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Wednesday, 10 February 2010 16:57 |
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By Margaret Kimberley .bmp)
“There are no warrants or indictments or grand juries impaneled in order for Barack Obama to decide to kill any individual he chooses.”
No one has the right to kill, or so we are told. Regardless of motive, murder is illegal, and the legal system rightfully sets the bar at a very high level before excusing this act. Not so where the government is concerned. Our constitutional law professor president, Barack Obama, like his predecessor George W. Bush, claims the right to murder American citizens.
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Tuesday, 02 February 2010 16:42 |
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A little over a year ago this week, millions of people in the U.S. greeted the inauguration of Obama with hope. For years people had watched in revulsion as Bush overrode massive public opposition to launch totally unjustified war against Iraq. They watched as he occupied Afghanistan and declared that the U.S. had the right to go to war against anyone it perceived to be even possibly “threatening” it.
They saw the pictures from Abu Ghraib and some heard the tales out of Guantánamo... they watched the basic rights that are supposed to be guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution shredded... and they saw a country rapidly heading in a direction that revolted them.
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Friday, 20 February 2009 04:57 |
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Orders 17,000 additional troops to Afghanistan
By Kenneth J. Theisen
This week President Barack Obama once again followed in the fascist footprints of his predecessor, George W. Bush. On Tuesday, February 17, 2009 Obama made official what he had promised during his presidential campaign--he is escalating the war in Afghanistan with the announced deployment of 17,000 additional troops to that war-torn nation. The Obama administration, as the new representative of U.S. imperialism, is intent on “winning” the Afghanistan war. Obama portrays the war in this Central Asian country as the good war or the real “war on terror.” This war was begun by Bush in 2001, but will continue under a president that claims to be an agent of change. What has changed when the new president is intent on escalating the war in Afghanistan on behalf of U.S. imperialism?
There are currently 37,000 US troops in the country (this does not include military contractors) but Obama has determined this is not enough to “win” the war. The additional troops to be sent by the new administration will include a Marine Expeditionary Brigade to be sent this spring, and an Army Stryker Brigade to be sent later this summer. There will also be a need for additional support troops and equipment. In his announcement Obama said, "This increase is necessary to stabilize a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, which has not received the strategic attention, direction and resources it urgently requires.” This is in keeping with Obama’s campaign criticism that the Bush regime was not putting in enough of an effort to win the war in Afghanistan.
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Thursday, 19 February 2009 16:58 |
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By Dennis Loo
"For months now, the right has been in a frenzy over the supposedly imminent return of the Fairness Doctrine, an old FCC regulation that mandated equal time for opposing viewpoints on public airwaves. Recent statements by a handful of Democrats who said they support the idea of reinstituting the rule, or something like it, have only fueled conservatives' fear that liberals are planning to censor talk radio and the Internet.
"Of course, as I've pointed out before, the chance the doctrine will actually make a comeback is right around nil, as it has been since the first time this became an issue, back in the Clinton administration. Certainly the Legislative Branch is decidedly unlikely to do anything -- when I asked him about it in 2007, Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, told me, 'To be honest, I barely even know what it is.' (A quote Manley gave to the conservative Washington Times earlier this year was even better; he told the paper, 'We have enough real problems facing this country that we don't need to invent ones that don't exist.')
"So lately conservatives have been focusing on President Obama and the FCC as the instrument through which the Fairness Doctrine will make its inevitable comeback -- nevermind that it didn't happen during former President Bill Clinton's eight years in office. But on Wednesday, a spokesman for Obama made clear that the administration has no such plans, telling FoxNews.com, 'As the president stated during the campaign, he does not believe the Fairness Doctrine should be reinstated.'
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"Unfortunately, the latest news is unlikely to put an end to all this manufactured outrage..."
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What Koppelman is doing here, of course, is aiming his fire at the GOP for making a mountain out of a molehill and he is congratulating Obama for his opposition to the Fairness Doctrine. But in "defending" Obama against the right-wing crazies, what Alex misses completely is the essence of what's going on.
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Tuesday, 17 February 2009 16:21 |
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Anybody who thought the nightmare of renditions, indefinite detention, and torture would be over when Barack Obama replaced George Bush ought to take a hard look at the case of Binyam Mohamed.
In 2002 Mohamed, a 31-year-old Ethiopian with refugee status in Britain, became a victim of rendition while visiting Pakistan. Rendition is the U.S. practice of snatching people overseas and throwing them into secret CIA prisons, or moving them to third countries where they may be tortured and/or killed. Rendition began in 1993 under Democratic President Clinton and was taken to a whole other level under Bush, when it became known as “extraordinary rendition.”
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