Fuck Obama

[ninakat]

Newt Gingrich praises Obama on Afghanistan
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Newt-Ging ... l?x=0&.v=1

[Jeff]

Sarah Palin applauds Obama's Afghan troop increase

[Maddy]

[freemason9]

Obama isn't really doing anything differently than his campaign suggested. Regarding Afghanistan, he's doing exactly as he said--sending more troops there. He said all along he would do that. He also stated clearly that he was against a single-payer option on health reform.

You're joking. Right?

Here are 7 lies in under 2 minutes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UErR7i2o ... r_embedded

Yeah, rub it it. See if I care.

[lightningBugout]

Nordic that video stinks.

As per "transparency," Whitehouse.gov is about 10,000 more extensive than any previous white house site. And they stream essentially every speech Obama gives, including special events.

And Justice Brandeis did in fact say "sunlight is the best disinfectant."

Several of the other "lies" are rote campaign bullshit that every single presidential candidate makes.

[8bitagent]

Obama widening attacks in Pakistan:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34270513/ns ... ork_times/

It's so amusing watching all the "anti war" liberals who voted for him
now look confused...forgetting that expanding the Af-Pak war was EXACTLY what he promised. There are no surprises here.

[freemason9]

Obama widening attacks in Pakistan:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34270513/ns ... ork_times/

It's so amusing watching all the "anti war" liberals who voted for him
now look confused...forgetting that expanding the Af-Pak war was EXACTLY what he promised. There are no surprises here.

We weren't exactly given a choice. This is America, you know. We went with hope, as silly as it sounds today.

Some of us make a conscious choice to remain optimistic. It gets harder every day, though.

I've been a registered Democrat my entire life. I will be changing my registration to Independent. The Senate Democrats are no different than Senate Republicans in reality.

[MinM]

I guess transparent gov't was another broken promise.

The group wants the material in order to gauge the influence of those executives in crafting a new healthcare policy.

Obama urges action, not just politics,....Ads by Google
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3 Minutes - Health Reform

Why do we need health reform?

Cover Story August 6, 2009, 5:00PM EST
The Health Insurers Have Already Won - BusinessWeek
How UnitedHealth and rival carriers, maneuvering behind the scenes in Washington, shaped health-care reform for their own benefit

Stevens directs industry leader UnitedHealth's strategy on Capitol Hill Stephen Voss

By Chad Terhune and Keith Epstein

As the health reform fight shifts this month from a vacationing Washington to congressional districts and local airwaves around the country, much more of the battle than most people realize is already over. The likely victors are insurance giants such as UnitedHealth Group (UNH), Aetna (AET), and WellPoint (WLP). The carriers have succeeded in redefining the terms of the reform debate to such a degree that no matter what specifics emerge in the voluminous bill Congress may send to President Obama this fall, the insurance industry will emerge more profitable. Health reform could come with a $1 trillion price tag over the next decade, and it may complicate matters for some large employers. But insurance CEOs ought to be smiling.

Executives from UnitedHealth certainly showed no signs of worry on the mid-July day that Senate Democrats proposed to help pay for reform with a new tax on the insurance industry. Instead, UnitedHealth parked a shiny 18-wheeler outfitted with high-tech medical gear near the Capitol and invited members of Congress aboard. Inside the mobile diagnostic center, which enables doctors to examine distant patients via satellite television, Representative Jim Matheson didn't disguise his wonderment. "Fascinating, fascinating," said the Democrat from Utah. "Amazing."

Impressing fiscally conservative Democrats like Matheson, a leader of the House of Representatives' Blue Dog Coalition, is at the heart of UnitedHealth's strategy. It boils down to ensuring that whatever overhaul Congress passes this year will help rather than hurt huge insurance companies.

Some Republicans have threatened to make health reform Obama's "Waterloo," as Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina has put it. The President has fired back at what he considers GOP obstructionism. Meanwhile, big insurance companies have quietly focused on what they see as their central challenge: shaping the views of moderate Democrats.

The industry has already accomplished its main goal of at least curbing, and maybe blocking altogether, any new publicly administered insurance program that could grab market share from the corporations that dominate the business. UnitedHealth has distinguished itself by more deftly and aggressively feeding sophisticated pricing and actuarial data to information-starved congressional staff members. With its rivals, the carrier has also achieved a secondary aim of constraining the new benefits that will become available to tens of millions of people who are currently uninsured. That will make the new customers more lucrative to the industry...

