Category: Barack Obama

Insanity Is Defined as Doing the Same Thing over and over Again and Expecting Different Results

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Barack Obama has decided that terrorizing the population of Yemen with drones, and allowing the House of Saud to indiscriminately bomb civilians is a successful antiterrorism strategy.

The net effect has been to quadrupling the size of al Qaeda in Yemen:

On September 10, 2014, President Obama gave a speech advocating for the same kind of approach to counterterrorism against ISIL his Administration had been using with Yemen (and Somalia).

………

Today, the Soufan Group wrote up an alarming detail from the State Department Country Report on Terrorism for last year: AQAP has quadrupled in size since Obama’s speech.

This is what happens you have a failed policy, and you stick with the conventional wisdom.

It is a failure of intellect.

It is a failure of imagination.

It is an unalloyed failure.

OBama Really Wants His Poodle to Stay in the EU

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Obama is now saying that if Britain votes to leave the EU, there won’t be a free trade deal with Britain for over 10 years.

This is, of course, a shameless attempt to threaten the British voters into staying in the EU, so that US influence on this body is not diminished.

The US (IMNSHO correctly) that the UK will blindly promulgate US policies and US interests within the European Union:

The UK could take up to 10 years to negotiate trade deals with the US if it leaves the EU, Barack Obama has said.

In a BBC interview, the US president said: “It could be five years from now, 10 years from now before we were able to actually get something done.”

Britain would also have less influence globally if it left, he added.

His warning over trade has angered UK campaigners for leaving the EU – with UKIP leader Nigel Farage dismissing Mr Obama’s comments as “utter tosh”.

As much as it pains me to agree with him, Nigel Farage is right.

Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever

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Barack Obama just admitted that mishandling of classified data is OK for his friends:

In an interview Sunday with Fox News, President Obama indicated he doesn’t think Hillary Clinton really truly shared top secret government information on a private email server while she was secretary of state. “There’s classified, and then there’s classified,” Obama said.

This is another version of Nixon’s comment to David Frost, “If the President Does It, That Means It’s Not Illegal.”

He has gone after critics that has led to more prosecutions than every single president since the creation of the Republic, but when Hillary mishandles information, or when Leon Panetta leaks classified infomation to Kathryn Bigelow, the CIA’s version of Leni Riefenstahl, it’s OK, because it is his Evil Minions™.

The terms corrupt and hypocritical come to mind, and this is just repulsive.

Yeah, He Endorsed Joe Lieberman Too.

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Barack Obama just endorsed Debbie Wasserman Schultz, because while he killed Osama bin Laden, he really hates liberals:

While President Barack Obama won’t tell us who he will be supporting in the general election, one candidate he has fully endorsed is Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Wasserman Schultz is currently running for her life in Florida against the first Democratic congressional opponent she has faced during her time in the House. Opponent Tim Canova is running on the idea that Wasserman Schultz is far too corrupt and indebted to Wall Street to effectively represent the people of her district. Canova has endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders and has been backed by some of the same groups that Sanders is.

President Obama does not often endorse candidates in House primaries, so his support for Wasserman Schultz is telling.

Interestingly enough, this came shortly after the Florida Democratic Party was shamed into providing voter lists to Mr. Canova:

Last week, the Florida Democratic Party — and Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz — took some serious heat after it banned upstart congressional candidate Tim Canova from using the party’s voter data files, which help candidates research and contact supporters. But the Florida Democratic Party reversed its decision yesterday, party spokesperson Max Steele has confirmed to New Times.

Improbably, this was the second voter-data scandal to ensnare Wasserman Schultz this election cycle. In December, Wasserman Schultz, acting as chair of the Democratic National Committee, temporarily banned Bernie Sanders from accessing the DNC’s voter data files after his campaign staffer was caught hacking into Hillary Clinton’s campaign data. (The information allows candidates to research and contact potential supporters in their area.) But the move backfired, and Wasserman Schultz has since been accused of intentionally trying to sink Sanders’ chances at the presidency. Sanders sued, the move was overturned, and critics across the country have called for her ouster. She’s had a bad few months.

In something of a twist, Canova, who once advised Sanders on Wall Street reform, then said he had also been denied access to that very same data. This was due to a Florida Democratic Party rule, instituted in 2010, which bans candidates running against incumbents from using the information. In an interview, Canova called the rule “undemocratic” and said the party was acting to protect Wasserman Schultz.

