Category: Barack Obama

This is Beyond Orwell’s Wildest Imaginings

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In his seminal work 1984, he coined the idiom, “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.”

Well, Obama and His Evil Minions™ have done this one better, and they claim that the list of people that we are at war with is classified:

Back in May, we noted the oddity of the charges in Bradley Manning’s trial, in which he was accused of aiding three different “enemies,” with the last one being classified. Specifically, he was accused of aiding Al-Qaida, Al-Qaida of the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP, which is different than AQ itself) and… mystery enemy. Back at the beginning of July, the government quietly dropped the charge against the classified enemy, so that’s no longer in play in that case. That said, apparently this concept of classifying who we’re at war with wasn’t just limited to the Manning trial. ProPublica has the ridiculous and frightening tale of finding out that the answer to the simple question of who the US is at war with, is apparently classified as well.

At a hearing in May, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., asked the Defense Department to provide him with a current list of Al Qaeda affiliates.

The Pentagon responded – but Levin’s office told ProPublica they aren’t allowed to share it. Kathleen Long, a spokeswoman for Levin, would say only that the department’s “answer included the information requested.”

The Pentagon also went on to tell ProPublica that revealing who we’re actually at war with would do “serious damage to national security.” The main reason? They think those groups would use the info as good publicity and allow them to recruit more.………

If the UK were to hook up a generator to the grave of Eric Arthur Blair, they could power all of Europe, because he is surely spinning in his grave at unbelievable speed.

Just When You Thought that Obama’s Secrecy Fetish Could Not Get Any More Reprehensible………

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I present to you the case of Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye, who was imprisoned at the demand of the US government because he revealed that it was a US drone strike, and not a Yemeni army attack, that killed 41 civilians in al-Majalla in 2009.

His “trial” was condemned as a kangaroo court by numerous human rights group, and when the President of Yemen wanted to pardon him because of internal protests, Barack Obama personally called him to brow beat him into extending his detention.

Well, Shaye has now been released, but the official wheels in the Obama administration continue to try to grind him to dust:

News broke yesterday afternoon that, after a nearly three-year-long imprisonment, Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye had been released by the Yemeni government. Shaye’s work drew international attention in 2009 when he reported on a U.S. airstrike in the Yemeni village of al-Majalla that killed 41 civilians. He also conducted multiple interviews with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.

 U.S. officials, including the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, have told journalists that Shaye facilitated AQAP attacks, but his accounts of his arrest detail press intimidation by the Yemeni government, then still headed by Ali Abdullah Saleh, who resigned amid mass protests in November 2011. Shaye’s five-year prison sentence has drawn criticism from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Federation of Journalists, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and the Yemen-based Freedom Foundation.

 The U.S. government is still concerned about Shaye. Bernadette Meehan, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, told FP this morning by email, “We are concerned and disappointed by the early release of Abd-Ilah al-Shai, who was sentenced by a Yemeni court to five years in prison for his involvement with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.” Meehan did not comment on whether the United States advocated against his release.

This is so repulsive on so many levels.

Barack Obama Reveals that he is Black

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Barack Obama has spent pretty much all of his time on the national stage trying to avoid the accusation that he is the stereotypical “Angry Black Man“, and so, with the brief exception (which he walked away from as quickly as he could) of a comment on the arrest of Henry Louis Gates.

This is why Obama saying that 35 years ago that he would be Trayvon Martin was such a big deal:

Barack Obama used an unexpected speech at the White House to personally address the debates over race relations that have convulsed America since George Zimmerman was acquitted over the shooting of the unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin.

In remarks immediately interpreted as the most expansive comments on race since he became president, Obama said the US was still not “a post-racial society”.

“You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is: Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” he said.

But once again, it appears that Obama immediately followed this up by pandering to bigots racial profilers by floating the name of New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who has aggressively profiled blacks, Hispanics, and Muslims:

Earlier this week, President Barack Obama endorsed New York City police commissioner, and stop-and-frisk cheerleader, Ray Kelly as an adequate replacement for Janet Napolitano as head of the Department of Homeland Security. Under Kelly, the New York Police Department’s policy on randomly stopping people in the streets and then questioning and patting them down for weapons and drugs, imposed a stiff burden on black and Latino residents. According to the ACLU in New York, between 2002 and 2011, black and Latino New Yorkers made up close to 90 percent of those stopped by police — 88 percent of whom had no weapons or drugs on them when it happened. Kelly has staunchly defended the policy regardless of the racial profiling it codifies and its fruitless conclusions.

But Obama told Univision on Wednesday that “Kelly has obviously done an extraordinary job in New York,” and that the police commissioner is “one of the best there is” — an “outstanding leader in New York.”

