Category: Barack Obama

To me, Obama’s SOTU was a giant horse syringe of lidocaine injected into the frontal cortex of America, an attempt to numb failed expectations of hope and change.  Theoretically, such a lesion is reversible, when the lidocaine eventually wears off, although some gliosis may be evident due to the excessive volume of the injection.  Whether the full extent of the damage is reversible or not, the lesion has predictably resulted in the spontaneous recovery, renewal or reinstatement of previous conditioned responding on “leftward” leaning blogs.  The lesion was made bi-lateral during Obama’s “schooling” of GOoPers.  The previously extinguished conditioned response, “hope,” was called forth immediately and was wholly redintegrated from memory on the basis of the most impoverished, partial, and secondary conditioned stimuli, resulting in the following response topography: “That’s the President I elected!”

olive branch

n

1. a branch of an olive tree used to symbolize peace

2. any offering of peace or conciliation

http://www.thefreedictionary.c…

dis dain

tr.v. dis·dained, dis·dain·ing, dis·dains

1. To regard or treat with haughty contempt; despise. See Synonyms at despise.

2. To consider or reject as beneath oneself.

n.

1. A feeling or show of contempt and aloofness; scorn.

http://www.thefreedictionary.c…

Given the same opportunity, the famed GOP guru, Frank Luntz, would recommend the same tactics again, in order to derail progress …

Give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union

By David Swanson, January 28, 2010

Those are the words used in Article II Section 3 of the US Constitution. The president is also to “recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.” Why does this not come up in Article I with all the other supreme powers of our Commander in Chief? Well, because only the military has one of those, and Article I is devoted to the most powerful branch of our government, the Congress.

The president is supposed to inform Congress on how things are going in his work of executing the laws they pass. We didn’t hear much of that on Wednesday. President Obama did not mention his ban on prosecuting torture, his advisors’ claims that he has the power to torture, his use of rendition, his removal from the Constitution of the right to habeas corpus, his list of Americans to be assassinated, his warrantless spying, his protection of Bush, Cheney, and gang from exposure or prosecution, his continuation of illegal wars, his use of unmanned drones to assassinate and slaughter, or his assertion of the power of aggressive war in a Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. All of that went without saying.

And how’s the bailing out of Wall Street billionaires going?  Obama asserted that he hated it but was doing it because it needed to be done even if unpopular.  He bragged more than once through the speech about doing unpopular things, as though democratic representation was the new enemy.  Thankfully, there wasn’t the same level of fear mongering about Terrorists that we’d grown used to in these speeches from Bush.  But Congress cheered for the president ignoring the public and even cheered for the president unconstitutionally ignoring Congress.  The whole room cheered when Obama said this:

“[T]he cost of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will continue to skyrocket. That’s why I’ve called for a bipartisan, Fiscal Commission, modeled on a proposal by Republican Judd Gregg and Democrat Kent Conrad. This can’t be one of those Washington gimmicks that lets us pretend we solved a problem. The Commission will have to provide a specific set of solutions by a certain deadline. Yesterday, the Senate blocked a bill that would have created this commission. So I will issue an executive order that will allow us to go forward, because I refuse to pass this problem on to another generation of Americans.”

Obama: Small Business Key for Recovery

Kent Bernhard, Jr. — Jan 27, 2010

The president proposed eliminating all capital-gains taxes on small-business investment, creating tax incentives for small businesses to hire new workers and raise the wages of those they already employ, and steering $30 billion in money from the Wall Street bailout to community banks to lend to small businesses.

“Now, the true engine of job creation in this country will always be America’s businesses. But government can create the conditions necessary for businesses to expand and hire more workers,” Obama said. “We should start where most new jobs do–in small businesses, companies that begin when an entrepreneur takes a chance on a dream, or a worker decides its time she became her own boss.”

http://www.portfolio.com/busin…

OK, how will Small Business, get the help they need, to put Americans back on the Road to Recovery?

The day after President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech to Congress, the conservaDems intent on bailing out the health insurance industry are happy to hear that House Speaker Pelosi say that:

“I think that the President’s, not only his appeal to pass it but his explanation to the American people as to what the possibilities were was a very powerful statement that will be helpful to us,” Pelosi said.

/snip

“You go through the gate. If the gate’s closed, you go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we’ll poll vault in. If that doesn’t work, we’ll parachute in. But we’re going to get health care reform passed for the American people.”

– from Greg Sargent’s Plumline

http://theplumline.whorunsgov….

Pelosi and her House are allegedly attempting to do a run around of the “60 vote Senate supermajority needed to block a filibuster” problem, by passing a House version of “side car reconciliation” to the bill first before signing off on the Senate’s version of a “health insurance reform” bill.  There is no timetable, other than they have a year to contemplate how to do this before the proto legislation already passed, expires.  

