Fuck Obama

[justdrew]

this seld out useless piece of ass is at it again:

once more the traitor in chief does nothing but suck up to the buishes, one more time: FUCK OBAMA

Obama names Bush’s former spokeperson to Broadcast board

Hopefully, the United States won't be broadcasting any programs about the Cuban missile crisis to foreign audiences.

President Barack Obama has tapped a former top aide of his predecessor George W. Bush to a key post on a board overseeing government-sponsored international broadcasting, just a few weeks after she called his administration's behavior "unbecoming" with regards to the so-called "White House war with Fox News."

Dana Perino, the first Republican woman to serve as White House press secretary, was appointed late Wednesday to the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG).

'I'm honored by the president's announcement and I'm looking forward to serving on the bipartisan board, if I'm confirmed,' Perino said.

She currently serves as chief issues counselor for the United States at international public relations firm Burson-Marsteller and as a contributor to the Fox News Channel, which has sparred with the Obama administration over the past several months.
Story continues below...

Created in 1994, the BBG oversees all of the US government's non-military international broadcasting outlets, including Voice of America, Alhurra television, Radio Sawa, TV Marti, Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Europe.

Obama also nominated Walter Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute leadership group and former CNN chief executive and Time magazine editor, to serve as BBG chairman. All nominees must next be confirmed by the Senate.

The BBG's mission is to "promote and sustain freedom and democracy by broadcasting accurate and objective news and information about the United States and the world to audiences overseas."

The BBG's site notes, "The Board is composed of nine bipartisan members with expertise in the fields of journalism, broadcasting, and public and international affairs. Eight members are appointed by the President of the United States and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. The ninth, an ex-officio member, is the Secretary of State. The current members of the Board are: James K. Glassman, Chairman; Joaquin F. Blaya; Blanquita Walsh Cullum; D. Jeffrey Hirschberg; Edward E. Kaufman; Steven J. Simmons; and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Nearly two years ago, as RAW STORY reported, Perino was widely mocked after an appearance on National Public Radio's quiz show, "Wait, Wait ... Don't Tell Me," where she shared a story she'd previously only shared in private.

When a reporter asked her a question during a White House briefing in which he referred to the Cuban Missile Crisis -- she didn't know what it was.

"I was panicked a bit because I really don't know about . . . the Cuban Missile Crisis," said Perino, who at 35 was born about a decade after the 1962 U.S.-Soviet nuclear showdown. "It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I'm pretty sure."

The exchange was first noted in the Washington Post.

"I came home and I asked my husband," she said on air. "I said, 'Wasn't that like the Bay of Pigs thing?' And he said, 'Oh, Dana.' "

Perino was referring to the White House briefing held on October 26, when a reporter asked her, "Do you want to address the remarks by President Putin, who said the United States setting up a missile defense shield in Eastern Europe was like the Soviet Union putting missiles in Cuba, setting up a Cuban missile crisis?"

"Well, I think that the historical comparison is not -- does not exactly work," Perino had responded.

Perino is a contributer to Fox News, where she just recently appeared to slam the media over its treatment of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin.

Perino told Fox's Greta Van Susteren, "And actually -- you know, I got to travel this weekend, too, out in Colorado and Wyoming, and just meeting some people who said they were excited about the book coming out, interested in what I thought, did I think she was going to run for president. But one of the things I heard repeatedly is that, I feel like I can trust her and I feel like I can relate to her. And I don't even think that some of the media, when they are asking questions about her or to her, realize how condescending they sound, not just to Sarah Palin, but to all the people who might admire her."

The Hill notes, "The Obama administration and Fox News have openly feuded for several months. The White House has accused Fox of injecting opinion into its news coverage of the administration."

Think Progress noted that last month on Fox, "Perino sharply criticized the Obama administration’s tactics and expressed absolute shock at the example the United States was setting for 'the free press in emerging democracies,' comparing the criticisms of Fox News to when 'Hugo Chavez shuts down television stations.'”

PERINO: That was a coordinated, calculated attack. It was unbecoming. And if you look at some of the coverage of what mainstream media covers when, for example, somebody like a Hugo Chavez shuts down television stations, he calls them illegitimate.

Now, I’m not suggesting that this White House believes that they are going to come over here and shut down Fox News. But they are defining a narrative in their first year, and it’s going to be very hard to recover from it. [...]

Through our State Department, we are trying to help emerging democracies get journalists and government officials to talk to one another, because freedom of the press is essential to any democracy. Believe me, they are watching this, and they have — surely are raising questions.

Roll Call reports, "This is the second time a president has nominated McCue to the Broadcasting Board of Governors. President George W. Bush also nominated her, but Senate Republicans refused to move her nomination to the Senate floor despite repeated attempts by Reid. Since leaving the White House, Perino, a frequent commentator on Fox News, has worked as the chief issues counselor for the United States at Burson-Marsteller."

[RocketMan]

this sold out useless piece of ass is at it again

ARE YOU REFERRING TO THE PREZNIT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, SON?

I was just about to post this, congrats on beating me to it. It's just pathetic, day by day, week by week. They're starting to compare him to Jimmy Carter, but that's outrageous towards Jimmy Carter, I find.

[justdrew]

this sold out useless piece of ass is at it again

ARE YOU REFERRING TO THE PREZNIT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, SON?