The party did not offer data access “to candidates challenging incumbent members of Florida’s Democratic congressional delegation,” Steele told New Times earlier this month. “This policy has been applied uniformly across the board since 2010. We stand with our incumbent members of Congress, and we’re proud of the job they do representing the people of Florida. The Voter File is proprietary software created and owned by the Democratic National Committee that is maintained and operated by the Florida Democratic Party here in state.”

………

After Canova put up a fight, the Florida Democratic Party reconsidered how Canova’s case looked to the outside world, Steele says. The party made the choice today to give Canova, and only Canova, access to the file.

“Given the unique circumstances of having an incumbent member of Congress who is also the DNC chair who is being challenged by a Democrat (a situation that as you can imagine has never arisen), the FDP has decided to grant Mr. Canova access to the Voter File,” Steele said via email. The file will cost $3,500 to access.

Steele reiterated that this will be a one-time policy change: “Given the dual nature of an incumbent who is also a national party chair, we’ve decided to grant Mr. Canova access to avoid any appearance of favoritism,” he said. Other candidates who run against incumbents will be out of luck.

As an aside, they would not have done this, or at least not have done this so soon, unless there was a significant amount of loathing directed towards Wasserman Schultz in the state party.

Considering her refusal to support challenges to reactionary Cuban-American Republicans in competitive districts, I rather expect that there is no small amount of loathing among the locals there.

Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever

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Upon announcing Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland for the Supreme court, they tweeted that he would ignore the Constitution of the United States of America:

“Merrick Garland would take no chances that someone who murdered innocent Americans might go free on a technicality.” —@POTUS #SCOTUSnominee

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 16, 2016

Those “Technicalities” are the bill of rights, and their comment reflects that Garland is positively dismissive about the due process rights of defendants.

I do understand political realities, but the idea that any President would try to trumpet the willingness of a nominee for Supreme Court justice to ignore the Constitution is truly awful.

H/t Cory Robin.

Sandoval to Obama: Drop Dead

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It appears that Obama’s attempt to spelunk his way into a supreme court nominee has failed, because Republican Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval’s having none of it.

You know, this whole prenegotiating bit, where he offers concessions before negotiations start, is really pretty damn stupid.

You would have though that Barack would have learned by now that this is stupid, and all it does is demoralize your power base.

It almost makes me long for President Trump.

The Official Hat of Team Obama

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A Spelunking Helmet for Frequent Cavers

There are reports taht Barack Obama is considering Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval as a Supreme Court appointment:

The White House is considering picking the Republican governor from Nevada to fill the current vacancy on the Supreme Court, scrambling political calculations in what is expected to be a contentious confirmation battle in which Senate Republicans have pledged to play the role of roadblock.

 President Obama is weighing the selection of Brian Sandoval, a centrist former federal judge who has served as governor since 2011, according to two people familiar with the process. Though the review process is in its initial phases and it is unclear whether the governor could ultimately emerge as the president’s pick, even the prospect of his nomination poses a difficult dilemma for Senate Republicans who have promised not to consider any nomination before November’s elections.

Here’s the kicker though, it turns out that Sandoval has explicitely called Obamacare unconstitutional:

The Washington Post reports that the White House is vetting Brian Sandoval, the Republican governor of Nevada who once labeled President Obama’s signature health law “unconstitutional,” as a possible nominee for the Supreme Court vacancy left by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. Sandoval previously served as a federal district judge, the lowest rank of judges who receive lifetime appointments, for just under four years. He resigned to run for governor in 2009.

 Though the Post claims that “Sandoval is increasingly viewed by some key Democrats as perhaps the only nominee President Obama could select who would be able to break a Republican blockade in the Senate,” the second-ranking Senate Republican poured cold water on this idea almost immediately after the Post’s report went live. According to Politico’s Burgess Everett, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-TX) “says [it] doesn’t make a difference if Sandoval is the nominee.”

 The fact that Obama would consider naming Sandoval is surprising, given the governor’s past statements on the Affordable Care Act. In his first State of the State Address in 2011, Sandoval said that “many aspects of the law are unconstitutional” and he pledged to “continue to fight to have them overturned.” He later personally signed briefs filed in the Supreme Court arguing against the law’s constitutionality and claiming that the Supreme Court “should hold the ACA invalid in its entirety.”

