Moore and Olberman

Michael Moore and Olberman talk about Obama

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677//vp/38650001#38650001

Posted by A nony mouse

OBAMA: NOT LISTENING..AT LEAST TO US

...does anyone remember Obama saying he would 'listen'?
Turns out he meant, listen in on your emails and phone calls, but not actuall listen TO you.....
Even Michael Moore is disgusted.
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0811/michael-moore-dear-biggest-obama-supporters-suck-give-money/

Posted by A nony mouse

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

Published on Tuesday, August 3, 2010 by the Inter Press Service
Obama Drops 2009 Pledge to Withdraw Combat Troops from Iraq
by Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - Seventeen months after President Barack Obama pledged to withdraw all combat brigades from Iraq by Sept. 1, 2010, he quietly abandoned that pledge Monday, admitting implicitly that such combat brigades would remain until the end of 2011.
Herson Blanco carries a mock coffin draped in an American flag during a protest march calling for an immediate end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on March 2010 in Washington, DC. US public support for the Iraq and Afghan war and President Barack Obama's handing of the conflict has hit an all-time low after the leak of secret military documents, a poll showed Tuesday.(AFP/Brendan Hoffman)
Obama declared in a speech to disabled U.S. veterans in Atlanta that "America's combat mission in Iraq" would end by the end of August, to be replaced by a mission of "supporting and training Iraqi security forces".
That statement was in line with the pledge he had made on Feb. 27, 2009, when he said, "Let me say this as plainly as I can: by Aug. 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end."
In the sentence preceding that pledge, however, he had said, "I have chosen a timeline that will remove our combat brigades over the next 18 months." Obama said nothing in his speech Monday about withdrawing "combat brigades" or "combat troops" from Iraq until the end of 2011.
Even the concept of "ending the U.S. combat mission" may be highly misleading, much like the concept of "withdrawing U.S. combat brigades" was in 2009.
Under the administration's definition of the concept, combat operations will continue after August 2010, but will be defined as the secondary role of U.S. forces in Iraq. The primary role will be to "advise and assist" Iraqi forces.
An official who spoke with IPS on condition that his statements would be attributed to a "senior administration official" acknowledged that the 50,000 U.S. troops remaining in Iraq beyond the deadline will have the same combat capabilities as the combat brigades that have been withdrawn.
The official also acknowledged that the troops will engage in some combat but suggested that the combat would be "mostly" for defensive purposes.
That language implied that there might be circumstances in which U.S. forces would carry out offensive operations as well.
IPS has learned, in fact, that the question of what kind of combat U.S. troops might become involved in depends in part on the Iraqi government, which will still be able to request offensive military actions by U.S. troops if it feels it necessary.
Obama's jettisoning of one of his key campaign promises and of a high-profile pledge early in his administration without explicit acknowledgment highlights the way in which language on national security policy can be manipulated for political benefit with the acquiescence of the news media.
Obama's apparent pledge of withdrawal of combat troops by the Sept. 1 deadline in his Feb. 27, 2009 speech generated headlines across the commercial news media. That allowed the administration to satisfy its anti-war Democratic Party base on a pivotal national security policy issue.
At the same time, however, it allowed Obama to back away from his campaign promise on Iraq withdrawal, and to signal to those political and bureaucratic forces backing a long- term military presence in Iraq that he had no intention of pulling out all combat troops at least until the end of 2011.
He could do so because the news media were inclined to let the apparent Obama withdrawal pledge stand as the dominant narrative line, even though the evidence indicated it was a falsehood.
Only a few days after the Obama speech, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was more forthright about the policy. In an appearance on Meet the Press Mar. 1, 2009, Gates said the "transition force" remaining after Aug. 31, 2010 would have "a very different kind of mission", and that the units remaining in Iraq "will be characterized differently".
"They will be called advisory and assistance brigades," said Gates. "They won't be called combat brigades."
But "advisory and assistance brigades" were configured with the same combat capabilities as the "combat brigade teams" which had been the basic U.S. military unit of combat organization for six years, as IPS reported in March 20009.
Gates was thus signaling that the military solution to the problem of Obama's combat troop withdrawal pledge had been accepted by the White House.
That plan had been developed in late 2008 by Gen. David Petraeus, the CENTCOM chief, and Gen. Ray Odierno, the top commander in Iraq, who were determined to get Obama to abandon his pledge to withdraw all U.S. combat brigades from Iraq within 16 months of taking office.
They came up with the idea of "remissioning" - sticking a non-combat label on the combat brigade teams -- as a way for Obama to appear to be delivering on his campaign pledge while actually abandoning it.
The "remissioning" scheme was then presented to Obama by Gates and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, in Chicago on Dec. 15, 2008, according a report in the New York Times three days later.
It was hardly a secret that the Obama administration was using the "remissioning" ploy to get around the political problem created by his acceding to military demands to maintain combat troops in Iraq for nearly three more years.
Despite the fact that the disparity between Obama's public declaration and the reality of the policy was an obvious and major political story, however, the news media - including the New York Times, which had carried multiple stories about the military's "remissioning" scheme - failed to report on it.
The "senior administration official" told IPS that Obama is still "committed to withdrawal of all U.S. forces by the end of 2011". That is the withdrawal deadline in the U.S.-Iraq withdrawal agreement of November 2008.
But the same military and Pentagon officials who prevailed on Obama to back down on his withdrawal pledge also have pressed in the past for continued U.S. military presence in Iraq beyond 2011, regardless of the U.S. withdrawal agreement with the Iraqi government.
In November 2008, after Obama's election, Gen. Odierno was asked by Washington Post correspondent Tom Ricks "what the U.S. military presence would look like around 2014 or 2015". Odierno said he "would like to see a ...force probably around 30,000 or so, 35,000", which would still be carrying out combat operations.
Last February, Odierno requested that a combat brigade be stationed in Kirkuk to avoid an outbreak of war involving Kurdish and Iraqi forces vying for the region's oil resources - and that it be openly labeled as such - according to Ricks.
In light of the fact that Obama had already agreed to Odierno's "remissioning" dodge, the only reason for such a request would be to lay the groundwork for keeping a brigade there beyond the 2011 withdrawal deadline.
Obama brushed off the proposal, according to Ricks, but it was unclear whether the reason was that Iraqi political negotiations over a new government were still ongoing.
In July, Odierno suggested that a U.N. peacekeeping force might be needed in Kirkuk after 2011, along with a hint that a continued U.S. presence there might be requested by the Iraqi government.
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.