I'm afraid it's come to that... :facepalm:

Barrack Pétain Obamma

[ninakat]

Obama orders 30-35,000 more troops for Afghanistan, surge to begin by Christmas

Nov. 30, 2009

After months of debate, President Barack Obama will spell out a costly Afghanistan war expansion to a skeptical public Tuesday night, coupling an infusion of as many as 35,000 more troops with a vow that there will be no endless U.S. commitment. His first orders have already been made: at least one group of Marines who will be in place by Christmas.

Obama has said that he prefers "not to hand off anything to the next president" and that his strategy will "put us on a path toward ending the war." But he doesn't plan to give any more exact timetable than that Tuesday night.

The president will end his 92-day review of the war with a nationally broadcast address in which he will lay out his revamped strategy from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. He spent part of Monday briefing foreign allies in a series of private meetings and phone calls.

Before Obama's call to Britain's Gordon Brown, the prime minister announced that 500 more U.K. troops would arrive in southern Afghanistan next month — making a British total of about 10,000 in the country. And French President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose nation has more than 3,000 in Afghanistan, said French troops would stay "as long as necessary" to stabilize the country.

Obama's war escalation includes sending 30,000 to 35,000 more American forces into Afghanistan in a graduated deployment over the next year, on top of the 71,000 already there. There also will be a fresh focus on training Afghan forces to take over the fight and allow the Americans to leave.

He also will deliver a deeper explanation of why he believes the U.S. must continue to fight more than eight years after the war was started following the Sept. 11 attacks by al-Qaida terrorists based in Afghanistan. He will emphasize that Afghan security forces need more time, more schooling and more U.S. combat backup to be up to the job on their own, and he will make tougher demands on the governments of Pakistan as well as Afghanistan.

"This is not an open-ended commitment," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said. "We are there to partner with the Afghans, to train the Afghan national security forces, the army and the police so that they can provide security for their country and wage a battle against an unpopular insurgency."

On a few of the bigger questions most on the minds of increasingly restive members of Congress and the public, such as how much the additional $30 billion to $35 billion cost will balloon the already skyrocketed federal deficit, how long the U.S. commitment will continue and how it will wind down, Obama was expected to make references without offering specifics.

Gibbs said detailed discussions on costs would be held later with lawmakers.

Even before explaining his decision, Obama told the military to begin executing the force increases. The commander in chief gave the deployment orders Sunday night, during an Oval Office meeting in which he told key military and White House advisers of his final decision.

At least one group of Marines is expected to deploy within two or three weeks of Obama's announcement and will be in Afghanistan by Christmas, military officials said. Larger deployments will begin early next year.

The initial infusion is a recognition by the administration that something tangible needs to happen quickly, officials said. The immediate addition of Marines will provide badly needed reinforcements for those fighting against Taliban gains in the southern Helmand province, and also could lend reassurance to both Afghans and a war-weary U.S. public.

(full story continues at link)

[ninakat]

Americans Are Deeply Involved In Afghan Drug Trade

The U.S. set the stage for the Afghan (and Pakistan) war eight years ago, when it handed out drug dealing franchises to warlords on Washington's payroll. Now the Americans, acting as Boss of All Bosses, have drawn up hit lists of rival, “Taliban” drug lords. “It is a gangster occupation, in which U.S.-allied drug dealers are put in charge of the police and border patrol.”

By Glen Ford

“U.S.-allied drug dealers are put in charge of the police and border patrol, while their rivals are placed on American hit lists.”

November 30, 2009 "BAR" -- - If you’re looking for the chief kingpin in the Afghanistan heroin trade, it’s the United States. The American mission has devolved to a Mafiosi-style arrangement that poisons every military and political alliance entered into by the U.S. and its puppet government in Kabul. It is a gangster occupation, in which U.S.-allied drug dealers are put in charge of the police and border patrol, while their rivals are placed on American hit lists, marked for death or capture. As a result, Afghanistan has been transformed into an opium plantation that supplies 90 percent of the world’s heroin.

An article in the current issue of Harper’s magazine explores the inner workings of the drug-infested U.S. occupation, it’s near-total dependence on alliances forged with players in the heroin trade. The story centers on the town of Spin Boldak, on the southeastern border with Pakistan, gateway to the opium fields of Kandahar and Helmand provinces. The chief Afghan drug lord is also the head of the border patrol and the local militia. The author is an undercover U.S.-based journalist who was befriended by the drug lord’s top operatives and met with the U.S. and Canadian officers that collaborate with the drug dealer on a daily basis.

The alliance was forged by American forces during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and has endured and grown ever since. The drug lord, and others like him throughout the country, is not only immune to serious American interference, he has been empowered through U.S. money and arms to consolidate his drug business at the expense of drug-dealing rivals in other tribes, forcing some of them into alliance with the Taliban. On the ground in Pashtun-speaking Afghanistan, the war is largely between armies run by heroin merchants, some aligned with the Americans, others with the Taliban. The Taliban appear to be gaining the upper hand in this Mafiosa gang war, the origins of which are directly rooted in U.S. policy.

“It is a war whose order of battle is largely defined by the drug trade.”

Is it any wonder, then, that the United States so often launches air strikes against civilian wedding parties, wiping out the greater part of bride and groom's extended families? America’s drug-dealing allies have been dropping dimes on rival clans and tribes, using the Americans as high-tech muscle in their deadly feuds. Now the Americans and their European occupation partners have institutionalized the rules of gangster warfare with official hit lists of drug dealers to be killed or captured on sight – lists drawn up by other drug lords affiliated with the occupation forces.