“Mr. Kelly might be very happy where he is,” said Obama. “But if he’s not I’d want to know about it. ‘Cause, you know, obviously he’d be very well qualified for the job.”

This endorsement seems tone deaf given the current conversations nationwide around national security. Kelly’s “extraordinary” work in New York City has led to the city council passing the Community Safety Act, which scales back the police’s ability to racially profile considerably. Kelly’s stop-and-frisk policy is being challenged in federal court by the Center for Constitutional Rights right now. Obama’s own Justice Department may be sending in a federal monitor to ensure that NYPD stops racial profiling. The following, questioning and apprehension of targeted black males is at the crux of the current debate around George Zimmerman’s killing Trayvon Martin.

Also, you have to read the New York Times OP/Ed by Ta-Nehisi Coates:

It was candidate Obama who in 2008 pledged to “ban racial profiling” on a federal level and work to have it prohibited on the state level. It was candidate Obama who told black people that if they voted they would get a new kind of politics. And it was State Senator Obama who understood that profiling was the antithesis of such politics. Those of us raising our boys in the wake of Trayvon, or beneath the eye of the Demographics Unit, cannot fathom how the president could forget this.

Of course, the best argument against allowing Ray Kelly anywhere near law enforcement are the words of Ray Kelly, who, writing in (where else) The Wall Street Journal, where he engages in transparent lying to defend his career:

Since 2002, the New York Police Department has taken tens of thousands of weapons off the street through proactive policing strategies. The effect this has had on the murder rate is staggering. In the 11 years before Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office, there were 13,212 murders in New York City. During the 11 years of his administration, there have been 5,849. That’s 7,383 lives saved—and if history is a guide, they are largely the lives of young men of color.

So far this year, murders are down 29% from the 50-year low achieved in 2012, and we’ve seen the fewest shootings in two decades.

He knows that these numbers are reflected nationwide in any number of cities with all sorts of different sorts of police tactics.

He knows these numbers, and the reason that he lies about this is because the only way that he can defend his contemptible policies is to misrepresent his numbers, and what they mean.

Barack Obama Gets a Warning from Dianne Feinstein*

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If there is one constant in the US Senate, it is that Dianne Feinstein is friendly to an expansive and intrusive state security apparatus.

Thus her signing onto letter to Obama suggesting that his allowing the force feeding of prisoners at Guantanamo is illegal is a big deal:

Dianne Feinstein and Dick Durbin sent Obama a letter yesterday, using Kessler’s [The Federal Judge who condemned the force feeding, but said that she had no standing to rule] ruling to connect the two explicitly.

U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Gladys Kessler also expressed concern about the force-feeding of Guantanamo Bay detainees. The Court denied detainee Jihad Dhiab’s motion for a preliminary injunction to stop force-feeding due to lack of jurisdiction, but in her order, Judge Kessler noted that Dhiab has set out in great detail in his court filings “what appears to be a consensus that force-feeding of prisoners violates Article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) which prohibits torture or cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment.” The United States has ratified the ICCPR and is obligated to comply with its provisions. Judge Kessler also wrote, “it is perfectly clear from the statements of detainees, as well as the statements from the [medical] organizations just cited, that force-feeding is a painful, humiliating, and degrading process.” (emphasis added).

 The judge concluded by correctly pointing out that you, as Commander in Chief, have the authority to intercede on behalf of Dhiab, and other similarly-situated detainees at Guantanamo. The court wrote: “Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution provides that ‘[t]he President shall be the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States. …’ It would seem to follow, therefore, that the President of the United States, as Commander-in-Chief, has the authority—and power—to directly address the issue of force-feeding of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay.”


 Feinstein only by association makes the next part of her argument. We comply with these treaties by complying with our Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel or unusual punishment. And the government has long said that if we can do something elsewhere in a our gulag system, we can do it in Gitmo.

………

Say what you will about DiFi (lord knows I’ve often said the same, where I thought it appropriate), but she has just told a President from her own party that he’s breaking the law.

This is what you call a, “statement against interests.”

When DiFi is implying that your intelligence activities are over the top, you have jumped the shark.

I would also note that the Snowden matter might very have something to do with this, she also sent a letter expressing concerns to SecDef Hagel about a month ago (about a week and a half after the Snowden revelations).

The US state security apparatus still thinks that this will blow over, but even DiFi realizes that something has changed.

*Full disclosure, her grandfather, Sam Goldman, and my great-grandfather, Harry Goldman, were brothers.

