Obama the Warrior

Glenn Greenwald, Salon

Tuesday, May 29, 2012 07:59 AM EDT

Miller (Link Here) devotes himself to debunking one of the worst myths in Washington, propagated out of self-interest by conservatives and progressives alike: namely, that there is a vast and radical difference between the parties on most key issues and that bipartisanship is so tragically scarce. In the foreign policy context which is his expertise, Miller explains that – despite campaign rhetoric designed to exaggerate (or even invent) differences in order to motivate base voters – the reality is exactly the opposite.

…

The article (Link Here) describes in detail how “Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret ‘nominations’ process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical” – an actual presidential-led death panel (as always in American media parlance, “Terrorist” means: individuals alleged by the U.S. Government – with no evidence, transparencey or due process – to be Terrorists). Specifically, Obama himself “insisted on approving every new name on an expanding ‘kill list,’ poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre ‘baseball cards’ of an unconventional war.” In total secrecy – with no transparency or oversight of any kind – he then selects who will live and who will die.

…

One of the most glaring myths progressives like to tell themselves and others is that the GOP refuses to praise Obama no matter what he does. This is patently false. Virtually every one of the most far-right neocon Bush officials – including Dick Cheney himself – has spent years now praising Obama for continuing their Terrorism policies which Obama the Senator and Presidential Candidate once so harshly denounced. Every leading GOP candidate except Ron Paul wildly praised Obama for killing U.S. citizen Anwar Awlaki without a shred of due process and for continuing to drop unaccountable bombs on multiple Muslim countries.

Florida: Hundreds of eligible citizens in Miami-Dade Co alone told they are ineligible to vote

By Gaius Publius, Americablog

5/29/2012 09:15:00 AM

So how does this play out? Here’s one way – Falsely disenfranchized Floridians appeal to Obama’s Justice Dept. Eric Holder makes noises that “this is an outrage.” Republicans make noises that “this is just political, and besides (shh, Holder has, well, melatonal ties that disqualify his etc., but shh).”

The White House, certain of November victory anyway, decides to back down. No need to ruffle R feathers.

Holder then makes all the right public noises, but does little to actually block this. (My best guess at the explanation: it’s a matter for “the courts,” plus something about the “states.”)

I really really want to be wrong. Let’s watch together, shall we? 115,000 purged eligible voters isn’t small beer.

The Ancien Régime

Luke Russert, nepotist prince

Luke Russert is being groomed as a simulacrum of his father — but without the inspiring rags-to-riches story

By Alex Pareene, Salon

Thursday, May 24, 2012 11:35 AM EDT

Tim Russert was not the unalloyed saint of tough journalism that his celebrators describe in posthumous tributes, but he was at least a classic American success story, of the sort that we still enjoy pretending is common: Blue-collar kid from Rust Belt town becomes enormously successful thanks largely to brains and hard work. The story of Luke Russert, alas, is a much more common one in American life: No-account kid of successful person has more success thrust upon him.

Pretty much immediately upon the death of his father, Luke Russert inexplicably had a full-time broadcasting job, supplanting his part-time broadcasting job co-hosting a satellite radio sports talk show with James Carville. (That was a real thing that actually existed. Can you imagine a human who would want to listen to that?)

Russert isn’t the only famous child in media. He isn’t even the only famous child at NBC, which also employs Jenna Bush Hager and Chelsea Clinton (who renewed her three-month temporary contract earlier this year, despite barely producing any work for the network). Fox has Peter Doocy, Chris Wallace and, here in New York, Greg Kelly. ABC has Chris Cuomo, and CNN Anderson Cooper. A.G. Sulzberger is a reporter for the New York Times. Some of those people are fine journalists, by the way. Nepotism has always been a major force in journalism and media – it is a fact of life and one that would be exhausting to be continually het up about – and plenty of nepotism beneficiaries are wonderful writers and talented people. If you’re raised by interesting people and get a good education at home and at the finest schools, you really ought to turn out pretty smart. But Russert is emblematic of the sort of nepotism that gives nepotism a bad name. He’s not a wonderful writer or a particularly talented person. And unlike Chelsea Clinton and her very silly “reporting good news about people who do charity or something” beat, he’s actually got a real journalism job that someone else without the name Russert could be doing much more effectively. He’s not even particularly good on TV.

I suppose the most obvious question is, how can I trust you?

