How I feel about Obama’s Afghanistan Policy

Mike Lux over at Open Left nails it.

I sure hope Matt Taibbi is wrong…

Matt Taibbi, who has been one of the best writers out there writing about the crash of our economy and the resulting recession, has a pretty pessimistic post today about the health care reform situation.  And while I hope and pray that he is wrong, I fear that he is right… The monied interests entrenched against any serious reform have basically bought off all of the republicans and enough idiot democrats that I despair for any serious reform.

I wonder when we’ll really figure it out, and see that every other first world country achieves better health results for a fraction of the money we spend, and manage to cover EVERYONE.

Meet the new President… Same as the old?

I’m clearly a supporter of our new president, and I supported Barack Obama in the last general election (although I was an Edwards guy during the primary season), and he is definitely not the same as the old president.  However, today the Department of Justice continued the Bush administration practice of asserting the “state secrets” privilege in the case of 5 people who were subjected to the Bush-admin policy of “extraoardinary rendition,” in which they were snatched up by the CIA (in foreign countries), and sent to other foreign countries with no qualms about torture (i.e. Egypt, in one case) for the express purpose of being tortured. Glenn Greenwald has a devastating post on why this is an epic fail by the Obama administration. Here’s hoping that Obama’s DOJ reverses course on this ASAP.

UPDATE: Here’s more from Glenn. Further, John Cole at Balloon Juice has an opinion on why Obama might be asserting the state secrets privilege here:

The only justifiable decision here would be to revoke the Bush DoJ’s attempt to use State Secrets to block not only specific evidence but any hearing at all. However, doing so would almost certainly compel a wider investigation and likely criminal charges against former government officials. To avoid being seen as the President who put his last administration on trial Obama must resort to the exact same heinous abuses of power that made the Bush DoJ into a national disgrace.

I understand that point, but to me that spells out clearly why both Obama’s desire for “bipartisanship” and his repeated statements of not pursuing criminal action against the past administration are so wanting. If criminal acts were committed by the previous administration, they must be prosecuted… Above all, the rule of law must be elevated, and it must be made clear that no one is above the law. It must be apparent that law-breaking, by anyone, will be punished and will not be tolerated.  If it is swept under the rug, there is no real deterrent to future law-breakers.  The correct response (at least in my opinion) when Obama is confronted with the question of whether the previous administration will be prosecuted should be “Well, where there is evidence of wrongdoing, we will investigate the actions of the previous administration. If no laws were broken, no prosecutions will be undertaken.  However, if laws were broken and violated, then those people responsible will be prosecuted, as is the case when any laws are broken.  No one is above the law, PERIOD.”

Thirteen+ months later…

So it’s been a long time… and I need to get back in the swing of blogging. Since I’ve last blogged, I’ve seen (among other things):

• The birth of my second child
• a 13-3 record for my Dallas Cowboys, only to get nipped by the juggernaut that was the eventual Super Bowl Champ Giants in the playoffs
• My Cal Bears being about 90 minutes away from the #1 ranking in the land, only to see that slip away in the final seconds of a loss to Oregon State, followed by one of the all-time implosions (impressive even by Cal standards)
• Those same bears firing the men’s basketball coach and replacing him with a fantastic coach whose most recent college job was the head coach at Cal’s arch-rival, Stanfurd… and strangely enough, the firing came the day immediately after I sent a long, passionate letter to the athletic director indicating my displeasure with the direction of the basketball team (not that there was any cause-and-effect, but it was still a strange coincidence)
• My Angels losing twice in the postseason, both times to the Red Sox, and “blessed” with management that doesn’t seem to understand much about how to identify quality offensive players (outside of the trade for Mark Teixeira, who many people think will spurn the Angels for greener pastures)
• A very intense Democratic primary, with 3 high-quality candidates, in which my first choice dropped out the day after I decided to donate money to him, and then later was found to have been hiding an affair which would have crushed his presidential hopes had he won the nomination (and has effectively scuttled a future in politics for him… John Edwards, I think that you showed an unforgivable level of arrogance in hiding that affair)
• A mixed-race candidate win the presidential nomination of a major party
• A supposedly democratic congress caving to a president with record-high levels of unpopularity and granting him powers (and granting telecoms retroactive immunity) that a republican congress was unable to give him
• The banking deregulation chickens coming home to roost in the recent economic crisis, in which the current administration’s initial response was to give away, with no strings attached, $700 billion of taxpayer money to the very people who created the mess(!)

I’ve left out many things, of course, but those were some of the first things I thought when i thought about what I would have blogged about. My impetus for blogging again today was a quote I saw from David Sedaris in the New Yorker (h/t Balloon Juice):

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

I don’t know if anyone could have put it better (although I will admit that after reading the full article, I don’t know if it was intended with the same implications that I read into it)… However, I’ll just leave it at that and let you decide .

One final link…. A great post by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

A "Pre-1776 Mentality"

Senator Russ Feingold has a great diary over at dailykos.com, debunking our fearful leader's reasons for why it was necessary to violate FISA and the constitution… If, as our fearful leader says, 1978's FISA was "out-of-date", does it also say that the Constitution is out of date? Really? And if a law is out of date, shouldn't the law be changed, rather than violated?

As Senator Feingold asks, "Why does this President feel we must sacrifice our freedoms to fight terrorism?"