Since Obama is carrying over, and mostly doubling down on, most Bush policies (use of drones, attacking Libya for freedom, warrantless wiretapping, funneling government money to large corporations, TSA/Homeland Security) yet receives none of the same negative coverage of same that Bush received
What planet are you from, where Bush received negative press? You forgetting how the media marched in lockstep support of the Iraq invasion or how minor details like massively illegal surveillance of non-suspects were suppressed for the 2004 election?
American establishment media is uniformly authoritarian, pro-establishment and pro-military-industrial complex. That was true under Bush, it's true under Obama, and it would be true if Romney wins the election.
Obama had positions in the last campaign that he has "evolved" from since then.
Deflection. Everybody knows that Obama has broken his promises. The question remains, why are you suddenly clueless of Romney's status as a flip-flopper extraordinaire.
I'm sure this is futile, since you sound like either an Obama hater, a Romney lover, or a tea partier, but here we go:
a man who claimed to hate Gitmo yet leaves it open
He tried to close it, Congress wouldn't let him.
Ah, the Helpless Bystander Fable, the liberal equivalent of the GOP's "no one could have predicted" excuse for Katrina. As if a new Democratic Congress really would have overridden a veto from a popular president fresh off a landslide election. Furthermore, even if Congress actually counted the votes and told Obama they would override his veto, he would still have had 10 days to veto the first bill - more than enough time to transfer all the prisoners to facilities on the mainland.
Please.
And even then, even if Congress had overridden Obama's veto, there's nothing stopping him from sending an Article III judge to the island to conduct civilian trials. So, at the end of the day, the Helpless Bystander Fable dies by a thousand cuts....he's sort of like Kenny that way.
As has been throughally documented by now, Obama never intended to end what makes Gitmo the FUBAR that is is: indefinite detention without trial. He just wanted to move it to Illinois. The only way Congress could have prevented Obama from closing Gitmo was by quickly impeaching him. How many Democratic votes do you think there would have been for that?
claimed to hate war yet doubles down on drone strikes and issues a surge in Afghanistan
The Iraq war (which he opposed) is over
That he opposed at the time as a state legislator. Since Obama has launched drone wars as president in a half dozen more countries that haven't attacked us, there's little doubt that today's Obama would have supported the invasion and occpuation of Iraq. Which was ended on the timeline set up by Bush, not Obama....who wanted to extend it but the Iraqi's said "hell no" to legal immunity for American forces.
Afghanistan is winding down because the surge worked and we'll be out of there in two years.
Because "the insurgency is in it's last throws", echoing Dick Cheney circa 2004. The surge did not work - it supported Karzai right after he stole the election - and we will be there far, far longer than two years.
claims to hate Wall Street while bailing out (and taking huge donations from) giant Wall Street banks
Rubbish, if he hadn't done that we'd be in a depression so bad it would have made the Great Depression look like boom times.
Nonsense. The bailout saved the bankers, not the economy. It re-inflated their worthless credit swap assets, let them go on paying out hundreds of billions in bonuses, and not a single banker has gone to jail for the largest fraud in history. The S&L crisis, which saw around a thousand prosecutions, was 1/70th of the size of the one from 2008. And if that wasn't bad enough, Obama's bailouts made for the largest transfer of wealth in history, as banks were bailed out by taxpayer dollars, but were not forced to write down mortgages for the benefit of the taxpayer - a concession that the Bush Administration was willing to make but left the decision for the next president. If McCain had won the election, there's a real chance that a few million people might not have lost their homes.
Oh, and we have slid into a depression. The only reason it's not as bad as the one from the 30's is public spending and the safety net of food stamps and unemployment benefits. Obama doesn't want to cut those, but he does want to cut Medicare, SS, and already has cut home heating assistance.
I'm shocked, shocked, to see it's nothing but a schtick to you. Well, not that shocked.
Good to see we're in the world of reality here.
Yes, reality. Where Obama covered up contractor rape, client state rape, and bacha bazi rape. The reality that you don't care about, for some reason.
Since when is Polanski in the news lately? If he was you'd hear me complaining just as vigorously.
As if Polanski has ever been out of the news. But yes that's the first question on the minds of actual advocates for rape victims: "is it newsworthy"? So, naturally, if the media forgot about Assange with the presidential election, you'd stop caring about Assange, right?
