November, and so cannot confirm whether Scott will attend.

At the start of business on Tuesday, Aug. 2, according to the Daily Treasury Statement, the national debt subject to the legal limit was $14.293975 trillion. Obama signed legislation that day lifting the limit by as much as $2.4 trillion—with an initial and immediate increase in the limit of $400 billion. By the close of business on Friday, Aug. 5, according to the Daily Treasury Statement, the national debt subject to the limit had grown to $14.536130 trillion.

Over just four days, the debt had jumped $242.155 billion.

By contrast, according to the Bureau of the Public Debt, over the ten-year period from the end of fiscal 1950 to the end of fiscal 1960, the national debt grew from approximately $257.36 billion to approximately $286.33  billion—an increase of approximately $28.97 billion.

Using the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator, $28.97 billion in 1960 dollars equals $220.92 billion in 2011 dollars.

Thus, the $242.155 billion in 2011 dollars that the Obama administration increased the debt between last Tuesday and last Friday is more in inflation-adjusted terms than the combined debt increases of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations in the ten-year period from the end of fiscal 1950 to the end of fiscal 1960.

The figures in the article are accurate, although the author of the piece understates the amount of debt taken out during the 1950s by adjusting for the value of the dollar in 1960, and not adjusting for its value during each year in the 1950-1960 period. The claims made in the article are nevertheless misleading because they obscure the fact that any debt taken on from August 2-5, 2011, was done so in order to spend on programs and agencies whose budget was already authorized — and thus mandated — by an act of Congress.

Because the U.S. Treasury reached the debt ceiling on May 16, the budgetary obligations that accumulated during the weeks and months that followed had to be immediately paid for once the debt limit was raised. The fact that the Treasury immediately took on $242 billion doesn’t mean that the Obama administration arbitrarily took on that amount of additional debt during those four days. Rather, spending had already been authorized by Congress and the Treasury was obligated to pay for it with additional debt, or face the legal consequences of failing to do so.

In order to accurately compare the 2011 deficit with the deficit of the 1950s, it’s important to recognize that the government is currently taking in revenue at a much smaller proportion to GDP than it did in the 1950s, a fact that cannot be directly attributed to the Obama administration. The primary reason for decreased federal government revenue is the ongoing economic slump, with secondary reason being the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts.

According to the Office of Management and Budget, federal government receipts averaged at 17.2 percent of GDP from 1950 to 1960, while in 2010, they were 14.9 percent of GDP. Federal tax revenue as a percentage of GDP is currently the lowest it’s been since the year 1950, after which it did not go below 16 percent until the year 2008, the start of the Great Recession.

As for spending, while it’s true that total federal discretionary spending averaged 17.6 percent of GDP in the 1950s and was a substantially higher 23 .8 percent in 2010, much of that can be explained by the one-time American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the 2009 stimulus law, which is already phasing out. Discretionary spending is projected to shrink in proportion to GDP in 2011 according to the Congressional Budget Office(PDF). Of course, that leaves off mandatory spending programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The latter two programs were created after the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, so including them in the comparison is also misleading.

The increase in debt during the August 2-5 period therefore reflects not an arbitrary effort on the part of the Obama administration to take advantage of increased borrowing authority, but rather a natural consequence of the profundity of the recession and the legal obligation to pay the costs of mandatory spending programs.

If, as the latest reports indicate, Attorney General Eric Holder is serious about prosecuting the worst torture and abuse of “war on terror” prisoners that occurred during the Bush administration, then there’s some key evidence he’s going to want to take a look at:  photographs. Although Bush Justice Department prosecutors claimed they didn’t have the facts to support prosecuting anyone for the mysterious deaths and disappearances of detainees hauled out of Bagram and Abu Ghraib in body bags, the photographs – which two courts have now ordered the Obama administration to turn over – would seem likely to provide some of the missing evidence.