In light of recent discussion of national economic issues, I would like to revisit Bill Clinton’s 1992 slogan, “it’s the economy, stupid.”  Here I will look at the rhetorical clout offered in various promises, against the background of economic and political history, while arguing that it’s the entire capitalist system which needs to be revisited.

(Crossposted at Orange)

I originally posted this interview with Howard Zinn back in April 2009 following the then recent revelations of President Obama’s DOJ under Eric Holder betraying Obama’s campaign promises to instead embrace the Bush administrations claims for immunity and “states secrets” in the case of clear FISA violations and illegal wiretapping.

So much more has gone down since then, including his troop increases in Afghanistan, his expansion of drone strikes, his coddling and enriching of Wall Street investment bankers at your expense, and his effective sellout of the American people to the health insurance industry.

And Obama has turned his back on so many of his campaign pledges to make his administrations policy decisions so far essentially a direct extension of the policies of the the Bush/Cheney years, with most of the bigger points outlined in Paul Street’s recent article The Dawning Age of Obama as a Potentially Teach-able Moment for The Left that I thought that in light of Obama’s SOTU speech that this might be a good time time for revisiting what Zinn had to say in this interview.

I also suspect that Zinn would be honored to have us honor his ideas more than himself.

RIP Mr. Zinn. We’ll do our best.

In part three of what was a series of interviews, historian, political scientist, social critic, activist, author and playwright Professor Howard Zinn talks here with Real News CEO Paul Jay about why so many people seem to be convinced that Obama is anything more than what he appears to be given his actions and policies implemented since inauguration, and about how to create a mass popular movement to pressure Obama for progressive results in a supportive way, and concludes that social turmoil is not only not bad but necessary if it leads to something good in the sense of creating real change.

Real News Network – April 10, 2009

Send a message to Obama

Howard Zinn: Social turmoil is not bad if it leads to something good

Did you know you have an unpleasant nature, and dislike people?  This is no obstacle.

IOZ:

What it is…I MAY NOT HAVE ENOUGH OF ME

BUT I’VE HAD ENOUGH OF YOU

Exposure: It is impossible to achieve the aim without suffering.

(If only I could find the original, high-pitched version, which is personified art.  Oh, well:)

Crossposted at Daily Kos

President Barack Obama is a superb orator.  If anyone can make an rousing speech, he can.  He has proven it time and again.  For him, words matter.  He is calm, rational, never gets too emotional, and always tends towards the logical.  Display of emotions is for losers, many an analyst has observed about his speaking style.

Tonight, he had the crowd’s attention all the way.  Talk about a “captive audience.”  Oh sure, the Republicans booed him and refused to stand up and cheer.  That’s what they always do.

Imagine the president’s surprise when he thanked the GOP for its invaluable contributions to our national discourse and, instead of screaming “You lie,” members of the loyal opposition stood up and cheered him when he uttered the following words of wisdom…

RJ Matson, Roll Call, Buy this cartoon

Is President Obama sanctioning the assassinations of American citizens without due process just as George W, Bush did? It would appear that is exactly what he is doing.

President Obama has now extended Bush’s “War on Terror” to Yemen. In today’s Washington Post there is an article by Dana Priest where she writes:

U.S. military teams and intelligence agencies are deeply involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni troops who in the past six weeks have killed scores of people, among them six of 15 top leaders of a regional al-Qaeda affiliate, according to senior administration officials.

snip

As part of the operations, Obama approved a Dec. 24 strike against a compound where a U.S. citizen, Anwar al-Aulaqi, was thought to be meeting with other regional al-Qaeda leaders. Although he was not the focus of the strike and was not killed, he has since been added to a shortlist of U.S. citizens specifically targeted for killing or capture by the JSOC, military officials said. The officials, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the operations.

(emphasis mine)

“The Bigger the Lie, the More the People will Believe it”

– Adolf Hitler

Just a few days after the latest fake Osama bin Laden tape release, scantly a month after the ridiculously trumped up false flag underwear bomber ‘attack’ on Jesus’s fake birthday and on the heels of a relentless propaganda campaign of fear obviously designed to roll away the stone and resurrect the big lie of 9/11 there is this: Report: Al-Qaeda aims to hit U.S. with WMDs. Bravo to the neocons, they are right back in the game, not that they ever left, you just can’t completely get rid all of the cockroaches after an infestation no matter how good the Orkin men happen to be. The Mighty Wurlitzer’s story on the report in question leads with this nightmare blurb which smacks of the apocalyptic conjecture of smoking guns in the form of mushroom clouds that years before had been used to sell the wars that are still bankrupting America: