Category: Barack Obama

This diary has been written in response to a diary on the reclist at Daily Kos which insinuates that all anger associated with BP Oilpocalypse and Obama’s handling of it is unwarranted.

You see, all criticism of Obama and his policies/appointees is stupid, and only really helps the Republicans. Holding “Feet to the fire” is stupid too. Instead of Yelling Louder, you should be CLAPPING LOUDER, or Tinkerbell will die and Obama’s approval ratings will drop.

CLAP LOUDER today, so Obama and the Democratic party can finally implement the GOP platform of 1994! and isn’t that so much better than what would happen if the post 1994 GOP were to come back into power? So who cares about demanding MORE and BETTER from Obama? Whose side are you on anyway?

More snark below the fold

And on the previous page were the names of Pvt. Grant A. Cotting and Spc. Matthew M. Pollini, the first and second American soldiers killed in action after the inauguration of Barack Obama.

Twenty-one-year-old Spc. Matthew Pollini was serving with the 772nd Military Police Company, an Army National Guard unit from Taunton. Flags flew at half-staff in Rockland and the town posted a memorial notice.

Erica Pollini told The Patriot Ledger of Quincy her brother “was a talented, loyal person” who joined the National Guard two or three years ago. She said his unit was activated last fall and he was due home in October. Joseph Pollini told WBZ-TV his older brother “was a hero, a hands-down hero,” and said he followed his brother into the same Guard unit, a dream of service they shared.

Pollini’s 20-year-old wife Sarah, whom he married Dec. 22, told The Patriot Ledger, “we had lots of plans.”

Crossposted at Daily Kos

THE WEEK IN EDITORIAL CARTOONS

This weekly diary takes a look at the past week’s important news stories from the perspective of our leading editorial cartoonists (including a few foreign ones) with analysis and commentary added in by me.

When evaluating a cartoon, ask yourself these questions:

1. Does a cartoon add to my existing knowledge base and help crystallize my thinking about the issue depicted?

2. Does the cartoonist have any obvious biases that distort reality?

3. Is the cartoonist reflecting prevailing public opinion or trying to shape it?

The answers will help determine the effectiveness of the cartoonist’s message.

:: ::

John Cole, Scranton Times-Tribune, Buy this cartoon

Although Mohamed Atta and his crew of suicide bombers had been identified as al Qaeda terrorists and barred from entering the United States before 9/11, Richard B. Cheney personally issued all of them “special student visas” without further investigation.

And wouldn’t the Democrats be screaming bloody murder if George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney had personally intervened to make 9/11 possible!

But after Ken Salazar personally intervened in federal court to overturn an injunction against offshore drilling, specifically for the catastrophic well at Mississippi Canyon Block 252…

Democrats just grinned their usual shit-eating grins, and blamed everybody else except Barack Obama.

And that’s the real story.

Obama/Salazar intervened last year to allow BP to drill at Mississippi Canyon Block 252, where tens of millions of gallons of oil are now polluting the Gulf of Mexico.

The actual exploratory drilling was approved by the Obama administration on April 6, 2009.

Within days of the 2009 approval, the Center for Biological Diversity and its allies won a court order vacating the Bush Five-Year Offshore Drilling Plan. Rather than use the court order as a timeout on new offshore oil drilling to develop a new plan, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar filed a special motion with the court to exempt approved oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. He specifically identified BP’s operation as one that should be released from the vacature.

So the system actually worked, and offshore drilling  had been shut down around Alaska and in the Gulf of Mexico by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, but then…

Obama/Salazar intervened in court to start drilling again, in April 2009, without further evironmental review, exactly where Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank.

And just because this is exactly the aspect of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe that so many Democrats want to forget, I’ll connect those two dots one more time.

1. The federal courts shut down offshore drilling in April 2009.

2. Obama/Salazar intervened to get BP a permit to drill its famous goddamned well.

So why aren’t the Democrats outraged about Obama’s catastrophic irresponsibility?

Let’s ask the most famous Democrat of them all, who once explained a similar conundrum.

“Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.“

Science is one of those subjects I’m passionate about. Without Science, we’d still be casting spells, and coaxing The Fates.