The photos I’m talking about are the same ones that, back in April, President Obama promised to release to the public by May. Then, after consulting with Defense Department and CIA leaders, he changed his mind. After the American Civil Liberties Union filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to obtain them, the photographs were ordered released by  a federal district court in New York in 2005 and then the court of appeals in 2008; both courts agreed that the photos are critical to the public debate over torture and the U.S. government’s counterterrorism tactics, and don’t fall under any exemption to the freedom of information law. Still, the Obama administration isn’t budging.

While the case was on appeal, lawyers from the same Washington law firm that Holder was then working at, Covington & Burling, wrote a powerful brief on behalf of 22 legal experts on the laws of war arguing for the photos’ release. These sorts of images are in part responsible for the regime of international humanitarian law that we have today, they argued.

The cornerstone of modern international humanitarian law — the Geneva Conventions of 1949 — was adopted after the release of vivid images of Nazi concentration camp survivors. And it was the United States and General Dwight D. Eisenhower himself who insisted on distributing huge volumes of these photos to the media. The images of corpses, prisoner remains and emaciated survivors helped persuade nations around the world to develop and adopt new universal humanitarian norms.

It’s because images can be so powerful and can motivate action that the Obama administration now wants to suppress them.

On Friday, the Justice Department filed a petition with the Supreme Court arguing that releasing the photos of detainee abuse would so inflame public opinion against the United States abroad that it would endanger the lives of U.S. soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

(Initially, the government refused to turn them over on the grounds that they would violate the privacy rights of the detainees. After the ACLU and the court agreed to have the photos redacted to conceal identifying information and protect personal privacy, the government came up with this second reason to object.)

On its face, the argument sounds pretty reasonable. I have to admit that when the administration first announced its change of heart, though Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Sullivan and many others were immediately outraged, I was somewhat sympathetic. After all, the Freedom of Information Act does include an exception to releasing information if it would reasonably be expected to “endanger the life or physical safety of any individual.” The photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib were certainly alarming. And who would want to endanger the lives of U.S. troops?

Meanwhile, the Justice Department had collected sworn statements from top military generals — including General Richard Myers, then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Nation’s highest ranking military officer — saying that releasing the photos would do just that. Who are we to question the top brass?

Amrit Singh, an ACLU lawyer handling the case, answered that for me yesterday. “The argument the government has put forward is unacceptable because it would afford the greatest protection from disclosure to records that depict the worst kind of government misconduct. That is fundamentally inconsistent with FOIA. And it’s fundamentally inconsistent with democracy.”

It’s a good point. Though I want to protect our troops as much as anybody, it turns out the law wasn’t drafted to protect Americans from retaliation that might result because their country did something illegal, or even just really embarrassing. If it were, then evidence of any illegal or upsetting U.S. government conduct would be exempt from disclosure. And that would defeat the entire purpose of the Freedom of Information law.

According to the Supreme Court, the purpose of FOIA is “to ensure an informed citizenry, vital to the functioning of a democratic society, needed to check against corruption and to hold the governors accountable to the governed.” So you can see how that would be seriously compromised by the government’s interpretation of the law here.

It turns out that when you look at the language of FOIA, the government’s interpretation doesn’t make much sense either.

Exemption 7(f) allows an agency to withhold “records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes, but only to the extent that the production of such law enforcement records or information … could reasonably be expected to endanger the life or physical safety of any individual.”

But does “any individual” mean any conceivable individual out there, or some specific individual that the government can identify?

The appeals court ruled that because Congress said the release must endanger “any individual” rather than just “endanger life or physical safety” generally to be considered exempt, Congress must have meant some identifiable individual – a particular witness to a crime or subject of a law enforcement investigation, for example. If Congress had meant to include any member of a group of people who could possibly become the target of someone’s anger, it would have used the more general phrase, the court reasoned. So the court ruled the exemption doesn’t apply, and the Obama administration has to turn over the photographs.