HOW HIGH WILL THEY GO?
Health Care Industry Stocks See Double-Digit Growth Since Death Of Public Option

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/2 ... 99733.html

[Nordic]

U.S. Participated in Slaughter of Dozens of Civilians in Yemen


http://cryptogon.com/?p=12709


Fuck Obama.[/quote]

[IanEye]

Jane Hamsher, Grover Norquist Call for Rahm Emanuel’s Resignation

[Nordic]

Chris Floyd:

Dred Scott Redux: Obama and the Supremes Stand Up for Slavery

http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/co ... avery.html

While we were all out doing our Christmas shopping, the highest court in the land quietly put the kibosh on a few more of the remaining shards of human liberty.

It happened earlier this week, in a discreet ruling that attracted almost no notice and took little time. In fact, our most august defenders of the Constitution did not have to exert themselves in the slightest to eviscerate not merely 220 years of Constitutional jurisprudence but also centuries of agonizing effort to lift civilization a few inches out of the blood-soaked mire that is our common human legacy. They just had to write a single sentence.

Here's how the bad deal went down. After hearing passionate arguments from the Obama Administration, the Supreme Court acquiesced to the president's fervent request and, in a one-line ruling, let stand a lower court decision that declared torture an ordinary, expected consequence of military detention, while introducing a shocking new precedent for all future courts to follow: anyone who is arbitrarily declared a "suspected enemy combatant" by the president or his designated minions is no longer a "person." They will simply cease to exist as a legal entity. They will have no inherent rights, no human rights, no legal standing whatsoever -- save whatever modicum of process the government arbitrarily deigns to grant them from time to time, with its ever-shifting tribunals and show trials.

This extraordinary ruling occasioned none of those deep-delving "process stories" that glut the pages of the New York Times, where the minutiae of policy-making or political gaming is examined in highly-spun, microscopic detail doled out by self-interested insiders. Obviously, giving government the power to render whole classes of people "unpersons" was not an interesting subject for our media arbiters. It was news that wasn't fit to print. Likewise, the ruling provoked no thundering editorials in the Washington Post, no savvy analysis from the high commentariat -- and needless to say, no outrage whatsoever from all our fierce defenders of individual liberty on the Right.

But William Fisher noticed, and gave this report at Antiwar.com:


In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal Monday to review a lower court’s dismissal of a case brought by four British former Guantanamo prisoners against former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the detainees’ lawyers charged Tuesday that the country’s highest court evidently believes that "torture and religious humiliation are permissible tools for a government to use."

...Channeling their predecessors in the George W. Bush administration, Obama Justice Department lawyers argued in this case that there is no constitutional right not to be tortured or otherwise abused in a U.S. prison abroad.

The Obama administration had asked the court not to hear the case. By agreeing, the court let stand an earlier opinion by the D.C. Circuit Court, which found that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act – a statute that applies by its terms to all "persons" – did not apply to detainees at Guantanamo, effectively ruling that the detainees are not persons at all for purposes of U.S. law.

The lower court also dismissed the detainees’ claims under the Alien Tort Statute and the Geneva Conventions, finding defendants immune on the basis that "torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military’s detention of suspected enemy combatants."

The Constitution is clear: no person can be held without due process; no person can be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. And the U.S. law on torture of any kind is crystal clear: it is forbidden, categorically, even in time of "national emergency." And the instigation of torture is, under U.S. law, a capital crime. No person can be tortured, at any time, for any reason, and there are no immunities whatsoever for torture offered anywhere in the law.

And yet this is what Barack Obama -- who, we are told incessantly, is a super-brilliant Constitutional lawyer -- has been arguing in case after case since becoming president: Torturers are immune from prosecution; those who ordered torture are immune from prosecution. They can't even been sued for, in the specific case under review, subjecting uncharged, indefinitely detained captives to "beatings, sleep deprivation, forced nakedness, extreme hot and cold temperatures, death threats, interrogations at gunpoint, and threatened with unmuzzled dogs."