This is the “war of necessity” that President Barack Obama has embraced as his own. It is a war whose order of battle is largely defined by the drug trade. Obama's generals call for tens of thousands of new U.S. troops in hopes of lessening their dependency on the militias and police forces currently controlled by American-allied drug dealers. But of course, that will only push America's Afghan partners in the drug trade into the arms of the Taliban, who will cut a better deal. Then the generals were argue that they need even more U.S. troops.

The Americans created this drug-saturated hell, and their occupation is now doomed by it. Unfortunately, they have also doomed millions of Afghans in the process.

For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Glen Ford. On the web, go to http://www.BlackAgendaReport.com .

[John Schröder]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/11/17-5

Published on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 by Spiegel Online/Germany

Obama Has Failed the World on Climate Change

by Christian Schwägerl

US President Barack Obama came to office promising hope and change. But on climate change, he has followed in the footsteps of his predecessor George W. Bush. Now, should the climate summit in Copenhagen fail, the blame will lie squarely with Obama.

The folder labeled "climate change" that George W. Bush left behind for his successor on the desk of the Oval Office in January likely wasn't a thick one. Although Bush once said that America is overly-dependent on oil, he never got beyond that insight. He was too busy waging war on Iraq and searching for a legal basis for extraordinary renditions to pay much attention to the real threat facing humanity. "Forget the climate" seems to have been Bush's unofficial motto.

But few people expected that the Barack Obama, of all people, would continue his predecessor's climate change plan. When he took office at the beginning of 2009, it was clear that the success of the UN Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen in December depended almost entirely on the US -- that America needed to take a clear leadership role on a problem that could shake civilization to its very core.

Only if the US manages to reduce its excessive energy consumption, commit itself to mandatory CO2 emission reduction targets and help finance the move away from oil for poorer countries, is there still a chance that countries like China and India will do the same and that a dangerous warming of the Earth can be stopped. On the weekend, Obama announced that there would be no agreement on binding rules in Copenhagen. It was the admission of a massive failing -- and the prelude to a truly dramatic phase of international climate policy.

Obama Lied to the Europeans

Barack Obama cast himself as a "citizen of the world" when he delivered his well-received campaign speech in Berlin in the summer of 2008. But the US president has now betrayed this claim. In his Berlin speech, he was dishonest with Europe. Since then, Obama has neglected the single most important issue for an American president who likes to imagine himself as a world citizen, namely his country's addiction to fossil fuels and the risks of unchecked climate change. Health care reform and other domestic issues were more important to him than global environmental threats. He was either unwilling or unable to convince skeptics in his own ranks and potential defectors from the ranks of the Republicans to support him, for example by promising alternative investments as a compensation for states with large coal reserves.

Obama's announcement at the APEC summit that it was no longer possible to secure a binding treaty in Copenhagen, is the result of his own negligence. China, India and other emerging economies have always spoken openly about the fact that the US, as the world's largest emitter of CO2, has to be proactive in commiting itself to targets agreed on by way of international negotiation. But that is not America's style. The US is quite happy to see itself as the leader of the Western world. But when it comes to climate change, America has once again failed miserably -- for the umpteenth time.

If the rest of the world were to follow the US example in their approach to fossil fuels, the oceans would not only heat up, but would probably soon begin to boil. American CO2 emissions per capita are about twice as high as those in comparable industrialized nations and many times greater than those of the developing world. The climate change bill that is currently making its way through Congress does not go nearly far enough -- and that is Obama's fault. The bill proposed reducing CO2 emissions by a ridiculous 4 percent relative to 1990 levels, by 2020. Climate researchers believe that reductions of 40 percent or more are required.

The bill has since been watered down even more -- by exactly the kind of lobbying interests which the new US president had promised to overcome. Obama has neglected to communicate the importance of climate change to his fellow citizens by speaking about it in a major speech or in his much-loved "town hall" meetings. And he has left it to the Europeans to take the lead.

Americans Do Not Look Beyond their Own Borders

Obama's priorities are wrong. Copenhagen is not just any old summit -- it is the long-awaited climax of many years of negotiations, negotiations whose failure was only averted at the last minute at the Bali summit two years ago. Industry and energy companies around the world will use the results of the Copenhagen summit as a benchmark when they are planning their investments for the coming years and decades.

Obama was quite happy to make the trip to Copenhagen in October to support his hometown Chicago's bid to host the Olympic Games. But he is currently leaving open the question of whether he will come to the Danish capital in December for the UN Climate Change Conference. In doing so, he has given other world leaders the signal that they do not need to attend. If the Copenhagen summit, which energy strategists and environmentalists have been preparing for two years, is a failure, then it will mainly be Obama's fault.

Admittedly the Europeans have been slow to make concrete pledges of the billions of euros that are needed to help developing countries combat climate change, but at least they are prepared to make significant CO2 reductions of up to 30 percent by 2020, relative to 1990 levels. The US, however, is dragging its feet, preferring tactics to strategy -- just as was the case under George W. Bush.

Dreamt Up by Hollywood

For most Americans, the world beyond the US's borders is nothing more than an irritating nuisance. Hence arguments based on appeals about drowning Bangladeshis, starving Africans and flooded islands in Indonesia have little effect. In Hollywood, the United States has an industry that continually pushes the materialistic ideal of Western prosperity to billions of people around the world, while at the same time bombarding them with apocalyptic visions in the form of disaster movies.

