Not only has obama embroiled us in more foreign conflicts than his predecessor, expanded, NOT decreased the military budget, dispatched more drones in three years, than shrub did in eight (with commensurate more collateral damage, presumably), but his apologists here, offer us that he is better than the alternative and urge us to vote for the lesser of two evils AGAIN.
That tried and true strategy of the past several decades has been shown to be an utter failure.
Despite his constant war-making, going as far as to ignore the warnings of his own Attorney General Eric Holder, OLC Chief Caroline Krass, and DoD General Counsel Jeh Johnson in the case of Libya (http://www.salon.com/2011/06/18/libya_10/); we are reassured that he is a "good and decent man."
The signature achievement of this administration, the health care plan, was largely crafted around Romney's disastrous Massachusetts plan , which was primarily designed by the right wing Heritage Foundation. This abomination of a bill was so popular that it was passed at a midnight session of the House by a SEVEN vote margin, and was viewed favorably by 50.3% of the american people; however the earstwhile doctor from OS, president of "radicals for obama" assures us it was a good first step because he has many friends and family who benefitted from it.
The fact that this nearly 2,000 page bill leaves 44 million americans without coverage, I guess this would be referred to as more obama collateral damage.
The obama economic team has been a complete disaster, with numerous members attempting to take the lead for the title of chief finger pointer, responsible for the abysmal "recovery." obama in a case of his classic penchant for making bad decisions, when he shows any initg\iative to make them, at all, brought in republican and former GE Chairman Jeffrey Immelt to save the day, but Immelt last month reportedly said he was "appalled" by obamanomics.
So I ask, by what measure can anyone adjudge this presidency not to be an abject failure?
When I left the following commentary from Alternet on Mr. Klingman's blog post, the reaction was deafening silence:
"Furthermore, Steve Rosenfeld of Alternet, correctly highlights obama's failed record in preserving constitutional protections. A few of his comments, abridged:
"When Barack Obama took office, he was the civil liberties communities’ great hope. Obama, a former constitutional law professor, pledged to shutter the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and run a transparent and open government. But he has become a civil libertarian’s nightmare: a supposedly liberal president who instead has expanded and fortified many of the Bush administration’s worst policies, lending bipartisan support for a more intrusive and authoritarian federal government."
"President Obama now has power that Bush never had. Foremost is he can (and has) order the killing of U.S. citizens abroad who are deemed terrorists. Like Bush, he has asked the Justice Department to draft secret memos authorizing his actions without going before a federal court or disclosing them. Obama has continued indefinite detentions at Gitmo, but also brought the policy ashore by signing the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, which authorizes the military to arrest and indefinitely detain anyone suspected of assisting terrorists, even citizens. That policy, codifying how the Bush treated Jose Padilla, a citizen who was arrested in a bomb plot after landing at a Chicago airport in 2002 and was transferred from civil to military custody, upends the 1878’s Posse Comitatus Act’s ban on domestic military deployment."
"How bad is it? Anthony Romero, the ACLU executive director, exclaimed in June 2010 that Obama “disgusted” him. Meanwhile, the most hawkish Bush administration officials have defended and praised Obama.
Last summer, liberal lawyer-journalist Glenn Greenwald tallied a list of Bush warrior endorsements. Jack Goldsmith, the former DOJ officials who approved the torture and domestic spying efforts, wrote in The New Republic in May 2009 that Obama actually was waging a more effective war on terror than Bush.
“The new administration has copied most of the Bush program, has expended some of it, and has narrowed only a bit,” Goldsmith wrote. “Almost all of the Obama changes have been at the level of packaging, argumentation, symbol and rhetoric.” Bush’s final CIA director, General Michael Hayden—whose confirmation Obama opposed as a senator—told CNN there was a “powerful continuity between the 43rd and 44th presidents.” And in early 2011 Vice-President Dick Cheney told NBC News, “He’s learned that what we did was far more appropriate than he ever gave us credit for while he was a candidate.”
http://www.alternet.org/rights/155045/how_obama_became_a_civil_libertarian%27s_nightmare/
So with a hat tip to the ever knowledgable and wise Peter Winkler, I bring you the always prescient and considered opininon of Ted Rall:
A President Who Doesn’t Even Try
Posted by Ted Rall on Wednesday, April 18, 2012 at 11:02 am
"Is Obama Kowtowing to the Right? Or Is He One of Them?
