Category: Barack Obama

Some Navel Gazing on My Part

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I’ve been fairly clear on this blog that I think that various actions of Obama renders him unfit to be President.*

I also understand that there are people who make arguments that could be called compelling to vote for him, most notably the Rude Pundit’s, “In the End, Vote for Obama Because F%$# Romney,”† (%$# mine)  because Mitt Romney is unfit to be President as well.

While I was in Ashland, I talked with my dad about this, and explained to him my position, and further explained that, living in Maryland, I had no moral dilemma, because my vote for President had not consequence.

He asked me what I would do if I lived in a battleground state, and I responded, “That way madness lies.”

My was flip, and it was a cop out. 

I simply don’t know what I would do if I lived in Ohio, or Virginia, or Florida,‡ or New Hampshire, or Wisconsin, or Colorado, or Iowa, and any statement that I might make would be self serving and shallow, and ultimately meaningless.

What I’m saying here is that, on this matter, if you think that I’m full of sh%$, then I’m full of shit, and if you think that I have a f%$#ing point, then I have a f%$#ing point. 

There are any number of times where I make an argument that is fact based, and I try my best to supply links to those facts, but this is not one of those times.

I think that I’m right, but opinions are like assholes, everyone has one.

*Normalizing torture by refusing to prosecute, his war on whistle-blowing, his steadfast refusal to prosecute the malefactors of wealth, his assertions of a executive authority that makes Dick Cheney look mild, etc.
†H/t Cthulhu for the catch.
‡OK, I know what I would do if I lived in Florida, I would kill myself.

I Won’t Be Liveblogging the Debate

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I have an appointment at 9:15, so I won’t be watching the debate.

I truth be told, the real meaning of the debates will be how it gets called by the press anyway.

As to my advice to the candidates, it is as follows:

  • Obama, don’t hippie punch. It will be tempting, because you hate the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, but it won’t convince the undecideds, and it would serve to demoralize your base.
  • Mitt, you have to go off the reservation. You need to attack Obama for not going after the banksters. Note that, despite clear evidence of fraud, there has been zero prosecutions of big bankers and no meaningful prosecutions of big banks.

FWIW, I predict that neither of them will do this.

Obama will go after liberal strawmen, and Rmoney won’t go after the banksters.

I Gotta Read This Book

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Neil Barkofsky’s book on his experiences monitoring the TARP, Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street, and the Bush administration comes off better than the Obama administration:

The Huffington Post described a scene in a forthcoming book by Neil Barofsky, the former Special Inspector General of TARP, where Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner delivered a string of F-bombs during a discussion about transparency. I’ve read the book, and while that’s an amusing diversion, it’s nowhere near the headline story.

The important moment in the book for me comes conveniently after Barofsky recounts this FDL News item, one of my HAMP horror stories. Barofsky shows how HAMP’s faulty design led to all sorts of problems like this, with trapped borrowers, extended trial payments, no-doc modifications, and eventually unnecessary foreclosures. Barofsky mused that Treasury didn’t care about the suffering of borrowers under HAMP, and the issue came up in a meeting with the Treasury Secretary, which was also attended by Elizabeth Warren, then the head of the Congressional Oversight Panel, another TARP watchdog.

Warren asked Geithner repeatedly about HAMP. After several evasions, Geithner said about the banks, “We estimate that they can handle ten million foreclosures, over time… this program will help foam the runway for them.”

This is a revelatory moment for Barofsky in the book, and should be for everyone reading. Geithner’s concern, first of all, was with how the banks would respond to the program, not how homeowners would respond to it. In fact, homeowners are quite besides the point. Regardless of their situation, they will be one of the 10 million foreclosures, in Geithner’s construction. His goal was merely to space out the foreclosures and give the banks time to earn their way back to health, mostly through the other parts of the bailout, that enabled them to earn profits.

I will note that the Cossacks work for the Czar, and notwithstanding all the turnover on the economic side of his cabinet, Geithner has been a constant.

This is going on because this is what Obama wants.

Most Transparent Administration Ever

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Have you heard the latest? The FDA spied on outside critics in an attempt to find out who were the whistleblowers.