 It’s worth noting that, after losing this case, Sandoval did agree to implement provisions of the law, such as its Medicaid expansion. Nevertheless, if Sandoval’s position had prevailed in the Supreme Court, Obamacare would have completely ceased to exist.

I understand that Obama is looking for items to bolster his legacy, and getting another Supreme Court justice confirmed by the Senate would be a feather in his cap, but Sandoval is only 52, and would likely be on the court for more than 25 years.

I understand your need to do your PPUS (Post Partisan Unity Schtick), and I know that you really want to appoint another justice, but it’s not worth it if you have to appoint a bad justice.

F%$# Me, I Agree with Geraldo Rivera

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On Fox News, he has stated thatthe reaction to Barack Obama’s presidency shows that the nation was not ready for a black man in the White House.

He further goes on to state that he believes that Obama shirked his duty to address these issues, which I also agree with:

Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera was Tuesday’s “One Lucky Guy” on the network’s “Outnumbered” midday hit and shared his unpopular opinion with the conservative female co-hosts ahead of President Obama’s seventh and final State of the Union address Tuesday evening.

………

 But Rivera argued that despite substantive policy disagreements, the real divisions made clear during the Obama presidency fall along racial lines:

When you strip away all of the gun rights and the, you know, terror all rest of it, what you have essentially is a nation divided between white people and everybody else in broad strokes. When you look at the groups that overwhelmingly favor the Democrats right now, the Asians, the Hispanics, the African-Americans, the Muslims, you see a nation where people have largely chosen up sides and if you strip away everything else, what you are going to find is a racial divide. It’s biggest, unaddressed issue.

………

 Rivera finally relented and charged that Obama had failed to confront race relations head-on as the first African-American president. “If I was this president,” the Fox News personality offered, “I would have said ‘I’m going to deal with this race. I’m going to deal with the legacy of the Civil War. The Civil War is over. The North/South divide — I would have made that the central focus of my president were I him.”

“He failed utterly,” Rivera concluded, and by “benign neglect made it worse.”

As I have noted many times before, Barack Obama’s public personae is all about avoiding to appear the “Angry Black Man”, and as such he has studiously attempted to avoid facing racial issues.

Still, agreeing with Geraldo?

I feel so dirty.

What it Means to Have Meaningful and Achievable Goals

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Notwithstanding all the reports from western that the Russians are somehow or other are immersing themselves into a quagmire, a military analysis of the Russian campaign in Syria has concluded that their campaign is well conceived and likely to achieve its goals at a relatively low cost:

Three months into his military intervention in Syria, Russian President Vladimir Putin has achieved his central goal of stabilizing the Assad government and, with the costs relatively low, could sustain military operations at this level for years, U.S. officials and military analysts say.

That assessment comes despite public assertions by President Barack Obama and top aides that Putin has embarked on an ill-conceived mission in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that it will struggle to afford and that will likely fail.

“I think it’s indisputable that the Assad regime, with Russian military support, is probably in a safer position than it was,” said a senior administration official, who requested anonymity. Five other U.S. officials interviewed by Reuters concurred with the view that the Russian mission has been mostly successful so far and is facing relatively low costs.

………

Yet since its campaign began on Sept. 30, Russia has suffered minimal casualties and, despite domestic fiscal woes, is handily covering the operation’s cost, which analysts estimate at $1-2 billion a year. The war is being funded from Russia’s regular annual defense budget of about $54 billion, a U.S. intelligence official said.

………

Putin has said his intervention is aimed at stabilizing the Assad government and helping it fight the Islamic State group, though Western officials and Syrian opposition groups say its air strikes mostly have targeted moderate rebels.

The western response to the Russian intervention, which, BTW, is actually legal under international law because the sovereign government of Syria has requested the aid, is completely incoherent.

Case in point, the absurd and self contradictory statements by the head of Human Rights Watch: On December 25 of this year he said that the killing of Zahran Alloush is an attempt to eliminate any moderate opposition, while on December 30 of this year, he claimed that the initial release of Alloush from prison in 2011 was an attempt to taint the opposition with a jihadist brush.

