Where are the civil libertarians?

America is shamed that only Rand Paul is talking about drone executions
Where are the civil libertarians in the president's party that we must rely on a Tea Party Republican to champion this issue?
Amy Goodman
Thursday 7 March 2013
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/07/america-shamed-rand-paul-drone-executions

You could say that a filibuster occurs when a senator drones on and on. The problem with the US Senate was that there were too few senators speaking about drones this week.

President Barack Obama's controversial nomination of John Brennan as director of the Central Intelligence Agency was held up Wednesday afternoon by a Senate filibuster. The reason: Brennan's role in targeted killings by drones, and President Obama's presumed authority to kill US citizens, without any due process, if they pose an "imminent threat". The effort was led by Tea Party Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky, joined by several of his Republican colleagues. Among the Democrats, at the time of this writing, only Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon had joined in the genuine, old-fashioned "talking filibuster", wherein the activities of the Senate floor are held up by a senator's speech.

Members of Congress, tasked with oversight of intelligence and military matters, have repeatedly demanded the memoranda from the White House detailing the legal basis for the drone program, only to be repeatedly denied. The nomination of Brennan has opened up the debate, forcing the Obama administration to make nominal gestures of compliance. The answers so far have not satisfied Senator Paul. Nearing hour six of his filibuster, Senator Paul admitted:

"I can't ultimately stop the nomination, but what I can do is try to draw attention to this and try to get an answer … that would be something if we could get an answer from the president … if he would say explicitly that noncombatants in America won't be killed by drones. The reason it has to be answered is because our foreign drone strike program does kill noncombatants. They may argue that they are conspiring or they may someday be combatants, but if that is the same standard that we are going to use in the United States, it is a far different country than I know about."

The issue of extrajudicial execution of US citizens, whether on US soil or elsewhere, is clearly vital. But also important is the US government's now-seemingly routine killing of civilians around the world, whether by drone strikes, night raids conducted by special operations forces or other lethal means.

Rand Paul's filibuster followed a curious route, including references to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, and quotes from noted progressive, constitutional attorney and Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald and blogger Kevin Gosztala of Firedoglake.

US Attorney General Eric Holder sent a letter to Senator Paul, 4 March, writing:

"It is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate under the Constitution and applicable laws of the United States for the president to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States."

Holder noted that Paul's question was "entirely hypothetical". So, on the Senate floor, Paul brought up the case of two actual US citizens killed by drone strikes, Anwar al-Awlaki and his son, Abdulrahman. Anwar al-Awlaki was killed by a US drone strike in Yemen on 30 September 2011. Two weeks later, also in Yemen, his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman, a Denver native, was also killed by a drone strike. Paul asked during his filibuster:

"If you happen to be the son of a bad person, is that enough to kill you?"

As Senator Paul filibustered, Will Fitzgibbon wrote from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London:

"Last month, we launched a new drones project: Naming the Dead. The aim of this project is to identify as many of the more than 2,500 victims of US drone strikes in Pakistan as possible. Given we currently do not know the identities of 80% of those killed, we believe this is a crucial and missing step to having a more transparent drones debate …

"With all the attention being recently paid to American citizens killed by drones and with the drone debate growing, we thought it would be a good time to remind ourselves of the individual human stories of drone victims. Those we know about and those we don't."

Barack Obama and John Brennan direct the drone strikes that are killing thousands of civilians. It doesn't make us safer. It makes whole populations, from Yemen to Pakistan, hate us. Senator Paul's outrage with the president's claimed right to kill US citizens is entirely appropriate. That there is not more outrage at the thousands killed around the globe is shameful … and dangerous.

• Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column

Billionaire Burglar Breaks into Obama's Cabinet

Pinch-Penny Pritzker pockets Commerce post
By Greg Palast for Truth-out
Wednesday, 13. February 2013

This article is based on the chapter Penny's from Heaven?
From Palast's New York Times Bestseller Billionaires & Ballot Bandits with comics by Ted Rall.

A parade of media reports this week name Penny Pritzker as Obama's prime choice for Secretary of Commerce. No longer will criminal bankers have to lobby the administration - because now they'll have one of their own in the Cabinet.

We never heard of this guy Barack Obama until 2004. Less than three years before taking the presidency, he was in the Illinois state senate, a swamp of scammers, backhanders, and party machine tools - not a stellar launch pad for the White House. And then, one day, state Sen. Barack Obama was visited by his fairy godmother. Her name is Penny Pritzker.

Penny's from Heaven?

Pritzger's net worth is listed in Forbes as $1.8 billion, which is one hell of a heavy magic wand in the world of politics. Her wand would have been heavier, and her net worth higher, except that in 2001, the federal government fined her and her family $460 million for the predatory, deceitful, racist tactics and practices of Superior, the bank-and-loan-shark operation she ran on the South Side of Chicago.

Superior was the first of the deregulated go-go banks to go bust - at the time, the costliest failure ever. US taxpayers lost nearly half a billion dollars. Superior's depositors lost millions and poor folk in Sen. Obama's South Side district lost their homes.

Penny did not like paying $460 million. No, not one bit. What she needed was someone to give her Hope and Change. She hoped someone would change the banking regulators so she could get away with this crap.

Pritzker introduced Obama, the neophyte state senator, to the Ladies Who Lunch (that's really what they call themselves) on Chicago's Gold Coast. Obama got lunch, gold and better - an introduction to Robert Rubin. Rubin is a former Secretary of the Treasury, former chairman of Goldman Sachs and, when Robert met Barry, co-chairman of Citibank. Even atheists recognized Rubin as the Supreme Deity of Wall Street.

Rubin opened the doors to finance industry vaults for Obama. Extraordinarily for a Democrat, Obama in 2008 raised three times as much from bankers as his Republican opponent.

So what did Citibank's Rubin get for showering Obama with gold? Obama agreed to take care of Rubin's poodles, Larry Summers and Tim Geithner. They became Obama's first cabinet picks: Summers as Economics Czar and Geithner as his czarina, Secretary of the Treasury.

Geithner and Summers were the gents who, under Treasury Secretary Rubin, designed the deregulation of banking. In effect, they had decriminalized the kind of financial flim-flammery that brought the planet to its knees while bringing Rubin, Pritzker and the banksters loads of lucre.

So, in 2008, Summers and Geithner were put back in the saddle - Obama's horse but Rubin's saddle.

Rubin received more than $100 million from Citigroup, the gargantuan commercial bank/investment bank/casino created by deregulation. It is worth a mention that Rubin's centi-million-dollar payoff went unchallenged by Citi's new owner, the US Treasury, which had put up more than a trillion dollars in loans and guarantees to pull Rubin's creature out of bankruptcy.

Rubin rocked, but Penny was pissed off.

Pritzker had taken this state senator/community organizer from the ghetto, made him a US Senator, then, as Obama's campaign finance chairwoman, raised a mind-blowing three-quarters of a billion dollars to make him president.

In return, in 2008, Obama decided to make his patron Penny the Secretary of Commerce. But then, in November 2008, just as Obama was about to submit her nomination to Congress, a bunch of Pritzker's victims marched on Washington. They were not from her busted bank, but unhappy workers from the lucrative nursing homes that her family owns through a string of complex offshore trusts. Obama slammed the door on Penny pronto.

In the 2012 campaign, Obama, to his credit, kept the door shut on Pritzker, reducing her to hosting an election fundraiser at her Gold Coast digs, which she had to bill as a Goldman Sachs PAC event. This marks possibly the first time anyone has used Goldman Sachs as a PR cover.

The Pritzker family made its billions mostly from Hyatt Hotels and Hyatt nursing homes. Penny, on the Hyatt board of directors, is an infamously combative anti-union apostle. UNITE HERE, the union that represents Hyatt workers, has called for an international boycott of Hyatt hotels. In 2012, UNITE HERE and its parent, the AFL-CIO, were crucial to Obama's winning Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. So, in this last campaign, Obama had to keep his billionairess heiress on the down-low.

But today, with the unions' money and votes already pocketed and counted, Obama can give working folks The Finger and give Penny her pound of flesh: the Commerce post.

The New York Times says that, "At Commerce, Ms. Pritzker could provide the president with a new way to reach out to the business community." The last time Pritzker reached out to the business community was to sell them sub-prime mortgage securities, worthless bags of financial feces manufactured by Superior Bank.

If Penny the Piggy Banker gets Commerce, we'll have to drop Obama's rating to sub-prime.

So what are you going to do about it?

Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic, named Book of the Year 2012 on BBC Newsnight Review.

Long lines at polls caused 49,000 not to vote

David Damron and Scott Powers, Orlando Sentinel
December 29, 2012
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/politics/os-discouraged-voters-20121229,0,215136.story

After working a 10-hour shift on Election Day, painter Richard Jordan headed to his east Orange County polling place at about 4:30 p.m. Based on more than a decade of voting, he expected to be in and out in minutes.

Three hours later, Jordan's back ached, he was hungry, thirsty — and nowhere near a voting booth. So he left. As it turned out, his Goldenrod Road precinct didn't close until 11 p.m.

"The line just wasn't moving," said the 42-year-old Democrat, who added that he now regrets not voting. "It was so depressing."

