Excusing Obama

BP, Deepwater, Obama, Salazar

Debcoop at Open Left has a new post up trying to make sure everyone knows that Republicans are to blame for the oil spill, and not Obama.

The NY Times thinks that President Obama has not responded aggressively enough to this spill. Let's be clear:

No way is this oil spill Barack Obama's fault.

Seriously? As Paul Rosenberg points out (also in a post on Open Left!), Obama appointed an Interior Secretary (Ken Salazar) with deep ties to the oil industry. Salazar was confirmed in January of 2009. The BP permit for the Deep Horizon well was approved 3 months later in April, with zero meaningful oversight.

Since then, 26 additional well permits have been handed out in exactly the same way, by the exact same Interior Secretary. As Rosenberg says, these permits were simply rubber stamped, and the oil companies were allowed to simply assert that there would be no environmental impact. (Read Rosenberg's post if you want to get a good idea of what the Interior Department does to make sure disasters like the BP catastrophe don't happen.)

Now, you may argue that we can't expect the president to know all of the intricacies of deep sea drilling, and that it is true. But you simply cannot excuse him for appointing an Interior Secretary with the record that Ken Salazar has.  

And in case you think he just didn't know any better, just last month Obama approved a massive expansion of offshore drilling, which would have been done using the exact same regulatory process, by the exact same department-a process that could best be described as simply signing whatever drilling applications the oil corporations filled out, and then going back to sleep.

This is not some case of Obama making the passive and innocent mistake of not realizing that the Secretary of the Interior was in charge of regulating activity that could (and did) result in a massive environmental catastrophe. No, this is worse. Obama actively planned to allow a huge expansion of this activity, and he either did not bother to look into the risks of such activity, or did look into it and saw nothing or didn't care. And we know this because his administration has continued to issue rubber stamp permits, just like the one that BP got, even after the BP explosion!

None of these explanations are acceptable, nor the actions excusable. They are precisely the kind of thing that we would be (rightly) excoriating Bush/Cheney for, and yet here is DebCoop, on Open Left of all places, excusing this behavior.

This is exactly the kind of sycophantic drivel one would expect to find on the pages of the White House web site or some Democratic Party hack's blog, and yet it is making it's way onto the pages of OpenLeft.com.

The fault lies with the ideology and mores of the Republican party and its theory of government.

Which are, it is becoming painfully obvious, no different from the ideology and mores of President Obama.

Their solution to this country's energy's future is to drill anywhere and everywhere.

This might be more relevant to your case if Obama had not- just last month!- approved a plan to pretty much just drill anywhere and everywhere.

Putting A Hit On An American Citizen

From the NYT:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen, the radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is believed to have shifted from encouraging attacks on the United States to directly participating in them, intelligence and counterterrorism officials said Tuesday. 

This is indeed an extraordinary step, and one which should disabuse anyone of the notion that President Obama is not only continuing the attacks on the constitutional civil rights of American citizens, but escalating them.

Al-Awlaki is an American citizen. He is not an enemy combatant, and the government is not claiming the right to kill him during battle, but at any time they see him, whether he is at home with his family or out shopping.

This is a direct assault on the Constitution of the United States, and specifically the 5th Amendment thereof:

No person shall be held to answer for any capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. 

The law is very clear on this. The US government cannot kill people for crimes they may have committed without first arresting them, trying them, and convicting them. The only exception is if they are engaged in active warfare. Al-Awlaki is most certainly not engaging in active warfare.

He has been vocal in his criticism of the United States and it's unjust war against Iraq. But this is not a crime. In fact, it is essential and protected free speech.

He has praised Ft. Hood shooter Major Nidal Hassan. But praising someone is also free speech, and the government has done nothing to show that he conspired with Hasan in any way. Furthermore, using the government's own definitions, Hasan was an enemy combatant, not a terrorist, and he directly attacked soldiers.

He has expressed support for the actions of others who have plotted attacks against the United States, but he has claimed steadfastly that he has not been involved in planning these attacks.

Al-Awlaki may or may not be guilty of plotting terror attacks. We just don't know, and the US government is claiming only that it believes this to be true. It has presented no evidence to a judge. It has presented no evidence to the American people.  But we do know that he is an American citizen. He was born in New Mexico; his father has a PhD from the University of Nebraska. He is guaranteed certain rights by the US Constitution. And now Obama plans to disregard those rights, and to murder him on sight without so much as a trial or a hearing before a federal judge to present evidence.