I Liked Him Better as Ford Prefect

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Yasiin Bey (aka Mos Def) volunteers to be force fed to show what it’s like for the Guantanamo detainees. (Not for the faint of heart, I felt ill after watching)

Note that they stopped when he asked. In our Gulag in the Caribbean, they don’t stop, and it goes on for 2 hours ……… Twice a day.

Because torturing people who have been cleared of any crime, because Barack Obama lacks the balls to let them out, is what we have become as a society.

And still, the Republicans are working on a phony IRS and Benghazi scandal, instead of this, or his coddling the banksters.

There are very real crimes here, and the Republicans cannot bring themselves to complain about the torture of non-white people.

And this will be the response from the Obamabots:

American Extremists - Food for thoughtlessness

Food for thoughtlessness

It’s Like a Slow Motion Car Wreck

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So, the little people will be required to buy health insurance under the PPACA (Obamacare), but the requirement for big employers has been pushed back a year:

Businesses won’t be penalized next year if they fail to provide workers health insurance after the Obama administration decided to delay a key requirement under its signature 2010 health-care law.

The government will postpone enforcement of the so-called employer mandate until 2015, the administration said today. Under the provision, companies with 50 or more workers face a fine of as much as $3,000 per employee if they don’t offer affordable insurance.

The move addresses complaints from employer groups to President Barack Obama’s administration about the burden of the law’s reporting requirements. The decision pushes the issue past the 2014 midterm congressional elections, as Republicans have sought to make the health law a symbol of government overreach.

“In our ongoing discussions with businesses we have heard that you need the time to get this right,” Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Obama, said in a White House blog post announcing the decision. “We are listening.”

The move may lead some employers to delay providing coverage to workers. The law’s individual mandate remains in effect, a provision that requires most Americans to carry health insurance.

You knew that this was coming.

When big business talks, they, “Are listening.”

When it’s civil libertarians, , the poor and elderly, advocates for financial reform, the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, etc., it’s, “talk to the hand”.

H/t to my Dad, who sent me a link to a (subscription only) WSJ article.

And While We Are On the Subject of Obama and Subverting Regulation………

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Gary Gensler surprised everyone when, as head of the CFTC, he actually enforced sensible rules.

So it it comes no surprise that Obama is firing him and replacing him with a corporate drone from the Vampire Squid:

Obama is no longer bothering to pretend that he is anything other than a stooge for banks and other big money interests.

 The president is effectively dismissing Gary Gensler, the ex-Goldman partner who headed the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. Gensler used his post at a secondary financial regulator to push for reforms. It was his office that blew the Libor scandal wide open by taking referrals from British regulators seriously (by contrast, Geithner, who heard about widespread, deliberate mismarking in 2008, passed the buck to the Bank of England). Gensler has also been making himself unpopular by taking the view that swap dealers, which includes foreign branches of US banks and parties that conduct business with US parties, must comply with Dodd Frank. ………

 Shahien Nasiripour at the Huffington Post describes how Gensler is being ousted for his position on swaps regulation, which was coming to a head in international meetings starting June 20, with a July 12 deadline looming. The industry was pushing for the usual “race to the bottom” approach, since the Dodd Frank provisions are more stringent than overseas requirments (the spin, of course, was that Gensler was acting unilaterally, as opposed to implementing what Congress mandated). Gensler faces varying degrees of resistance from three of his four fellow commissioners. International regulators were apparently also unhappy with Gensler’s tough stand, to the point where they were complaining to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew.

 Even if Obama fails in fast-tracking his chosen replacement, Amanda Renteria, Gensler’s lame-duck status will considerably weaken his ability to arm-twist the fence-sitters among his colleagues.

 And Renteria is a simply pathetic choice. Oh, she’s got a very appealing personal story, having worked her way up from a very disadvantaged background, a child of migrant workers who made her way to Stanford and later Harvard Business School. But there’s nothing in her background that qualifies her to act either as a senior regulator or as the head of a large operation (the CFTC has over 400 employees). This leap in responsibilities is tantamount to taking a promising law firm associate and making them the head of a large law practice. You’d never do that if you cared about the health of the firm. A move like this looks an awful lot like an effort not just to sideline Gensler’s push on swaps regulation, but to render the CFTC incompetent over time.

 Renteria’s knowledge of finance appears to consist of having worked right after college for a few years at Goldman. ………

And to this we add the bonus story that Barack Obama has nominated Walmart’s biggest fan to head his council of economic advisors:

On June 10, 2013, President Obama announced his intention to nominate Jason Furman to become the next chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. This is a big-time, highly influential post. So what kind of economist is Furman?

One who thinks Walmart is the best thing since sliced bread.

