At last, someone points out the obvious

I never expected it to be Richard Wolffe, who's about as cautious as they come, but here you go:





Republicans hated Clinton too, but you never saw this level of contempt. And good for Wolffe for pointing out what's been obvious since January 20, 2009 -- that this country elected a black president and there are a sizable number of people, some of them Federal legislators, who simply can't deal with that.



The image I posted yesterday captured from Limbaugh's site embodies this perfectly -- a subordinate, supplicating black man, seemingly pleading with a white man, with Rush Limbaugh there with a megaphone shouting "NO!" Is there any image we've seen over the last nearly three years that more fully encapsulates the dynamic we've seen with this president's relations with the right? So good for Wolffe for going there.



Chauncey de Vega over at Alternet puts the disturbing dynamic of the whole jobs speech fracas -- a foofarah that is ultimately trivial in content but emblematic of the entirety of the Obama years so far, into historical perspective:

Where blacks had since slave days been expected to step off the sidewalk to allow white persons to pass unimpeded-failure to do so could result in being murdered-some communities with the new century began to require blacks to keep off the sidewalks altogether when any white children were occupying any part of them. Much the same held for the roadway, where blacks could expect to be stopped by police if they dared pass a white driver. So offensive to white sensibilities was a black driving an expensive car that even well-to-do African-Americans kept to older models so as not to give the dangerous impression of being above themselves…



One requirement was to sometimes illogically cede the right-of-way to a white driver-or even to a black driver who was chauffeuring white passengers. At many four-way-stop intersections in the South, the right-of-way was determined not by who reached the intersection first, but rather by the race of the drivers. When confronting a white driver who was female, a black male driver in the South could and sometimes did face a life-or-death decision. Compounding the difficulty facing African-Americans was the lack of universality of any of these conventions. In some places whites did maintain normal driving rules. But in others, Jim Crow was more important than highway safety.

Boehner just pulled a "boy you best get off the sidewalk and let a white man pass moment"; in his demand that the President reschedule his jobs speech scheduled for next week before Congress. If President Obama is not careful the Right may get him for “reckless eyeballing.”



Of course and once more, the Tea Party GOP are behaving like spoiled children.



Here MSNBC’s Richard Wolffe is spot on: to casual observers the spat over the time of the President’s speech on the economy, and how it “conflicts” with the Republican debate, seems mighty petty. This obstructionism on all things is the dominant political strategy by the GOP in the Age of Obama, and it is fueled by a deep hostility to Obama’s legitimacy as President.



As I have suggested many times, the idea that a Black person could be in the White House is too much for the White Conservative Soul and the white racial frame to handle. The symbolism is anathema to their conception of America.



[snip]



When the Birthers, the Graders and Donald Trump led a witch hunt and demanded to see the transcripts of the President, a Harvard grad and University of Chicago professor, because he could not possibly have earned his bonafides (and they remain curiously silent about Rick Perry’s abysmal college career as a “Gentlemen D” student).



In sum, these are moments where black Americans as a community have been collectively slapped in the face and denied their dignity simply because of the color of our skin, and the ways that race works to locate people in a hierarchy of “naturalized” relationships. America no longer has laws demanding that blacks get off the sidewalk when whites pass, or that African Americans cannot try on clothes or hats at a store without buying them first.



But, the intangibles of full and equal respect from whites towards non-whites cannot be legislated: history’s weight is too great and private thoughts and attitudes are often immune from legal precedent. In the United States, one of white supremacy’s most damning and difficult legacies is that for centuries the lowest, most ignorant, stupid, lazy trashy White was elevated above the most educated, refined, literate, and hard working black person.

The Tea Party GOP and their foot soldiers are drunk on that legacy. They may claim to respect the Office of the President, but they most certainly don’t respect the man. And no small part of that is because he is Black.

Wouldn't it be easier to just say you don't want to do it anymore and go home?

I'm really starting to get pissed off at Barack Obama for his insistence on wasting our time with running for re-election when it's clear based on his actions that he's trying to sabotage his own presidency so he can go home.



