How I woke up to the untruths of Barack Obama

By Christopher Booker

The President’s State of the Union address was as weaselly as any politician’s could be.

When I happened to wake up in the middle of the night last Wednesday and caught the BBC World Service’s live relay of President Obama’s [...]]]>

How I woke up to the untruths of Barack Obama

By Christopher Booker

The President’s State of the Union address was as weaselly as any politician’s could be.

When I happened to wake up in the middle of the night last Wednesday and caught the BBC World Service’s live relay of President Obama’s State of the Union address to Congress, two passages had me rubbing my eyes in disbelief.

The first came when, to applause, the President spoke about the banking crash which coincided with his barnstorming 2008 election campaign. “The house of cards collapsed,” he recalled. “We learned that mortgages had been sold to people who couldn’t afford or understand them.” He excoriated the banks which had “made huge bets and bonuses with other people’s money”, while “regulators looked the other way and didn’t have the authority to stop the bad behaviour”. This, said Obama, “was wrong. It was irresponsible. And it plunged our economy into a crisis that put millions out of work.”

I recalled a piece I wrote in this column on January 29, 2009, just after Obama took office. It was headlined: “This is the sub-prime house that Barack Obama built”. As a rising young Chicago politician in 1995, no one campaigned more actively than Mr Obama for an amendment to the US Community Reinvestment Act, legally requiring banks to lend huge sums to millions of poor, mainly black Americans, guaranteed by the two giant mortgage associations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

It was this Act, above all, which let the US housing bubble blow up, far beyond the point where it was obvious that hundreds of thousands of homeowners would be likely to default. Yet, in 2005, no one more actively opposed moves to halt these reckless guarantees than Senator Obama, who received more donations from Fannie Mae than any other US politician (although Senator Hillary Clinton ran him close).

A later passage in Obama’s speech, when he hailed the way his country’s energy future has been transformed by the miracle of shale gas, met with a storm of applause. Not only would this give the US energy security for decades, creating 600,000 jobs, but it could now go all out to exploit its gas and oil reserves (more applause). Yet this was the man who in 2008 couldn’t stop talking about the threat of global warming, and was elected on a pledge to make the US only the second country in the world, after Britain, to commit to cutting its CO2 emissions from fossil fuels by 80 per cent within 40 years.

Even more telling than his audience’s response to this, however, was what happened when Obama referred briefly to the need to develop “clean energy on enough public land to power three million homes”. But no mention now of vast numbers of wind turbines – those props beside which he constantly chose to be filmed back in 2008. No harking back to his boast that “renewable energy” would create “four million jobs”. And even to this sole fleeting reminder of what, four years ago, was his flagship policy the response of Congress was a deafening silence.

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Barack Obama is still driving America towards decline

Two words hardly mentioned in Barack Obama’s 65-minute State of the Union address to Congress: freedom and liberty. President Obama’s fourth and possibly last State of the Union speech was long on big government proposals, but short on the principles that have made America the [...]]]>

Barack Obama is still driving America towards decline

Two words hardly mentioned in Barack Obama’s 65-minute State of the Union address to Congress: freedom and liberty. President Obama’s fourth and possibly last State of the Union speech was long on big government proposals, but short on the principles that have made America the world’s greatest power. His lecturing tone exuded arrogance, and he failed to present a coherent vision for getting the United States back on its feet after three years of economic decline. It was heavy on class-war rhetoric, punitive taxation, and frequent references to the Left-wing mantra of “fairness”, hardly likely to instil confidence in a battered business community that is the lifeblood of the American economy.

Above all, he remains in denial over the levels of federal debt that threaten the country’s long-term prosperity. This was not a speech that was serious about the biggest budget deficits since World War Two. There was no sense at all that America is a superpower on a precipice, sinking in a sea of debt that threatens to undermine America’s power to project global leadership for generations to come. In fact, his interventionist proposals will only make matters worse.

From new federally funded infrastructure projects to increasing regulations on financial institutions, President Obama remains wedded to big government – an approach rejected by a clear majority of Americans, who view it as a millstone around their necks. As Gallup’s polling has found, nearly two thirds of Americans see big government as “the biggest threat” to their country.

This should have been a serious speech addressing the economic problems facing the United States. Instead it was a laundry list of half-baked proposals designed to appease the Left. The president should have been talking about reining in spending, lowering taxes, and fostering greater economic freedom, but he opted for policies that will speed America’s decline, not reverse it.