Someone who exposes the other side's hypocrisy is all well and good in political entertainment.
And if that's what people like Limbaugh did, you'd have a great point. Hitting Obama for his broken promises over civil liberties, respecting state medical marijuana, or holding health care hearings on CSPAN. Instead, it's petty bullshit over college transcripts and making shit up on how Obama wants to take your guns away.
It's not and never has been about tapping Al Queda, but you knew that already. It's about tapping people the government doesn't even bother to claim are up to no good, since FISA laws already allowed for secret, retroactive warrants.
Do you think we didn't figure out that argument was dishonest misdirection back in 2009 when it was President Paaaaalin instead of Romney? Or when Bushies were answering revelations about WMD lies with "what, you'd rather have Saddam back in power"?
Unacceptable doesn't become acceptable just because it's the "right person" doing it.
Completely beside his point, which was growing new parties to take on the establishment.
where various parties can form coalitions and whatnot. There is no such thing as a "minority government" in the US legislature
Just because there aren't formal groups doesn't mean that coalitions aren't formed independent of party lines. Upper river states vs lower river states, urban states vs rural states, states that are primary based around energy and agriculture vs banking and finance.....
What the hell is wrong with the Judiciary? Why not require a warrant like any other search, because it's digital? If it REALLY is a matter of national security a judge would sign a warrant in a second.
Oh, it's much worse than that. FISA laws allowed the government to go head and tap someone's phone and then get a retroactive warrant. And out of more than 10,000 such taps, there were something like 4 denials in the history of the FISA court. All you had to do was basically tell one of the judges (who operate in secrecy) that, "hey, we think this might be a bad guy and we want to tap his phone".
Which of course means that the only reason to go around the FISA laws is if you want to tap phones without even having to bother with that rubber stamp. For thousands if not millions of phone calls.
Actually, the difference that it made was the chief law enforcement officer of the land ended up lieing in court when asked a question that was only able to be asked because of a law he championed and signed into law allowing women claiming sexual harassment and discrimination to use references outside the claimed act to support a pattern to help make their case. That's a big ass do as I say not as I do to the American public.
Really? This winger chestnut stills needs debunking, in 2012? What's next, Clinton was at fault for both Waco and Ruby Ridge?
First problem: Clinton didn't lie. Starr wanted to use a definition of "sexual relations" so broad that anyone passing through a crowded bus or subway would have "sexual relations" with half a dozen people. Clinton's team complained, so the judge tightened the definition of "sexual relations" to "penis in vagina". Which rules out blowjobs. Which not only means that Clinton did not lie according to the courts definition, if he had said "yes", that would have been a lie. Bitch as much as you want, but at the end of the day, according to the rules of the court, Clinton did not lie when he denied having "sexual relations" with Lewinsky. Deal with it.
Second problem: even if it it was a lie, it's not perjury if it's not relevant. Whether or not Clinton had a consensual affair is irrelevant to the question of if he harassed Paula Jones. Which means the law you cite was also batshit irrelevant.
Third problem: it became painfully clear just how much you wingers really care about lying when Bush came around. Taking credit for HMO legislation that he actually vetoed as governor? You didn't care. Lying about WMD's? You didn't care. Lying about wiretapping? You didn't care. Lying about torture? You didn't care. You're like the mirror image of the Obamabots. And if you're going to try to weasel your way out by saying that it was a lie under oath (except it wasn't, see above), you also didn't care when Bushies like Gonzalez, Libby, or Alito swore the the whole truth only to lie through their teeth.
The Republicans didn't investigate or impeach Clinton because they had probable cause that crimes were committed. They investigated him because they wanted any excuse to remove him from office, and when they couldn't find one after re-investigating Vince Foster and Whitewater for the 12th time, they settled on a manufactured perjury charge.
Protesting is inherently public. As you protest, if you break more and more laws, you get less and less support, because everyone's watching you descend into madness.
1) If you care so much for the alleged victims of Assange - what do you have to say about Obama continuing the policy of giving Mubarak billions in aid, when Egypt was well known for using rape as a torture device?
Going so far as to use fucking dogs specially trained to sodomize prisoners?
2) If the Ecuadorian government is scum for harboring Assange, what do you have to say about the U.S. government protecting the former president of Bolivia, who is wanted in his own country for ordering hundreds of civilian deaths?
