Tag: TMC Politics

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

The news is just flying off the “wires” and through the “tubes”. So, in an Attempt to keep up with some really important developing events, a quick summery of the big stuff and some of the related details.

This is obviously not the optimum solution but Qaddafi is a lunatic. Both MSF and the ICRC have pulled out of Behghazi yesterday and most of the news media is gone.

• UN Security Council Approves No-Fly Zone Over Libya
  

  Forces loyal to Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi have driven back rebels to the eastern city of Benghazi this week. And after weeks of ambiguity about an official position on Libya, the Obama administration yesterday said the U.S. would support military action beyond a no-fly zone to prevent a humanitarian disaster. “We need to be prepared to contemplate steps that include, but perhaps go beyond, a no-fly zone at this point, as the situation on the ground has evolved, and as a no-fly zone has inherent limitations in terms of protection of civilians at immediate risk,” U.S. ambassador to the UN Susan Rice said.

  With a UN Security Council resolution authorizing military action in Libya looming, Qaddafi today warned rebels in Benghazi, “We are coming tonight.” He promised amnesty for those who surrender, but added that his forces will show “no mercy or compassion” to those who resist.

  But just minutes ago, the UN Security Council voted 10-0 to authorize the no-fly zone and any measures necessary to protect civilians from attacks by Qaddafi’s forces. Five countries abstained from the vote, including Russia and China. A UN source tells ThinkProgress that the resolution also demands an immediate cease fire and rules out any foreign occupation of any part of Libyan territory.

• Britain, France and US prepare for air strikes against Gaddafi
  

  British, French and US military aircraft are preparing to defend the Libyan rebel stronghold of Benghazi after Washington said it was ready to support a no-fly zone and air strikes against Muammar Gaddafi’s forces.

  Jets could take off from French military bases if a no-fly zone is approved in a fresh United Nations security council resolution authorising “all necessary measures short of an occupation force” to protect civilians.

  France, which has led the calls for a no-fly zone along with Britain, has offered the use of military bases on its Mediterranean coast about 750 miles from the Libyan coast. Several Arab countries would join the operation.

I doubt that the UN or the US will do much about this, other than a “tsk, tsk” from Hillary:

• America rebukes Bahrain after violent crackdown on demonstrators
  

  Hillary Clinton condemns the rulers in Manama for not showing restraint as Shia-Sunni tensions mount around the Middle East

  The capital, Manama, was under curfew from 4pm to 4am, and the government was using emergency laws to ban public gatherings. The central square known as Pearl Roundabout, which had been a base for the protest movement, was violently cleared by riot police.

  Troops and riot police then moved on to locations across the city, including the Salmaniya medical clinic , which had become a second focal point of demonstrations. Doctors reported being attacked in wards and claimed power to part of the hospital had been turned off. The government said it was pursuing “thugs and outlaws”.

  “We have been chased, attacked and locked inside the grounds,” one doctor told the Guardian. “But the worst thing is … that we have been stopped from reaching patients.”

Japan’s earthquake, tsunami, nuclear crisis is just getting worse by the hour. The weather has been cold and it has snowed to add insult to injury

• Japan holds the line in nuclear plant crisis
  

  # NEW: An emergency generator running at one unit is sending power to two others

  # Cooling efforts are “somewhat effective,” TEPCO says

  # Helicopters and trucks spray water onto No. 3 reactor housing

• Japan disaster: U.S. starts to evacuate Americans using charter flights
  

  The U.S. government is arranging charter flights to evacuate Americans from Japan, according to a message issued Thursday by the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo. The action came after the State Department upgraded its advisory on Japan’s earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis from an alert to a warning that said Americans in Japan “should consider departing.”

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Barack now not only owns two wars, a failing economic policy but torture policy as well. After saying that the treatment of Pfc. Bradley Manning was “ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid”, State Department Spokesperson, P.J. Crowley, was forced to resign early this morning. Some may not remember Richard M. Nixon’s firing of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and the resignations of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus on October 20, 1973 during the Watergate scandal but it precipitated a firestorm in Congress and the eventual resignation of Nixon from office. I doubt that either the Republicans or the Democrats are that principled these days, this does, however speak volumes about Barack and his loyal supporters who have the audacity to call themselves progressive and liberals.

Glen Greenwald also reminds of the Bush administration “firings” and what Barack had asked us to do:

Remember when the Bush administration punished Gen. Eric Shinseki for his public (and prescient) dissent on the Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz plan for Iraq, and all good Democrats thought that was so awful, such a terrible sign of the administration’s refusal to tolerate any open debate? And then there was that time when Bush fired his White House economic adviser, Lawrence Lindsey, for publicly suggesting that the Iraq War might cost $100 billion, prompting similar cries of outrage from Democrats about how the GOP crushes internal debate and dissent. Obama’s conduct seems quite far from the time during the campaign when Obama-fawning journalists like Time‘s Joe Klein were hailing him for wanting a “team of rivals”, and Obama was saying things like this: “I don’t want to have people who just agree with me. I want people who are continually pushing me out of my comfort zone.”