Again, let's be absolutely clear: Barack Obama has taken the freely chosen, public, formal stand -- in court -- that there is nothing wrong with any of these activities. Nothing to answer for, nothing meriting punishment or even civil penalties. What's more, in championing the lower court ruling, Barack Obama is now on record as believing -- insisting -- that torture is an ordinary, "foreseeable consequence" of military detention of all those who are arbitrarily declared "suspected enemy combatants."

And still further: Barack Obama has now declared, openly, of his own free will, that he does not consider these captives to be "persons." They are, literally, sub-humans. And what makes them sub-humans? The fact that someone in the U.S. government has declared them to be "suspected enemy combatants." (And note: even the mere suspicion of being an "enemy combatant" can strip you of your personhood.)

This is what President Barack Obama believes -- believes so strongly that he has put the full weight of the government behind a relentless series of court actions to preserve, protect and defend these arbitrary powers. (For a glimpse at just a sliver of such cases, see here and here.)

One co-counsel on the case, Shayana Kadidal of the Center for Constitutional Rights, zeroed in on the noxious quintessence of the position taken by the Court, and by our first African-American president: its chilling resemblance to the notorious Dred Scott ruling of 1857, which upheld the principle of slavery. As Fisher notes:


"Another set of claims are dismissed because Guantanamo detainees are not ‘persons’ within the scope of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act – an argument that was too close to Dred Scott v. Sanford for one of the judges on the court of appeals to swallow," he added.

The Dred Scott case was a decision by the United States Supreme Court in 1857. It ruled that people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves, or their descendants — whether or not they were slaves — were not protected by the Constitution and could never be citizens of the United States.

And now, once again, 144 years after the Civil War, we have established as the law of the land and the policy of the United States government that whole classes of people can be declared "non-persons" and have their liberty stripped away -- and their torturers and tormentors protected and coddled by authority -- at a moment's notice, with no charges, no defense, no redress, on nothing more than the suspicion that they might be an "enemy combatant," according to the arbitrary definition of the state.

Barack Obama has had the audacity to declare himself the heir and embodiment of the lifework of Martin Luther King. Can this declaration of a whole new principle of universal slavery really be what King was dreaming of? Is this the vision he saw on the other side of the mountain? Or is not the nightmarish inversion of the ideal of a better, more just, more humane world that so many have died for, in so many places, down through the centuries?

Lots of hyperlinks in the above text at the post itself linked to at the top.

[lightningBugout]

Between health care and the Dred Scott piece, I'm feeling viscerally disgusted by Barack this afternoon.

Those loved ones with whom I'm spending the holly days acknowledge that he's simply a well crafted illusion and they acknowledge in the next breath that they are simply too busy to care. Should one really have to take the time in a late-Capitalist society to read as much as one needs to these days to get an iota of understanding of what seems to really be going down?

I know the answer to that one, I suspect.

Throw me in with the rest of the choir - fuck Obama.

[kristinerosemary]

i took advantage of the edit function to disappear my original post leaving only the last ending part and to wish you all a happy new year.

i would like it if we never had to worry
our heads about cons, cheats, liars, thieves, pirates or bankers ever again and we could tend to our own gardens and await the inevitable zombie apocalypse in peace and quiet.

[Nordic]

i would like it if we never had to worry
our heads about cons, cheats, liars, thieves, pirates or bankers ever again and we could tend to our own gardens and await the inevitable zombie apocalypse in peace and quiet.

Funny. That's how I imagine my life would be if I were rich. I'd just go away and ignore this crap as much as possible.

[Sounder]

kristinerosemary wrote:

i would like it if we never had to worry
our heads about cons, cheats, liars, thieves, pirates or bankers ever again and we could tend to our own gardens and await the inevitable zombie apocalypse in peace and quiet.

Sorry kristinerosemary, but if you were tending this garden in peace and quiet while all this shit is going on outside of your garden, you would have to be a zombie anyway.

If we had ways to understand the con, we might worry less and do more to stop the con. The con continues because many people make their money by taking advantage of the difference between appearances and actuality. Ignorance is monetized and unconsciously validated by all of us denying our ignorance so we may protect our precious egos. We bury our ignorance under charts and facts and quotes of famous people and put on the act of, well at least I know what is going on.

Folk that hang around here spend lots of time establishing that there is a con going on, and precious little to nearly no time in trying to understand the structure of the con, or how that con might be deconstructed.

As we approach the wall, this may change.