I'm finding it increasingly difficult to find a reason to go to the polls next year, and "Ooh, Scary!" in the context of an executive-ordered Christian Dominionist mandate by President Perry or President Bachmann just isn't doing it for me the way it used to. Maybe it's just that I see this kind of theocracy as inevitable, so we might as well get it over with now. Why should I plan to bust my ass for another decade or so when I'm just going to be burnt at the stake as a heretic anyway?



I don't know if he's embraced the Washington bubble so much that he really believes that 80% of Americans are teabaggers who want to see Social Security and Medicare eliminated and a nation still reeling from recession to be subject to an austerity plan that will make 1933 look like 1995, or if he doesn't give a shit because Lloyd Blankfein has promised him an eight-figure job when he leaves office and he doesn't care whether it's in January of 2013 or January of 2017 (but would prefer it to be earlier.



But it's become increasingly clear that this guy at best has no clue on what to do to improve this nation's prospects and is listening to the wrong people, and at worst he truly does not care. And the rest of his party, while turning its back on him, isn't exactly doing a great job of fighting the good fight.



When poll after poll shows huge majorities of Americans wanting the New Deal and Great Society programs kept, and the teabag coalition consisting of the same 18-19% of dead-enders who still think George W. Bush was a great president, there are eimply no other explanations for the kind of boneheaded adherence to austerity to which the Obama Administration insists on clinging.



And now the polls show just how disgusted the public is with this man's utter refusal to take a stand on their behalf:

President Obama's summer woes have dragged his approval rating to an all-time low, sinking below 40% for the first time in Gallup's daily tracking poll.



New data posted Sunday shows that 39% of Americans approve of Obama's job performance, while 54% disapprove. Both are the worst numbers of his presidency.



Obama's approval rating has hovered in the 40% range for much of 2011, peaking at 53% in the weeks following the death of Osama bin Laden.



But Americans' view of his job performance continued to tick downward as the debt-ceiling debate heated up. By the time he signed legislation averting a federal default, he was mired in the low-40% range.

The first thing this president's team did upon taking office was to throw his entire base under the bus, branding us all as "the professional left." Instead, they've tried to focus on a bunch of low-information ignoramuses who vote based on "Ooh! Shiny!" But even those who don't pay attention to politics DO pay attention to the fact that they no longer have a paycheck because their job has been outsourced to a low-wage country, and that the cost of heating oil has tripled in the last five years, and that even an "inexpensive" college for their kid is going to set them back twenty-five grand a year, and that without a paycheck they have to find $20,000 a year to pay for health insurance that will deny every single claim. And when they start to see what "less government" means, they don't much care for it.



Maybe the "Ooh, shiny!" crowd is still interested in what this man has to say, though I doubt it because he isn't shiny anymore. But those of us that at one time could have been relied on to be good soldiers have tuned him out.



Prepare the public heretics' pyre, Mr. Perry. I'm ready.



More good stuff on the preposterousness that is the Obama re-election campaign at Sardonicky.

Richard Milhouse Obama

Or George Walker Obama, if you prefer. Once one president snatches powers not granted to him by the Constitution, all others will keep it:

President Obama rejected the views of top lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department when he decided that he had the legal authority to continue American military participation in the air war in Libya without Congressional authorization, according to officials familiar with internal administration deliberations.

Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and Caroline D. Krass, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, had told the White House that they believed that the United States military’s activities in the NATO-led air war amounted to “hostilities.” Under the War Powers Resolution, that would have required Mr. Obama to terminate or scale back the mission after May 20.

But Mr. Obama decided instead to adopt the legal analysis of several other senior members of his legal team — including the White House counsel, Robert Bauer, and the State Department legal adviser, Harold H. Koh — who argued that the United States military’s activities fell short of “hostilities.” Under that view, Mr. Obama needed no permission from Congress to continue the mission unchanged.

Maybe there really IS such a thing as 11-dimensional chess

Heh. From Pam:

And that photo reminded me again of this:

(Yes, I know, he's going to break our hearts again by selling out on reproductive self-determination, or on Social Security, or on tax cuts. But for now I'm going to smell the roses and eat the chocolate and pretend that it really IS going to be different this time, baby.)

This can't be good news... Well, maybe it can

Just saw from Joe Sudbay at Americablog that President Obama is to address the nation any minute with the topic being National Security. MSNBC will have video.

