The Obama File

After writing the essay, Obama and Foreign Policy -- A Checklist I thought maybe I should keep track and see how he does, what he does.

• Related Pages
• Index

• 2010/08/30: Salon:GG: Lawsuit challenges Obama's power to kill citizens without due process
• 2010/08/31: UrukNet: Lawsuit Challenges Obama Administration's Targeted Assassination Policy
• 2010/08/30: uComics: (cartoon - Rall) The Solutionators
• 2010/08/29: NewsWeek: Obama’s Old Deal -- Why the 44th president is no FDR - and the economy is still in the doldrums
• 2010/08/28: Guardian(UK): Barack Obama says US troop withdrawl from Iraq keeps campaign pledge
• 2010/08/23: uComics: (cartoon - Rall) Visitors to the WhiteHouse...
• 2010/08/19: UrukNet: Obama's pledge to close down Guantanamo is 'not even close'
• 2010/08/16: UrukNet: Obama’s covert wars
• 2010/08/15: UrukNet: US Death Squads Roam The Globe
• 2010/08/14: Slate: (cartoon - McCoy) In the Wash
• 2010/08/12: CCurrents: Excuse The American Left Mr. Gibbs
• 2010/08/13: DVoice: Obama Demands Access to Internet Records, in Secret, and Without Court Review
• 2010/08/13: FDL: Accountabilitiness [Gibbs, Obama etc]
• 2010/08/13: BBC: Obama signs $600m US-Mexico border bill
• 2010/08/09: DVoice: "No Drama Obama" Needs a Strong Second Act
• 2010/08/09: Independent(UK): Caught in America's legal black hole
  Guantanamo still holds 176 detainees, and one of them is about to stand trial -- in a test of Barack Obama's resolve to embrace the rule of law
• 2010/08/05: Grist: Why won’t Team Obama save a clean-energy program from Fannie and Freddie?
• 2010/08/05: NYRB: ‘Why Has He Fallen Short?’ -- President Obama, Year One
• 2010/08/02: WiC: Daniel Ellsberg: Obama tougher on leaks than any other US president
• 2010/07/30: CCurrents: Mr. Obama, Why We Are Not That Impressed
• 2010/07/30: WiC: Obama administration in danger of establishing ‘new normal’ with worst Bush-era policies
• 2010/07/30: S&R: I voted for killing women and children
• 2010/07/30: AlterNet: How the Obama Admin Turned its Back on Democracy in Honduras (and Missed a Chance for a Real "Change" in Foreign Policy)
• 2010/07/29: NYT:PK: Curbing Your Enthusiasm
• 2010/07/29: RawStory: White House pushes for warrantless access to Internet records
• 2010/07/29: RawStory: ‘Worst Bush-era policies’ becoming the ‘new normal’: ACLU
• 2010/07/26: TPMCafe: Mr. Obama's Vietnam: The New Pentagon Papers
• 2010/07/27: Guardian(UK): Barack Obama enlists Afghan war leaks in support of policy switch
• 2010/07/23: FDL: Surveillance, Spying, and Racial Profiling in Obama Era
• 2010/07/23: WiC: The American way of war; how Bush’s wars became Obama’s
• 2010/07/20: CIP: Abject Political Cowardice
• 2010/07/16: WiC: How Netanyahu wrecked the peace process
  When Barack Obama said last week, "I believe Prime Minister Netanyahu wants peace," the president either revealed himself to be a much bigger fool than he is generally regarded, or, thought he must be addressing fools if he imagined his declaration would be taken seriously, or and most likely, assumed everyone reporting his words would know they were horse shit yet no one would be so rude as to point out the fact.
• 2010/07/16: CG&G: Obama Drama
• 2010/07/16: MKeiser: The Dangers of a Failed Presidency
• 2010/07/13: CCurrents: Has "Obamageddon" Signed The World's Death Warrant?
• 2010/07/12: CCurrents: Obama's Collapse
• 2010/07/10: ABC(Au):TDU: The Great Disappointment
• 2010/06/29: PRWatch: "Change" President Not Pressing for Change
• 2010/07/07: CCurrents: "Hope-And-Change," A Hoax
• 2010/07/04: uComics: (cartoon - Trudeau) July 4th at the WhiteHouse
• 2010/06/30: JWN: Obama 'wilfully' provoking Beijing?
• 2010/06/26: AlterNet: Oliver Stone: The US Has Launched Military Interventions and Political Coups Fifty-Five Times in Latin America
• 2010/06/21: Salon:GG: The Obama administration and its pundit-defenders
• 2010/06/22: Salon:GG: Follow-up on the weak, impotent, helpless presidency
• 2010/06/21: Salon:GG: The weak, helpless, impotent presidency
• 2010/06/23: AlterNet: Obama's Approach to Jobs Is Out of Touch with Reality
• 2010/06/20: NYT: The Agony of the Liberals
  They doubted him during the health care debate. They second-guessed his Afghanistan policy. They’ve fretted over his coziness with Wall Street and his comfort with executive power. But now is the summer of their discontent. From MSNBC to "The Daily Show," from The Huffington Post to the halls of Congress, movement liberals have had just about enough of Barack Obama. The catalyst was last week’s lackluster Oval Office address, but the real complaints run deeper.
• 2010/06/19: Guardian(UK): Obama's liberal critics find their voice
  We on the left have been in numb denial about President Obama's failures. But as the crises pile up we can't remain silent
• 2010/06/17: uComics: (cartoon - Auth) Obama - Campaignng vs. Governing
• 2010/06/17: DemNow: Jeremy Scahill on Blackwater Owner Erik Prince’s Rumored Move to UAE and Obama Admin’s Expansion of Special Forces Operations Abroad
• 2010/06/17: EmpireBurlesque: Sincerely Yours: Another Legal Triumph for the Obama-Yoo Administration
• 2010/06/14: WiC: Obama’s contempt for international standards
• 2010/06/15: HuffPo: Court Order Highlights U.S. Legal Distortions
  Last week, U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy, Jr. released a forceful 36-page opinion in the case of a Guantanamo detainee that would ordinarily be shocking. Sadly, such opinions are now so common that, except for one reporter and a few particularly alert bloggers, hardly anyone noticed.
  
  In his opinion, issued in May but publicly released just last Thursday, the Judge found that a young man from Yemen, seized at the age of 17, has been imprisoned in the United States detention center in Cuba for the past eight years without cause. Although five different times since his arrest officials reviewing his case said Odaini should be released, Obama administration lawyers argued against his petition for habeas corpus, insisting that because the Yemeni student had spent one night at the guest house of a fellow student's family, and because he had a medical visa rather than a student visa (he said his father had gotten him a medical visa because it was cheaper), the U.S. government can lawfully continue to imprison him.
  
  If that sounds bizarre, it's not, really. That's because the Obama administration interprets the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, or AUMF, passed by Congress in 2001, as providing the U.S. government the authority to detain indefinitely anyone, anywhere in the world who it suspects is affiliated with the Taliban, al Qaeda or associated forces. And if its position in the case of Mohamed Hassan Odaini is any guide, then it interprets that right very very broadly.
• 2010/06/13: Salon:JW: Protecting the Obama brand -- The president's recent political missteps raise questions about what he's doing for -or to- the Democratic Party
• 2010/06/10: CCurrents: Obama's Charade On Iran Sanctions
• 2010/06/11: NYT: Obama Takes a Hard Line Against Leaks to Press
  Hired in 2001 by the National Security Agency to help it catch up with the e-mail and cellphone revolution, Thomas A. Drake became convinced that the government’s eavesdroppers were squandering hundreds of millions of dollars on failed programs while ignoring a promising alternative. He took his concerns everywhere inside the secret world: to his bosses, to the agency’s inspector general, to the Defense Department’s inspector general and to the Congressional intelligence committees. But he felt his message was not getting through. So he contacted a reporter for The Baltimore Sun. Today, because of that decision, Mr. Drake, 53, a veteran intelligence bureaucrat who collected early computers, faces years in prison on 10 felony charges involving the mishandling of classified information and obstruction of justice. The indictment of Mr. Drake was the latest evidence that the Obama administration is proving more aggressive than the Bush administration in seeking to punish unauthorized leaks. In 17 months in office, President Obama has already outdone every previous president in pursuing leak prosecutions.
• 2010/06/11: TP:WR: Obama, Iraq, And ‘The Left’
• 2010/06/08: Salon:GG: A growing part of the Obama legacy
• 2010/06/11: NakedCapitalism: BP: Is Team Obama Pushing for a Full Externalities Precedent?
• 2010/06/10: TWTB: Stop blaming Rahm for Obama’s decisions
• 2010/06/09: ACLU: Obama Administration Might Hold Non-Afghan Detainees At Bagram Indefinitely After Prison Transfer -- Administration Should Not Re-Create Gitmo, Says ACLU
• 2010/06/10: RawStory: ACLU director says he’s ‘disgusted’ with Obama policies
  Anthony Romero, director of the American Civil Liberties Union, had some fighting words for President Barack Obama during a speech to liberal activists in Washington on Wednesday. Romero told the crowd at America's Future Now that he was "disgusted with this president," according to blogger Marcy Wheeler of Firedoglake, who was in attendance. "I'm going to start provocatively ... I'm disgusted with this president," Romero said. Politico's Josh Gerstein interviewed Romero following the speech and confirmed the quote. The ACLU chief emphasized he didn't intend it as a personal attack. "I'm not disgusted at President Obama personally," Romero remarked. "It's President Obama's policies on civil liberties and national security issues I'm disgusted by. It's not a personal attack."
• 2010/06/10: AlterNet: Neocons Have Disturbing Amounts of Influence Over Obama
• 2010/06/09: DVoice: Obama’s National Security Strategy (NSS): A New Direction or Continuity?
• 2010/06/09: DerSpiegel: Left-Wing Icon Daniel Ellsberg -- 'Obama Deceives the Public'
  Daniel Ellsberg, legendary leaker of the "Pentagon Papers" in 1971, still has a bone to pick with the White House. In an interview with Spiegel Online, the 79-year-old peace activist accuses President Obama of betraying his election promises -- in Iraq, in Afghanistan and on civil liberties.
• 2010/06/09: BBC: Obama says Iran sanctions send 'unmistakable message'
• 2010/06/08: RawStory: Obama quietly declines to nominate CIA watchdog
• 2010/06/04: EmpireBurlesque: War on the World: Obama's Surge in State Terror
• 2010/06/04: DVoice: What Is Obama Doing At Bagram? (Part One): Torture And The "Black Prison"
• 2010/06/05: DerSpiegel: Obama's Cairo Speech, One Year On -- 'A Perceived Lack of Follow-Up'
• 2010/06/04: WaPo: U.S. 'secret war' expands globally as Special Operations forces take larger role
  Beneath its commitment to soft-spoken diplomacy and beyond the combat zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama administration has significantly expanded a largely secret U.S. war against al-Qaeda and other radical groups, according to senior military and administration officials. Special Operations forces have grown both in number and budget, and are deployed in 75 countries, compared with about 60 at the beginning of last year. In addition to units that have spent years in the Philippines and Colombia, teams are operating in Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia.
• 2010/06/01: CCurrents: Attack On Freedom Flotilla- Come On Obama, Earn Your Nobel!
• 2010/05/31: CCurrents: The Gaza Flotilla -- Your Move, Mr. President
• 2010/06/02: AlterNet: From Wall Street To The Gulf Coast: When Will Obama Get In The Ring And Fight For Real Reforms?