Posted by Chuck

Where is Obama?

The Appeal of Austerity Is Fading -- Where Is Obama?
This fall, Congress will either follow the conventional wisdom and prematurely cut government outlay before an economic recovery arrives, or it will increase public spending, put jobless Americans back to work, and reduce the deficit in a less painful fashion thanks to increasing economic tailwinds. The road that Congress takes depends on presidential leadership.
Until very recently, deficit hawks were hogging every available megaphone, claiming that deficits and debts were more ominous than protracted joblessness and recession. But you know that this foolish consensus is beginning to crack when political moderates such as columnist Matt Miller, budget guru Robert Greenstein, and Yale economist Robert Shiller take a different view.
Greenstein, who heads the influential Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), bows to nobody in his longstanding concern about unsustainably large deficits. CBPP's latest paper, by Greenstein's close colleague Paul Van de Water, takes issue with the premise articulated by Erskine Bowles, chair of Obama's own commission on budget reform, that the federal budget should be balanced at about 21 percent of GDP, roughly the postwar average.
But as Van de Water points out in his paper, released July 28:
Such recommendations, however, fail to take account of fundamental changes in society and government -- the aging of the population, substantial increases in health care costs, and new federal responsibilities in areas such as homeland security, education, and prescription drug coverage for seniors. These factors make the expenditure levels of several decades ago inapplicable today. A careful analysis of these factors indicates that it will not be possible to maintain federal expenditures at their average level for decades back to 1970 without making draconian cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and an array of other vital federal activities.
Matt Miller, a longtime budgetary moderate, made a similar argument in Wednesday's Washington Post, noting that spending was well above 21% of GDP under Reagan.
Miller added:
Reagan ran government at this size at a time when 76 million baby boomers weren't about to hit their rocking chairs. In 1988, 32 million retirees received Social Security and 33 million were on Medicare, our two biggest domestic programs. By 2020, about 48 million elderly Americans will receive Social Security, and 62 million Americans will be on Medicare (then the numbers really soar).... Health costs in the Reagan era were around 10 percent of GDP, while they're now 17 percent, headed toward 20. Obviously we need a national crusade to make health-care delivery more efficient. But until there's progress on this front, the 21 percent goal would be tantamount to Democrats agreeing that Uncle Sam should handle health care, pensions, defense and little else.
Obviously, government needs to spend more money, both to get the economy out of the deep jobs recession, and then to meet other commitments valued by citizens. The only way to accomplish these goals is not to get hung up on deficits in the short run -- to spend what it takes to put Americans back to work and then raise taxes on the wealthy so that we can have a more balanced fiscal picture -- but that could be social outlay of 25 percent or even 30 percent of GDP.
Another mainstream economist, Yale's Robert Shiller, author of the book that warned of the financial collapse, Irrational Exuberance, recently wrote in the New York Times that government needed to spend more money putting people back to work directly -- breaking an Obama administration taboo. Obama economic policy chief Larry Summers opposes Roosevelt-style direct jobs programs, and stimulus spending has been carefully directed to the states and the private sector. But Shiller wrote:
Why not use government policy to directly create jobs -- labor-intensive service jobs in fields like education, public health and safety, urban infrastructure maintenance, youth programs, elder care, conservation, arts and letters, and scientific research?
Would this be an effective use of resources? From the standpoint of economic theory, government expenditures in such areas often provide benefits that are not being produced by the market economy. Take New York subway stations, for example. Cleaning and painting them in a period of severe austerity can easily be neglected. Yet the long-term benefit to businesses from an appealing mass transit system is enormous.
Meanwhile, senior Republican economists as orthodox as former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and former Reagan budget director David Stockman are excoriating the Republican Party and leaders like Senator Mitch McConnell for wanting to extend the Bush tax cuts at a time when a long-term path to fiscal discipline needs to be a combined recovery program.
So here is the state of play:
Republicans are setting themselves up as the wildly irresponsible party by arguing that we can have both tax cutting and effective fiscal and economic policies, too. Sensible moderates are breaking with the orthodox view that we need smaller government.
This is another of those teachable moments.
But where is the high-profile Obama speech making clear that the top priority for now is putting America back to work, that deficit reduction will come when the economy is back on track -- and that the budget will not be balanced on the backs of those who depend on Social Security, Medicare, and other key social outlays?
The misguided Erskine Bowles, with his austerity program, did not drop into the budget debate from Mars. He was appointed by Barack Obama.
The New York Times reported Sunday that Obama has been meeting with vulnerable Democratic members of Congress, offering to do anything to help them -- including staying out of their districts. The front-page piece, by political reporter Jeff Zeleny, was headlined, "To Help Democrats in the Fall, Obama May Stay Away."
Uh, why does this not sound like a winning political strategy? Maybe if Obama got serious about putting Americans back to work and explaining the real connection between an economic recovery and deficit politics, incumbent Democrats -- and voters -- might welcome the president into their districts.
Robert Kuttner's new book is A Presidency in Peril.
He is co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior fellow at Demos.

