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.

“The One Percent Doctrine”…

is the name of a new book by Ron Suskind (amazon.com link here), which details the administrations actions and policies in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. A good insight into the book is given in a review by the Washington Post, which explains in detail what Suskind learned about the man George W. Bush called "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States," Abu Zubaydah. However, according to the review,

Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries "in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3" — a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail "what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said." Dan Coleman, then the FBI's top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality."

Hmm… so a man thought to be a major adversary in the War on Terror turns out to be mentally disturbed. Could it get worse? Only if one was to then torture this man and then use information obtained in the torture of an insane man in the run-up to war:

Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda's go-to guy for minor logistics — travel for wives and children and the like. That judgment was "echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President," Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States." And over the months to come, under White House and Justice Department direction, the CIA would make him its first test subject for harsh interrogation techniques.

…

Which brings us back to the unbalanced Abu Zubaydah. "I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied. Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?" Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target."

A quote from Suskind summarizes things nicely:

the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.

Gotta get this book and read it.

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?"

Hmm… he *REALLY* didn’t mean what he said…

Not only is the administration saying that the president really didn't mean what he said in the SOTU about reducing middle east oil imports by 75% by 2025 (see post below), but now, he really didn't mean what he said about seriously investigating alternative fuel sources.

Dubya: About what I said last night… I really didn’t mean it.

Just because Dubya says something in the State of the Union, doesn't mean he means it.

Actions Speak louder than words…

So, despite all of the reports, the SOTU last night was not focused on HSAs or health insurance. But how did our fearful leader do if you analyze what he did talk about? Think Progress has a number of great articles comparing what was said in the SOTU last night with the actual track record of the current administration.

1. Despite what was said, the White House has no desire to learn from the mistakes they committed during Hurricane Katrina and it's aftermath.
2. Despite what was said, poverty has increased under the current administration.
3. Despite what was said, the current administration has repeatedly betrayed the public trust.
4. Despite what was said, the current administration has undermined science education (and education in general).
5. Despite what was said, the current administration has done nothing to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and has been in favor of cuts for biofuels and cuts for renewable energy sources.
6. Despite what was said, HSAs will likely not lead to savings or reduce costs.
7. Despite what was said, the current administration has overseen sustained, record deficits but still continues to argue for tax cuts for the wealthiest among us. Further, those tax cuts do not help the economy and would be disastrous if made permanent.
8. Despite what was said, job growth under this administration has been the worst since WWII. Further, the jobs that have been created pay less, and if you subtract government-funded jobs, there have been zero net gains in jobs under the current administration.
9. Despite what was said, previous administrations have *not* violated the law like this one has.
10. Despite what was said, breaking the law would not have prevented 9/11.
11. Despite what was said, the current administration has been given failing grades in its attempts to improve homeland security.
12. Despite what was said, the current administration's handling of Iran has weakened our position.
13. Despite what was said, the current administration has failed to really support our troops.
14. Despite what was said, the administration's Iraq strategy is failing on all three fronts, the terrorist threat remains strong in Afghanistan, and terrorism worldwide has grown and intensified since the so-called war on terror began.

A few things to think about before the State of the Union Tonight…

Before our fearful leader gets up this evening and tries to use truthiness to obfuscate what the state of the union really is, I thought I'd link to a few relevant articles that deal in facts and truth rather than the administration's preferred truthiness.

U.S. Congresswoman Louise Slaughter has a fantastic diary at DailyKos.com regarding the truth about the current administrations track record when it comes to energy policy. The president may get up tonight and talk about "alternative energies," and when he does, make sure you know how little the administration has done to actually reduce our dependence on oil, and how much they've done to fatten the pockets of the Big Oil Companies.

TPMCafe has a primer on HSAs (Health Savings Accounts), which has been reported to be a big part of the SOTU tonight.

If tonight's speech contains references to the warrantless (and thus illegal) wiretapping the administration has done, here's a couple articles to read… First, what the country really thinks about illegal wiretaps, and second, why illegal wiretaps and surveillance should matter to everyone.

UPDATED: Steve Soto over at TheLeftCoaster.com has a great diary on the empty gestures sure to be made in tonight's SOTU.

Strange Bedfellows…

Only with this administration… Iran might be a member of the axis of evil, but when it comes to gay rights, Dubya and Iran are best buddies!

The Incompetence of our Fearful leader…

Read it if you have a chance.