10:50 PM: MSNBC is reporting that Osama Bin Laden is dead. President Obama to speak shortly.

Yes, there really IS a difference

It doesn't always seem that way, but there is:

In numerous interviews in the low-income Alberta neighborhood here on Friday, shortly before President Obama and other officials toured what is now an unimaginable wasteland, residents said they had few complaints about the handling of the aftermath by state, local and federal agencies.

Many expressed mild frustration about limits on their access to damaged homes, the pace of road clearing and power restoration, and traffic jams caused by roadblocks and nonfunctioning signals. But most agreed that government and charitable agencies were coping as effectively as feasible with immediate demands for shelter, food, water and medical care, along with search and rescue operations.

“It ain’t like Katrina,” said Darius Rutley, 21, whose house in Alberta was obliterated. “We’re getting help.”

Friday Big Blue Smurf Blogging: What they said

Today's honoree: BooMan, who has some advice for President Obama in dealing with the Republicans.

Money quote:

...at a certain point you have to knock off the happy talk about how we can solve our problems if we just talk to each other. These idiots think you're a Muslim who isn't even an American citizen. They think you're pushing some Leninist agenda. They're cuckoo for cocoa puffs. And those who aren't are perfectly content to pretend that they are. I am not saying you should accuse them all of doing six months in Chino for exposing themselves to eight year-olds, but it might not be the worst idea. The truth doesn't matter anymore, and you'd probably be half-right with a bunch of these kooks.

Obama caves again

I wonder if President Obama realizes that even if he enacted every part of a Tea Party agenda, they would still regard him as an illegitimate usurper to their rightful perpetual control of the White House. Because so far there is NO issue on which he won't cave to Republicans. Now he's decided that the wealthiest Americans can keep their Bush-era tax cuts at the same time that his Catfood Commission has decided that Social Security needs to be cut:

President Barack Obama's top adviser suggested to The Huffington Post late Wednesday that the administration is ready to accept an across-the-board continuation of steep Bush-era tax cuts, including those for the wealthiest taxpayers.

That appears to be the only way, said David Axelrod, that middle-class taxpayers can keep their tax cuts, given the legislative and political realities facing Obama in the aftermath of last week's electoral defeat.

"We have to deal with the world as we find it," Axelrod said during an unusually candid and reflective 90-minute interview in his office, steps away from the Oval Office. "The world of what it takes to get this done."

"There are concerns," he added, that Congress will continue to kick the can down the road in the future by passing temporary extensions for the wealthy time and time again. "But I don't want to trade away security for the middle class in order to make that point."

Translation: We are too fucking weak-ass to fight for what we think is right.

And so it continues.

Quote of the Day

“The 20-year-old kid who voted for Barack Obama and then saw this White House cut backroom deals with special interests instead of truly fighting for big change like the public option doesn't need a public shaming...He needs to see Democrats acknowledge that the Rahm Emanuel strategy of pre-emptively caving before a fight is a failure -- and that if he trusts Democrats with his vote again, he will be electing a fighting Democratic Party.” – Adam Green, Progressive Change Campaign Committee

(via)

WEDNESDAY Big Blue Smurf Blogging: What They Said

This morning's honoree: Terrence Heath at Alternet, who tells President Please Hit Me Again that it's time for him to man up.

Money quotes:

With all due respect, it’s time to man up. It is time, way past time for you to grow into the job you were elected to do, and promised to do. It is time to stand up and be the man we hope we elected. It is time to justify that hope, and the trust that was placed in you. It is time to pick up the mantle of history that has been entrusted to you and prove yourself worthy of carrying it forward.

Too much is at stake now. Too many people are beginning to think their faith in you was misplaced. What’s worse is you are proving them right.

Strike one was Van Jones.

Strike two was ACORN.

And now Shirley Sherrod had become strike three.

Yours has become an administration that remains loyal to people who are and have been part of the problem (Any problem we’re currently facing. Pick one.)

It’s an administration in which a Ben Bernanke can keep a job, but a Van Jones can’t.

It’s an administration in which a Larry Summers can keep a job, but a Shirley Sherrod can’t.

It’s an administration in which a Tim Geithner can keep a job, but an Elizabeth Warren may not be able to get one.