Posted by Chuck

AMEN

..Published on Thursday, July 22, 2010 by TomDispatch.com
“Our American Heroes”: Why It’s Wrong to Equate Military Service with Heroism
by William Astore

When I was a kid in the 1970s, I loved reading accounts of American heroism from World War II.

I remember being riveted by a book about the staunch Marine defenders of Wake Island and inspired by John F. Kennedy's exploits saving the sailors he commanded on PT-109. Closer to home, I had an uncle -- like so many vets of that war, relatively silent on his own experiences -- who had been at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked on December 7, 1941, and then fought them in a brutal campaign on Guadalcanal, where he earned a Bronze Star. Such men seemed like heroes to me, so it came as something of a shock when, in 1980, I first heard Yoda's summary of war in The Empire Strikes Back. Luke Skywalker, if you remember, tells the wizened Jedi master that he seeks "a great warrior." "Wars not make one great," Yoda replies.
Okay, it was George Lucas talking, I suppose, but I was struck by the truth of that statement. Of course, my little epiphany didn't come just because of Yoda or Lucas. By my late teens, even as I was gearing up for a career in the military, I had already begun to wonder about the common ethos that linked heroism to military service and war. Certainly, military service (especially the life-and-death struggles of combat) provides an occasion for the exercise of heroism, but even then I instinctively knew that it didn't constitute heroism.

Ever since the events of 9/11, there's been an almost religious veneration of U.S. service members as "Our American Heroes" (as a well-intentioned sign puts it at my local post office). That a snappy uniform or even intense combat in far-off countries don't magically transform troops into heroes seems a simple point to make, but it's one worth making again and again, and not only to impressionable, military-worshipping teenagers.

Here, then, is what I mean by "hero": someone who behaves selflessly, usually at considerable personal risk and sacrifice, to comfort or empower others and to make the world a better place. Heroes, of course, come in all sizes, shapes, ages, and colors, most of them looking nothing like John Wayne or John Rambo or GI Joe (or Jane).

"Hero," sadly, is now used far too cavalierly. Sportscasters, for example, routinely refer to highly paid jocks who hit walk-off home runs or score game-winning touchdowns as heroes. Even though I come from a family of firefighters (and one police officer), the most heroic person I've ever known was neither a firefighter nor a cop nor a jock: She was my mother, a homemaker who raised five kids and endured without complaint the ravages of cancer in the 1970s, with its then crude chemotherapy regimen, its painful cobalt treatments, the collateral damage of loss of hair, vitality, and lucidity. In refusing to rail against her fate or to take her pain out on others, she set an example of selfless courage and heroism I'll never forget.

Hometown Heroes in Uniform

In local post offices, as well as on local city streets here in central Pennsylvania, I see many reminders that our troops are "hometown heroes." Official military photos of these young enlistees catch my eye, a few smiling, most looking into the camera with faces of grim resolve tinged with pride at having completed basic training. Once upon a time, as the military dean of students at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, I looked into such faces in the flesh, congratulating young service members for their effort and spirit.

I was proud of them then; I still am. But here's a fact I suspect our troops might be among the first to embrace: the act of joining the military does not make you a hero, nor does the act of serving in combat. Whether in the military or in civilian life, heroes are rare -- indeed, all-too-rare. Heck, that's the reason we celebrate them. They're the very best of us, which means they can't be all of us.

Still, even if elevating our troops to hero status has become something of a national mania, is there really any harm done? What's wrong with praising our troops to the rafters? What's wrong with adding them to our pantheon of heroes?

The short answer is: There's a good deal wrong, and a good deal of harm done, not so much to them as to us.

To wit:

*By making our military a league of heroes, we ensure that the brutalizing aspects and effects of war will be played down. In celebrating isolated heroic feats, we often forget that war is guaranteed to degrade humanity. "War," as writer and cultural historian Louis Menand noted, "is specially terrible not because it destroys human beings, who can be destroyed in plenty of other ways, but because it turns human beings into destroyers."

When we create a legion of heroes in our minds, we blind ourselves to evidence of their destructive, sometimes atrocious, behavior. Heroes, after all, don't commit atrocities. They don't, for instance, dig bullets out of pregnant women's bodies in an attempt to cover up deadly mistakes. They don't fire on a good Samaritan and his two children as he attempts to aid a grievously wounded civilian. Such atrocities and murderous blunders, so common to war's brutal chaos, produce cognitive dissonance in the minds of many Americans who simply can't imagine their "heroes" killing innocents. How much easier it is to see the acts of violence of our troops as necessary, admirable, even noble.

*By making our military generically heroic, we act to prolong our wars. By seeing war as essentially heroic theater, we esteem it even as we excuse it. Consider, for example, Germany during World War I, a subject I've studied and written about. Now, as then, and here, as there, the notion of war as heroic theater became common. And when that happens, war's worst excesses are conveniently softened on the "home front," which only contributes to more war-making. As the historian Robert Weldon Whalen noted of those German soldiers of nearly a century ago, "The young men in field-grey were, first of all, not just soldiers, but young heroes, Junge Helden. They fought in the heroes' zone, Heldenzone, and performed heroic deeds, Heldentaten. Wounded, they shed hero's blood, Heldenblut, and if they died, they suffered a hero's death, Heldentod, and were buried in a hero's grave, Heldengrab." The overuse of helden as a modifier to ennoble German militarism during World War I may prove grating to our ears today, but honestly, is it that much different from America's own celebration of our troops as young heroes (with all the attendant rites)?

*By insisting programmatically on American military heroism, we also lay a firm foundation for potentially dangerous post-war myths, especially of the blame-mongering "stab-in-the-back" variety. After all, once you have a league of heroes, how can you assign responsibility for costly, debilitating, perhaps even lost wars to them? It's just a fact that heroes don't lose. And if they're not responsible, and their brilliant, super-competent leaders (General "King David" Petraeus springs to mind) aren't responsible -- then it's only a small step to assigning blame to weak-willed civilians and so-called unpatriotic elements on the "home front," especially since we're not likely to credit our enemies for much. By definition, cravenly hiding among civilians as they do, our enemies are just about incapable of behaving heroically.

Of Young Heroes and Front Pigs

In rejecting the "heroic" label, don't think we'd be insulting our troops. Quite the opposite: we'd be making common cause with them, for most of our troops undoubtedly already reject the "hero" label, just as the young "heroes" of Germany did in 1917-18. With the typical sardonic humor of front-line soldiers, they preferred the less comforting, if far more realistically descriptive label (given their grim situation in the trenches) of "front pigs."

Whatever nationality they may be, troops at the front know the score. Even as our media and our culture seek to elevate our troops into the pantheon of demi-gods, our "front pigs" carry on, plying an ancient and brutal trade. Most simply want to survive and come home with their bodies, their minds, and their buddies intact. Part of the world's deadliest war machine, they are naturally concerned first about saving their own skins, and only secondarily worried about the lives of others. This is not beastliness. Nor is it heroism. It's simply a front pig's nature.

