Tag: Barack Obama

On Monday October 04…

…the Supreme Court said it would not take up a warrantless surveillance case, Wilner v. National Security Agency (NSA), filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). The lawsuit argued that the Executive Branch must disclose whether or not it has records related to the wiretapping of privileged attorney-client conversations without a warrant. Lawyers for the Guantánamo detainees fit the officially acknowledged profile of those subject to surveillance under the former administration’s program, and the Bush administration argued in the past that the Executive Branch has a right to target them.

“The Obama administration has never taken a position-in this or any of the other related cases-on whether the Bush administration’s NSA surveillance program was legal. In this case they claimed that even if it was illegal, the government has the right to remain silent when asked whether or not the NSA spied on lawyers,” said Shayana Kadidal, Senior Managing Attorney of the CCR Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative. “Today the Supreme Court let them get away with it.”  […]

The plaintiffs [had] filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking records of any surveillance of their communications under the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program, which began after 9/11 but was only disclosed to the public in December 2005. The government refused to either confirm or deny whether such records existed, and the lower courts refused to order the government to confirm whether it had eavesdropped on attorney-client communications. The question before the Supreme Court was whether the government can refuse to confirm or deny whether records of such surveillance exist, even though any such surveillance would necessarily be unconstitutional and illegal.

more at CCR…

Real News Network’s Paul Jay talks with Shayana Kadidal** – Senior Managing Attorney of the Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative (GGJI) at the Center for Constitutional Rights about the CRR’s initiative and about this case and the Administration’s eavesdropping.

“The Edge… There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.” — Hunter S. Thompson

Leading up to the 1994 midterm elections, Bill Clinton’s job approval measured by Gallup was 46%. The Democrats subsequently lost 53 seats in the midterms that year.

Barack Obama’s presidential job approval for the last week of September was 44%. Historically in any midterm year with a president with a job approval below 50%, his party has suffered major midterm losses.

Congressional job approval measured by Gallup for the last week of September was 18% – the lowest congressional approval measured by Gallup going back through 1974.

Leading up to the 1994 midterm elections, Congressional job approval measured by Gallup was 23%. Again, the Democrats subsequently lost 53 seats in the midterms that year.

Gallup’s generic ballot – simply asking registered voters which party they plan to vote for – was tied for the last week of September at 46% for each party. Galllup’s historical data indicates that when the generic ballot is tied, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to turn out at the polls.

29 Sept. 2010 | Gallup’s Editor-in-Chief Dr. Frank Newport reviews four key indicators of midterm election results – all of which suggest the Democrats are likely to lose a significant number of House seats in November:

I and many others, including Michael Moore the other day, have many times stressed that the only way the Democrats can turn things around and not only save themselves but the country too in November is to start producing progressive results.

Obama and the Democrats have a month. I’d suggest they get busy.

The biggest mistake I see many make when trying to sell the Democrats is to call the prospects stupid, and tell them buying the product is the only way they can stop being stupid, apparently thinking the prospects will immediately reach for their wallets and say “where do I sign”?

Of course, that result only happens in salespeople’s dreams – and is the reason 90 percent of people who go into sales never make any money at the job.

There is also a (real life) tried and true technique in sales and marketing that the democrats could try: the top sales producers in any industry constantly critique themselves and ask themselves “If I’m not getting the results I want to get, what am I doing to get the results I am getting?”

Instead of asking themselves what they are doing to produce the results they are getting (dropping support) – and they are producing those results whether they want to or not – Democrats and their supporters are taking the easy route of blaming the voters (their prospects) and treating the voters as if they are stupid.

Obama: Democratic voter apathy ‘inexcusable’:

WASHINGTON – Admonishing his own party, President Barack Obama says it would be “inexcusable” and “irresponsible” for unenthusiastic Democratic voters to sit out the midterm elections, warning that the consequences could be a squandered agenda for years.

“People need to shake off this lethargy. People need to buck up,” Obama told Rolling Stone in an interview to be published Friday. The president told Democrats that making change happen is hard and “if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren’t serious in the first place.”

Back in the beginning of August I wrote about “Four Little Words”, “electronic communication transactional records“, which the Obama administration wanted to add to the FBI’s ability to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual’s Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation. The lawyers were claiming that this would not give them access to the content of the e-mail just access to the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user’s browser history. Sounds invasive? Well, it wasn’t good enough, either. Charles Savage reports in the New York Times that Federal law enforcement and national security officials want to make it easier to wiretap the Internet.

Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications – including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype  – to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.

The bill, which the Obama administration plans to submit to lawmakers next year, raises fresh questions about how to balance security needs with protecting privacy and fostering innovation. And because security services around the world face the same problem, it could set an example that is copied globally.

The bill would also require Financial Institutions to report all electronic money transfers into and out of the country, no matter how small. Currently banks must report international money transfers of $10,000 or greater.

But critics have called it part of a disturbing trend by government security agencies in the wake of the 2001 attacks to seek more access to personal data without adequately demonstrating its utility. Financial institutions say that they already feel burdened by anti-terrorism rules requiring them to provide data, and that they object to new ones.

“These new banking surveillance programs are testing the boundaries of privacy,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “Many consumers both in the United States and outside are likely to object.”

“This regulation is outrageous,” said Peter Djinis, a lawyer who advises financial institutions on complying with financial rules and a former FinCEN executive assistant director for regulatory policy. “Consider me old-fashioned, but I believe you need to show some evidence of criminality before you are granted unfettered access to the private financial affairs of every individual and company that dares to conduct financial transactions overseas.”

Djinis said he does not think the department has made a case that it could analyze such volumes of data effectively or needs so much raw data. “It’s presumed that the information will be valuable in anti-terrorism activity,” he said. “We’re told, ‘Trust us. Once we get the data, we’ll determine what’s legal or not.’ ”

(emphasis mine)

Marcy Wheeler points out that it may be the banks that bail us out of this further unfettered invasion of the government into our lives.

Any communication you make, any financial transaction you make, the Obama Administration thinks nine years after 9/11 is the time to demand such access.

I suspect it’s only the corporations can save us from this power grab. Not only are corporations doing business in the US not going to want all their transactions accessible by the government (we’ve already stolen enough corporate secrets), but banks aren’t going to want to track transactions at that level.

Crossposted at Daily Kos and Docudharma

Christine O’Donnell is fast becoming the face of the Republican Party.  Her campaign slogan is — to put it in Marxist language — power to the people.  Or, something like that. To quote an oft-used phrase on the internet(s) and one used frequently on this blog, “Teh stoopid! It burns.”  

Time permitting, I will try to post Part II of this diary later on this week.  

It’s always nice to be validated, especially by an Author I respect as much as Glenn Greenwald–

(P)erhaps the most significant result of Simpson’s candor is that Obama loyalists and Beltway media voices are now forced to publicly defend Social Security cuts, because Simpson’s comments have prematurely dragged out into the open what has been an open secret in Washington but was supposed to be a secret plot for everyone else until the election was over.  The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait recently decreed, in response to the Simpson controversy, that “liberals should be open to Social Security cuts as part of a balanced package of deficit reduction.”  And in The Washington Post today, both the Editorial Page and Dana Milbank  defend Simpson and call for cuts in Social Security (Milbank even defends cuts in aid to wounded veterans).  That Social Security must be cut is not only a bipartisan consensus among the GOP and “centrist” Democratic wing, but at least as much, among the Beltway media establishment.

But it’s not just good policy, it’s also good politics.  You see, unlike the Obamabots and Institutional Democrats, I actually care about electoral victory–

I certainly have not seen eye-to-eye with Bob Shrum on political strategies over the years.  So when we’re both beating the same drum with the same urgency at the same time, it’s somewhat unusual.

But we both agree that President Obama and the Catfood Commission threaten the electoral chances of every Democrat running for office this November.

Shrum has a piece in The Week in which he echoes Ed Kilgore and others Democratic strategists in pointing out that the Democrats don’t have an issue to run on this November.  Like them, he says that saving Social Security could be the issue that saves their seats as well.

But Shrum is willing to utter the uncomfortable truth that Kilgore ignores:  it is deeply, deeply cynical and unconvincing for the Democrats to be out there castigating the GOP for wanting to do the very thing that the White House is privately telling journalists they themselves plan to do by way of the Catfood Commission after the election.

They are just sycophantic liars.