If we’re not careful, we may be headed back to those “bad old days”.

Scientists Fault Lack of Studies Over Gulf Oil Spill

Justin Gillis, NYTimes – 05/19/2010

“It seems baffling that we don’t know how much oil is being spilled,” Sylvia Earle, a famed oceanographer, said Wednesday on Capitol Hill. “It seems baffling that we don’t know where the oil is in the water column.”

The administration acknowledges that its scientific resources are stretched by the disaster, but contends that it is moving to get better information, including a more complete picture of the underwater plumes.

“We’re in the early stages of doing that, and we do not have a comprehensive understanding as of yet of where that oil is,” Jane Lubchenco, the NOAA administrator, told Congress on Wednesday. “But we are devoting all possible resources to understanding where the oil is and what its impact might be.”

Maybe NOAA was too busy, texting BP?

This is a must read review in Salon of today’s court ruling on “Boumediene vs Bush”  written by Glenn Greenwald, which gives the history of the creation of Bush’s prison gulag in 2006 with the Military Commissions Act, and background and then says:

  Congratulations to the United States and Obama for winning the power to abduct people anywhere in the world and then imprison them for as long as they want with no judicial review of any kind.  

If you’re secretly kidnapped by, say,  a military for profit contractor and shipped off to Gitmo, the Bush DOJ contended that the detainee under Boumediene has a right to a hearing (when they get “around to it,” years later, if you survived the torture) but when you’re secretly kidnapped by Only God Knows What or Who and shipped off to Bagram’s Secret little hell holes in Afghanistan, then the non existent detainee has no rights to any such kind of hearing.  

Greenwald:

 In other words, the detainee’s Constitutional rights depends on where the Government decides to drop them off to be encaged.  One of the first acts undertaken by the Obama DOJ that actually shocked civil libertarians was when, last February, as The New York Times put it, Obama lawyers “told a federal judge that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush’s legal team.”

But last April, John Bates, the Bush-43-appointed, right-wing judge overseeing the case, rejected the Bush/Obama position and held that Boumediene applies to detainees picked up outside of Afghanistan and then shipped to Bagram.  

But which Bagram are they being shipped to ?  The known Bagram Prison, or the one Gen McChrystal’s Secret Special Forces and the CIA and Blackwater Xe’s operations aren’t admitting the existence of ?  

Tom Friedman thinks that George W. Bush should have responded to 9/11 by imposing a $1 tax on gasoline at the pump, and the idea of regressive taxes as a tool of environmental policy would obviously appeal to a tool for globalization like Tom, oscillating between his 11,400 square-foot cottage in Bethesda and after-dinner speeches @ $50,000 for his corporate clientele.

Now Friedman has identified the Deepwater Horizon oil-spill as “Obama’s 9/11,” and likewise re-evaluated the rest of recent American history into a never-ending demonstration of…

The genius of Tom Friedman!  

President Bush’s greatest failure was not Iraq, Afghanistan or Katrina. It was his failure of imagination after 9/11 to mobilize the country to get behind a really big initiative for nation-building in America.

I suggested a $1-a-gallon “Patriot Tax” on gasoline that could have simultaneously reduced our deficit, funded basic science research, diminished our dependence on oil imported from the very countries whose citizens carried out 9/11, strengthened the dollar, stimulated energy efficiency and renewable power and slowed climate change.

Ethnic cleansing in New Orleans and genocide in Iraq could have been mere footnotes to the brilliant Bush/Friedman gas tax, which would have simultaneously solved almost every problem in America and the world today!

And all for one regressive tax, which millionaire shills for globalization like Tom Friedman wouldn’t even notice at the pump.

Hurrah!

And of course down-playing the invasion of Iraq simultaneously protects Tom Friedman’s reputation as an economic and foreign-policy prophet, because…

If the invasion and occupation of Iraq are recognized as crimes against humanity and in general catastrophic blunders, then cheerleaders for war like Tom Friedman might look like idiots, instead of geniuses.