So, next time you talk to our soldiers, Marines, sailors, or airmen, do them (and your country) a small favor. Thank them for their service. Let them know that you appreciate them. Just don't call them heroes.

© 2010 William Astore
William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and TomDispatch regular, teaches History at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. He welcomes reader feedback at wjastore@gmail.com. Check out the latest TomCast audio interview in which Astore discusses heroism and the military by clicking here, or to download to your iPod, here.

Posted by Chuck

DO YOU STILL BELIEVE?

...for his people.
The bankers, health care insurance insustry, military industrial complex.
If you still believe in Obama,
I am willing to bet you believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.
As we run out of money here in the US, what does Obama do...?
Earn his Nobel prize?
Not exactly.
A Nony Mouse

"Concerns are rising as lawmakers consider a bill for $37 billion in emergency war funding for Afghanistan and Iraq. Although Congress overall still supports the U.S. mission and is unlikely to cut off funding, members may seek to attach conditions, such as requiring the administration to outline goals and fixed timetables to reduce the U.S. commitment in Afghanistan. Democratic and Republican leaders alike have said the lack of specific goals in the Obama plan makes it impossible to define success."
http://freedomsyndicate.com/fair0000/latimes00278.html

"THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH"

from A Nony Mouse

The Ministry of Truth
The Ministry of Truth was how George Orwell described the mechanism used by government to control information in his seminal novel 1984. A recent trip to Europe has convinced me that the governments of the world have been rocked by the power of the internet and are seeking to gain control of it so that they will have a virtual monopoly on information that the public is able to access. In Italy, Germany, and Britain the anonymous internet that most Americans are still familiar with is slowly being modified. If one goes into an internet café it is now legally required in most countries in the European Union to present a government issued form of identification. When I used an internet connection at a Venice hotel, my passport was demanded as a precondition and the inner page, containing all my personal information, was scanned and a copy made for the Ministry of the Interior -- which controls the police force. The copy is retained and linked to the transaction. For home computers, the IP address of the service used is similarly recorded for identification purposes. All records of each and every internet usage, to include credit information and keystrokes that register everything that is written or sent, is accessible to the government authorities on demand, not through the action of a court or an independent authority. That means that there is de facto no right to privacy and a government bureaucrat decides what can and cannot be "reviewed" by the authorities. Currently, the records are maintained for a period of six months but there is a drive to make the retention period even longer.

The excuses being given for the increasing government intervention into the internet are essentially two: first, that the anonymity of the internet has permitted criminal behavior, fraud, pornography, and libel. Second is the security argument, that managing the internet is an integral part of the "global war on terror" in that it is used by terrorists to plan their attacks requiring governments to control those who use it. The United States government takes the latter argument one step farther, claiming that the internet itself is a vulnerable "natural asset" that could be seized or damaged by terrorists and must be protected, making the case for a massive $100 billion program of cyberwarfare. Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) argues that "violent Islamist extremists" rely on the internet to communicate and recruit and he has introduced a bill in the Senate that will empower the president to "kill" the internet in case of a national emergency.

But all of the arguments for intervention are essentially themselves fraudulent and are in reality being exploited by those who favor big government and state control. The anonymity and low cost nature of the internet means that it can be used to express views that are unpopular or unconventional, which is its strength. It is sometimes used for criminal behavior because it is a mechanism, not because there is something intrinsic in it that makes it a choice of wrongdoers. Before it existed, fraud was carried out through the postal service and over the telephone. Pornography circulated freely by other means. As for the security argument, the tiny number of actual terrorists who use the internet do so because it is there and it is accessible. If it did not exist, they would find other ways to communicate, just as they did in pre-internet days. In fact, intelligence sources report that internet use by terrorists is rare because of persistent government monitoring of the websites.

The real reason for controlling the internet is to restrict access to information, something every government seeks to do. If the American Departments of Defense and Homeland Security and Senator Lieberman have their way, new cybersecurity laws will enable Obama's administration to take control of the internet in the event of a national crisis. How that national crisis might be defined would be up to the White House but there have been some precedents that suggest that the response would hardly be respectful of the Bill of Rights. Many countries already monitor and censor the internet on a regular basis, forbidding access to numerous sites that they consider to be subversive or immoral. During recent unrest, the governments of both Iran and China effectively shut down the internet by taking control of or blocking servers. Combined with switching off of cell phone transmitters, the steps proved effective in isolating dissidents. Could it happen here? Undoubtedly. Once the laws are in place a terrorist incident or something that could be plausibly described in those terms would be all that is needed to have government officials issue the order to bring the internet to a halt.

