Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth says that Obama, if he signs what is being called the National Defense Authorization Act, “will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in U.S. law.” More here.
Tag: Barack Obama
Obama is on our side… when he’s campaigning
In his speech Tuesday, President Obama noted the “deficit of trust between Main Street and Wall Street,” and suggested that the big banks should “go the extra mile in helping to close that deficit.” I’m sorry, but why wasn’t he saying these things two years ago? More here.
Obama tries, but wing-nuts won’t accept his love
Barack Obama has been a good friend to gun nuts, but they hate him. In fact, no matter how hard the president tries to be the right wing’s new Reagan, they still call him Hitler. More here.
‘Occupy’ news that’s not fit to print in NYT
If you haven’t seen Naomi’s Wolf’s analysis of the nationwide, federally supported crackdown against Occupy encampments, that’s because you don’t read Reader Supported News or foreign newspapers such as The Guardian. More here.
Obama’s silence speaks volumes
Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, weighed in today on the OWS mess, lest we forget the disgraceful abandonment of the poor and middle-class by Barack Obama, the anti-FDR:
“One of the appalling things here is that there are so many Democratic mayors involved in these crackdowns or in Bloomberg’s case, someone who is seen as a liberal,” Ehrenreich said in a telephone interview. “And where in all this was Obama? Why couldn’t he have picked up the phone at some point a couple of weeks ago and called the mayors of Portland and Oakland and said: ‘go easy on these people. They represent the anger and aspirations of the majority.’ Would that have been so difficult?”
Obama to fight Wall St. corruption — joking!
When Barack Obama took office, it was almost embarrassing to watch so many otherwise intelligent people rejoice at the notion that he could do good and yet remain closely allied with the corrupt banks that had wrecked the economy. Most people know better now, but does Obama? More here.
The better question: Is Iraq really done with US?
The headline on a recent Daily Beast story was “Are we really done with Iraq?” I doubt it, even though Barack Obama is saying our involvement there will end in a few months. Interesting that Obama conveniently left out the fact that the U.S. is withdrawing its remaining forces reluctantly, after a breakdown in negotiations with the Iraqi government:
It was in the final months of George W. Bush’s presidency that the United States negotiated an agreement to withdraw its troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.
In his first year as commander in chief, Obama promised to adhere to the timeline, even though many US and Iraqi military leaders said some American forces should remain in the country. The US position on the 2011 date changed this year, however. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and his predecessor, Robert Gates, said publicly that some US troops should remain in the country after the withdrawal. The conflict has claimed 4,200 American lives.
Proponents of remaining in Iraq argued that the smaller US footprint would be needed to train the Iraqi military on new American equipment – and as a trip wire if sectarian tensions flared up again and threatened to plunge the country into another civil war.
Continue reading “The better question: Is Iraq really done with US?”
Instead of New Deal, we got No Deal
Here’s Robert Scheer’s reminder that we need a president whose policies help the 99 percent of Americans who are hurting, not the one percent who are extremely wealthy:
… To accomplish that, we need a moratorium on bank-ordered evictions, along with a government-funded program to aid the underemployed that is as robust as the trillions spent to save the Wall Street swindlers who caused all of this trouble.
Instead we are left with a Democratic president who soothes our rage with promises of decent-paying jobs that in actuality are being vigorously exported from our shores by the president’s top corporate backers. That absurdity was marked by Barack Obama’s choice of Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of General Electric—a company that has shifted to foreign countries two-thirds of its workforce and 82 percent of its profits—to head the president’s job creation council.
Obama has failed not because he is a progressive in the mold of Franklin Delano Roosevelt but because he is not. He has blindly followed the lead of George W. Bush in bankrupting the nation by throwing money at Wall Street while continuing to fund wildly expensive and unneeded wars…
Warren way too honest for Obama’s inner circle
At the time of the betrayal, the Daily Kos crowd and other Obama-bots insisted Elizabeth Warren didn’t really want the CFPB job, that the president had stood up for her, that it was her decision not to go through the arduous process of trying to get Congressional approval. This was all bullshit. More here.
What’s crazier, belief in UFOs or in ‘free trade’?
Yesterday, I read new remarks by Dennis Kucinich about so-called free trade and thought, damn, I’d vote for this guy over Barack Obama in a heartbeat. More here.