For Furman, Walmart is nothing short of a miracle for America’s poor and working-class folks. For him, progressives should be cheering the firm: he even wrote a 16-page paper titled, “Wal-Mart: A Progressive Success Story,” which was posted on the Center for American Progress website. ………

In Furman’s view, “the US productivity miracle and the emergence of Wal-Mart-style retailing are virtually synonymous.”

For the man who will have President Obama’s ear on vital matters like jobs, the evidence of whether Walmart’s wages and benefits are substandard is “murky.” And he doesn’t much care for those who question Walmart’s approach: In the 2006 dialogue with Ehrenreich on Slate, he upbraided activists who had pushed the firm to increase wages and offer better benefits:………

To complete the finger in the eye, the American Enterprise Institute has issued effusive praise on the choice.

I’m not surprised.  I’m disappointed, but not surprised.

Obama loves hippie punching.

Hope & Change ……… Not!!! Environment Edition………

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The White House is slow walking major environmental regulations:

The White House has blocked several Department of Energy regulations that would require appliances, lighting and buildings to use less energy and create less global-warming pollution, as part of a broader slowdown of new antipollution rules issued by the Obama administration.

The administration has spent as long as two years reviewing some of the energy efficiency rules proposed by the Energy Department, bypassing a 1993 executive order that in most instances requires the White House to act on proposed regulations within 90 days. Regulatory review times at the White House Office of Management and Budget are now the longest in 20 years, having spiked sharply since 2011.

………

The proposed rules would require that refrigerators, light bulbs and electrical equipment use less energy, much as the Obama administration in its first term required automakers to commit to make cars more energy efficient.

With a sweeping climate bill having died in the Senate in Mr. Obama’s first term, his only options for major action on the issue in the second term appear to involve executive action. In one of the signature moments of his 2013 State of the Union address, he vowed that if Congress failed to act on energy and climate change, he would use his executive powers to do so.

What it comes down to is that Barack Obama does not believe in regulation. That’s why he had Cass Sunstein as the head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

The slowdown stems from a combination of factors, including high-level vacancies and election-year politics. Analysts and former administration officials said the White House, sensitive to Republican charges that it was threatening the economy by pushing out dozens of so-called job-killing regulations, reined in the process last year, leaving many major rules awaiting action for months beyond legal deadlines.

Some administration officials are also concerned that regulations have the potential to do more harm than good. “If we make refrigerators lousy, that’s a big problem,” Cass R. Sunstein wrote in “Simpler: The Future of Government,” a book published this year about his time running the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a small unit of the budget office responsible for reviewing regulations.

………

Lisa Heinzerling, a professor of law at Georgetown University and a former top Environmental Protection Agency official who tangled with Mr. Sunstein over a number of environmental regulations in Mr. Obama’s first term, said in a recent article that such demands for detailed analysis become “a regulatory game of Whac-A-Mole: every time the agency meets one demand for a piece of information about the costs or benefits of a rule, it finds itself met with a new and different demand.”

She said the decision of how quickly to move now rested with Mr. Obama. “The cabinet does not need a presidential directive telling the agencies to do their work,” she said, “rather, it needs presidential support for the work they are trying to do.”

I think that Ms. Heinzerling is missing the point: If Obama wanted regulations to progress with alacrity, they would be.

Regulations are stalled because that is what he wants. 

Cass Sunstein was head of the OIRA, QED.

Paul Ryan Calls the NSA Surveillance “Creepy”, and He is Right

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Look at those dead eyes, he knows creepy

Seriously, makeing Paul f%$3ing Ryan right on ANYTHING is the epitome of fail:

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) expressed misgivings with the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance programs, suggesting on Monday that the activities “go way beyond the scope” of what the federal government has been authorized to do by laws like the Patriot Act.

 “It comes across as creepy,” the 2012 Republican vice presidential nominee said in an interview with the Wisconsin radio station WJRN. “I understand FISA court orders to go after some known person, and their phone records and whoever they’re communicating with. But to do a blanket dragnet nationwide, that seems to go way beyond the scope of the law that I’m familiar with called the Patriot Act.”

The fail is strong with the Obama administration.

More than any sitting president I have ever seen, Obama seems to obsess over his legacy.

Well, this is your legacy.

Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever.™

Hurray for the ACLU

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They have filed suit to get access to the FISA court orders authorizing the NSA drift netting of Americans’ communications data:

The ACLU and Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Information Clinic filed a motion today with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), seeking the release of secret court opinions that permit the government to acquire Americans’ phone records en masse. The public has a right to know the legal justification for the government’s sweeping surveillance—but, until now, those judicial opinions have remained a heavily guarded secret.

