During the last election his campaign was running commercials saying how opposed to the "death tax" he is. Christ, this is just f'ing retarded that Obama is endorsing this guy. He is for all the stuff Obama is supposed to be against.

Does Obama want to have the sort of Congress that Jimmy Carter had? The one that tears your presidency to shreds and then turns around and acts to facilitate the subsequent presidency of a right-wing ideologue?

... I don't have to change the entry for "bipartisan" in my Newspeak dictionary

http://dailydoubt.blogspot.com/2005/08/new-american-newspeak-dictionary.html

"Bipartisan: agreeing to do what conservatives want done; not to be confused with two sides of a political dispute compromising to come to a mutually beneficial position"

I love how American political discourse works. Republicans can be as fiercely partisan and non-compromising as they like. They can impeach the president over a trivial manufactured scandal. Democrats, on the other hand, in the midst of the most unpopular and already regarded by historians as the worst presidency in US history which is now close to a lameduck stage still need to act in a "bipartisan" manner to help the president break our laws.

No wonder the slow drift on American discourse continues to shift ever "right." Ideologues are rewarded for being ideologues because the center is continually redefined as halfway between the ideologue and the non-ideologue.

Heck, makes sense to me. Republicans keep saying the Constitution establishes a Christian nation based on "Christian principles."

Bond is just expressing the Abraham view of authority. Sure, it might sound wrong to slash your sons throat, but you recognize that when God tells you to do something you do it.

Thank you for the opportunity to plug my friend Alonzo Fyfe.

http://atheistethicist.blogspot.com/2006/05/further-considerations-on-government.html

“If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear from government spying.”

Anybody who utters this statement has illustrated the full height of his stupidity.

The problem is, the common citizen does not always get to decide whether he has something to hide. Sometimes, somebody else makes those decisions for him.

In Nazi Germany, “having something to hide” meant being a Jew, homosexual, gypsy, or even willing to work for regime change in the country. Imagine how much easier Hitler’s job would have been if the government already had a practice of wiretapping phones without a warrant and a database of every phone call that had ever been made by anybody in the country.

In America, in the 1950s, ‘having something to hide’ meant how you would answer the question, ‘have you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party.’ Imagine the situation in this country if, instead of asking people to name names, McCarthy simply needed to access a database of who had been calling whom in order to get his list of suspects.

In the 1960s, “having something to hide” meant being a part of the Civil Rights movement. Martin Luther King was viewed as a threat. Many people in government would have loved to have been able to plug his phone number into a database and get a list of everybody he had called as well as when and how long they talked.

In the 1970s, Nixon had an official “political enemies project” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon's_Enemies_List which involved a program of using government tools such as IRS audits and legal harassment against those who dared to speak out against him. I suspect that, if this database had existed while he was President, he would have made use of it.

Other times in which Americans had “something to hide” included being Japanese American in 1940, or German American in the 1910s. It included being an escaped slave or being somebody who aided in the Underground Railroad in 1850. In the 1770s, it included anybody and everybody who was fighting for independence from England.

Was how Obama in his statement says essentially trust me with these powers, I'll use them responsibly.

Nope.

"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty." - John Adams

I don't care if he has a D after his name - you don't get to wield the Ring of Gyges.

Digby said (before she updated her post) at least Obama promised to review the program and what not. Hogwash. The promise is in the Law - not in confidence that power won't be abused

"F]ree government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence; it is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power: that our Constitution has accordingly fixed the limits to which, and no further, our confidence may go ... In questions of powers, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."

And let's put this in perspective:

A president who has unprecedented unpopularity levels, is arguably the worst president in American history, had an historical defeat of his party in the last election, who is now approaching lame duck territory, looks as though he is going to get telecom amnesty which he couldn’t get from a Republican led Congress from the Democrats who were voted in because the public was sick of Bush vassal Republicans with the Democratic candidate for President voting Yes on it as well. Could there possibly be any clearer indication of how broken, corrupted, rotten, and dyfunctional American politics is? Can anyone possibly imagine the reverse scenario ever taking place?

http://dailydoubt.blogspot.com/2006/03/ring-of-gyges-and-temptation-of-frodo.html

That's what I was getting at with my Ring of Gyges comment.