Like Jordan, as many as 49,000 people across Central Florida were discouraged from voting because of long lines on Election Day, according to a researcher at Ohio State University who analyzed election data compiled by the Orlando Sentinel.

About 30,000 of those discouraged voters — most of them in Orange and Osceola counties — likely would have backed Democratic President Barack Obama, according to Theodore Allen, an associate professor of industrial engineering at OSU.

About 19,000 voters would have likely backed Republican Mitt Romney, Allen said.

This suggests that Obama's margin over Romney in Florida could have been roughly 11,000 votes higher than it was, based just on Central Florida results. Obama carried the state by 74,309 votes out of more than 8.4 million cast.

Allen's first analysis of the impact of long lines at the polls was done in 2004, when he estimated that more than 20,000 voters in Franklin County, Ohio, where Ohio State is located, were discouraged from casting ballots in the razor-close contest between President George W. Bush and Democrat John Kerry. He has continued his research in every election since.

His analysis of Central Florida results compared precinct closing times, Election Day turnout and results in the presidential race — which attracted the highest vote totals of any race on the ballot — for all Lake, Orange, Osceola and Seminole county precincts.

His review indicated that for every additional hour that a precinct stayed open past 7 p.m. — a good indicator of line length throughout the day — turnout dropped by as much as 4.8 percent. The precincts with the longest lines, he found, had some of the lowest turnouts, a fact he attributed mostly to a record-long ballot that, in Orange County, ran to six pages.

As Allen put it in a report to the Sentinel: "Without understanding the importance of ballot length as a variable, it would be surprising to see from the data from 2012 in Central Florida that lower turnout was recorded in the locations with the longest waits. This is because longer ballots (not higher turnout) likely caused the longer lines which, in turn, suppressed the turnout."

Florida's long lines and late results have drawn unfavorable comparisons to the Sunshine State's 2000 presidential election problems, and state and federal lawmakers are pledging again to address it.

"Look, people are frustrated in our state," Gov. Rick Scott said recently on CNN. "Some of our counties, we have very long lines. You know, we've got to restore confidence in our election."

A previous Sentinel analysis of precinct-closing times and demographic data found that thousands of Central Florida voters waited in line at their polling places for three or more hours — some as long as five hours — after the 7 p.m. official closing time. Even longer waits were reported around the state.

There were few long lines in Lake and Seminole counties. But in Orange and Osceola, where lines were longest and voting ran latest, precincts with high percentages of Hispanic voters were most likely to be open late, the previous Sentinel analysis found. Allen's findings mirror that, he said.

Allen said that his Ohio analyses found that both Hispanics and blacks were disproportionately more deterred because of the longer lines in their communities. However, few black Central Florida precincts stayed open late.

Elections officials blame the lines on several factors, from a ballot that included 11 constitutional amendments to fewer early-voting days and an outsized turnout of 67 percent or more in all four counties. But there are also indications that new state rules about address changes and the ballot layout in Orange County were factors.

Allen suggested that expanding early-voting and mail-in ballot options and steering more machines and resources to communities with longer ballots could ease long lines. Even enabling people to preview ballots while they stand in line would save time in the voting booth, he said.

"A $100 poster could be worth two voting machines," Allen said.

Democratic activists such as Orlando's David Rucker said he saw a fierce devotion among voters to weather long lines to counter efforts by Republicans to limit early voting.

"They had to stay in those lines," Rucker said.

But many Central Florida voters faced unyielding work schedules, child-care issues or other demands. They could not wait out lines that sometimes stretched around blocks.

Carol Dishong went to her east Orange County precinct at 7:30 a.m. on Election Day, saw a long line and no empty parking spaces, and decided to come back after work. But the Republican loan underwriter and single mom said it was even worse when she returned. Next time, she said, she'll vote early or absentee.

"My days are full as it is," Dishong said.

Demand justice for Aaron

Support "Aaron's Law" and inquiry into his prosecution
http://act.demandprogress.org/sign/aaron_justice

Robalini's Note: Some people wonder if Swartz's death was really a murder and not just a suicide.  In the end, it's a pretty minute distinction.  Either way, the primal cause of his death was the over-the-top harrassment of him by the DOJ due to opposition of White House hit lists and his defense of free speech against korporate power.  By suicide or "suicide" the death of Swartz has the fingerprints of the US establishment (including Barack Obama) all over the place...

LETTER ISSUED BY DEMAND PROGRESS AND HARVARD LAW PROFESSOR LAWRENCE LESSIG:

We spent Tuesday burying and mourning our friend Aaron. We're sad, we're tired, we're frustrated -- and we're angry at a system that let this happen to Aaron.  Now we want to set upon honoring his life's work and helping to make sure that such a travesty is never repeated.

We and Aaron's friends and family have been in touch with lawmakers to ask for help, and several of them -- who've worked with Aaron and Demand Progress on SOPA and other issues -- are beginning to take action.  We're asking them to help rein in a criminal justice system run amok. Authorities are encouraged to bring frivolous charges and hold decades of jail time over the heads of people who are accused of committing victimless crimes.

1) Representative Zoe Lofgren has introduced what's been named  "Aaron's Law."  It would fix a key part of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which is one of the statutes under which Aaron was indicted.  We need to pass Aaron's Law AND further amend the CFAA.

The CFAA makes violations of a website's terms of service agreement or user agreement -- that fine print you never read before you check the box next to it -- a FELONY, potentially punishable by many years in prison.  That's how over-broad this dangerous statute is, and one way it lets showboating prosecutors file charges against people who've done nothing wrong.

Aaron's Law would decriminalize violating these agreements: They're essentially contracts, and as with other contracts, disputes about them should be settled in civil courts rather than in out of control criminal trials under threat of decades of prison time.As currently written, Aaron's Law alone wouldn't have saved Aaron -- there is still more to do to make sure that victimless computer activities are not charged as felonies -- but this is a solid start that we can pass now and it's a law he wanted to change.  Then we'll keep pushing forward.

2) Additionally, we asked Congressman Darrell Issa -- who controls the powerful Oversight Committee -- to open an investigation into prosecutorial misconduct in Aaron's case. Amazingly, he's already responded and is dispatching a staffer to investigate the U.S. Attorney who was pressing charges against Aaron.

We want the inquiry to proceed, and to be broadened to include a more thorough investigation into rampant over-prosecution of alleged crimes with no victims -- as in the case of what Aaron was accused of.  And we want those who abused their power to be held to account.

We loved Aaron -- so many people loved Aaron -- and his death is tragic.  We and others who were close to him are overwhelmed by the outpouring of support, and the calls for justice.  Thank you for joining us in that fight.

Brennan chosen by Barack Obama as CIA head

John Brennan chosen by Barack Obama as new CIA head
The mastermind of Barack Obama's secret drone war was chosen on Monday to lead the CIA and "relentlessly" extend its controversial campaign against al-Qaeda into the president's second term.
Jon Swaine, Washington
07 Jan 2013
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/9786434/John-Brennan-chosen-by-Barack-Obama-as-new-CIA-head.html

John Brennan, Mr Obama's counter-terrorism adviser, was nominated as the intelligence agency's next director two months after David Petraeus resigned over an extramarital affair with his biographer.

He has played a key role in expanding a programme of air strikes by unmanned drones on suspected terrorists in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, which has killed more than 2,000 people.

Accepting the nomination in a speech at the White House, Mr Brennan, 57, said: "I will make it my mission to ensure the CIA has the tools it needs to keep our country safe."

He paid tribute to CIA successes that would never be known outside the "hallowed halls of Langley and the White House". Many human rights campaigners say that the drone campaign is illegal.

Mr Obama said Mr Brennan would "remain relentless" in pursuing al-Qaeda.

Praising him as a tireless public servant who obsesses about US security, he added: "I'm not sure he has slept in four years".

White House colleagues have described him as "a priest whose blessing has become indispensable" to the president in their selection of targets for drone strikes from a so-called "kill list".

A career spy who served as CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia, Mr Brennan was also accused of being complicit in the agency's torture of terror suspects under former president George W. Bush.

Controversy over his involvement in the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" is believed to have prevented Mr Obama from nominating Mr Brennan to lead the CIA after his 2008 election win.

He promised to ensure the work of the CIA "always reflects the liberties, the freedoms, and the values that we all hold dear".

Mr Obama also confirmed his nomination of Chuck Hagel, a former Republican senator whose foreign policy stances have attracted criticism from former colleagues, as his next defence secretary.

If confirmed by the Senate, the 66-year-old would be the first combat veteran of the Vietnam War, and the first veteran of enlisted rank, to head the defence department.

Hailing him as an "American patriot" who "bears the scars and the shrapnel of battles fought in our name", Mr Obama said: "Chuck knows that war is not an abstraction".

The selection of Mr Hagel, who once criticised intimidation of US politicians by "the Jewish lobby" has been sharply criticised as an insult to Israel that could jeopardise a key alliance.

Mr Obama on Monday praised Mr Hagel's "willingness to speak his mind", stating that he "understands that America stands strongest when we stand with allies and with friends".

Lindsey Graham, a Republican Senator for South Carolina, has said Mr Hagel "would be the most antagonistic secretary of defence towards the state of Israel in our nation's history".