• 2010/06/01: MondoWeiss: It’s up to Obama whether the siege of Gaza continues
• 2010/05/27: CCurrents: Obama’s Rudderless Foreign Policy Underscores America’s Waning Power
• 2010/05/29: MondoWeiss: When the establishment is at the guns, Obama will always retreat
• 2010/05/28: HuffPo: Obama's Missing Moral Narrative
• 2010/05/27: TD: Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, Obama's Flip-Flop Leadership Style
• 2010/05/27: NakedCapitalism: "Obama’s Flip-Flop Leadership Style"
• 2010/05/25: CCurrents: The End Of Habeas Corpus: This Is "Justice" In Obama’s America
• 2010/05/26: AlterNet: Obama the Aggressive, Militaristic Interventionist?
• 2010/05/26: AlterNet: How Obama's Election Drove the American Right Insane
• 2010/05/21: Salon:GG: Obama wins the right to detain people with no habeas review
  Few issues highlight Barack Obama's extreme hypocrisy the way that Bagram does.
• 2010/05/20: WiC: Obama -- still a slave of the lsrael lobby
• 2010/05/18: Salon:GG: Obama and the myth of the public opinion excuse
• 2010/05/17: DVoice: Obama’s Slippery Slope: Ginning-Up the "Terror" Threat, Shredding the Constitution
• 2010/05/18: TP:WR: While Gates Says Cut Pentagon Fat, Obama Lards Up Nuclear Weapons Budget
• 2010/05/14: CCurrents: Obama Myths And Realities
• 2010/05/07: CCurrents: Obama Widens Drone Attacks In Pakistan
• 2010/05/04: CCurrents: Prosecuting A Tortured Child: Obama’s Guantánamo Legacy
• 2010/05/06: DVoice: America’s Nuclear Intentions -- Obama's War Machine: Part 2
• 2010/05/05: DVoice: The Pentagon’s Game Plan -- Obama's War Machine: Part 1
• 2010/05/04: IanWelsh: What is Obama?
• 2010/04/28: PS: Obama the Centrist
• 2010/04/28: AlterNet: Chomsky: Obama's No Human Rights Crusader -- Just Look at How He Aids Israel's Atrocities
• 2010/04/14: TPR: Obama’s Record On Guantanamo Just As Shoddy As Bush’s
• 2010/04/20: JQuiggin: Hope
• 2010/04/16: ACLU: Obama Administration Officials Drafting Secret Indefinite Detention Policy -- Government Must Follow Rule Of Law, Says ACLU
  According to a report today in the Los Angeles Times, some Obama administration officials are in the process of drafting classified guidelines that would allow the government to indefinitely hold terrorism suspects outside of the United States without charge or trial. The policy, if adopted, would apply to future terrorism captures, and is reportedly still being debated within the administration with some officials voicing objections. The ACLU continues to call on the Obama administration to adhere to the rule of law in its handling of terrorism suspects.
• 2010/04/15: DVoice: The Democrats’ Mea Culpas
• 2010/04/16: NakedCapitalism: Is Obama Winning in DC and Losing the Country?
• 2010/04/15: TD: America and the Dictators -- From Ngo Dinh Diem to Hamid Karzai
• 2010/04/09: Salon:GG: The death of Dawn Johnsen's nomination
• 2010/04/12: TLC: Down is Down
  [...]
  the official (useless) unemployment rate has doubled to over an appalling 10% since Obama took office, and if global warming and shooting Afghans can be blown off as political abstracts in our confusing world keeping the lights on with food on the table cannot, Americans need jobs.
  The President’s approval hit a new low this morning with Gallup, perhaps indelibly marking the importance of employment to the American electorate...
• 2010/04/11: Guardian(UK): The 'Obama doctrine': kill, don't detain
  George Bush left a big problem in the shape of Guantánamo. The solution? Don't capture bad guys, assassinate by drone
• 2010/04/10: EconView: "Barack Obama is Not a Socialist"
  [...]
  "In the technical sense, in the economic definition, he is not a socialist," the Texas Republican [Ron Paul] said to a smattering of applause at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference. "He’s a corporatist," Paul quickly added, meaning the president takes "care of corporations and corporations take over and run the country."
• 2010/04/08: uComics: (cartoon - Rall) This Time We're Really Really Really Sure...
• 2010/04/07: ACLU: Obama Administration Reportedly Authorizes Targeted Killing Of U.S. Citizen
• 2010/04/08: Salon:GG: Confirmed: Obama authorizes assassination of U.S. citizen
• 2010/03/26: CCurrents: Have A Nice World War, Folks
  Here is news of the Third World War. The United States has invaded Africa. US troops have entered Somalia, extending their war front from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and now the Horn of Africa. In preparation for an attack on Iran, American missiles have been placed in four Persian Gulf states, and "bunker-buster" bombs are said to be arriving at the US base on the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. In Gaza, the sick and abandoned population, mostly children, is being entombed behind underground American-supplied walls in order to reinforce a criminal siege. In Latin America, the Obama administration has secured seven bases in Colombia, from which to wage a war of attrition against the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay. Meanwhile, the secretary of "defence" Robert Gates complains that "the general [European] public and the political class"are so opposed to war they are an "mpediment"to peace.
  
• 2010/03/23: DVoice: Obama the Cold Warrior?
• 2010/03/22: Guardian(UK): President Obama, war is bad romance
  Students taking part in an anti-war protest in Washington DC at the weekend felt jilted by the man they helped get elected
• 2010/03/20: AlterNet: Barack Obama, I Want a Divorce
• 2010/03/15: DemNow: Noam Chomsky on Obama’s Foreign Policy, His Own History of Activism, and the Importance of Speaking Out
• 2010/03/09: FAS:SS: Testing the No-New-Nuclear-Weapons Pledge
  One of the important tests of Obama Administration’s nuclear nonproliferation policy will be whether the long-delayed Nuclear Posture Review will approve new nuclear weapons.
• 2010/03/09: DVoice: Obama State Department: Venezuela Must Return to Free Market Capitalism
• 2010/03/04: CCurrents: Black President And American Imperialism
• 2010/03/02: CCurrents: Ralph Nader Was Right About Barack Obama
  We owe Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney an apology. They were right about Barack Obama. They were right about the corporate state. They had the courage of their convictions and they stood fast despite wholesale defections and ridicule by liberals and progressives.
  
  Obama lies as cravenly, if not as crudely, as George W. Bush. He promised us that the transfer of $12.8 trillion in taxpayer money to Wall Street would open up credit and lending to the average consumer. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), however, admitted last week that banks have reduced lending at the sharpest pace since 1942. As a senator, Obama promised he would filibuster amendments to the FISA Reform Act that retroactively made legal the wiretapping and monitoring of millions of American citizens without warrant; instead he supported passage of the loathsome legislation. He told us he would withdraw American troops from Iraq, close the detention facility at Guantánamo, end torture, restore civil liberties such as habeas corpus and create new jobs. None of this has happened.
  
  He is shoving a health care bill down our throats that would give hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to the private health insurance industry in the form of subsidies, and force millions of uninsured Americans to buy insurers’ defective products. These policies would come with ever-rising co-pays, deductibles and premiums and see most of the seriously ill left bankrupt and unable to afford medical care. Obama did nothing to halt the collapse of the Copenhagen climate conference, after promising meaningful environmental reform, and has left us at the mercy of corporations such as ExxonMobil. He empowers Israel’s brutal apartheid state. He has expanded the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where hundreds of civilians, including entire families, have been slaughtered by sophisticated weapons systems such as the Hellfire missile, which sucks the air out of victims’ lungs. And he is delivering war and death to Yemen, Somalia and perhaps Iran.
• 2010/03/02: AlterNet: Obama's Budget Revealed: Money for Wars and Weapons, While More Americans Face Joblessness and Hunger
• 2010/02/23: Guardian(UK): 'Pacification' of Europe is threat to security, US tells NATO
  Obama administration accused Europe's leaders of endangering peace because of reluctance to foot bill for adequate defence
• 2010/02/23: AlterNet: Who's Really In Control of the White House? Maybe Not Obama
• 2010/02/23: NakedCapitalism: Shiela Bair Rejected by Vogue Over Her Looks, but Geithner Gets the Nod
  Team Obama’s answer to all negative feedback from the real world is to treat it as a communication/PR problem. Repackage the product, put the "new, improved" message out on all available frequencies, and move on to the next "public is a chump" maneuver.
• 2010/02/20: POGGE: Not quite the change I was hoping for
• 2010/02/20: AlterNet: Obama's Pentagon Rebrands Iraq War, Rolls Out PR Offensive in Afghanistan
• 2010/02/13: CDreams: Obama's Chance to Be Next FDR or Reagan Fading Fast
• 2010/02/12: HuffPo: Obama vs. Obama
  The enigma that is Barack Obama grows day by day. Contradiction after contradiction, abrupt gear shifts, perpetual motion that never reaches a destination. 'Obscene' Wall Street bonuses suddenly transmute into well earned rewards for a good guy golfing buddy; the imperative to act boldly on the jobs crisis means placing it the callous hands of Max Baucus and Chuck Grassley of health care fame; the plotting of exit strategies from Afghanistan by 2011 becomes a 'long as we have to' occupation. All these contrapuntal reversals against a sound track of non-stop exhortation and a restless shuttling from one photo-op to another. Who is this guy, anyway?
• 2010/02/11: AlterNet: Is Obama Trying to Dismantle Roosevelt's New Deal?
• 2010/02/11: BBerg: Obama Says He’s ‘Fierce’ Free-Market Advocate, Rejects Critics
• 2010/02/05: TSun: Wars sending U.S. into ruin -- Obama the peace president is fighting battles his country cannot afford
  U.S. President Barack Obama calls the $3.8-trillion US budget he just sent to Congress a major step in restoring America’s economic health. In fact, it’s another potent fix given to a sick patient deeply addicted to the dangerous drug -- debt.
  More empires have fallen because of reckless finances than invasion.
  [...]
  If Obama really were serious about restoring America’s economic health, he would demand military spending be slashed, quickly end the Iraq and Afghan wars and break up the nation’s giant Frankenbanks.
• 2010/02/09: NakedCapitalism: George Washington: "More Empires Have Fallen Because Of Reckless Finances Than Invasion"
• 2010/02/06: CCurrents: Please, Mr. President, Stop Talking Nonsense
• 2010/02/05: uComics: (cartoon - Rall) Obama Launches A New Tactic...
• 2010/02/03: CCurrents: Obama Provokes War Against China And Iran
• 2010/02/01: DVoice: Court Tosses NSA Spy Suits, Sides with White House Over Illegal Surveillance
• 2010/01/26: NakedCapitalism: Edward Harrison: Obama’s new triangulation strategy
• 2010/01/24: Guardian(UK): Obama's accidental ambition
  In place of Bush-era democratisation, Obama has found himself trying to secure the world's ungoverned spaces
• 2010/01/23: DerSpiegel: Obama's Year of Crises -- Mr. Change Needs a Reboot
• 2010/01/21: GP: Is Obama's foreign policy "amazingly lackluster" or "fairly courageous"?
• 2010/01/19: CCurrents: Your Wall Of Shame Is Complete, Mr. President
• 2010/01/19: ACLU: ACLU Issues Report On Obama Administration's Civil Liberties Record -- First Year Saw Civil Rights Advances And End Of Torture But Continuation Of Overbroad Domestic Surveillance Practices
• 2010/01/18: HNN: U.S. Military Escalation in Afghanistan: A Response to President Obama
• 2010/01/15: AlterNet: Do Obama and Geithner Have the Same Flaw: Accommodation Instead of Moral Action?
• 2010/01/14: FP: The Carter Syndrome
  Barack Obama might yet revolutionize America's foreign policy. But if he can't reconcile his inner Thomas Jefferson with his inner Woodrow Wilson, the 44th president could end up like No. 39.
• 2010/01/09: AlterNet: Obama's Election Struck a Huge Blow Against Racism, But He's Kept the US War Machine "Set on Kill"
• 2010/01/04: CCurrents: Obama's War On Yemen
• 2010/01/03: CCurrents: Obama: When Empire + Militarism Equals Peace?