Don't bother complaining that this is an attempt at deflection, to say that the U.S. is more guilty so Assange must be left aloooone. If you are outraged by alleged rape in Sweden, you must be proportionally outraged by a country routinely using rape as a torture device - and those who financed the government of said country. If you are demanding that Ecuador hand over Assange so he can face charges in Sweden, you must be proportionally upset that the U.S. is harboring a mass murderer. But since that's not the case.....
3) Who's paying you, Rei? Is it the State Department? CIA? Who's signing your checks to pay you to obsess over Assange and attack anyone who points out the holes in the case or the obvious vendetta from western powers?
Obama is merely taking advantage of the increase in technological capability.
And the fact that the Democratic party wont bother to even get out of bed for actions that would have had them in the streets demanding impeachment if it were Bush doing it. NDAA, new NSA domestic spy center, assassinations of American citizens, starting new wars without Congressional authorization, drone bombing people we don't even bother to claim have any affiliation with Al Queda.....
Releasing information about our critical military operations is very detrimental to our soldiers and gives our enemy the advantage.
Nevermind no western power has demonstrated any such detriment or any such enemy advantage. But you authoritarian apologists haven't let that fact get in the way of your storyline so far, why stop now?
You might want to read up a bit on the whole "checks and balances" thing.
You first. The president has the veto pen to check the legislature. He could have used it to block renewal of the Patriot Act.
He chose not to.
And I don't think that the President is called the "Prosecutor-in-Chief."
Who said he did? The president does, however, appoint the Attorney General, all federal judges, and all federal prosecutors. Obama could have appointed judges and prosecutors willing to hold Bushco and Wall Street accountable to the law.
Yes, as found in the section where it says "anything goes" applies to any state or entity that has not signed the Geneva Convention. It's right around here somewhere.....
I hate war but I hate bullshit too. The presidents power to be commander and chief comes from the constitution. You can't pass a law that constrains the presidents power under the constitution without changing the constitution. The supremacy clause still applies no matter what any law you pass says to the contrary.
You bullshit. Think about it for a couple seconds - only Congress has the power to declare war. What's to stop the President, under your Unitary Executive theory, to claim that Russia was involved with 911 because the SVR (successor to the KGB) gave intelligence to bin Laddin.
And the President decided to "deal" with that by launching a couple nukes. At Moscow. You know what the response would be.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why the power to declare war was not vested with the POTUS. Because one man cannot be allowed to drag a nation into war.
Of course it would have been different with a President McCain. McCain couldn't have gotten away with half the shit Obama has, nor had the knee-jerk support of Democrats in Congress for crap like the NDAA.
Because Democrats wanted impeachment hearings for Bush for tapping our phones with warrants. Obama has Americans killed without trial, even in absentee, and it's no big deal.
Slashdot Mirror
What planet are you from, where Bush received negative press? You forgetting how the media marched in lockstep support of the Iraq invasion or how minor details like massively illegal surveillance of non-suspects were suppressed for the 2004 election?
American establishment media is uniformly authoritarian, pro-establishment and pro-military-industrial complex. That was true under Bush, it's true under Obama, and it would be true if Romney wins the election.
Deflection. Everybody knows that Obama has broken his promises. The question remains, why are you suddenly clueless of Romney's status as a flip-flopper extraordinaire.
Ah, the Helpless Bystander Fable, the liberal equivalent of the GOP's "no one could have predicted" excuse for Katrina. As if a new Democratic Congress really would have overridden a veto from a popular president fresh off a landslide election. Furthermore, even if Congress actually counted the votes and told Obama they would override his veto, he would still have had 10 days to veto the first bill - more than enough time to transfer all the prisoners to facilities on the mainland.
Please.
And even then, even if Congress had overridden Obama's veto, there's nothing stopping him from sending an Article III judge to the island to conduct civilian trials. So, at the end of the day, the Helpless Bystander Fable dies by a thousand cuts....he's sort of like Kenny that way.
As has been throughally documented by now, Obama never intended to end what makes Gitmo the FUBAR that is is: indefinite detention without trial. He just wanted to move it to Illinois. The only way Congress could have prevented Obama from closing Gitmo was by quickly impeaching him. How many Democratic votes do you think there would have been for that?
