There Is No Super Secret Obama Waiting for 2013

By: Jon Walker, Firedog Lake

Tuesday April 17, 2012 12:26 pm

I want to give the same piece of advice to some apparently delusional people who both oppose and support President Obama: there is no super secret Obama 3.0 just waiting until after the election to strike.

Apparently this delusional belief that some secret Obama, way better or way worse than today, will magically emerge in 2013 isn’t just limited to conservatives who think Obama will take away their guns or socialize the whole economy. It apparently also exists among his supporters who are trying to make up totally absurd reasons for voting for him. For example, last night Lawrence O’Donnell basically claimed you should vote for Obama because he has a super secret plan to decriminalize drugs and end the drug war once he wins re-election.

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The reality is that Obama has been in office for over three years. We know how he has governed, and it is a great predictor of how he will govern in another term. The priorities he set for the first four years should be about the same as for the next four years. While Obama will have some more flexibility after the election, if he really cared about something he would have actively tried to achieve it by now or at least worked to prepare the groundwork for it.

The Obama we now have is the Obama we will get if he wins re-election. People should judge him on what his record has been so far, not some decade old statements or fevered fantasy.

If Obama significantly changes course on this or any other issue after re-election, it won’t be because it was all part of Obama’s super secret plan for his second term. It would be a result of changing facts, popular opinion, and political pressure making his old course untenable.

When I was 6, I began putting together a massive collection of comic books. Batman implanted a concept in my mind, introduced me to a paradigm as to how the world is set up: that there are oppressors, there are the oppressed, and there are those who step up to defend the oppressed. This resonated with me so much that throughout the rest of my childhood I gravitated towards any book that reflected that paradigm-‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X,’ and I even saw an ethical dimension to ‘The Catcher in the Rye.’

By the time I began high school and took a real history class, I was learning just how real that paradigm is in the world, I learned about the Native Americans and what befell them at the hands of European settlers. I learned about how the descendants of those European settlers were in turn oppressed under the tyranny of King George III. I read about Paul Revere, Tom Paine, and how Americans began an armed insurgency against British forces-an insurgency we now celebrate as the American Revolutionary War. As a kid I even went on school field trips just blocks away from where we sit now. I learned about Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, John Brown, and the fight against slavery in this country. I learned about Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs and the struggles of the labor unions, working class and poor. I learned about Anne Frank, the Nazis, and how they persecuted minorities and imprisoned dissidents. I learned about Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and the civil rights struggle. I learned about Ho Chi Minh, and how the Vietnamese fought for decades to liberate themselves from one invader after another. I learned about Nelson Mandela and the fight against apartheid in South Africa. Everything I learned in those years confirmed what I was beginning to learn when I was 6: that throughout history, there has been a constant struggle between the oppressed and their oppressors. With each struggle I learned about, I found myself consistently siding with the oppressed, and consistently respecting those who stepped up to defend them-regardless of nationality, regardless of religion. And I never threw my class notes away. As I stand here speaking, they are in a neat pile in my bedroom closet at home.

In your eyes, I’m a terrorist, and it’s perfectly reasonable that I be standing here in an orange jumpsuit, but one day, America will change and people will recognize this day for what it is. They will look at how hundreds of thousands of Muslims were killed and maimed by the U.S. military in foreign countries, yet somehow I’m the one going to prison for ‘conspiring to kill and maim’ in those countries- because I support the mujahedeen defending those people. They will look back on how the government spent millions of dollars to imprison me as a ‘terrorist,’ yet if we were to somehow bring Abeer al-Janabi back to life in the moment she was being gang-raped by your soldiers, to put her on that witness stand and ask her who the ‘terrorists’ are, she sure wouldn’t be pointing at me.

First They Come For the Muslims

By Chris Hedges, Truthdig

Posted on Apr 16, 2012

Stephen F. Downs, a lawyer in Albany, N.Y., a founder of Project Salam and the author of “Victims of America’s Dirty War,” a booklet posted on the website, has defended Muslim activists since 2006. He has methodically documented the mendacious charges used to incarcerate many Muslim activists as terrorists. Because of “terrorism enhancement” provisions, any sentence can be quadrupled-even minor charges can leave prisoners incarcerated for years.