Mr Hagel has also been criticised for opposing additional unilateral sanctions on Iran and for urging Israel's government to engage in direct talks with Hamas, the militant Islamic group.

He pledged yesterday to give Mr Obama his "honest and most informed counsel".

Both nominees must be confirmed in votes by the US Senate, where Mr Obama's Democrats hold a majority. So far Ted Cruz, a Texas senator, has promised to vote against Mr Hagel's appointment.

Coming soon after the selection of Senator John Kerry to replace Hillary Clinton as US Secretary of State, the nominations also prompted accusations that Mr Obama had failed to make his Cabinet diverse.

Tim Miller, a Republican spokesman, said Mr Obama's promotion of "three old white guys" who backed the war in Iraq made a mockery of his re-election campaign slogan, which he restyled as "Forward-ish".

Mr Brennan was also blamed for a series of erroneous briefings to the media following the death of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, which angered the then-defence secretary Robert Gates.

After Mr Brennan said bin Laden had been killed while using one of his wives as a shield, officials later said that this was untrue.

Marijuana advocates hope to rise from 'prohibition'

Opponents of marijuana in the 1930s used employed similar tactics as those who sought to ban alcohol.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Voters in Colorado and Washington approved legalizing marijuana for recreational use
The federal government, which still considers marijuana possesion a crime, hasn't weighed in
There are many similarities in the move to legalize pot and the end to alcohol Prohibition
Detractors of both drugs have also used similar tactics, including stoking racial fears
Eliott C. McLaughlin
Sat December 1, 2012
http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/01/us/marijuana-legalization-and-prohibition/

Turn on a television show or open a magazine in the United States today and you're bound to see someone with a drink in hand -- something unthinkable nearly a century ago.

Advocates of marijuana hope that someday that drug will emerge from its current "prohibition" period, the same way alcohol did, and become not only legal but as socially acceptable as having a drink.

Could that happen? Depends who you ask. Advocates point to the November ballot in Colorado and Washington, where voters approved legal pot for everyone, not just for those who have a medical reason.

Detractors of marijuana legalization say there are serious health consequences, and argue the drug is often a gateway to more harmful, addictive substances.

However pot's future is going to play out in this country, its recent path to limited legalization has interesting parallels to alcohol, which was banned by the federal government in the 1920s and early 1930s. The Prohibition era gave rise to an underground market for booze, produced by unregulated bootleggers and moonshiners, and consumed in back-alley speakeasies.

A few years after Prohibition's repeal, the federal government banned marijuana, hardly as popular and socially acceptable as alcohol. It would be decades before supporters of pot would mobilize and successfully get the drug legalized in some states.

Advocates and detractors for both drugs seem to have read from the same playbook, stoking fears based on prejudices and questionable scientific studies.

Rather than discuss issues of substance, opponents of marijuana in the early 20th century preferred to exaggerate its effects and pin its use on foreigners and black entertainers.

It was a familiar tactic that had panned out well in pre-Prohibition days.

In a 1914 speech before the House, Rep. Richmond Hobson of Alabama warned that booze would make the "red man" savage and "promptly put a tribe on the war path." He added, "Liquor will actually make a brute of a Negro, causing him to commit unnatural crimes."

Twenty-three years later, while arguing for marijuana prohibition, Harry Anslinger also played on Americans' fear of crime and foreigners. The Bureau of Narcotics chief spun tales of people driven to insanity or murder after ingesting the drug and spoke of the 2 to 3 tons of grass being produced in Mexico.

"This, the Mexicans make into cigarettes, which they sell at two for 25 cents, mostly to white high school students," Anslinger told Congress.

The term marijuana itself was intended to stoke alarm, as many Americans in the 1930s were already familiar with other terms for the drug, according to Michael Aldrich.

"(The drug's opponents) preferred the word marijuana instead of cannabis or hemp because people thought it was some new devil drug from Mexico," said Aldrich, the curator of what is now Harvard University's Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library, a collection of psychoactive drug-related literature.

"All of a sudden, there's this new thing being introduced by outside people," Aldrich, who is credited with writing the first dissertation on marijuana myths and folklore. "It was all a bunch of crap."

'Reefer Madness' vs. 'Medicinal marijuana'

In the shaky, handwritten opening lines of the 1936 movie "Reefer Madness," marijuana is described as a "violent narcotic" that first renders "sudden, violent, uncontrollable laughter" on its users before "dangerous hallucinations" and then "acts of shocking violence ... ending often in incurable insanity."

Watching the movie today (available on YouTube) might provoke "uncontrollable laughter" -- even from those who oppose marijuana legalization. Yet the movie's message was based in part on scientific studies that were considered legitimate at the time.

There were similar claims about alcohol in the years leading up to Prohibition. While the Anti-Saloon League painted drinking as un-American and immoral to convince counties and states they'd be better off saloonless, they also leaned on hokey research, according to Garrett Peck, author of "The Prohibition Hangover."

The ASL used "quack medical experiments" to demonize beer, wine and liquor, Peck said. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union went into classrooms purporting to demonstrate the effects of alcohol by pouring it directly onto sheep and cow brains, quickly transforming the pink organ to a grayish hue, he said.

"It was scientifically without merit because when you drink, it goes through your stomach," Peck said. "Otherwise, most of us would be lobotomized."

That's not to say there aren't substantial health detriments to alcohol and marijuana use.

Both can have impacts on brain development in younger users. Smoking marijuana can cause respiratory issues. Long-term alcohol consumption is linked with a host of cardiovascular and nervous system problems, not to mention cirrhosis. And that's the short list.

But just like opponents have overplayed the drugs' detrimental effects, advocates have exaggerated their benefits.
Think "medicinal." In 2010, ahead of California's failed marijuana-legalization referendum, several medicinal marijuana users shared their symptoms and ailments.

Among them were AIDS patients who needed it to boost their appetites. The husband of a cervical cancer sufferer recalled how cream-based marijuana soups eased his wife's agony more effectively than the powerful painkiller Dilaudid.
Others, however, told CNN of lesser maladies. One said with a smirk that he'd jammed his thumb. Another said he'd been stressed out at work and explained how less-reputable dispensaries had doctors in back rooms who prescribed pot for almost anything.

It was no different when alcohol was banned, Peck said. Despite the American Medical Association saying alcohol had no medicinal value, the Volstead Act, which led to the federal ban on alcohol, stated that no one could prescribe alcohol except "a physician duly licensed to practice medicine" -- much to the delight of the nation's Jay Gatsbys.

"Yes, medicinal whisky -- all of a sudden, all of these doctors are saying we need to prescribe this because there's so much money to be made. You could prescribe a pint a week," Peck said. "We know enough about alcohol now; it's not medicinal."
As Prohibition expert Daniel Okrent wrote in 2010, "... all too often, 'medicinal' has been a cynical euphemism for 'available.' "

John Kane, a U.S. district judge in Colorado, explained that while there was a medical exception to Alcohol Prohibition, health had little to do with its repeal.

No one was clamoring to make brandy legal to cure the country's headaches, explained Kane, whose father was a pharmacist during Prohibition and prescribed brandy to his patients.

Rather, the nation had grown weary of the organized crime that accompanied Prohibition, he said.

Many of the immigrant groups vilified by the teetotalers formed the organized crime units that plagued Prohibition days, he said. Prior to the ban on alcohol, gangs generally ran numbers, extorted folks or charged fees for protecting neighborhoods.
"Then Prohibition came along, and that basically gave them an American Express black card," he said. "It subsidized criminal activity in this country."

The price of legalization

Just as Prohibition bore Al Capones and strengthened the Frank Costellos and "Lucky" Lucianos, American drug prohibition has spawned a host of cartels south of its border. They wage war against each other for the rights to the most lucrative illegal drug market on Earth -- the United States -- which by some estimates, consumes two-thirds of all the illegal drugs in the world.

Yet there is a major difference between Capone's henchmen and the Mexican cartels: "The violence is not to the scale of what's going on in Mexico," Peck said.

The St. Valentine's Day Massacre of 1929, one of the most heinous crimes of the era, left seven dead. That many could be murdered in a Mexican border town on your average Wednesday.

How big a hit the cartels would take if the United States legalized pot is a matter of debate, and conclusions vary widely. While U.S. officials said in 2009 that 60% of cartel revenue came from weed, the RAND Corporation said the following year that "15-26 percent is a more credible range."

A report this month by the Mexican Competitive Institute predicted Mexican drug organizations, namely the Sinaloa Cartel, could lose almost $2.8 billion just with the legalization votes in Colorado and Washington.

When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, states saw two immediate benefits aside from neutering the criminal gangs, the first being that they could regulate the product.

Under Prohibition, unscrupulous bootleggers had manufactured moonshines and bathtub gins that could render tipplers blind or dead. Once alcohol was legal, you had a return to quality control, Peck said.

The second immediate benefit? They could also tax the hooch.

"It was a huge consideration. The Great Depression was going on at that point," Peck said. "FDR pays for the New Deal with excise taxes on alcohol and tobacco."

In President Franklin Roosevelt's first two terms, federal taxes jumped from $1.6 billion in 1933 to $5.3 billion in 1940.

How that might translate to marijuana taxation today is debatable, and the ends of the gamut are nowhere near middle ground.