That he opposed at the time as a state legislator. Since Obama has launched drone wars as president in a half dozen more countries that haven't attacked us, there's little doubt that today's Obama would have supported the invasion and occpuation of Iraq. Which was ended on the timeline set up by Bush, not Obama....who wanted to extend it but the Iraqi's said "hell no" to legal immunity for American forces.
Because "the insurgency is in it's last throws", echoing Dick Cheney circa 2004. The surge did not work - it supported Karzai right after he stole the election - and we will be there far, far longer than two years.
Nonsense. The bailout saved the bankers, not the economy. It re-inflated their worthless credit swap assets, let them go on paying out hundreds of billions in bonuses, and not a single banker has gone to jail for the largest fraud in history. The S&L crisis, which saw around a thousand prosecutions, was 1/70th of the size of the one from 2008. And if that wasn't bad enough, Obama's bailouts made for the largest transfer of wealth in history, as banks were bailed out by taxpayer dollars, but were not forced to write down mortgages for the benefit of the taxpayer - a concession that the Bush Administration was willing to make but left the decision for the next president. If McCain had won the election, there's a real chance that a few million people might not have lost their homes.
Oh, and we have slid into a depression. The only reason it's not as bad as the one from the 30's is public spending and the safety net of food stamps and unemployment benefits. Obama doesn't want to cut those, but he does want to cut Medicare, SS, and already has cut home heating assistance.
Tired false-framing is tired. Do politicians flip flop? Of course. Do many politicians literally flip flop on almost every level of every issue?
No. That takes an exceptional politician, and his name is Mitt.
Non-response to Romney's gloating, or the idea that there are some voters who see past partisan tribalism and think both candidates are unacceptable.
I'm shocked, shocked, to see it's nothing but a schtick to you. Well, not that shocked.
Yes, reality. Where Obama covered up contractor rape, client state rape, and bacha bazi rape. The reality that you don't care about, for some reason.
As if Polanski has ever been out of the news. But yes that's the first question on the minds of actual advocates for rape victims: "is it newsworthy"? So, naturally, if the media forgot about Assange with the presidential election, you'd stop caring about Assange, right?
Right?
Thought so.
Re-implement the concept with new code. Only way to block it is with a software patent, and aren't FOSS types against software patents?
And if that's what people like Limbaugh did, you'd have a great point. Hitting Obama for his broken promises over civil liberties, respecting state medical marijuana, or holding health care hearings on CSPAN. Instead, it's petty bullshit over college transcripts and making shit up on how Obama wants to take your guns away.
But you knew that already.
False equivalency, noted. You have to go to North Korea to find anyone to the left as far as the Teabaggers are to the right.
Greenwald just had a nice comment about that bipartisan sophistry.
It's not and never has been about tapping Al Queda, but you knew that already. It's about tapping people the government doesn't even bother to claim are up to no good, since FISA laws already allowed for secret, retroactive warrants.
Do you think we didn't figure out that argument was dishonest misdirection back in 2009 when it was President Paaaaalin instead of Romney? Or when Bushies were answering revelations about WMD lies with "what, you'd rather have Saddam back in power"?
Unacceptable doesn't become acceptable just because it's the "right person" doing it.
Completely beside his point, which was growing new parties to take on the establishment.
Just because there aren't formal groups doesn't mean that coalitions aren't formed independent of party lines. Upper river states vs lower river states, urban states vs rural states, states that are primary based around energy and agriculture vs banking and finance.....
Obama promised to not only vote against telecom immunity, but to filibuster its passage. His first Big Promise broken....
Oh, it's much worse than that. FISA laws allowed the government to go head and tap someone's phone and then get a retroactive warrant. And out of more than 10,000 such taps, there were something like 4 denials in the history of the FISA court. All you had to do was basically tell one of the judges (who operate in secrecy) that, "hey, we think this might be a bad guy and we want to tap his phone".
Which of course means that the only reason to go around the FISA laws is if you want to tap phones without even having to bother with that rubber stamp. For thousands if not millions of phone calls.
Really? This winger chestnut stills needs debunking, in 2012? What's next, Clinton was at fault for both Waco and Ruby Ridge?
