Posts filed under ‘Obama — Don’t Count on My Vote’
Judge Rules in Favor of the Constitution, Against Barack Obama
I’ve been following this lawsuit by Chris Hedges, et al., and while this, sadly, will be in the courts for years (thanks to hope and change Constitutional lawyer guy Barack Obama), I’m happy for this development:
A federal judge Wednesday issued an injunction against a National Defense Authorization Act provision that grants the military the right to detain anyone it suspects of involvement in terrorism. [Vague and subjective or what?] U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest ruled in favor of a group of plaintiffs, including Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges, who filed a lawsuit against the legislation within weeks of President Obama signing it.
Signed by President Barack Obama on New Year’s Eve, the 565-page NDAA contains a short paragraph, in statute 1021, letting the military detain anyone it suspects “substantially supported” al-Qaida, the Taliban or “associated forces.” The indefinite detention would supposedly last until “the end of hostilities.”
In a 68-page ruling blocking this statute, U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest agreed that the statute failed to “pass constitutional muster” because its broad language could be used to quash political dissent.?
“There is a strong public interest in protecting rights guaranteed by the First Amendment,” Forrest wrote. “There is also a strong public interest in ensuring that due process rights guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment are protected by ensuring that ordinary citizens are able to understand the scope of conduct that could subject them to indefinite military detention.”
Thank you Judge Forrest for respecting the Constitution.
I have a category on this blog: “Obama — Don’t Count on My Vote.” I’m filing this post there. “Democrats:” I can only take so much. There are lines I won’t cross. This is one of them.
Obama Acting Like a Republican Homophobe
This is just so, so wrong it’s inexcusable that Obama refuses to stop it:
President Obama disappointed and vexed gay supporters on Wednesday with his decision, conveyed to activists by a senior adviser, not to sign an executive order banning discrimination by employers with federal contracts.
The executive order, which activists said had support from the Labor and Justice Departments, would have applied to gay, bisexual and transgender people working for or seeking employment from federal contractors. Current law does not protect against discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, and legislation to do so, which Mr. Obama endorses, lacks sufficient votes in Congress.
Employers who get “federal contracts” are employers who get our tax dollars via those federal contracts. An employer who gets so much as a dime of our tax dollars should not be permitted to discriminate against taxpaying American. Period.
I’m disgusted with Obama (Mr. Constitutional Lawyer) for not wiping this off the books once and for all. If doing away with this isn’t a core democratic (and Democratic) value, I don’t know what is.
Constitutional Lawyer Obama Hates Whistleblowers
A quickie post:
The law-breaking telecoms who received retroactive immunity from Congress, the interrogators who tortured prisoners, the officials who gave the orders, the attorneys who authored the torture memos, and the CIA agents who destroyed the interrogation tapes have not been held professionally accountable, much less been charged with crimes. National security and intelligence whistleblowers have become the glaring exception to the Obama administration’s mantra of “looking forward, not backward.” If you committed crimes under the guise of national security and the war on terrorism, you will not be held criminally liable, but if you blow the whistle on crimes, you risk criminal prosecution under the Espionage Act.
Learn more here about what Obama’s doing. He’s worse than Bush when it comes to prosecuting people who expose corruption.
I thought he would encourage that, because he said he would:
I didn’t add an “Obama — Don’t Count on my Vote” category to this blog on a whim.
Rick Warren Shits on President Obama
Obama, what were you expecting when you asked conservative gay-hating Rick Warren to give the invocation at your inauguration? A Kubayah moment when we’d all come together?
Huh? Have you had enough of that drug yet?
Pastor Rick Warren: Obama’s Policies Endanger Religious Freedom
Heads Up Obama — Cut the Timidity Already. People Want Change
My Tweet of the Day:
Hello! Anybody home?
It’s hopeless. Obama is owned too.
Obama to Propose Cutting Corporate Taxes
OMG. Is this Obama talking or is this Obama under the influence of Citizens United talking?
(Reuters) – President Barack Obama, who has angered businesses with his plans to close corporate tax loopholes, is expected to call for cutting the top 35 percent corporate tax rate as early as this month, according to two sources close to the administration.
The president is likely to propose a rate close to an average of peer nations, the sources said.