Many Americans clearly also believe that real climate change is just something dreamt up by the entertainment industry.

Obama has proven himself to be unable to put an end to the lies that modern American society is based on. He is unable to overcome the entrenched lobbyists of the oil and coal industries and make the reality clear to his compatriots: They are the worst energy wasters on the planet -- and are thus indirectly a major threat to world peace in the 21st century. Although they do not enjoy a higher quality of life than Europeans, Americans consume twice as much fossil fuel per capita. Their cars are too big, their homes are not energy efficient and they have yet to focus their talents for innovation away from trivial entertainment gadgets and toward renewable energy technologies.

The Main Culprit

It may seem arrogant to take the Americans to task to such a degree. But at least in Europe, many are willing to question their own lifestyle and to look at events beyond their own borders.

The Copenhagen summit, which is just three weeks away, is not lost yet. But if the worst-case scenario becomes reality at Copenhagen and at the follow-up conferences -- if, in other words, world leaders ignore the findings of the global scientific community -- then the US will find itself in a very uncomfortable position. America will be seen as the primary culprit of global warming -- and this after the US, with its rampant real estate speculation, has given us a global economic crisis which has not only destroyed assets, but pushed 100 million people worldwide into hunger. With that kind of track record, the US hardly has a claim any more to the leadership of the Western world -- let alone a Nobel Peace Prize for its leader.

A world of flooded coasts, dried-up rivers and disappearing rainforests will lead to massive refugee movements and conflict. The Nobel Committee should postpone the award of the Nobel Peace Prize from Dec. 10 to Dec. 20. Only if Obama has achieved a convincing deal at the Copenhagen conference will there be a real reason to honor him.

© 2009 Spiegel Online
--Christian Schwägerl

[John Schröder]

http://www.truthout.org/1120094

Obama’s Failure to Close Guantánamo by January Deadline Is Disastrous

Friday 20 November 2009

by: Andy Worthington, t r u t h o u t | Report

President Obama’s admission in China that he will miss his self-imposed deadline for the closure of Guantánamo is disastrous for the majority of the 215 men still held in the detention facility, and for those who hoped, ten months ago, that the president would move swiftly to close this bitter icon of the Bush administration’s lawless detention and interrogation policies in the "war on terror."

Despite announcing the closure of Guantánamo on his second day in office as part of a number of executive orders rolling back the Bush administration’s executive overreach, Obama then failed to follow up with a detailed plan. He missed the opportunity to bring a number of wrongly imprisoned men to the US mainland (the Uighurs, Muslims from China whose release into the US had been ordered by a district court judge), and allowing Republican fearmongers to seize the initiative, mobilizing lawmakers (including some in Obama’s own party) to pass legislation preventing any cleared prisoner from being released into the United States.

Recently, lawmakers were even prepared to go so far as to prevent the administration from bringing prisoners to the US mainland for any reason, even to face trials. Senior officials successfully fought back against this proposal, and announced last week that ten prisoners, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-confessed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, were to be brought to the US mainland to face trials, either in federal courts or in a revamped version of the much-criticized military commissions, introduced in November 2001, and revived by Congress in 2006 after the Supreme Court ruled that they were illegal.

However, administration officials have also explained, as The Washington Post described it, that the government does not intend to put more than 40 prisoners in total on trial, leaving 175 men in Guantánamo in a predicament that has been troubling since Congress rose up in revolt against Obama’s intentions, and that has suddenly become even more alarming.

While Obama’s deadline stood, there remained the possibility that the president could persuade lawmakers to drop their opposition to bringing these 175 men to the US mainland, so that Guantánamo could be closed as promised.

Now, however, with the president publicly conceding that this will not be possible and refusing to set a new deadline, it is difficult to see what pressure the administration can exert on lawmakers to persuade them to overturn their opposition to allowing any prisoners into the US unless they are to face trials.

As a result, prisoners cleared by military review boards under the Bush administration, by the Obama administration’s interagency task force (established as part of his executive orders) or by the US courts, after successful habeas corpus petitions, who cannot be repatriated because of fears that they will be tortured in their home countries, have no alternative but to in Guantánamo, until, if possible, other countries can be found to accept them.

According to officials, around 90 prisoners cleared for release are still at Guantánamo, and a majority of these - from countries including Algeria, China, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Uzbekistan - cannot be repatriated. European countries have so far accepted a handful of cleared prisoners, but a major stumbling block to the acceptance of others has been the Americans’ refusal to accept cleared prisoners themselves.

The other group - numbering around 75, according to administration officials - are those whom the government does not wish to either charge or release. It either claims that they are too dangerous to be released but that not enough evidence exists to put them on trial, or that the evidence is tainted through the use of torture (or, as the Washington Post put it, "because of evidentiary issues and limits on the use of classified material"). This is deeply disturbing, as there is simply no excuse for holding people in what is essentially an identical form of "preventive detention" to that practiced by the Bush administration.

For a small number of these men - eight, to date - the administration can justify its actions because they lost their habeas corpus petitions before district court judges, who ruled that the government had established, by a preponderance of the evidence, that they were associated with al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban. As a result, the government can continue to hold them under the Authorization for Use of Military Force, the founding document of the Bush administration’s "war on terror." Through this authorization, Congress permitted the president "to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons."