This war is so unprecedented that it has always been a gut call – and my gut has told me four things. First, this is a war of choice. Saddam Hussein poses no direct threat to us today. But confronting him is a legitimate choice – much more legitimate than knee-jerk liberals and pacifists think. Removing Saddam – with his obsession to obtain weapons of mass destruction – ending his tyranny and helping to nurture a more progressive Iraq that could spur reform across the Arab-Muslim world are the best long-term responses to bin Ladenism.

Harharharhar!!!

What a fucking idiot!

And now the self-proclaimed economic and foreign policy genius Tom Friedman is bashing Barack Obama, and for what?

Sadly, President Obama seems intent on squandering his environmental 9/11 with a Bush-level failure of imagination.

Squandering his environmental 9/11?

But let’s resist the temptation to lose ourselves in admiration of Tom Friedman’s triple-Pulitzer-Prize-winning rhetorical glory, and remember that…

Barack Obama had already squandered the possibility of using Deepwater Horizon as a “teaching moment” by rolling out his vast expansion of offshore drilling only three weeks before Deepwater Horizon exploded.

“Don’t use drugs,” says the teacher, with a needle in his arm!

So what could Obama do now, if he kicked out all his Friedman-lovin’ “centrist” advisors, and devoted the rest of administration to helping ordinary American citizens and protecting the environment?

I personally favor most of the same programs as Dennis Kucinich and Raul Grijalva, which are typical of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, but virtually none of those policies is even on the table, and what do we get instead, if we’re lucky?  

Nothing but a feeble  and indirect version of Tom Friedman’s gas tax, which would add less than $0.25 to the price of a gallon of gas, and won’t that scare all those gas-guzzlers right off the road?

So what’s the point of this apparently aimless little odyssey around the regressive center of American politics?

Figure it out for yourself!

But one possible point is that Obama is now getting bashed from the left, right, and center of the triangular firing squad of American politics, except for his mindless TV cult of personality, and the most significant difference between progressive Obama-bashing and all the rest of it is that progressives aren’t promoting anti-government know-nothingism or out-of-control corporate predation.  

Crossposted at Daily Kos

THE WEEK IN EDITORIAL CARTOONS

This weekly diary takes a look at the past week’s important news stories from the perspective of our leading editorial cartoonists (including a few foreign ones) with analysis and commentary added in by me.

When evaluating a cartoon, ask yourself these questions:

1. Does a cartoon add to my existing knowledge base and help crystallize my thinking about the issue depicted?

2. Does the cartoonist have any obvious biases that distort reality?

3. Is the cartoonist reflecting prevailing public opinion or trying to shape it?

The answers will help determine the effectiveness of the cartoonist’s message.

:: ::

Steve Sack, Comics.com (Minneapolis Star-Tribune)

“Well, if there’s any doubt about the leadership that our military is showing, you just need to look at this F-18 fighter and the light-armored vehicle behind me.  The Army and Marine Corps have been testing this vehicle on a mixture of biofuels.  And this Navy fighter jet — appropriately called the Green Hornet — will be flown for the first time in just a few days, on Earth Day.”

Can anyone imagine a stupider way to celebrate Earth Day than rolling out yet another version of one of the most lethal fighter-bombers ever invented?

After a week away, here’s my advice: in news terms, you can afford to take a vacation.  When I came back last Sunday, New Orleans was bracing for tough times (again).  BP, a drill-baby-drill oil company that made $6.1 billion in the first quarter of this year and lobbied against “new, stricter safety rules” for offshore drilling, had experienced an offshore disaster for which ordinary Americans are going to pay through the nose (again).  News photographers were gearing up for the usual shots of oil-covered wildlife (again).  A White House — admittedly Democratic, not Republican — had deferred to an energy company’s needs, accepted its PR and lies, and then moved too slowly when disaster struck (again).

Okay, it may not be an exact repeat. Think of it instead as history on cocaine.  The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, already the size of the state of Delaware, may end up larger than the disastrous Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, and could prove more devastating than Hurricane Katrina.  Anyway, take my word for it, returning to our world from a few days offline and cell phone-less, I experienced an unsettling déjà-vu-all-over-again feeling.  What had happened was startling and horrifying — but also eerily expectable, if not predictable.

[snip]