With this action, Obama is claiming the right to kill any American citizen anywhere, at any time, for any reason that he deems sufficient.

Film director Roman Polanksi fled the country after pleading guilty to the sexual assault of a 13 year old girl. Why not send in a sniper team to kill him? He's actually had his day in court.

Nine members of the Hutaree Christian militia were believed to be plotting to murder police officers. Why not just drop a bomb on their homes?

The fact that we can't easily arrest Al-Awlaki because he is in Yemen is not an excuse to murder him. The United States government has not even gone to the trouble of presenting evidence and getting an indictment. Is their evidence so thin that they believe they can't get an indictment? If so, how can they contemplate murdering him on the basis of this evidence?

Both the C.I.A. and the military maintain lists of terrorists linked to Al Qaeda and its affiliates who are approved for capture or killing, former officials said. But because Mr. Awlaki is an American, his inclusion on those lists had to be approved by the National Security Council, the officials said.

Who gave the National Security Council the authority to unconstitutionally target American citizens for killing? The NYT notes that "As a general principle, international law permits the use of lethal force against individuals and groups that pose an imminent threat to a country," but international law does not supersede the US Constitution.

Al Qaeda is undoubtedly winning. Their goal was never to defeat the United States on its home soil militarily; that would be impossible. Their goal was change the fundamental character of the United States, and every time we allow our government to suspend civil rights- to spy on its citizens, to torture, to murder its own citizens without any due process whatsoever-Al Qaeda wins.

And today, Obama is driving one more nail into the coffin that holds all the things that America once stood for.

A Matter Of Time

USA Today has a front page article about the growing consensus for a need to reform marijuana articles. And when USA Today, the most mainstream of publications, has a story about pot reform, you know it's becoming acceptable. Interestingly, the story is now the most popular piece on all of USAToday.com. This probably shouldn't surprise anyone; remember the online Q&A Obama had last May in which the top query was whether we should legalize marijuana. (Obama belittled the question insultingly- he apparently thinks a war on drug users which costs $40 billion per year and imprisons millions of Americans is trivial.)

LOS ANGELES — James Gray once saw himself as a drug warrior, a former federal prosecutor and county judge who sent people to prison for dealing pot and other drug offenses. Gradually, though, he became convinced that the ban on marijuana was making it more accessible to young people, not less.

"I ask kids all the time, and they'll tell you it is easier to get marijuana than a six-pack of beer because that is controlled by the government," he said, noting that drug dealers don't ask for IDs or honor minimum age requirements.

So Gray — who spent two decades as a superior court judge inOrange County, Calif., and once ran for Congress as aRepublican— switched sides in the war on drugs, becoming an advocate for legalizing marijuana.

"Let's face reality," he says. "Taxing and regulating marijuana will make it less available to children than it is today."

There is literally no rational reason for continuing the criminalization of a harmless plant like marijuana. And even right-wing Republican drug warriors are beginning to see the light. Even if you really believe that marijuana is harmful, as Gray still apparently does, you have to recognize that the current approach only works if you believe that the goal is to imprison more Americans.

The Obama administration still opposes smoking marijuana for its medicinal benefit, says Tom McLellan, deputy director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. He says more research is needed to deliver the medically useful ingredients in a non-smokable form.

The Obama administration still opposes smoking marijuana, period, for its political benefit. As usual, it is petrified of leading on this issue. President Obama is an intelligent man. He cannot possibly believe that we should be imprisoning people for non-violent marijuana crimes. And yet he refuses to lead because he is afraid of the repercussions.

But perhaps that's for the best. If he had an honest talk about marijuana, every single Republican in the country would put aside their personal beliefs and unite in a massive condemnation of that drug-using, witch-doctor, crack-baby president (who just so happens to be black) and accuse him of trying to corrupt their innocent, young, white daughters with the horrifyingly dangerous marijuana drug. And then every Democrat in the country would fall all over themselves in an effort to appear even tougher on pot  (because the Democrats are a bunch of wimps without the courage of their mostly correct convictions) and the marijuana reform movement would be set back 25 years.

And I don't think I'm exaggerating the Republican response one bit.

Obama's New Plan: The Anti-Stimulus!

This just out at the NYT:

WASHINGTON — President Obama will call for a three-year freeze in spending on many domestic programs, and for increases no greater than inflation after that, an initiative intended to signal his seriousness about cutting the budget deficit, administration officials said Monday.