Note that the Russians are also supporting the Kurds, while the NATO forces are both supporting the Kurds (most of NATO) and bombing them (our NATO “allies”the Turks)

The Russian strategy appears to be effective because their goals are limited, and not self-contradictory:

Rather than pushing back the opposition, Russia may be settling for defending Assad’s grip on key population centers that include the heartland of his minority Alawite sect, said the U.S. intelligence official.

Russia is taking advantage of the operation to test new weapons in battlefield conditions and integrate them into its tactics, the intelligence official said. It is refining its use of unarmed surveillance drones, the official added.

“The Russians didn’t go blindly into this,” said the U.S. intelligence official, adding that they “are getting some benefit out of the cost.”

………

Vasily Kashin, a Moscow-based analyst, said the war is not financially stressing Russia.

“All the available data shows us that the current level of military effort is completely insignificant for the Russian economy and Russian budget,” said Kashin, of the Center for Analyses of Strategies and Technologies.

“It can be carried on at the same level year after year after year,” he said.

Compare this to the US policy:

  • Support regime change in Syria with a goal of a democratic and secular replacement.
  • Support for Saudi and Turkish efforts supporting Sunni Salafist Jihadi forces,which included the creation of ISIS.
  • Opposition to ISIS, the declaration that they are of a significant threat to the US, and supporting a massive air campaign against them.
  • Support of Kurdish forces fighting ISIS.
  • Allowing Turkish attacks against those same Kurdish forces by Turkey.
  • Supporting “moderate” rebels that collapse as soon as they end up in conflict with Jihadi rebels.  (Said support ends up in ISIS hands)
  • Demanding the removal of the Assad regime.
  • Demanding that government remains intact in some form.

This is the stupidest big of mind f%$#ery since Johnson and Kennedy’s “Best and Brightest” believed that they could win the war in Vietnam.

Basically, the Russians are following Barack Obama’s stated policy, “Don’t do stupid sh%$,” and Barack Obama is ignoring ignoring this policy, which is why their strategy appears to be gaining traction, and ours does not.

H/t Moon of Alabama.

They Don’t Even Care How it Looks

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The Senate Intelligence Committee issued its torture report.

The unclassified summary was released redacted to the point of incoherence.

The full report was sent to the wWhite House which promptly locked it away and forbade anyone from reading it, regardless of their security clearance.

It’s the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ear saying, “La, la, la, I can’t hear your!”

One year ago today, the Senate Intelligence Committee published a highly redacted executive summary of its investigation into the CIA’s torture and rendition program. The 525-page summary was shocking in many of its details, revealing the torture and rape of detainees held in CIA custody and encompassing treatment far in excess of even the torture techniques formally authorized by the Bush administration.

Despite the passage of 12 months, the actual report, comprising 6,700 pages, still has not been made publicly available. In fact, reading it appears to be prohibited among officials in the executive branch. Nearly a month and a half after the report’s initial release, it had not even been taken out of the package in which it was delivered to the Department of Justice and Department of State, according to government lawyers. Even the organization that was the subject of the report, the CIA, tightly controlled internal access and made “very limited use” of it, as had the Department of Defense, the lawyers said in a court filing.

That shunning of the torture report appears to be ongoing and very much by design: It turns out the Department of Justice has “refuse[d] to allow executive branch officials to review the full and final study,” Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Patrick Leahy wrote in a letter last month to the attorney general and FBI director, urging that they or their “appropriately cleared” underlings read the full report.

“The legacy of this historic report cannot be buried in the back of a handful of executive branch safes, never to be reviewed by those who most need to learn from it,” they added.

Elizabeth Beavers, a policy coordinator focusing on torture at Amnesty International, believes that no one in the Obama administration, including at the Department of Justice, has read the full report. “They appear to be taking a ‘see no evil, hear no evil’ [stance] with regards to the proof of criminal acts it may contain,” she said. But “for the administration not even to read the whole report, and to look the other way while it is possibly buried or even destroyed, sets a dangerous precedent by excusing major crimes like torture and forced disappearance.”

It appears that Obama is still insisting on ignore the most depraved excesses of the state security apparatus, and someone in his administration is trying to insure that they never have direct knowledge of what was done.

They must think that they won’t be subject to the International Criminal Court if they are willfully blind.

Admittedly, my knowledge of international law is limited, but I do not think this argument would wash in The Hague.