 The ACLU filed its motion on the heels of last week’s disclosure of an order, issued under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, compelling a Verizon subsidiary to turn over call details for every domestic and international phone call placed on its network during a three-month period. Since then, media reports and statements by members of the congressional intelligence committees have made clear that this order belongs to a much larger surveillance program—covering all the major telephone companies—that has been in existence for the past seven years. When pressed about the program, members of Congress as well as executive officials have emphasized that this mass acquisition of Americans’ phone records was reviewed and approved by judges on the FISC.

 ………

 The release of these FISC opinions is the first step to an informed public discussion of the surveillance powers asserted by the government. It should not be able to shield such a radical and unprecedented intrusion on Americans’ privacy behind a secret court issuing secret legal interpretations of our laws.

I have a sense that they are going to have to fight like hell to get access to the legal opinions, because the filings will almost certainly reveal the low bar presented by the administration, and the low bar accepted by the judiciary, will make a travesty of their protestations of due process.

As Juan Cole pithily notes, “We Misunderstood Barack: He only wanted the Domestic Surveillance to be Made Legal, not to End It.

The idea that you take a blatantly lawless program of nearly unlimited surveillance powers (Bush/Yoo unitary executive), and slap on some due process and retain the same nearly unlimited power, and it’s OK, because the Obama administration is a bunch of good people*, normal checks and balances do not need to apply.

It can all be done in secret, with the approval of a secret court that you have to keep away from toilet paper, because they will sign anything, and the public will never know, and it’s all good.

It’s why I call him, “the Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever™.”

*Now that Rahm Emanuel is afflicting the people of Chicago, anyway.

Yes, We Are Being Watched

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Glenn Greenwald got a copy of a FISA court order requiring that Verizon turn over all phone call information for a 3 month period.  Members of Congress have revealed that this was in fact a renewal, and that this has been going on for 7 years.  Senator Udall stated that he has been trying reveal that this was going on for much of that time, but he had been stymied:

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

 The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an “ongoing, daily basis” to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

 The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

 The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.

And, BTW, they are also data mining all the major Internet providers:

The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.

 The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.

 The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation – classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies – which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program. The document claims “collection directly from the servers” of major US service providers.

 Although the presentation claims the program is run with the assistance of the companies, all those who responded to a Guardian request for comment on Thursday denied knowledge of any such program.

 ………

 A chart prepared by the NSA, contained within the top-secret document obtained by the Guardian, underscores the breadth of the data it is able to obtain: email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP (Skype, for example) chats, file transfers, social networking details, and more.

 ………

 “Fisa was broken because it provided privacy protections to people who were not entitled to them,” the presentation claimed. “It took a Fisa court order to collect on foreigners overseas who were communicating with other foreigners overseas simply because the government was collecting off a wire in the United States. There were too many email accounts to be practical to seek Fisas for all.”

Because that whole Constitution is just so inconvenient.

BTW, the Washington Post also published an article about the PRISM program at the same time as the Guardian, and toward the end of their article, they have this tidbit:

Firsthand experience with these systems, and horror at their capabilities, is what drove a career intelligence officer to provide PowerPoint slides about PRISM and supporting materials to The Washington Post in order to expose what he believes to be a gross intrusion on privacy. “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the officer said.

And in the world of conventional wisdom, the New York Times editorial board, has unleashed a can of whup ass on the Obama administration about this:

Within hours of the disclosure that federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.

Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability.

 The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.

………

 On Thursday, Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, who introduced the Patriot Act in 2001, said that the National Security Agency overstepped its bounds by obtaining a secret order to collect phone log records from millions of Americans.

 “As the author of the Patriot Act, I am extremely troubled by the F.B.I.’s interpretation of this legislation,” he said in a statement. “While I believe the Patriot Act appropriately balanced national security concerns and civil rights, I have always worried about potential abuses.” He added: “Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American.”

 Stunning use of the act shows, once again, why it needs to be sharply curtailed if not repealed.

Yes, I agree with what Sensenbrenner says, which is a complete mind f%$#.

BTW, it gets worse, because it looks like the NSA was getting credit card data as well:

The National Security Agency’s monitoring of Americans includes customer records from the three major phone networks as well as emails and Web searches, and the agency also has cataloged credit-card transactions, said people familiar with the agency’s activities.

 The disclosure this week of an order by a secret U.S. court for Verizon Communications Inc.’s phone records set off the latest public discussion of the program. But people familiar with the NSA’s operations said the initiative also encompasses phone-call data from AT&T Inc. and Sprint Nextel Corp. records from Internet-service providers and purchase information from credit-card providers.