"Medical marijuana helped save the economy in California ... The counties north of San Francisco survived the recession through marijuana," said Aldrich, the marijuana historian.

He was referring to the Emerald Triangle, which is known for producing and exporting some of the country's highest-grade cannabis.

On the other side, you have President Barack Obama's drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, who emphatically denied that marijuana legalization would prove a boon to state coffers. Taxes on alcohol, he told CNN in 2010, amount to $14.5 billion a year, where as the social costs are closer to $185 billion.

Ahead of the recent ballot initiatives in Colorado and Washington, the Colorado Center on Law & Policy estimated that legalization would yield $60 million in state and local revenue and savings by 2017, and perhaps double thereafter. And Washington's Office of Financial Management estimated that a "fully functioning" marijuana industry could bring in nearly $2 billion in revenue over the next five years.

"Fully functioning." Therein lies the rub.

Both the Colorado and Washington estimates came with caveats explaining the obvious: Any revenue projection is contingent on the federal government not enforcing the laws that still render possession of an ounce of marijuana illegal -- even in Colorado and Washington.

University of Virginia law professor Richard Bonnie, co-author of "Marijuana Conviction: A History of Marijuana Prohibition in the United States," said it's a tricky equation.

"There is something attractive about saying you've got this underground market that's not going away, that you're missing a tax opportunity," he said. "The amount of tax revenue you're going to derive from it is going to depend on what your regulatory approach is going to be."

Bonnie was part of the commission that futilely recommended marijuana decriminalization to President Richard Nixon in the 1970s, but he is quick to emphasize that states must step gingerly if marijuana is legalized.

There were many problems with regulating alcohol post-Prohibition, and there still are today. More than a third of eight-graders say they've used alcohol, and almost three-quarters of high schoolers have gotten drunk.

"You have to have a model that doesn't seem to actively encourage use in ways that are harmful to society and the individual," he said, noting the modern regulation of cigarettes provides an admirable model.

Though the Tax Policy Center reports state and local governments collected $17.3 billion in tobacco taxes in 2010, cigarette use, especially among youngsters, has dropped almost 33% since 2000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Looking into the crystal ball

When alcohol Prohibition was lifted in 1933, regulation was left to the states. Oklahoma stayed dry until 1959, Mississippi until 1966.

Bonnie said he sees marijuana legalization advocates leaning toward a similar model. But, he warns, "there is a social cost to a regulatory regime that taxes and becomes dependent on the revenue."

Overtax it, and you create another dilemma: black markets and the smuggling of marijuana from state to state, a la post-Prohibition. Canada and Sweden learned that lesson with cigarette taxes in the 1990s.

All of this is putting the roach before the joint, of course. Marijuana, no matter what Colorado and Washington say, remains illegal at the federal level.
Experts are reluctant to forecast when that might change. Aldrich predicts federal legalization by 2017, but he concedes that in 1969 he predicted the federal government would relent by 1979.

Judge Kane said he foresees marijuana following a similar path as alcohol. Toward the end of Prohibition, judges wantonly dismissed violations or levied fines so trivial that prosecutors quit filing cases, he said.

While he sees marijuana laws that target kingpins, traffickers and those who engage in violence remaining in place, he believes possession laws are endangered, he said.

"The law is simply going to die before it's repealed. It will just go into disuse," Kane said. "It's a cultural force, and you simply cannot legislate against a cultural force."

Secret Service Stop Press From Talking To CEO

White House Deploys Secret Service To Stop Press From Talking To Goldman Sachs CEO
Wall Street pays its respects to the president it tried to defeat.
Zeke Miller
Nov 28, 2012
http://www.buzzfeed.com/zekejmiller/white-house-deploys-secret-service-to-stop-press-f

WASHINGTON — As CEOs concluded their meeting with President Barack Obama Wednesday evening, the White House deployed three uniformed Secret Service officers to keep the awaiting reporters from speaking with the group, among them Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

As Blankfein and his entourage exited the West Wing, reporters shouted questions at him and tried to approach him to ask about his meeting with the president on the fiscal cliff. But even camera crews trying to get to their stand-up locations for evening news live-shots were prevented from crossing the driveway until Blankfein passed. The Goldman boss appeared on CNBC and CNN before leaving the White House grounds — but not before aides retrieved the blackberry he left inside the West Wing.

Obama Rejected Bush Mortgages Concession

Barney Frank: Obama Rejected Bush Administration Concession to Write Down Mortgages
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/05/barney-frank-obama-rejected-bush-administration-concession-to-write-down-mortgages.html

Matt Stoller is a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.  You can follow him on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/matthewstoller
WEDNESDAY, MAY 30, 2012

Here’s Barney Frank, in an exit interview recently in New York Magazine, revealing unwittingly that Obama during the transition rejected a Bush administration concession to write down mortgages.  Here’s what Barney said.

The mortgage crisis was worsened this past time because critical decisions were made during the transition between Bush and Obama. We voted the TARP out. The TARP was basically being administered by Hank Paulson as the last man home in a lame duck, and I was disappointed. I tried to get them to use the TARP to put some leverage on the banks to do more about mortgages, and Paulson at first resisted that, he just wanted to get the money out. And after he got the first chunk of money out, he would have had to ask for a second chunk, he said, all right, I’ll tell you what, I’ll ask for that second chunk and I’ll use some of that as leverage on mortgages, but I’m not going to do that unless Obama asks for it.  This is now December, so we tried to get the Obama people to ask him and they wouldn’t do it.

This is consistent with other accounts.  There were policy debates within Obama’s economic team about what to do about the mortgage crisis.  The choices were to create some sort of legal entity to write down mortgage debt or to allow the write-down of mortgage debt through a massive wave of foreclosures over the next four to six years.  He choice the latter.  That choice was part of what led to roughly $7 trillion of middle class wealth gone, with financial assets for the elites re-inflated.

Since I pointed out that the growth of income inequality under Obama is worse than that under Bush, many people have responded by saying that somehow this is not Obama’s responsibility, that it was an inherited crisis and structural problems that caused a widening of inequality.  They simply do not want to accept that policy matters, or, if it does, that Obama had any choice in the policy choices he made.

In fact, crisis response is the single most significant policymaking time imaginable, because all structural barriers are swept away.  Think about it – this was literally a deal offered by Hank Paulson – one guy – to Barack Obama, with a multi-trillion dollar impact.  No 60 votes in the Senate.  No hearings.  No confirmations.  Just a handshake, basically.  In other words, policy does matter, and Obama had a variety of choices and leverage, and he did what he thought was best.  He did not want to write down mortgages, even though he was offered that choice by the Bush administration and Barney Frank.  So he didn’t.

So yes, Barack Obama is worse than George Bush on economic inequality.  While Paulson didn’t want to write down mortgages, the single biggest factor in determining whether the American middle class has any stored wealth, Paulson was willing to do so in response to pressure.  Barack Obama was not.

Obama and progressives

Obama and progressives: what will liberals do with their big election victory?
With fights over social security, Medicare, ongoing war, and other key progressive priorities looming, what will they do with their new power?
Glenn Greenwald
Wednesday 7 November 2012
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/07/obama-progressives-left-entitlements

The greatest and most enduring significance of Tuesday night's election results will likely not be the re-election of Barack Obama, but rather what the outcome reflects about the American electorate. It was not merely Democrats, but liberalism, which was triumphant.

To begin with, it is hard to overstate just how crippled America's right-wing is. Although it was masked by their aberrational win in 2010, the GOP has now been not merely defeated, but crushed, in three out of the last four elections: in 2006 (when they lost control of the House and Senate), 2008 (when Obama won easily and Democrats expanded their margins of control), and now 2012. The horrendous political legacy of George Bush and Dick Cheney continues to sink the GOP, and demographic realities – how toxic the American Right is to the very groups that are now becoming America's majority – makes it difficult to envision how this will change any time soon.

Meanwhile, new laws to legalize both same-sex marriage and marijuana use were enacted in multiple states with little controversy, an unthinkable result even a few years ago, while Obama's late-term embrace of same-sex marriage seems to have resulted only in political benefit with no political harm. Democrats were sent to the Senate by deeply red states such as Indiana, Missouri and North Dakota, along with genuinely progressive candidates on domestic issues, including Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts and Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, who became the first openly gay person elected to the Senate. As a cherry on the liberal cake, two of the most loathed right-wing House members – Rep Joe Walsh of Illinois and Allen West of Florida – were removed from office.

So the delirium of liberals this morning is understandable: the night could scarcely have gone better for them. By all rights, they should expect to be a more powerful force in Washington. But what are they going to get from it? Will they wield more political power? Will their political values and agenda command more respect? Unless the disempowering pattern into which they have voluntarily locked themselves changes, the answer to those questions is almost certainly "no".

Consider the very first controversial issue Obama is likely to manage, even before the glow of his victory dims, literally within the next couple of weeks. It is widely expected - including by liberals - that Obama intends (again) to pursue a so-called "Grand Bargain" with the GOP: a deficit- and debt-cutting agreement whereby the GOP agrees to some very modest tax increases on the rich in exchange for substantial cuts to entitlement programs such as social security and Medicare, the crown legislative jewels of American liberalism.