That’s Gonna Leave a Mark

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President Obama just called the Republican cowardice explosion over Syrian refugees a sign that they were afraid widows and orphans:

President Obama is lashing out at Republican politicians who oppose allowing Syrian refugees into the U.S., accusing them of being “scared of widows and orphans.”

Speaking to reporters Wednesday morning in the Philippines, Obama scoffed at attempts to block refugees following the Paris terror attacks as “political posturing” that “needs to stop.”

“Apparently they are scared of widows and orphans coming into the United States of America,” Obama said of Republicans. “At first, they were too scared of the press being too tough on them in the debates. Now they are scared of three year old orphans. That doesn’t seem so tough to me.”

Obama apparently directed his ire at New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), who said Tuesday he opposes allowing people fleeing the conflict in Syria to resettle in the U.S., even “orphans under five.”

………
“We are not well served when, in response to a terrorist attack, we descend into fear and panic,” he said. “We don’t make good decisions if its based on hysteria or an exaggeration of risks.”

What is going on with the refugees right now is cowardice, naked pants-soiling cowardice, and it’s nice to see Obama calling it out.

I Should Feel Good about This, but I Keep Waiting to the Other Shoe to Drop

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Obama has now officially rejected the Keystone-XL pipeline.

While a rational person should see this as an unalloyed good, I keep thinking that if TranCanada had not attempted to defer its application, making it clear that they were planning for a Republican victory in 2016, Obama would still be hedging his bets:

Saying that “the Keystone XL Pipeline would not serve the national interests of the United States,” President Obama rejected the much-debated project on Nov. 6. (AP)

President Obama rejected a presidential permit Friday for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, citing concerns about its impact on the climate.

“America’s now a global leader when it comes to taking serious action to fight climate change,” Obama told reporters, standing in the Roosevelt Room beside Vice President Biden and Secretary of State John F. Kerry. “And frankly, approving this project would have undercut that global leadership. And that’s the biggest risk we face, not acting.”

Also, I wonder if this might be some sort of attempt to disarm the left in an attempt to get the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal passed.

Not this Sh%$ Again!

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Obama has decided to put boots on the ground in Syria, and as near as I can figure, it’s because we cannot admit that our policy has failed:

In a dramatic shift in policy, the United States is preparing to send about 50 special operations forces to Syria within days to begin training and assisting “moderate” rebels fighting the Islamic State.

The U.S. military has sent elite forces into Syria before to conduct short in-and-out raids, but the move will for the first time keep American service members on the ground — and in harm’s way — in a four-plus year conflict that has killed over 200,000 people. It marks a significant departure in strategy for a White House that has repeatedly ruled out any U.S. “boots on the ground” in either Iraq or Syria and bristled at any suggestion that the American forces would take part in combat.

The U.S special operations forces being deployed to Syria will not play a direct combat role, at least initially, a senior defense official said Friday. Instead, the small number of commandos will focus more on advising local Arab and Kurdish rebels who are fighting the Islamic State in northern Syria.

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the Defense Department is not ruling out direct action raids in the future, but for now, “they will remain singularly at the headquarters” of the rebel groups, to ”help with operational planning.”

Still, the American forces could come under fire in their new mission, which could last weeks or months, officials said.

This is nucking futs.

The problem here is that we have mindlessly supported the policy goals of  the House of Saud.

As Pepe Escobar aptly notes, “But the problem was never Iran. The problem is the ideological matrix of goons who metastasize into Caliphs: Saudi Arabia,” and now that it has proven to be an abject failure, we have do double down, because our state security apparatus is unwilling to the failure of this policy.

So, now the White House and the Pentagon are so afraid that someone, anyone, else might approach something resembling a resolution in Syria that we are now supporting al Qaeda affiliated groups that we are calling “Moderates”.

This is insanity.  This is stupidity.

This is  ……… There are no words.

And this Guy Got a Nobel Peace Prize?

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Every time we get a new bit of information about Obama’s drone policies, it just gets worse:

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that U.S. drone policy is insane.

But one story told by the main drone whistleblowing reporter – Jeremy Scahill – shows just how insane it really is.

Specifically, Scahill explained today that Americans target TALL people in Afghanistan and other countries … assuming that tall men must be Arabs or “foreign fighters.”

In one instance, the U.S. targeted for drone assassination a man who they thought was unusually tall. In reality, he was a normal-size man … who happened to be surrounded by children.