BTW, Marcy Wheeler is spot on when she says that the only reason for all this secrecy is to prevent court challenges by making it impossible for a plaintiff to show standing:

The Administration wants you to believe that “all three branches” of government have signed off on this program (never mind that last year FISC did find part of this 215 collection illegal — that’s secret too).

But our court system is set up to be an antagonistic one, with both sides represented before a judge. The government has managed to avoid such antagonistic scrutiny of its data collection and mining programs — even in the al-Haramain case, where the charity had proof they had been the target of illegal, unwarranted surveillance — by ensuring no one could ever get standing to challenge the program in court. Most recently in Clapper v. Amnesty, SCOTUS held that the plaintiffs were just speculating when they argued they had changed their habits out of the assumption that they had been wiretapped.

This order might just provide someone standing. Any of Verizon’s business customers can now prove that their call data is, as we speak, being collected and turned over to the NSA. (Though I expect lots of bogus language about the difference between “collection” and “analysis.”)

That is what all the secrecy has been about. Undercutting separation of powers to ensure that the constitutionality of this program can never be challenged by American citizens.

It’s no big deal, says the Administration. But it’s sufficiently big of a deal that they have to short-circuit the most basic principle of our Constitution.

Also, read Bruce Schneier’s impassioned defense on whistle blowing.

As I have noted a number of times before, Barack Obama is showing himself to be the Worst ……… Constitutional ……… law ……… professor ……… ever.

Speaking of Fails………

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How about that funny looking guy with the big ears?

You know, the one who ran against John McCain in 2008?

Well, there are reports that that he will nominate Bush Administration apparatchik James Comey as the next FBI director:

President Obama plans to nominate James B. Comey, a former senior Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration, to replace Robert S. Mueller III as FBI director, according to two people with knowledge of the selection process.

 Comey, 52, was at the center of some of the most bruising debates over counterterrorism during the Bush administration and established a reputation as a fierce defender of the law and the integrity of the Justice Department regardless of the political pressures of the moment.

 The expected nomination of Comey, a Republican, was seen in some quarters as a bipartisan move by a president besieged by Republicans in Congress. But Chuck Hagel’s prior service as a Republican senator from Nebraska did not spare him from a bruising nomination battle for secretary of defense.

(emphasis mine)

Yes, more of the PPUS (Post Partisan Unity Schtick).  It does not work, and neither does starting the negotiation process with capitulation does a disservice to the basic morals on that Obama purports to believe it.

Notwithstanding the fact that he opposed one the most egregious excesses of the Cheney Bush administration, he is a bad guy, who has next to no interest in supporting civil rights, as the ACLU has observed:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: 212-549-2666, media@aclu.org

WASHINGTON – Below is a statement from Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, on President Obama’s reported plan to nominate James B. Comey as the next director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“While the ACLU does not take official positions on nominations to appointed office, there are many questions regarding Comey’s record that deserve careful scrutiny from the Senate Judiciary Committee. As the second-highest ranked Justice Department official under John Ashcroft, Comey approved some of the worst abuses committed by the Bush administration. Specifically, the publicly available evidence indicates Comey signed off on enhanced interrogation techniques that constitute torture, including waterboarding. He also oversaw the indefinite detention without charge or trial of an American citizen picked up in the United States and then held for years in a military brig. Although Comey, despite tremendous pressure from the Bush White House, deserves credit for courageously stopping the reauthorization of a secret National Security Agency program, he reportedly approved programs that struck at the very core of who we all are as Americans.

“It’s critical that the Senate ensures that the men and women of the FBI know that they have a leader who will demand adherence to the rule of law and will hold those accountable who do not, wherever he or she may find them.”

Seeing the Obama administration’s consistently dismissive attitude towards civil rights (Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever), they may see his role in the some of the worst excesses of the Bush administration, including torture, as a plus.

All You Need to Know About Barack Obama is that His Crucial Mentor is Penny Pritzker

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Without Penny Pritzker, the scion of the Hyatt hotel chain, Barack Obama would have never achieved anything in politics. She was the first, and arguably the most enthusiastic, big money donor to fund the political career of that guy with the funny name.

The most recent news is that she had to modify the financial disclosure forms that she filed when she was submitted as commerce secretary, because she understated her pay from her consulting by at least $80 million.

What makes this even worse is that these wages were pay to offshore funds to avoid taxes:

And also like many of the plutocrats in America Pritzker has a lot of tax abnormalities involving offshore accounts. But now Prtizker is under fire for providing a false financial disclosure statement which she has since amended.

