Hope Burning

By Robert Scheer

So now we have Rambo Obama, a steely warrior who, according to a lengthy leaked insider account in The New York Times, hurls death-dealing drones at anyone who threatens the good old USA. Including children. Those children are presumed guilty by virtue of proximity, and the Times plays along, not even modifying a targeted terrorist with the word “alleged,” as once had been the paper’s convention: “When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises—but his family is with him—it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.”

Obama as the cool triggerman is an image useful to White House operatives as they buff the president’s persona for the coming election. But what it reveals is the mindset of a political cynic whose seductive words cloak the moral indifference of a methodical executioner. Forget Harry Truman, who obliterated the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or Lyndon Johnson, who carpet-bombed millions in Vietnam. The Democrats have got themselves another killer, one whose techniques are as devastatingly effective, but brilliantly refined.

The story obviously was planted in The New York Times to benefit the Obama political campaign. Otherwise, why would the president’s former chief of staff, William Daley, and three dozen current and past intelligence insiders provide the newspaper with the most sensitive details of national security decision-making?

Pfc. Bradley Manning was held for many months in solitary confinement for allegedly disclosing information of far lower security classification. The difference is that the top secrets in the news article are ones the president wants leaked in the expectation they will burnish his “tough on terrorism” credentials. This is clearly not the Obama whom many voted for in the hope that he would stick by his word, including the pledge he made on his second day in office to ban brutal interrogation and close the prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. “What the new president did not say was that the orders contained a few subtle loopholes,” the Times now reports concerning the early promises by Obama. “They reflected a still unfamiliar Barack Obama, a realist who, unlike some of his fervent supporters, was never carried away by his own rhetoric.”

Parse that sentence carefully to learn much of what is morally decrepit in our journalism as well as politics. The word “realist” is now identical to “hypocrite,” and the condemnation of immoral behavior addresses nothing more than “rhetoric” that only the “fervent” would take seriously. The Times writers all but thrill to the lying, as in recounting the new president’s response to advisers who warned him against sticking to his campaign promises on Guantanamo prisoners: “The deft insertion of some wiggle words in the president’s order showed that the advice was followed.”

How telling that reporters who might as well be PR flacks are so admiring of the power of “wiggle words” to free a politician from accountability to the voters who put him in office: “A few sharp-eyed observers inside and outside the government understood what the public did not. Without showing his hand, Mr. Obama had preserved three major policies—rendition, military commissions and indefinite detention—that have been targets of human rights groups since the 2001 terrorist attacks.”

The Obama answer to those human rights groups is the same as that offered by George W. Bush: Get the Justice Department to say that anything goes. When Obama wanted to kill “an American citizen, in a country with which the United States was not at war, in secret and without the benefit of a trial,” the Times tells us, “ ... the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel prepared a lengthy memo justifying that extraordinary step, asserting that while the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process applied, it could be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch.” Obama approved, and two American citizens were assassinated, including Samir Khan, who was not on any official list of targeted terrorists. “This is an easy one,” Obama told his chief of staff.

What makes such decisions particularly easy is that Obama does not have to release any details of drone attacks or the legal rulings of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) that justify the assassinations—exactly the practice that Bush followed in regard to the OLC briefs that he cited for the legality of his torture policy. Michael Hayden, a director of the CIA under Bush and now an adviser to presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney, accurately described the danger that this poses to a democratic society: “This program rests on the personal legitimacy of the president, and that’s not sustainable. I have lived the life of someone taking action on the basis of secret O.L.C. memos, and it ain’t a good life. Democracies do not make war on the basis of legal memos locked in a [Department of Justice] safe.”

But imperial plutocracies do.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/hope_burning_20120531/

As someone who did vote for Obama and is willing to admit it, I will take a shot at answering this...

I voted for Obama because historically, democratic presidents have been better able to handle the national debt than republican presidents. I was looking forward to him putting the kibosh on these trillion dollar give-aways to wall-street.

When he took office, not only did he let Bush's bailout continue, he took ownership of it and seemed to proudly call it his own.

Most political measures put me a little bit left of center, but it seems that Obama, despite being a democrat, is pretty far to the right.



I too am very high on your scale, but I have been for quite a while. Long before 2008 I felt that there is something fundamentally wrong with our election system and we need a better way of voting.

I'm a fan of an idea that California is trying out right now. A primary that has everybody from both parties on one ticket, then a final election that pits the two that got the most votes in the primary. I think such a system will tend to favor moderates (regardless of party) rather than the current system that favors pitting the poles against each other.

Obaummer has spent money over twice as fast as GW, who ws no fiscal conservative.