But the ability to control the internet technically is only part of the story. Laws are being passed that criminalize expressing one's views on the internet, including both "hate crime" legislation and broadly drafted laws that make it a crime to support what the government describes loosely as terrorism in any way shape or form. Regular extra-legal government intrusion in the private lives of citizens is already a reality, particularly in the so-called Western Democracies that have the necessary technology and tech-savvy manpower to tap phones and invade computers. In Europe, draconian anti-terrorism laws enable security agencies to monitor phone calls and e-mails, in many cases without any judicial oversight. In Britain, the monitoring includes access to detailed internet records that are available for inspection by no less that 653 government agencies, most of which have nothing whatsoever to do with security or intelligence, all without any judicial review. In the United States, the Pentagon recently sought an internet and news "instant response capability" which it dubbed the Office of Strategic Influence and it has also seeded a number of retired military analysts into the major news networks to provide a pro-government slant on the war news. The State Department is also in the game, tasking young officers to engage presumed radicals in debate on their websites while the growing use of national security letters means that private communications sent through the internet can be accessed by Federal law enforcement agencies. The Patriot Act created national security letter does not require judicial oversight. More than 35,000 were issued by the FBI last year and the recipient of a letter commits a felony if he or she reveals the receipt of the document. In a recent case involving an internet provider in Philadelphia, a national security letter demanded all details of internet messages sent on a certain date, to include account information on clients with social security numbers and credit card references.

The danger is real. Most Americans who are critical of the actions of their own government rely on the internet for information that is uncensored and often provocative, including sites like Campaign for Liberty. As this article was being written, a story broke reporting that Wordpress host Blogetery had been shut down by United States authorities along with all 73,000 Blogetery-hosted blogs. The company's ISP is claiming that it had to terminate Blogetery's account immediately after being ordered to do so by law enforcement officials "due to material hosted on the server." The extreme response implies a possible presumed terrorist connection, but it is important to note that no one was charged with any actual offense, revealing that the government can close down sites based only on suspicion. It is also likely only a matter of time before Obama's internet warfare teams surface either at the Defense Department or at State. Deliberately overloading and attacking the internet to damage its credibility, witness the numerous sites that have been "hacked" and have had to cease or restrict their activities. But the moves afoot to create a legal framework to completely shut the internet down and thereby control the "message" are far more dangerous. American citizens who are concerned about maintaining their few remaining liberties should sound the alarm and tell the politicians that we don't need more government abridgement of our First Amendment rights.
-Philip Giraldi

DISPERSANTS: BAD NEWS!

Obama find new ways to massively poison people and the environment
while taking our country down.

http://www.examiner.com/x-10438-Human-Rights-Examiner~y2010m7d20-Censored-Gulf-news-Stop-spraying-dispersants-Call-for-scientists-plublic-action

A Nony Mouse

WHAT PRIVACY??

The Ministry of Truth
Obama's War on the Internet

By Philip Giraldi

July 20, 2010 "Campaign for Liberty " -- The Ministry of Truth was how George Orwell described the mechanism used by government to control information in his seminal novel 1984. A recent trip to Europe has convinced me that the governments of the world have been rocked by the power of the internet and are seeking to gain control of it so that they will have a virtual monopoly on information that the public is able to access. In Italy, Germany, and Britain the anonymous internet that most Americans are still familiar with is slowly being modified. If one goes into an internet café it is now legally required in most countries in the European Union to present a government issued form of identification. When I used an internet connection at a Venice hotel, my passport was demanded as a precondition and the inner page, containing all my personal information, was scanned and a copy made for the Ministry of the Interior -- which controls the police force. The copy is retained and linked to the transaction. For home computers, the IP address of the service used is similarly recorded for identification purposes. All records of each and every internet usage, to include credit information and keystrokes that register everything that is written or sent, is accessible to the government authorities on demand, not through the action of a court or an independent authority. That means that there is de facto no right to privacy and a government bureaucrat decides what can and cannot be "reviewed" by the authorities. Currently, the records are maintained for a period of six months but there is a drive to make the retention period even longer.

The excuses being given for the increasing government intervention into the internet are essentially two: first, that the anonymity of the internet has permitted criminal behavior, fraud, pornography, and libel. Second is the security argument, that managing the internet is an integral part of the "global war on terror" in that it is used by terrorists to plan their attacks requiring governments to control those who use it. The United States government takes the latter argument one step farther, claiming that the internet itself is a vulnerable "natural asset" that could be seized or damaged by terrorists and must be protected, making the case for a massive $100 billion program of cyberwarfare. Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) argues that "violent Islamist extremists" rely on the internet to communicate and recruit and he has introduced a bill in the Senate that will empower the president to "kill" the internet in case of a national emergency.