It’s an administration that quickly leaves twisting in the wind good people who are trying to be a part of the solution, but have the misfortune of being targeted by smear campaigns from a political right-wing you clearly fear more than you respect the concerns of not just progressives who worked hard to put you into office, but the very people Sherrod spoke of in her unedited speech

It took less time for your administration to respond to Andrew Breitbart’s deceptively edited video than it took for you to stand and fight for health care reform.

It took less time than it has to break the Senate filibuster on extending unemployment benefits.

It took less time than it has thus far to pass legislation that will create jobs, or extend aid to states that could potentially save 900,000 jobs, or keep hundreds of thousand of teachers on the job.

In all of the above, the shadow of the closed fist has loomed — both in the form of threats of filibuster and obstruction, and threats of violence — and fear of it has stalled the work that we — the coalition of black and white and latino, young and old, poor, working class, and middle class, etc. — elected you and trusted you to do.

That trust has been abused, and must now be earned back.

I'm not holding my breath.

I have nothing to add to this

It's days like yesterday that make me glad I work for a giant multinational corporation instead of blogging full-time. Because if I'd had to cover this latest incident of the Obama Administration going into full-blown panic mood every time that racist scum Andrew Breitbrat says "Boo!", I think I would have to kill myself.

I don't know how Rachel held it together for this:

Even NPR this morning decided to cover the story from the standpoint of "Are we too sensitive about race", rather than "Andrew Breitbart is a libelous racist scumbag provacateur who should be shunned by all civilized people."

Science: Another casualty of Barack Obama's desperate need to be liked by Republicans

From Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility:

Tomorrow marks the one-year anniversary of the date when new rules to protect federal scientists and science from political interference were supposed to have been in place. As a result, federal scientists continue to report the same sort of suppression and skewing of scientific and technical reports by agency managers that occurred under the George W. Bush administration, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

On March 9, 2009, President Obama issued an Executive Memorandum to all federal departments and agencies declaring his intent to adopt policies that protect scientific integrity. The accompanying White House fact sheet described the action as addressing “one of the President’s key campaign commitments on science policy, which was to ‘restore scientific integrity in government decision making.’” That order directed the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to develop proposed policies for Presidential action by July 9, 2009. That deadline has long since lapsed with no new due date and without a cogent explanation for the delay.

“The atmosphere under Obama for federal scientists remains largely unchanged from the Bush era,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, whose organization works with federal scientists seeking to remedy scientific misconduct and political obfuscation. “Federal agency science is still manipulated for political reasons largely because there are still no rules against it.”

Is there nothing in this country that won't be sacrificed on the altar of Barack Obama's childhood emotional baggage?

My predictions for the Obama speech tonight

Mark Riley had callers tonight making all kinds of pie-in-the-sky predictions about what President Obama is going to say tonight in his speech about the BP oil disaster. They're expecting everything from a Marshall Plan for alternative energy to criminal charges against BP executives.

I don't know where these people have been for the last year and a half, but here's what I expect him to say:

1) I'm angry.

2) I'm REALLY angry.

3) Hey, Chuck [Todd], am I angry enough for you now?

4) The people of the Gulf coast really need you to spend your money at their beaches before they're gone.

5) Have some cocktail shrimp. They're perfectly safe.

Let's see how close I get. Tune in later.

UPDATE: Pretty close, I'd say, at least for ineffectual points. Convene a commission, good old American know-how, and prayer.

Yup. That'll solve the problem.

UPDATE: Rachel is pretty disgusted too:

So is Robert Reich.

So what is the deal with this guy? Is he, as I fear, just biding his time until he can go home and use the contacts he's made to parlay his role as ex-president into some kind of big fat corporate job? Is he so paralyzed by this Ingratiate-With-The-White-People baggage he has that he simply cannot address a crisis? Or were we completely sold a bill of goods and he is truly, in his heart and soul, a corporatist at heart who really thinks Americans can go fuck themselves, this country should be run only for the rich and he's going to become one of them, dammit?

I thought he would sell us out one teensy-tiny bit less than Hillary Clinton would. But that tiny bit is getting tinier by the day.