It is difficult to see why administration officials mentioned the number of prisoners whom the administration intends to hold indefinitely without charge or trial, as their ongoing habeas corpus petitions will put these decisions in the hands of judges, where they belong. In the long run, it is uncertain how acceptable it is to hold prisoners on this basis, especially if it turns out that they may be held for the rest of their lives for "crimes" no more egregious than, for example, cooking for an Arab fighting force supporting the Taliban in 2001.

In a world unsullied by the Bush administration’s lawlessness, they would have been held as prisoners of war protected by the Geneva Conventions, who can be held until the end of hostilities (in which case they would still be held, as no one seems to have any idea when this particular war will come to an end). However, this didn’t happen, of course, and, as a result, the administration needs to do all in its power to facilitate the habeas corpus petitions of the majority of these 75 men, and to release those whose petitions succeed (as in 30 of the 38 cases so far decided).

Even so, it remains unacceptable that these men should have to stay in Guantánamo while their petitions proceed to court, just as it remains unacceptable that cleared prisoners should languish at Guantánamo for one minute longer, let alone for months or possibly years beyond the deadline that has proven impossible for the administration to honor.

In an interview with Fox News that followed his announcement about Guantánamo, President Obama explained, "We are on a path and a process where I would anticipate that Guantánamo will be closed next year. I’m not going to set an exact date because a lot of this is also going to depend on cooperation from Congress."

That last line sums up the problem succinctly, and I can only hope that this cooperation will be forthcoming, although one major problem, clearly, is that Republicans will delight in thwarting the President still further. If it does not happen, however, the failure to close Guantánamo will cast a dark shadow on Obama’s presidency, and an even darker one on the prisoners - whether cleared men, or others still held without charge or trial – who will rightly conclude that, for them, there really is no justice in the United States.

[John Schröder]

http://pubrecord.org/commentary/6109/obama-treasury/

Obama Must Toss the Bums in Treasury Out, End the Wars, and Start Leading

By Dave Lindorff
The Public Record
Nov 19th, 2009

If you are sitting in class taking a test, and you’ve chosen to sit amongst your bone-headed, slacker friends, don’t turn to them for help when you can’t figure out of any of the answers. They may all tell you the same thing, but they’ll all be wrong.

That’s the situation President Obama finds himself in today in the White House. Having surrounded himself with the very Wall Street con men who set up the crooked game that led to the current financial crisis and economic collapse, and finding that the lousy advice they have been giving him since last January has left the country still mired in deepening economic decline, with the banks still not lending and unemployment still mounting, and with growing signs that instead of bottoming out and starting to recover, the economy is threatening to fall a second time, to new lows and higher unemployment, Obama has turned to the same rotten advisors for answers.

A few days ago, in an interview with Fox-TV while he was in China off all places (a country that has made a stupendous stimulus investment to create domestic jobs!) Obama warned, for the first time, that America faces the possibility of a “double-dip” recession. That’s fine as far as it goes. I agree. But what did he say the risk was? Not that the government has been failing to put significant numbers of people back to work, but that the government keeps piling up deficits.

This has to be the lamest economic thinking since Herbert Hoover started tightening the screws on government spending at the onset of the Great Depression in 1930.

Clearly the American government needs to do just the opposite of worrying about deficits. The only growth the US economy has seen to date has been the result of government funding—the cash-for-clunkers program gave a brief restoration of pulse to the auto industry, and the $8000 tax credit for buying a first home kicked up home sales briefly. We know this because when the clunkers program ended, auto sales crashed, and when the deadline approached for the end to the new home tax credit, home building plunged almost 11 percent. The hundreds of billions of dollars poured into so-called “shovel-ready” state and local projects like roads, schools, etc., may have added or saved as much as a million jobs, but the economy lost many times that many jobs over the same period.

The problem with these stimulus programs is that they are inefficient ways to create jobs or preserve jobs. If roughly one million jobs were created through the stimulus spending of say $200 billion (assuming that the February $800-billion stimulus program, to mollify Republicans, consisted of one-half tax cuts and only one-half actual federal spending, and that this federal spending was spread evenly over a two-year period, that’s $200,000 per job!

If, instead, Obama had chucked the dunces at Treasury and in his Council of Economic Advisors, and instead asked your Labor Secretary to initiate a wide-ranging $200-billion-per-year jobs program, hiring the unemployed at perhaps $20-25,000 per person to do everything from teach in overcrowded urban schools to laying high-speed rail trackbeds, from cleaning up parks to putting insulation in homes, he could have given jobs to close 8 million people—people who would have then spent their money on goods and services and helped rally the economy from the bottom up.

Deficits? Who gives a damn about deficits at this point! The country is up to the gills in debt without creating any jobs. (It’s kind of like my mortgage. Why would I worry about using my credit card to buy food for the week if I was low on cash, when my mortgage has me deep in the red for the next ten years? Obama’s financial advisors, on the evidence, would tell me I should let my family go hungry, because I need to worry about my total debt load.)

If you’re worried about deficits, Mr. Obama, end the god-damned wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is costing one million dollars a year to send one lousy grunt to Afghanistan or Iraq. And you want to have at least 100,000 guys over there. That’s $100 billion a year right there—enough to hire four million unemployed Americans back here at home!

This president is well on the way to rescuing President Hoover from history’s crap heap by one-upping him in the realm of economic mismanagement. We already have Obamavilles springing up around the country. We haven’t started calling them that, but Naming Day isn’t far off.

At least Hoover didn’t mire the country in another war while the economy was collapsing around him.

