Uh-Oh, Brian

Seems that Brian Williams' exaggerations are continuing to be rooted out, the latest catch pertaining to his presence at the Arab Spring protests in Egypt's Tahir Square back in 2011.

Actually, the details don't matter too much, it's the bigger picture that matters, so I really appreciated this analysis over at First Draft:

Again, this isn’t nothing. Brian Williams had a very big chair with a very big microphone in front of it. But the stories we’ve heard about aren’t exaggerations on the facts of the story as they related to the story or anyone in it. They’re exaggerations on how fucking cool and badass Brian Williams is, and about all the crazy shit he’s seen, man. They’re basically a guy in a bar, telling war stories, only he’s on TV.

That’s not okay, but it’s not the UVA rape story. It’s not Judith Miller’s Iraq reporting. Nobody died. And more attention is being paid to these fabrications than the ones that did lead to deaths. To wars

So we are arguing about who fucked up the color of the bunting on the runaway train. Yeah, let’s fire that guy, because he screwed up. But let’s also find out why the brakes failed and the cargo’s flying off and oh, up ahead, is that a hole? A big one? Well, shit. Guess we’re going straight in.

All lies are lies and all lies on this scale are wrong and should be rooted out. But not all lies lead to the same place.

Seems that the hapless Brian is the only one being held accountable for lies pertaining to Iraq (yes, I realize this story is about Egypt) but it does certainly beg the question as to why "the media" isn't conducting a massive analysis of how the war in Iraq was sold and prosecuted.  Sure, President Obama made quite the point about looking forward, not backward, when it came to war crimes...but I think that he was trying to set a self-serving precedent for when his actions might later be scrutinized.  

In other words, rather than do the right things as president and thus NOT be at risk for crimes, he instead chose to tee up an established precedent for future presidents to have a get-out-of-jail-free card.  Think about the drone war and how that'll look in hindsight.  Oh wait!  Hopefully the next president won't want to look back either!

The bride and I (in truth, me much more than her) used to be news junkies, but of late we've pulled back.  And you know what?  The world keeps on going, minus some of our outrage.

Senate Report on Torture

From the Earth Bound Misfit, a succinct summary of where things stand or should stand with respect to the just-released Senate Report on torture.

"Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly." -- Attorney General John Ashcroft, in one of many meetings about using torture.

The Bush Administration knew about it. The Cheney Cabal pushed for using more brutal methods.  

As horrific as the report is turning out to be, it is also a profile in cowardice. There was no acknowledgement of the Bush Administration's demands that people be tortured. And the Obama Administration, aka MTAHNS, refused to turn over nearly ten thousand documents to the investigators. Obama opposed the CIA turning anything whatsoever over to the Senate inquiry, which makes Obama, for trying to cover up the commission of war crimes, as culpable as Bush.

The CIA and the Department of Defense committed war crimes. They committed the sort of crimes that, nearly seventy years ago, we executed enemy prisoners for doing similar things.

But they were not rogue agencies. The CIA and the military did what their bosses demanded of them. Which is not an excuse, but an explanation.

The release of the Senate report is a laudable step. But it is also a stark example of the shitty tendency of bureaucracy to blame the underlings for following the orders of the bosses.

Which leads me to this: We should either open a prosecution of the senior members of the Bush Administration for what they did, or pardon everyone who was convicted for torturing prisoners at Abu Graib. Either we follow through on being a nation of laws or embrace that we are a nation of war criminals. There really isn't any middle ground.

My thoughts are that since so many people wanted to hide the report--basically because it contained unpleasant things and would cast the mighty United States of America in an unfavorable light--then that's all the more reason to release it fully. 

If we are not proud of what we did, then it was wrong.  Period.  So...I'm waiting for the indictments or the pardons.  It's likely to be a long wait.

On Being Ashamed

Ran across this great quote here.  The entire post by Jaime O'Neill is worth a read:

Jonathan Swift, who waged war on ignorance, fear, and hate a couple of centuries ago, wrote: “I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.”

As I survey the political landscape I am continually amazed to discover just how shameless, arrogant, tone-deaf, unaware, lying, unapologetic--you name the adjective--that some of our "leaders" are.

For example, Ms. Shelley Moore Capito was just elected to the U.S. Senate from the adjacent state of West Virginia.  Since we are close, we saw on TV some of her ads (too many, actually) prior to the election. Capito ran on an Obama-bashing platform, and one of her principal campaign ads said that Obama was going to kill jobs and take away our freedoms.

Really?  You can say that with a straight face?

Nobel Prize Winner

Via the always-vigilant Digby, we have a follow-on to my post of a couple weeks ago about the bombing proclivities of a certain Nobel Prize winner:

A very select club petitions one of its own members to do the right thing by digby

Hey, remember when President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize? I know, those were heady times.  Check out what his fellow Peace Prize Winners are asking of him today:

Twelve winners of the Nobel Peace Prize asked President Barack Obama late Sunday to make sure that a Senate report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s use of harsh interrogation tactics is released so the U.S. can put an end to a practice condemned by many as torture.

The release of the report, which is the most detailed account of the CIA’s interrogation practices in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, would be an opportunity for the U.S. and the world to come to terms with interrogation techniques that went too far, the laureates said in an open letter and petition. The release of the report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has stalled as the Obama Administration the CIA, and lawmakers clashed over how much of it should be redacted.

Why not just release the report?  Oh, I guess it might make us look bad....so maybe that tells us that what we did wasn't so good.

Duh.

Obama...Who Fails to Occupy the High Ground

Via Avedon Carol, I was directed to a Salon article in which Thomas Frank interviews Cornel West, a professor at Union Theological Seminary and noted public intellectual.