Good thing it’s Friday. This is the kind of news that makes me want to take my head off and set it down for a while.
Free Speech — As Long as the Government Approves
This would be our quote of the day (and maybe of the year), from Air Force Colonel Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor at the Guantanamo Bay military base/prison in Cuba. He resigned in 2007, protesting political interference in the military commissions of Guantánamo prisoners. He was a guest this morning on DemocracyNow! on a show marking the 10th anniversary of the United States detaining prisoners there.
Photo: Wikipedia
Yeah, I—as I said, I was very optimistic when President Obama took office that he was going to follow through on what he promised [to close Gitmo within a year of taking office]. You know, I believed in hope and change. When he began to backpedal, I wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that accused—that said it was a double standard, what we were doing. And I got my termination notice the next day. So, it was disappointing I spent 25 years defending the Constitution, and then to be told that it didn’t apply to me. You know, we have free speech for everyone that has nothing to say. But if you have an opinion, then it’s speak at your own peril. And so, I was fired for expressing an opinion.
Davis was fired for expressing an opinion by the administration of Mr. Hope and Change Constitutional lawyer, Barack Obama. If a president who’s a Constitutional lawyer will fire someone for exercising their freedom of speech, anyone will.
(If you’d like to hear more of what Col. Davis had to say, see the “rushed transcript” or the video at the DemocracyNow! link above.)
Obama: Why I Might Not Vote For You In November / #17
Here’s yet another act on President Obama’s part that (don’t forget, he’s a “Constitutional lawyer”) is making me think twice about how I’ll vote in November:
Obama Makes It Official: Suspected Terrorists Can Be Indefinitely Detained Without a Trial
Despite having once threatened to veto the bill due to controversial language about the treatment of suspected terrorists, the president signed the controversial National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law on Saturday. Barack Obama did not keep his lingering concerns about aspects of the bill law a secret, however. In justifying his decision to sign NDAA into law, Obama said in a statement, “I have signed the Act chiefly because it authorizes funding for the defense of the United States and its interests abroad, crucial services for service members and their families, and vital national security programs that must be renewed.” He continued, “The fact that I support this bill as a whole does not mean I agree with everything in it. In particular, I have signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation, and prosecution of suspected terrorists.”
Obama: If you have “serious reservations” about a bill, you veto it. Period.
And bear in mind — nut cases could become president who could abuse this new law to no end.
More on how you and I might land in indefinite detention as a result of this bill here and here.
Oh, and talk about Friday afternoon DC “document dumps.” This is even worse. It’s Saturday and it’s New Year’s Eve. The White House is clearly worried about this yet hey, they think we’re idiots and we won’t notice.
Happy New Year!
Another Reason Why I Might Not Vote for Barack Obama
Salmonella Bacteria -- Photo: Janice Haney Carr / CDC
Earlier this month, the Maine-based grocery chain Hannaford issued a ground beef recall after at least 14 people were infected with an antibiotic-resistant strain of salmonella. Chances are this is the first you’ve heard of it. After all, it’s not much compared to the 76 illnesses and one death back in August that led Cargill to recall almost 36 million pounds of ground turkey products potentially contaminated with drug-resistant salmonella. The particulars get confusing, but the trend is unmistakable: our meat supply is frequently contaminated with bacteria that can’t readily be treated by antibiotics.
[...]
It’s not like this is happening without a reason; the little germs have plenty of practice fighting the drugs designed to kill them in the industrially raised animals to which antibiotics are routinely fed. And although it’s economical for producers to drug animals prophylactically[1], there are many strong arguments against the use of those drugs, including their declining efficacy in humans.Probably you’d agree with the couple of people I described this situation to earlier this week, one of whom said something like, “Ugh, that’s crazy,” and the other simply, “They gotta do something about that!”
The thing is, “they” did. In 1977.
That’s when the Food and Drug Administration, aware of the health risks of administering antibiotics to healthy farm animals, proposed to withdraw its prior approval of putting penicillin and tetracycline in animal feed. Per their procedure, the F.D.A. then issued two “notices of opportunity for a hearing,” which were put on hold by Congress until further research could be conducted. On hold is exactly where the F.D.A.’s requests have been since your dad had sideburns.
Until last week, when the agency decided to withdraw them.