President Obama is on a short leash at this point. His fans, and I was one of those who was willing to give him a shot last November, are mostly giving up on him. Activists are already turning on him. My union friends are disgusted. My African-American friends just shake their heads in dismay. Liberal friends act embarrassed.

A leftist friend, retired, who devoted a month to campaigning for Obama full time in Pennsylvania last fall now writes angry letters almost weekly to Obama’s former campaign manager David Plouffe and others, blasting Obama’s handling of the bank crisis and his Afghan War plans. Clearly Obama cannot continue to appease Republicans and cater to Blue Dogs in Congress and expect to be re-elected in 2012.

Indeed, if he doesn’t toss the crooks and charlatans in the Fed, the Treasury and his Council of Economic Advisers out, and doesn’t stop listening to the self-serving crazies in the military, he won’t even have a Democratic majority in Congress by the end of next year.

President Obama, aren’t you tired of being an embarrassment to your friends and family? Aren’t you tired of being mocked by your foes?

Come on. We’re sick of your speeches! Suck it up, be a leader finally and kick some butt. Do something unconventional and daring. End the wars, bring the troops home, announce a huge jobs program, issue an executive order expanding the Medicare program, raise taxes on the wealthy to back where they were in the 1960s, and let’s get the country moving forward again.

[John Schröder]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/11/30-9

Published on Monday, November 30, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

Barack Obama: Manchurian Candidate Version 2.0

by Dave Lindorff

I once wrote an article about former President George W. Bush saying that he was a perfect Manchurian candidate. That is, if his missing year when he was supposed to have been flying fighter jets with the Texas Air National Guard was actually spent in the former Soviet Union being reprogrammed as a covert KGB agent whose job it was to go back to America, win election to the White House, and proceed to destroy the US, he couldn't have done a better job than he actually did.

Now I wonder whether President Obama might not be a perfect Manchurian Candidate of the Republican Party, or perhaps of some nefarious foreign entity-perhaps the China or the always-enigmatic Al Qaeda. How else to explain policies that have wreaked such destruction on the Democratic Party in Washington and on the nation at large.

Consider for a moment the history of this new president in whom so many invested so much hope and enthusiasm:

Almost immediately upon taking office President Obama announced that he was appointing Timothy Geithner, part of the Bush/Cheney financial team, to head up his Treasury Department. This is the same Timothy Geithner who, as head of the New York Federal Reserve, engineered the initial give-away of $85 billion to AIG, and the subsequent pass-through of tens of billions of dollars to a handful of the nation's largest banks and investment banks-surely the largest theft of public assets by private billionaires in the history of mankind. Obama went on to name a whole gang of Wall Street crooks to run his economic policy, assuring that the recession would be not an opportunity to restore long neglected and undermined New Deal programs, but rather to crush workers and the middle class while shifting staggering sums to the wealthy.

This was followed by a deliberate policy of dropping the ball on health reform, which a vast majority of Americans was clamoring for, and allowing it to be turned into a giant wet kiss for the insurance industry, whose stocks have leapt up with each advance of the massive and massively corrupt health "reform" legislation in Congress. (The ball drop took the form of Obama simply leaving the whole task of "reforming" health care up to the Congress, staying on the sidelines while Congress blew the job.)

Then there is the military. Here Obama kicked things off by insuring that there would be no real change from the Bush/Cheney imperialist scheme by reappointing to the post of secretary of defense the same guy, Robert Gates, who was secretary of defense under President Bush. He put the general formerly in charge of the Iraq War, David Petraeus, in charge of overall Middle East military operations, and took another Bush-era general, Stanley McCrystal, who had run special ops in Iraq, in charge of the Afghanistan War. And since then he has proceeded to ramp up the Afghanistan War from a small-scale operation to a full-fledged war, with no prospect of ending it, and every sign pointing to an ever wider and bigger war in that region, possibly sucking in Pakistan and Iran.

And as for the biggest crisis facing mankind, climate change, this new president, who because of the collapse of the US auto industry had a unique opportunity to compel one of the industries most responsible for the looming global ecological catastrophe to start to fix it by beginning a massive conversion to development and production of electric vehicles and mass transit, instead dropped the ball and just provided a taxpayer bailout with the goal of getting the domestic auto industry back into the business of cranking out gas guzzlers. The president has provided no leadership on climate change at all, effectively sabotaging the global effort to reach a new treaty to limit and cut back on greenhouse gas emissions this December.

Think about this. If the Republicans had created and inserted into the Democratic Party a secret candidate designed to trick Democrats into electing him, so that he could then enact Republican policies of robbing from the poor to enrich the rich, expanding the military budget to a level not seen since World War II, putting the nation deeper into a global war against Islam, sabotaging efforts to combat climate change, and further deregulating the financial sector, could they have come up with anything better than Barack Obama?

If Al Qaeda had wanted to insinuate someone into the White House to further undermine American empire, already on shaky legs during the Bush/Cheney years, by getting the US to further overextend its military, further bankrupt its already creaky economy, and further demoralize its citizens by boosting unemployment and undermining its Constitution, could Bin Laden & Co. have come up with a better Manchurian Candidate than Barack Obama?

If China had wanted a candidate to destroy the American currency, bankrupt the US and its remaining industrial base and leave it helpless and begging to be bought out by Chinese interests (there is now serious talk of China buying General Motors), could the country's Communist rulers have done better than Barack Obama?

