Tag: George W. Bush

    The Obama Justice Department (on April 15th 2010)* announced that it has secured a ten-felony-count indictment against Thomas Drake, an official with the National Security Agency during the Bush years.  

~snip~

    (T)he DOJ alleges “that between approximately February 2006 and November 2007, a newspaper reporter published a series of articles about the NSA,” and it claims “Drake served as a source for many of those articles, including articles that contained classified information.”

~snip~

    Although the indictment does not specify Drake’s leaks, it is highly likely (as Shane also suggests) that it is based on Drake’s bringing to the public’s attention major failures and cost over-runs with the NSA’s spying programs via leaks to The Baltimore Sun.

salon.com

Bold text and some editing* done by the diarist

   The indictment of Thomas Drake has NOTHING to do with the illegality of the Bush warrantless wiretapping program, rather, it has to do with Drake’s uncovering of major failures and cost over-runs within the domestic spying program. As Greenwald writes . . .

    I used to write post after post about how warped and dangerous it was that the Bush DOJ was protecting the people who criminally spied on Americans (Bush, Cheney Michael Hayden) while simultaneously threatening to prosecute the whistle-blowers who exposed misconduct.  But the Bush DOJ never actually followed through on those menacing threats; no NSA whistle-blowers were indicted during Bush’s term (though several were threatened ).  It took the election of Barack Obama for that to happen, as his handpicked Assistant Attorney General publicly boasted yesterday of the indictment against Drake.

salon.com

Bold text added by the diarist

    Wait, wait, wait! If Obama’s DoJ is prosecuting crimes from the Bush era isn’t that an act of “Looking backwards, not forward”? ( and yes, revealing state secrets, even if done for the good of the public as whistleblowers do, is still illegal. )

More below the fold

Building on the President’s Health Care Agenda

The President’s vision is the right one, […] Congress should enact specific policy changes that are consis­tent with that vision and that would fulfill its promises. However, Congress should be bolder than the White House and broaden the scope of change well beyond the President’s specific policy recommendations by:

— Expanding the proposed tax provisions to cover all health plans, not just HSA-qualified plans;

— Encouraging health insurance portability through individual ownership, a defined-contribution system, and establishment of a consumer-based “health exchange” marketplace; and

— Transforming the health care market into a more consumer-based system in which individuals are empowered to take direct control of their health care decisions.

http://www.heritage.org/Resear…

Nina Owcharenko, 05/11/06

That is the advice from the Conservative Think-Tank — the Heritage Foundation!

AND the President they are talking about — is George W. Bush!

SO … a Health Exchange Marketplace = Marxist Socialism ???

Oh Really!?

The plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty used to say, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

Now it says, “Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here.”

Why did everything go to Hell so fast?    

driftglass knows why, we ll know why . . .

We got the Bush Regime, arguably the most incompetent, corrupt and outright-treasonous Administration in American history. A regime so reckless, savage and gleefully bestial that it made the career-Nixon-hating Hunter Thompson actually pine for the good old days of Tricky Dick: “I miss Nixon.  Compared to these Nazis we have in the White House now, Richard Nixon was a flaming liberal.”

And, like Nixon, it is more than likely that not a single one of the smirking traitors who nearly wrecked this country will ever spend a day in jail.  Instead they remain lodged in our flesh like so many ricin pellets, oozing their poison into our national bloodstream, waddle from one fawning audience to another, worming their way into major media outlets, or dispatching their degenerate children and underlings out into the world the keep their poison pumping.

They soiled our good name, bankrupted the country, shredded the Constitution and kicked the crutches out from under the global economy on their way out the door, and while it is sometimes hard to focus on them through the flames of the world they set on fire, we must.

America could have had justice.

But America didn’t get justice.  

America got Hopey McChange, who said he wants to look forward, not backward.  Who said there must be no “retribution”, no “vengeance”, no “payback”, who said the era of “divisive partisanship” must end.  

Anybody who ever reflected on the evidence for as much as a minute knows that Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush all smoked pot. Obama admitted it, Bush never really denied it, and Clinton (ha ha!) “didn’t inhale.”

