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Friday, May 24, 2013

Why President Obama Is the Most Heckled President

politics



Earl Ofari Hutchinson


Why President Obama Is the Most Heckled President

Posted: 05/24/2013 4:30 pm




Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Is this the President Obama we voted for?



This is not the President Obama we voted for

 

Candidate Obama promised a different kind of culture in Washington, but it's looking similar to the Bush era




Barack Obama checks to see if he still needs the umbrella held by a US marine.
Barack Obama checks to see if he still needs the umbrella held by a US marine. Photograph: Jason Reed/Reuters
You can argue that Republicans have blocked President Obama from doing just about anything. You can argue that he's had bad luck. You can argue that he isn't always the greatest orator. But you can't argue away that the Department of Justice took the unprecedented step of seizing phone records from the Associated Press. Or the flimsy rationale justifying drone attacks abroad and at home. Or the bizarre step the Pentagon has taken to expand the ability of the military to intervene in state and local matters. Or the fact that Guantanamo Bay is still open years after Obama vowed he would close it, and the US is making headlines for force feeding inmates.
These are actions that President Obama and his top team have taken on their own.

Yes, the various scandals have been politicized this week. That's the American we live in today, but even among Obama voters, there should be genuine disappointment. This not the President Obama we voted for, not even close.
I was in Washington DC the night that Barack Obama was elected president in 2008. As usual, people were hopping from bar to bar to watch the returns come in and high five friends (or boo, in some cases). When it became clear that Obama had won and he gave his victory speech, something happened that I have rarely witnessed in America: spontaneous demonstrations broke out. People started marching down some of the main streets, many shaking keys or banging on pots and pans. Others carried American flags. Cars honked (more than usual) in solidarity.

It was mostly young people marching – from varied backgrounds. Many of these parades ended up in front of the White House where chants of "goodbye Bush" (or some variation thereof) began. It was the same slogan heard as Barack Obama was sworn in as president in January 2009 and Bush flew away in a helicopter.

There was a belief, especially among voters in their 20s and 30s, that Obama was going to be different. That his promises to "change the culture in Washington" were real. That his administration wouldn't be beholden to lobbyists and conduct executive power grabs. That any wars would be justified.
This was, after all, the candidate who put statements on his website like:
"The Bush administration has ignored public disclosure rules and has invoked a legal tool known as the 'state secrets' privilege more than any other previous administration to get cases thrown out of civil court."
Don't get me wrong, we've seen cracks in Obama's idealism since he was sworn in as president. It is typified in the fact that prisoners – 166 of them – are still detained at Guantanamo Bay despite Obama's promises to close the prison swiftly after he took office.

But this week was one head-shaking moment too many for me, and it appears from the president's sinking approval rating that others – including some who gave Obama a real chance – are with me. As a registered Republican, I thought long and hard about whether to vote for Obama, but I crossed party lines, as did many of my young peers. I wanted a more transparent and accountable government. I wanted America to make a very different statement after the Bush years.

Yet even setting aside Benghazi and the IRS conservative targeting ordeal, which is a big set aside considering reports now suggest that officials in Washington were very much involved, there's still plenty that makes Obama's presidency eerily reminiscent of the Bush administration, especially when it comes to these "trust us, this is in the name of national security" kind of statements.

Huh? The government just had to seize the phone records of 20 Associated Press phone lines, including on in the agency's Congress bureau, and not tell anyone about it for what appears to be weeks. This was supposedly done because of a leak about a failed al-Qaida plot in Yemen on the anniversary of Osama bin Laden's death in 2012. But as the AP has stated, it held the article for several days before publication because of a government request, and CIA Director John Brennan later testified that there was no threat to the American people since the plot was foiled.

Keep in mind that candidate Obama opposed the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping of US citizen phones in the name of national security.
Something doesn't line up here, and the fact that no one in the Justice Department has been fired like the IRS acting commissioner suggests that the White House doesn't see anything wrong.

No, this isn't in the league of weapons of mass destruction that don't exist. But add the AP overreach to the Obama administration's stance on drones, inaction on Guantanamo and the continued push to expand military and intelligence powers and you get more of the same old White House power grabs.

This isn't the president so many took to the streets to cheer on in 2008. And the blame for that can't be placed solely on partisan politics or the media's thirst for a good scandal.