He further makes the point that Barack has now embraced the policies of of those who instituted world wide torture and illegal eavesdropping. He has refused to prosecute them and given them cover of full presidential immunity and given cover to Manning’s abusers. Yet from the apologists, we get lockstep support of the very same policies that they said they would not tolerate and tell those of us who dare call out Barack, to STFU because he’s a Democrat.

Besides embracing Reagan and his economic, anti-worker policies, he’s now taken a page from Nixon’s playbook. Where is Barack’s sense of justice? His sense of morality? His support of the law and the Constitution? Nixon would be proud.

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Up Date below.

Barack says it’s OK to torture an American soldier who is being held in isolation on an American military base on American soil just miles from the White House. Why? Because the Pentagon said it is. Sound familiar? It should because, just a very short 26 months ago, the other guy who said torture was OK left the White House. It appears he was replaced with his ideological clone, and now, fellow war criminal, Barack who has taken torture, detention and rendition even further than Dick even could have imagined.

State Department spokesperson, P. J. Crowley, who was speaking to a small group at MIT discussing “the new media and the foreign policy”, he let was queried by a young man about Wikileaks:

Charlie deTar: There’s an elephant in the room during this discussion: Wikileaks. The US government is torturing a whistleblower in prison right now. How do we resolve a conversation about the future of new media in diplomacy with the government’s actions regarding Wikileaks?

PJC: “I spent 26 years in the air force. What is happening to Manning is ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid, and I don’t know why the DoD is doing it.

Then today at a press conference on the disaster in Japan, ABC News White House correspondent pulled his cajones out of the lock box in his boss’s office, asking Barack about P.J.’s condemnation of Bradley’s treatment. Barack’s response:

With respect to Private Manning, I have actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures that have been taken in terms of his confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards. They assure me that they are. I can’t go into details about some of their concerns, but some of this has to do with Private Manning’s safety as well. [my emphasis]

So, let me get this straight, the basic standard of treatment of an innocent man who has yet to be formerly charges for eight months is to apply the standards that were condemned at Abu Grab and Guantanamo in 2002?  

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Some of this is just really depressing. Where is this country headed?

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Two years and two months ago the American people hailed a new President and an end to our national nightmare of the Bush reign of eight years of trampling the Constitution, the laws that govern  and the economy. Since then the reality that nothing has changed comes down with crashing reality. This President, Barack Hussein Obama, is as complicit as the last President in the war on the US Constitution, International laws and treaties and human rights. Today it became evidently clear that Obama is not Bush, he’s Cheney.

Today Obama issued an Executive Order (pdf) that not only will restart the Military Commissions at Guantanamo but also orders indefinite detention for forty seven detainees without any of them ever being charged with a crime. Why? Because Obama is covering up the war crimes of the previous administration which, according to the Nuremberg Principles, is a war crime. Claims that the evidence against these men would harm national security just rings hollow.

Marcy Wheeler at FDL explains that “the new and improved Military Detention Regime has two parts”. The first part relates to the indefinite detention polices without anything other than a claim of “because I say it’s justified”:

“Continued law of war detention is warranted for a detainee subject to the periodic review in section 3 of this order if it is necessary to protect against a significant threat to the security of the United States.“

. . . .this doesn’t appear to tie to any wrong-doing on the detainee’s part. “It” here appears to refer to “continued law of war detention,” suggesting that “it” may be necessary regardless of any threat posed by the detainee himself.

Also note that the standard “significant threat to the security of the United States” doesn’t invoke the war (ostensibly, the war against Afghanistan) itself. This seems very very wrong. It also seems designed to authorized the continued detention of the Yemeni detainees who we admit aren’t themselves a threat, but must be detained, our government says, because they come from a dangerous country.

(all emphasis mine)

The EO also restarts the Military Commissions where evidence that has been attained through torture is admissible.

Dana Milbank, in his Op-Ed, remarked that the conference call with reporters and “some top-notch lawyers from across the executive branch” with “ground rules required that the officials not be identified”, sounded very much like what the Bush lawyers used to say:

It was another important moment in the education of Barack Obama.

He began his presidency with a pledge to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay within a year. Within months, he realized that was impossible. And now he has essentially formalized George W. Bush’s detention policy.

