Obama indoctrinating schoolchildren

...or not. Susannah, over at Get the Big Idea, posted on this. Obama, on Tuesday, September 8th, which will be the first day of school for most of the country's schoolchildren, will be delivering an address over the internet that most schools will be broadcasting into every classroom.


In Susannah's post, she likens this to the "Hitler Youth," and in her comments links to a video where children were pledging their undying support to Hitler in Nazi Germany. She says she will be pulling her children out of school due to this "unprecedented 'Presidential address' to the captive audience of our nation's school children." She has said she will be pulling her children out of school, which is her right, but is a little ridiculous. I normally wouldn't say anything, but she correctly points out that "hundreds of thousands of other parents across the nation" are doing the same, and she says it is because "Our country’s current political climate has produced unparalleled Government control in our society, and has raised to high alert suspicions of socialist motivations (& worse). In such a climate, for the President to deliver an unprecedented “address” to every child in the nation’s public schools..."


Susannah isn't alone in her hysteria. That's why it is scary. I'm seeing so much hysteria on both sides right now...the left saying the right wants to kill Obama, the right saying the left and Obama want to round them up and put them in concentration camps...enough!

The hysteria has to stop. Susannah, I do respect you, but you are just as guilty as the left in falling into hysteria about the opposition's President.

This address isn't socialistic, nor is it unprecedented.

On the U.S. Department of Education Web site Secretary Arne Duncan wrote that the speech was about "the importance of education."

"The president will challenge students to work hard, set educational goals, and take responsibility for their learning," Duncan wrote. "He will also call for a shared responsibility and commitment on the part of students, parents and educators to ensure that every child in every school receives the best education possible so they can compete in the global economy for good jobs and live rewarding and productive lives as American citizens."
...
President George H.W. Bush addressed the nation's students in a televised speech during school hours in 1991. ''I can't understand for the life of me what's so great about being stupid,'' Bush said, according to news reports from the time. He told students to ''block out the kids who think it's not cool to be smart'' and ''work harder, learn more.''

Democrats at the time criticized the speech. "The Department of Education should not be producing paid political advertising for the president, it should be helping us to produce smarter students," said Richard Gephardt, then the Democratic majority leader in the House of Representatives.

Republican Newt Gingrich defended Bush's speech, though. "Why is it political for the president of the United States to discuss education?" Gingrich said at the time. "It was done at a nonpolitical site and was beamed to a nonpolitical audience. . . . They wanted to reach the maximum audience with the maximum effect to improve education."

Everyone needs to calm down.

Global warming is to Democrats as Global terrorism is to...

Read an interesting article over at New Majority, which brought up some interesting points regarding the cap & trade bill, Democrats & Republicans, and the tendancy of Politicians to fling baseless accusations along the lines of "treason."

In a phone interview with MSNBC, Representative Henry Waxman, D-CA, accused the Republican party of being unamerican in voting against the cap & trade, stimulus, and budget measure. Waxman used some surprisingly familiar rhetoric when he said that the GOP has been "rooting against the country" by voting no on the Democrats' bills.

In the article, the author first gives part of Rep. Waxman's accusations:

So far, this Congress -- since Obama became President -- the Republicans have said no to an economic stimulus bill, they’re saying no to a global warming bill... They want to play politics and see if they can keep any achievements from being accomplished that may be beneficial to the Democrats. They're rooting against the country and I think in this case, even rooting against the world because the world needs to get its act together to stop global warming. I wish they were playing a more constructive role. Some Republicans doubt the whole science of global warming, even though the consensus is overwhelming. They don’t want to believe it.

The author then points out the similarities in the rhetoric from the left on global warming, and the rhetoric from just a few years ago from the right on global terrorism. He takes Waxman's quote, and replaces "global warming" with phrases about the war on terror and Iraq:

So far, this Congress -- since they became the majority -- the Democrats have said no to the troop surge, they’re saying no to a war funding bill... They want to play politics and see if they can keep any achievements from being accomplished that may be beneficial to the Republicans. They're rooting against the country and I think in this case, even rooting against the world because the world needs to get its act together to stop global terrorism. I wish they were playing a more constructive role. Some Democrats doubt the whole success of the surge, even though the consensus is overwhelming. They don’t want to believe it.

Hmm. Interesting. Never thought about it that way. The similarities are striking.

Don't believe it? Here's Paul Krugman from the NY Times:
Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an “existential threat” to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole — but the existential threat from climate change is all too real.

Whoa.

The author of the article points out that both sides are looking for "snakes in the garden," being vigilant against those they view as trying to ruin the country. But, he points out, "his accusation was both wrongly directed and poorly applied."