• 2010/01/06: DemNow: "Obama Has Kept the Machine Set on Kill" -- Journalist and Activist Allan Nairn Reviews Obama’s First Year in Office
• 2010/01/02: CDreams: Obama’s Royal Scam and The Iron Fist Of Rahm
• 2010/01/03: CDreams: The Perils of Passivity
• 2010/01/04: AlterNet: US Is Increasing Its Hegemony As the "Global War Gladiator" Under Obama
• 2010/01/04: RA: So who is Barack Obama?
• 2009/12/28: IOC: Does the left want to Impeach Obama too?
• 2010/01/01: BBC: Obama lauds CIA after bomb strike
• 2009/12/20: TPMCafe: How Obama Foreign Policy (Is Supposed To) Work
• 2009/12/24: AlterNet: I Volunteered For Obama in 2008, But His Support of Landmines Is the Last Straw
• 2009/12/23: LiberalCatnip: Obama Lies; Heads Explode; The Spin Begins
• 2009/12/23: OpenDem: Barack Obama, the fallen messiah
  The "salvation narrative" projected onto Barack Obama created false expectations on the left and invited his demonisation by the right
• 2009/12/23: AlterNet: Is Obama's Problem That He Just Doesn't Want to Deal with Conflict?
• 2009/12/20: HuffPo: Leadership, Obama Style, and the Looming Losses in 2010: Pretty Speeches, Compromised Values, and the Quest for the Lowest Common Denominator
• 2009/12/20: NYT:PK: The WYSIWYG president
  There’s a lot of dismay/rage on the left over Obama, a number of cries that he isn’t the man progressives thought they were voting for. But that says more about the complainers than it does about Obama himself. If you actually paid attention to the substance of what he was saying during the primary, you realized that
  (a) There wasn’t a lot of difference among the major Democratic contenders
  (b) To the extent that there was a difference, Obama was the least progressive
  Now it’s true that many progressives were ardent Obama supporters, with their ardency mixed in with a fair bit of demonization of Hillary Clinton. And maybe they were right -- but not on policy grounds. (I still remember people angrily telling me that if Hillary got in, she’d fill her economics team with Rubinites).
  So what you’re getting is what you should have seen.
• 2009/12/16: CCurrents: The Audacity Of Imperial Hubris: Obama In Oslo
• 2009/12/16: CCurrents: President Obama Has Lost His 2012 Bid For Re-election
• 2009/12/17: BRitholtz: Why Obama’s Poll Numbers Are Plummetting
• 2009/12/14: NakedCapitalism: Yes, Obama is Getting Serious About Banks. He is Now Calling Them Bad Names!
  Are we supposed to take this posturing seriously? The media is now peddling more and more banker-favoring narratives with a straight face.
• 2009/12/12: CCurrents: 'Just War' Is Just Words by Ralph Nader
• 2009/12/10: CCurrents: Yeswecanistan
• 2009/12/11: AlterNet: Dear Barack, Spare Me Your E-Mails
• 2009/12/09: RS: Obama's Big Sellout
  The president has packed his economic team with Wall Street insiders intent on turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway
• 2009/12/11: NakedCapitalism: Edward Harrison: Matt Taibbi: Obama’s Big Sellout
• 2009/12/10: AlterNet: To the Hope and Change Crowd -- How's It Working Out for You?
• 2009/12/06: CCurrents: Obama -- Israel’s Puppet
• 2009/12/09: AlterNet: Obama Far Outdoes Bush in Escalating War -- The Numbers Will Surprise You
• 2009/12/03: TPR: Af-Pak War Racket: The Obama Illusion Comes Crashing Down
• 2009/12/07: TPR: Change And The Chosen Path
• 2009/12/06: TSun: Preaching peace, flexing muscle -- America's 'surge' may only expand, intensify and prolong the Afghan conflict
• 2009/12/05: AntiWar: O=W -- "O=W" is a bumper sticker beginning to show up on liberals’ cars...
• 2009/12/01: PoN: A Deadly Liar and Manipulator
• 2009/12/03: NYRB: Afghanistan: The Betrayal
  I did not think he would lose me so soon -- sooner than Bill Clinton did. Like many people, I was deeply invested in the success of our first African-American president. I had written op-ed pieces and articles to support him in The New York Times and The New York Review of Books. My wife and I had maxed out in donations for him. Our children had been ardent for his cause. Others I respect have given up on him before now. I can see why. His backtracking on the treatment of torture (and photographs of torture), his hesitations to give up on rendition, on detentions, on military commissions, and on signing statements, are disheartening continuations of George W. Bush’s heritage. But I kept hoping that he was using these concessions to buy leeway for his most important position, for the ground on which his presidential bid was predicated. There was only one thing that brought him to the attention of the nation as a future president. It was opposition to the Iraq war. None of his serious rivals for the Democratic nomination had that credential—not Hillary Clinton, not Joseph Biden, not John Edwards. It set him apart. He put in clarion terms the truth about that war—that it was a dumb war, that it went after an enemy where he was not hiding, that it had no indigenous base of support, that it had no sensible goal and no foreseeable cutoff point. He said that he would not oppose war in general, but dumb wars. On that basis, we went for him. And now he betrays us.
• 2009/12/01: Salon:GG: Obama's exceedingly familiar justifications for escalation
• 2009/12/02: Guardian(UK): Afghanistan is now Obama's war
  By upping the stakes and sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, Obama has donned the mantle of wartime president
• 2009/12/01: CNN: Will Obama's war become his Vietnam?
• 2009/11/30: BBC: Obama orders Afghan troop surge
  US President Barack Obama has issued new orders for the US military in Afghanistan after deciding how many more troops to send, officials say. Mr Obama told senior military leaders about his long-awaited decision on troop numbers on Sunday night, a White House spokesman said.
• 2009/11/25: DemNow: Ahead of Key Global Conference, U.S. Announces Continued Rejection of Land Mine Ban
• 2009/11/26: AlterNet: Is Obama Following in the Footsteps of Bill Clinton?
• 2009/11/26: AlterNet: Citing "National Defense Needs," Obama Administration Says it Won't Sign Ban on Land Mines
• 2009/11/24: AntiWar: Obama Quietly Backs PATRIOT Act Provisions
  With the health care debate preoccupying the mainstream media, it has gone virtually unreported that the Barack Obama administration is quietly supporting renewal of provisions of the George W. Bush-era USA PATRIOT Act that civil libertarians say infringe on basic freedoms. And it is reportedly doing so over the objections of some prominent Democrats.
• 2009/11/23: DerSpiegel: US Foreign Policy -- Obama's Nice Guy Act Gets Him Nowhere on the World Stage
  When he entered office, US President Barack Obama promised to inject US foreign policy with a new tone of respect and diplomacy. His recent trip to Asia, however, showed that it's not working. A shift to Bush-style bluntness may be coming.
• 2009/11/21: Salon:GG: Rule-of-law extremism engulfs primitive Eastern Europe
• 2009/11/19: Salon:GG: The administration guts its own argument for 9/11 trials
• 2009/11/18: BBC: Obama admits delay on Guantanamo
  US President Barack Obama has for the first time admitted that the US will miss the January 2010 deadline he set for closing the Guantanamo Bay prison. Mr Obama made the admission in interviews with US TV networks during his tour of Asia. He said he was "not disappointed" that the deadline had slipped, saying he "knew this was going to be hard". Officials are trying to determine what to do with some 215 detainees still held at the US prison in Cuba.
• 2009/11/17: TP:WR: Scoring Obama’s Foreign Policy Record
• 2009/11/16: MondoWeiss: Clinton to Palestinians: Settlement policy has changed. Get over it
  In what should go down as one of the most humiliating episodes in the history of Israel-US relations, former President Bill Clinton told the Saban Forum in Jerusalem on Sunday that Palestinians must "accept America’s modification of its anti-settlement policy and return to the bargaining table," according to a report in the Jerusalem Post which the US media apparently ignored It was the last nail in the coffin of Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s earlier demand for an Israeli settlement freeze.
• 2009/11/15: MondoWeiss: Slaves of the peace process
  Despite all its efforts to retract the moment, the Obama Administration’s embrace of Netanyahu 2 weeks ago for "unprecedented" progress was hugely-clarifying to many of us. A shattering moment, it has liberated people to think about the failed peace process in new ways. It has made me vow not to be trusting about officials’ statements in the light of real conditions.
• 2009/11/14: CBC: Gates blocks detainee abuse photos
  Defence Secretary Robert Gates has blocked the public release of any more pictures of foreign detainees abused by their U.S. captors, saying their release would endanger American soldiers. The Obama administration filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court late Friday saying that Gates has invoked new powers blocking the release of the photos. The American Civil Liberties Union had sued for the release of 21 colour photographs showing prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq being abused by Americans. Federal courts had rejected the government's arguments to block their release, so Congress gave Gates new powers to keep them private under a law signed by President Barack Obama last month.
• 2009/11/14: uComics: (cartoon - Rall) Apologism
• 2009/11/11: AntiWar: A Year With Obama -- and US Foreign Relations Have Only Worsened
• 2009/11/09: NotR: How Venezuela sees Obama
• 2009/11/07: AlterNet: Obama's First Year: It Ain't No Crystal Staircase
• 2009/11/06: BSD: TigerHawk's right - Obama should apologize to conservatives about the state secrets privilege
• 2009/11/02: EFF: As Congress Considers State Secrets Reform, Obama Admin Tries to Shut Down Yet Another Warrantless Wiretapping Lawsuit
• 2009/10/30: TNA: Barack Obama Continues Bush Administration Policy Regarding Posse Comitatus
• 2009/11/04: CCurrents: Noam Chomsky: No Change In US 'Mafia Principle'
  As civilised people across the world breathed a sigh of relief to see the back of former US president George W. Bush, top American intellectual Noam Chomsky warned against assuming or expecting significant changes in the basis of Washington's foreign policy under President Barack Obama. During two lectures organised by the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, Chomsky cited numerous examples of the driving doctrines behind US foreign policy since the end of World War II. "As Obama came into office, Condoleezza Rice predicted that he would follow the policies of Bush's second term, and that is pretty much what happened, apart from a different rhetorical style," said Chomsky.
• 2009/11/02: CCurrents: Obama Resuming G.W.Bush's "Extraordinary Renditions"
• 2009/11/03: NYRB: One-Term President?
• 2009/11/02: TPMM: Obama Adopts Bush's State Secrets Position -- And Exact Language -- In NSA Spying Case
• 2009/10/31: Google:AP: Obama administration: Toss wiretap lawsuit
  Attorney General Eric Holder says a lawsuit in San Francisco over warrantless wiretapping threatens to expose ongoing intelligence work and must be thrown out. In making the argument, the Obama administration agreed with the Bush administration's position on the case but insists it came to the decision differently. A civil liberties group criticized the move Friday as a retreat from promises President Barack Obama made as a candidate. Holder's effort to stop the lawsuit marks the first time the administration has tried to invoke the state secrets privilege under a new policy it launched last month designed to make such a legal argument more difficult.
• 2009/11/01: Guardian(UK): A year on, has Barack Obama met the hopes of the world?
• 2009/10/29: RawStory: Obama signs law blocking release of torture photos
• 2009/10/31: AlterNet: Why Obama's Grand Schemes for Iran Are Doomed to Fail
• 2009/10/29: Yahoo: Obama's real death panels
  Shortly after 9/11, George W. Bush secretly signed two executive orders. Both violated basic constitutional protections as well as U.S. obligations under international treaties, yet both carried the force of law. They still do. The first order grants the president (and other officials, including the secretary of defense, the secretary of homeland security and presumably certain postal clerks) the right to declare anyone--including an American citizen--an "unlawful enemy combatant." A person so declared has no redress, no way to appeal, no ability to challenge that designation. Once a person has been named an enemy combatant, according to the Bush Administration--and now to the Obama Administration--he has no rights. He can be held without charges forever, tortured, you name it--well, actually, the president or the secretary of defense names it. In the second covert executive order, Bush authorized the CIA to target and assassinate said "enemy combatants"--again, including American citizens.