Tuesday Big Blue Smurf Blogging: What They Said

Today's honoree: Roger Shuler, a.k.a. The Legal Schnauzer, on how Obama still doesn't fully "get it" about Republicans.

Money quote:

For roughly 30 years, since Ronald Reagan opened his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, with a speech about states' rights, conservative Republicans have been marked by four traits:

* A willingness to twist the truth for political gain;

* A willingness to act corruptly in order to gain and consolidate political power;

* A willingness to make expert use of the race-based fear card in order to attract middle-class white voters; and

* A tendency to govern in such an incompetent fashion that voters turn to Democrats to clean up Republican messes.

Obama clearly wants to break this dysfunctional cycle. But we fear he's going about it the wrong way.

The president tried to reason with Republicans last Friday--politely, but bluntly, calling them on their false statements. For good measure, Obama seemingly tried to shame them into realizing that they needed to work with Democrats in a bipartisan, constructive fashion.

But here, we suspect, is the ugly truth about the modern GOP: You can't reason with them, and you can't shame them into doing the right thing.

That's because the modern Republican political brand, shaped by Reagan with several dollops of Nixonian skulduggery, remains intact. It never has been discredited the way it should have been long ago.

You may not agree with the tinfoil with which he closes the post (I actually do), but it is apot on the money.

Damn, he's good

I just got finished watching Barack Obama stumping for Jon Corzine here in NJ. If only he were as fired up about health care as he is about re-electing Corzine, because damn he's good on the stump.

We are in a bit of a pickle here in the Garden and Tank Farm state. We have a huge budget hole that started when Christine Todd Whitman decided to borrow-and-tax-cut her way into prominence, continued with her designated successor, Donald DiFrancesco, steamrolled under the disastrous Jim McGreevey, and the wonkish Jon Corzine has been able to do little to stop it.

Politics in New Jersey is among the most corrupt in the nation. Someone is always either under indictment or on trial or going to jail. Right now it's Democrats like former Bergen County Democratic Organization head Joe Ferriero, primarily because Democrats are in power. When Republicans are in power, it's Republicans. Corruption, graft, and kickbacks aren't about party affiliation here in NJ, they're endemic to the state.

Tomorrow night is a much-anticipated debate in my town among the Republican and Democratic candidates for mayor and council, with our town gadfly running as an independent. This will be our first contested election in three decades. Rumor has it that the incumbent Republicans, who are bankrolled by a wealthy military contractor who's all but sure to win a state Assembly seat, are terrified that the Democrats will get in, open the books, and see what's been going on. All I want to know is whether the no-show jobs and the crony contracts will stop and we will start actually getting something for our tax dollars. I'm planning to go; if nothing else it promises to be a "lively discussion."

Corzine is pretty unpopular here in New Jersey. Perhaps if he had Obama's dynamism, he wouldn't be so unpopular, particularly running as he is against a particularly odious specimen of Republican in Chris Christie. I don't know what the Republican Party was thinking, making him their standard-bearer, except that the only other candidate was the extreme wingnut xenophobe Steve Lonigan. Perhaps they thought that Christie would be New Jersey's Rudy Giuliani, with a similar reputation as a "crime-fighter." Unfortunately, Christie is a Bush-era prosecutor with Bush-era tendencies to be highly selective about his prosecutions, which tend to be exclusively against Democrats. It doesn't help Christie that his New York counterpart's BFF, Bernie Kerik, went to jail today for revealing sealed information before his trial.

It seems that Chris Christie may have his own Bernie Kerik in the form of Michele Brown:

When news broke in August that the former United States attorney, Christopher J. Christie, had lent $46,000 to a top aide in the federal prosecutor’s office, he said he was merely helping a friend in need. He also said the aide, Michele Brown, had done nothing to help his gubernatorial campaign.

ut interviews with federal law enforcement officials suggest that Ms. Brown used her position in two significant and possibly improper ways to try to aid Mr. Christie in his run for governor.

In March, when Gov. Jon S. Corzine’s campaign requested public records about Mr. Christie’s tenure as prosecutor, Ms. Brown interceded to oversee the responses to the inquiries, taking over for the staff member who normally oversaw Freedom of Information Act requests, according to federal law enforcement officials in Newark and Washington. The requested information included records about Mr. Christie’s travel and expenses, along with Ms. Brown’s travel records.