Indeed, Obama already sought in his first term to implement sizable cuts to those programs, but liberals were saved only by GOP recalcitrance to compromise on taxes. In light of their drubbing last night, they are likely to be marginally if not substantially more flexible, which means that such a deal is more possible than ever.

In other words, the political leader in whose triumph liberals are today ecstatically basking is likely to target their most cherished government policies within a matter of weeks, even days. With their newly minted power, will they have any ability, or even will, to stop him? If history is any indication, this is how this "fight" will proceed:

STEP ONE: Liberals will declare that cutting social security and Medicare benefits – including raising the eligibility age or introducing "means-testing" – are absolutely unacceptable, that they will never support any bill that does so no matter what other provisions it contains, that they will wage war on Democrats if they try.

STEP TWO: As the deal gets negotiated and takes shape, progressive pundits in Washington, with Obama officials persuasively whispering in their ear, will begin to argue that the proposed cuts are really not that bad, that they are modest and acceptable, that they are even necessary to save the programs from greater cuts or even dismantlement.

STEP THREE: Many progressives – ones who are not persuaded that these cuts are less than draconian or defensible on the merits – will nonetheless begin to view them with resignation and acquiescence on pragmatic grounds. Obama has no real choice, they will insist, because he must reach a deal with the crazy, evil GOP to save the economy from crippling harm, and the only way he can do so is by agreeing to entitlement cuts. It is a pragmatic necessity, they will insist, and anyone who refuses to support it is being a purist, unreasonably blind to political realities, recklessly willing to blow up Obama's second term before it even begins.

STEP FOUR: The few liberal holdouts, who continue to vehemently oppose any bill that cuts social security and Medicare, will be isolated and marginalized, excluded from the key meetings where these matters are being negotiated, confined to a few MSNBC appearances where they explain their inconsequential opposition.

STEP FIVE: Once a deal is announced, and everyone from Obama to Harry Reid and the DNC are behind it, any progressives still vocally angry about it and insisting on its defeat will be castigated as ideologues and purists, compared to the Tea Party for their refusal to compromise, and scorned (by compliant progressives) as fringe Far Left malcontents.

STEP SIX: Once the deal is enacted with bipartisan support and Obama signs it in a ceremony, standing in front of his new Treasury Secretary, the supreme corporatist Erskine Bowles, where he touts the virtues of bipartisanship and making "tough choices", any progressives still complaining will be told that it is time to move on. Any who do not will be constantly reminded that there is an Extremely Important Election coming – the 2014 midterm – where it will be Absolutely Vital that Democrats hold onto the Senate and that they take over the House. Any progressive, still infuriated by cuts to social security and Medicare, who still refuses to get meekly in line behind the Party will be told that they are jeopardizing the Party's chances for winning that Vital Election and – as a result of their opposition - are helping Mitch McConnell take over control of the Senate and John Boehner retain control of the House.

And so it goes. That is the standard pattern of self-disempowerment used by American liberals to render themselves impotent and powerless in Washington, not just on economic issues but the full panoply of political disputes, from ongoing militarism, military spending and war policies to civil liberties assaults, new cabinet appointments, immigration policy, and virtually everything else likely to arise in the second term.

Indeed, nobody takes STEP ONE in that depressing ritual even a little bit seriously. Nobody believes the declarations of progressives about what is "unacceptable", about what their "red lines" are, about how they will refuse to go along with what they are given if it contains what they declare intolerable. That's because STEPS TWO THROUGH SIX always follow, and until that pattern is broken, STEP ONE will continue to be viewed as a trivial joke.

With last night's results, one can choose to see things two ways: (1) emboldened by their success and the obvious movement of the electorate in their direction, liberals will resolve that this time things will be different, that their willingness to be Good Partisan Soldiers depends upon their core values not being ignored and stomped on, or (2) inebriated with love and gratitude for Obama for having vanquished the evil Republican villains, they will follow their beloved superhero wherever he goes with even more loyalty than before. One does not need to be Nate Silver to be able to use the available historical data to see which of those two courses is the far more likely one.

Obama supporters prepare to be betrayed

Obama supporters mobilize for him and prepare to be betrayed
Webster G. Tarpley
Sat Oct 27, 2012
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2012/10/27/268946/obama-supporters-prepare-to-be-betrayed

Compared to the euphoria created in 2008 by Obama’s messianic and utopian posturing, his supporters are now a chastened crew, and this could well lose him the election."

In a turn of events which once again shows the absurdity of Wall Street’s current US two party system, supporters of Barack Obama are mobilizing to re-elect their candidate, and at the same time planning a campaign to prevent Obama from stripping them of their hard-won rights under Social Security, Medicare, and related safety net programs.

For some of these groups, the anti-Romney demonstrations are scheduled to morph just a few hours after the polls into demonstrations against Obama’s planned sellout, known as the “Grand Bargain.”

Wall Streeter and Republican candidate Mitt Romney, joined by his extremist running mate Paul Ryan, is running on an openly advertised pledge to voucherize Medicare, privatize Social Security, and vaporize the social safety net - meaning that they intend to euthanize large numbers of working people in the name of deficit reduction. Ironically, the economic stupidity of Romney-Ryan is so stubborn that, despite the immense economic damage and human suffering they will inflict, their approach will actually increase, and not decrease, the US federal budget deficit, for reasons well known since they 1930s.

But Obama has based his campaign on a pledge to defend the New Deal and Great Society reforms against Romney-Ryan, and is appealing to the 65% to 80% of the US population who oppose any cuts in the social safety net. At the same time, Obama has left no doubt among careful observers that he is determined to drastically cut, although not fully privatize, Social Security, Medicare, and related programs.

If Obama manages to win the election, the result may well be a historic crisis of confidence, in reality a true constitutional crisis, as Americans finally give up on the two existing parties.

Obama has not made his savage austerity plans the centerpiece of his campaign, but he has not totally hidden them either. He believes his austerity commitment is attractive to the so-called independent voters. Obama talked austerity cuts last week in an off-the-record interview with the editorial board of the Des Moines Register, an influential newspaper in Iowa, a Midwest farm state which is among the 9 or 10 swing states where the outcome of the election is likely to be determined.

Obama spoke confidentially to these editors in the hopes of winning their endorsement. But then a blogger for the Des Moines Register complained in public that Iowa voters deserved to know the contents of the interview. Obama, eager to please this newspaper, then had little choice but to release the transcript.

As a result, the US public now knows more about Obama’s brutal austerity plans. Obama told the editors: “We’re going to be in a position where I believe in the first six months we are going to solve that big piece of business. It will probably be messy. It won’t be pleasant. But I am absolutely confident that we can get what is the equivalent of the grand bargain that essentially I’ve been offering to the Republicans for a very long time, which is $2.50 worth of cuts for every dollar in [taxes], and work to reduce the costs of our health-care programs.”

Here Obama’s treachery was clearly displayed, along with his tendency to grant massive concessions to his adversaries. Why not demand tax hikes on the rich and exclude the entitlements from any austerity deal, since that is what three quarters of the American people want? Why not transform the situation by raising the issue of the Wall Street sales tax? As for reducing health care costs, the only way to do this without genocidal measures is to invest boxcar sums in biomedical research to find cures for the dread diseases - something Obama is plainly unwilling to talk about?

THE TRAGIC DILEMMA OF THE AFL-CIO

The AFL-CIO trade unions are working hard for Obama, but they also know their demands are on the chopping block. Writing in Politico, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka condemned Obama’s Grand Bargain as “lower tax rates for rich people - paid for by benefit cuts for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. These are precisely the issues that are being debated so vigorously in the campaign, and voters do not want anything to do with such a deal.” Sounds OK, but those who want Trumka to call a national general strike against austerity have been waiting in vain so far.

As The Hill pointed out, “The AFL-CIO has planned a series of coordinated events around the country on Nov. 8, two days after Election Day, to pressure lawmakers not to sign onto any deficit-reduction deal that cuts Medicare and Social Security benefits by raising the Medicare eligibility age or changing the formula used for Social Security cost-of-living adjustments.” So the transition from backing Obama to fighting Obama will be seamless.

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who caucuses with the Democrats, understated the obvious when he noted that “Unlike four years ago, the president has not been outspoken in saying he’s not going to cut Social Security.” Sanders talked about the broad rejection of Obama’s austerity obsession among Democratic constituency groups, noting that “you can have virtually all of the senior groups, you can have the unions, you can have some of the veteran groups as well coming on board.” He added: “… I think you’re going to have a whole lot of people beginning to stand together and say, ‘Sorry, at a time when the wealthiest are doing phenomenally well and so many people are hurting terribly because of this recession, you’re not going to balance the budget on the backs of the elderly, the children, the sick, the poor, the disabled veterans.’” And this is exactly what Obama wants to do, and Sanders supports him anyway.

WILL OBAMA SELL HIS OWN SUPPORTERS DOWN THE RIVER

Given Obama’s track record of treachery against his own base, Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, was only being realistic when he commented: “There’s going to be a major effort by lots of groups to make sure people we vote for don’t sell us down the river. People, groups, organizations and networks are working very hard to get Obama and the Democrats elected, and yet we are worried that it is possible that we could be betrayed almost immediately.” Hickey’s group will soon release a letter signed by 350 economists pointing out the danger that austerity measures could cause a new economic downturn.