Bingo. It is a pickle. No doubt about it. The bad news is there’s no way if you can really know whether I’m here to help you or not, so it’s really up to you. You just have to make up you own damned mind to either accept what I’m going to tell you, or reject it.

A proud conservative and supporter of the privitization of education.

After all, Kaplan Prep is the only profitable part of the Washington Post.

Obama Campaign Proud of Bashing Teachers’ Unions

By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake

Friday May 25, 2012 9:38 am

It looks like we’re going to have six more months of the Obama campaign trying to prove that their candidate has conservative values and believes in conservative ideas.

…

(T)he question becomes, why does Stephanie Cutter, Deputy Campaign Manager for Obama 2012, feel so strongly about needing to broadcast that teachers’ unions don’t like her candidate? Is this a typical approach for campaigns? Don’t you normally want to tout support rather than opposition?

Not when it comes to teachers’ unions, apparently. And who needs them, they only represent 3.2 million members in the National Education Association and 1.5 millionb in the American Federation of Teachers. And they only represent one out of ten delegates on the typical Democratic National Committee Convention floor. It makes perfect sense for the head of the party to display his independence from such a marginal group.

Education “reform” is a pretty contentious topic with a split in the Democratic coalition. But Obama has always lined up on the opposite side of the unions on the matter. Not only that, he boasts of it.

Of course this is a pattern. The previous tweet from Stephanie Cutter highlights the President’s commitment to austerity, proudly stating for the record that federal spending has slowed down under Obama to the largest degree since the Eisenhower Administration. So we’re going to have six months of the President’s allies stating the record, showing all of Obama’s conservative positions on a host of issues. You would think this would be the role of, say, a primary challenger to the President from the left. But no, it’s the President’s own campaign doing this.

…

His education policies are generally disfavored by teachers’ unions, and I should add, disfavored by reality, because the data on charters and teacher evaluations is weak to the point of totally being debunked.

Not that reality should stand in the way.

It is shameful that Mother Jones publishes bullshit like this-

Is Congress Really Authorizing US Propaganda at Home?

By Adam Weinstein, Mother Jones

Tue May. 22, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

(T)he outcry in this case seems misguided. For starters, the proposed law doesn’t permit the spread of any information that isn’t already available to the American public. Moreover, the amendment could conceivably bring more of the government’s overseas information operations into the sunlight, a good thing.

…

The argument against Thornberry’s and Smith’s amendment appears to be pretty straightforward: We only want US propaganda peddled to foreign populations, but not to our own! In reality, though, most “public diplomacy” is mundane boilerplate about America’s purple mountains’ majesties.

Bullshit.

Pentagon Contractor Admits To Perpetrating Online Smear Campaign Against USA Today Reporters

By Adam Peck, Think Progress

May 24, 2012 at 6:21 pm

The former head of a group that contracts with the Pentagon to produce propaganda material used oversees has admitted to launching a similar disinformation campaign against two U.S.-based reporters.

In April, two USA Today journalists claimed they were the victims of a deliberate “reputation attack” after they wrote a series of stories about the Pentagon’s contracts with groups that specialize in the production of propaganda. Days after the journalists began speaking with officials at the Pentagon and other sources for the story, fake websites and social media accounts set up in the names of the two reporters were mysteriously registered and began trying to discredit the stories.

Elmer Fudd’s Debut.

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

How The Blue Dog/DCCC Axis Really Operates

Howie Klein, DownWithTyranny

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

(T)he Blue Dogs lost half their members in the 2010 elections because Democratic voters refused to show up at the polls to vote for them, a completely rational decision since the Blue Dogs refuse to support Democratic principles, policy or values. This weekend the Salt Lake Tribune explains how Matheson is trying to grow the Blue Dog caucus and has “hired the Blue Dogs’ first campaign strategist and overhauled the coalition’s recruitment effort, trying to get stronger candidates to run in districts he thinks Democrats can reclaim.” The article doesn’t mention Steve Israel’s insidious role in this venture, embracing all 11 right-wing Blue Dog candidates this year, many of them running against progressives in primaries where the DCCC has promised to stay neutral, a lie that never goes away.

Here’s how it works in district after district across the country.