• 2009/10/19: HuffPo: In the Name of Hope: Perpetual War and the Nobel Peace Prize
• 2009/10/22: OpposingViews: Obama Every Bit as Bad as Bush/Cheney on Patriot Act
• 2009/10/24: AlterNet: Presidential Power Has Gone Way Too Far
• 2009/10/24: AlterNet: Obama Is Keeping Bush's Worst "War on Terror" Policies Firmly In Place
• 2009/08/14: CWM: The War We Can’t Win -- Afghanistan & the Limits of American Power by Andrew J. Bacevich
• 2009/10/19: Nation: 'War on Terror' II
  We know the rules by now, the strange conventions and stilted Kabuki scripts that govern our cartoon facsimile of a national security debate. The Obama administration makes vague, reassuring noises about constraining executive power and protecting civil liberties, but then merrily adopts whatever appalling policy George W. Bush put in place. Conservatives hit the panic button on the right-wing noise machine anyway, keeping the delicate ecosystem in balance by creating the false impression that something has changed. We've watched the formula play out with Guantánamo Bay, torture prosecutions and the invocation of "state secrets." We appear to be on the verge of doing the same with national security surveillance.
• 2009/10/15: CSM: Obama's Guantánamo, counterterror policies similar to Bush's?
  Afghanistan's Bagram is becoming the new Guantánamo, one legal scholar said at a gathering of the American Constitution Society.
• 2009/10/17: TPR: Presidential Power Grows: Will You Love Every Future President?
  Presidential power has been on a pathway of expansion beyond what the Constitution outlined, and what a government of, by, and for the people requires, since George Washington was president. That expansion, which hit the highway after World War II, got a turbo boost during the co-presidency of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Some of the new powers that those two stole from Congress, the courts, the states, and us the people are being abused less severely in this new age of Obama; others, more so; but far more crucially, in a pattern followed by recent presidencies, all are being maintained, if not expanded, and thus more firmly cemented into place for future presidents to use. Wherever you fall on the political spectrum, you are likely to strongly oppose some major decisions of some future presidents. So it shouldn’t be hard to envision some pretty undesirable consequences that might flow from presidential power that increasingly approaches the absolute.
• 2009/10/16: CCurrents: War Is Peace, Ignorance Is Strength [Pilger on Obama]
• 2009/10/13: P&S: Can the Lot of Them
  How is it that a United States president who just won the Nobel Peace Prize is having such a tough time telling one of his generals that he doesn’t want to escalate a war that doesn’t enhance America’s national security?
• 2009/10/10: CCurrents: Warmonger Wins Peace Prize
• 2009/10/10: NakedCapitalism: Obama Nobel Peace Prize Smackdown Wrap
• 2009/10/07: CCurrents: It’s Time We Got Over Barack Obama
• 2009/10/02: SST: Not their kind of town, Chicago!
• 2009/10/02: WaTimes: Obama agrees to keep Israel's nukes secret
  President Obama has reaffirmed a 4-decade-old secret understanding that has allowed Israel to keep a nuclear arsenal without opening it to international inspections, three officials familiar with the understanding said. The officials, who spoke on the condition that they not be named because they were discussing private conversations, said Mr. Obama pledged to maintain the agreement when he first hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House in May. Under the understanding, the U.S. has not pressured Israel to disclose its nuclear weapons or to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which could require Israel to give up its estimated several hundred nuclear bombs.
• 2009/10/01: MondoWeiss: Mr. Yes we can says, No we can’t
• 2009/09/30: ACLU: FBI Continues To Use Gag Order To Suppress Key Information About National Security Letters -- Newly Public Documents Underline Need For NSL Reform As Congress Prepares For Patriot Act Markup On Thursday
• 2009/10/01: AlterNet: According to Obama Global Capitalism Is an 'Abstraction,' Not Worth Protesting
• 2009/09/30: EmpireBurlesque: Obama Fires Diplomat for Urging Fraud Probe in Afghan Vote
• 2009/09/28: AlterNet: There Was Nice Talk About 'Change' and 'Hope' But the Money Party Won Again
• 2009/09/24: EFF: Obama’s Disappointing State Secrets Procedures
• 2009/09/22: DemNow: Obama Administration Seeks Renewal of Three Key Parts of PATRIOT Act
• 2009/09/24: NakedCapitalism: EdwardHarrison: Obama caves to pressure on consumer financial protection
• 2009/09/23: Guardian(UK): Barack Obama's UN general assembly speech in full
• 2009/09/17: RawStory: US to scrap plans for missile shield in Europe
• 2009/09/17: BBC: Obama shelves Europe missile plan
  US President Barack Obama has shelved plans for controversial bases in Poland and the Czech Republic in a major overhaul of missile defence in Europe. The bases are to be scrapped after a review of the threat from Iran. Mr Obama said there would be a "proven, cost-effective" system using land- and sea-based interceptors against Iran's short- and medium-range missile threat. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has welcomed the US decision, calling it a "responsible move". Russia had always seen the shield as a threat. However, there has been criticism of the decision in conservative circles in the US.
• 2009/09/15: ACLU: Obama Administration Seeks To Deny Bagram Prisoners Access To U.S. Courts -- Detainees In Afghan Prison Should Be Afforded Legal Right To Challenge Detention, Says ACLU
• 2009/09/15: FTimes:WB: Expect little [of Obama] and you may yet be disappointed
• 2009/09/13: TStar: Obama not much better than Bush on rights
  Barack Obama won well-deserved applause for banning torture and promising to shut down Guantanamo Bay. But his overall record and that of the Democratic-controlled Congress in restoring the rule of law and human rights leave a lot to be desired.
• 2009/09/10: ProPublica: Bush and Obama: A Counterterrorism Comparison
• 2009/09/11: AlterNet: Obama's Quagmire Looks a Lot like Vietnam
• 2009/09/07: FTimes: President procrastinator
• 2009/09/07: AlterNet: Bill Moyers: Mr. President, We Need a Fighter to Take on the Deranged Right-Wing
• 2009/09/05: JWN: "The White House regrets... "
  The statement the White House issued yesterday in response to Netanyahu's announcement that he would unleash the construction of hundreds of additional settler housing units before he considered submitting to any possible freeze on additional construction was weak and pathetic...
• 2009/09/04: MondoWeiss: Defied by Netanyahu again, Obama expresses... appreciation!?
• 2009/09/02: CDreams: Bush's Third Term? You're Living It
• 2009/09/04: AlterNet: Progressives to Gather at Tides Momentum Conference with Frustration with Obama on Their Minds
• 2009/09/03: ScienceInsider: Obama Keeps Head of Nuclear Weapons Program
  The Obama Administration announced today that it will retain Thomas D'Agostino as head of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex. The decision was met with dismay by many in the arms control and non-proliferation community, who fear that it will be harder to implement the soaring vision for a nuclear-free future that President Obama has articulated while retaining key figures from a Bush Administration that supported expansion of the country's nuclear arsenal.
• 2009/09/01: Tomgram: David Swanson, The More Things Change -- Bush's Third Term? You're Living It
• 2009/09/02: EmpireBurlesque: The 16th Term: Obama's New Betrayals are Old, Old Hat
• 2009/09/03: AlterNet: Obama Is Leading the U.S. Into a Hellish Quagmire
  America now has more military personnel in Afghanistan than the Red Army had at the peak of the Soviet invasion and occupation of that country. According to a Congressional Research Service report, as of March of this year, the U.S. had 52,000 uniformed personnel and another 68,000 contractors in Afghanistan -- a number that has likely grown given the blank check President Obama has written for what's now being called "Obama's War."
• 2009/09/02: AlterNet: Obama Has Betrayed the Progressives Who Got Him Elected -- So Now What Do We Do?
• 2009/09/01: Guardian(UK): Obama loses the left
  It's not just gun-toting rightwingers who distrust Obama. US progressives have lost faith in his commitment to change
• 2009/08/28: Rabble: Noam Chomsky in Venezuela: 'A better world is being created'
  U.S. author, dissident intellectual, and Professor of Linguistics at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology Noam Chomsky met for the first time with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in Caracas and analyzed hemispheric politics during a nationally televised forum on Monday. [...] Chomsky also addressed the media and freedom of expression in the U.S. "In the United States the socio-economic system is designed so that the control over the media is in the hands of a minority who own large corporations... and the result is that the financial interests of those groups are always behind the so-called freedom of expression," he said. Chomsky said the growing disappointment with the Obama administration in the U.S. was predictable because the corporate media marketed Obama's presidential candidacy on the slogan of "Change We Can Believe In" but omitted concrete proposals for effective changes, and the Obama administration has since shown an incapacity to institute such changes.
• 2009/08/27: HuffPo: Squandered Honeymoon: How Botched Bailouts Hamper Healthcare Reform
• 2009/08/17: Nation: Squandered Opportunity
• 2009/08/25: Grist: Barack Obama is not Bagger Vance
  Things are pretty grim among progressives these days, what with health care bogging down and climate legislation on indefinite delay; right wing crazies everywhere and Blue Dogs intransigent; the organized coalition that brought Obama to office fractured and ineffective. Disillusionment is in the air.
  In response, on listservs and private conversations, I’m hearing more and more people express some version of the following sentiment: Barack Obama should save us. According to this line of thinking, if Obama really got serious, got his messaging right, did a really good speech, exercised his extraordinary popularity with the American people, he could right the ship for his two main domestic initiatives, both of which are drifting perilously close to the shoals.
  It’s understandable. Everyone still remembers the extraordinary high of the campaign, the rare and almost forgotten feeling of being genuinely moved by a civic-minded politician. Everyone wants that high back, as an escape from the lies, bottlenecks, and general unpleasantness that now beset us.
  But let me be blunt: Barack Obama is not our magic negro. He’s not Bagger Vance.
• 2009/08/24: MongaBay: Environmental disappointments under Obama
• 2009/08/21: P&S: In Bush's Footsteps
• 2009/08/22: AlterNet: Obama, Ignoring Local Outrage, Set to Expand U.S. Military Presence in Colombia
• 2009/08/18: CCurrents: Obama Pledges Intensified War In Afghanistan And Pakistan
• 2009/08/19: OLJ: The Latin American policies of Richard Milhous Obama
• 2009/08/17: NakedCapitalism: Is This the Start of the Big One?
  [...]
  Lack of political leadership. The health care fiasco is going to be a defining event for Obama, in a negative way. His inability to respond effectively to simply absurd distortions of his plan and of the record of public supported programs overseas (including that many are government funded but still privately run, for instance) may dispel the illusion that he is or can be an effective leader. His banking policy, which is vital to recovery, became hostage to Geithner and Summer's deep loyalty to the industry, and his lack or interest in rocking any boats. All Team Obama has done on the banking front is write a lot of blank check, hold some bogus "stress tests" in lieu of doing the real thing, and raise a stink on a few symbolic issues to try to paper over the failure to embark on real and badly needed reforms.
  Ed Harrison has called him a black Herbert Hoover. If the economy takes another down leg, it will further confirm his inability to do anything other than compromise and try to spin it as success. The confidence game worked when he was a new President, but nice talk and not much action is already wearing thin. We could use someone at the helm who is willing to plot a course and stick with it, and instead what we have is someone long on charisma and short on resolve.
• 2009/08/15: HuffPo: Valarie Jarrett Heckled And Hissed At Netroots Nation
• 2009/08/13: WSWS: Obama’s Abu Ghraib solution
  [...] Five years later, the Bush administration is history, and a Democratic president has taken office, verbally repudiating torture and promising "transparency." Nonetheless, according to published reports, President Barack Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, are dusting off the Abu Ghraib tactic of prosecuting a few supposed "bad apples" at the bottom of the chain of command in order to whitewash the far more serious crimes committed by those at the top.