Chicago billionaire Penny Pritzker inadvertently understated a portion of her income by at least $80 million in a disclosure form required for her nomination to be U.S. Commerce secretary and has amended the document.
Forms released online last night by the Office of Government Ethics show that Pritzker earned additional income for consulting work on hundreds of trusts, including family trusts, beyond what she disclosed last week. The omission, discovered by Pritzker’s financial advisers, was due to a clerical error, said Susan Anderson, the nominee’s spokeswoman

Not surprisingly Pritzker makes a nice chunk of change “consulting” with other 1%ers.

Documents released last week show Pritzker received $32.2 million for a decade’s worth of consulting on the restructuring of domestic trusts. The filings released yesterday show she earned at least $80 million for that work, according to Bloomberg’s compilation of the data. The revised total is in addition to the amount reported last week, according to Anderson.

Pritzker, whose family founded Hyatt Hotels Corp, is scheduled to testify on her nomination before the Senate Commerce Committee tomorrow. She disclosed last week that she earned $54 million in consulting fees last year for a similar restructuring of trusts based in the Bahamas, also over 10 years. The Bahamas’ income wasn’t changed in the amended disclosure document.

Just what we need in a Commerce Secretary, someone who knows how to help companies offshore their profits to avoid tax liabilities.

Also, she has a long history of avoiding taxes through arcane instruments and offshoring for her own benefit.

We also have the the fact that she profited at taxpayer expense when she ran Superior Bank into the ground by aggressively pursuing subprime loans.  (Also here)

Also, as head of Hyatt, she has a long history of being virulently anti labor union, (also here.) as well as being a big supporter of Rahm Emanuel’s plans to privatize public education.

And finally there are the longstanding family ties between the family fortune and organized crime.

The reason that this is important is not because of her nomination.  The Commerce Secretary’s job has traditionally been the aggressive support of what is now called “the 1%”.

Her relationship to Barack Obama is important because it defines his entire political career.

It’s why we are not seeing a pursuit of the banksters, and we are seeing a pursuit of a “grand bargain” on Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, which will have grandma eating cat food.*

*In the interest of health, I would suggest that people eat dog food, and not cat food. Cats because they are one of the few true carnivores, do not need the complex carbohydrates and fats that people, and dogs do. As such, dog food is better for you than cat food because it provides carbs and essential fatty acids. A dog can go blind if it is fed on cat food, but a cat lives just fine on dog food. The phenomenon is known as rabbit starvation.

This could very well be the stupidest person on the face of the earth. Perhaps we should shoot him.*

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I am referring, of course, to former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, who’s latest brainstorm is that Obama should appoint Kenneth Starr as a special prosecutor to investigate the latest ginned up faux scandals against the Obama administration:

Republicans are howling for President Obama to name a special prosecutor to investigate the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of Tea Party groups. The president should call their bluff.

 The president should announce that he has told the Justice Department to appoint an independent investigator with bulldog instincts and bipartisan credibility. The list of candidates could start with Kenneth Starr, who chased down the scandals, real and imagined, of the Clinton presidency. It might include Patrick Fitzgerald, who was special counsel in the Valerie Plame affair, winning the conviction of Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, and who has successfully prosecuted two corrupt governors of Illinois, one from each party.

This is batsh%$ insane.

It’s also ahistorical. Ken Starr did not pursue any real scandals, that was done by his predecessor, Robert Fiske, who uncovered significant corruption in Arkansas. Starr had no interest beyone his witch hunt.

Ken Starr???? This is beyond the wildest dreams of the writers for The Onion.

I cannot believe that anyone can be this obtuse.

Neither can the people reading his post.  The comments are nearly universally disparaging.

The stupid, it burns us.

*What, you’ve never seen Ruthless People? Great movie.

Just When You Thought that Obama Could Not Get Any Worse………

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He is proposing to sell the Tennessee Valley Authority to Wall Street for some magic beans:

The headline issue, cutting Social Security benefits by changing the measurement of inflation (the “chained CPI”), is something that writers on Naked Capitalism have been predicting for a long time. What has come as a shocking (but not surprising) twist is a bombshell buried in Obama’s budget: the proposed privatization of the Tennessee Valley Association. At this point I think it’s important to quote a part of this section of the budget at length:

TVA is a self-financing Government corporation, funding operations through electricity sales and bond financing. In order to meet its future capacity needs, fulfill its environmental responsibilities, and modernize its aging generation system, TVA’s current capital investment plan includes more than $25 billion of expenditures over the next 10 years. However, TVA’s anticipated capital needs are likely to quickly exceed the agency’s $30 billion statutory cap on indebtedness. Reducing or eliminating the Federal Government’s role in programs such as TVA, which have achieved their original objectives and no longer require Federal participation, can help put the Nation on a sustainable fiscal path. Given TVA’s debt constraints and the impact to the Federal deficit of its increasing capital expenditures, the Administration intends to undertake a strategic review of options for addressing TVA’s financial situation, including the possible divestiture of TVA, in part or as a whole.