Crossposted at Daily Kos and Docudharma

When I see a 9/11 victim family on television, or whatever, I’m just like, “Oh shut up” I’m so sick of them because they’re always complaining. — Glenn Beck

~~~~~~~~~~~

Man is man because he is free to operate within the framework of his destiny.  He is free to deliberate, to make decisions, and to choose between alternatives.  He is distinguished from animals by his freedom to do evil or to do good and to walk the high road of beauty or tread the low road of ugly degeneracy. — Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Hat tip to David Swanson at WarIsACrime.org.

“New markets for our goods stretch from Asia to the Americas”

“…we have not done what is necessary to shore up the foundation of our own prosperity. We have spent over a trillion dollars at war, often financed by borrowing from overseas. This, in turn, has short-changed investments in our own people, and contributed to record deficits. For too long, we have put off tough decisions on everything from our manufacturing base to our energy policy to education reform. As a result, too many middle class families find themselves working harder for less, while our nation’s long-term competitiveness is put at risk.”

— Barack Obama, Oval Office Address on Iraq, August 31, 2010

part 1

Background

GOP Tea Party Takes 10-Point Lead in Generic Poll

Taylor Marsh, 30 August 2010 6:00 pm

The Point

Obama just doesn’t get it

Unemployment is a catastrophe, the recovery is stalling, but the president says his priority is “debt and deficits”

by Joan Walsh, Salon

Monday, Aug 30, 2010 14:50 ET

It’s been written before: The Obama team seems to think 2012 will take care of itself, as long as they burnish that shining Obama "brand," which requires reaching out to Republicans and independents and ignoring the pesky left, with its old culture-war grudges and its subversive demand for greater economic fairness. I’ve heard some smart folks speculate that the White House may even welcome a Republican takeover, the better to “let Obama be Obama,” and continue to play out his fantasy of being a Democratic Ronald Reagan, creating a generation of what he used to call “Obamacans” and realigning politics for his lifetime.

If anyone in the White House still believes that, they are delusional. If Republicans win back the House, they will tie up the president in subpoenas and bogus investigations faster than you can say Darrell Issa. The president hasn’t created “Obamacans”; instead he’s created a phenomenon best described as “Obamacan’t.” And still he cozies up to Republicans like Alan Simpson, who’s determined to slash Social Security and its “310,000,000 tits” (in how many ways was Simpson’s statement wrong? Probably close to 310 million). And the problem with Obama’s milquetoast approach to the economy isn’t just political: If Republicans get to reverse or obstruct the Democrats’ inadequate but promising steps forward on healthcare and financial reform, while slashing government spending and extending the disastrous Bush tax cuts, we may yet see an economic collapse to rival the Great Depression — the one that an earlier generation of brave and visionary Democrats vowed would never happen again.

It is too late for anything Obama says or does to materially improve the economy, or ease economic suffering, in time for November. In an e-mail today to Politico, Time’s Mark Halperin laid out the list of Democratic problems that he says could lead to the party losing up to 60 seats in the House (that’s still unlikely): “the enthusiasm gap, the state of the economy, the failure to materialize of a lot of what Democrats were counting on (health care law getting more popular, and ‘recovery summer’ taking hold).” The only thing on Halperin’s list Obama and the Democrats have any real control over now is that so-called enthusiasm gap, the fact that Democrats are much less excited about the November election than Republicans are. Trust me, watching the president continue to mouth Republican platitudes about “debts and deficits” and a recovery built on “private investment” is only going to increase that gap, not narrow it.

Great job.  You have my policy prescription.

(h/t Corrente)

Well it seems that someone has stuck their size 15s in it again for the second time in a week.

Apparently Veterans are now “lesser people” sucking at the public tit.

I’m certainly not the first blogger to notice this story (though I did cover it yesterday- #20), there’s digby and Teddy Partridge and Oliver Willis for example.

My take is a little different.  I’m not in favor of his firing or resignation.  His honest exposure of the endless greed of our ruling class, that they would STEAL the benefits of the troops they so hypocritically and incessantly praise as well as food out of the mouths of babies and the elderly so that the richest one tenth of one percent can get richer by looting our public treasury, says everything you need to know about the morality and values of our “professional political class”.

If I believed in Hell I’d hope you’d rot in it for eternity you heartless, soulless bastards.

It will be interesting to see how Obama, who just last night wasted 18 minutes I’ll never get back, and his mouthpiece Bobby Gibbs handle this.