• 2009/08/12: IPSNews: Iran: Under Pressure from Hawks, Obama Tacks to the Right
  In the face of mounting pressure from hawks in Washington and the continued threat of military action from Israel, the Barack Obama Administration has been taking a harder line in its latest pronouncements about Iran
• 2009/08/13: DemNow: Alleged Obama-Era Rendition Victim Accuses US of Torture, Coercion
• 2009/08/03: EmpireBurlesque: Obama Sends a Signal to the Few Remaining Suckers Who Believe in the Rule of Law
  For anyone still harboring a few scraps of vestigial hope that the change of administration effected by the 2008 election would restore even a thin, weak, straggly lineament thin of the rule of law in the United States, the recent opinion piece by Barack Obama's hand-picked CIA chief, the doleful Establishment water-toter Leon Panetta, will tell you all you need to know. In the friendly confines of the authoritarian newsletter known as the Washington Post -- Panetta, the weak reed appointed precisely because of his weakness and reedness by Obama, who then surrounded the little puppet with some of the most complicit torture mavens of the Bush Regime to really run the CIA show -- delivered himself of one of the most cringe-worthy performances by a high public official since the ritual abasements of Stalin's 1930s show trials. In this case, however, Panetta was not making a ludicrous, outrageous confession of false crimes he never committed; instead, he was making a ludicrous, outrageous defense of real crimes committed by Obama's predecessors -- and in the process justifying his boss's craven (if entirely predictable) failure to faithfully execute the laws of the United States, as he swore to do in front of so many swooning millions just a few months ago, and prosecute the top Bushists for their manifest (not to mention openly confessed) high crimes.
• 2009/08/14: OLJ: Bridges of rhetoric and suspicion
• 2009/08/12: Guardian(UK): The Honduras coup is a sign: the radical tide can be turned
  If this were Burma or Iran the assault on democracy would be a global cause celebre. Instead, Obama is sitting on his hands
• 2009/08/12: Guardian(UK): Obama's torture hangover
  The lawyer president still hasn't reversed Bush's flouting of the Geneva conventions, despite lofty words and election pledges
• 2009/08/07: NakedCapitalism: "The Health Insurers Have Already Won"
  One of the guest bloggers here, the esteemed Ed Harrison, was initially more hopeful about Obama than some of us (I an sufficiently cynical that I find it hard to get excited about any politician, although I will confess to falling for Australia's Kevin Rudd) but is now calling him a black Herbert Hoover.
  
  Even that is not quite sufficient, but is directionally correct. One of the defining characteristics of Team Obama its preference for spin in lieu of substance. Admiittedly, the Bushies had a variant of that, in their obsession with the visual staging of any presidential appearance (the attention to props and lighting detail would do Annie Liebowitz proud).
  
  But with the Obama cohort, the focus is Orwellian, the use of language to misrepresent substance. Recall the totally mislabeled "stress tests" which were not tests. The tests were self-administered and the result pre-determined, since Administration officials said repeatedly that the point of the exercise was to show that the banks were sufficiently well capitalized. And since there were doubts about the seriousness of the exercise, it was helpful to the PR process that the banks got pissy and pushed back, which gave the misleading impression that they were being handled roughly (as opposed to they were given a yard and wanted to see if they could take a mile).
• 2009/08/04: CCurrents: Why The U.S. Government Hates Venezuela
  [...] Having lost in the realm of ideas, those supporting capitalism must compensate by other means. Barack Obama is a very outspoken devotee of capitalism, and has shown by his coup in Honduras -- and also the military build-up in Colombia -- that he will go to any length to prop-up U.S. corporations and rich investors in the region. There can be absolutely no doubt that Obama will seek to undermine the Venezuelan government by any means available, including the very real possibility of a proxy invasion through Colombia. None of these attempts to undermine the advances in Venezuela and other countries will benefit the peoples of Latin America or the United States, minus a tiny minority of the super wealthy.
• 2009/08/05: JFrankel: An Evaluation of the First 200 Days of Obama Economics
• 2009/08/03: OLJ: The Obama opiate -- crisis deepens, crowds cheer
• 2009/07/24: CPunch: Report Card on Obama From a New Frontiersman -- The List of Negatives Keeps Growing
• 2009/07/30: TL: Obama, Clinton Threaten To Cut Off Intelligence To Brits If Torture Evidence Exposed
• 2009/07/29: AlterNet: Obama Accused of Continuing Bush's Racial Profiling of Immigrants
• 2009/07/24: OLJ: Obama’s geopolitical demarche in Russia’s backyard is moving ahead nicely -- for the present
• 2009/07/23: OLJ: Remember the Cairo Speech? Here comes President Obama’s first test
• 2009/07/22: OLJ: Government gone mad
• 2009/07/22: WSWS: Obama task force backs indefinite detention without trial
• 2009/07/21: WSWS: Six months of the Obama administration
• 2009/07/14: CDreams: Is Obama Continuing the Bush/Cheney Assassination Program?
  Congress is outraged that Cheney concealed a CIA program to assassinate al Qaeda leaders, but they should also be investigating why Obama is continuing -- and expanding -- U.S. assassinations.
• 2009/07/18: WSWS: Obama’s speech to the NAACP
• 2009/07/17: WSWS: Obama’s war
  With Obama approaching the end of his sixth month in the White House, there is growing evidence that his administration is in only the first stages of what is shaping up to be a major and sustained escalation of the US war in Afghanistan. Elected in large part because of the hostility of American working people to the militarist policies of the Bush administration, Obama and the Pentagon are waging an intensified and brutal counter-insurgency campaign that has the potential of dwarfing the carnage in Iraq and dragging on for another decade.
• 2009/07/16: WSWS: Obama’s neocolonial mission in Africa
• 2009/07/15: OLJ: Quo vadis, Barack Obama?
  [...] It has painfully taken me almost six months to realize that Barack Obama is not the agent of change this nation needs; an agent we are unlikely to get through political evolution in a corrupt two-party system. Nonetheless, better Obama at the helm than one of the many Republican nuts itching to deliver us to Armageddon.
• 2009/07/16: AlterNet: It's Wasn't Only Cheney Who Had Assassination Programs: Clinton Did It, and Obama Does It, Too
• 2009/07/10: WSWS: Obama claims right to imprison "combatants" acquitted at trial
• 2009/07/10: SF Gate: Obama quoted in wiretap lawsuit in S.F.
  An Islamic charity challenging former President George W. Bush's wiretapping program in a San Francisco federal court cited candidate Barack Obama's words Thursday in arguing that a president has no power to unilaterally order eavesdropping on Americans. Lawyers for the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation introduced their brief by quoting Obama's words in December 2007: "Warrantless surveillance of American citizens, in defiance of FISA, is unlawful and unconstitutional." FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, requires the government to get a warrant from a court that meets in secret before intercepting messages between Americans and suspected foreign terrorists. Bush acknowledged in 2005 that he authorized such surveillance four years earlier and said he had constitutional authority to take such actions during wartime. Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker in San Francisco has scheduled a hearing Sept. 1 on whether Al-Haramain has the right to sue the government and, if so, whether it was wiretapped unconstitutionally. The government accidentally gave Al-Haramain a classified document in 2004 that reportedly showed that two of the organization's lawyers had been wiretapped before the Bush administration designated it as a terrorist group.
• 2009/07/10: Guardian(UK): Obama administration plans forceful policy to end conflicts in Africa
  US president to emphasise democratic goals for African countries during speech to Ghanaian parliament The US is planning a dramatically more assertive policy in Africa, sometimes backed by a threat of force, to end conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria that are seen as among the principal obstacles to the continent's revival.
• 2009/07/10: AlterNet: What Kind of "Hope" Is Obama Offering to Latin American Countries Still Traumatized by U.S. Empire?
• 2009/07/06: AmericaBlog: Frank Rich on Wall Street and Obama's own stress test
• 2009/07/04: MondoWeiss: Obama's ambassadorial nods are no gamechanger: Citigroup to London, Goldman to Germany
• 2009/07/03: Time:Swampland: Europe's Ambassadorial Angst
• 2009/07/03: B2B: Helen Thomas Blasts White House Control Of Press
• 2009/07/01: TPR: ACLU: Obama Admin. Relying On Tortured Confession In Habeas Case
• 2009/07/02: TPR: Obama Continues to Move Further Away From Promise of Transparency
• 2009/07/03: WaPo: New Evidence Cheney Swayed Reaction to Leak -- Discussions of CIA Agent Listed in Filing
  A document filed in federal court this week by the Justice Department offers new evidence that former vice president Richard B. Cheney helped steer the Bush administration's public response to the disclosure of Valerie Plame Wilson's employment by the CIA and that he was at the center of many related administration deliberations. The administration's discussion of Wilson's link to the CIA was meant to undermine criticism by her husband of administration allegations that Iraq attempted to acquire uranium, a matter that her husband had probed for the CIA, according to testimony presented in a 2007 trial. A list of at least seven related conversations involving Cheney appears in a new court filing approved by Obama appointees at the Justice Department. In the filing, the officials argue that the substance of what Cheney told special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald in 2004 must remain secret. No such agreement was reached between Fitzgerald and Cheney at the time of their chat, according to a 2008 Fitzgerald letter to lawmakers. But the Bush administration rejected requests by Congress and a nonprofit group for access to two FBI accounts of the conversation, saying the material was exempt from disclosure under subpoena or the Freedom of Information Act. The Obama administration has since agreed that the material should not be disclosed.
• 2009/06/29: WSWS: Following in Bush’s footsteps -- Obama administration preparing order for indefinite detentions
• 2009/06/29: ACLU: Obama Administration Should Not Revive Military Commissions, Says ACLU -- "Tweaking" The System Will Not Make It Constitutional
• 2009/06/29: uComics: (cartoon - Rall) All Purpose Obama-toon
• 2009/06/26: TheHill: Obama issues signing statement on $106B war bill
  President Obama signed the $106 billion war-spending bill into law Friday, but not without taking a page from his predecessor and ignoring a few elements in the legislation. Obama included a five-paragraph signing statement with the bill, including a final paragraph that outlined his objections to at least four areas of the bill. President George W. Bush was heavily criticized for his use of signing statements, declaring he'd ignore some elements of legislation by invoking presidential prerogative. The Obama administration announced in the statement it would disregard provisions of the legislation that, among other things, would compel the Obama administration to pressure the World Bank to strengthen labor and environmental standards and require the Treasury department to report to Congress on the activities of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF).
• 2009/06/27: uComics: (cartoon - Rall) We Mourn...
• 2009/06/27: WaPo: White House Weighs Order on Detention -- Officials: Move Would Reassert Power To Hold Terror Suspects Indefinitely
• 2009/06/27: TPMM: Report: Obama Admin Drafts Memo To Detain Terror Suspects Indefinitely
• 2009/06/26: RawStory: White House drafts executive order to allow indefinite detentions
• 2009/06/26: WSWS: Obama administration seeks to quash suit by 9/11 families
  The Obama administration has intervened to quash a civil suit filed against Saudi Arabia by survivors and family members of victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The suit seeks to hold the Saudi royal family liable, charging that it provided financial and other support to Al Qaeda and was thereby complicit in the hijack bombings that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York and Washington DC. According to an article by Eric Lichtblau in the June 24 New York Times, documents assembled by lawyers for the 9/11 families "provide new evidence of extensive financial support for Al Qaeda and other extremist groups by members of the Saudi royal family." However, the article states, the documents may never find their way into court because of legal challenges by Saudi Arabia, which are being supported by the US Justice Department.
• 2009/06/23: EmpireBurlesque: A Brand New Day -- Yea, Verily, Morning in America!