Now, the administration faces a dilemma. When it released the Office of Legal Counsel memos written by the now-infamous John Yoo authorizing the administration to torture prisoners abroad, it wasn’t prepared for the media firestorm that erupted — and the growing public pressure to prosecute. Reluctant to face that again, Obama and senior officials in his administration are trying hard now not to stoke the fires. (Even if they can go along with a limited prosecution along the lines of what Holder has described, they certainly don’t want to face calls for prosecuting senior Bush officials.)

But it looks like they can’t legally stop this release.

Sill, they can delay it. Supreme Court review could delay the case months or even years, depending on what the court decides to do. In the meantime, other reports will be released about the Bush era anti-terror tactics. Those include the Senate Intelligence committee’s investigation led by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the report from the ethics division of the Justice Department, the Office of Professional Responsibility, on the work of the Justice Department lawyers who crafted the memos, and, of course, the 2004 CIA inspector general report I wrote about earlier that’s supposed to be released by Aug. 24.

Which raises the question whether the government will invoke Exemption 7(f) of FOIA to try to withhold that report. After all, couldn’t the government make the exact same argument about the CIA report that it’s making about the photos? You see the slippery slope we’re on.

The CIA report apparently describes cases of murder and abuse so horrific that Holder was moved to consider initiating prosecutions. And that’s despite the fact that the Justice Department under President George W. Bush investigated those cases, but decided not to prosecute them. That report must be pretty upsetting.

So don’t be surprised if we start hearing that we shouldn’t be allowed to see that one either, because someone somewhere might get hurt.

The administration could, of course, try to distinguish the report from the photographs, arguing that, essentially, a picture is worth a thousand words. The photos may be just too powerful.

When faced with the atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps at the close of World War II, Eisenhower found that words failed him:

I have never felt able to describe my emotional reactions when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency. Up to that time I had known about it only generally or through secondary sources. I am certain, however that I have never at any other time experienced an equal sense of shock . . . as soon as I returned to Patton’s headquarters that evening I sent communications to both Washington and London, urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures. I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt.

-Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (1977), at 408-09.

One can only conclude that the Obama administration is taking refuge in that doubt, or is not prepared to face the consequences in this country once the veil of doubt is lifted.

Pres. George W. Bush and Sen. Barack Obama meet in the Oval Office on Monday. (whitehouse.gov)

And now comes the transition. After winning his historic victory last Tuesday, the nation’s first African-American president –and the first non-white chief executive elected in a white majority nation — President-elect Barack Obama has earned an interlude for celebration and relaxation.

But he has barely paused to breathe. Having reconceived campaign organization and fund-raising and redrawn the national political map, Obama may next rewrite the rulebook for political transitions. Already he has selected a White House chief of staff; is set to name more White House staffers this week, and is poised to function much like a sitting president well in advance of Inauguration Day.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

In the past, presidential transitions have posed dangerous stumbling blocks for the president-elect, as well as potential political windfalls, all the more so in times of economic emergency or international crisis. What might Obama expect as he navigates the 77-day waiting period?

For the most part, successful president-elects have kept their distance from the incumbent. Transitions hamstring incumbent presidents, particularly if the president-elect hails from the opposing party. It’s worse, of course, if the lame duck has lost his own campaign for re-election.

The transition, an interregnum that lasted four months until 1936, could be a difficult time. President Woodrow Wilson, for example, believed that he “would be without such moral backing from the nation as would be necessary to steady and control our relations with other governments.” Anticipating defeat in his 1916 re-election bid (he won a late, unexpected victory), Wilson worried that he “would be known to be the rejected, not the accredited, spokesman of the country; and yet the accredited spokesman would be without legal authority to speak for the nation.”

Accordingly, lame-duck presidents often try to draw the president-elect into their orbit — to win their endorsement for policies the outgoing leader lacks the political capital to pursue on his own. This year, Obama is already under pressure to cooperate with the Bush administration’s effort to relieve the global financial crisis.