Notice how nonsensical the justification for the “divestiture of TVA” is. The authors clearly acknowledge that the Tennessee Valley Authority is a “self-financing Government corporation”. The TVA issues its own debt and also has income from electricity sales. Yet because its capital expenditures are counted as part of the federal deficit for accounting purposes, privatizing the TVA supposedly counts as a “spending cut”. This is the willful blindness of orthodox thought taken to extreme levels. Privatizing the TVA doesn’t shrink the amount of debt in the economy one cent; all it does is bring that debt onto private balance sheets. In fact, private investors will buy the Authority on mainly on credit, increasing the amount of private debt.

Note also whoever buys this will pay far less than market value, because that is how this sh%$ works, and since they get it on the cheap, their goal will be to suck the marrow out of it, and to raise rates on the people it serves as fast as it possibly can.

That’s more than 9 million people he wants to f%$# like a drunk sorority girl.

Thatcher was too smart to privatize Britrail, but John Major was not, and the result was crappy service and fatal accidents.

It is so bad that even the Tories have disavowed selling off rail.

You will see the same from privatizing the TVA.

So, he’s going after two of the remaining jewels in the crown of the New Deal, the TVA, and Social Security.

He’s doing it because he wants to, because, except for the appeals to racial bigotry and abortion criminalization, he’s well to the right of Ronald Reagan, and he hates the liberal wing of the Democrat Party in general, and the New Deal in particular.

I’m beginning to think that I should add the tag “Manchurian Democrat” to posts like this.

If You Claim the Right to Kill Anyone You Want, You Will Kill Anyone You Want

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It turns out that Obama’s claims that drone strikes are exclusively made against senior terrorist figures are a lie:

Contrary to assurances it has deployed U.S. drones only against known senior leaders of al Qaida and allied groups, the Obama administration has targeted and killed hundreds of suspected lower-level Afghan, Pakistani and unidentified “other” militants in scores of strikes in Pakistan’s rugged tribal area, classified U.S. intelligence reports show.

The administration has said that strikes by the CIA’s missile-firing Predator and Reaper drones are authorized only against “specific senior operational leaders of al Qaida and associated forces” involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks who are plotting “imminent” violent attacks on Americans.

“It has to be a threat that is serious and not speculative,” President Barack Obama said in a Sept. 6, 2012, interview with CNN. “It has to be a situation in which we can’t capture the individual before they move forward on some sort of operational plot against the United States.”

Copies of the top-secret U.S. intelligence reports reviewed by McClatchy, however, show that drone strikes in Pakistan over a four-year period didn’t adhere to those standards.

The intelligence reports list killings of alleged Afghan insurgents whose organization wasn’t on the U.S. list of terrorist groups at the time of the 9/11 strikes; of suspected members of a Pakistani extremist group that didn’t exist at the time of 9/11; and of unidentified individuals described as “other militants” and “foreign fighters.”

In a response to questions from McClatchy, the White House defended its targeting policies, pointing to previous public statements by senior administration officials that the missile strikes are aimed at al Qaida and associated forces.

Micah Zenko, an expert with the Council on Foreign Relations, a bipartisan foreign policy think tank, who closely follows the target killing program, said McClatchy’s findings indicate that the administration is “misleading the public about the scope of who can legitimately be targeted.”

Gee, you think that they are lying to us?

Hoocoodanode?

You remember what they say about absolute power.

And Cue the Republicans Accusing Obama of Throwing Grandma Out on the Streets in 3 … 2 … 1 …

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Because offering cuts that Republicans are afraid to mention in public work so well

Well, right now:

Appearing on CNN, the National Republican Congressional Committee chairman accused Obama of “trying to balance this budget on the backs of seniors” and signaled Republicans may try to use the changes against Democrats in the coming election.

 Walden’s comments come even as key Republicans have embraced Obama’s “chained CPI” proposal to cut Social Security benefits.

 “I thought it’s very intriguing in that his budget really lays out kind of a shocking attack on seniors, if you will,” Walden (Ore.) said. “We haven’t seen all the detail yet, so we’ll look at it. But I’ll tell you, when you’re going after seniors the way he’s already done on Obamacare, taking $700 billion out of Medicare to put into Obamacare, and now coming back at seniors again — I think you’re crossing that line very quickly here in terms of denying access to seniors for health care…”

Not only is this mind-blowingly bad policy, it is mind-blowingly bad politics.

And let us remember something important:  Social Security contributes nothing to the deficit, and it will not for decades.

Once again, we have Obama playing the Manchurian Democrat.