• 2009/06/22: Grist: Cheney must be smiling -- White House refuses to disclose information on meetings with coal executives
• 2009/06/18: TPR: Obama Backs Bush in Refusing to Release Cheney's CIA Leak Transcript
• 2009/06/22: TPR: Obama's Pledge of Transparency Remains Largely Unfulfilled
• 2009/06/21: uComics: (cartoon - Toles) We've decided to keep the Bush policy...
• 2009/06/17: DemNow: Despite Campaign Promises, President Obama Adopts President Bush’s Policy of Secrecy
• 2009/06/17: NewDeal2: In reform, more of the same
  [...] As with so much of the Obama administration, great-sounding words, but nothing in the way of substantive change.
• 2009/06/15: OLJ: The Obama enigma: Imperial interventionism and militarism
• 2009/06/13: AlterNet: Commencement Speech to Graduates of the Bush Years: Empire Continues in the Obama Era
• 2009/06/12: McClatchyDC: No change: Obama ambassadorships still go to fundraisers, friends
• 2009/06/12: ACLU: Obama Administration Seeks To Keep Torture Victims From Having Day In Court
  Justice Department Asks Court For Rehearing In Extraordinary Rendition Lawsuit Against Boeing Subsidiary. The Justice Department today argued that the victims of the "extraordinary rendition" program should not have their day in court, asking a federal appeals court to block a landmark case the court had earlier ruled could go forward. In April, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit against Boeing subsidiary, Jeppesen DataPlan Inc., for its role in the Bush administration's unlawful "extraordinary rendition" program could proceed, but today the government asked the appeals court's full panel of judges to rehear that decision. "The Obama administration has now fully embraced the Bush administration's shameful effort to immunize torturers and their enablers from any legal consequences for their actions," said Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, who argued the case for the plaintiffs. "The CIA's rendition and torture program is not a 'state secret;' it's an international scandal. If the Obama administration has its way, no torture victim will ever have his day in court, and future administrations will be free to pursue torture policies without any fear of liability."
• 2009/06/11: OLJ: Beyond the soaring rhetoric of Obama’s Cairo speech, a toxic innocence at home
• 2009/06/11: OLJ: Obama’s doublespeak on Iran
• 2009/06/10: AlterNet: Do You Really Think Arabs in the Middle East Clapped for Obama's Speech?
• 2009/06/08: AlterNet: Obama's Broken Promises
• 2009/06/04: AlterNet: Obama's "Open Government" Project Censors Popular Proposal to "End Imperial Presidency"
• 2009/06/01: MondoWeiss: Despite tough talk on settlements, Obama seems to be continuing flawed Bush plan when it comes to Hamas
• 2009/06/01: TPR: Obama's DOJ Increasingly Channeling Bush On State Secrets
• 2009/06/01: AlterNet: Taibbi: No More Compromise -- Obama Must Wholly Reject Bush's Dictator Policies
• 2009/05/30: CNN: U.S. vows to keep using 'state secrets' defense
  Obama administration in legal battle with Islamic charity suspected of funding terror - Islamic group sues U.S., alleging wiretapping; demands classified information - U.S. tells judge it will invoke "state secrets" privilege and not release documents - "State secrets" privilege used if U.S. thinks litigation could harm national security
• 2009/05/29: OLJ: Against the tortured logic of Obama's placebo presidency, a call for the audacity of hopelessness
• 2009/05/26: TPMM: Obama Administration Taking Secrecy Efforts Abroad
• 2009/05/26: DVoice: Two Sides of the Same Coin: Heads-Heads by Sibel Edmonds
• 2009/05/26: DVoice: Beyond Obama’s Rhetoric
  With each passing day, president Barack Obama provides more and more evidence that the line distinguishing him from his predecessor George W. Bush is one of style rather than of substance.
• 2009/05/23: DVoice: Four More Years: The Obamavore’s Dilemma
  Can we survive the conundrum of Obama’s presidency: a decent, intelligent man promoting weak and dangerous policies?
• 2009/05/22: DVoice: What Obama Isn’t Going to Change about Military Commissions
• 2009/05/22: DVoice: Obama’s Foreign Policy Failures: Diplomacy, Militarism and Imagery
• 2009/05/26: WaPo: Showdown Looming On 'State Secrets' -- Judge Threatens To Penalize U.S. In Wiretap Case
  President Obama vowed last week to rein in the use of a legal privilege that allows the administration to discard lawsuits that involve "state secrets," promising that a new policy is in the works that will quell criticism by civil libertarians. But hours after Obama's speech laid out a "delicate balance" on national security, his Justice Department was criticized by a federal judge in California overseeing a case that has delved deeper than any other into one of the government's most highly classified data-gathering programs. The Obama administration has invoked the state-secrets privilege in resisting a lawsuit filed by an Oregon charity whose attorneys may have been subjected to warrantless wiretapping.
• 2009/05/24: TPR: Shhhhhh...It’s Still a (State) Secret
• 2009/05/20: DailyKos: OBAMA NOW OFFICIALLY SUCKS
• 2009/05/20: CREW: Obama admin. opposes Joe and Valerie Wilson's request for Supreme Court appeal in suit against Cheney, Rove, Libby and Armitage
• 2009/05/24: FTimes:WB: Obushma-Biney in the Home of the Frightened
  The spinelessness and moral cowardice of the Obama administration know no bounds.
• 2009/05/21: CDreams: The March of Folly, Continued
• 2009/05/22: OLJ: Watching Obama morph into Dick Cheney -- America has lost her soul, and so has her president.
• 2009/05/19: Salon: (cartoon - TomTom) I Don't Know How Republicans Do It...
• 2009/05/20: OLJ: Leaders shouldn’t always compromise
• 2009/05/18: WSWS: Right-wing rampage by Obama administration
  The past week has provided a definitive demonstration of the subservience of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party to the military-intelligence apparatus of American imperialism.
• 2009/05/18: AlterNet: Change We Can Believe In for U.S.-Israeli Relations?
• 2009/05/18: AlterNet: Cheney's Chief Assassin Is Now Obama's Commander in Afghanistan
• 2009/05/17: uComics: (cartoon - Toles) Time to Regulate Derivatives
• 2009/05/11: EmpireBurlesque: The Children's Crusade -- Day after day, week after week, Barack Obama's "Overseas Contingency Operations" keep churning through the bodies of children...
• 2009/05/16: WSWS: Obama restarts military commission trials
• 2009/05/15: WSWS: Obama on torture photos: cover-up and complicity
• 2009/05/14: WSWS: Obama bows to Republican right and military on torture photos
• 2009/05/15: ACLU: Obama Administration To Revive Fatally Flawed Military Commissions -- Decision Strikes Blow To Due Process And Rule Of Law
• 2009/05/14: CBC: Obama orders tribunals restarted for some Guantanamo detainees
• 2009/05/13: Atlantic:TDD: Obama, Neocon In Chief
• 2009/05/13: AngryBear: What Obama Means when he says "the troops" -- Meet the New Boss; Same as the Old Boss.
• 2009/05/13: CNN: Obama reverses course on alleged prison abuse photos
  Obama says releasing photos would "further flame anti-American opinion" - ACLU attorney says Obama's decision goes against his promise - Gates says commanders "expressed very serious reservations" about release - Photos show detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2001 and 2006
• 2009/05/13: BBC: Obama U-turn on abuse photographs
  US President Barack Obama has changed his mind and will now attempt to block the publication of photographs showing the abuse of prisoners by US soldiers. The US government had previously said it would not fight a court ruling ordering the release of the pictures. Mr Obama now believes the release of the photos would make the job of US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan more difficult, White House officials said.
• 2009/05/13: WSWS: Obama prepares to resume military commissions of Guantánamo Bay prisoners
• 2009/05/07: SST: AfPak and the Neoconization of Obama
• 2009/05/08: Guardian(UK): Obama to scrap funding for abstinence-only programmes
• 2009/05/09: ACLU: Obama Administration To Revive Fatally Flawed Military Commissions -- Move Would Strike A Blow To Due Process, Says ACLU
• 2009/05/09: AlterNet: Obama Officials Talk About Countries Like They Own Them -- Anyone Else Think That's Strange?
• 2009/05/06: DVoice: Is Bush Still President?
  "Obama’s acquiescence to the old regime is outrageous in part because it is politically unnecessary."
  On January 20th of this year, George W. Bush left Washington and headed back to Texas after the inauguration of Barrack Obama. Or are those memories merely figments of our collective imagination? A quick perusal of government policy has to make one wonder, is Bush still in the White House? According to the New York Times, the Obama administration is considering resuming the use of military tribunals to prosecute Guantanamo detainees.
• 2009/05/06: OLJ: Mr. Obama’s torturous two-step on torture
• 2009/05/01: OLJ: Obama’s "First 100 Days" . . . NOT through the hopefuls’ prism
• 2009/04/30: OLJ: Pinter to Obama: "Smash the mirror"
• 2009/04/30: G&M: Canada placed on copyright blacklist
  The Obama administration added Canada Thursday to a notorious blacklist of countries where Internet piracy flourishes, reflecting a new, tougher line in Washington over the Harper government's chronic failure to deliver on promises of new copyright laws
• 2009/04/30: JPilger: Obama's 100 days - the mad men did well
• 2009/04/30: PeakEnergy: Obama's 100 Days
• 2009/04/30: AlterNet: Obama's Grade at 100 Days? What About Our Grade?
• 2009/04/29: AlterNet: The Failure of Obama's First 100 Days in Afghanistan
• 2009/04/27: OLJ: Multitask, Mr. President
• 2009/04/28: AlterNet: Obama Has Amassed Enormous Political Capital, But He Doesn't Know What to Do with It
• 2009/04/27: BBC: Barack Obama's 100-day report card
• 2009/04/24: MediaMatters: 100 days of myths and falsehoods
  Summary: As media figures prepare to recognize President Obama's 100th day in office, Media Matters has reviewed coverage since the inauguration and identified numerous myths and falsehoods about the administration and its policies.
• 2008/11/02: MondoWeiss: How Obama Learned to Love the Israel Lobby
• 2009/04/24: CCurrents: Dr. King Spanks Obama: Part 1
• 2009/04/23: AlterNet: How Is He Doing? Obama's First 100 Days and His Next 900
• 2009/04/19: EFF: Obama's Transparency Promise: We're Still Waiting
• 2009/04/21: RReich: A Report Card on Obomanomics, Approaching One Hundred Days
• 2009/04/21: OLJ: Rebranding a failed product
• 2009/04/21: OLJ: They are all accountable for torture
• 2009/04/21: AlterNet: Mr. President, War Crimes Must Be Investigated
• 2009/04/21: AngryBear: Torture: Obama Is on a Slippery Slope
• 2009/04/20: Guardian(UK): What about the torture victims, Obama?
  The US president could learn a lot from a juror who refused to accept that past injustices could not be addressed
• 2009/04/18: APOV: Obama's Decision Not To Prosecute Torture Violates The Law
• 2009/04/18: AlterNet: Got a Hopeover? A Dictionary for Disheartened Obama Fans
• 2009/04/18: WSWS: New NSA domestic spying exposed as Obama stonewalls court challenges
• 2009/04/11: ThinkP: Defending Bush, Obama admin. appeals decision allowing detainees to challenge imprisonment
• 2009/04/10: CJR: Obama and State Secrets? Shhh...Silence breaking on key legal filing
• 2009/04/09: TPMM: Expert Consensus: Obama Mimics Bush On State Secrets
• 2009/04/10: TPMM: Obama Website Slams Secrecy Claim That Obama Now Invokes
• 2009/04/10: OLJ: The smooth criminal transition from Bush/Cheney to Obama
• 2009/04/10: OLJ: Torture, renditions, disastrous wars: Will Obama bring real change to America?
• 2009/04/10: MondoWeiss: Haaretz: Obama is not George Bush's opposite
• 2009/04/07: EFF: In Warrantless Wiretapping Case, Obama DOJ's New Arguments Are Worse Than Bush's
• 2009/04/08: MondoWeiss: Obama prepares to take on Netanyahu and the lobby as the battle lines come into focus
• 2009/04/08: Ha'aretz: Obama team readying for confrontation with Netanyahu
  In an unprecedented move, the Obama administration is readying for a possible confrontation with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by briefing Democratic congressmen on the peace process and the positions of the new government in Israel regarding a two-state solution. The Obama administration is expecting a clash with Netanyahu over his refusal to support the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
• 2009/04/08: AlterNet: Obama Administration Quietly Expands Bush's Legal Defense of Warrantless Wire tapping
• 2009/04/07: ThinkP: Obama administration invokes ‘state secrets’ claim to defend Bush’s wiretapping program
• 2009/04/07: APOV: Yes, Once Again: Meet The New Boss ...
• 2009/04/06: AlterNet: Obama Lawyers Invoke "State Secrets" to Block Warrantless Spying Lawsuit
• 2009/04/06: Salon:GG: New and worse secrecy and immunity claims from the Obama DOJ
• 2009/04/07: SF Gate: Government opts for secrecy in wiretap suit
  The Obama administration is again invoking government secrecy in defending the Bush administration's wiretapping program, this time against a lawsuit by AT&T customers who claim federal agents illegally intercepted their phone calls and gained access to their records. Disclosure of the information sought by the customers, "which concerns how the United States seeks to detect and prevent terrorist attacks, would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security," Justice Department lawyers said in papers filed Friday in San Francisco. Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a lawyer for the customers, said Monday the filing was disappointing in light of the Obama presidential campaign's "unceasing criticism of Bush-era secrecy and promise for more transparency."
• 2009/04/06: EFF: Obama Administration Embraces Bush Position on Warrantless Wiretapping and Secrecy -- Says Court Must Dismiss Jewel v. NSA to Protect 'State Secrets'
• 2009/04/07: SlashDot: Obama Administration Defends Warrantless Wiretapping
• 2009/03/30: CCurrents: Obama Looks More And More Like Bush
• 2009/03/30: Guardian(UK): [Letters] Afghanistan: war and a fragile peace -- President Obama's latest ratcheting up of the "war" in Afghanistan is deeply concerning
• 2009/03/26: BBerg: Obama Backs Banks, Seeks to Block Fair-Lending Probe
  The Obama administration’s call for greater financial regulation may have its limits. The administration late yesterday urged the U.S. Supreme Court to bar New York and other states from enforcing their fair-lending and other consumer-protection laws against federally chartered banks including JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo & Co. The legal brief, which adopts the Bush administration’s position, is a setback for consumer and civil-rights groups that had urged President Barack Obama’s team to switch positions. The filing puts the administration at odds with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo over the respective roles of state and federal regulators. The high court will hear arguments April 28.
• 2009/03/26: DemNow: Report: Despite Obama’s Vow, Combat Brigades Will Stay in Iraq
• 2009/03/25: TPMM: Does Obama's Approach To State Secrets Ape Bush's?
• 2009/03/23: APOV: Obama = Bush = Cheney ... Q.E.D.
• 2009/03/20: Rabble: Who's Obama proving to be?
• 2009/03/17: Wired:27B/6: Obama Administration: Constitution Does Not Protect Cell-Site Records
  The Obama administration says the Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures does not apply to cell-site information mobile phone carriers retain on their customers. The position is being staked out in a little-noticed surveillance case pending before the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia. The case has wide-ranging implications for Americans, as most citizens have or will carry a mobile phone in their lifespan. At issue is whether the government can require federal judges to order mobile phone companies to release historical cell-tower information of a phone number without probable cause -- the standard required for a search warrant. While judges have varied on the issue, the resulting evidence can be used in a criminal prosecution.
• 2009/03/19: JWN: Palestine Question now absent from Obama's agenda
• 2009/03/18: WSWS: Obama signing statement weakens "whistle-blower" protections
• 2009/03/17: FDL: Greg Craig Won’t Tell You How Obama Disappeared the Whistleblowers
• 2009/03/17: AlterNet: No More 'Enemy Combatants' -- But Is Obama Merely Rebranding Bush's 'War on Terror'?
• 2009/03/11: Cryptome: Memorandum of March 9, 2009 -- Presidential Signing Statements
• 2009/03/16: APOV: Obama's Embrace Of Bush Policies And (Abusive) Presidential Powers
• 2009/03/15: Redress: The Rape of Washington -- Israel lobby humiliates Obama administration
• 2009/03/13: ACLU: Justice Department Adheres To Key Elements Of Bush Administration Detention Policy
• 2009/03/13: MondoWeiss: Mearsheimer: if you think Obama's going to put pressure on Israel, you're living in Disneyland
• 2009/03/13: Guardian(UK): US justice department argues former detainees have no constitutional rights
• 2009/03/10: DVoice: US Missile Defense: The End Game
• 2009/03/11: MondoWeiss: Walt says Obama is a 'wimp'
• 2009/03/10: BBC: Fifty days of the Obama presidency
• 2009/03/09: APOV: It Is Now Official: Obama = Bush ...
• 2009/03/06: WSJ: Obama Channels Cheney -- Obama adopts Bush view on the powers of the presidency
  The Obama Administration this week released its predecessor's post-9/11 legal memoranda in the name of "transparency," producing another round of feel-good Bush criticism. Anyone interested in President Obama's actual executive-power policies, however, should look at his position on warrantless wiretapping. Dick Cheney must be smiling. In a federal lawsuit, the Obama legal team is arguing that judges lack the authority to enforce their own rulings in classified matters of national security. The standoff concerns the Oregon chapter of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a Saudi Arabian charity that was shut down in 2004 on evidence that it was financing al Qaeda. Al-Haramain sued the Bush Administration in 2005, claiming it had been illegally wiretapped.
• 2009/03/07: Guardian(UK): Obama's backsliding on torture
  After the president's swift move to close Guantánamo, I thought Binyam Mohamed would soon be free. I fear we were deceived
• 2009/03/06: EUO: US defends Polish and Czech missile base plans
• 2009/03/05: CCurrents: Chomsky: No Change Coming With Obama
• 2009/03/05: DVoice: The Plan to Not End the Occupation of Iraq
• 2009/03/02: DVoice: Obama Expands War, Slaps Peace Voters
• 2009/02/26: AntiWar: Freeing Up Resources... for More War
  [...]
  Those who are fond of talking and writing about President Obama's admirable progressive values will, sooner or later, need to come to terms with the particulars of his actual policies. In foreign affairs, the realities now include the ominous pairing of his anti-terrorism rhetoric and his avowed commitment to ratchet up the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan.
• 2009/03/01: IndexResearch: Obama's Rhetoric: Damning Evidence on Guantanamo, Rendition, Torture
• 2009/03/03: MoonOfAlabama: Obama Implements Neocon Strategy Against Iran
• 2009/03/05: OLJ: Obama’s change could be just cosmetic
  US President Barack Obama has been in office for only five weeks so no one should expect miracles, and especially since he’s been busy fixing the economy. Like most people around the world, I cheered his election victory and hoped it heralded a new era in which the superpower would once again lead by example. That may happen yet, but thus far, the signs are not exactly reassuring. He rode to the White House on a ticket of ‘change’ but has surrounded himself with the old guard. Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Special Adviser on Iran Dennis Ross, Middle East envoy George Mitchell and Defence Secretary Robert Gates, a leftover from the Bush camp, are hardly agents for change. Where are the fresh faces? Is there anyone in his cabinet bursting with new ideas and prepared to implement out-of-the-box solutions for longtime problems? Admittedly, he’s altered the tone and I’m convinced he won’t be pasting up "Wanted. Dead or Alive" posters any time soon, but I’m getting a niggling feeling that ‘change’ in Obama’s book may be little more than cosmetic.
• 2009/03/04: uComics: (cartoon - Toles) Will this be a U-shaped recession?
• 2009/03/03: ProPublica: Chart: Obama Tracks Bush on National Security Cases
• 2009/03/03: APOV: Civil Liberties under the Obama administration
• 2009/03/02: uComics: (cartoon - Rall) The Nazis Lose An Elections And...
• 2009/03/01: APOV: More Of "What If Bush Did It?"
• 2009/03/01: OttawaSun: U.S. influence in Iraq far from over
  Barack Obama won the votes of many Americans by promising to swiftly end the Iraq War and bring U.S. troops home. He denounced George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq as a "violation of international law." So will U.S. troops leave Iraq? Will those responsible for this trumped-up war face justice? No, on both counts. President Obama says U.S. combat troops will leave Iraq by August 2010. However, the U.S. military occupation will not end. What we are seeing is a public relations shell game.
• 2009/02/27: CCurrents: Obama Embraces Bush's "War On Terror" Policy Without Naming It So
• 2009/02/27: CBC: Court rejects Obama bid to stop wiretapping lawsuit
  The Obama administration has lost its argument that a potential threat to national security is grounds to stop a lawsuit challenging the government's warrantless wiretapping program. A federal Appeals Court in San Francisco on Friday rejected the Justice Department's request for an emergency stay in a case involving a defunct Islamic charity. Yet government lawyers signaled they would continue fighting to keep the information secret, setting up a new showdown between the courts and the White House over national security. The Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, claimed national security would be compromised if a lawsuit brought by the Oregon chapter of the charity, Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, were allowed to proceed.
• 2009/02/27: APOV: Security Agencies And Their Neverending Need For Increased Powers
• 2009/02/27: APOV: Obama's Very Own Quagmire
• 2009/02/26: APOV: Reloaded: More Wars, Please
• 2009/02/27: OLJ: Torture, renditions, disastrous wars: Will Obama bring real change to America?
• 2009/02/26: APOV: More WIBDI - "What If Bush Did It?"
• 2009/02/25: EmpireBurlesque: Orwell in Babylon: Obama's War-Continuing "Withdrawal" Plan
• 2009/02/23: TPR: Obama's DOJ Quietly Sought Dismissal of Missing E-Mails Lawsuit
• 2009/02/21: Google:AP: Obama administration tries to kill e-mail case
  The Obama administration, siding with former President George W. Bush, is trying to kill a lawsuit that seeks to recover what could be millions of missing White House e-mails. Two advocacy groups suing the Executive Office of the President say that large amounts of White House e-mail documenting Bush's eight years in office may still be missing, and that the government must undertake an extensive recovery effort. They expressed disappointment that Obama's Justice Department is continuing the Bush administration's bid to get the lawsuits dismissed.
• 2009/02/21: BBC: 'No US rights' for Bagram inmates
  Detainees being held at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan cannot use US courts to challenge their detention, the US says. The justice department ruled that some 600 so-called enemy combatants at Bagram have no constitutional rights. Most have been arrested in Afghanistan on suspicion of waging a terrorist war against the US. The move has disappointed human rights lawyers who had hoped the Obama administration would take a different line to that of George W Bush.
• 2009/02/20: CBC: Obama administration backs Bush, grants no rights to Bagram prisoners -- 'We all expected better': human rights lawyer
• 2009/02/18: EmpireBurlesque: Operation Uptick: Obama Launches Afghan Surge
• 2009/02/20: SMH: US must face Jakarta's cruel past
  Australian and United States policies towards Indonesia have long been quite close, and it is going to be interesting to see the impact of the change in Washington. Both countries in the past supported the Soeharto regime, including its illegal seizure of East Timor, where both governments helped shield the regime from allegations of war crimes by the TNI, the Indonesian Army. However, many Americans, including congressmen, mostly Democrats, have long condemned this support, and they are pressing President Barack Obama to shift away from the US's longstanding close relationship with the Indonesian military.