The f%$#ing F f%$#ing D f%$#ing A was engaged in a f%$#ing witch hunt and coverup?

Un-f%$#ing-believable:

A wide-ranging surveillance operation by the Food and Drug Administration against a group of its own scientists used an enemies list of sorts as it secretly captured thousands of e-mails that the disgruntled scientists sent privately to members of Congress, lawyers, labor officials, journalists and even President Obama, previously undisclosed records show.
What began as a narrow investigation into the possible leaking of confidential agency information by five scientists quickly grew in mid-2010 into a much broader campaign to counter outside critics of the agency’s medical review process, according to the cache of more than 80,000 pages of computer documents generated by the surveillance effort.
Moving to quell what one memorandum called the “collaboration” of the F.D.A.’s opponents, the surveillance operation identified 21 agency employees, Congressional officials, outside medical researchers and journalists thought to be working together to put out negative and “defamatory” information about the agency.
F.D.A. officials defended the surveillance operation, saying that the computer monitoring was limited to the five scientists suspected of leaking confidential information about the safety and design of medical devices.
While they acknowledged that the surveillance tracked the communications that the scientists had with Congressional officials, journalists and others, they said it was never intended to impede those communications, but only to determine whether information was being improperly shared.
The agency, using so-called spy software designed to help employers monitor workers, captured screen images from the government laptops of the five scientists as they were being used at work or at home. The software tracked their keystrokes, intercepted their personal e-mails, copied the documents on their personal thumb drives and even followed their messages line by line as they were being drafted, the documents show.
The extraordinary surveillance effort grew out of a bitter dispute lasting years between the scientists and their bosses at the F.D.A. over the scientists’ claims that faulty review procedures at the agency had led to the approval of medical imaging devices for mammograms and colonoscopies that exposed patients to dangerous levels of radiation.
A confidential government review in May by the Office of Special Counsel, which deals with the grievances of government workers, found that the scientists’ medical claims were valid enough to warrant a full investigation into what it termed “a substantial and specific danger to public safety.”

There is a saying, “A fish rots from the head,” and this is completely in line with the Obama administration’s jihad against whistle blowers.

He Would Have Liked to Help, But He Had to Wash His Hair

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That’s the reason that Obama gave for doing absolutely nothing with regard with the Scot Walker recall:

President Obama suggested Monday that he was too busy to campaign in Wisconsin ahead of the recall election that targeted Republican Gov. Scott Walker, whose victory last week has raised questions about whether there are broader implications for the president in the fall.

In his first public comments about the election, Obama responded to a question about his decision not to appear in the state to support the Democratic challenger, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, by explaining that he has “a lot of responsibilities” as president.

Obama had limited himself to sending a message on his Twitter account expressing support for Barrett on June 4, a day before voters went to the polls.

“I was supportive of Tom and have been supportive of Tom. Obviously, I would have loved to see a different result,” the president said in an interview with WBAY, an ABC TV affiliate in Green Bay, Wis.

Some political analysts concluded that Obama was hesitant to spend time in Wisconsin because he wanted to avoid being tainted by an embarrassing defeat if Barrett lost.

Seriously, does anyone in the Obama administration besides Hillary have any balls at all?

Troof

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Writer Jamie Malanowski gets to the heart of the matter when he says that if Obama loses, his refusal to prosecute the criminals at the big banks will be a major cause of this:

This much is clear: if President Obama loses this election, the failure to hold financial titans legally, financially and morally responsible for this financial meltdown will be the factor that will have cost him re-election.

I would argue that this was is also much of the reason for the 2010 debacle.

Malanowski talks about bravery, and how Obama has the courage to take down bin Laden, but not the courage to face the banksters.

I don’t think that this is a a matter of courage, but a matter of tribalism.

I am not making a Kenyan Muslim reference here, but rather an Ivy League reference.

I think that Barack Obama (Columbia and then Harvard Law) is simply unwilling to confront the old boy network which he joined when he went to college.

So How Are We Not Terrorists?