Sunday, May 19, 2013

Obama Has Rarely Or Never Praised Whistleblowers



politics




Obama Has Rarely Or Never Praised Whistleblowers

 

Posted:   |  Updated: 05/18/2013 9:12 am EDT
NEW YORK -- In more than four years of office, President Barack Obama has frequently praised the idea of whistleblowing. He even signed the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act into law in 2012. But has he actually praised any whistleblowers by name?

That's a question The Huffington Post posed to several non-profits representing whistleblowers, and to the White House, in light of the news about the subpoenas the Justice Department used to obtain the phone records of journalists at the Associated Press. The revelation has renewed focus on the administration's treatment of the press, along with its attitude toward whistleblowers.

"Sad to say, we can't think of a single one," Joe Newman, director of communications for the Project on Government Oversight, said when asked if Obama had ever praised a whistleblower.

"I'm not aware of him ever praising a whistleblower, or apologizing to a whistleblower who was wrongfully prosecuted," said Jesselyn Radack, national security and human rights director for the Government Accountability Project. The closest Radack could think of was Lily Ledbetter, who spoke out against unequal pay for women in the workplace but did not work for the federal government.

The White House did not respond to a request for background on whistleblowers praised by Obama.

As a candidate in 2008, Obama praised instances of whistleblowing as "acts of courage and patriotism" that "should be encouraged rather than stifled as they have been during the Bush administration." But since his election critics have repeatedly called into question his record on supporting whistleblowers, pointing to several individuals who have not only not been praised, but were prosecuted.
Obama's Justice Department continued the Bush-era prosecution of Thomas Drake, a former NSA official who went to a reporter with news about massive overspending in an intelligence program. He took a plea deal for a minor misdemeanor. Thomas Tamm, a Justice employee who told The New York Times about the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program, was investigated until 2011. John Kiriakou, a former CIA analyst who spoke out against the use of torture against suspected terrorists, was likewise prosecuted and given a 30-month sentence.

Although he took a plea for a lesser charge, Kirakou was initially charged under the Espionage Act, a World War I-era law that critics have claimed the Obama administration is using as a cudgel against the press.

"What would really encourage whistleblowers is not threatening them with the Espionage Act when they step forward with information about corruption, waste or abuses of power," said Newman. "But sure, if Obama praised whistleblowers, it would signal a significant paradigm shift."

Saturday, May 18, 2013

Four Examples from the Last Week Prove Obama Is Full of Hot Air on Climate Protection



Fracking  


You can't hit 400 ppm CO2 and still think "all of the above" is a rationale energy strategy.

 
 

Police cordon off the area in front of the White House in Washington, DC, on April 17, 2013. A 45-year-old man suspected of sending poison-laced letters to President Barack Obama and a US senator has been charged with threatening the life of the president

 
 
A lot has happened in the last week. The Earth hit the 400 parts per million CO2 threshold for the first time in human history. Scientists tell us this is bad news if we want to prevent runaway climate change. "If we continue to burn fossil fuels at accelerating rates, if we continue with business as usual, we will cross the 450 parts per million limit in a matter of maybe a couple decades," scientist Michael Mann told Democracy Now! "We believe that with that amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, we commit to what can truly be described as dangerous and irreversible changes in our climate."
If you didn't know this already, we should be listening to Mann and to other scientists. I thought this was settled a long time ago, but someone keeps giving print space to climate deniers, so a new survey of 12,000 peer-reviewed studies on the climate was just completed and the not-so-shocking conclusion was this, as Mother Nature Network reports
Published this week in the journal Environmental Research Letters, the analysis shows an overwhelming majority of climate scientists agree that humans are a key contributor to climate change, while a "vanishingly small proportion" defy this consensus. Most of the climate papers didn't specifically address humanity's involvement -- likely because it's considered a given in scientific circles, the survey's authors point out -- but of the 4,014 that did, 3,896 shared the mainstream outlook that people are largely to blame.
In light of this news, it makes it even more infuriating to see that the Obama administration has spent the week prostrating to the fossil fuel lobby. Here are four disturbing things the administration's been up to.

1. Moniz Hearts Fracking

Obama tapped nuclear physicist Ernest Moniz to head the Energy Department and the Senate gave a big thumbs-up to Moniz on Thursday. Many environmental groups had concerns that Moniz was too pro-fracking, and those concerns are clearly warranted. Moniz's first order of business Friday was to clear the way for 20 years of liquified natural gas exports via Freeport LNG Terminal on Quintana Island, Texas. 