That happens on both sides of the aisle. It really should stop. I like how he ends the article:

...In Waxman's recent episode, legitimate concern was mistaken for callous sedition, quite possibly because he (like Krugman and others) truly believes global warming is a more deadly threat than radical Islam. In his world, regrettably, basic policy skepticism is “treason” and the largest tax on the middle class in more than a decade, in the words of another Democrat, is “patriotic.”

Funny, you could switch that around as well.

Barack Dubya Obama: Part II

Thanks to the Impolitic for first posting about this:

Obama Blocks Access to White House visitor log:

So much for "more transparency"!

So much for "[the white house] is the people's house," not the President's.

Ugh.

As BluePitBull is fond of saying, if the voters don't want something that the politician does, "too bad."

Voters overwhemingly voted Obama in office based on his promises of "more transparency" and "change we can believe in"...so far, we're getting more of the same. I posted on another broken promise back in April. You can read it here.

Here we go:

Despite President Barack Obama's pledge to introduce a new era of transparency to Washington, and despite two rulings by a federal judge that the records are public, the Secret Service has denied msnbc.com's request for the names of all White House visitors from Jan. 20 to the present. It also denied a narrower request by the nonpartisan watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which sought logs of visits by executives of coal companies.

From the Impolitic again:

This isn't change we can believe in. Hell, it's not even a change and all these little incidents are adding up. I'm beginning to wonder if Obama wants to be a one term president after all.

Barack Dubya Obama

Same sh*t, different piles.

Okay, so remember how during Obama's campaign he got people like me to vote for him because he criticized George W. Bush's domestic spying surveillance program and said he'd end it?

Well, I do. That's a huge reason I voted for him. I was tired of Bush's trampling over our Constitution and treating us as terrorism suspects.

Remember when Obama's campaign website said that "The Problem" is described in part as the Bush administration having "invoked a legal tool known as the 'state secrets' privilege more than any other previous administration to get cases thrown out of civil court"?

I do.

In February, President Obama's Justice Department quietly argued in a San Francisco court that it was maintaining the same position as President Bush's Justice Department on a case involving detainees trying to sue a private company for its role in their (allegedly) extraordinary renditions.

This time the issue was the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program, and whether courts would be able to assess its constitutionality in a case called Jewel v. NSA, where the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is challenging the NSA surveillance by suing on behalf of AT&T customers whose records may or may not have been caught up in the NSA "dragnet."
Last Friday, while President Obama traversed throughout Europe, his Justice Department sought to have Jewel v. NSA dismissed because "the Court lacks subject matter jurisdiction with respect to plaintiffs’ statutory claims against the United States because Congress has not waived sovereign immunity" and "because information necessary to litigate plaintiffs’ claims is properly subject to and excluded from use in this case by the state secrets privilege and related statutory privileges."

Argued the Justice Department: Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair "has once again demonstrated that the disclosure of the information implicated by this case, which concerns how the United States seeks to detect and prevent terrorist attacks, would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security."

"President Obama promised the American people a new era of transparency, accountability, and respect for civil liberties," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. "But with the Obama Justice Department continuing the Bush administration's cover-up of the National Security Agency's dragnet surveillance of millions of Americans, and insisting that the much-publicized warrantless wiretapping program is still a 'secret' that cannot be reviewed by the courts, it feels like deja vu all over again."

Exactly. Deja vu. French for WTF Obama? You are alienating those who voted for you. You know, the ones tired of Bush and his policies. But you are continuing them? Wow.

"beyond even the outrageously broad 'state secrets' privilege invented by the Bush administration and now embraced fully by the Obama administration, the Obama DOJ has now invented a brand new claim of government immunity, one which literally asserts that the U.S. Government is free to intercept all of your communications (calls, emails and the like) and -- even if what they're doing is blatantly illegal and they know it's illegal -- you are barred from suing them unless they 'willfully disclose' to the public what they have learned...

"Everything for which Bush critics excoriated the Bush DOJ -- using an absurdly broad rendition of 'state secrets' to block entire lawsuits from proceeding even where they allege radical lawbreaking by the President and inventing new claims of absolute legal immunity -- are now things the Obama DOJ has left no doubt it intends to embrace itself..."

Obama, you are going to lose your base. People like me. The majority of Americans voted for you because we opposed these policies. Do you think we'll vote for you again if you continue them?

Get it together, man.

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/04/on-state-secret.html

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/09/tpm/index.html

More of the Constitution trampled upon by Bush's Legacy.

This is taken from a truthdig article. You can read the entire thing here.

Here are the highlights:

U.S. federal agents were preparing to arrest Youssef Megahed in Tampa, Fla. Just three days earlier, on Friday, a jury in a U.S. federal district court had acquitted him of charges of illegally transporting explosives and possession of an explosive device.