The President’s progressive critics blame him for continuing and expanding upon his Republican predecessor’s policies. His supporters point to the obstructionist, Republican-controlled Congress. What can Obama do? He’s being stymied at every turn.
If Obama had wanted to pursue a progressive agenda—banning foreclosures, jailing bankers, closing Guantánamo, stopping the wars, pushing for the public option he promised in his healthcare plan—he could have. He had ample political capital, yet chose not to spend it."
SNIP
"Team Obama’s attempt to shore up his liberal base also falls short on the facts. Progressives were shocked by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling, along party lines, that legalized strip-searches and body cavity rapes by police and private security firms who detain people suspected of any crime, even minor traffic infractions.
“What virtually none of this…commentary mentioned,” reported Glenn Greenwald in Salon, “was that that the Obama DOJ [Department of Justice] formally urged Court to reach the conclusion it reached…this is yet another case, in a long line, where the Obama administration was able to have its preferred policies judicially endorsed by getting right-wing judges to embrace them.”
No wonder Obama stayed mum."
SNIP
"Which brings us to the biggest, yet least discussed, flaw in the attempt to pin Obama’s inaction on the heads of Congressional Republicans: the bully pulpit.
Whether Donald Trump likes it or not, Barack Obama is still president. If he calls a press conference to call attention to an issue, odds are that reporters will show up. But he’s not walking tall or even talking big.
Responding to fall 2011 polls that indicated softening support among the younger and more liberal voters who form the Democratic base, Obama’s reelection strategists began rolling out speeches inflected with Occupy-inspired rhetoric about class warfare and trying to make sure all Americans “get a fair shot.” But that’s all it is: talk. And small talk at that.
Instead of introducing major legislation, the White House plans to spend 2012 issuing presidential orders about symbolic, minor issues.
Repeating Clinton-era triangulation and micro-mini issues doesn’t look like a smart reelection strategy. The Associated Press reported: “Obama’s election year retreat from legislative fights means this term will end without significant progress on two of his 2008 campaign promises: comprehensive immigration reform and closing the military prison for terrorist suspects at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Piecemeal presidential directives are unlikely to make a sizeable dent in the nation’s 8.6 percent unemployment rate or lead to significant improvements in the economy, the top concern for many voters and the issue on which Republican candidates are most likely to criticize Obama. In focusing on small-bore executive actions rather than ambitious legislation, the president risks appearing to be putting election-year strategy ahead of economic action at a time when millions of Americans are still out of work.”
SNIP
"For progressives and leftists, however, the main point is that Obama NEVER tries to move the mainstream of ideological discourse to the left.
Obama has been mostly silent on the biggest issue of our time, income inequality and the rapid growth of the American underclass. He hasn’t said much about the environment or climate change, the most serious problem we face—and one for which the U.S. bears a disproportionate share of the blame. Even on issues where he was blocked by Congress, such as when Republicans prohibited the use of public funds to transport Gitmo detainees to the U.S. for trials, he zipped his lips."
SNIP
"Liberals don’t blame Obama for not winning. They blame him for not trying. When he does crazy things like authorizing the assassinations of U.S. citizens without trial, progressives have to ask themselves: Is this guy kowtowing to the Right? Or is he one of them?"
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Comments
Certainly, You are right concerning the big money, Thoth, but what gets me, is that on this allegedly left leaning site, all the breast beating about what a successful first-term we've just been through, when by any objective standards, obama has been a complete and utter failure. The liar-in-chief has killed any hope, and would someone please wake me when the change part comes!