Notwithstanding some domestic accomplishments, such as his half assed healthcare reform, Obama’s true legacy will be his immoral and counterproductive drone war.

Obama’s embrace of the contemptible and disasterous historical legacy of the Dulles brothers is complete.

Who Knew that Hillary was the Peace Candidate in 2008?

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So, to paraphrase Ron Zeigler,* any statements that Barack Obama about ending Any war that the US is involved in are now inoperative:

Barack Obama was elected to end the grueling ground wars of his predecessor, but he will leave office entrenching a military era defined by an inability to achieve either victory or extrication.

Obama’s decision to scrap his long-deferred ambition to end the US military commitment to Afghanistan reflects a twilight period in US warfare: after more than a decade, military commanders are unable to defeat an insurgency or field an indigenous proxy force and political leaders are unwilling to accept the blame of losing a war or openly committing the US to indefinite combat.

The result is a fudge that favors a rump force based on dubious military necessity and a hope that, at some point, the local force – whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere – will be able to shoulder the burden.

While “no one wants to quote, ‘lose a war’ on their watch”, said retired army lieutenant general Dan Bolger, who once led the training of the Afghan army, the US is “kidding ourselves – the US-led counterinsurgency has already been lost, the Afghans’ counterinsurgency is on. We have to decide: do we contribute to it, and how?”

The latest version of Obama’s plans for Afghanistan is to retain the 9,800 troops presently in the country through most of 2016, with the aspiration to reduce this number to 5,500 by the time Obama leaves office. These will be based at Bagram, north of Kabul; Jalalabad in the east; and Kandahar in the south.

Reflecting the military’s wariness of abandoning Afghanistan, the revision follows a pattern established throughout Obama’s presidency: to tell the American public that the “tide of war is receding”, as his 2012 campaign mantra put it, while not actually stopping it.

………

Obama has now given up on ending US wars. Like Bush before him, he passes off to his successor the decision whether to disentangle or escalate, and his likely successors – except for longshot candidate Bernie Sanders – are more hawkish than he is.

He is maybe the closest thing to a peace president that the US has elected in a generation. But along with Obama’s geographically boundless campaign of quasi-assassination, twilight wars are his legacy.

I think that Spencer Ackerman is being too charitable here.

Based on his actions, as opposed to his words, it is entirely reasonable to conclude that he was never a “Peace President”, he just played on on TV.

Dishonesty is the explanation which best describes the actions.

*Let me Google that for you.

I Think That Obama Is Beginning to F%$# with Republicans for Sh%$S and Giggles

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White House officials have just met with Black Lives Matter officials:

Black Lives Matter activists, including select members of Campaign Zero, met with top White House officials on Wednesday, a senior administration official confirmed to BuzzFeed News.

Activists met with senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, as well as Roy Austin, the deputy assistant to the president for urban affairs, and a collection of White House officials. The meeting focused on law enforcement and community policing with an emphasis on how to increase public safety locally.

I can hear wingnut heads exploding right now.

And Once Again, Obama Bails out Crooked Banksters

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It looks like the Obama Administration has once again insured that there is no accountability for crooked banksters:

Three top Democrats are accusing the Department of Housing and Urban Development of quietly removing a key clause in its requirements for taxpayer-guaranteed mortgage insurance in order to spare two banks recently convicted of federal crimes from being frozen out of the lucrative market.

HUD’s action is the latest in a series of steps by federal agencies to eliminate real-world consequences for serial financial felons, even as the Obama administration has touted its efforts to hold banks accountable.

In this sense, the guilty plea has become as meaningless to banks as their other ways of resolving criminal charges: out-of-court settlements, or deferred prosecution agreements. “Too Big to Fail” has morphed into “Too Big to Jail” — and then again, into “Bank Lives Matter.”

Sens. Sherrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Maxine Waters fired off a letter to HUD on Tuesday, saying they believe that the timing of the change was designed to clear the way for two banks recently convicted of federal crimes — JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup — to continue to make Federal Housing Administration-insured loans. Last year, JPMorgan Chase wrote $1.67 billion in FHA loans, and Citi wrote $342 million, according to data from the Congressional Research Service.

On May 20 of this year, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup both entered a guilty plea on one felony count of conspiring to rig foreign currency exchange trades, the largest market on the globe.