First problem: Clinton didn't lie. Starr wanted to use a definition of "sexual relations" so broad that anyone passing through a crowded bus or subway would have "sexual relations" with half a dozen people. Clinton's team complained, so the judge tightened the definition of "sexual relations" to "penis in vagina". Which rules out blowjobs. Which not only means that Clinton did not lie according to the courts definition, if he had said "yes", that would have been a lie. Bitch as much as you want, but at the end of the day, according to the rules of the court, Clinton did not lie when he denied having "sexual relations" with Lewinsky. Deal with it.
Second problem: even if it it was a lie, it's not perjury if it's not relevant. Whether or not Clinton had a consensual affair is irrelevant to the question of if he harassed Paula Jones. Which means the law you cite was also batshit irrelevant.
Third problem: it became painfully clear just how much you wingers really care about lying when Bush came around. Taking credit for HMO legislation that he actually vetoed as governor? You didn't care. Lying about WMD's? You didn't care. Lying about wiretapping? You didn't care. Lying about torture? You didn't care. You're like the mirror image of the Obamabots. And if you're going to try to weasel your way out by saying that it was a lie under oath (except it wasn't, see above), you also didn't care when Bushies like Gonzalez, Libby, or Alito swore the the whole truth only to lie through their teeth.
The Republicans didn't investigate or impeach Clinton because they had probable cause that crimes were committed. They investigated him because they wanted any excuse to remove him from office, and when they couldn't find one after re-investigating Vince Foster and Whitewater for the 12th time, they settled on a manufactured perjury charge.
Too bad the First Amendment disagrees with you.
1) If you care so much for the alleged victims of Assange - what do you have to say about Obama continuing the policy of giving Mubarak billions in aid, when Egypt was well known for using rape as a torture device?
Going so far as to use fucking dogs specially trained to sodomize prisoners?
2) If the Ecuadorian government is scum for harboring Assange, what do you have to say about the U.S. government protecting the former president of Bolivia, who is wanted in his own country for ordering hundreds of civilian deaths?
Don't bother complaining that this is an attempt at deflection, to say that the U.S. is more guilty so Assange must be left aloooone. If you are outraged by alleged rape in Sweden, you must be proportionally outraged by a country routinely using rape as a torture device - and those who financed the government of said country. If you are demanding that Ecuador hand over Assange so he can face charges in Sweden, you must be proportionally upset that the U.S. is harboring a mass murderer. But since that's not the case.....
3) Who's paying you, Rei? Is it the State Department? CIA? Who's signing your checks to pay you to obsess over Assange and attack anyone who points out the holes in the case or the obvious vendetta from western powers?
Because Rei is on somebody's payroll. You find the same username trolling the same shit elsewhere online.
Except worse has already happened. Two people were kidnapped from Sweden by the CIA, with Sweden's blessing, then flown to Egypt to be tortured.
And the fact that the Democratic party wont bother to even get out of bed for actions that would have had them in the streets demanding impeachment if it were Bush doing it. NDAA, new NSA domestic spy center, assassinations of American citizens, starting new wars without Congressional authorization, drone bombing people we don't even bother to claim have any affiliation with Al Queda.....
Nevermind no western power has demonstrated any such detriment or any such enemy advantage. But you authoritarian apologists haven't let that fact get in the way of your storyline so far, why stop now?
You first. The president has the veto pen to check the legislature. He could have used it to block renewal of the Patriot Act.
He chose not to.
Who said he did? The president does, however, appoint the Attorney General, all federal judges, and all federal prosecutors. Obama could have appointed judges and prosecutors willing to hold Bushco and Wall Street accountable to the law.
He chose not to.
Yes, as found in the section where it says "anything goes" applies to any state or entity that has not signed the Geneva Convention. It's right around here somewhere.....
You bullshit. Think about it for a couple seconds - only Congress has the power to declare war. What's to stop the President, under your Unitary Executive theory, to claim that Russia was involved with 911 because the SVR (successor to the KGB) gave intelligence to bin Laddin.
And the President decided to "deal" with that by launching a couple nukes. At Moscow. You know what the response would be.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why the power to declare war was not vested with the POTUS. Because one man cannot be allowed to drag a nation into war.
Of course it would have been different with a President McCain. McCain couldn't have gotten away with half the shit Obama has, nor had the knee-jerk support of Democrats in Congress for crap like the NDAA.
Because Democrats wanted impeachment hearings for Bush for tapping our phones with warrants. Obama has Americans killed without trial, even in absentee, and it's no big deal.