Thoth, if You don't stop by more often, I'm gonna leave this verklempt place which will set off riotous celebrations, such that it will take zerry until the end of hope and change part II to get those Commodore 64 servers up and running again.
I guess I'm losing hope that we'll ever get an honest person who will work for the common good.
The republicans scare me, but I, also, have a long-standing policy. Mine is to never vote for a incontrovertible war criminal. It seems to me that obama fits that description.
I think by the time america has an opportunity to vote for an honest candidate, it will have reached the category, it now calls an undeveloped or terrorist country.
Thanks, again, for taking the time to stop by.
The statistics have been cooked for years. They did away with M3, the amount of money printed monthly, several years ago, to "protect" us from the coming hyperinflation.
Needless to say, stripping out energy, education and food from the inflation statistics serves to allow them to lie about rising costs.
The birth/death model is only one factor in allowing the government to lie about unemployment numbers. Not counting the prison population, nor those who have stopped looking for work allows the government to maintain the facade of an unemployment rate of ~8%
There is good reason that in ALL my correspondence to obama or the democratic committee, I ALWAYS refer to him as the liar-in-chief.
Recently I asked a DCCC funds appeal by asking them why they waste their money sending correspondence to me, when I'd sooner vote for Idin Amin than the current incumbent.
Thanks for stopping by, RW.
With interest rates already at zero (and promised to remain there until 2014), we haven't even the interest to pay on our national debt.
In 2012 alone, there have already been TWENTY-ONE cases of municipal defaults accounting for NINE HUNDRED and SEVENTY EIGHT million dollars.
Essential and emergency services have and are being cut in cities and counties across the country. Congress is FINALLY working on a plan to cut back bases around the world, simply because we haven't the money to pay the bills.
To take our minds off this, newspapers make a big deal about a Chinese soft landing, because their growth rate has slowed to 8.1%!!!
Is something rotten in Denmark with this situation? Is this all happening unbeknownst to the current administration?
All one has to do is connect the dots to see that this administration is and has been an abject failure.
Thanks again, for Your return visit, Phyllis.
Ted Rall was the man who answered his riddle as to the diff between the Bush and Obama regimes! OPPOSITION!
I have been reading all about drones, maybe my next blog if I can re-raise a sagging morale that realizes just how many people in America will be enabling Obomney!!! How many on os enabling and rewarding an Obama whom I consider the American Judas.
Did you catch an incredible article by Brian McGrory about one insurance company fat cat? Some excerpts:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31126.htm
"AT SOME point in the future, historians will look back at this era as the time when America basically lost its collective mind.
"The latest example is Ted Kelly, the recently retired chief executive officer of Boston's Liberty Mutual insurance company. Ask any official or business person across the state, and they'll sing Ted Kelly's praises: good guy, insanely smart, devoted to the common cause, all of that manifest in that Liberty Mutual grew at breakneck speed under his leadership and gave millions of dollars away.
"There's something else, though, that came out this week. Mr Kelly had an annual compensation package of $US50 million for the past four years. Yes, there's a zero after the 5. That's just shy of a million dollars a week, $192,000 per working day, $24,000 an hour. To run an insurance company.
[$24,000 an hour!!!! And I got pissed off at the CT guy making $9,000 an hour!!!]
snip
"It's not apparent that Mr Kelly had those same reservations. As a result, every Liberty Mutual policyholder, all those regular people making ends meet at kitchen tables, have paid for Mr Kelly to take $200 million out of the company, their company, over the past four years.
"Every Massachusetts taxpayer is footing part of his salary, given that the state granted Kelly's company a $46.5 million tax break for a new headquarters in Boston. The whole thing is grotesque.
snip
These boards, of course, are the real problem. Mr Kelly revealed this week that the Liberty Mutual directors are paid $200,000 a year, a figure never previously reported.
Enter NStar chief executive Tom May, a marquee character in the serial of overpaid executives. Mr May sits on the Liberty Mutual board, helping to set Mr Kelly's salary.