Even the Tea Baggers, like newly minted Senators Rand Paul (R-KY) and Mike Lee(R-UT), are saying indefinite detention is wrong and calling for trials in civilian courts:

Fox News contributor Andrew Napolitano, subbing for Glenn Beck on his television show, hosted Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Mike Lee (R-UT) to talk about a variety of issues. At one point, Napolitano mentioned Obama’s announcement and queried the two senators about their positions on indefinite detention. Lee and Paul both broke with the standard positions of their party, slamming the policy and endorsing trials for terrorism suspects instead. Paul said that he had met with a mother of a 9/11 victim who said that what she really wanted to see was justice, and that the best way to do that was to “have trials.” Lee said that detaining someone who “has been tried and found not guilty” is “particularly problematic”

Human Rights Watch points out that 47 of these men will never be tried. Those detainees will be able to “submit documentary evidence every six months, but will only go before the full panel once every three years”. However, as the press release states, “the use by the US of indefinite detention without trial still fails to meet the most basic elements of due process under international law”.

While Obama’s EO confirms the administration’s commitment to prosecuting  some cases in civilian courts

“Is added review an improvement? Yes. Does it make US detention policies lawful? No,”

said Andrea Prasow, senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch. “Signing an executive order does not suddenly make it legal to lock people up and hold them forever without proving they have committed a crime.”

HRW further notes:

. . .compared to federal courts, military commissions have moved very slowly. During the nine years since the military commissions were first announced, military prosecutors have brought only six cases to completion, four of them by plea bargain. Federal courts, in contrast, have prosecuted hundreds of terrorism-related offenses during the same period, convicting, among others, 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui and “shoe bomber” Richard Reid.

“Any trial in the military commission system carries the stigma of Guantanamo and will be tainted by a lack of due process,” Prasow said. “A verdict in the federal court system, in contrast, would be recognized internationally as legitimate.”

As I read through the executive order and news articles, all that I could think of was that surely, Dick Cheney will approve.

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

David Cay Johnson, professor at Syracuse University, author of “Free Lunch” and columnist for Tax.com, spoke with Rachel Maddow about the Republican plans to cut funding to the IRS and the direct impact that will have on the governments ability to collect taxes and reduce the deficit.

Johnson also reported in an article at Tax.com, that tax revenues in 2010 were smaller than in 2000 before the Bush tax cuts.

We take you now to the official data for important news. Federal tax revenues in 2010 were much smaller than in 2000. Total individual income tax receipts fell 30 percent in real terms. Because the population kept growing, income taxes per capita plummeted.

Individual income taxes came to just $2,900 per capita in 2010, down 36 percent from more than $4,500 in 2000. Total income taxes and income taxes per capita declined even though the economy grew 16 percent overall and 6 percent per capita from 2000 through 2010.

Corporate income tax receipts fell 27 percent and declined 34 percent per capita, even though profits boomed, rising 60 percent.

Payroll taxes increased slightly overall, but slipped per capita because the nation’s population grew five times faster than the number of people with any work. The average wage also declined slightly.

You read it here first. Lowered tax rates did not result in increased tax revenues as promised by politician after pundit after professional economist. And even though this harsh truth has been obvious from the official data for some time, the same politicians and pundits keep prevaricating. Some of them even say it is irrelevant that as a share of GDP, income tax revenues are at their lowest level since 1951, when Harry S. Truman was president.

No matter how many times advocates of lower tax rates said it, tax rate cuts did not pay for themselves, did not spur economic growth, did not increase jobs, and did not make America better off.

(emphasis mine)

The full transcript for the video can be read a Rachel’s blog.

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

The Obama administration is still protecting US war criminals from prosecution in the International Criminal Court. A little noticed clause in the UN Security Council resolution that brought sanctions against Libyan dictator Moammar Gadafi and his regime forbids the prosecution of the mercenaries from nations which are not signatories to the International Criminal Court (ICC), which protects many of the mercenaries Gadaffi has hired to kill Libyan protesters.

“6. Decides that nationals, current or former officials or personnel from a State outside the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya which is not a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court shall be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of that State for all alleged acts or omissions arising out of or related to operations in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya established or authorized by the Council, unless such exclusive jurisdiction has been expressly waived by the State;

That clause was inserted at the insistence of the US and was a deal breaker if it was not included. Why would the US do that? After all. hadn’t US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice said that all those “who slaughter civilians” would “be held personally accountable”? Well, my dears, it is once again an attempt to prevent a precedent that would permit the prosecutions of Americans  by the ICC for alleged crimes in other conflicts.

So now while protecting US war criminals from justice. Obama is protecting the foreign mercenaries from countries who are not signatories to the ICC from accountability. Good going there, Mr. Rule of Law.

h/t Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com