• 2009/02/19: DVoice: Obama Administration Continues US Military Global Dominance
• 2009/02/18: ThinkP: Ashcroft: Only difference between Bush and Obama is how they spell their names
• 2009/02/18: NYT: Obama’s War on Terror May Resemble Bush’s in Some Areas Even as it pulls back from harsh interrogations and other sharply debated aspects of George W. Bush’s "war on terrorism," the Obama administration is quietly signaling continued support for other major elements of its predecessor’s approach to fighting Al Qaeda. In little-noticed confirmation testimony recently, Obama nominees endorsed continuing the C.I.A.’s program of transferring prisoners to other countries without legal rights, and indefinitely detaining terrorism suspects without trials even if they were arrested far from a war zone. The administration has also embraced the Bush legal team’s arguments that a lawsuit by former C.I.A. detainees should be shut down based on the "state secrets" doctrine. It has also left the door open to resuming military commission trials. And earlier this month, after a British court cited pressure by the United States in declining to release information about the alleged torture of a detainee in American custody, the Obama administration issued a statement thanking the British government "for its continued commitment to protect sensitive national security information." These and other signs suggest that the administration’s changes may turn out to be less sweeping than many had hoped or feared -- prompting growing worry among civil liberties groups and a sense of vindication among supporters of Bush-era policies.
• 2009/02/17: AlterNet: Obama's Immigration Outlook: More Militarism, Abuse
• 2009/02/16: Guardian(UK): US missile strike kills 30 in Pakistan -- Fourth air attack on border region since Obama took office
• 2009/02/14: TPR: Obama Relucatant to Get Involved in Rove, Congressional Legal Battle
• 2009/02/15: TFN: Bill Moyers Interview of Simon Johnson: Obama, What Change?
• 2009/02/16: ChinaDaily: Suspected US missile strike kills 26 in Pakistan
• 2009/02/15: NakedCapitalism: Obama to Neuter Bank Pay Restrictions
• 2009/02/14: AlterNet: Obama, Your Treasury Secretary's Plan Stinks -- Assume Responsibility and Take Care of It
• 2009/02/13: Guardian(UK): Obama's state secrets mistake
  The Binyam Mohamed case isn't just making waves in Britain. Obama's state secrets claim is causing a backlash in the US
• 2009/02/13: GristMill: Brit's Eye View: Is Barack Obama the American Tony Blair? Is Obama up to the challenge on climate and the economy, or will he disappoint like Blair?
• 2009/02/13: OLJ: Obama, like Bush, is throwing public money into a black hole
• 2009/02/13: OLJ: Yes, we can’t
• 2009/02/13: BBC: Obama diary: The first 100 days
• 2009/02/11: EmpireBurlesque: Shock Absorbers: Progressives Stunned by Obama Non-Surprises
  There is certainly a great deal of slack-jawed shock going around these days, especially in progressive circles, where pundits, commentators, analysts and kibitzers continually find themselves reeling from yet another "inexplicable" move by the Obama Administration to uphold the core principles of their predecessors: enriching the rich, extending the empire, and enhancing the authoritarian power of a thoroughly militarized state.
  For example, Glenn Greenwald and Scott Horton at Harper's (among many others) are deeply shocked by Team Obama's draconian maneuvers to quash a court case based on clear, abundant and credible evidence that American security forces -- and their corporate accomplices -- colluded to inflict horrendous tortures on a gulag captive (whose only "crime," it turns out, was reading a satirical magazine article). While Horton struggles to find some small justification for what he sees as an unwise decision, Greenwald is scathing and detailed in denouncing Obama's action, in which the new president seeks to uphold -- and to seize for himself -- some of the most egregious claims of arbitrary, tyrannical power once advanced by George "Unitary Executive" Bush.
  It is good to see these worthy gentlemen -- lawyers both -- give us chapter and verse on this act of evil, yet one still must ask: why all the surprise? From the beginning of his presidential campaign to this very day, Obama has always made it perfectly clear -- as another great unitary executive used to say -- that he has no intention whatsoever of dismantling the unbridled powers of the "imperial presidency."
• 2009/02/10: Time:Swampland: Unexpected Headline: Obama Backs Bush On Rendition Case, Secrecy
• 2009/02/09: Stratfor: Munich and the Continuity Between the Bush and Obama Foreign Policies
• 2009/02/09: ThinkP: Obama DOJ affirms Bush’s state secrets position in extraordinary rendition lawsuit
• 2009/02/10: NYT: Obama Backs Off a Reversal on Secrets
• 2009/02/09: Salon: Obama fails his first test on civil liberties and accountability -- resoundingly and disgracefully
• 2009/02/10: OLJ: Biden vows to continue Bush policy towards Iran
• 2009/02/10: OLJ: Obama signals he doesn’t back Leahy’s plan to probe Bush abuses
• 2009/02/10: AlterNet: 'State Secrets' Invoked to Cover Up Torture and Renditions -- Sound Familiar?
• 2009/02/09: ACLU: ACLU In Court Today To Argue Extraordinary Rendition Case [against Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen DataPlan, Inc.] Should Go Forward
• 2009/02/09: CSM: Europe listens cautiously to Obama agenda -- Biden opens a door on Iran, but presses allies on Afghanistan
• 2009/02/09: Guardian(UK): Obama administration maintains Bush's 'state secrets' policy
  Barack Obama's justice department has repeated a Bush administration policy of citing "state secrets" to prevent the release of evidence concerning extraordinary renditions. The decision, revealed at a hearing in a San Francisco appeals court, came days after the British high court ruled that evidence of renditions and torture must remain secret so as not to endanger the intelligence relationship between the two countries.
• 2009/02/09: MoonOfAlabama: U.S. Foreign Policy - "Here we go again."
  VP Biden today gave the first outlook on the Obama administration's foreign policy in a speech at the current Security Conference in Munich.
  The short version: No change
• 2009/02/07: Salon: Obama's team of zombies
  Even under the new president, Washington is the same one-party town it always has been -- controlled not by Democrats or Republicans, but by thieves.
• 2009/02/05: CCurrents: A New Administration, Tired Old [Economic] Policies
• 2009/02/05: ACLU: White House Announces Troubling Faith-Based Order, ACLU Says Administration Is Heading Into Uncharted Waters
• 2009/02/04: ACLU: Obama Endorses Bush Secrecy On Torture And Rendition
  After the British High Court ruled that evidence of British resident Binyam Mohamed's extraordinary rendition and torture at Guantánamo Bay must remain secret because of threats made by the Bush administration to halt intelligence sharing, the Obama administration told the BBC today in a written statement: "The United States thanks the UK government for its continued commitment to protect sensitive national security information and preserve the long-standing intelligence sharing relationship that enables both countries to protect their citizens."
• 2009/02/04: DVoice: The Anti-Empire Report -- Shortchanged and Real Change by William Blum
• 2009/02/05: AlterNet: Obama Is Against Pot Raids, the Public Is Against Pot Raids, And Yet ... the Drug Cops' Raids Continue
• 2009/02/03: NYT: Obama’s Pledge to Reform Ethics Faces an Early Test
  During almost two years on the campaign trail, Barack Obama vowed to slay the demons of Washington, bar lobbyists from his administration and usher in what he would later call in his Inaugural Address a "new era of responsibility." What he did not talk much about were the asterisks.
  The exceptions that went unmentioned now include a pair of cabinet nominees who did not pay all of their taxes. Then there is the lobbyist for a military contractor who is now slated to become the No. 2 official in the Pentagon. And there are the others brought into government from the influence industry even if not formally registered as lobbyists.
  President Obama said Monday that he was "absolutely" standing behind former Senator Tom Daschle, his nominee for health and human services secretary, and Mr. Daschle, who met late in the day with leading senators in an effort to keep his confirmation on track, said he had "no excuse" and wanted to "deeply apologize" for his failure to pay $128,000 in federal taxes.
  But the episode has already shown how, when faced with the perennial clash between campaign rhetoric and Washington reality, Mr. Obama has proved willing to compromise.
• 2009/02/03: Guardian(UK): Rift with EU as US sticks to Bush line on 'war on drugs'
• 2009/02/02: Times(UK): Barack Obama grants CIA permission to retain right to carry out renditions
• 2009/02/02: TL: Obama's No-Torture Order and CIA Secret Renditions
• 2009/02/02: uComics: (cartoon - Rall) Officer Obama
• 2009/01/30: AlterNet: Obama Gathering a Flock of Hawks to Oversee U.S. Foreign Policy
• 2009/01/30: OLJ: For Palestinians, Obama’s message is crystal clear
• 2009/01/27: DVoice: The Torture Ban that Doesn’t Ban Torture
  Obama's Rules Keep It Intact, and Could Even Accord With an Increase in US-Sponsored Torture Worldwide
• 2009/01/24: IndexResearch: Iran: No Change in Obama's Diplomacy?
• 2009/01/28: EmpireBurlesque: Get Some: Obama's New Hard Line on Afghanistan
• 2009/01/28: OLJ: We can be fooled again
  Letting go of an ideal and a sense of hopefulness came sooner than expected. Resignation set in faster than had been anticipated, leaving no illusions about the nature of the Obama administration’s plans for foreign policy.
• 2009/01/28: CCurrents: Nine Brutal Disappointments For US Obama Fans
• 2009/01/28: DerSpiegel: A test case for Obama -- After Guantanamo, What Next for Bagram?
• 2009/01/27: TPMM: Ball In Obama's Court On Rove's US Attorney Testimony
  On the question of whether we'll get to the bottom of the Bush White House's role in the US Attorney firings, it's starting to look more and more like the ball is squarely in President Obama's court. Yesterday, as we noted, House Judiciary chair John Conyers issued a subpoena to Karl Rove, ordering him to testify about the affair February 2nd and declaring ominously: "It's time for him to talk." (Rove, making a claim to executive privilege backed by President Bush, had defied a subpoena issued by the last Congress. That Congress ended before the full House could vote on contempt charges against Rove.) And just now, Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, told TPMmuckraker that he had already forwarded Conyers' subpoena to the Obama White House, asking them to give an opinion as to whether President Bush retains his ability to assert executive privilege. In other words, the Obama White House will decide, essentially, whether to back Rove's claim of privilege, or to deny it. (And given that Rove is supposed to appear February 2, that decision from the White House should come soon.) In the latter case, said Luskin, a negotiation would ensue between the Obama White House, President Bush, and Rove. That would likely result in the matter going to court.
• 2009/01/27: Guardian(UK): Obama the imperialist
  Change? In foreign policy, hardly. The new president is in the classic liberal interventionist mould
• 2009/01/26: Guardian(UK): [Letters] Judging Obama on ghost prisons, Guantánamo and air strikes
• 2009/01/26: OLJ: Obama approves missile strikes in Pakistan
• 2009/01/22: Wired:27B/6: Obama Sides With Bush in Spy Case
  The Obama administration fell in line with the Bush administration Thursday when it urged a federal judge to set aside a ruling in a closely watched spy case weighing whether a U.S. president may bypass Congress and establish a program of eavesdropping on Americans without warrants. In a filing in San Francisco federal court, President Barack Obama adopted the same position as his predecessor.
• 2009/01/24: Guardian(UK): President orders air strikes on villages in [Pakistan] tribal area
• 2009/01/23: DemNow: Noam Chomsky: Obama’s Stance on Gaza Crisis "Approximately the Bush Position"
• 2009/01/22: Independent(UK): Robert Fisk: So far, Obama's missed the point on Gaza...
• 2009/01/19: WaPo: Obama and Chávez Start Sparring Early
  In an interview shown in the past week on the Spanish-language network Univision, U.S. President-elect Barack Obama said that Venezuela's firebrand president, Hugo Chávez, has hindered progress in Latin America, and he expressed concern that Chávez's leftist government has assisted Colombia's biggest guerrilla movement, a group the United States considers a terrorist organization. Chávez responded this weekend by saying that Obama had "the same stench" as President Bush, a frequent target of Chávez's remarks.

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Last modified August 25, 2010