Meantime, a key Liberty Mutual official sits on the NStar board, which recently hiked Mr May's pay from $7.9 million to $9.2 million.
[CRONYISM, I'LL PAY YOU OODLES OF MONEY IF I CAN GET IN ON THE GAME, TOO]
"This isn't fair market value; it's a rigged game: executives hurling bundles of money at each other, then using the raises as benchmarks. Is there a synonym here for grotesque?
"Corporate profits set a post World War II record last year, but workers' pay fell 2 per cent. Chieftains are swimming in millions while unemployment is historically high. We're in an era of princes and paupers, mansions and minions, with income inequality in the US rivalling developing countries such as Uganda and Cameroon and tax policies that favour the ueber-rich."
MARK, THIS IS SO DISGUSTING, BUT IT IS NOT ENUF FOR THEM. THEY HAVE TO THROW TORTURE AND WAR IN FOR PROFIT AND WHATEVER DARK DARK EVIL MOTIVATES SUCH PATHOLOGY. WE ARE AS A COUNTRY NOW A "PATHOCRACY" ... pathological. Profoundly so. Made up of authoritarians and authoritarian zombie followers for the most part. Don't touch their status quo, for God's sake!
Appreciate your awake conscience! You take care!
Best, libby
Here on OS, we have a crew of folks who think they are left-leaning, yet they continue to play the Stockholm Syndrome game extraordinaire.
Bright folks, yet they seem not to care that they are being fleeced.
Worse than that, they are also uncaring as to how they are raping, killing, and plundering, the rest of the world.
Caught the traveler in another one of his lies, again. Denial. Stone cold denial. Yet this old cretin thinks he can say what he wants, deny it, and then when faced with a cut and paste of his own lying words, he explodes in vituperative ad hoc attack mode.
Were it only he, this place would not be degenerating into the cesspool it is becoming.
As we approach the coming (S)election, and don't let anyone fool You into thinking that an election; anything resembling a democratic election is approaching, as the scum, like mr. kelly are the ones who will choose who the next puppet, pretending to be the supreme commander of this TOTALLY corrupt nation will be.
Watch the stock market - it will have incredible predictive value as to whether obama is rewarded with another four years to loot the pockets of the small people and further augment and consolidate the corporate coffers.
In past years, Diebold, one of the largest maker of automated election machines, was sufficient to pick who would serve as the apparent "choice of the people." Now United Technologies is attempting a hostile takeover of Diebold.
This time around an amalgamation of new american-century plantation owners will choose who will serve the next four years.
Touch screen voting with no paper trail was NOT designed to streamline the voting process.
Excuse the redundancy, but it IS ALWAYS a pleasure and honor to have one of the few capable of connecting the dots visit.
As you might already suspect, I agree with Thoth and rw. There is not one bloody thing Obama or ANY mock-elected pseudo-representatives of the citizens can do. The simple fact is that the bottom line - as always - is money. And the big banks - no, THE BIG BANKS - control the world supply and value of money.
Obama could have the vote of every American, and the Dems could own every elected seat in the nation, and that won't change a damned thing. You know, and I know too, that the "Golden Rule" (He who has the gold, makes the rules) is in effect, and has been for quite some time.
It is BIG MONEY that initiates stupid wars for its own ends. It is BIG MONEY that controls the value of the dollar, the yen, the euro, etc.
The left has been distracting us for decades, unintentionally, by keeping up the rhetoric about "the rich" as individuals. That was true in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it changed in the twentieth century. Rich individuals are small time beside the rich corporations and financial institutions. And make no mistake about it; those institutions rule all of the world that matters to them.
No revolution in one, two, or two dozen nations, including the US and my beloved Canada, will change anything UNLESS it is a totally different kind of revolution. Unless it is one that does not merely seek to change the shape and size of the asses sitting in the seats at the apex of the power pyramid but seeks to eliminate that pyramid of power and privilege entirely. Unless it is one that creates a new economy. One that just simply ignores - goes around - the old one. One that makes all present day wealth obsolete and valueless.
I am much heartened by the OCCUPY movement with its determination not to form a pyramidally structured organization. I also love its concept of co-oparatives that bypass the "regular" economy in favour of a "grey market" economy among the citizens. Until OCCUPY came along I'd pretty much given up hope that we'd ever get out from under this horrendous monster that rules our lives now.
.
That singular word lead me to trace the life of Jim Rogers who along with George Soros broke the Bank of England and forced them to devalue the pound in '82. I then segued into a name You likely have come across, Don Coxe of Canada.
These are two of the leading proponents of owning REAL assets; agriculture, energy, mining and precious metals. Both tend to feel that it is important to ignore the day to day fluctuations of the market, as the economic system is fundamentally broken, and in the long term, these types of assets are guaranteed to prevail.
I'm really sorry that OS chose to devour my response to You, as the story of Jim Rogers life is quite fascinating.
In any case, I REALLY do appreciate Your prescient comments, and they truly enhance this blog post immeasurably.
I happen to believe that Google is either a CIA front operation or heavily under their control/influence, so NOTHING surprises me anymore.
I DO believe that NOTHING we write or speak of is not in some way monitored. I belong to an Okinawan progressive group devoted to forcing Tokyo not to go along with their insane plans to burn the radioactive debris left from the earthquake/tornado.
One day, recently, I printed my standard list of american interventions in the past fifty years on the site, and he following day, I got a Skype call from a four star general, based in DC. As he queried me as to what my name was, I googled him and found that there was in fact a four-star general by this guy's name stationed in DC.
The natural question is, if this guy was in fact a four star general, why would he need to be asking my name. I mean, mr obama assures us that his administration is devoted to transparency, so wouldn't a four-star general calling me know who I was.
It was a VERY surreal experience, but it did confirm to me that there is NO such thing as privacy, either on the internet or anywhere else. They know who we are, and there is a database tracking all that we do and say.
Thanks again for the visit.
The apisamonster don't wander around these parts:
A. There are too many multisyllabic words used.
B. Independent thought is encouraged, and we all know he don't do that well.
C. Trolls are NOT treated tenderly here.
D. Opposing viewpoints are tolerated, especially if the person can express themselves.
E. He's busy arguing with johnny fever as tho who's a fourth grader. In all honesty, I think both of them are in elementary school; just can't tell which is in a more advanced grade. The battle is an epic one and would be best suited as a four act live play.
In any case, his presence here is not missed, and from the comments above You can see he would have nothing intelligible to add; however You fit right in well here, Michael, so please DO wander in from time to time. I think You'd like the mode and manner of expression here, AND we'd be pleased as punch anytime Ya' care to visit.
Once again, thanks for coming by.
As to Rall's post, I printed it up so I can show it to a friend I'm staying with. She watches MSNBC and has been conditioned to regurgitate the Obamabot talking points. I doubt she'll believe it at all, though.
Ted's got a GREAT site that I visit regularly, Michael - I think You'd like it: http://www.rall.com/rallblog/
They rarely make the same mistake twice.
Romney might be a better bet than Obama; frankly, we can't tell. There's one respect in which he'd be nearly guaranteed to be worse:
Supreme Court nominations for vacancies. That, in terms of limiting future damage, may be the most important factor, as witnessed by the Corporations Are People Too decision that has messed up campaign financing far worse than it already was, which I didn't realize was physically possible.
We know Obama's awful in a lot of respects (with a few notable exceptions, such as apparently to the very poor), and the fact that he hasn't tried as opposed to hasn't succeeded is something I agree with wholeheartedly. That was miserably striking when the Tea Party nearly shut the government down. I posted at that point about economic misperceptions because I needed a way to explain how a guy so allegedly bright could miss something I found obvious - that GOP policies are actually worse for business than Democratic policies are, though Democrats have been acting a whole lot less Democratic lately. I just kept waiting for him to Make A Case instead of horse-trading that didn't land him the damned horse. I've also read an assessment of him by Tim Wise, the best analyst of racism I know, who says that his being in denial about racism being currently responsible for any of America's ills ends up promoting the primary form that racism has morphed into. His stand on civil liberties has been nothing short of disgraceful; the idea that his administration could kill an American citizen abroad without so much as a court order gotten in the middle of the night, even before the fact, is scary.