[snip]

In mid-June, when F.B.I. agents and prosecutors gathered to set a date for the arrests of more than 40 targets of a corruption and money-laundering probe, Ms. Brown alone argued for the arrests to be made before July 1. She later told colleagues that she wanted to ensure that the arrests occurred before Mr. Christie’s permanent successor took office, according to three federal law enforcement officials briefed on the conversation, presumably so that Mr. Christie would be given credit for the roundup.

The federal law enforcement officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were barred from speaking on the record.

Ms. Brown declined to be interviewed for this article. In an e-mail message to The New York Times, she called the allegations “outrageous and inaccurate,” but declined to answer further questions. Through a spokesman, Mr. Christie stood by his earlier assertions that Ms. Brown had not assisted his campaign in any way.

[snip]

Allegations that Mr. Christie played politics as a prosecutor have dogged him; reports that he discussed a run for governor with Karl Rove in 2006 led Democrats to assert he had violated the Hatch Act, which forbids candidates from “testing the waters” for a run for office.

The possibility that Ms. Brown may have helped Mr. Christie’s campaign from inside the United States attorney’s office casts a new light on their relationship and on the prosecutor’s office. Federal law and Justice Department policy prohibit prosecutors from using their “official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election.”

That's the problem with these law 'n' order guys -- they seem to think that they're somehow special, and the laws don't apply to them. Christie has has been in six accidents and was cited 13 times for moving violations since 1985. Yes, that's a long time, but since 1973 I have been in only TWO accidents, neither of them my fault, and NEVER been cited for moving violations.

Christie is in the unenviable position of many Republicans living in states where the majority of the population is not insane: he has to ingratiate himself with the lunatics of his party and still try to appeal with his more moderate constituents. In perhaps his biggest gaffe, he has advocated allowing insurance companies to refuse to cover mammograms, especially for young women, because a young woman with breast cancer is "an exception." I'm sure that Rochelle Shoretz, who was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 28, doesn't feel like "an exception."

Here in New Jersey, we pay the highest property taxes in the nation, an "honor" we've had for decades, under both Republican and Democratic governance. A good chunk of this is due to the rampant corruption that infects both parties. Another good chunk is home rule, which results in little fiefdoms like my hometown, regarded as piggybanks for the business buddies of the people who run them. And a chunk is because New Jersey receives less per capita back from the Federal government than any other state in the country. Here in my Congressional district, our Congressman Scott Garrett is too busy showing what an ideological purist he is to vote for anything that might actually help his constituents.

It remains to be seen whether Barack Obama can bring disaffected Democrats out on November 3. People tend not to come out to vote when they aren't thrilled with the available candidate(s). But as ineffective as Corzine may have been so far, a Chris Christie governorship promises to be nasty, brutish, and unfortunately, long.

Rachel Maddow explains it all for you

Rachel puts Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize in context:

THAT'S why.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely

I just didn't think it would happen this quickly:

Obama administration officials, fearing a battle with Congress that could stall plans to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, are crafting language for an executive order that would reassert presidential authority to incarcerate terrorism suspects indefinitely, according to three senior government officials with knowledge of White House deliberations.

Such an order would embrace claims by former president George W. Bush that certain people can be detained without trial for long periods under the laws of war. Obama advisers are concerned that an order, which would bypass Congress, could place the president on weaker footing before the courts and anger key supporters, the officials said.

Look, I understand the dilemma. I understand that by utilizing torture, the Bush Administration created evidence against some of the people held at Guantanamo Bay that cannot be used under the system of justice we claim to utilize in the U.S. But does Barack Obama really believe that embracing the Bush Administration's power grab to incarcerate anyone, at any time, for any reason, under the cover of "war", is "change we can believe in" and that it's going to "keep us safe"?

Either we're better than the government of Iran or we aren't. And if we aren't, then let's throw this notion of "change" out the window and stop this crap about how America is so special and some kind of moral beacon for the rst of the world.