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Slime time radio host Rush Limbaugh took to the air yesterday and declared that GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul “sounds like an Islamic terrorist”.

Limbaugh was commenting on the incident involving Congressman Paul’s son, Senator Rand Paul, who was detained by the TSA in Nashville after refusing to submit to an enhanced pat-down.

by John Rubino on January 22, 2012

As the Greek default (and it is a default no matter what they end up calling it) is finalized this week, the consensus seems to be that failure to reach a deal would cause a global financial apocalypse. [...]]]> Why Isn’t Illinois A Bigger Story Than Greece?

by John Rubino on January 22, 2012

As the Greek default (and it is a default no matter what they end up calling it) is finalized this week, the consensus seems to be that failure to reach a deal would cause a global financial apocalypse.

That may be true. And if it is, why aren’t we more worried about Illinois? It’s more or less the same size as Greece, its finances are in the same generally catastrophic shape, and its leaders are just as feckless and dishonest. It owes tens of billions of dollars to various investors and stakeholders and will clearly have to stiff many of them at some point. The following article captures the “failed state” dilemma perfectly:

The question isn’t whether Illinois’ finances are in dreadful shape, it’s how to fix the problem. Or perhaps more accurately, will legislators have the political will to fix it when they return to Springfield for their spring session?

Even though the legislature and Gov. Pat Quinn last year imposed a temporary 67 percent state income tax increase, Quinn’s office expects to have a $500 million budget deficit this year.

Quinn is calling for a 9 percent cut in most areas of state government, except education and health care. But even with cuts at that level, the state would have a projected $800 million budget deficit for fiscal 2015, the year when most of the tax hike expires.

Quinn’s budget spokesman, Kelly Kraft, said the state’s fiscal situation is not pretty.

“These projections clearly demonstrate that action must be taken to control not only Medicaid costs but also (pension) costs, or all other areas of government will continue to be squeezed,” Kraft said.

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– Oliver Stone

An Exclusive Interview

In this candid conversation with Rock Cellar Magazine, Oliver Stone discusses On History, the new book he co-authored [...]]]>

“He’s the only one of anybody who’s saying anything intelligent about the future of the world…”

– Oliver Stone

Director Oliver Stone On History. And America, Jim Morrison & Ron Paul.

An Exclusive Interview

In this candid conversation with Rock Cellar Magazine, Oliver Stone discusses On History, the new book he co-authored with Tariq Ali, the activist/intellectual who inspired Mick Jagger to write Street Fighting Man.

Stone also chats about his related TV documentary series, rock ’n’ roll, his preference in the current presidential race (Ron Paul?), and oh – the fall of the American empire.

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[ Apparently only the "overlords" of society have a "right" to photograph you, fingerprint you, swab you for DNA, catalog you, scan your genitals, and so on, but if you are a private citizen who simply likes to take photographs as a hobby, you are now regarded as a potential threat... "Nothing to [...]]]>

[ Apparently only the "overlords" of society have a "right" to photograph you, fingerprint you, swab you for DNA, catalog you, scan your genitals, and so on, but if you are a private citizen who simply likes to take photographs as a hobby, you are now regarded as a potential threat... "Nothing to see here... Move on." ]

=======

A snapshot of our times

by George Will

Shawn Nee, 35, works in television but hopes to publish a book of photographs. Shane Quentin, 31, repairs bicycles but enjoys photographing industrial scenes at night. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department probably wishes that both would find other hobbies. Herewith a story of today’s inevitable friction between people exercising, and others protecting, freedom.

When the Los Angeles Police Department developed a Suspicious Activity Report program, the federal government encouraged local law enforcement agencies to adopt its guidelines for gathering information “that could indicate activity or intentions related to” terrorism. From the fact that terrorists might take pictures of potential infrastructure targets (“pre-operational surveillance”), it is a short slide down a slippery slope to the judgment that photography is a potential indicator of terrorism and hence photographers are suspect when taking pictures “with no apparent aesthetic value” (words from the suspicious-activity guidelines).

