Obama Beats Trump as Most Admired

President Obama beat out Donald Trump as the most admired person of 2017, marking the tenth time he was won that title. Trump joined Harry Truman and Gerald Ford as the only presidents who failed to win the top distinction in his first year in office.

Hillary Clinton, who beat Trump in the popular vote during the presidential election,  retained her title as the most admired woman for the 16th year in a row.    The former senator, secretary of state and Democratic presidential nominee has won 22 times overall, the most ever.

More Faux Outrage

Threat Level: Bogus?

Foreign Policy's Rosa Brooks gleefully mocked Obama's U.N. address this week:

PRESIDENT OBAMA: My fellow Americans, the Middle East today is frighteningly full of threatiness.

What, you ask, is threatiness? As my good friend Mr. Stephen Colbert will surely understand, threatiness is to threat as truthiness is to truth. By this, I mean that sometimes we cannot articulate why something is a threat, or offer evidence, but we still think it just feels, you know, threaty. We know it in our gut. And let me be clear: when there is enough threatiness floating around, America must take action.

So when exactly is somebody going to make a halfway-decent case for why anything in Syria or Iraq is enough of a threat to justify going back to war?  I'm not sure there is a case to be made.

Getting Drone Operators To Face Humanity

The child pictured in the giant art installation above (whose name was not released) lost two siblings and both of her parents in a Predator drone strike.   The title of the work, Not a Bug Splat, refers to to a military slang terms for targeted victims of drone strikes.  Predator drone operators often refer to their kills as "bug splats", since viewing the body through a grainy video image gives the sense of an insect being crushed.   But many of these disembodied "insects" are innocent victims-- people who were unluckily in the vicinity of the intended drone target.

A 2013 study conducted by a U.S. military adviser found that drone strikes in Afghanistan during a year of the protracted conflict caused 10 times more unintended civilian casualties than strikes by manned fighter aircraft.   These findings directly contradict claims by proponents of drone warfare who say that drone strikes are precise and only target terrorists.   But a study from Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute found that the number of Pakistani civilians killed in drone strikes is “significantly and consistently underestimated" and that as many as 98% of those killed by drone strikes are civilians.  As a result of 193 Pakistan drone strikes authorized by Obama between 2009 and 2013, only 22 Al-Qaeda officers were killed-- but over 800 innocent civilians were killed, including 97 children.

In light of those statistics, a group of artists-- using the printing technology utilized in street artist JR’s work-- placed a massive portrait of the anonymous drone victim in Pakistan’s Pukhtoonkhwa region, where drones have killed over 200 people.  Their hope is that remotely-operating pilots flying overhead might see her face and be reminded of their victims’ humanity.

Ted Cruz Facebook Fail

Ted Cruz thought he would stir up some negative shit on the anniversary of Obamacare by posting a quick poll on his Facebook page-- "Are you better off now than you were then?"   Looks like he didn't get the memo that the majority of Americans now favor health care reforms:

Drudge Caught In Yet Another Lie

"Does this hat make me look more credible?"

Earlier this year, right-wing guttersnipe Matt Drudge announced that he was never going to comply with Obamacare-- but guess what? He announced last week that he had just paid the Obamacare penalty (which he has renamed ”the Liberty Tax”). 

The main problem with this story is that the penalty for not having insurance isn't being assessed until 2014 returns are filed a year from now.  But some Republican apologists tried to point out that perhaps Drudge had decided to estimated his 2014 income and thus pre-pay both his tax and the penalty a full year in advance.  But those GOPers also failed to do their research-- oops!  The IRS hasn't updated its forms yet for reporting the penalty-- so if Drudge had pre-paid his 2014 taxes and included the penalty, the IRS would have treated the entire amount as pre-paid tax, since there is no place to itemize the penalty amount.