So if smoking pot doesn’t mess you up too much to be President, then what’s the problem with pot?

The problem is shameles and hypocritical politicians sucking up to tight-assed low-IQ no-info hoodoos in Alabama and South Dakota, who fear that their little Barbies and Kens will end up in the gutter if they sample the demon weed, although…

Since 1992, your chance of getting elected President without a whole lotta preliminary tokin’ has been zero.

But while Obama is prancing around the Oval Office and laughing at the net-roots because they made legalizing marijuana and ending the “War on Drugs” #1 and #2 on Obama’s own bullshit website Ideas for Change in America…

While Obama is prancing around the Oval Office and enforcing even the very few drug-laws that he promised not to enforce…

Meanwhile the “War on Drugs” continues to decimate black communities, as described in a excellent new book by legal scholar Michelle Alexander…

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

AMY GOODMAN: Nearly half of America’s young black men are behind bars or have been labeled felons for life? That’s an astounding figure. Also, what does it mean in terms of their rights for the rest of their lives?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes, thanks largely to the war on drugs, a war that has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies have consistently shown that people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites. The war on drugs waged in these ghetto communities has managed to brand as felons millions of people of color for relatively minor, nonviolent drug offenses. And once branded a felon, they’re ushered into a permanent second-class status, not unlike the one we supposedly left behind. Those labeled felons may be denied the right to vote, are automatically excluded from juries, and my be legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, public benefits, much like their grandparents or great grandparents may have been discriminated against during the Jim Crow era.

In fact, in 2005, four out of five drug arrests were for possession. Only one out of five were for sales.

AMY GOODMAN: Yes, I just wanted to bring it up to President Obama, because this piece you wrote, very interesting, at tomdispatch.com called “The Age of Obama as Racial Nightmare.” Explain.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: What is the system designed to do? The system is designed to send you right back to prison, which is, in fact, what happens to the vast majority of people who are released. About 70 percent of former prisoners are returned within three years. And the majority of those who are returned are returned within three months, because the obstacles, the legal barriers to just surviving on the outside, are so great. I’m often-you know, people often say to me, “Well, I know somebody who is a felon and who managed to get a job. You know, it’s possible to get a job,” they say.

Well, it may be possible, but what kind of job? Why is it that, you know, our young kids, young black and brown kids, are expected to be locked into low-wage jobs for life, if they’re lucky enough to get them, but kids in other communities are given the opportunity to go on to college, to compete for a full range of job opportunities? During the Jim Crow era, the problem wasn’t that black people couldn’t get jobs; it was that they were locked permanently in a lower tier of jobs. And that’s the reality.

Considering the shameless hypocrisy and downright idiocy of politics in America, maybe it isn’t surprising that after 40 years of failure, the “War on Drugs” is still fully funded and still destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands of black Americans…

But how many people who voted for “Hope and Change” with Barack Obama foresaw that they were only electing a new Enforcer-in-Chief of the new Jim Crow?

Crossposted at Daily Kos.  If you choose to recommend it there, the Rec Button may have been pushed to the bottom after the last diary comment made.

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.

:: ::

Chris Britt, see reader comments in the State Journal-Register (Springfield, IL)

Is good news one of those quaint relics, exclusively relegated to our past, fovever doomed to never again be a part of our present or future?  

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)

Crossposted at Daily Kos

    If accountability is off the table, so is Democracy.

    In an age when the rich and powerful have more control over the creation of the law than ever we face the greatest threat to our Democracy we have ever known. We have met the enemy, and he is us.

    If the rich and powerful can bribe lawmakers to do their bidding AND those lawmakers are not subject to the same laws they are supposed to uphold than there is no freedom, there is no equality, there is no justice. The biggest threat to our democracy is not a man with a bomb in his pants or a hijacker flying a plane, it is a man with unlimited power and no one that he must answer to. If that man is an American he is capable of doing more damage to America than any terrorist could ever dream of.

   If you love freedom and Democracy please join me below the fold.

As the old saying goes, “Read it and Weep!”