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In the New York Times, they have an article on how the Obama administration selects people for their kill list, and according to sources, among those flagged, “Two were teenagers, including a girl who looked even younger than her 17 years.”

We are sending drones with missiles after 17 year old children.

And what is whispered in the article is that a political electoral calculus is motivating much of this, which does not make this better.

Pass the Popcorn…

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Pass the Popcorn

It looks like former TARP Inspector General Neil Barofsky is writing a tell-all memoir about his experiences with the Bush and Obama administration:

From December 2008 until March 2011, Barofsky was the Special Inspector General charged with oversight of TARP, working to ensure against fraud and abuse in the spending of the $700 billion allocated for the bailouts. From the start he was in constant conflict with the officials at the Treasury Department in charge of the bailouts who were in thrall to the interests of the big banks and steadfastly failed to hold them accountable, even as they disregarded major job losses caused by the auto bailouts and failed to help struggling homeowners. Barofsky recounts how his reports of a wave of criminal mortgage fraud and other abuses being perpetrated against homeowners in connection with programs that the Treasury itself set up were ignored time and again.

Barofsky offers detailed accounts of the behind-the-scenes conflicts and his struggles with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the Bush appointed “TARP Czar” Neel Kashkari and his successor, the Obama appointed Herb Allison, and others. His revelations show in stark detail just how captured by Wall Street our political system is; why the banks have not been held accountable; and how the failure to enact effective regulation has put the country in danger of an even bigger crisis in the future.

I can’t imagine that either Obama or Geithner are happy about this.

Leadership Matters

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Here’s a shocker. Now that Barack Obama has endorsed same-sex marriage, the polls are moving abruptly in that direction:

Public opinion continues to shift in favor of same-sex marriage, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, which also finds initial signs that President Obama’s support for the idea may have changed a few minds.

Overall, 53 percent of Americans say gay marriage should be legal, hitting a high mark in support while showing a dramatic turnaround from just six years ago, when just 36 percent thought it should be legal. Thirty-nine percent, a new low, say gay marriage should be illegal.

The poll also finds that 59 percent of African Americans say they support same-sex marriage, up from an average of 41 percent in polls leading up to Obama’s announcement of his new position on the matter. Though statistically significant, it is a tentative result because of the relatively small sample of black voters in the poll.

Leadership generates its own support for policy.

Hopefully, this lesson will stick, but I doubt it.

I am Disappointed in Myself

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You see, I’ve been watching the kerfuffle over Obama and gay marriage since Biden’s statement on Sunday, and what appeared to be a full on weasel by Obama, or at least his Press Secretary Jay Carney, from which I inferred that the President would give the weasel answer.

I had been drafting my scathing response to this in my head for days, so when he actually made a clear and unambiguous statement I was surprised.

But my first reaction wasn’t surprise.  My first thought was, “Son of a bitch!  I have to rewrite now!”

At least I had the basic level of self awareness to be ashamed.

Obama Supports Gay Marriage

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In an interview with ABC, Barack Obama has announced that he now supports gay marriage:

Before President Obama left the White House on Tuesday morning to fly to an event in Albany, several aides intercepted him in the Oval Office. Within minutes it was decided: the president would endorse same-sex marriage on Wednesday, completing a wrenching personal transformation on the issue.

As described by several aides, that quick decision and his subsequent announcement in a hastily scheduled network television interview were thrust on the White House by 48 hours of frenzied will-he-or-won’t-he speculation after Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. all but forced the president’s hand by embracing the idea of same-sex unions in a Sunday talk show interview.

Advisers say now that Mr. Obama had intended since early this year to define his position sometime before Democrats nominate him for re-election in September. Yet many of the president’s allies believed he would not do so, trusting instead in his strong support from gay voters for having ended a ban on openly gay people in the military and disavowing a federal law defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

Such caution was understandable, the allies said, given the unpredictable fallout the president would face by taking a clear stand on one of the most contentious and politically charged social issues of the day, before what is likely to be a close election. Mr. Obama’s closest advisers say only the timing was in question. Mr. Biden’s unexpected remarks undoubtedly accelerated the timetable.