Even before Election Day, Treasury Sec. Henry Paulson Jr. asked the candidates to join him in choosing the person to oversee the dispersal of the $700-billion bailout package. House Republican Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), has called on the next president to reach out “to the current president to say, ‘What can we do to work together so that on Jan. 20, I’ve got as big a head start on solving the problems as we can possibly achieve?’ ”

Obama may find it difficult to avoid such entanglements. The freshness and urgency of the economic crisis demand immediate response from the president-elect, but he must somehow avoid tying himself to Bush policies and becoming accountable for them.

Consider that, in December 1992, President-elect Bill Clinton’s transition team publicly endorsed the elder Bush administration’s decision to intensify U.S. military operations in Somalia. A year later, after U.S. forces had to withdraw in defeat after a chaotic battle in the Somali capital, Clinton suffered the political consequences for the failed intervention.

Franklin D. Roosevelt (Wikimedia Commons)

Heady president-elects have avoided such snares. In 1932, as the nation’s financial system unraveled and the Great Depression deepened, incumbent President Herbert Hoover sought President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt’s cooperation for his recovery program. The two men met several times, with Roosevelt calmly reassuring the nation while refusing to endorse Hoover initiatives, which Roosevelt considered anemic or misguided. After three years of depression, Roosevelt understood that any alliance with Hoover, however public-spirited it might seem in the short term, would only limit his freedom of action and tether him to his predecessor’s approach.

But if Obama must evade the warm embrace of President George W. Bush and dissociate himself from the administration’s approach to the financial crisis, he nonetheless needs some dramatic action to seize the agenda and reassure the nation. While assembling his administration remains the essential work of the transition, it will not suffice amid so acute a crisis.

In 1952, for example, Dwight D. Eisenhower redeemed his campaign promise to visit Korea and personally inspect the stalemated war zone. Little of substance came out of Eisenhower’s tour, but the widely publicized event dramatized a commander in control, someone preparing to tackle the nation’s most pressing challenge.

Forty years later, Clinton followed a similar script. Fulfilling his own campaign pledge to focus “like a laser” on the economy, Clinton convened an economic summit of 400 prominent businessmen, labor leaders and economists in Little Rock. The nationally televised event offered no concrete policy advances, but it vividly displayed the incoming chief executive’s mastery of policy detail and empathy for suffering Americans. Clinton seized the agenda even though he as yet lacked the authority to take action.

But while Obama can and must wield influence immediately, the president-elect should roll out specific policies carefully. For months, the presidential nominees have debated the details of campaign proposals, sparring over Obama’s tax plan and Sen. John McCain’s health-care program. Once Election Day passes, however, those plans normally find their way to history’s landfill. The shifting current of daily events and the practical demands of actually getting a bill through Congress relegate campaign rhetoric to the ash heap. Effective president-elects enunciate broad policy principles during the transition without yoking themselves to specific legislation that might quickly become obsolete.

Jimmy Carter suffered that fate in 1976, as he waited for Inauguration Day amid a gnawing and complex economic crisis. Stagflation, the crippling combination of inflation and economic stagnation gripped the United States, and spot fuel shortages complicated the manner.

During the campaign, unemployment had seemed the biggest economic problem and soon after Election Day, the Carter team announced an economic stimulus package. At its heart was a one-time tax rebate: $50 for each taxpayer as a quick, concentrated dose of stimulus.

But two months later, when President Carter took office, the economy had emerged from its doldrums. Unemployment had stabilized and inflation seemed to be the biggest threat. Carter canceled the rebate, infuriating legislative leaders who had worked hard to shepherd his proposal through Congress and earning the president a reputation for waffling and vacillation that he would never shake.

For better or worse, transitions can create lasting impressions: they can establish templates of effectiveness or create enduring images of incompetence that hamstring a president for years. “This victory alone,” Obama explained in his victory speech last Tuesday, “is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change.”

Opportunity and peril began last Wednesday.

Bruce J. Schulman is the Huntington professor of American history at Boston University. His latest book, co-edited with Julian E. Zelizer, is “Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s.” He is the author of “The ’70s: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society and Politics,” “Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism” and “From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt : Federal Policy, Economic Development and the Transformation of the South 1938-1980.”