Now don't get me wrong. I don't think for a second that Obama is a secret Republican or a secret Al Qaeda or Chinese operative, though I know that there are right-wing Tea Baggers out there who sincerely believe the latter two scenarios (often at the same time!). I think Obama is simply another slick politician with a giant ego and a shriveled sense of principle and ethics-a man that is, not unlike most of our political class, though with better diction and smile, whose interests include himself, his family, and those who bankroll him, but certainly not you, me and the country as a whole.

But it might help if we started to think of him in these terms, because objectively what we have right now in the White House is a president who is steering the nation towards disaster as surely as if it were his goal in life.

Because he is a Democrat, and because he talked a good line during the campaign last year, progressives are disoriented and don't know how to respond to his massive betrayal of all things progressive. At this rate, by next fall, we could have a raging full-scale war going on in Afghanistan, Pakistan in a state of chaos, Iran under attack by Israel or perhaps by Israel and the US, health reform a forgotten issue, real unemployment at over 20 percent, the dollar at half the value of the British pound, and negotiations for a global climate treaty in collapse. And progressives still will not be mounting any effective protest or political action.

I'm not sure what the answer is to this crisis. Many people on the left are arguing that it is essential to abandon the Democrats and move to a third party. I think that's a great idea. The Democratic Party has proved to be absolutely corrupt and beyond salvation--useful only as a sump pump whose purpose is to suck the life out of the progressive movement, such as it is. But I also can't help noticing that the vast majority of the middle class seems still content enough to struggle on with the jobs they still have -- the 80-85 percent of them who still have jobs -- ignoring the plight of those who do not and of the poor. It was an observation made by the late John Kenneth Galbraith that the problem with modern post-industrial democracies is that the vast majority of people do well enough that they no longer care about the suffering of the minority of the population.

As long as the ruling elites are able to keep the majority at least employed and in their homes, they can tighten the screws on the rest with impunity, and that is the situation we are in today. It is hard to see a new progressive party succeeding under such circumstances.

What is undeniable is that we are witnessing the systemic and probably terminal decline of the US as an economic power, and as a military power, and that is certainly a good thing, if not for Americans, then surely for the larger world. What is remarkable is watching President Obama, who was elected by Americans who were hoping he would turn things around, again and again act to hasten that decline.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. He is author of Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For-Profit Hospital Chains (BantamBooks, 1992), and his latest book "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

[John Schröder]

http://rawstory.com/2009/11/obamas-patr ... r-stances/

ACLU: Obama’s reversal on Patriot Act reform ‘a major travesty’

By Sahil Kapur
Monday, November 30th, 2009 -- 1:33 pm

Key components in the USA Patriot Act are set to expire at the end of the year, but President Barack Obama is seeking to extend them, reversing his stark opposition in the past to the same provisions.

"The president's reversal on Patriot Act reform is a major travesty," said Michelle Richardson, Legislative Counsel for the leading civil rights group ACLU, in an interview with Raw Story. "There have been many, many abuses of power in the last four years."

These three main aspects in question allow the government to acquire private information about civilians through warrantless wiretapping of phone calls and emails, as well as seizure of records from credit reporting companies, banks, internet service providers and libraries. Another component includes the loosening of conditions under which an individual can be accused of providing "material support" to terrorists.

In 2005, then-Senator Obama pledged to filibuster a Bush-sponsored bill that included several of these exact components, calling it "just plain wrong" in a Senate speech.

"Government has decided to go on a fishing expedition through every personal record or private document -- through library books they've read and phone calls they've made," he declared, adding: "We don't have to settle for a Patriot Act that sacrifices our liberties or our safety -- we can have one that secures both."

ABC News reports that "Four years ago, then Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., who taught constitutional law, voted down the same provisions along with all Senate Democrats who insisted on changes to the bill that better protected libraries, limited clandestine search warrants, roving wiretaps, and FBI gag orders."

"This was the most opportune time for the surveillance authorities to reverse course," Richardson told Raw Story. "If these programs continue, more abuses of power are absolutely inevitable -- there's no way around it. The level of secrecy granted by Congress is very troubling."

Obama has championed the continuation of all three provisions until at least 2013, a wish that has been granted by the Senate Judiciary Committee and two-thirds fulfilled by the House counterpart. (The House version slaps greater oversight and restrictions on acquiring personal records of non-US citizens.) While he has always been resolutely opposed to former President George W. Bush's vision of the Act, he has defended certain parts of it, and voted in 2006 to re-authorize an altered version.

"Overall, the Obama administration has made marginal improvements but is largely a continuation of the Bush administration with respect to civil liberties," Richardson told Raw Story, referring to the president's rising acquiescence to his predecessor's approach.

The Patriot Act, initially pushed through Congress quickly after 9/11 by the Bush administration as an alleged necessity to combat future attacks, has long been fiercely criticized by the ACLU and other civil libertarians as a gross violation of privacy rights under the Constitution.

Salon's Glenn Greenwald, a former civil rights litigator, recently wrote: "Democrats spent so many years screaming bloody murder over Bush's use of indefinite detention, military commissions, state secrets, renditions, and extreme secrecy -- policies Obama has largely and/or completely adopted as his own."

[John Schröder]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... 89x7131530

President Barack Obama delivered the best speech George W. Bush ever gave in his life.