Initially Mr. Obama and his aides expected that the moment would be Monday, when the president was scheduled to be on “The View,” the ABC daytime talk show, which is popular with women. Certainly, they thought, he would be asked his position on same-sex marriage by one of the show’s hosts, who include Barbara Walters and Whoopi Goldberg.

Yet the pressure had become too great to wait until then, his aides told him; on Monday, the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, was pummeled with questions from skeptical reporters about Mr. Obama’s stance. After the Tuesday morning meeting, Dan Pfeiffer, the president’s communications director, contacted ABC and offered a wide-ranging interview with the president for the following day.

Oh snap. They took a scoop away from the ladies of The View. There will be consequences.

All joking aside, this is an unambiguous good.

BTW, the best comment I’ve heard about this so far was made by Kurt_T (His web site, www.kurttrue.com should be coming on line shortly):

Hahahaha! I really DID want people to marry their pets and climb Mount Rushmore in nipple clamps and buttless chaps! And this makes it all possible!

Suckers!

OK, I’m off to the Kinko’s to print up some recruitment materials for your children.

-kurt_t
President and Supreme Cher Impersonator for Life
Secret Gay Agenda

The timing was disappointing though, it seem to be calculated to avoid any impact on the North Carolina hate amendment vote, for which the executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans rightly castigates him, (scroll down) though partisan considerations might have informed his statement.

What a Surprise

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If you diss organized labor by holding a convention in an anti-union right to work state, they are not inclined to pony up sponsorship money:

Democrats are struggling to raise money for the party’s national convention this summer in Charlotte, N.C., in part because they’ve barred corporations and lobbyists from contributing.
Democrats are struggling to raise money for the party’s national convention this summer in Charlotte, N.C., in part because they have barred corporations and lobbyists from contributing. Peter Nicholas has details on The News Hub. Photo: Reuters.
Now, one set of donors the party was banking on—organized labor—says it won’t help pay for the event or will scale back contributions, partly because it is upset that the convention will be in a state considered unfriendly to unions.
Labor unions chipped in $8.6 million of the $60.5 million the party spent in 2008 in Denver. This year, a number of construction unions, as well as the labor organization Unite Here, plan to give nothing, officials say.
The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers gave $1 million in 2008, but it isn’t planning to contribute this year. It cites North Carolina’s “right to work law” that is opposed by unions, as well as labor’s need to spend money on grass-roots campaign work. “Registration drives, get-out-the-vote drives and leafleting—that’s where we can make our best contribution,” said spokesman Jim Spellane.
“We are making no contribution this year,” said Tom Snyder, a top official at Unite Here, which contributed $100,000 to the 2008 convention. “That’s all I’m going to say about that,” he said.

With about four months to go before the Sept. 3 opening of the Charlotte convention—which has been scaled back from the one in Denver four years ago—Democrats are about $20 million short of their fundraising goal of $36.7 million, according to two prominent Democrats who have been briefed by convention planners.

You know, if you sell your base down the river, this is what happens.

Anyone regretting the Obama administration decision to actively slow walk the Employee Free Choice Act over the past 3 years?

Probably not.

Because they are Whiny Babies

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Brad Delong wonders why Wall Street dislikes Barack Obama so much:

A worker bee at a mainline investment bank told me last fall:

Back in 2008 Wall Street was split 40-60 Obama-McCain. Now it is split 10-90 Obama-Romney.

Why? It is not as though Wall Street has done badly under Obama. Stock prices are up and interest rates are down, so leveraged financial institutions long assets–as Wall Street inevitably is–have done very, very well indeed. The standard bargain that the Democrats offer Wall Street has held. It is:

We will try to tax you (and, given the power of your lobbying operation in Congress, probably fail to do so), but we will give you competent economic management in striking contrast to that offered by the ideologically-blinded wingnuts who are the Republicans.

That has been the bargain that the Democrats have offered Wall Street from the days of Hoover to Bush II, and when Wall Street has had a sense of its own long-run interests, it has taken the Democrats up on it. And it has been happy.
But not this time.