Megahed, acquitted by a jury of his peers, thought he was secure, back with his family. He was enrolled in his final course at the University of South Florida that would allow him to receive his college degree. Then the nightmare he had just escaped returned. His father told me: “Yesterday around noon, I took my son to buy something from Wal-Mart ... when we received a call from our lawyer that we must meet him immediately ... when we got to the parking lot, we found ourselves surrounded by more than seven people. They dress in normal clothes without any badges, without any IDs, surrounded us and give me a paper.

“And they told me, ‘Sign this.’ ‘Sign this for what?’ I ask him. They told me, ‘We are going to take your son ... to deport him.’”

Megahed is being held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for a deportation proceeding. The charges are the same ones from which he was completely acquitted. In August 2007, Megahed and a fellow USF student took a road trip to see the Carolinas. When pulled over for speeding, police found something in the trunk that they described as explosives. Megahed’s co-defendant, Ahmed Mohamed, said they were homemade fireworks.

Prosecutors pointed to an online video by Mohamed, said to show how to convert a toy into an explosives detonator. Facing 30 years behind bars, Mohamed took a plea agreement and is now serving 15 years. Megahed pled not guilty, and the federal jury in his trial agreed with his defense: He was an unwitting passenger and completely innocent of any wrongdoing.
That’s where ICE comes in. Despite being cleared of the charges in the federal criminal case, it turns out that people can still be arrested and deported based on the same charges. The U.S. Constitution protects people from “double jeopardy,” being charged twice with the same offense. But in the murky world of immigrant detention, it turns out that double jeopardy is perfectly legal.

Ahmed Bedier, the president of the Tampa Human Rights Council and co-host of “True Talk,” a global-affairs show focusing on Muslims and Muslim Americans on Tampa community radio station WMNF, criticizes the pervasive and persistent attacks on the U.S. Muslim community by the federal government, singling out the Joint Terrorism Task Forces, or JTTFs. The JTTFs, Bedier says, “include not only federal FBI agents, but also postal inspectors, IRS agents, deputized local police officers and sheriff’s deputies, any type of law enforcement,” and when one agency fails to take down an individual, another agency steps in. “It’s like an octopus,” he says.

Wow. I'm floored. This is entirely ridiculous. First the wiretapping and PATRIOT act. Guantanamo Bay. Then the John Yoo Memos. Now this? C'mon!! Wake up, people! This is George W. Bush's legacy. This is the Republicans' legacy. While they whine about the first lady returning the Queen of England's hug, they silently take away all that we hold dear.

Double Jeopardy. Habeas Corpus. Free Speech. Warrants. Due Process. All sacrificed to the "war on terror." We sure won that.

Its Tuesday, let's laugh at conservatives! (Torture Update)

John Yoo & Others: Europe calls for arrest for war crimes

Thanks to the Impolitic Blog & Jay McDonough for talking about this.

Those that have been following the Bush administration's legacy of war crimes through the use of legal memos written by John Yoo & others, giving the Executive Branch carte blanche to torture anyone, US Citizen or not, and throw them into a legal blackhole and deny any and all rights. In fact, those memos gave the Bush Administration (and any subsequent administration) authority to overturn Congress, the Supreme Court, and the US Constitution and its amendments in its search for terrorists, even if the suspects are US Citizens. Goodbye, habeas corpus, hello Gestapo!!

Anyway, Spain is just a little bit pissed off about the US committing these war crimes. Especially when the US tortured one of their citizens for information when he was charged with terrorism, but later realized he was innocent and sent him home. That didn't go over so well in Spain. They know torture when they see it, especially with their history blighted with the Inquisition. The Chief Magistrate in the case, Judge Baltasar Garzón, is Europe's best known counterterrorism judges. He has been involved in prosecuting the Basque terrorist group, ETA, as well as al Qaeda affiliated groups residing in Spain and Morocco, as well as the prosecution of former Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet.

Under Magistrate Garzón, the Spanish court has forbidden cooperation with anything associated with Guantanamo Bay. After further investigation, Spain is likely to issue arrest warrants for many top Bush legal aids, including lawyer John Yoo and the Former Chief of Staff & Legal Counsel to Vice President Cheney, David Addington for drafting those memos. If those warrants are issued, John Yoo and David Addington would be barred from travel to Europe, since almost all of Europe is part of the European Extraditions Convention (and outside of that, most countries do formal extradition with Europe). If they were to step foot in Europe they would be prosecuted for war crimes.

Looks like we might finally be looking at some justice. Too bad no one has put Bush and Cheney on the list yet. That would be nice to see. We just might, though, with the news that even more damning evidence that the Bush admin tried to hide will be released. A New York federal judge has ordered the CIA to release all evidence about the torture that took place and the rationale for doing do. They have until April 9th to begin releasing the information.