One reason law enforcement is such a demanding, and admirable, profession is that it requires constant exercises of good judgment in the application of general rules to ambiguous situations. Such judgment is not evenly distributed among America’s 800,000 law enforcement officials and was lacking among the sheriff’s deputies who saw Nee photographing controversial new subway turnstiles. (Subway officials, sadder but wiser about our fallen world, installed turnstiles after operating largely on an honor system regarding ticket purchases.) Deputies detained and searched Nee, asking if he was planning to sell the photos to al-Qaeda. Nee was wearing, in plain view, a device police sometimes use to make video and audio records of interactions with people, and when he told a deputy he was going to exercise his right to remain silent, the deputy said:

“You know, I’ll just submit your name to TLO (the Terrorism Liaison Officer program). Every time your driver’s license gets scanned, every time you take a plane, any time you go on any type of public transit system where they look at your identification, you’re going to be stopped. You will be detained. You’ll be searched. You will be on the FBI’s hit list.”

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by Dave Daubenmire

It is amazing to me that people cannot see that politics is a rigged game.

All you have to do is watch the media-circus in Iowa with its constantly changing “front-runners” to understand the degree to which the media controls our elections.

Polls are not news, but they create the [...]]]>

by Dave Daubenmire

It is amazing to me that people cannot see that politics is a rigged game.

All you have to do is watch the media-circus in Iowa with its constantly changing “front-runners” to understand the degree to which the media controls our elections.

Polls are not news, but they create the news. Knowing the “herd mentality” of most folks, the media, like good sheep-dogs, do their best to drive the flock in the direction they want them to go. Everyone loves a winner and the polls tell us who the winner will be.

It used to be that the American media was somewhat honest…or at least honest in their attempts at reporting a story…but honesty and objectivity have fallen prey to ideology.

I don’t believe any of them. Not Rush, not Hannity, not Faux News, and certainly not Bill O’Reilly. They all claim to be independent, but that is part of the ruse. They all have strong loyalties and they all have someone who pulls their strings…writes their checks…knows what’s in their closets.

Somewhere “behind the curtain”, the decision was made who the “top tier” candidates were going to be. The job of the media is to make sure that the “establishment” favorites are the ones who make it through the primaries to the final stage.

In 2000, in a speech before the Commonwealth Club of California, straight-shooting radio host Michael Savage said:

“As you know, the media is very badly needed to serve as a thorn in the side of government. In order to keep the government reasonably honest we need the media to be constantly poking at it. However, when the media becomes a thorn in the side of the skeptical private citizen, then it becomes an arm of the government. That’s why I say, “Beware the Government-Media Complex.”

Wake up Zombies. “The People” may get to pick the President, but we sure don’t get to pick who the candidates will be. Can anyone explain to me how John McCain became the Republican nominee in 2008? Did it seem to you like the Republican establishment wanted to lose in 2008? Perhaps they knew the mess that lay on the road ahead.

Are things any different today? Even though he has been in constant campaign mode since 2008, Mitt Romney still cannot get more than 25% of the Republican vote. Yet “they” call him the “front runner”, the only candidate “capable of beating Obama.”

The real story is, everyone knows Romney and 75% of them don’t want him. But the media tells us Mitt is the front-runner and “likely Republican nominee.”

How do they know this?

They don’t. They create the appearance of front-runner status through the use of the latest “public opinion polls.” It is the way they steer the sheep to the winner.

Good for her to school such a flatulent egomaniac — who now ranks right up there with Rush Limbaugh as America’s biggest muttonhead….

According to its latest annual report, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) received $487.4 million in tax dollars over a twelve-month period and performed 329,455 abortions.

In addition, the number of adoption referrals made by the organization continued to decline.

The latest annual report covers the period from July 1, 2009 to [...]]]>

According to its latest annual report, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) received $487.4 million in tax dollars over a twelve-month period and performed 329,455 abortions.

In addition, the number of adoption referrals made by the organization continued to decline.

The latest annual report covers the period from July 1, 2009 to June 30, 2010, the PPFA’s fiscal year. The report states that the organization received “government health services grants and reimbursements” totaling $487.4 million.

Previous Planned Parenthood annual reports showed total funding from “government grants and contracts” (which were $363.2 million in 2009), while this year’s report also accounts for payments from Medicaid managed care plans among the payments the group receives from government .

When compared with previous annual reports, the latest one shows an almost steady increase in the number of abortions performed at its clinics: In 2006, Planned Parenthood did 289,750 abortions; in 2007, it did 305,310; in 2009, it did 331,796; and, in 2010, it did 329,445–a small decrease from the previous year.