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“I was unprepared for the fact that the government would put together a case that was just one lie piled up on top of another lie,” Downs said. “And when you pointed it out to them they didn’t care. They didn’t refute it. They knew that it was a lie. The facts of most of these pre-emptive cases don’t support the charges. But the facts are irrelevant. The government has decided to target these people. It wants to take them down for ideological reasons.”

“In the past, when the government wanted to do something illegal it simply went ahead and broke the law,” he said. “They rounded up the Japanese during World War II and stuck them in concentration camps. They knew they were breaking the law when they decided to go after the activists with COINTELPRO in the 1960s but they rationalized that they were doing it for a higher purpose. This is different. The government is destroying the legal framework of our country. They are twisting it out of recognition to make it appear as though what they’re doing is legal. I don’t remember that kind of a situation in the past. The opinions of the court are now only lame excuses as to why the courts can’t do justice.”

“The government lawyers must know these pre-emptive cases are fake,” he said. “They must know they’re prosecuting people before a crime has been committed based on what they think the defendant might do in the future. They defend what they are doing by saying that they are protecting the nation from people who might want to do it harm. I’m sure they’ve been co-opted at least to believe that. But I think they also know that they are twisting the legal concepts, they are stretching them beyond what the framework of the law can tolerate. They have convinced themselves that it is OK to convict many innocent people as long as they prevent a few people from committing crimes in the future. They are creating an internal culture within the Justice Department where there is contempt for the law and for the foundational principle that it is better for one guilty person to go free than that one innocent person is convicted. They must know they do not do justice, and that they serve only ideological ends.”

Downs pointed out that if the government was actually concerned about the rule of law it would prosecute politicians and other prominent Americans who have publicly spoken out in support of Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK or People’s Holy Jihadis), an armed group on the State Department terrorism list that carries out terrorist attacks inside Iran. They include former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, former homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend, former FBI Director Louis Freeh, former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Hugh Shelton and Gen. James Jones, who was President Obama’s first national security adviser. Some of them voiced their backing in speeches for which they were paid lavishly.

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Already dissidents such as peace activists, environmentalists and outspoken intellectuals have been treated as terrorists. Downs expects soon to see labor organizers and those in Occupy encampments treated as terrorists, especially if domestic dissent spreads. Yet despite his pessimism he has no intention of surrendering.

“I take comfort from organizations like the White Rose in Germany,” he said, referring to the anti-Nazi group that defied Hitler and saw most of its members arrested and executed. “They were doomed almost from the beginning. How long could you defy Hitler before you were rounded up and shot? It appeared to be a futile effort. And yet, after the war, when people went back and began to rebuild the German nation, they could look to the White Rose as an example of what German culture was really about. There were Germans who cared about peace, freedom and tolerance. I’m working now as much for the historical record as for those still in jail.”

‘Better 100 guilty go free than one innocent punished.’  (Benjamin Franklin on Blackstone’s Formulation)

The White Rose.

New Captain Scarlet

Instrument of Destruction

Part 1

Part 2 below the fold.

Actually this diary is not about food so much as it is about writing.

From 1934 to 1975 Rex Stout chronicled the adventures of Archie Goodwin (fictional detective) and Nero Wolfe.

If you have not yet made Archie’s acquaintance yet you really should.  He’s a fun guy.  Dances 2 or 3 nights a week, heiress girlfriend with interesting connections that can usually scare up a buck or two. Often deployed by his boss as a sympathetic face for the women to cry on the shoulder of.

Still, among your other exciting duties are the cataloging of the orchid hybrids and book keeping.

About Nero

His name is taken from The Black Mountain where he and Marko were born and where he served in Italian Intelligence during the first world war.  He has a house in Egypt you know.

Yet it is hard to pry him away from 35th street where he keeps a very rigid schedule.

• 9 to 11 Orchids.
• 4 to 6 Orchids.
• Lunch is usually at 1:15 p.m.
• Dinner is generally at 7:15 or 7:30 p.m.

He is obsessed with sausage recipes and never does business outside his house except when tempted by his love of food and flowers.  When he is not otherwise occupied he reads books about which he has strong opinions.

What makes Nero Nero instead of a Mycroft Holmes variant is that he’s admirably mercenary.  He’s not interested in detecting so much as he is in making money, right up to his Galtian marginal tax rate.

They don’t do much.

This week’s episode originally aired October 14, 2005.

This is a 22 minute show, the divided ones are just not as good visually.  I’m undecided what I go with tomorrow.