Compared to the euphoria created in 2008 by Obama’s messianic and utopian posturing, his supporters are now a chastened crew, and this could well lose him the election. Nancy Altman of the Strengthen Social Security Coalition hinted at the cold indifference of the elitist Obama, saying she thinks “the president has shown more concern about the deficit than we think is warranted, and less concern for how crucial these programs are.”

In this grim panorama of cruelty and betrayal, one bright spot is the upcoming founding conference of the United Front Against Austerity (UFAA) in New York City on October 27. UFAA plans to unite anti-Wall Street forces to support and broaden isolated local struggles, while equipping them with the programmatic demands they need to win. UFAA will also pressure union officials like Trumka to use tactics and strategy better suited to the current desperate situation.

Born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 1946, Dr. Webster Griffin Tarpley is a philosopher of history who seeks to provide the programs and strategies needed to overcome the current world crisis. As an activist historian he first became widely known for his book George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography (1992), a masterpiece of research which is still a must read. AB Princeton 1966, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa; Fulbright Scholar at University of Turin, Italy; MA in humanities from Skidmore College; and Ph.D. in early modern history from the Catholic University of America with emphasis on the role of Venice in the origins of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). During 2008, he warned of the dangers of an Obama presidency controlled by Wall Street with Obama: The Postmodern Coup, The Making of a Manchurian Candidate and Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography. His interest in economics is reflected in Surviving the Cataclysm: Your Guide Through the Worst Financial Crisis in Human History Against Oligarchy. His books have appeared in Japanese, German, Italian, French, and Spanish.

Why Obama Is the Least Efficient Antichrist Ever

Soren Bowie
09-21-2012
http://www.cracked.com/quick-fixes/why-obama-least-efficient-antichrist-ever

In the weeks leading up to the November election, President Obama will be doing everything within his power to remind the American people of his successes in office while simultaneously qualifying his mistakes. However, he will avoid one topic at all costs, because it has been, without a doubt, his most dismal failure. Regardless of whether you think Barack Obama has been a fit leader for the United States, he has been unquestionably bad at being an antichrist.

Four years ago, there was a lot of excitement around the promise of "change," and many Americans may have overestimated the potential for large-scale reform. Admittedly, it was hard not to be swept up in the magic of it all, in the possibilities of a man who seemed almost supernatural. But in retrospect, it proved a lot to ask of one person -- to be the answer to all our hopes and dreams, as well as the harbinger of the apocalypse.

But even knowing that he couldn't accomplish everything, it was like Obama wasn't even trying at any of his duties as the ruler of hell on Earth. When he should have been breaking his covenant with seven nations and declaring himself God within their temples, instead he bought a dog. When he was supposed to be searing his mark into the hands and foreheads of his worshipers and executing anyone who refused the brand, he was off singing Al Green songs at the Apollo.

Now, we all understand that big jobs require flexible time frames; the Abu Ghraib fiasco at the beginning of his presidency prepared us for that. But the antichrist is already supposed to be slaughtering the righteous and governing the world from a throne in Israel by his third year in power. Obama has done nothing but drag his feet and procrastinate about being unabashedly evil deep into his fourth year. Where is the colossal statue of him that springs to life and kills Christians? Where is the fire pouring out of the sky into the eyes of men? I don't even think he's drawn up any schematics.

Needless to say, those of us who expected Obama to reveal himself as the beast of sorrow and despair are more than a little disappointed. Instead, we got universal health care and environmental protection acts. And now he has the nerve to ask for another four years to get everything done. Yeah right, Barry. If you're not going to take this seriously, we'll wait for the next antichrist, thank you very much.

We're beginning to question if Obama even has wicked horns.

Of course he has his apologists, making videos for YouTube and cluttering their own websites with adamant declarations that he is in fact the true antichrist. But these people are the die-hard Obama believers who started stocking up on assault rifles the moment he was elected. They want him to be the manifestation of evil so badly that they are blind to the truth we're all staring in the face after four years: Barack Obama is probably not the antichrist. It is entirely possible he is just a human male. So when you walk into your respective polling booths this November, remember: If you just want a regular old president, fine, vote for Obama. But if you are looking for world reorganization under the cloven hoof of physically manifested agony, maybe it's time to give some other guy a shot.

Obama: 'Help Us Destroy Jesus'

Obama: 'Help Us Destroy Jesus And Start A New Age Of Liberal Darkness'
SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 | ISSUE 48•36
The president calls for his ultraliberal minions to join him in the godless slaughter of Jesus Christ and the advancement of eternal sin.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/obama-help-us-destroy-jesus-and-start-a-new-age-of,29478

CHARLOTTE, NC — With the savage roar of the heathen Democratic horde rising all around him, President Barack Obama delivered an incendiary speech to close his party’s national convention Thursday night, commanding the ultraprogressive minions in attendance to help him “destroy Jesus and usher in a new age of liberal darkness that shall reign o’er the earth for a thousand years.”

The thunderous 45-minute address—during which the president argued for a second term so that he could “finally kill Jesus once and for all, as well as all those who worship him”—was well received by the frenzied, wild-eyed audience, whose piercing chants of “Four more years!” and “Slaughter the believers!” echoed throughout the Time Warner Cable Arena.

“My fellow Americans and godless infidels, I command you to join me as we cast an endless pall of far-left evil across the hills and valleys of our nation!” Obama bellowed from the stage, as thousands in attendance moaned in compliance and gyrated their hips and groins in a lascivious dance. “Together, as a barbarian people forged by the wicked flames of irreligiosity and united by visions of a liberal dystopia, we will rise up as one to scorch the earth with boundless amorality.”

“The streets shall run red with the blood of forced sodomy, performed daily upon every American man, woman, and child!” the commander-in-chief shouted, froth forming around his mouth as the crowd threw hundreds of aborted fetuses onto the stage. “Die, Christians, die!”

Slamming his fists on the lectern until his hands began to bleed, Obama proceeded to lay out a “three-point plan of sin and lechery” for his second term. If reelected, the president said, he would begin by banning organized religion entirely—starting with Christianity—and burning all churches to the ground, preferably “with their wretched, Jesus-loving congregants still huddled inside like rats.”

As members of the audience violently tugged at their genitals and howled like sex-starved, atheist wolves, Obama stated that his administration would then seek to make free, taxpayer-funded abortions legal at any stage of pregnancy, even up to one full year after birth, in order to supply his newly created “federal stem-cell harvesting plants” with raw materials.

In addition, the cackling president vowed to “end traditional marriage as we know it” by passing legislation that would allow only homosexuals to raise children, a longtime Democratic policy goal.

“A glorious new age of sinister, unconstrained liberalism is dawning! Oh, dear Satan, I can feel it coursing through my veins at this very moment!” shrieked Obama, ripping off his shirt to reveal an ornate tattoo of a pentagram, with a different homosexual act positioned at each of the star’s five points. “Agnosticism, contempt for human life, and radical sexual experimentation shall rule the day! Any good, virtuous, family-values-oriented Christian Americans who seek to topple our magnificent liberal kingdom of eternal darkness will be powerless to stop us! We will crush them!”

Added Obama, “Thank you, may Satan reward you all, and may God tremble in fear at the United States of America!”

The president was then handed an unbaptized, orphaned newborn baby drenched in the blood of 666 slaughtered Christians, which he handed over to its new, gleefully squealing homosexual parents.

The Supreme Court & Arizona Immigration

A common theme in news involving the Supreme Court and Obama lawyers is how woefully incompetent Team Obama appears.  This may be charitable at best: the Obama DOJ pretty much comes off as arrogant, dismissive of basic constitutional questions and ultimately spineless to take any principled stand even if they believed in any.  In short, the DOJ has become a perfect representation of Barack Obama.  That was the case in the Obamacare challenge, was the case in the Citizen's United case, and was the case in the recent Supreme Court battle over Arizona's immigration law.

An AP news story from June 25 had the title "High court rejects part of Arizona immigration law."  The story gets all the facts right: despite the extreme right-wing tilt of the court, the Supremes overwhelming rejected the reactionary law: "The court struck down these three major provisions: requiring all immigrants to obtain or carry immigration registration papers, making it a state criminal offense for an illegal immigrant to seek work or hold a job and allowing police to arrest suspected illegal immigrants without warrants."

Despite these rulings, one key part of the law was left in place: "that police must check the status of people stopped for various reasons who might appear to be in the U.S. illegally."  Prez Obama decried this provision being left intact, declaring in writing: "No American should ever live under a cloud of suspicion just because of what they look like."

That Obama presented his objection in writing rather than one of his supposedly awesome speeches should tell you something.  What was left out in the AP article: the reason didn't reject the "Show me your papers" provision as an in-your-face abuse of civil liberties is because the Obama DOJ never objected the law on this point.  In fact, many of the Supreme judges could barely conceal their disgust of the DOJ during arguments over this fact.  The reasons seem pretty obvious: the Obama political team felt that sticking up for the rights of Latinos would be an election loser.

The good news: though they didn't overturn the most offensive part of the law, the Court made it pretty clear that they would if anyone could present evidence to the court that the law has or could violate any person's basic constitutional liberties.  It's a shame that Team Obama weren't the ones who did it.