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I never thought I would have to write this: but—incredibly—Congress has now passed the National Defense Appropriations Act, with Amendment 1031, which allows for the military detention of American citizens. The amendment is so loosely worded that any American citizen could be held without due process. The language of this bill can be [...]]]>

I never thought I would have to write this: but—incredibly—Congress has now passed the National Defense Appropriations Act, with Amendment 1031, which allows for the military detention of American citizens. The amendment is so loosely worded that any American citizen could be held without due process. The language of this bill can be read to assure Americans that they can challenge their detention — but most people do not realize what this means: at Guantanamo and in other military prisons, one’s lawyer’s calls are monitored, witnesses for one’s defense are not allowed to testify, and one can be forced into nudity and isolation. Incredibly, ninety-three Senators voted to support this bill and now most of Congress: a roster of names that will live in infamy in the history of our nation, and never be expunged from the dark column of the history books.

They may have supported this bill because—although it’s hard to believe—they think the military will only arrest active members of Al Qaida; or maybe, less naively, they believe that ‘at most’, low-level dissenting figures, activists, or troublesome protesters might be subjected to military arrest. But they are forgetting something critical: history shows that those who signed this bill will soon be subject to arrest themselves.

Our leaders appear to be supporting this bill thinking that they will always be what they are now, in the fading light of a once-great democracy — those civilian leaders who safely and securely sit in freedom and DIRECT the military. In inhabiting this bubble, which their own actions are about to destroy, they are cocooned by an arrogance of power, placing their own security in jeopardy by their own hands, and ignoring history and its inevitable laws. The moment this bill becomes law, though Congress is accustomed, in a weak democracy, to being the ones who direct and control the military, the power roles will reverse: Congress will no longer be directing and in charge of the military: rather, the military will be directing and in charge of individual Congressional leaders, as well as in charge of everyone else — as any Parliamentarian in any society who handed this power over to the military can attest.

Perhaps Congress assumes that it will always only be ‘they’ who are targeted for arrest and military detention: but sadly, Parliamentary leaders are the first to face pressure, threats, arrest and even violence when the military obtains to power to make civilian arrests and hold civilians in military facilities without due process. There is no exception to this rule. Just as I traveled the country four years ago warning against the introduction of torture and secret prisons – and confidently offering a hundred thousand dollar reward to anyone who could name a nation that allowed torture of the ‘other’ that did not eventually turn this abuse on its own citizens — (confident because I knew there was no such place) — so today I warn that one cannot name a nation that gave the military the power to make civilian arrests and hold citizens in military detention, that did not almost at once turn that power almost against members of that nation’s own political ruling class. This makes sense — the obverse sense of a democracy, in which power protects you; political power endangers you in a militarized police state: the more powerful a political leader is, the more can be gained in a militarized police state by pressuring, threatening or even arresting him or her.

Mussolini, who created the modern template for fascism, was a duly elected official when he started to direct paramilitary forces against Italian citizens: yes, he sent the Blackshirts to beat up journalists, editors, and union leaders; but where did these militarized groups appear most dramatically and terrifyingly, snapping at last the fragile hold of Italian democracy? In the halls of the Italian Parliament. Whom did they physically attack and intimidate? Mussolini’s former colleagues in Parliament — as they sat, just as our Congress is doing, peacefully deliberating and debating the laws. Whom did Hitler’s Brownshirts arrest in the first wave of mass arrests in 1933? Yes, journalists, union leaders and editors; but they also targeted local and regional political leaders and dragged them off to secret prisons and to torture that the rest of society had turned a blind eye to when it had been directed at the ‘other.’ Who was most at risk from assassination or arrest and torture, after show trials, in Stalin’s Russia? Yes, journalists, editors and dissidents: but also physically endangered, and often arrested by militarized police and tortured or worse, were senior members of the Politburo who had fallen out of favor.

Is this intimidation and arrest by the military a vestige of the past? Hardly. We forget in America that all over the world there are militarized societies in which shells of democracy are propped up — in which Parliament meets regularly and elections are held, but the generals are really in charge, just as the Egyptian military is proposing with upcoming elections and the Constitution itself. That is exactly what will take place if Congress gives the power of arrest and detention to the military: and in those societies if a given political leader does not please the generals, he or she is in physical danger or subjected to military arrest. Whom did John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, say he was directed to intimidate and threaten when he worked as a ‘jackal’, putting pressure on the leadership in authoritarian countries? Latin American parliamentarians who were in the position to decide the laws that affected the well-being of his corporate clients. Who is under house arrest by the military in Myanmar? The political leader of the opposition to the military junta. Malalai Joya is an Afghani parliamentarian who has run afoul of the military and has to sleep in a different venue every night — for her own safety. An on, and on, in police states — that is, countries with military detention of civilians — that America is about to join.