Of course, we've already been sold the story that we're suposed to frack the crap out of the country in the name of energy security, but we knew all along it was for industry profit, right? Brad Jacobson recently detailed for AlterNet about how Congress members are clamoring for export plans to be fast-tracked -- although what Americans will get out of the deal will be higher gas prices and less energy security. 

2. Thanks for Nothing, Sally

While the nomination of Moniz disappointed many environmentalists, some were cheered by REI exec Sally Jewell taking over the Interior Department. Those same folks might not be cheering after Jewell announced the Bureau of Land Management's newest regulations (or lack thereof) for fracking on our public lands.

As Sierra Club's Michael Brune reported Friday:
The new rules are disappointing for many reasons: Drillers won't be required to disclose what chemicals they're using, there is no requirement for baseline water testing, and there are no setback requirements to govern how close to homes and schools drilling can happen. Once again, though, the policy documents an even bigger failure to grasp a fundamental principle: If we're serious about the climate crisis, then the last thing we should be doing is opening up still more federal land to drilling and fracking for fossil fuels.
3. No Time for Farmers

The group Bold Nebraska reported this week that Obama turned down an invitation to hear from Nebraska farmers and ranchers about their concerns that the Keystone XL pipeline could destroy their livelihoods. Of course, the President is a busy guy, right? And besides, the White House said he was not "taking any meetings on the pipeline."
Or is he? The group writes:
Bold Nebraska was therefore surprised the President is meeting with staff at Ellicott Dredges, a company that just testified in Congress in support of Keystone XL and makes equipment that creates the tailing ponds, which are massive bodies of polluted water and a byproduct of the tar sands mining process.
"I simply do not understand why President Obama can find the time to visit a company that helps hold 12 million liters of toxic tar sands water but cannot find the time to visit ranchers who put over $12 billion of Nebraska-grown food on Americans' dinner tables every year," said Meghan Hammond, a young farmer whose family land is at risk with the current route in Nebraska.
4. Who Needs the Arctic? (Hint: We Do)

Subhankar Banerjee, a photographer and longtime Arctic activist, was recently appalled by a new report from the Obama administration on the future of the Arctic. And the rest of us should be, too. Banerjee writes about the report:
“Our pioneering spirit is naturally drawn to this region, for the economic opportunities it presents…” President Obama hides his excitement for oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean by carefully choosing the euphemism—“economic opportunities.” In page 7 the true intent of the report is finally revealed: “The region holds sizable proved and potential oil and natural gas resources that will likely continue to provide valuable supplies to meet U.S. energy needs.” Of course the report mentions protecting the environment, but gives no specific details.
We know that Obama talks a good talk about climate protection, but his second term has proven thus far that he's completely out of touch with reality. You can't hit 400 ppm CO2 and still think "all of the above" is a rationale energy strategy.


Tara Lohan, a senior editor at AlterNet, has just launched the new project Hitting Home, chronicling extreme energy extraction. She is the editor of two books on the global water crisis, including most recently, Water Matters: Why We Need to Act Now to Save Our Most Critical Resource. Follow her on Twitter @TaraLohan.

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

The Day the Obama Administration Went All Nixon On Us


media




The Day the Obama Administration Went All Nixon On Us

Posted: 05/14/2013 8:46 am

 





Spoiler alert: That day was May 7, 2012... but first a quick history lesson.





 

Okay, I'm one of those folks who obsesses about the late 1960s and early 1970s, but this time it's really important. Because today that is the rallying cry for any presidential scandal, that this one is "worse than Watergate." But the Watergate break-in happened 41 years ago, which means that more than half of all Americans weren't even born yet, so you can't blame a lot of voters if they don't know much about what Watergate and the related scandals of Richard Milhous Nixon were all about.

One of the biggest drivers of Watergate was the seemingly unending war in Vietnam. As opposition increased to a foreign war that ultimately killed 58,000 Americans, for goals that were murky at best, so did government paranoia. At the core of Watergate was a team of shady operatives that were nicknamed "the White House Plumbers" -- because they went after news leaks... get it? In May 1969, after news reports about U.S. bombing activities in Cambodia, Nixon and his then-national security adviser Henry Kissinger enlisted J. Edgar Hoover's FBI to wiretap journalists and national security aides.