Source:
http://news.yahoo.com/high-court-rejects-part-arizona-immigration-law-142916381.html

The Worst Teacher in Chicago

by Greg Palast | For the Occupied Chicago Tribune
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
GregPalast.com

This is a true story.

CHICAGO.  In a school with some of the poorest kids in Chicago, one English teacher – I won't use her name – who'd been cemented into the school system for over a decade, wouldn't do a damn thing to lift test scores, yet had an annual salary level of close to $70,000 a year.  Under Chicago's new rules holding teachers accountable and allowing charter schools to compete, this seniority-bloated teacher was finally fired by the principal.

In a nearby neighborhood, a charter school, part of the city system, had complete freedom to hire.  No teachers' union interference. The charter school was able to bring in an innovative English teacher with advanced degrees and a national reputation in her field - for $29,000 a year less than was paid to the fired teacher.

You've guessed it by now:  It's the same teacher.

It's Back to School Time!  Time for the editorialists and the Tea Party, the GOP and Barack Obama's Education Secretary Arne Duncan to rip into the people who dare teach in public schools.

And in Arne's old stomping grounds, Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel is stomping on the teachers, pushing them into the street.

Let's stop kidding ourselves. This is what Mitt Romney and Obama and Arne Duncan and Paul Ryan have in mind when they promote charter schools and the right to fire teachers with tenure:  slash teachers salaries and bust their unions.

They've almost stopped pretending, too.  Both the Right Wing-nuts and the Obama Administration laud the "progress" of New Orleans' schools–a deeply sick joke.  The poorest students, that struggle most with standardized tests, were drowned or washed away.

One thing Democrat Emanuel and Republican Romney both demand of Chicago teachers is that their pay, their jobs, depend on "standardized tests." Yes, but whose standard?

Here is an actual question from the standardized test that were given third graders here in NYC by the nation's biggest test-for-profit company:

"...Most young tennis stars learn the game from coaches at private clubs.  In this sentence a private club is...."   Then you have some choices in which the right answer is "Country Club - place where people meet."

Now not many of the "people [who] meet" at country clubs are from the South Side of Chicago--unless their parents are caddies.  A teacher on the South Side whose students are puzzled by the question will lose their pay or job. Students on the lakefront Gold Coast all know that mommy plays tennis at the Country Club with Raul on Wednesdays. So their teacher gets a raise and their school has high marks.

And while Mayor Rahm promises kids in "bad" schools new teachers (the same ones at lower pay) at high-score schools, in fact, they are never actually allowed in.

But Rahm, after all, is just imposing Bush education law which should be called, No Child's Behind Left.

You want to know what's wrong with our schools?  Benno Schmidt, CEO of the big Edison Schools teach-for-profit business is a creepy, greedy privateer.  But he told me straight: that before Hurricane Katrina, his company would never go into New Orleans because Louisiana spent peanuts per child on education.  He made it clear: You get what you pay for.  Not what you test for.  

So the charter carpetbaggers slither in, cherry-pick the easy students, declare success. The tough cases and special ed kids are left in the public system so they can claim the public system fails.

Here's what the teacher who was terrible at $70,000 but brilliant at $41,000 told me:
"They're not doing this in white neighborhoods.  And they want to get rid of the older, experienced teachers with seniority who cost more.  Get rid of the teachers and, ultimately get rid of the kids.  And the charter school gets to pick the kids who get in."

It's simple.  When you look at the drop-out rates in New York (41%) and Chicago (44%), the solution offered is to pay teachers less. They punish those who dare to work in poor schools where kids struggle and you can bet that "washing away" half the kids in our schools is, in fact, exactly what they've planned.

It's notable that, when he lived in Chicago, Barack Obama played basketball with city school chief Arne Duncan, but Obama sure as hell didn't send his kids to Arne's crap public schools. Those are for po' folk.

His kids went to the tony "Lab" School in Hyde Park.  Obama believes what Duncan believes and what Romney believes:  there's no need for universal education and no need to spend money on it.  Yes, they like to say that "children are our future."  But they mean the children of China are our future, the Chinese kids who will make the stuff we want and the children of India who will program it all for us.

After all, how much education does some obese kid from Texas need to stack boxes from China in a Wal-Mart warehouse?

Education is no longer about information and learning skills.  It's now about "triage."  A few selected by standardized tests or privileged birth will be anointed and permitted into better and "gifted" schools.

The chosen elite are still very much needed:  to invest in India and Vietnam, to design new derivatives to circumvent the laughable new banking laws, and to maintain order among the restless hundred-million drop-outs squeezed out of the colon of our educational system.

Democrats' Bantustans, Republicans' Value-less Vouchers.

The Obama/Duncan/Emanuel plan is to create Bantustans of un-chartered, cheaply-run dumpster schools within a government system.  But Romney and the GOP would give every child a "choice" even outside government schools with "vouchers."

Of course, the "vouchers" don't vouch for much.  Romney's old alma mater, Cranbrook Academy, runs at $34,025 a year, not counting the polo sticks and horse.  The most generous voucher program is Washington DC's, beloved of the GOP, which pays about $7,500, or if the student's "choice" is Cranbrook, about 2 months of school.  Hyde Park Day School Chicago is $35,900.  To give each kid a real choice, not just a coupon, means a massive increase in spending per pupil.  I didn't see that in the Republican platform, did you?

The experienced teacher in Chicago who took the pay cut was offered one consolation.  She was told she could make up some of the pay loss by quitting the union and saving on union dues.

So that's the program.  An educational Katrina: squeeze the teachers until they strike, demolish their unions and drown the students.

Chicago's classroom war is class war by another name.

Class dismissed.

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and Vultures' Picnic.

Palast's brand new book Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, will be out on September 18. You can pre-order Billionaires & Ballot Bandits from Barnes & Noble, Amazon or Indie Bound. Author's proceeds from the book go to the not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund for reporting on voter protection issues.

Or donate and get a signed copy of the book.

Bill blockbuster: O’s an ‘amateur’

CARL CAMPANILE
May 11, 2012
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/bill_blockbuster_an_amateur_XJHYdaV5LT1vpr5I39IKrN

Bill Clinton thought so little of President Obama — mocking him as an “amateur” — that he pressed his wife last summer to quit her job as secretary of state and challenge him in the primaries, a new book claims,
“The country needs you!” the former president told Hillary Clinton, urging her to run this year, according to accounts of the conversation included in Edward Klein’s new biography of Obama.

The title of Klein’s explosive, unauthorized bio of Obama, “The Amateur” (Regnery Publishing), was taken directly from Bill Clinton’s bombshell criticism of the president, the author said.

“Barack Obama,” Bill Clinton said, according to book excerpts, “is an amateur.”

The withering criticism is incredible, given the fact that Bill Clinton is actively campaigning for Obama’s re-election.

But according to the book, Bill Clinton unloaded on Obama and pressed Hillary to run against her boss during a gathering in the ex-president’s home office in Chappaqua last August that included longtime friends, Klein said.

“The economy’s a mess, it’s dead flat. America has lost its Triple-A rating . . . You know better than Obama does,” Bill said.

Bill Clinton insisted he had “no relationship” with Obama and had been consulted more frequently by his presidential successor, George W. Bush.

Obama, Bill Clinton said, “doesn’t know how to be president” and is “incompetent.”

But Hillary resisted the entreaties, according to two of the guests interviewed for the book.

“Why risk everything now?” a skeptical Hillary told her husband, emphasizing that she wanted to leave a legacy as secretary of state.

“Because,” Bill replied, his voice rising, “the country needs you!”

“The country needs us!” added Bill.

He later even joked about the prospect of having two Clinton presidential libraries — about the only time that Hillary cracked a smile.

“I want my term [at the State Department] to be an important one, and running away from it now would leave it as a footnote,” Hillary argued.

She said she had the option of running again in 2016.

But Bill wouldn’t let go.

“I know you’re young enough!” Bill said, his voice booming. “That’s not what I’m worried about. I’m worried that I’m not young enough.”

“I’m the highest-ranking member in Obama’s Cabinet. I eat breakfast with the guy every Thursday morning. What about loyalty, Bill? What about loyalty?” she responded.

“Loyalty is a joke,’’ Bill shot back. “Loyalty doesn’t exist in politics.”

Bill’s verbal battle with Hillary over the presidency, if anything, intensified when daughter Chelsea showed up with her husband, Marc Mezvinsky.

“You deserve to be president,” Chelsea said.

Bill was clearly pleased that Chelsea was on his side and vowed to have allies commission polls on a Hillary-Obama matchup.

“What are you trying to do — force my hand?” Hillary said.

“I want everyone to know how strong you poll,” Bill said.

Hillary said, “Go ahead and knock yourself out.”

The book’s explosive claims were shot down last night by spokesmen for the White House and the Clintons, who closed ranks last night.

Bill Clinton’s spokesman Matt McKenna said the excerpts were “totally and completely false” and called Klein “a known liar.”

Phillipe Reines, a spokesman for the secretary of state, noted that Hillary Clinton challenged the veracity of an earlier book Klein wrote about her, “Truth About Hillary.”

White House spokesman Eric Schultz accused Klein of making up facts to sell books.

