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a song

marc

Glenn, have you looked into the large number of FEMA detention facilities? Some brush the existence of such camps away as conspiracy theory, but the pictures I've seen look real enough to me. Also, if you haven't read Peikoff's 'The Ominous Parallels', now might be a good time.

Trying to understand Barack Obama's personality as the source of his policies as president is not unproductive, I think. If he is viewed as an intellectual lightweight, ineffectual because he does not engage and combat opposition, his first six months can be understood. He has the personality and talents of a preacher. Obama can stand before an audience and speak convincingly, but he does not like to fight. He wants to get people "together". That was his recognized talent when was editor of the Harvard Law Review. He did not appoint liberal associates to his staff, as they expected. He appointed conservatives, as has been the case since he entered the White House. You may think that is because he is a conservative, but I don't think so. I think he would like to see programs like single-payer, but he does not have the will to fight for them.

His presidency, I regret to predict, will be a disaster. The White House does not need a preacher. It needs a man with principles and the will to fight for them.

I think that this is a bad analogy. When the executive wants to hold on to powers that the last guy grabbed and used, that is one thing. When the relatively small (compared to the Euro SDs) amount of social spending in the US tends to stick, that is something else altogether.

Consider popular support. Executive powers are retained despite a lack of real support from the people. On the other hand, social programs tend to be pretty popular, enough so that discussing their elimination can create some risk of being voted out of office.

Sometimes I wonder if Dick Cheney openly murdered someone in plain site, on camera, and vocally announced the fact to everyone within earshot if he would be arrested and tried.

I'm seriously beginning to think not.

Yet, a black man in his own home can be arrested for no apparent reason even after showing the cops proof that he lives there.

Alice in Wonderland doesn't even begin to capture the true idiocy at work here.

-- Goedel I am often amazed at the people in this country like you who equate 'good leadership' with violence. Who seem to think kicking someone's ass is the only answer to problems. The country can't be protected by diplomacy and common sense. You like to forget that it's conservatives country to whether we like it or not. Even though I think Obama is wasting his time on conservatives. There isn't anything on earth going to win hateful bunch like them over. The facts are that everyone but the rabid right was left out of the process during the Bush Administration. He was to hardheaded to listen to anyone least of all a liberal (9/11 would have never happened if he had listened to Clinton's warnings). Bush was a know it all who knew very little about anything. He had literally no common sense. Conservatives shoved their ideas down American's throat's whether they liked it or not. Give the guy a chance before you declare him a disaster. I personally think he will turn out to be a decent one. McCain was not suited temperamentally to the job.

When I saw the story in the NYT, I thought of this:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/radio/2008/10/27/hafetz/

Since it seems that this stikes a chord with many people who haven't been too concerned with torture and other abuses, I think the most important point to convey is that by the prevailing conventional wisdom, nobody could be held accountable if troops had been deployed. Someone in DOJ wrote a memo, so it's all perfectly legal.

The Bush administration operated under the assumption that Constitutional guarantees were optional. Bush was free, as "Commander in Chief," to ignore them whenever he pleased. The corporate media bent over backwards to avoid mentioning this fact, and still does. (The other day, Alberto Gonzales was on NPR's "Tell Me More," for the third time this year, to opine -- wait for it -- on Judge Sotomayor's alleged lack of allegiance to the concept of judicial impartiality, with no mention of the U.S. attorney's scandal, warrantless wiretapping, or torture policies, crimes with which Gonzales was intimately involved.)

The quite obvious outcome is that the Obama administration -- surprise! -- operates under the same assumption: Constitutional guarantees are respected only when the King, ur, the President, allows their exercise.

You will not hear this amazing development discussed in our copy-and-paste media. Other than The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and sometimes, the Rachel Maddow Show and Countdown, the dumbed-down discourse we laughingly refer to as tv "journalism" is preoccupied with endless discussions of racial politics, the President's birth certificate, and our supposed race toward "socialism." All while the oligarchs quietly pocket billions through the bank bailout, Fed largesse, and the upcoming give-away to the health industrial complex, referred to laughingly as health care "reform."

The disconnect between the good governance that Americans were promised by candidate Obama during the primaries and Presidential campaign, and the reality of his policies in virtually every area is a betrayal that even many generally clear-thinking progressives are loathe to admit. It's time everyone woke up and smelled the coffee -- Obama has sold out big time, and the sooner we admit it, the better.

"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal..."

Justice Louis Brandeis - Olmstead v. United States (1928)

"Confronted with a new enemy and their own intelligence failure, [Bush] and Cheney turned to some familiar conservative nostrums that had preoccupied the far right wing of the Republican Party since the Watergate era: There was too much international law, too many civil liberties, too many constraints on the President's war powers, too many rights for defendants and too many rules against lethal covert actions. There was also too much openness and too much meddling by Congress and the press.

Jane Mayer - The Dark Side (2008)

"He who does battle with monsters needs to beware lest he in the process becomes a monster himself. And if you stare too long into the abyss, the abyss will stare right back at you."

Fredrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil