Obama is doing a job.
POSTED BY: OPPYH
UPDATED: Thursday, July 2, 2009 13:59
VIEWED: 13329
PAGE 3 of 14
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Originally posted by OPPYH:
He certainly isn't an idle president. He hasn't even been in office for a year yet. You can't expect "change" in a 6 month period can you?
Except NOT doing anything (no change) would have been better than what he's done. The complaint is NOT that he isn't improving things fast enough. The complaint is that he is making things worse than before!
Let's recap, shall we? (Read the following and imagine how you would feel if it were McCain who were doing it instead of Obama. Incidentally, the following quotations come from fellow liberals.)
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Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley: "Well it can't get any worse: extreme executive privilege arguments in court, withholding of abuse photos, adoptions of indefinite detentions without trial, restarting military commissions, and blocking any torture investigation. Welcome to Bush 2.0..."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-cusack/a-war-on-terror-by-any-ot_b_
204887.html
1. Sovereign Immunity: Instead of reversing the broad surveillance powers Bush enacted ("state secrets"), or at least not changing them, Obama has added a new executive power called "sovereign immunity." That's right. His DOJ defends Bush policies, and then adds one worse.
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In other words, beyond even the outrageously broad "state secrets" privilege invented by the Bush administration and now embraced fully by the Obama administration, the Obama DOJ has now invented a brand new claim of government immunity, one which literally asserts that the U.S. Government is free to intercept all of your communications (calls, emails and the like) and -- even if what they're doing is blatantly illegal and they know it's illegal -- you are barred from suing them unless they "willfully disclose" to the public what they have learned.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/06/obama/index.html
2. Secrecy Law. Instead of opposing it, or at least abstaining from it, Obama is supporting a bill that would keep detainee abuse photos from being released. Thankfully, his fellow Democrats are opposing him and blocking this bill.
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The photo suppression bill is an abomination that is reminiscent of the worst Bush-era excesses. It gives the executive branch the power to withhold an entire category of information from public scrutiny without any review. This law is Example A of the theory of the Presidency that says citizens should just trust the benevolent executive to do the right thing. Even if you oppose releasing some of the photos, I don't see why you would want to give the White House the power to unilaterally decide what's best. It says a lot about the Congress that members are willing to give Obama this kind of power. It says a lot about Obama that he supports this bill.
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2009/06/house-liberals-trying-block-ob
ama-backed-foia-exemption-torture-photos
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Exactly. We already have a law in place -- FOIA -- that is incredibly permissive in what it allows the government to keep secret... But passing a new law because you don't want to abide by the old one and because courts have rejected the President's claimed powers was one of the most defining and abusive strategies of the Bush administration....
The issue is not whether disclosure of these photographs will produce value... The issue is whether or not you believe in transparency in government (a major plank of Obama's campaign), and whether you want the President to have the unilateral, unreviewable power to simply decree that the 4o-year-old FOIA law need not be complied with when it comes to all photographic evidence of detainee abuse.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/06/05/photos/index.html
3. Indefinite preventative detention. Instead of releasing Gitmo detainees as he campaigned, or at least detaining them without good cause as Bush did, Obama is instituting a new policy to justify such detentions and carry them out indefinitely.
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ha....
You won't even recognize America in 4 years. And watch gas shoot up to eight bucks a gallon after he gets reelected. Obama is a piece of shit. He's nothing but Bush Jr. with blackface on.
Name one thing he and his Democratic Congress hasn't reneged on since his campaign.
He's a LIAR!
That's what you idiots get for voting an Illinois politician into the White House.
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." http://www.myspace.com/6ixstringjack
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In the interest of clarity, this site seems to track things relatively accurately:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/
It's not quite as bad as some of us pretend, but it's hardly the sweeping change that was supposedly his mandate.
SergeantX
"It's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah"
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No health care? Expect a requirement to get it
By LIZ SIDOTI – 5 hours ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — Don't have health insurance? Don't want to pay for it? Too bad.
It's looking like President Barack Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress are going to require you to pick up the bill.
In Washington-speak, it's called an individual mandate — or a requirement that people who don't already have health insurance to purchase it, much like most states require drivers to have automobile insurance.
Obama long has been wary of the idea, arguing that people cannot be required to buy coverage if they can't afford it. His plan during the presidential primary didn't require all adults to have coverage, only children. He and then-rival Hillary Rodham Clinton, who backed a universal requirement, sparred repeatedly over the issue.
Now in the White House, Obama has set in motion steps toward his broad goal of making health care more affordable, improving quality of care and expanding coverage. Says Obama: "We are not a nation that accepts nearly 46 million uninsured men, women and children."
He largely has left it to the House and Senate to work it out.
But in recent weeks, Congress signaled that legislation overhauling health care was all but certain to require that people have insurance. Of course, details about how to implement such a mandate must be worked out — and there are many — but the overall concept increasingly seems on track to be included in any sweeping health care overhaul that makes its way to Obama's desk.
The president's support for the requirement is recent — and conditional.
In a letter in early June, he told key Senate Democrats writing legislation that he was willing to consider their ideas for "shared responsibility," requiring people to have insurance with employers sharing in the cost. "But," he added, "I believe if we are going to make people responsible for owning health insurance, we must make health care affordable."
He went a smidgen further last week.
"I am confident in our ability to give people the ability to get insurance," he told doctors. Thus, he said: "I am open to a system where every American bears responsibility for owning health insurance, so long as we provide a hardship waiver for those who still can't afford it."
Obama also indicated that if he were giving a little, insurance companies eager for new customers must as well, and called on them to stop denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions. Said Obama: "The days of cherry-picking who to cover and who to deny — those days are over."
Even before the president took office in January, the insurance industry, which killed former President Bill Clinton's health care overhaul, indicated it was willing to accept that trade-off, making a mandate all the more likely.
Democrats have opposed such a mandate in previous years, fearing it would disadvantage the poor. In fact, it was Republicans, including 1996 presidential nominee and former Sen. Bob Dole, who pushed the idea in the 1990s.
These days, it's hard to find many opposed to a requirement.
Insurers like it: A mandate means a ready pool of new customers. Businesses back it: They say employers alone shouldn't shoulder the responsibility to pay for coverage. Hospitals cheer such a provision: They're tired of absorbing the costs of the uninsured seeking medical attention. Doctors support it: They want to stop providing services for free. And advocates for the poor are conditionally favorable: They want adequate subsidies and so-called hardship waivers.
This particular part infuriates me. It's the epitome of "corporatism". Clearly, the only entities that matter in this debate are large organized interest groups. And the fucking press just falls in line with this shit.
I heard a program on NPR last week, with a mouthpiece for the Massachusetts insurance slavery system br
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Quote:
Originally posted by SergeantX:
In the interest of clarity, this site seems to track things relatively accurately:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/
It's not quite as bad as some of us pretend, but it's hardly the sweeping change that was supposedly his mandate.
I beg to differ.
As an example, here is what they said about his promise of habeas corpus.
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Still, Obama is essentially saying that some prisoners will face neither courts nor military commissions of any sort, but will be imprisoned anyway. This is not a good sign for him keeping his promise on habeas corpus for enemy combatants. So we rate the promise Stalled.
Uh, hello?! Imprisoned anyway? That isn't a stalled habeas corpus. That is a broken promise, period. These folks are rating his broken promises with a great deal of wishful thinking.
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Oh, come on now, CTS - I'm sure the process is just stalled. And I've no doubt they'll get around to habeas in... oh... 40 to 50 years.
Yeah, for anyone who couldn't detect the sarcasm, I'm pretty damned disgusted with Obama's treatment of detainees. If you don't have evidence - hell, in this day and age, if you can't even MANUFACTURE some decent evidence - you need to damn well let the bastards go.
Mike
Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day...
Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
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Fair enough guys. I missed that one.
I think there are two aspects surrounding this issue that Obama didn't count on.
At this point I think he's mostly worried about the fallout of releasing prisoners who have been tortured. Are they going to promise not to tell anyone about it? No, they'll sing it from the rooftops and fill the tabloids (and the rare MSM media with the balls to publish it) with stories of US depravity.
There's also probably plenty of evidence against some of these guys. But substantiating it would reveal the deplorable lengths we went to to get it. They'd also likely spill the beans on spying that the could kick off nasty responsess, here and abroad. Obama want's neither on his watch.
Also, he's a lying piece of shit. But you know, "politician".
SergeantX
"It's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah"
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Quote:
Originally posted by SergeantX:
At this point I think he's mostly worried about the fallout of releasing prisoners who have been tortured. Are they going to promise not to tell anyone about it? No, they'll sing it from the rooftops and fill the tabloids (and the rare MSM media with the balls to publish it) with stories of US depravity.
It boils down to accountability, period. Everybody (except maybe Rap and folks like him) knows we did a bad thing in torturing folks. Now with any bad deed, the question is do we hide it or do we own up to it? This is elementary morality, the kind of lecture you give to an 8 year old who broke Mrs. Johnson's window.
The norm in our society is to tell the 8 year old to confess the deed to Mrs. Johnson, apologize deeply, and pay for the damage. It is the mature thing to do.
The message Obama is sending by hiding the torturers from accountability is this: Torture is justified and sanctioned, if not legal, in the USA. We will not denounce it, we will not apologize, and we certainly will not make things right.
What do you think harms our international image more? Allowing details of torture to go public with an apology for the former administration, or protecting the torturers and continuing to detained the tortured? Obama had a golden window to make things right, to let people know we are under new management, and he peed on it.
He did exactly what everyone thought McCain would have done.
Come to think of it, his health care reform is going the same direction too--doing what everyone thought McCain would have done.
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SergeantX
"It's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah"
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ROFL!!!!
I love it.
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