But all of the arguments for intervention are essentially themselves fraudulent and are in reality being exploited by those who favor big government and state control. The anonymity and low cost nature of the internet means that it can be used to express views that are unpopular or unconventional, which is its strength. It is sometimes used for criminal behavior because it is a mechanism, not because there is something intrinsic in it that makes it a choice of wrongdoers. Before it existed, fraud was carried out through the postal service and over the telephone. Pornography circulated freely by other means. As for the security argument, the tiny number of actual terrorists who use the internet do so because it is there and it is accessible. If it did not exist, they would find other ways to communicate, just as they did in pre-internet days. In fact, intelligence sources report that internet use by terrorists is rare because of persistent government monitoring of the websites.

The real reason for controlling the internet is to restrict access to information, something every government seeks to do. If the American Departments of Defense and Homeland Security and Senator Lieberman have their way, new cybersecurity laws will enable Obama's administration to take control of the internet in the event of a national crisis. How that national crisis might be defined would be up to the White House but there have been some precedents that suggest that the response would hardly be respectful of the Bill of Rights. Many countries already monitor and censor the internet on a regular basis, forbidding access to numerous sites that they consider to be subversive or immoral. During recent unrest, the governments of both Iran and China effectively shut down the internet by taking control of or blocking servers. Combined with switching off of cell phone transmitters, the steps proved effective in isolating dissidents. Could it happen here? Undoubtedly. Once the laws are in place a terrorist incident or something that could be plausibly described in those terms would be all that is needed to have government officials issue the order to bring the internet to a halt.

But the ability to control the internet technically is only part of the story. Laws are being passed that criminalize expressing one's views on the internet, including both "hate crime" legislation and broadly drafted laws that make it a crime to support what the government describes loosely as terrorism in any way shape or form. Regular extra-legal government intrusion in the private lives of citizens is already a reality, particularly in the so-called Western Democracies that have the necessary technology and tech-savvy manpower to tap phones and invade computers. In Europe, draconian anti-terrorism laws enable security agencies to monitor phone calls and e-mails, in many cases without any judicial oversight. In Britain, the monitoring includes access to detailed internet records that are available for inspection by no less that 653 government agencies, most of which have nothing whatsoever to do with security or intelligence, all without any judicial review. In the United States, the Pentagon recently sought an internet and news "instant response capability" which it dubbed the Office of Strategic Influence and it has also seeded a number of retired military analysts into the major news networks to provide a pro-government slant on the war news. The State Department is also in the game, tasking young officers to engage presumed radicals in debate on their websites while the growing use of national security letters means that private communications sent through the internet can be accessed by Federal law enforcement agencies. The Patriot Act created national security letter does not require judicial oversight. More than 35,000 were issued by the FBI last year and the recipient of a letter commits a felony if he or she reveals the receipt of the document. In a recent case involving an internet provider in Philadelphia, a national security letter demanded all details of internet messages sent on a certain date, to include account information on clients with social security numbers and credit card references.

The danger is real. Most Americans who are critical of the actions of their own government rely on the internet for information that is uncensored and often provocative, including sites like Campaign for Liberty. As this article was being written, a story broke reporting that Wordpress host Blogetery had been shut down by United States authorities along with all 73,000 Blogetery-hosted blogs. The company's ISP is claiming that it had to terminate Blogetery's account immediately after being ordered to do so by law enforcement officials "due to material hosted on the server." The extreme response implies a possible presumed terrorist connection, but it is important to note that no one was charged with any actual offense, revealing that the government can close down sites based only on suspicion. It is also likely only a matter of time before Obama's internet warfare teams surface either at the Defense Department or at State. Deliberately overloading and attacking the internet to damage its credibility, witness the numerous sites that have been "hacked" and have had to cease or restrict their activities. But the moves afoot to create a legal framework to completely shut the internet down and thereby control the "message" are far more dangerous. American citizens who are concerned about maintaining their few remaining liberties should sound the alarm and tell the politicians that we don't need more government abridgement of our First Amendment rights.

Philip M. Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served 19 years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was Chief of Base in Barcelona from 1989 to 1992, was designated as senior Agency officer for support at the Olympic Games, and served as official liaison to the Spanish Security and Intelligence services. He has been designated by the General Accountability Office as an expert on the impact of illegal immigration on terrorism.