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This past year has not been a good one for the 99%, and the new year is likely to be even worse. This column deals with the outlook for liberty. The next will deal with the economic outlook.

The outlook for liberty is dismal. Those writers who [...]]]>

The Outlook for the New Year

This past year has not been a good one for the 99%, and the new year is likely to be even worse. This column deals with the outlook for liberty. The next will deal with the economic outlook.

The outlook for liberty is dismal. Those writers who are critical of Washington’s illegal wars and overthrow of the US Constitution could find themselves in indefinite detainment, because criticism of Washington’s policies can be alleged to be aiding Washington’s enemies, which might include charities that provide aid to bombed Palestinian children and flotillas that attempt to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza. (Source)

The Bush/Obama regimes have put the foundation in place for imprisoning critics of the government without due process of law. The First Amendment is being all but restricted to rah-rah Americans who chant USA! USA! USA! Washington has set itself up as world prosecutor, forever berating other countries for human rights violations, while Washington alone bombs half a dozen countries into the stone age and threatens several more with the same treatment, all the while violating US statutory law and the Geneva Conventions by torturing detainees. (Source)

Washington rounds up assorted foreign politicians, whose countries were afflicted with civil wars, and sends them off to be tried as war criminals, while its own war crimes continue to mount. However, if a person exposes Washington’s war crimes, that person is held without charges in conditions that approximate torture.

While America degenerates into a total police state, politicians constantly invoke “our values.” What are these values? Indefinite imprisonment without conviction in a court. Torture. Warrantless searches and home invasions. An epidemic of police brutality. Curtailment of free speech and peaceful assembly rights. Unprovoked aggression called “preemptive war.” Interference in the elections and internal affairs of other countries. Economic sanctions imposed on foreign populations whose leaders are not in Washington’s pocket.

Bradley Manning is the case in point. Manning, a US soldier, is alleged to be the person who released to WikiLeaks the “Collateral Murder” video, which, in the words of Marjorie Cohn, “depicts U.S. forces in an Apache helicopter killing 12 unarmed civilians, including two Reuters journalists. People trying to rescue the wounded were also fired upon and killed.”

One of the Good Samaritans was a father with two small children. The video reveals the delight that US military personnel experienced in blowing them away from the distant skies. When it became clear that the Warriors Bringing The People Democracy had blown away two small children, instead of remorse we hear an executioner’s voice saying: “that’s what he gets for bringing children into a war zone.”

The quote is from memory, but it is accurate enough. When I first saw this video, I was astonished at the brazen war crime. It is completely obvious that the dozen or so murdered people were simply people walking along a street, threatening no one, unarmed, doing nothing out of the ordinary. It was not a war zone. The horror is that the US soldiers were playing video games with live people. You can tell from their commentary that they were having fun by killing these unsuspecting people walking along the street. They enjoyed killing the father who stopped to help and shooting up his vehicle with the two small children inside.

This was not an accident of a drone, fed with bad information, blowing up a school full of children, or a hospital, or a farmer’s family. This was American soldiers having fun with high tech toys killing anyone that they could pretend might be an enemy.

When I saw this, I realized that America was lost. Evil had prevailed.

I was about to write that nothing has been done about the crime. But something was done about it. An American soldier who recognized the horrific war crime knew that the US military knew about it and had done nothing about it. He also knew that as a US soldier he was required to report war crimes. But to whom? War crimes dismissed as “collateral damage” are the greatest part of Washington’s 21st-century wars.

A soldier with a moral conscience gave the video to WikiLeaks. We don’t know who the soldier is. Washington alleges that the soldier is Bradley Manning, but Washington lies every time it opens its mouth. So we will never know.

All we know is that retribution did not fall on the perpetrators of the war crime. It fell upon the two accused of revealing it — Bradley Manning and Julian Assange.

Manning was held almost two years without charges being presented to a court.

In December’s pre-trial hearings all Washington could come up with was concocted accusations. No evidence whatsoever. The prosecutor, a Captain Fein, told the court, if that is what it is, that Manning had been “trained and trusted to use multiple intelligence systems, and he used that training to defy that trust. He abused our trust.”

In other words, Manning gave the world the truth of a war crime that was being covered up, and Washington and the Pentagon regard a truth teller doing his duty under the US military code as an “abuser of trust.”

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