Daniel, was your shot at answering that question that you would NOT vote for him again? You didn't actually come out and say it.

And the other early on posters who were proud to have voted for this lunatic left wing Zealot? Where are you? Where do you stand? Romney in his sleep would be better than this.

Really?

When Mitt Romney was a college freshman, he told fellow residents of his Stanford University dormitory that he sometimes disguised himself as a police officer – a crime in many states, including Michigan and California, where he then lived. And he had the uniform on display as proof.

So recalls Robin Madden, who had also just arrived as a freshman, the startling incident began when Romney called him and two or three other residents into his room, saying, “Come up, I want to show you something.” When they entered Romney’s room, “and laid out on his bed was a Michigan State Trooper’s uniform.”

Madden, a native Texan who graduated from Stanford in 1970 and went on to become a successful television producer and writer, has never forgotten that strange moment, which he has recounted to friends over the years as he observed his former classmate’s political ascent. The National Memo learned of the incident from a longtime Madden friend to whom he had mentioned it years ago.

Said Madden in a recent interview, “He told us that he had gotten the uniform from his father,” George Romney, then the Governor of Michigan, whose security detail was staffed by uniformed troopers. “He told us that he was using it to pull over drivers on the road. He also had a red flashing light that he would attach to the top of his white Rambler.”

In Madden’s recollection, confirmed by his wife Susan, who also attended Stanford during those years, “we thought it was all pretty weird. We all thought, ‘Wow, that’s pretty creepy.’ And after that, we didn’t have much interaction with him,” although both Madden and Romney were prep school boys living in the same dorm, called Rinconada.

Other eyewitnesses have previously recalled Romney’s alleged use of a police or trooper uniform in pranks during his high school years at the exclusive Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

Phillip Maxwell, a prep school buddy, told the New Republic in 2008 that Romney had pulled over students from a girls school next door to Cranbrook while wearing a police uniform as a prank. Other former classmates described Mitt as a “happy-go-lucky guy known less for his achievements and more for his pranks.”

In The Real Romney, a biography published by Boston Globe reporters Michael Kranish and Scott Helman this year, another former friend recalled how Romney had “put a siren on top of his car and chased two of his friends who were driving around with their dates.” The two friends were in on the scheme, but the girls were not. There was beer in the car trunk, according to a prearranged plan. Mitt told his two counterparts to get out of their vehicle and into his car. Then they drove off, leaving the girls behind.

“It was a terrible thing to do,” said one of his accomplices, a Cranbrook classmate named Graham McDonald.

To some observers, Romney’s alleged masquerading as a cop to intimidate innocent drivers shows a character defect that is also revealed by other bullying incidents during his youth. When those incidents were disclosed in the Washington Post earlier this year, Romney issued an apology of sorts, stating that he had done “stupid” things and was sorry if he had harmed anyone.

While he may have believed that his cop antics were harmless, Romney may well have been breaking the law merely by donning a police uniform, committing a crime if he pretended to be a cop and a felony if he did so more than once. In both California and Michigan, any person convicted of fraudulently impersonating a police officer may be sentenced to up to one year in prison. (The National Memo has collected some other examples of police impersonators.)

The Romney campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Todd,

What we need is another Clinton. Now there was a man who knew what it took to balance the budget.

Let's look at the numbers... In GW's last year in office, he presided over an increase in the debt by 14.9% while in Obama's first year the debut only increased by 14.1% and the defect has been improving every year since he took office. Source: http://www.skymachines.com/US-National-Debt-Per-Capita-Percent-of-GDP-and-by-Presidental-Term.htm

As for your other comment, Obama is far from a left wing zealot. He actually leans quite far to the right. Source: http://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2012

Honestly, if Rick Santorum had won the republican nod it would have been a no brainer for me, but at this point I'm undecided.

Staring Mitt "suicidal destruction of the Republican Party" Romney's father...



Like father like son..

How's that voter suppression deal working for you GOoPers?


JUNE 07, 2012
TBTimes Editorial: Don't repeat history, Gov. Scott



An editorial in Friday's Tampa Bay Times':

Dear Gov. Rick Scott,

Take note of this photograph. On a June day in 1963, Alabama Gov. George Wallace stood in a schoolhouse door to keep black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama. He refused U.S. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach's request to move, stepping aside only after President John F. Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard and ordered Wallace to let the students enroll.

This June, the governor of another Southern state is challenging the federal government's authority. Nearly 50 years after Wallace's showdown, you are standing between Floridians and their right to vote as U.S. citizens. We agree that only citizens should vote, but your approach to cleaning up the voter rolls is fatally flawed. The U.S. Justice Department and county supervisors of election have reached the same conclusion and told you to stop, yet you persist.