That would be the change-we-can-believe-in Obama administration’s FDA, bowing to corporate pressure. It’s disgusting.
Read more gory details here. I’m a meat eater but what’s going on behind the scenes in the American meat industry is horrifying. It’s enough to make me think about becoming a vegetarian.
Repression 8.0
This would our Tweet of the Day. Can’t say things are getting better around here. (Hope? Change?) As a matter of fact, in some cases, they’re worse than ever:
The President as Judge, Jury, Executioner
UPDATED.
It’s hard to believe President Obama is a “constitutional scholar:”
U.S. citizens are legitimate military targets when they take up arms with al-Qaida, top national security lawyers in the Obama administration said Thursday.
The lawyers were asked at a national security conference about the CIA killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen and leading al-Qaida figure. He died in a Sept. 30 U.S. drone strike in the mountains of Yemen.
The government lawyers, CIA counsel Stephen Preston and Pentagon counsel Jeh Johnson, did not directly address the al-Awlaki case. But they said U.S. citizens do not have immunity when they are at war with the United States.
Johnson said only the executive branch, not the courts, is equipped to make military battlefield targeting decisions about who qualifies as an enemy.
So, the president alone gets to decide whether a citizen is “taking up arms with al-Qaida” without having to obtain a warrant for that person’s arrest thus having to run some sort of “proof” by a judge first.
What if we have an insane, paranoid president who thinks putting up posts against Fox News is “taking up arms with al-Qaida?” What if we have a president who thinks Occupy Wall Street people or Greenpeace people are “taking up arms with al-Qaida?” I guess they’re screwed because they won’t have a right to be charged or to have a trial. They can be imprisoned or shot on sight…based on the president’s word.
Sound like the United States of America you know and love?
Filed under: Obama – Don’t Count on My Vote.
UPDATE: Imagine this:
Christmas Tree Farmers Complain About Obama, the Wimp
I can relate to this like there’s no tomorrow because I am pissed off out of my head about Obama caving and caving and caving:
image Via: ChristmasTreeGeek.com
Bending to a flash-in-the-pan controversy over a misunderstood 15-cent fee on Christmas tree sales that would allow farmers to run ads promoting natural trees, the Obama administration formally delayed a proposal for a so-called “Christmas tree tax.”
The proposal was stayed indefinitely in a notice published in the Federal Register on Thursday.
[...]
Christmas tree farmers are pretty upset that the administration caved so quickly, according to a release from the National Christmas Tree Association.
“It’s just so disappointing to have something like this happen because of an internet rumor,” Oregon tree farmer Betty Malone, who was involved in submitting the proposal to the USDA, said in a statement.
It seems to me that the Obama administration is just plain scared of its own shadow.
The wingers spread an “internet rumor” because they know they can make hay out of it and the White House runs backward with its tail between its legs. Why they don’t get that this is an orchestrated thing that will never go away, I don’t know. And why they aren’t more adept and savvy about dealing with this kind of thing — hello, after three years! — is what drives me out of my mind.
I’m Very Suspicious Of Today’s Keystone XL Pipeline News
President Obama just issued this statement regarding his impending decision as to whether to allow the Keystone XL Pipeline to go through:
I support the State Department’s announcement today regarding the need to seek additional information about the Keystone XL Pipeline proposal. Because this permit decision could affect the health and safety of the American people as well as the environment, and because a number of concerns have been raised through a public process, we should take the time to ensure that all questions are properly addressed and all the potential impacts are properly understood. The final decision should be guided by an open, transparent process that is informed by the best available science and the voices of the American people. At the same time, my administration will build on the unprecedented progress we’ve made towards strengthening our nation’s energy security, from responsibly expanding domestic oil and gas production to nearly doubling the fuel efficiency of our cars and trucks, to continued progress in the development of a clean energy economy.
Obama implies that this was the State Department’s idea, as if he had nothing to do with it, which I don’t believe.
Additionally, the global warming and environmental community is overjoyed, claiming victory as a result of their very impressive work opposing the pipeline. The thinking is that this effectively delays Obama’s decision until after the 2012 election. If that is true, I say this is purely a sly political move. Obama doesn’t want to alienate environmentalists prior to the election (i.e., they won the battle but not the war) and I predict, sorry to say, if he is re-elected, Obama will approve the pipeline in his second term.