“Nobody in their right mind would believe the nonsense in this one, especially since both Secretary Clinton and President Clinton have been loyal and supportive of the president at every turn.”

Klein, a former editor of The New York Times Magazine and Newsweek, defended the book and his earlier one as factually sound.

Meanwhile, today's daily presidential Rasmussen Poll shows Mitt Romney ahead of the president with 50 percent to Obama's 43 percent. It is the highest level of support the presumptive Republican nominee has received in his matchup with Obama as well as his largest lead.

The Real Health Care Debate

Chris Hedges
Apr 9, 2012
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_real_health_care_debate_20120409

The debate surrounding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act illustrates the impoverishment of our political life. Here is a law that had its origin in the right-wing Heritage Foundation, was first put into practice in 2006 in Massachusetts by then-Gov. Mitt Romney and was solidified into federal law after corporate lobbyists wrote legislation with more than 2,000 pages. It is a law that forces American citizens to buy a deeply defective product from private insurance companies. It is a law that is the equivalent of the bank bailout bill—some $447 billion in subsidies for insurance interests alone—for the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. It is a law that is unconstitutional. And it is a law by which President Barack Obama, and his corporate backers, extinguished the possibilities of both the public option and Medicare for all Americans. There is no substantial difference between Obamacare and Romneycare. There is no substantial difference between Obama and Romney. They are abject servants of the corporate state. And if you vote for one you vote for the other.

But you would never know this by listening to the Democratic Party and the advocacy groups that purport to support universal health care but seem more intent on re-electing Obama. It is the very sad legacy of the liberal class that it proves in election cycle after election cycle that it espouses moral and political positions it will not pay a price to defend. And since we have no fight in us, since we will not punish politicians like Obama who betray our core beliefs, the corporate juggernaut rolls forward with its inexorable pace to cement into place our global neofeudalism.

Protesting outside the Supreme Court recently as it heard arguments on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act were both conservatives from Americans for Prosperity who denounced the president as a socialist and demonstrators from Democratic front groups such as the SEIU and the Families USA health care consumer group who chanted “Protect the law!” Lost between these two factions were a few stalwarts who hold quite different views, including public health care advocates Dr. Margaret Flowers, Dr. Carol Paris and attorneys Oliver Hall, Kevin Zeese and Russell Mokhiber. They displayed a banner that read: “Single Payer Now! Strike Down the Obama Mandate!” They, at least, have not relinquished the demand for single payer health care for all Americans. And I throw my lot in with these renegades, dismissed, no doubt, as cranks or dreamers or impractical by those who flee into the embrace of empty political theater and junk politics. These single payer advocates, joined by 50 doctors, filed a brief to the court that challenges, in the name of universal health care, the individual mandate.

“We have the solution, we have the resources and we have the money to provide lifelong, comprehensive, high-quality health care to every person,” Dr. Flowers said when we spoke a few days ago in Washington, D.C. Many Americans have not accepted the single payer approach “because people get confused by the politics,” she said. “People accept the Democratic argument that this [Obamacare] is all we can have or this is something we can build on.

“If you are trying to meet the goal of universal health coverage and the only way to meet that goal is to force people to purchase private insurance, then you might consider that it is constitutional,” Flowers said. “Our argument is that the individual mandate does not meet the goal of universality. When you attempt to use the individual mandate and expansion of Medicaid for coverage, only about half of the uninsured gain coverage. This is what we have seen in Massachusetts. We do, however, have systems in the United States that could meet the goal of universality. That would be either a Veterans Administration type system, which is a socialized system run by the government, or a Medicare type system, a single payer, publicly financed health care system. If the U.S. Congress had considered an evidence-based approach to health reform instead of writing a bill that funnels more wealth to insurance companies that deny and restrict care, it would have been a no-brainer to adopt a single payer health system much like our own Medicare. We are already spending enough on health care in this country to provide high-quality, universal, comprehensive, lifelong health care. All the data point to a single payer system as the only way to accomplish this and control health care costs.”

Obamacare will, according to figures compiled by Physicians for a National Health Plan (PNHP), leave at least 23 million people without insurance, a figure that translates into an estimated 23,000 unnecessary deaths a year among people who cannot afford care. Costs will continue to climb. There are no caps on premiums, including for people with “pre-existing conditions.” The elderly can be charged three times the rates provided to the young. Companies with predominantly female workforces can be charged higher gender-based rates. Most of us will soon be paying about 10 percent of our annual incomes to buy commercial health insurance, although this coverage will pay for only about 70 percent of our medical expenses. And those of us who become seriously ill, lose our incomes and cannot pay the skyrocketing premiums are likely to be denied coverage. The dizzying array of loopholes in the law—written in by insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyists—means, in essence, that the healthy will receive insurance while the sick and chronically ill will be priced out of the market.

Medical bills already lead to 62 percent of personal bankruptcies, and nearly 80 percent of those declaring personal bankruptcy because of medical costs had insurance. The U.S. spends twice as much per capita on health care as other industrialized nations, $8,160. Private insurance bureaucracy and paperwork consume 31 percent of every health care dollar. Streamlining payment through a single, nonprofit payer would save more than $400 billion per year, enough, the PNHP estimates, to provide comprehensive, high-quality coverage for all Americans.

But as long as corporations determine policy, as long as they can use their money to determine who gets elected and what legislation gets passed, we remain hostages. It matters little in our corporate state that nearly two-thirds of the public wants single payer and that it is backed by 59 percent of doctors. Public debates on the Obama health care reform, controlled by corporate dollars, ruthlessly silence those who support single payer. The Senate Finance Committee, chaired by Max Baucus, a politician who gets more than 80 percent of his campaign contributions from outside his home state of Montana, locked out of the Affordable Care Act hearing a number of public health care advocates including Dr. Flowers and Dr. Paris; the two physicians and six other activists were arrested and taken away. Baucus had invited 41 people to testify. None backed single payer. Those who testified included contributors who had given a total of more than $3 million to committee members for their political campaigns.

“It is not necessary to force Americans to buy private health insurance to achieve universal coverage,” said Russell Mokhiber of Single Payer Action. “There is a proven alternative that Congress didn’t seriously consider, and that alternative is a single payer national health insurance system. Congress could have taken seriously evidence presented by these single payer medical doctors that a single payer system is the only way to both control costs and cover everyone.”

Jeb Bush eyed as latest 'white knight' candidate in GOP presidential race

Former Florida governor was critical of current field in a speech this week, prompting rumours he could be a surprise contender
Paul Harris in New York
guardian.co.uk, Friday 24 February 2012
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/24/jeb-bush-latest-white-knight-republican

Speculation that a late challenger might still emerge in the increasingly bitter race for the Republican presidential nomination is set to surge after former Florida governor Jeb Bush made remarks criticising the current field.

Bush, who is the brother of President George W Bush and son of President George Bush Sr, is a beloved figure among many conservatives who see him as a strong and charismatic leader who is popular in the must-win swing state of Florida.

That contrasts with a widespread unease among many Republican leaders and grassroots activists with the remaining crop of Republican candidates and the vitriolic nature of the fight between frontrunner Mitt Romney and his main challengers Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich.

In answers to questions from the audience after a speech in Dallas on Thursday, Bush cautioned the remaining Republican campaigns from drifting so far to the right that they put off the key independent voters needed to beat President Barack Obama in November.

"I think it's important for the candidates to recognise though they have to appeal to primary voters, and not turn off independent voters that will be part of a winning coalition," Bush told the audience according to CBS news.

Bush also directly took on the strident tone of recent Republican debates, accusing participants of scare-mongering. "I used to be a conservative and I watch these debates and I'm wondering, I don't think I've changed, but it's a little troubling sometimes when people are appealing to people's fears and emotion rather than trying to get them to look over the horizon for a broader perspective and that's kind of where we are," he said according to Fox News.

With Mitt Romney failing so far to secure the nomination but with no convincing challenger emerging to unseat him, many Republican pundits have speculated about the possibility that none of the current field will be able to amass enough support to secure the nomination this August in Tampa.

Though that is still unlikely, and Romney remains favourite to win the contest, it has led to a slew of names being mentioned as possible "white knights" who could still enter the race or emerge at Tampa as a compromise candidate to unite a splintered party. They include Bush, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, Indiana governor Mitch Daniels and Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan.

Though none of these figures have expressed any intention to run, and several have repeatedly denied it, Bush's comments are likely to set the rumour mill spinning furiously.

They also come after Tea Party favourite Sarah Palin entered the fray, raising the idea that she might see herself as her party's saviour. In recent interviews the former Alaska governor has said she would "help" out the party if a contested convention happened and told CNN earlier this month that she believed such an event would be a good thing. "I don't think it would be a negative for the party … That's part of the competition, that's part of the process and it may happen," she said.

Ron Paul's campaign has also complicated matters. Though the libertarian-leaning Texan congressman has not yet won a single state's popular ballot, he is trying to build up a large number of delegates to take to Tampa. In caucus states, where complex rules mean the number of delegates assigned to a candidate can outweigh their score in the popular vote, Ron Paul's campaign is working hard to win as much support as possible. That could see him amass a body of delegates in Tampa that far exceeds his standings in the polls and makes a contested convention, with no one having enough support to secure victory, more likely.