Gov. Scott, we do not believe you share Wallace's hateful views on race. Nor are we equating young African-American students of the '60s with noncitizens of today. But it was wrong then to deny those students their right to a public education, and it is wrong now to use an inaccurate database that could deprive U.S. citizens of their right to vote. Of nearly 2,700 voters the state identified as potentially ineligible because they were not citizens, hundreds already have proven they are citizens. Only a handful have been confirmed as noncitizens, and many Floridians who are citizens stand to lose their voting rights by not responding to threatening letters from elections officials. The practical result disproportionately affects poor and minority residents and prevents them from voting in much the same way that black students were denied entry to public schools and universities in Alabama.

Wallace spoke of states' rights and defended the indefensible by portraying the federal government as the enemy. Your administration's intemperate letter to the Justice Department strikes a similar tone. The rights of U.S. citizens to vote in Florida elections should not be compromised by your continuing political fights with the Obama administration.

Florida should not be at war with Washington, and Floridians should not have to rely on the Justice Department to prevent their rights from being compromised by their state government. Governor, we again join in the call for you to stop this flawed purging of the voter rolls. To continue this approach puts at risk the image of this state, the rights of its citizens and your own reputation.

It's all good Todd. Mittens explains everything.

Hello, human diary. It is I, Mitt Romney, your better.

Reporters have apparently been querying, Mr. Diary, about other instances of youthful indiscretion I may have engaged in during the time I was an indiscreet youth. This time it was about an incident in which I showed my fellow college chums a Michigan State Trooper uniform that I had procured from my father, during the time he was governor and I was an indiscreet youth, and which I used in order to make random traffic stops on the roads of Michigan during those times that I was feeling particularly irritated with the commoner units for their various insufficiencies. (I had also procured a flashing red light to affix to my beloved Rambler, thus better completing the impression of law enforcement officer.)

My staff seems to be worried about this revelation. I am not sure why; I merely did what any respectable son of a wealthy and powerful man might do, which is to use his power and influence to place myself in positions of power over others, whether that power was deserved or not. I think I would have been more foolish as a wealthy teen to not dress up in a State Trooper uniform procured by my powerful father in order to pull drivers over and reprimand them about their driving habits or the incorrect heights of their cars.

Indeed, I have tried my best to fulfill that same role throughout my life—that is, to use my wealth and my parent's political stature to place myself in positions of authority over others, as is appropriate of youth within all respectable circles of wealth and political power. It has not always worked out to my satisfaction, since elections are irritatingly complicated things, but I consider it a point of pride that I have been so rigorous in my attempts at it. Whether it be pulling motorists over by pretending to be an officer of the law or requiring my less wealthy school chums to wear their hair the correct length, my efforts to assist commoners and other less fortunate units by imparting to them my own wisdom and decision-making capabilities was instilled in me, I am proud to say, at an early age.

Nevertheless, my advisers unanimously feel this is a subject that should not be discussed further. Eric F. has forbidden me from mentioning it during the campaign. It is confusing, as I thought my staff would be quite pleased about the anecdote; if nothing else it shows an impressive amount of creativity and initiative-taking, since as you well know, Mr. Diary, there were few other opportunities for a young American man in the 1960s to put on a uniform.

Are you a reasonable person Todd?

Supreme Court forced to ignore idiot birthers yet again

by Kaili Joy Gray

This is not excellent news for Mitt Romney's favorite surrogate, Donald Trump:

The Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal challenging President Barack Obama's U.S. citizenship and his eligibility to serve as commander in chief.

And no, the justices did not bother to issue a statement of explanation—just a lot of eye rolling.

So will this finally put an end to the birthers? Of course, because birthers are perfectly reasonable people who will no doubt accept this as the final word that yes, the president was born in Hawaii, and yes, Hawaii is in the United States, so yes, he is an American citizen.

Either that, or they'll assume that the Supreme Court justices are now part of the ever-growing conspiracy to cover up the shocking truth that something something Kenyan socialist something.

Anyone want to make a $10,000 bet on it?


Damn activist judges.

Family net worth plummets nearly 40%

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- The average American family's net worth dropped almost 40% between 2007 and 2010, according to a triennial study released Monday by the Federal Reserve.

The stunning drop in median net worth -- from $126,400 in 2007 to $77,300 in 2010 -- indicates that the recession wiped away 18 years of savings and investment by families.

http://money.cnn.com/2012/06/11/news/economy/fed-family-net-worth/