Phil Giraldi is now the Francis Walsingham Fellow at The American Conservative Defense Alliance and provides security consulting for a number of Fortune 500 corporate clients.

Posted by Chuck

Obama's future: "All used up."

The Fall of Obama
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

The man who seized the White House by fomenting a mood of irrational expectation is now facing the bitter price exacted by reality. The reality is that there can be no “good” American president. It’s an impossible hand to play. Obama is close to being finished.

The nation’s first black president promised change at the precise moment when no single man, even if endowed with the communicative powers of Franklin Roosevelt, the politic mastery of Lyndon Johnson, the brazen agility of Bill Clinton, could turn the tide that has been carrying America to disaster for 30 years.

This summer many Americans are frightened. Over 100,000 of them file for bankruptcy every month. Three million homeowners face foreclosure this year. Add them to the 2.8 million who were foreclosed in 2009, Obama’s first year in office. Nearly seven million have been without jobs in the last year for six months or longer. By the time you tot up the people who have given up looking for work and the people on part-time, the total is heading toward 20 million.

Fearful people are irrational. So are racists. Obama is the target of insane charges. A hefty percentage of Americans believe that he is a socialist – a charge as ludicrous as accusing the Archbishop of Canterbury of being a closet Druid. Obama reveres the capitalist system. He admires the apex predators of Wall Street who showered his campaign treasury with millions of dollars. The frightful catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico stemmed directly from the green light he and his Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, gave to BP.

It is not Obama’s fault that for 30 years America’s policy – under Reagan, both Bushes and Bill Clinton – has been to export jobs permanently to the Third World. The jobs that Americans now desperately seek are no longer here, in the homeland, and never will be. They’re in China, Taiwan, Vietnam, India, Indonesia.

No stimulus program, giving money to cement contractors to fix potholes along the federal interstate highway system, is going to bring those jobs back. Highly trained tool and die workers, the aristocrats of the manufacturing sector, are flipping hamburgers – at best – for $7.50 an hour because U.S. corporations sent their jobs to Guangzhou, with the approval of politicians flush with the money of the “free trade” lobby.

It is not Obama’s fault that across 30 years more and more money has floated up to the apex of the social pyramid till America is heading back to where it was in the 1880s, a nation of tramps and millionaires. It’s not his fault that every tax break, every regulation, every judicial decision tilts toward business and the rich. That was the neoliberal America conjured into malign vitality back in the mid 1970s.

But it is Obama’s fault that he did not understand this, that always, from the getgo, he flattered Americans with paeans to their greatness, without adequate warning of the political and corporate corruption destroying America and the resistance he would face if he really fought against the prevailing arrangements that were destroying America. He offered them a free and easy pass to a better future, and now they see that the promise was empty.

It’s Obama’s fault, too, that, as a communicator, he cannot rally and inspire the nation from its fears. From his earliest years he has schooled himself not to be excitable, not to be an angry black man who would be alarming to his white friends at Harvard and his later corporate patrons. Self-control was his passport to the guardians of the system, who were desperate to find a symbolic leader to restore America’s credibility in the world after the disasters of the Bush era. He is too cool.

So, now Americans in increasing numbers have lost confidence in him. For the first time in the polls negative assessments outnumber the positive. He no longer commands trust. His support is drifting down to 40 per cent. The straddle that allowed him to flatter corporate chieftains at the same time as blue-collar workers now seems like the most vapid opportunism. The casual campaign pledge to wipe out al-Quaida in Afghanistan is now being cashed out in a disastrous campaign viewed with dismay by a majority of Americans.

The polls portend disaster. It now looks as though the Republicans may well recapture not only the House but, conceivably, the Senate as well. The public mood is so contrarian that, even though polls show that voters think the Democrats may well have better solutions on the economy than Republicans, they will vote against incumbent Democrats in the midterm elections next fall. They just want to throw the bums out.

Obama has sought out Bill Clinton to advise him in this desperate hour. If Clinton is frank, he will remind Obama that his own hopes for a progressive first term were destroyed by the failure of his health reform in the spring of 1993. By August of that year, he was importing a Republican, David Gergen, to run the White House.

Obama had his window of opportunity last year, when he could have made jobs and financial reform his prime objectives. That’s what Americans hoped for. Mesmerized by economic advisers who were creatures of the banks, he instead plunged into the Sargasso Sea of “health reform,” wasted the better part of a year, and ended up with something that pleases no one.

What can save Obama now? It’s hard even to identify a straw he can grasp at. It’s awfully early in the game to say it, but, as Marlene Dietrich said to Orson Welles in Touch of Evil, “your future is all used up.”

Posted by Chuck