And by the way, in case Barack Obama doesn't know it yet, the very same wingnuts who ignored the destruction of habeas corpus under the Bush Administration are suddenly going to find it objectionable and a Threat to the Republic now that a Democrat has embraced it. So if he thinks this is a way to curry favor with Republicans, he'd better guess again. And if the new boss is going to be the same as the old boss, then we might as well sit on our hands in 2012 and let Sarah Palin become President. Because what the hell's the difference?

He's Barack Obama, and You're Not!

Tonight at the 65th Annual Television and Radio Correspondent's Dinner, we were treated again, for a few moments, to a POTUS with a real sense of humor. I find him quite witty, and even though he does have writers, (he's not a professional comedian, after all,) its all in the delivery; he is one cool character.

At the same event Jib Jab debuted their new video about President Obama in front of the man himself. From the video I've seen of his reaction, he liked it:

Try JibJab Sendables® eCards today!

Here is some of his speech:



RIPCoco

The Revenge of the Fly...

I don't make the news, I merely report it....


PETA apparently is upset that Obama killed that fly. They wish he hadn't. They think he's a bad example of how we should act towards other living beings. So they've sent him a humane fly trap, which allows the trapper to release the live fly outside, where it can fly off and find some shit to lay a kajillion eggs in and then go off and annoyingly spread shit germs!

Worse, there is a certain amount of capitalizing on the back on that dead fly on PETA's part. They sell the Katcha Bug humane fly trap and think that they can sell more by making a certain amount of stink about this poor dead fly. PETA claims that its the news outlets that are making them out to be some sort of fly lovers...uh-huh...

PETA has gone over the edge this time. Whats next, mosquitoes? How about the rights of germs? Isn't it also unfair to kill pneumonia germs in the prime of their lives?

Attention PETA: You are doing more harm to any animals that you might have helped by going to bat for flies!
I just ordered a mess of beneficial nematodes that eat fly eggs...and I'm also not beyond spraying yard guard around the edges of things if I'm gonna be outside. I'm a DEET gal, and besides the usual swatters, we also have a GUN swatter that Will uses to murder flies every day!
President Obama is my hero! Look at those reflexes! Down with Flies!! Long live Obama!

OK, I'm done....



RIP Coco

Lets Not Sort it Out; Obama Considers Allowing Detainees to Plead Guilty With No Trial??? Impossible!!

OK, here we go; US Military law does not really allow for guilty pleas in cases where the death penalty is a possible outcome. According to the New York Times today, President Obama and his administration are looking at ways to make this law less ambiguous. The push to clarify this comes from military prosecutors who don't want to have to put on an entire case if a defendant pleads guilty....really?...Isn't putting on cases sorta what they do?

But American military justice law, which is the model for the military commission rules, bars members of the armed services who are facing capital charges from pleading guilty. Partly to assure fairness when execution is possible, court-martial prosecutors are required to prove guilt in a trial even against service members who want to plead guilty.

Why?
Well, what comes to mind immediately for me is that the military is a very controlling apparatus, just like, say, a terrorist group, in that there is a strong belief system so deeply held that one would gladly die for it, to keep a code of silence, or to become a martyr. When young recruits are broken down and built back up, they are imbued with a code that could maybe, in some off chance, in a system that has been proven time and again to be imperfect, falsely incriminate themselves.
If that part of the law was left "ambiguous" maybe it was so that cases could be decided on their individual merits and depending on the judge. I'm happy to have all of the evidence presented if we are going to put anyone to death, much less a soldier or an enemy combatant. There are certain standards of morality and ethics that have to be upheld, even if it seems like an exercise to these supposed prosecutors.

I'm no law expert, and I'm definitely no military law expert, but in the middle of a certain amount of confusing backpedaling by the Obama Administration, I find it incredibly disconcerting to hear that the idea is being kicked around to allow certain Guantanamo detainees to plead guilty to the 9-11 attack and therefore be executed without a full trial.

This is not because there is some 100% way to know they are guilty. Their stated intent has been to die as martyrs by execution, and because their confessions are completely the fruit of torture techniques that have been proven to elicit false confessions, it would seem to be a little counter intuitive to just give them what they want. It would, however, make the problem of what we did to them go away pretty nicely!