After much public skepticism of his original story, Drudge later tweeted (in two messages, both now deleted) that he had been forced to pay the penalty because of quarterly filings.   But that story doesn't hold water either, since the penalty for businesses with under 100 employees was delayed until 2016.  But wait-- maybe the Drudge Report employs over 100 people (not according to Wikipedia, he doesn't) . . .  hmmm, running out of stories here . . . maybe he's filing quarterly as an individual (really?) and then adding a penalty to his quarterly tax payments---but as we've already established, federal tax forms haven't been updated, so the IRS would treat any prepayments as tax payments.  I'm calling bullshit on this whole thing.

Response To Ukraine Crisis Deserves Mockery

"Is Seymour there?  Last name: Butts"

"Caught me just before bedtime-- but I'm here"

"I'm now patched in as well.  Sorry for the delay"

 

Obama Officials Got Comcast's Back

The news that cable and news giant Comcast has struck a deal to purchase Time Warner, another large cable business, has raised serious concerns over market concentration.   The merger would make the combined company the dominant provider in 19 of the top 20 markets in the United States,

A Seattle Times editorial has pointed out that the recent wave of media consolidations has diluted the breadth and quality of journalism in America, and that regulatory failures have eliminated almost all oversight of broadband and Internet services.  Putting all the access under ever fewer corporate brands, and decreasing already limited competition raises basic concerns about prices.

When Comcast purchased NBC Universal in 2011, lobbyists were hired to ensure the merger went through. After signing off on the Comcast-NBC deal, FCC Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker, (married to the son of Republican James Baker) was hired by Comcast for an undisclosed amount.  FCC Commissioner Michael Powell (son of Colin Powell) then became head of the industry lobbying association for a seven-figure salary.

The current head of the FCC, Tom Wheeler, is the former head of both the largest cable lobbying organization (National Cable & Telecommunications Association), as well as largest wireless lobby (CTIA – The Wireless Association).  The recently installed head of the Department of Justice Antitrust Division, William Baer, was a lawyer representing GE and NBC in their push for the merger with Comcast.  Maureen Ohlhausen, one of four commissioners on the Federal Trade Commission, which oversees antitrust enforcement, provided legal counsel for Comcast as an attorney just before joining the FTC.   In addition, FTC Commissioner Joshua Wright currently works for a consulting firm that worked to secure antitrust clearance from DOJ and the FCC for the NBC-Comcast merger.

Unless the public rises up in outrage over the proposed merger, the deck is stacked against the consumer. 

State Of The Union Remix

Obama Now Supressing The Rights Of Innocent Citizens

According to reports, President Obama is now putting pressure on countries from which whistleblower Ed Snowden has requested political asylum.

"The president ordered his vice president to pressure the leaders of nations from which I have requested protection to deny my asylum petitions," Snowden is quoted as saying.

"This kind of deception from a world leader is not justice, and neither is the extralegal penalty of exile. These are the old, bad tools of political aggression. Their purpose is to frighten, not me, but those who would come after me."

In the statement, Snowden describes himself as "a stateless person", accusing President Obama of stopping him from exercising the "basic right...to seek asylum".

On Sunday, the 30-year-old fugitive applied for asylum in Russia.  Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Moscow "never hands over anybody anywhere and has no intention of doing so".

Snowden also publicly thanked President Correa, praising Ecuador for guaranteeing "my rights would be protected upon departing Hong Kong - I could never have risked travel without that". He further acknowledged President Correa's "great personal admiration of [his] commitment to doing what is right rather than what is rewarding".

No Due Process For You!

Attorney General Eric Holder has acknowledged four U.S. citizens have been killed in drone strikes since 2009.  In a letter to the Senate judiciary committee, Eric Holder defended the targeted killing of Anwar al-Awlaki.  But he said Awlaki's 16-year-old son as well as two other individuals were "not specifically targeted by the U.S."

The disclosure comes as President Barack Obama prepares to make a speech on counter-terrorism and the drone program on Thursday.  The president will "discuss why the use of drone strikes is necessary, legal and just, while addressing the various issues raised by our use of targeted action", administration officials said.