So here's my question:
Not voting does nothing. Voting is anonymous, so it's not like I'm worried about voicing my approval visibly. So, if you vote from out there in the heavily militarized Pacific, do you vote for Romney? Is that the best way not to waste a vote if it's close?
What's your suggestion?
It's bad enough that the apisamoron makes me wish to regurgitate every time I, more and more, infrequently log on; and now he's got a rival nealy as mindless, who most appropriately call himself ordinaryjoe (should be ordinarily moronicjoe), but holders despicable.
holder is to justice like I am Santa incarnate.
Thanks for visiting.
romney is as fake as can be.
Find someone, anyone, whom You believe has morals and principles, and let the rest of the "good" Germans be responsible for the disasters that are SURE to come anyway.
Had I the chance, on my short list would have been Feingold and Kucinich (and one or two others). As it now stands Rocky Anderson and Jill Stein seem to have the courage of their convictions.
Yes, I know Anderson is a Mormon, but he hasn't been reticent to criticize STRONGLY when appropriate.
NO WAY EITHER of the sellout parties gets my vote. Lesser of two evils has been a grand failure for decades. Play the apisa game, vote for whom You perceive as the lesser, and the odds are strong You'll get GREATER evil. Doddering old demented mcsame could NOT have been worse than obama.
Thanks for visiting.
I noticed that on the Knechtges blog concerning whom independents will vote for the bulk of the answers are obama and the reason given is an unspecified because he's a good guy.
Unspecified are the wars, the destruction of the economy, the blatant corporate cronyism, and the willful destruction of centuries of constitutional principles, just as a starter.
Is that Your definition of a good guy?
Why do You choose one sentence to respond to, and ignore the fact that I mentioned FOUR possible people?
Thank You VERY much!
I find it a bit crazymaking that the enablers of the rotten status quo demand an answer and imply sabotage of national security and recklessness from the very people like us who have chosen to go against the perpetrators of corruption and won't acknowledge we are leaving toxicity and toward a sane and humane solution, and it is the status quo clingers who are the dead weight enablers of the problem in this country. Their reason for not taking courageous action is that "not enough others are, either." Wasn't that an excuse grade school kids use, everybody is doing or not doing something? Geeeeez. What are WE to do? Those of us standing up for integrity? Going after those on the vanguard of healthy change and pointing out our potential for recovery. It is in the cowardly voting hands of the cowardly status quo clingers. Don't vote for the two-headed one real corporate party system, don't vote Obomney is my answer! We should have primaried Obama a long time ago (impeachment is what he deserves now) and come up with an alternative who supports the constitution. I mean, it is not that hard to recognize. Maybe if enough Democrats had called out what was happening as Obama was sledding merrily down the slippery slope of fascism it would have given a fear of God into the amoral Dems who are such colossal sell outs. I'd rather be oppressed by honest sell-outs than covert both sides of the mouth back-stabbing ones.
best, libby
Lead by the stalwart apisamaniac, it seems all possibilities narrow down to:
obama, good and decent man.
romney, rich, shifty, and not to be trusted, ergo
obama good; romney bad.
The possibility of an alternative or third way is to contemplate the unthinkable.
AND, yes, Libby, You and I are heretics for daring to try and make a judgement based on moral considerations.
I agree with EVERY word of Your comment (and it is one of the best yet, here), except for one. Impeachment is off the table.
The guy is a freakin' WAR CRIMINAL and he belongs in the Hague charged with genocide and crimes against humanity.
Thanks again for the return visit, my "fellow traveler."