Five days earlier, on May 15, HUD slipped a notice into the Federal Register, seeking to alter its standard loan-level certification form, known as HUD-92900-A. This form must be filled out for lenders to receive FHA insurance, which reimburses them if the homeowner falls into foreclosure.

On the current HUD-92900-A form, lenders must certify that their firm and its principals “have not, within a three-year period … been convicted of or had a civil judgment rendered against them” for a variety of crimes, including “commission of fraud … violation of Federal or State antitrust statutes or commission of embezzlement, theft, forgery, bribery, falsification or destruction of records, making false statements or receiving stolen property.”

JPMorgan and Citi’s guilty plea would fall under the antitrust statute, and according to Brown, Warren and Waters’ reading of the certification, that would make them ineligible to obtain FHA insurance on their loans.

On the updated form, this language has been excised. The notice in the Federal Register did not even mention the removal, making it impossible to discover without comparing the old form and the proposed form side by side. The Wall Street Journal ran a story about the certification changes in May, but failed to notice that the new language would let law-breaking banks off scot-free.

The day before HUD released the notice in the Federal Register, the New York Times reported that the Justice Department sought to lessen the consequences of the guilty pleas in the foreign exchange rigging case, ensuring that federal regulators would not use the pleas to bar banks from certain business lines.

The Securities and Exchange Commission then granted waivers from disqualification to JPMorgan Chase, Citi, and the other guilty banks in the case, over the objections of one SEC Commissioner that the big banks had effectively become “Too Big to Bar.”

The HUD changes would similarly take away an automatic penalty for bank misbehavior. Per Brown, Warren and Waters, they “allow HUD to turn a blind eye to criminal violations — putting homebuyers and taxpayers at additional risk.”

HUD spokesperson Cameron French said the agency was not providing comment on the Democratic letter. He said HUD would review it and respond accordingly.

………

The Democratic lawmakers believe removing the certification language results in a change in policy rather than simply a change to the form. They requested that HUD withdraw the notice and issue it again under the Administrative Procedures Act, giving an explicit rationale for the change, and how it would affect JPMorgan and Citigroup’s FHA loan status. The public would then have an additional 60-day comment period.

This sort of crap needs to end.

Obama Just Whitewashed Malaysian Slave Trafficking

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The Obama administration has just upgraded Maylaysia’s human trafficking tier, despite the absence of any evidence of improvement:

The United States is upgrading Malaysia from the lowest tier on its list of worst human trafficking centres, US sources said on Wednesday, a move that could smooth the way for an ambitious US-led free-trade deal with the south-east Asian nation and 11 other countries.

The upgrade to so-called “tier two watch list” status removes a potential barrier to President Barack Obama’s signature global trade deal.

A provision in a related trade bill passed by Congress last month barred from fast-tracked trade deals Malaysia and other countries that earn the worst US human trafficking ranking in the eyes of the US State Department.

The upgrade follows international scrutiny and outcry over Malaysian efforts to combat human trafficking after the discovery this year of scores of graves in people-smuggling camps near its northern border with Thailand.

The State Department last year downgraded Malaysia in its annual “Trafficking in Persons” report to tier three, alongside North Korea, Syria and Zimbabwe, citing “limited efforts to improve its flawed victim protection regime” and other problems.

But a congressional source with knowledge of the decision told Reuters the administration had approved the upgraded status. A second source familiar with the matter confirmed the decision.

Some US lawmakers and human-rights advocates had expected Malaysia to remain on tier three this year given its slow pace of convictions in human-trafficking cases and pervasive trafficking in industries such as electronics and palm oil.

………

In its report last year, the State Department said Malaysia had reported 89 human-trafficking investigations in the 12 months to March 2014, down from 190 the previous year, and nine convictions compared to 21 the previous year.

In the latest year to March, Malaysia’s conviction rate is believed to have fallen further, according to human-rights advocates, despite a rise in the number of investigations. That reinforced speculation Malaysia would remain on tier three.

“I would be stunned if they are upgraded. They have done very little to improve the protection from abuse that migrant workers face,” said Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division.

This decision has the effect of condoning slavery in Malaysia, and throughout the world.

Of course, this does not matter to Barack Obama, because is looking at the TPP in the Pacific, the TTIP with Europe, and TiSA* world wide.

*The TiSA is arguably far worse than the other two deals, and has as one of its goals to make financial, insurance, and investment regulation next to impossible.