If you're reading this and thinking, "Well, the deficit is out of control," then you need to put down your bullshit, discredited Chicago-School economic theory that got us in this mess in the first place, and read some John Maynard Keynes. Because the one thing you don't do in the middle of a recession is cut spending.

You're supposed to cut spending in the middle of a boom, so you can save some cash for the recessions. Like the one we had earlier in the last decade, when we were in the middle of a massive housing bubble. That was the time to do it. Remember those days? We were wallowing in cash, and yet somehow, the Bush administration managed to run up a record deficit anyway. That was the time to run a surplus. Like Clinton did during his boom years.

Not now. Now is when you run a deficit. If you don't understand how this works, then you should go look it up. Google output gap, or Keynesian economics, or active fiscal policy. Freezing spending right now is dumb. And even if we were in an economic expansion, arbitrarily cutting or freezing all government spending, instead of doing the hard work of deciding which spending is essential and which isn't, is stupid.

But Obama probably knows all this, and is just counting on you not knowing it.

You see, the choice is pretty simple.

A) You can run a deficit, and risk inflation somewhere down the road, but get the economy growing and start creating jobs. This is good for most people, because most people need jobs, and inflation is good for you if you have a mortgage because your income goes up, but your mortgage stays the same.

Or,

B) you can cut spending, and reduce the deficit. This will make sure that the safety net is shredded, and that we continue to lose jobs, but inflation is held at bay, and in fact we may get deflation. Deflation is really bad if you're a mortgage holder, but great if you're a bondholder. Of course, the whole reason you keep hearing all the calls for deficit reduction is because the rich fucks who are making all these calls are bondholders, and they know that if they scare you with deficit talk, you'll go along with their plans to rig the system to benefit them instead of everyone else.

And you'll keep thinking that there's a right way and wrong way to run a budget, but in reality, there are ways that are good for some people, and ways that are good for others. Bondholders, Congress, the moneyed elite, and, of course, Obama, are making sure that the people with money get to keep it, and they're setting budget policy to make sure that happens. And Glenn Beck is telling people that Obama is a Marxist, and people are believing him!

Of course Obama isn't planning to cut all spending.

The freeze would cover the agencies and programs for which Congress allocates specific budgets each year, including air traffic control, farm subsidies, education, nutrition and national parks.

But it would exempt security-related budgets for the Pentagon, foreign aid, the Veterans Administration and homeland security, as well as the entitlement programs that make up the biggest and fastest-growing part of the federal budget: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

So, to recap:

We cut funding for things which could actually improve society*, like nutrition programs for the most obese nation on earth, education (education!?), and national parks.

We don't cut funding for our five unnecessary wars, and for foreign aid to countries like Israel.

Pure. Fucking. Genius.

*Farm subsidies for Monsanto can just go away altogether.

Update: I missed this quote:

Republicans were quick to mock the freeze proposal. “Given Washington Democrats’ unprecedented spending binge, this is like announcing you’re going on a diet after winning a pie-eating contest,” said Michael Steel, a spokesman for the House Republican leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio.

Democrats? After 8 years of Bush wars and Bush entitlements and Bush tax cuts for the rich, the Republicans are going to complain about spending? In a recession handed off by...Bush?

The tea-baggers will believe this, of course.

This isn't America...

...But it's about 25% of America.


Here's uber-moron Rush Limbaugh comparing Obama's response to the underwear bomber to his response to the Haitian earthquake:

"I want you to remember it took him three days-three days!-to respond to the Christmas Day Fruit of Kaboom bomber...He comes out here in less than 24 hours to speak about Haiti."

Don't speak wing-nut? Let me translate Rush's words for you:

I mean, what's hurry? Sure, thousands of people are dying underneath rubble, and thousands more dying from lack of basic care, but don't you see the message this sends? It's sending the message that 50,000 dead Haitians are more important than a couple hundred Americans who got scared on a plane. Unacceptable! And these people are niggers! I've seen 'em right there on TV. Niggers!

You don't think this is what Rush is saying?

Here he is on Obama:

"This will play right into Obama's hands. Humanitarian, compassionate. They'll use this to, to burnish their, shall we say, credibility with the black community, the both light-skinned and dark-skinned black community in, in this country. It's made-to-order for him. That's why he couldn't wait to get out there, could not wait to get out there."

Somehow, I doubt this would be his response if an earthquake struck Britain and Bush sent aid, as he surely would have:

"This will play right into Bush's hands. Humanitarian, compassionate. They'll use this to, to burnish their, shall we say, credibility with the white community, the both light-skinned and re headed community in, in this country. It's made-to-order for him. That's why he couldn't wait to get out there, could not wait to get out there."

It's ridiculous. What does race have to do with any of this? Nothing, unless you're a racist and can't stand to see black people get any kind of help at all.

Also, Via Roger Ebert: 

Justin of Raleigh, North Carolina: "Why does Obama say if you want to donate some money, you could go to whitehouse.gov to direct you how to do so? If I wanted to donate to the Red Cross, why do I have to go to the White House page to donate?"

Limbaugh: "Exactly. Would you trust the money's gonna go to Haiti?"

Justin: "No."

Rush: "But would you trust that your name's gonna end up on a mailing list for the Obama people to start asking you for campaign donations for him and other causes?"

Justin: "Absolutely!"

Limbaugh: "Absolutely!"

Here, he is literally accusing the President of stealing Red Cross donations. And people who listen to him nod their heads and buy this shit. In wing-nut code, "black" is synonymous with "theif". And so it all makes sense to them.

Ugh. Let's help. There are links here. Or find your own. But let's do this.

The Real Numbers

Jeremy Scahill on the large numbers of private contractors that the US has in Afghanistan:

A hearing in Sen. Claire McCaskill’s Contract Oversightsubcommittee on contracting in Afghanistan has highlighted some important statistics that provide a window into the extent to which the Obama administration has picked up the Bush-era war privatization baton and sprinted with it. Overall, contractors now comprise a whopping 69% of the Department of Defense’s total workforce, “the highest ratio of contractors to military personnel in US history.” That’s not in one war zone—that’s the Pentagon in its entirety.

In Afghanistan, the Obama administration blows the Bush administration out of the privatized water. According to a memo[PDF] released by McCaskill’s staff,

“From June 2009 to September 2009, there was a 40% increase in Defense Department contractors in Afghanistan. During the same period, the number of armed private security contractors working for the Defense Department in Afghanistan doubled, increasing from approximately 5,000 to more than 10,000.”

At present, there are 104,000 Department of Defense contractors in Afghanistan. According to a report this week from the Congressional Research Service, as a result of the coming surge of 30,000 troops inAfghanistan, there may be up to 56,000 additional contractors deployed. But here is another group of contractors that often goes unmentioned: 3,600 State Department contractors and 14,000 USAID contractors. That means that the current total US force in Afghanistan is approximately 189,000 personnel (68,000 US troops and 121,000 contractors). And remember, that’s right now. And that, according to McCaskill, is a conservative estimate. A year from now, we will likely see more than 220,000 US-funded personnel on the ground in Afghanistan.

Private contractors are widely known to be more expensive than US military personnel. Even worse, there is very little oversight or accountability with private contractors. Fraud is rampant. And an example of what the lack of accountability will get you can be found in the Blackwater murders of unarmed, innocent Iraqi civilians in 2007, an atrocity which will go unpunished primarily because the perpetrators were private contractors. Iraqi's (and Muslims across the region) don't really care if soldiers or contractors kill innocent people; they want justice in either case. And when we do not give them justice, they retaliate, and more people die. So we end up with these mercenaries who are presumed to be acting as representatives of the US government, but who the US government can't really control. It's a bad situation.


So why do we have all of these contractors? Well, there is no doubt that some are needed. There are technical things that the US military isn't very good at; turbine repair, or network maintenance, for example. Here, contractors can help. But security? Why should we ever need to give a private contractor a weapon? Isn't this what the US military is supposed to do?


Well, yes, but when you've decided to flout the will of the American people and escalate a very unpopular war, it helps to be able to hide the true number of people you are sending to fight it.


Those 30,000 troops Obama is sending? That number doesn't include contractors. Contractors, you see, don't count as troops. Even when they are doing the jobs troops should be doing.


What does all this mean? We're spending more money than we should, and allowing mercenary soldiers to sully what's left of our national reputation, because the government doesn't want you to really know how many people are going to Afghanistan. Once again, politics trumps the national interest. 


I guess it isn't just Jim DeMint.

More Casualties of the "War on Terror"

There is an important post up at Washington's Blog which talks about some of the truly scary things that have been happening as a result of the Obama administration's attempt to gain total government immunity for everything it does in regards to what it considers national security. Here's an tease; read the rest here.