His speech coincides with the signing of new "presidential policy guidance" on when drone strikes can be used, the White House said.  According to news reports, the Pentagon has already started taking over responsibility from the CIA for drone strikes outside Pakistan. 

The disclosure of the killings in Yemen and Pakistan marks the first formal public acknowledgement of the U.S. citizen deaths in drone strikes.  Holder defended the killing of Awlaki, whom he described as a "senior operational leader" of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.  Holder said officials "appropriately concluded that [Awlaki] posed a continuing and imminent threat" to the U.S.

Awlaki, who was born in the state of New Mexico, was killed in a missile strike from an unmanned plane in Yemen in September 2011.  The original announcement of his death did not officially reveal he was killed by a drone.  Samir Khan, a naturalized U.S. citizen who produced an online magazine promoting al-Qaeda's ideology, died in the same missile strike.

Awlaki's 16-year-old son Abdulrahman, who was born in Colorado, was killed in Yemen a month later.  Jude Kenan Mohammad, a North Carolina resident with a Pakistani father and an American-born mother, was thought to have died in a strike in November 2011 in Pakistan's South Waziristan region. Speculation of his death had been reported in local media in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he lived, but was not confirmed by U.S. officials before Wednesday.

 

 

Beware Barack's Betrayal

President Barack Obama reneged on his campaign promise to protect Social Security and the middle class this week-- by shockingly unveiling a budget proposal that would change tax brackets and Social Security cost-of-living adjustments from being pegged to the Consumer Price Index to a "chained CPI," which is based on the assumption that inflation rises more slowly than the CPI (anybody who's struggled to make ends meet the last four years knows what crap that is).

Such a switch to "chained CPI" would reduce future benefit increases and push more taxpayers into higher brackets, a phenomenon known as "bracket creep."  For an average worker retiring at the age of 65, this would amount to a cut of $650 a year by age 75. At age 85, this would be a cut of $1,130 a year.

Americans for Tax Reform, the advocacy group that asks lawmakers to sign a formal "Taxpayer Protection Pledge," said this week that chained CPI violates the pledge.

Anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist, leader of the organization, criticized the policy via Twitter, saying "Chained CPI is a very large tax hike over time."

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that chained CPI would reduce Social Security spending by $127 billion and increase tax revenue by $123 billion over 10 years.

When asked Friday if chained CPI represents a tax hike on the middle class, White House spokesman Jay Carney said, "I'm not disputing that."

For me, that's the last straw for Obama.  I don't believe anymore that he cares enough about the elderly or the middle class-- and he's given the GOP a perfect talking point against every Democrat that voices even the slightest support for Obama's proposal.  Everyone needs to bombard their congressmen and tell them to protect Social Security and the middle class and abandon any and all support for Obama's attack on Social Security.

Senate phone numbers and addresses can be found here.  House phone numbers and addresses can be found here.

Drone Program Being Slowly Dragged Into The Light

In the first judicial blow to secrecy surrounding the Obama Administration’s armed drone program, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has unanimously rejected the CIA’s claim that it could refuse to confirm or deny whether it possesses any records related to drone strikes.

The judges found that public statements about drones from President Barack Obama, former CIA director Leon Panetta and new Central Intelligence Agency Director and former White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan have made it implausible for the CIA to assert that it needed to keep secret the very question of whether it maintains any information on the subject.  “As it is now clear that the Agency does have an interest in drone strikes, it beggars belief that it does not also have documents relating to the subject,” Judge Merrick Garland wrote in the opinion.

The judges did not rule that any specific documents must be made public by the CIA.  However, the CIA will now be obligated to make some further filings with a lower court, describing the relevant records in some fashion and explaining why they are covered by one or more Freedom of Information Act exemptions.

The ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer called the decision an important victory, saying in a statement, “We hope that this ruling will encourage the Obama administration to fundamentally reconsider the secrecy surrounding the targeted killing program,” Jaffer said. “The public surely has a right to know who the government is killing, and why, and in which countries, and on whose orders.”.