Later, one of the worst governmental abuses occurred after whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg leaked the massive Pentagon Papers that exposed governmental lies about the conduct of the war in Vietnam. Nixon's "Plumbers" broke into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist to dig up dirt to discredit him. Here is what one of Nixon's former aides, Egil Krogh, wrote about it in 2007:
The premise of our action was the strongly held view within certain precincts of the White House that the president and those functioning on his behalf could carry out illegal acts with impunity if they were convinced that the nation's security demanded it. As President Nixon himself said to David Frost during an interview six years later, "When the president does it, that means it is not illegal." To this day the implications of this statement are staggering.
No doubt. Luckily for America, not everyone agreed. Over the next couple of years, criminal charges against Ellsberg were tossed because of the government's misconduct, and Nixon resigned facing certain impeachment over the activities of his Plumbers and the ensuing, elaborate cover-up. The nation mostly rejoiced. The system worked... for a while.

Flash forward to 2012. America had at that point been in an undefined "war on terror" for 11 years -- the same amount of time from the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident that greatly expanded the Vietnam War to the 1975 fall of Saigon. Just as during the 1960s and early 1970s, this terror war had provided government with an excuse to greatly expand its domestic spying on American citizens -- some of that through a law called the Patriot Act and some of it even more dubious, constitutionally.

Then, on May 7, 2012, the Associated Press published an article about the Obama administration's conduct of its war in a country that we'd never declared war on (it was Cambodia in 1969, but Yemen in 2012) and Obama's Justice Department -- for reasons not yet fully known -- went crazy over the leak. This, then, is a reminder of why history matters so much.
Because if we're not careful... it repeats:
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative's top executive called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather the news.

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of the calls.

In all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown, but more than 100 journalists work in the offices where phone records were targeted, on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.

The AP's CEO said last night that "[t]here can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters" -- and I could not agree with him more. This revelation is deeply troubling -- and has the makings of a major scandal. Sure, you could try to mitigate it by noting, fairly, that accessing these phone records isn't as bad as wiretapping. But that is small solace, indeed. There's every reason to believe that Attorney General Eric Holder signed off on this unwarranted assault on the First Amendment, and if so, he ought to be canned (hasn't he overstayed his welcome, anyway?). Also, you might try to excuse this as a one-off, an ill-advised but isolated incident.

Except that it's not.

Since the day he took office, the Obama administration has undertaken an assault on government whistleblowers -- people informing citizens of what their government doesn't want them to know -- that surpasses anything that Nixon or any other president has done. Since 2009, the Obama administration has brought espionage charges against six whistleblowers. And most of these whistleblowers have been criticizing that way that America conducts its neverending war of the 21st century. One, Thomas Drake, blew the whistle on the illegal warrantless wiretapping that began under George W. Bush. John Kiriakou dropped the dime on illegal U.S. torture -- and was sent away to prison, even as the perpetrators of torture from Dick Cheney to John Yoo continue to walk freely among us.

Nixon had Daniel Ellsberg, and Obama has Bradley Manning of Wikileaks. Okay, so they didn't break into the office of Manning's psychiatrist, but they have detained Manning in a solitary confinement that a UN torture expert called "cruel, inhuman and degrading." Do you feel better about that? Because I don't. The war on whistleblowers, the treatment of Manning, and now this investigation of journalists are all hallmarks of a White House that promised transparency but has been one of the most secretive -- all to the detriment of the public's right to know.

Let's be clear -- this is about Obama... and it is about much, much more than Obama. It is yet another example of how the national security state that has dominated our political life since World War II has corrupted the American soul. It is exactly what Philadelphia's own Benjamin Franklin tried to warn us about -- trading liberty for security, and geting neither. To the conservatives reading this, who warn so much about big government running amok...here it is. To the liberals reading this, who thought that one man named Barack Obama could change the system, he couldn't. Only we, the citizens, can truly change things.

Let's work together. Let's start by repealing the 2001 Authorization of the Use of Force, declare victory in what was formerly known as the war on terror, and resolve that never again will this nation enter into a perpetual and constitutionally dubious war. Let's repeal the most egregious aspects of the USA Patriot Act, hold public hearings on the true extent that the U.S. government has spied on citizens without warrants -- and then bring those practices to an end.
And as today's events made crystal clear, let's make America a nation where journalists and other truth-tellers can write stories or reveal information that the government might not like...without fear of intrusion or reprisal. Ironically, many of those type of changes were supposed to happen after Nixon, after Vietnam But they either didn't last, or they didn't come at all.

If greater liberty comes from the latest revelations, Obama's sins -- however bad or not bad they may turn out to be -- will not make things worse than Watergate. This time, it -- the aftermath, anyway -- will be better than Watergate.