Why not? What is going on? What is there about 50% real increases in equity values over less than 3 1/2 years that is not to like?

For the past 30+ years, these guys have been surrounded by people who treat them like they were Pashas, both in their social circles on Wall Street as well both sides of the partisan divide in Washington, DC, so when Barack Obama  calls them “Wall Street Fat Cats”, their heads explode.

This is despite the fact he, and his sidekick Timmy Geithner, bail them out, and quash prosecutions.

One wonders just how insecure these guys are about their value to society. 

Hmm…come to think of it, this answer was a bit more involved than I intended.

Here’s a hint:  You are all worthless parasites.

What a Surprise

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Obama announces a DoJ investigative task force to investigate foreclosure fraud, in order to bring the state Attorney Generals, most notably NY’s Eric Schneidermann, and they are not staffing it:

Three months ago, in his State of the Union speech, President Obama announced a new task force to investigate mortgage fraud and bring some measure of relief to the 12 million American families who are either losing their homes or in danger of losing them.

The new Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Working Group would be co-chaired by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, U.S. Attorney John Walsh of Colorado and three Washington insiders from the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Obama said, “This new unit will hold accountable those who broke the law, speed assistance to homeowners and help turn the page on an era of recklessness that hurt so many Americans.”

Whether or not the President, attorney general and others intend to get around to this task someday, “speed” was a terrible word to choose. Because 85 days after that speech, there is no sign of any activity.

………

Yes, for a few days, there seemed to be a renewed sense of purpose and focus from the administration. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder held his own news conference and announced that at least 55 Justice Department lawyers, agents, analysts and investigators would be assigned to the effort. A news release promised 30 staffers would be joining efforts “in the coming weeks.”

………

On March 9 — 45 days after the speech and 30 days after the announcement — we met with Schneiderman in New York City and asked him for an update. He had just returned from Washington, where he had been personally looking for office space. As of that date, he had no office, no phones, no staff and no executive director. None of the 55 staff members promised by Holder had materialized. On April 2, we bumped into Schneiderman on a train leaving Washington for New York and learned that the situation was the same.

Tuesday, calls to the Justice Department’s switchboard requesting to be connected with the working group produced the answer, “I really don’t know where to send you.” After being transferred to the attorney general’s office and asking for a phone number for the working group, the answer was, “I’m not aware of one.”

The promises of the President have led to little or no concrete action.

In fact, the new Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Working Group was the sixth such entity formed since the start of the financial crisis in 2009. The grand total of staff working for all of the previous five groups was one, according to a surprised Schneiderman. In Washington, where staffs grow like cherry blossoms, this is a remarkable occurrence.

Schneidermann got punked.

There were over 1000 FBI agents assigned to the Savings and Loan crisis, so 55 is a joke, but they aren’t even staffing that.

If there was any question as to whether the banksters owned Obama, it’s been answered.

And on the other side is Mitt, who is a bankster.

What a choice.

The Obvious Answer is Because They Don’t Care

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Annie Lowrey of the New York Times looks at the parts of the TARP that were intended to help ordinary homeowners, and it ain’t pretty:

A fund to support homeowners in the communities hit hardest by the collapse of the housing bubble has disbursed just 3 percent of its budget and aided only 30,640 homeowners in the two years since its creation, according to a report released on Thursday by a federal watchdog office.

The Hardest Hit Fund, which was created in the spring of 2010, grants money to state housing finance agencies for efforts to help families that are facing foreclosure. It has “experienced significant delay” because of “a lack of comprehensive planning” by the Treasury Department and limited participation by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the large mortgage servicers, said the report by the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

“TARP wasn’t supposed to be just a bank bailout,” said Christy L. Romero, the special inspector general for TARP, in an interview. “It was specifically designed with the goal of helping homeowners, and our concern is that that goal may not be met.”

As of the end of 2011, the Hardest Hit Fund had spent $217.4 million out of its $7.6 billion budget, the report found. The program is intended to reach homeowners who are unemployed, or living in areas with high unemployment rates or steeply falling home values.