The judges did not rule that any specific documents must be made public by the CIA. However, the CIA will now be obligated to make some further filings with a lower court, describing the relevant records in some fashion and explaining why they are covered by one or more Freedom of Information Act exemptions.

Religious Wingnuts Rebuffed In Missouri

A federal judge has struck down a Missouri law exempting religious organizaions from mandatory birth control coverage because it conflicts with an insurance requirement under President Barrack Obama's health care law.  The ruling by U.S. District Judge Audrey Fleissig cites a provision in the U.S. Constitution declaring that federal laws take precedence over contradictory state laws.

The Missouri law had required insurers to issue policies without contraception coverage if individuals or employers assert that the use of birth control violates their "moral, ethical or religious beliefs." The state's Republican-led Legislature overrode Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon's veto of the law last September.

Peter Brownlie, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri, praised the ruling for ensuring "that all Missouri women -no matter who their boss is - have access to basic preventive health care without a co-pay, including birth control."

Who Needs A Trial? Death Penalty By Fiat

One morning in late September 2011, American drones took off from an airstrip the C.I.A. had built in the remote southern expanse of Saudi Arabia. As profiled by the New York Times, the drones crossed the border into Yemen, and were soon hovering over a group of trucks clustered in a desert patch of Jawf Province, a region of the impoverished country once renowned for breeding Arabian horses.

A group of men who had just finished breakfast walked over to get in their trucks. One was Anwar al-Awlaki, the firebrand preacher, born in New Mexico, who had evolved from a peddler of Internet hatred to a senior operative in Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen. Another was Samir Khan, another American citizen who had moved to Yemen from North Carolina and was the creative editor of Inspire, the militant group’s English-language Internet magazine. 

Two of the Predator drones pointed lasers on the trucks to pinpoint the targets, while the larger Reaper drones took aim.  The Reaper pilots, operating their planes from thousands of miles away, locked on their missiles, and fired.  Anwar al-Awlaki was the designated target on this historic day-- as lawyers in the Obama administration had believed his killing to be justifiable.  On the other hand, officials had judged that Samir Khan was not a significant enough threat to warrant being targeted . . . too bad about his choice of where to have breakfast that morning.

The missile strike launched that day not only killed Awlaki, but also unintentionally killed Samir Khan.  For the first time since the Civil War, the United States government had carried out the deliberate killing of an American citizen as a wartime enemy-- and without a trial.

The next month, another drone strike mistakenly killed Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, while he was searching the Yemeni desert for his father. Within just two weeks, the American government had killed three of its own citizens in Yemen. Only one had been killed on purpose.

The war in Iraq has ended and the war in Afghanistan soon will be as well.  At that point, will we be at war?  If not, when will we ever stop being at war?  Unfortunately, the complex legal justifications created to justify extra-judicial killing by the U.S. president are available for only a small group of officials to read-- but apparently they are largely based on powers granted to the Executive Branch for the purposes of conducting "war".  Even worse-- if the president can order the assassination of Americans overseas, based on secret intelligence without  the oversight of Congress or the Judicial branch, what are the limits to his power?

A Small Victory For Privacy Rights

An appeals court has smacked down the Obama administration's claim that customs agents can peruse Americans' electronic devices for evidence when returning to the country-- without having even a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity.   U.S. customs officials must have a reasonable justification before snatching your laptop at the border and scanning through all your files for incriminating data, a federal appeals court ruled last week.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Homeland Security's border agents must have "reasonable suspicion" before they can legally conduct a forensics examination of laptops, mobile phones, camera memory cards, and such other devices.

The court's ruling is a limited -- but hardly complete -- rejection of the Obama administration's claim that any American entering the country may have his or her electronic files minutely examined for evidence of criminal activity. Homeland Security has said the electronic border searches could detect terrorists, drug smugglers, and people violating "copyright or trademark laws."

It's only a limited rejection because certain warrantless searches at the border remain permissible: The judges said that "a quick look" or "unintrusive search" of a laptop, such as asking its owner to turn it on and peruse open windows, is perfectly OK. In addition, the court indicated that previous criminal history qualifies as "reasonable suspicion" that justifies a complete forensics analysis.