It appears to me that Obama has had to backtrack on the military tribunals because in a regular court these guys might just go free under the weight of how these confessions were coerced out of these very same detainees. The idea of cutting out the tribunal altogether is not only far fetched but pretty unbelievable! We may need a new set of laws and a new sort of prison to deal with this sort of detainee over the long term, but I've got to say that putting them to death on the strength of confession elicited by torture is not the way to go.

As much as the New York Times seems to be sure that this idea has legs in the administration, it seems like a long shot that it could ever work. The administration is, for some reason, going to great lengths to try to prevent the details of torture on the Bush watch from coming out, but in so doing they are implicating the Obama administration as more of the same. This is a slippery slope that none of us wants to start sliding down; and I'm afraid that we are already there.

It seems that alot of this revolves around the 9-11 case and our usual need for vengeance by death penalty. According to the Times:

Lawyers who were asked about the administration’s proposed change in recent days said it appeared to be intended for the Sept. 11 case.
“They are trying to give the 9/11 guys what they want: let them plead guilty and get the death penalty and not have to have a trial,” said Maj. David J. R. Frakt of the Air Force, a Guantánamo defense lawyer.

I can just hear the wheels turning in the conspiracy theorists minds. But, if this is just about that pound of flesh, and also serves to cover up the crimes committed by the Bush Administration, its not worth the long term effect on the law and our constitution, which will be skirted in a way that will not serve anyone but the Bush folks, who really need to be at least investigated!

Further:

Cmdr. Suzanne M. Lachelier, a Navy lawyer for one of the detainees in the Sept. 11 case, Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, said of the Obama administration, “They’re encouraging martyrdom.”

Which is exactly right, and a shortsighted band-aid on a long term problem, exacerbated by the very treatment that is now being glossed over in this way. The Bush answer to martyrs would be "Martyr This, You Asshole...Bring it On!" But that reverberates across the world and creates thousands of more of these same guys. Hiding what happened is not goign to prevent more terrorism; its going to incite it. The best thing that we can do is, if they want to plead guilty, have a trial and then keep them in a small cell forever; take the execution option off the table, at least. The need to make the torture facts go away is a crime in itself, and the need for a pound of flesh in regards to 9-11 is a big example of human weakness. What would Jesus do, after all?

I say that as a non-religious person trying to understand the methods and logic of how these things work in the minds of good religious and community minded people of all ilks. If heaven and martyrdom is the ultimate gift to some, and death is the ultimate punishment to others, where do logical people find a common ground?

Considering that we each live on this earth for a speck of time in the grander scheme of history, and considering that it seems like a relatively long time to us, during which we go through many changes mentally, doesn't it make sense that perhaps the better punishment for a criminal is to make them live out their lives in a high security facility with little contact with the outside world? Is our need to cover up our own misdeeds so strong that we would, in their minds anyway, let them go freely to their reward in heaven? And if there is the slightest possibility for these guys to ever fully realize the gravity of what they've done and to suffer the anguish of having to live with it, day in and day out, into old age, isn't that a worse punishment?
The real story may lie in the fear that we have of realizing the gravity of what was done in our names while we crumbled to the terra and went shopping. We are all guilty of that, but our system and our way of being should allow for us to look at that so that it never can happen again. The ruined cases of these alleged 9-11 conspirators will go down in history as a reason that we don't torture; you cant make a real case out of what you find out that way.



If President Obama is behind this misguided idea, I'm going to have a very hard time reconciling the image that he presents in his wonderful speeches around the world with this ass backward, Bushian idea. I never thought I would agree with President Obama on everything, but on the issue of torture and holding the previous administration accountable, its going to be very hard to get past what seems to be purposeful governmental roadblocks to justice! I've said it before and I'll keep saying it: We can not heal and learn from the past unless and until we look hard at what went on, the good and the bad; there is no moving on! There is only repetition of our mistakes until we fully understand what went into making them. Alot of that may be fear, and fear is an issue that human beings have alot of trouble looking at. But, if we don't look, we can be controlled by it; and thats exactly what happened!! So, face it, and move ahead; but do it in the right way, like real Americans, not scared and embarassed children.

My theory at this point is to wait and see, but I would hope that some sort of check and balance system would kick in in order to give the people a voice. In the meantime, I am heading over to the White House page to drop him a note.

c/p RIP Coco