Yeah, WTF? That’s by comics’ version of a grindhouse director, Rob Liefeld. It makes no sense to me either.
Tagobama
Martin Wolf started off his Financial Times column for February 11 with the bold question: “Has Barack Obama’s presidency already failed?” The stock market had a similar opinion, plunging 382 points. Having promised “change,” Mr. Obama is giving us more Clinton-Bush via Robert Rubin’s protégé, Tim Geithner. Tuesday’s $2.5 trillion Financial Stabilization Plan to re-inflate the Bubble Economy is basically an extension of the Bush-Paulson giveaway – yet more Rubinomics for financial insiders in the emerging Wall Street trusts. The financial system is to be concentrated into a cartel of just a few giant conglomerates to act as the economy’s central planners and resource allocators. This makes banks the big winners in the game of “chicken” they’ve been playing with Washington, a shakedown holding the economy hostage. “Give us what we want or we’ll plunge the economy into financial crisis.” Washington has given them $9 trillion so far, with promises now of another $2 trillion– and still counting.
– “Obama’s Awful Financial Recovery Plan” by Michael Hudson.
Democracy Now interview with Michael Hudson and Kuttner (very lucid conversation about the problems with the stimulus and the bailout).
Oregon Congressman Peter DeFazio‘s open letter on why he voted against the stimulus package. DeFazio serves on the Transportation and Infrastructure, Homeland Security, and Natural Resources committees, and subcommittees of each; he chairs the Transportation subcommittee on Highways and Transit. He was a contender for the position of Secretary of Transportation in the Obama administration.
Long NYT Magazine piece on how there’s some long term strategic ideas included in the package (it’s a cold comfort though).
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Surprising even a judge at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, a lawyer for the Obama administration embraced the Bush administration’s position in the first state secrets case since Obama took power. The case involves five accused terrorist detainees who are attempting to sue a subsidiary of Boeing for arranging flights to accommodate the Bush administration’s “extraordinary rendition” program, which flew them off to be tortured by other governments.
Though it’s now well-known that the practice went on and the details even of these particular cases have been well-documented, just as it did in the horrifying case of Khalen Masri the Bush administration invoked states secrets privilege to prevent the suit from coming to trial. State secrets is a judge-made law (based entirely on a lie, by the way) allowing the executive branch to exclude evidence in a case merely by stating it would be contrary to the interests of national security to allow the evidence to be admitted. Bush administration officials claimed judges are obligated to show the president “utmost deference” on state secrets claims, provoking a federal judge in a domestic spying/wiretapping case to ask if that means “the king can do no wrong,” and that judges are supposed to “bow” before the president in such claims.
According to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the state secrets privilege was invoked about 55 times from 1954 to 2001. In the first four years after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the Bush administration invoked it 23 times.
Obama has promised to review Bush’s invocation of state secrets privilege, including voicing his support for a reform bill working its way through Congress. But the case this week was his first opportunity to do something about it. He didn’t.
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The Obama administration talks a lot about transparency. It’s a key element of the pitch behind the president’s stimulus bill. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” said the president last week in a typical remark. “I know that restoring transparency is not only the surest way to achieve results but also to earn back that trust in government without which we cannot deliver the changes the American people sent us here to make.” […]
But when it comes to personnel appointments like Daschle’s, the administration has fallen short of its own standard. Daschle’s and Tim Geithner’s tax troubles were first reported in the press. William J. Lynn and Mark Patterson, exceptions to Obama’s new ethics guidelines regarding lobbyists, were also discovered by the press. Because the administration failed to come forward on its own with this information, it looks as if it’s trying to hide something and creates the distractions that predictably follow. […]
Telling us about Daschle’s problems before the press did would not have wiped them away. But if the White House had revealed them first, at least it would have reduced the feeling that it was trying to hide something. In addition to whatever credit they would have gotten for acting in good faith, early disclosure would also have allowed the administration to get the first crack at defining the debate on its own terms.
Instead, it tried the old Washington wiggle. Aides had the information, didn’t release it, and then just tried to manage the fallout. This ensured a new degree of skepticism not only about the Obama team’s vetting process but about its judgment and ability to live up to its ethics and transparency standards. This rolling day-by-day set of stories distracted from the administration’s own message—Hey, look at Tom Daschle when he didn’t have a chauffer!—and created a pressure that makes it harder to deal with each new problem. This pressure is also what caused Nancy Killefer to resign before she could even take the job as administration performance officer.
(via Jay Rosen)
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In a breathless piece of reporting in the Sunday Los Angeles Times, we are told that Barack Obama “left intact” a “controversial counter-terrorism tool” called renditions. Moreover, the Times states, quoting unnamed “current and former U.S. intelligence figures,” Obama may actually be planning to expand the program. The report notes the existence of a European Parliament report condemning the practice, but states “the Obama Administration appears to have determined that the rendition program was one component of the Bush Administration’s war on terrorism that it could not afford to discard.”