The report is just the latest to criticize the Obama administration’s efforts to relieve homeowners battered by the nationwide drop in housing prices and the broader recession. The office of the special inspector general has repeatedly criticized Treasury’s management of the Home Affordable Modification Program, Washington’s main initiative to prevent foreclosures.

By this point, they were supposed to have helped 2-3 million, so they are low by a factor of almost 100.

Think about it.  They had $7.6 billion to spend, without any meaningful oversight, but they couldn’t be bothered to spend it.

This was not just an economic opportunity, it was a political one, because when they saved people, they would most likely get their votes, but it just didn’t matter.

This is going on because the Obama administration in the person of Timothy Geithner, the last man standing of Obama’s original economic team, simply don’t care.

The Treasury has already admitted that the homeowner protection programs was primarily about allowing banks to buy time, and extract fees, from desperate homeowners before they wrote down the loans.

Helping homeowners was in the TARP because they needed it to get the votes, but if it ain’t protecting the big banks and big banking, Geithner/Obama ain’t interested.

Obama Conspiring to Lock Up Foreign Journalist

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Seriously.

Yemeni journalist proves that military operations in his country are actually US drone strikes, and gets sentenced on trumped up charges to 5 years in prison.

A few months after the kangaroo court, President Saleh had a pardon for him prepared, but Obama pressured him to keep him in prison:

On February 2, 2011, President Obama called Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The two discussed counterterrorism cooperation and the battle against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. At the end of the call, according to a White House read-out, Obama “expressed concern” over the release of a man named Abdulelah Haider Shaye, whom Obama said “had been sentenced to five years in prison for his association with AQAP.” It turned out that Shaye had not yet been released at the time of the call, but Saleh did have a pardon for him prepared and was ready to sign it. It would not have been unusual for the White House to express concern about Yemen’s allowing AQAP suspects to go free. Suspicious prison breaks of Islamist militants in Yemen had been a regular occurrence over the past decade, and Saleh has been known to exploit the threat of terrorism to leverage counterterrorism dollars from the United States. But this case was different. Abdulelah Haider Shaye is not an Islamist militant or an Al Qaeda operative. He is a journalist.

Unlike most journalists covering Al Qaeda, Shaye risked his life to travel to areas controlled by Al Qaeda and to interview its leaders. He also conducted several interviews with the radical cleric Anwar al Awlaki. Shaye did the last known interview with Awlaki just before it was revealed that Awlaki, a US citizen, was on a CIA/JSOC hit list. “We were only exposed to Western media and Arab media funded by the West, which depicts only one image of Al Qaeda,” recalls his best friend Kamal Sharaf, a well-known dissident Yemeni political cartoonist. “But Abdulelah brought a different viewpoint.”

………

While Shaye, 35, had long been known as a brave, independent-minded journalist in Yemen, his collision course with the US government appears to have been set in December 2009. On December 17, the Yemeni government announced that it had conducted a series of strikes against an Al Qaeda training camp in the village of al Majala in Yemen’s southern Abyan province, killing a number of Al Qaeda militants. As the story spread across the world, Shaye traveled to al Majala. What he discovered were the remnants of Tomahawk cruise missiles and cluster bombs, neither of which are in the Yemeni military’s arsenal. He photographed the missile parts, some of them bearing the label “Made in the USA,” and distributed the photos to international media outlets. He revealed that among the victims of the strike were women, children and the elderly. To be exact, fourteen women and twenty-one children were killed. Whether anyone actually active in Al Qaeda was killed remains hotly contested. After conducting his own investigation, Shaye determined that it was a US strike. The Pentagon would not comment on the strike and the Yemeni government repeatedly denied US involvement. But Shaye was later vindicated when Wikileaks released a US diplomatic cable that featured Yemeni officials joking about how they lied to their own parliament about the US role, while President Saleh assured Gen. David Petraeus that his government would continue to lie and say “the bombs are ours, not yours.”

So, a journalist revealed a US lie, and the worst constitutional law professor ever decides that this guy needs to remain behind bars forever, because he embarrassed our military/intelligence services.

Truly repulsive.