Keith Olbermann Predicts Ed Schultz is a Goner
MSNBC moved The Ed Schultz Show to 8:00 p.m. ET this week, the show’s third time slot since it debut in April, 2009.
Yeah, it’s only been a week but it isn’t bringing in the big buckaroos the corporate media counts on:
I can’t defend Schultz. I have no idea what he’s thinking. He led tonight with a long segment about Paul Ryan (R-WI) and his speech yesterday at the Heritage Foundation during which he said (in essence) that President Obama is waging class warfare and oh, something incoherent about jobs. The point is, Schultz gave Paul Ryan — a sociopath whose policies will never fly — a whole bunch of time and attention and frankly, I don’t give a rat’s ass about Paul Ryan and I don’t think anybody else does either…other than maybe the beltway pundits.
As a matter of fact, I’m willing to bet that most Americans have no idea who Paul Ryan is.
I changed the channel.
Schultz seems to be fixated on Ryan because he seems to be fixated on defending President Obama and the DNC. I mean, the guy has repeatedly said of late that the Occupy Wall Street protesters are “frustrated,” a word Obama and his Press Secretary, Jay Carney, use all the time.
We aren’t “frustrated” Ed, we’re FURIOUS! We’re furious but we’re trying to hold it together.
Ed Schultz’s time has come and gone. If he continues to side with President Obama and the Democrats – who have failed the 99%ers as tragically as the Republicans have — he’s done. His ratings will continue to lag and hey, he’ll bore an audience that’s willing to die, almost literally, to buck the establishment. Again, we aren’t frustrated, we’re furious. But Ed can’t deliver because he’s owned by the corporate media and because he just doesn’t seem to get what’s going on around here.
Keith Olbermann is right when he tweets:
500 Americans Gassed by the Oakland Police Department
“opd” is the Oakland Police Department.
Follow JoshuaHol here.
Police State America
This is the United States of America tonight (@10:41 pm ET):
Follow JoshuaHol here.
Obama — I am Your Base but I Might Not Vote for You Next Year
Obama — It’s time to get serious. Really, really serious. Because if you don’t, for the first time in my life, I might not cast a vote for president next year. Here’s why:
I no longer trust my own government to be the provider of a civilized society. No government is perfect or without corruptions. But in 2007, I thought I lived in a remarkably well-governed nation that had gone off-kilter under a small and mean administration. In 2011, I view my government as the sharp edge of an entrenched kleptocracy, engaged in ever more expansive schemes of surveillance and arrogating powers of ever less restrained brutality. At a visceral level, I dislike President Obama more than I have disliked any politician in my lifetime, not because he is objectively worse than most of the others — he is not — but because he disproved my hypothesis that we are a country with basically good institutions brought low by poor quality leadership.
Whenever I hear the President speak and am impressed by the quality of his intellect, by his instinct towards diplomacy and finding common ground and rising above petty struggles, I despair more deeply. Not just because a leader of high quality failed to restore passably clean and beneficient government. It is worse than that. The kleptocracy has harnassed this man’s most admirable qualities and made them a powerful weapon for its own ends. He has rebranded as “moderate”, “adult”, “reasonable”, practices such as unaccountable assassination lists and Orwellian nonhostilities. He has demostrated that the way grown-ups get things done in Washington is by continually paying off thieves in suits. Perhaps it is unfair to blame Barack Obama for all this. Maybe he has done the very best a person could do under our present institutions. But then it is not unfair to detest the institutions, to wish to see them clipped, contained, or starved.
“Job Creators” Care More About Bonuses Than Jobs
Memo to the GOP:
Don’t talk to me about how the so-called “job creators” need fewer regulations and tax cuts in order to create those jobs we’ve been waiting for for the last ten years.
Far from creating jobs, the big boys are even downsizing their drinking cups for God’s sake to save money — not to create jobs — but to give bigger bonuses to their already filthy rich CEOs:
Wall Street is planning to lay off thousands of workers in a supposedly underperforming quarter, and Goldman Sachs is no exception, saying that it plans to cut $1.2 billion in costs by laying off 1,000 people, roughly 3 percent of its workforce. The mega-bank is also going after small savings by downsizing its drinking cups.