The Los Angeles Times just got punked. Its description of the European Parliament’s report is not accurate. (Point of disclosure: I served as an expert witness in hearings leading to the report.) But that’s the least of its problems. It misses the difference between the renditions program, which has been around since the Bush 41 Administration at least (and arguably in some form even in the Reagan Administration) and the extraordinary renditions program which was introduced by Bush 43 and clearly shut down under an executive order issued by President Obama in his first week.
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Starhawk, along with other members of the group Code Pink, held a ritual to “cleanse the Whitehouse” on Bush’s last day in office. Video of the event can be found here: Witches Sweep Clean for Obama.
Of course, much is being made of this on conservative blogs. At www.freerepublic.com, the article on the event was accompanied by keywords such as “religiousleft”, “antichristian”, and “dementedwomen”.
Www.vnnforum.com added the commentary:
We knew it would happen: Full bore weirdness! The Messiah ushers in
pagan superstition along with his Czars, totalitarianism and an
incredible uptick in demonic fury—to be vented mindlessly upon all available
scapegoats…
Welcome to the Utopia of Weird.
They added:
Besides invoking witchcraft against the United States, Code Pink also works with state sponsors of terrorism and the terrorists in Iraq to undermine America in the war on terror. And Code Pink works with President Obama.
There is definitely some rage and desperation out there. If anyone needs more adrenaline than their coffee can provide this morning, www.vnnforum.com has contains some high-grade racism, sexism, and some seriously irrational frothing-at-the-mouth.
Radley Balko on Obama’s first 40 hours:
# Obama rescinded Bush’s 2001 executive order allowing former presidents, vice presidents, and their heirs to claim executive privilege in determining which of their records get released to the public. Even better, he’s requiring the signature of both his White House counsel and the attorney general before he can classify a document under executive privilege.
# Issued a memorandum to all executive agencies asking them to come up with a new plan for open government and complying with FOIA requests. He is also instructing three top officials, including the U.S. attorney general, to come up with a new policy on open government. The new policy would replace the existing policy, infamously set by a 2001 memo from John Ashcroft that instructed federal agencies to essentially to take every measure they can to refuse FOIA requests.
# Put a freeze on the salaries of top White House aides.
# Suspended the military trials at Gitmo, and is expected to issue an order closing Gitmo as soon as today.
President-elect Barack Obama signaled in an interview broadcast Sunday that he was unlikely to authorize a broad inquiry into Bush administration programs like domestic eavesdropping or the treatment of terrorism suspects.
But Mr. Obama also said prosecutions would proceed if the Justice Department found evidence that laws had been broken.
As a candidate, Mr. Obama broadly condemned some counterterrorism tactics of the Bush administration and its claim that the measures were justified under executive powers. But his administration will face competing demands: pressure from liberals who want wide-ranging criminal investigations, and the need to establish trust among the country’s intelligence agencies. At the Central Intelligence Agency, in particular, many officers flatly oppose any further review and may protest the prospect of a broad inquiry into their past conduct.
In the clearest indication so far of his thinking on the issue, Mr. Obama said on the ABC News program “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” that there should be prosecutions if “somebody has blatantly broken the law” but that his legal team was still evaluating interrogation and detention issues and would examine “past practices.”
(via Cryptogon)
I would be very interested in hearing what Biden has to say about this quote now: “I think we should be acquiring and accumulating all the data that is appropriate for possibly bringing criminal charges against members of this administration at a later date.”
Re: Dawn Johnsen:
There are several striking pieces of evidence that suggest this appointment may be Obama’s best yet, perhaps by far. Consider, first, this rather emphatic Slate article authored by Johnsen in the wake of the disclosure, last April, of the 81-page John Yoo Memo which declared that the President’s power to torture detainees is virtually limitless. Her article is notable at least as much for its tone as for its substance
Re: Leon Panetta:
Supporting Bush’s illegal NSA program — as Harman did, repeatedly and explicitly — should be disqualifying for the position of CIA Director. Panetta may have many flaws — who doesn’t after years and years in Washington? — but Obama’s apparent determination to avoid anyone “tainted” by the CIA’s last eight years is commendable. Like the Johnsen appointment, it doesn’t, standing alone, prove anything — only actions will do that — but it’s still a positive step.
(via The Agitator)
Of course, this could all turn out to be hype. Most of my friends have strong doubts that the “Change” Barack Obama represents means anything beyond being an effective ad slogan. My own view is more complex. Personally, I don’t see the next President as a token figurehead or a liberal messiah, but as a dedicated political realist. As Obama himself explains, “since the founding, the American political tradition has been reformist, not revolutionary.” He appears to be actutely conscious of the comprimises he makes and the games he’s playing, and he’s got a larger vision behind everything he’s doing.
Here’s the good news: if I’m wrong, I’ll find out very quickly. The online organizing and social networking that engineered Barack Obama’s rise to the White House wasn’t just an expensive tool, it was a culture. A culture of people who are motivated, informed and demanding, and a culture that will turn on Obama once they suspect they’ve been used.
In fact, we might watch Obama alienate his fan base before he even gets sworn in.
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