A unusual dissent written by Judge Milan Smith argues that flagging a traveler merely based on a decades-old conviction does not amount to "reasonable suspicion," saying: "The bottom line is that thousands of individuals -- many with decades-old convictions -- will now be forced to reconsider traveling to entire countries or even continents, or will need to leave all their electronic equipment behind, to avoid arousing a 'reasonable' suspicion."

Fly Ball Into Far Right Field Goes Way Foul

Words like "offensive," "abhorrent," and "pathetic" are being used to describe a billboard in Caldwell, Idaho, that compares President Barack Obama — unfavorably — to James Eagan Holmes, the suspect in the shooting deaths of 12 people in a Colorado movie theater last week.

 The billboard attempts to equate the actions of the president's foreign policies to the cowardly acts of Holmes.   Of Holmes, it says: "Kills 12 in a movie theater with assault rifle, everyone freaks out." Of Obama, it says: "Kills thousands with foreign policy, wins Nobel Peace Prize."

The libertarian group that owns the board, The Ralph Smeed Foundation, says it wants to draw attention to military men and women dying overseas.  "This billboard is offensive to all those lives lost and affected by the shooting," wrote a commenter on the Facebook page of KBOI-TV of Boise, which first reported the story. "Just pathetic, even if this is their expression of the 1st amendment."

Patriot Act Abuses Continue Under Obama

For more than two years, a handful of Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee have warned that the government is secretly interpreting its surveillance powers under the Patriot Act in a way that would be alarming if Congress and the general public knew about it.

Two senators — Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado — have now gone further. In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, they say a recent top-secret intelligence operation that is based on the secret legal theory made possible by the Patriot Act is not as crucial to national security as executive branch officials have publicly maintained.

The senators wrote that it was appropriate to keep specific operations secret. But, they said, the government in a democracy must act within publicly understood law so that voters “can ratify or reject decisions made on their behalf” — even if that “obligation to be transparent with the public” creates other challenges.

“In recent months we have grown increasingly skeptical about the actual value of the ‘intelligence collection operation,’ ” they added. “This has come as a surprise to us, as we were initially inclined to take the executive branch’s assertions about the importance of this ‘operation’ at face value.”

The letter from Wyden and Udall also complained that while the Obama administration told Congress in August 2009 that it would establish “a regular process for reviewing, redacting and releasing significant opinions” of the secret court, since then “not a single redacted opinion has been released.”

With Obama's Help, BOA Too Crooked To Fail

Have you heard about the plot to rig global interest rates? The $137 million fine for bilking needy schools and cities? The ingenious plan to suck multiple fees out of the unemployment checks of jobless workers?  If not, you haven't been keeping up on Bank of America.

It's been four years since the government, in the name of preventing a depression, saved this megabank from ruin by pumping $45 billion of taxpayer money into its arm. Since then, the Obama administration has looked the other way as the bank committed an astonishing variety of crimes.

As thoroughly documented by Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi, Bank of America has systematically cheated investors, insurers, depositors, homeowners, shareholders, pensioners and taxpayers.

BOA brought tens of thousands of Americans to foreclosure court using bogus, "robo-signed" evidence. It hawked worthless mortgages to dozens of unions and state pension funds, draining them of hundreds of millions in value. It also helped push insurance giants like AMBAC into bankruptcy by fraudulently inducing them to spend hundreds of millions insuring those same worthless mortgages.

But despite being the very definition of an unaccountable corporate villain, Bank of America is now bigger and more dangerous than ever. It controls more than 12 percent of America's bank deposits (skirting a federal law designed to prohibit any firm from controlling more than 10 percent), as well as 17 percent of all American home mortgages.

By looking the other way and rewarding the bank's bad behavior with a massive government bailout, we actually allowed a huge financial company to not just grow so big that its collapse would imperil the whole economy, but to get away with any and all crimes it might commit.

Bill Maher New Rules - 2/17/12