If the president or one of his subordinates declares someone to be an “enemy combatant” (the 21st century version of “enemy of the state”) he is denied any protection of the law. So any trouble-maker (which means anyone) can be whisked away, incarcerated, tortured, “disappeared,” you name it. Floyd’s commentary:

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...

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….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.

Yves here. The implications are FAR worse. Anyone can be stripped, with NO RECOURSE, of all their legal rights on a Presidential say so. Readers in the US no longer have any security under the law.

Roman citizens enjoyed a right to a trial, a right of appeal, and could not be tortured, whipped, or executed except if found guilty of treason, and anyone charged with treason could demand a trial in Rome. We have regressed more than 2000 years with this appalling ruling. 

To make this worse, this is the Supreme Court which is setting this precedent. They were the last line of defense, and they've completely abdicated they're responsibility to the Constitution in the face of pressure from the Obama administration.

To make it perfectly clear, these decisions quite literally enable the president to order you arrested, to declare you an enemy combatant, and to then proceed to torture you to death. The Supreme court has said that you will have no rights, and that the president or his men cannot be held responsible for anything the do, including torturing and killing you. It will not matter if you are an American citizen. The only thing that will matter is whether the King president wants to kill you. Because there is now no one who can stop him, or even make him think twice.

Taibbi on Obama

Here's a great interview with Matt Taibbi. If you don't know who he is, he's the guy who, among other things, wrote the devastating expose of Goldman Sachs, which famously described them in the opening paragraph this way.

The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. 

Here he describes how Obama made a calculated decision to fill his administration will Wall Street insiders, including the despicable Robert Rubin. (H/T Digby)



There is really no point anymore in defending Obama from the right wing nutcases who attack him as a socialist. They're too blinded by what is all too often overt racism to realize that on economic policy, Obama is one of them. So let them eat their own.

Journalism: Epic Fail

The House has officially shown it's disapproval of Rep. Joe Wilson for his outburst of "You Lie", which was directed at President Obama during his address to Congress last week.

This whole sorry affair is a window into the way Washington operates, and in particular, the epic failures of mainstream journalism.

For the record, I don't care if Joe Wilson pissed on Joe Biden's desk during the speech; it's just not that important. And if Joe Wilson really believes that the president is lying, well, then he should probably say so.

But the media reaction has been pathetic. I watched an hour or so of cable news the day after this happened, and one thing is clear: they have absolutely no interest in finding out whether the president was lying or not.

Think about this. Pretend, for a moment, that you are a journalist. Your job is to find out important facts and then communicate them to the public. You are watching the president make a speech, when a congressman interrupts him and says that he is lying.

Do you:

A) Investigate whether this important allegation is true?

or do you

B) Spend countless hours bickering over whether it was rude for him to raise the subject?


The answer, of course, is "B". This is the sorry state of "journalism" in this country today.

Mainstream journalists just cover the soap opera. They are concerned with how things will look. They spend hours and days analyzing how they think the public will respond to certain policy proposals. They quote poll after poll after poll on subjects like Afghanistan, or health care reform, or torture, or the bailouts of Wall Street.

But the one thing they avoid like the plague is analyzing the actual policies! I don't care one bit how many people want us to escalate the war in Afghanistan; I want to know if it will work. I don't give a damn if 80% of 30-35 year old southern white Republican males think Obama was born in Kenya; I want to know if he was born in Kenya!

The opinions of all of these people don't matter unless they are informed. And it is the job of journalists to inform them! And they fail miserably at this job. And we fail miserably at our job, which is to hold them accountable for their failure.

Most of us treat politics like a sporting event. We just want to watch politicians score points, and win. And mainstream journalists aren't really much different than the guys on "Around the Horn".( Actually that's not really true; those guys actually do some analysis from time to time.)

Mainstream journalism exists mostly to perpetuate the status quo in Washington. But they know that they have to seem like they are practicing adversarial journalism, so they seize on these stupid, meaningless events (like Joe Wilson's outburst), and saturate the airwaves with endless bloviating about them in order to distract from the real issues.

If you doubt me, ask yourself if you ever heard anyone from the major cable news networks actually investigate and make a definitive statement about whether the president was lying. I will be shocked if you did, because the number one goal over there at CNN and Fox and CNBC is to feed you a steady stream of entertaining nonsense, so that you will feel as though you are doing your civic duty by getting involved in the important issues of today. And all the while, politicians will do what they want since you are not paying attention.

And if Americans really think that Joe Wilson's manners are one of the most important issues of the day, then may God have mercy on our souls.