A real Democrat enters the primary and along comes a Blue Dog. The Blue Dog PAC and the Blue Dog incumbents fill the Blue Dog candidate’s coffers with contributions. The most corrupt corporate whores on Capitol Hill, the Blue Dogs get their sleazy lobbyist friends– many of whom are Blue Dog ex-congressmen and former Blue Dog staffers– to shower even more cash on candidates who they know will “play ball.” Then Matheson and Barrow go to a very sympathetic Steve Israel and whine about the neutrality policy, claiming it isn’t a real contest because the real Democrat has raised so little money and their candidate is flush with cash. Israel then “reluctantly” adds the Blue Dog to one of the bogus “Red-to-Blue” lists– lists that signal wealthy Democratic donors that these are the candidates the party is backing.

That’s how a reactionary and corrupt operative like Hayden Rogers, who opposes almost every single plank the differentiates Democrats from Republicans, has wound up as the Democratic candidate in western North Carolina. Israel is already spending money on the race even though there is virtually no chance that Rogers will win.

It’s a scenario that plays out endlessly in district after district. Millions of donor dollars will be wasted to rescucitate the all-but-extinct Blue Dogs but smart money says that 2013 will find less of tehm– not more– in Congress.

And all those wasted millions… could have been used to elect actual Democrats like Dave Gill in Illinois, Carol Shea-Porter in New Hampshire and Patsy Keever in North Carolina, who beat, against all odds, well-financed conservative challengers but are now being starved for cash by Israel and the DCCC.

If you’d like, you can help real Democrats here — while the DCCC fights to elect anti-Choice, anti-gay, anti-working family fanatics like Hayden Rogers and the 10 other Blue Dogs they’ve taken under their wing.

(h/t Gaius Publius @ Americablog)

Formatted for presentation.

And don’t you dare ever say so!

Warrantless spying fight

Obama officials demand full, reform-free renewal of the once-controversial power to eavesdrop without warrants

By Glenn Greenwald, Salon

Thursday, May 24, 2012 09:37 AM EDT

In 2006, The New York Times’ James Risen and Eric Lichtblau won the Pulitzer Prize for their December, 2005 article revealing that the Bush administration was eavesdropping on the electronic communications of Americans without the warrants required by the FISA law (headline: “Officials Say U.S. Wiretaps Exceeded Law”). Even though multiple federal judges eventually ruled the program illegal, that scandal generated no accountability of any kind for two reasons:

(1) federal courts ultimately accepted the arguments of the Bush and Obama DOJs that the legality of Bush’s domestic spying program should not be judicially reviewed; and

(2) the Democratic-led Congress, in 2008, enacted the Bush-designed FISA Amendments Act, which not only retroactively immunized the nation’s telecom giants for their illegal participation in that spying program and thus terminated pending lawsuits, but worse, also legalized the vast bulk of the Bush spying program by vesting vast new powers in the U.S. Government to eavesdrop without warrants (in his memoir, President Bush gleefully recounted that the 2008 eavesdropping bill supported by the Democrats gave him more than he ever expected).

It was then-Sen. Obama’s vote in favor of the FISA Amendments Act that caused the first serious Election Year rift between him and his own supporters. Obama’s vote in favor of the bill was so controversial for two independent reasons:

(1) when he was seeking the Democratic nomination only a few months earlier and needed the support of the progressive base, Obama unequivocally vowed to filibuster “any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies,” only to turn around once he had secured the nomination and not only vote against a filibuster of that bill but then vote in favor of the bill itself; and

(2) the bill itself legalized vast new powers of warrantless eavesdropping: powers which the Democratic Party (and Obama) had spent years denouncing (as Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin put it at the time: “Through the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, Congress has legitimated many of the same things people are now complaining about”).

When Obama announced his reversal, his defenders insisted he was only doing it so that he could win the election and then use his power as President to stop warrantless eavesdropping abuses, while Obama himself claimed he voted for the FISA bill “with the firm intention – once I’m sworn in as President – to have my Attorney General conduct a comprehensive review of all our surveillance programs, and to make further recommendations on any steps needed to preserve civil liberties and to prevent executive branch abuse in the future.”

The only positive aspect of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 was that Congress imposed a four-year sunset provision on the new warrantless eavesdropping powers it authorized. That sunset provision is set to expire and – surprise, surprise – the Obama administration, just like it did for the Patriot Act, is demanding its full-scale renewal without a single change or reform.

Of course he’ll be better and more courageous and “progressive” when he never has to face voters again.

Sinkin’ in the Bathtub was the very first Warner Bros. theatrical cartoon short as well as the very first of the Looney Tunes series.