WilliamPitt

On Tuesday night, President Barack Obama delivered the best speech George W. Bush ever gave in his life. Mr. Bush, if he was watching, would have recognized virtually every facet of Obama's speech, for it was the Bush administration that hammered out the template used by Mr. Obama to deliver the news that he is doubling down on the war in Afghanistan.

Obama's eloquence was far superior to anything Mr. Bush could have ever hoped to achieve - for the first time in the 21st century, the United States has a president who can pronounce "nuclear" correctly - but at the end of the day, it was the same script all over again.

Mr. Obama's speech contained all the well-worn Bushian touchstones, one above all: sharing a stage with soldiers in uniform - and how heartbreakingly young were the faces in that room; one could hear a pin drop throughout in that roomful of children whose lives will be directly affected by the decision that was announced - as a means of political defense and to augment his martial profile. Mr. Bush pulled this sickening stunt more times than can be counted, and it burned like acid to see another president defile their service by using them as props in a bit of political theater.

It took exactly 130 words for Mr. Obama to invoke the attacks of September 11, which is just about how long it usually took Mr. Bush whenever he unleashed one of his linguistic muggings upon the populace.

Mr. Obama blessed the calamity of Iraq as a success - "We have given Iraqis a chance to shape their future, and we are successfully leaving Iraq to its people," said the president - which was a favorite habit of Mr. Bush, no matter how brazen facts to the contrary happened to be.

Mr. Obama likewise blessed the recent fraud-riddled election in Afghanistan as a positive thing, despite the cancerous effect that farce of a vote has had on the confidence of the Afghan people. In this, the president echoed Mr. Bush once again, as it was often Mr. Bush's practice to fete Iraqi elections that were controlled by Iran and riven with violence as successful steps towards democracy.

Mr. Obama re-introduced the American people to the menace of weapons of mass destruction, a favorite note of Mr. Bush. Obama did not go so far as to say that Afghanistan is in possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent, 30,000 missiles to deliver the stuff, mobile biological weapons labs, and uranium from Niger for use in a robust nuclear weapons program, as Mr. Bush did during another memorable prime-time speech, but the call to dread was there all the same. The threat of "loose nukes" is indeed real enough, but it was a kick in the stomach to see the Bush Handbook on Fear put into play once again.

Mr. Obama acknowledged in his speech that America's war in Afghanistan has lasted eight long years, and even tipped a wink at America's share of responsibility for helping to shape the bleak and battered history of that nation. But then, as Bush so often did with Iraq, Mr. Obama threw the responsibility for putting the pieces of that shattered nation back together squarely on the shoulders of the Afghan people. In effect, the occupier demanded that the occupied shape up and fly right. The Hebrew word for this is "chutzpah," and it fits the situation like a glove.

Mr. Obama never used the words "Coalition of the Willing," but his high-flown rhetoric about NATO and an international alliance to deal with Afghanistan stood in stark contrast to reality. Hardly anyone in the international community appears to have much interest in sharing or increasing the burden of continued warfare - a few of those hesitant nations have personal experience with that region in their history, none of it positive - leaving Mr. Obama and the United States pretty much on their own going forward. This may change, but not by much.

Where Mr. Obama departed from the well-worn script of Mr. Bush was in the realm of the rhetorical. He weaved a tapestry of interconnected American interests - economic, social, diplomatic - to explain why the war in Afghanistan must not just go on, but grow. Take this gem, for example:

But as we end the war in Iraq and transition to Afghan responsibility, we must rebuild our strength here at home. Our prosperity provides a foundation for our power. It pays for our military. It underwrites our diplomacy. It taps the potential of our people, and allows investment in new industry. And it will allow us to compete in this century as successfully as we did in the last. That is why our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended - because the nation that I am most interested in building is our own.

Indeed, it was all wonderfully phrased and brilliantly delivered. But in the end, Mr. Obama simply told us what we have been hearing for too long already: we must beat our swords into ploughshares by using swords. Mr. Bush never said it so well, but he said it all the time nonetheless.

Mr. Bush was proud to call himself a war president - "I make decisions here in the Oval Office in foreign policy matters with war on my mind," he famously boasted to Tim Russert with that signature smirk on his face. On Tuesday, Mr. Obama was nowhere near as blunt, but nonetheless, the torch has been passed. Whether or not his strategy for Afghanistan will be successful remains to be seen, but he sold it to the American people in exactly the same fashion as his predecessor. There was a little more sugar to make the medicine go down, but the taste of it remained all too terribly familiar.

At the end of Mr. Obama's address, the cadet corps of West Point stood and applauded. They had to; here was the commander in chief, and they are required to stand whenever he enters and exits. One wonders, however, what they really thought about what they heard. After all, it wasn't anything new; they, and we, have heard it all before.

[freemason9]

I confess that I'm losing my religion at this point.

[Alaya]

I confess that I'm losing my religion at this point.

Good. We have to face it as much as we don't want to, never wanted to face it.

What drew said, Barack Petain Obama is perfect.

I was warned before the election by someone I trust and still took a 'wait and see' attitude.

Stick a fork in it.

[Cosmic Cowbell]

I love it how the "fuck Obama" thread gets bumped to the top every week or so, when there's some new betrayal.

It's actually kind of funny, in a sad way.

Agreed. At this point it's gone beyond "discussion" and has really become more of a Data Dump thing dear to the heart of "Fuck Obama" circlejerkers...



Sad and embarrassing....

[ninakat]

Sad and embarrassing....

Yes you are.