Even plants aren’t safe from the bank’s tightened budget. The London office removed potted plants, reportedly causing “disquiet” among employees and led “to a stand-off between the plant pickers and staff.” Morgan Stanley has also cut back on office foliage, while Bank of America skipped an annual field day.
However, the real measure of whether Wall Street is serious about cutting costs will be if bonuses go down during lean times. And so far, the chances do not look good. The New York Times’ Dealbook reports that banks, including Goldman, have set aside $65.69 billion for bonuses at the end year, an 8 percent increase over last year.
When was the last time you got an 8 percent raise?
One Last Thing About 9/11: The Assholes on Each Side Won
I always love reading Chris Hedges and this essay — A Decade After 9/11: We Are What We Loathe — is no exception. It captures what I was thinking and feeling yesterday.
What was played out in the weeks after the attacks was the old, familiar battle between force and human imagination, between the crude instruments of violence and the capacity for empathy and understanding. Human imagination lost. Coldblooded reason, which does not speak the language of the imagination, won. We began to speak and think in the empty, mindless nationalist clichés about terror that the state handed to us. We became what we abhorred. The deaths were used to justify pre-emptive war, invasion, Shock and Awe, prolonged occupation, targeted assassinations, torture, offshore penal colonies, gunning down families at checkpoints, massive aerial bombardments, drone attacks, missile strikes and the killing of dozens and soon hundreds and then thousands and later tens of thousands and finally hundreds of thousands of innocent people. We produced piles of corpses in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, and extended the reach of our killing machine to Yemen and Somalia. And by beatifying our dead, by cementing into the national psyche fear and the imperative of permanent war, and by stoking our collective humiliation, the state carried out crimes, atrocities and killings that dwarfed anything carried out against us on 9/11. The best that force can do is impose order. It can never elicit harmony. And force was justified, and is still justified, by the first dead. Ten years later these dead haunt us like Banquo’s ghost.
[...]
We have still not woken up to whom we have become, to the fatal erosion of domestic and international law and the senseless waste of lives, resources and trillions of dollars to wage wars that ultimately we can never win. We do not see that our own faces have become as contorted as the faces of the demented hijackers who seized the three commercial jetliners a decade ago. We do not grasp that Osama bin Laden’s twisted vision of a world of indiscriminate violence and terror has triumphed. The attacks turned us into monsters, grotesque ghouls, sadists and killers who drop bombs on village children and waterboard those we kidnap, strip of their rights and hold for years without due process. We acted before we were able to think. And it is the satanic lust of violence that has us locked in its grip.
[...]
We could have gone another route. We could have built on the profound sympathy and empathy that swept through the world following the attacks. The revulsion over the crimes that took place 10 years ago, including in the Muslim world, where I was working in the weeks and months after 9/11, was nearly universal. The attacks, if we had turned them over to intelligence agencies and diplomats, might have opened possibilities not of war and death but ultimately reconciliation and communication, of redressing the wrongs that we commit in the Middle East and that are committed by Israel with our blessing. It was a moment we squandered. Our brutality and triumphalism, the byproducts of nationalism and our infantile pride, revived the jihadist movement. We became the radical Islamist movement’s most effective recruiting tool. We descended to its barbarity. We became terrorists too. The sad legacy of 9/11 is that the assholes, on each side, won.
Obama Preparing to Fail Again
Say it ain’t so. I mean, really. This is the hope and change guy? This is the bold new initiative?
I don’t know if I can stand to watch.
Obama Bows and Bows and Bows
People tend to like and respect a person who has principles; who stands for something, and who is willing to fight for what they believe — even if they don’t agree with him.
This is not the way to win an election Obama:
Obama Bows to Boehner, Will Speak on September 8
Barack Obama Backtracks on Smog Plan, Bows to to Big Business
It’d be nice to read an article about Obama that didn’t contain the word “bow.”
Obama is Out-Bushing the Bushes
Yes we can! turns into the-corporatocracy-and-the-GOP-have-me-by-the-balls-so-no-we-can’t-because-I’m-scared-of-them:
Not only that, he pushed air quality standards back more than 20 years.
I just created a new category: Obama: Don’t Count on my Vote