NOTE: this interview came before the Obama speech on ISIL on 10 September.  The highlighting in BLUE is mine.  Professor West nails it for me: I was so ready, so excited, for a progressive president back in 2008.  But that's not what we got.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

FRANK: So that’s my first question, it’s a lot of ground to cover but how do you feel things have worked out since then, both with the economy and with this president? That was a huge turning point, that moment in 2008, and my own feeling is that we didn’t turn.

WEST: No, the thing is he posed as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit. We ended up with a Wall Street presidency, a drone presidency, a national security presidency. The torturers go free. The Wall Street executives go free. The war crimes in the Middle East, especially now in Gaza, the war criminals go free. And yet, you know, he acted as if he was both a progressive and as if he was concerned about the issues of serious injustice and inequality and it turned out that he’s just another neoliberal centrist with a smile and with a nice rhetorical flair. And that’s a very sad moment in the history of the nation because we are—we’re an empire in decline. Our culture is in increasing decay. Our school systems are in deep trouble. Our political system is dysfunctional. Our leaders are more and more bought off with legalized bribery and normalized corruption in Congress and too much of our civil life. You would think that we needed somebody—a Lincoln-like figure who could revive some democratic spirit and democratic possibility.

FRANK: What on earth ails the man? Why can’t he fight the Republicans? Why does he need to seek a grand bargain?

WEST: I think Obama, his modus operandi going all the way back to when he was head of the [Harvard] Law Review, first editor of the Law Review and didn’t have a piece in the Law Review. He was chosen because he always occupied the middle ground. He doesn’t realize that a great leader, a statesperson, doesn’t just occupy middle ground. They occupy higher ground or the moral ground or even sometimes the holy ground. But the middle ground is not the place to go if you’re going to show courage and vision. And I think that’s his modus operandi. He always moves to the middle ground. It turned out that historically, this was not a moment for a middle-ground politician. We needed a high-ground statesperson and it’s clear now he’s not the one.

And so what did he do? Every time you’re headed toward middle ground what do you do? You go straight to the establishment and reassure them that you’re not too radical, and try to convince them that you are very much one of them so you end up with a John Brennan, architect of torture [as CIA Director]. Torturers go free but they’re real patriots so we can let them go free. The rule of law doesn’t mean anything.

I Guess I'm Being Sanctimonious

About a week ago, President Obama made some remarks about the torture program of the US during the previous administration. I've had some days to mull this topic over, then today I read a post, here, by William Rivers Pitt, that absolutely articulated my thoughts so much better than I ever could.

So here's an excerpt.  You should really go and read the whole thing.

"Even before I came into office," said the President on Friday, "I was very clear that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, we did some things that were wrong. We did a whole lot of things that were right, but we tortured some folks. We did some things that were contrary to our values."

"I understand why it happened," the President continued. "I think it's important when we look back to recall how afraid people were after the twin towers fell and the Pentagon had been hit and the plane in Pennsylvania had fallen and people did not know whether more attacks were imminent and there was enormous pressure on our law enforcement and our national security teams to try to deal with this.".

By citing the fear that came after the attacks of 9/11 - a moment when defending the Constitution and holding to that oath was very, very hard - as a free pass for those who instituted and practiced this program of torture, the president betrayed his oath, just as those who practiced torture betrayed theirs. No one was prosecuted for these crimes, and the "investigations" conducted by this administration into that torture were so piddly and toothless as to be utterly meaningless.

Beyond that oath is the Geneva Convention Against Torture, of which the United States is a signatory, and is therefore bound to its edicts. Article Two, Section One of the Convention reads, "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture." In other words, no excuses, period, end of file. "Afraid" is not an excuse.

The Constitution was violated, the Geneva Convention was violated, and still everyone walked, and on Friday, the president said that was fine, because we were "afraid." The moral failure in this is so vast as to be bottomless...but Mr. Obama wasn't quite finished twisting the knife.

"And, you know," he continued, "it's important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had. A lot of those folks were working hard under enormous pressure and are real patriots, but having said all that, we did some things that were wrong." 

There's more; the whole post is worth  reading if you want to be disgusted.  Unless, of course, I'm being sanctimonious.

The Real Soution for the Sticky Syria Issue

Looks like we're going to war in Syria.

The Very Serious People will tell us in solemn tones how we have to send a message to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and how since there will be no American boots on the grounds it would not really be a war anyway.

But footwear aside, it would be a war, and we'd just be following through on our death threats, with no good outcome really expected other than saving face.

Before I get to my solution, better read this.  It's from The Onion, a satirical web site, but it tells you better than the conventional media everything you need to know about the state of current affairs with respect to the whole Syrian issue.  Go ahead and click over, I'll wait.

Done?  Well, President Obama seems caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place, with no good options on the table.

But there is one option, in fact a very good one, so here's my advice to President Obama, in the form of the short address he should use to the world when he announces his course of action:

Pressident Bashar al-Assad is batshit crazy.  So crazy, in fact, that sending him any sort of military message would probably be futile.  It might make some of us feel better--you know, that whole eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth Old Testament stuff--but in point of fact any leader who would use weapons of mass destruction on his own people is already around the bend and immune to ordinary lesson-teaching.

Plus, no matter how well we'd target our weapons there would be more dead civilians.

So, we are not going to make a military response.  The hawks here in this country and around the world will get their panties all in a bunch, but what I've decided the United States will do instead is this. 

Our military strategists have figured out their recommended "proper response."  That is, just enough blown-up stuff to try to teach a lesson to al-Assad and for us to save face with the world, but not enough blown-up stuff to upset the balance in the ongoing Syrian civil war.

But rather than launch those munitions, we will instead take the $_____ billion that would have been expended on bombs and missiles and use it for humanitarian aid for the millions of Syrian civilians displaced or affected by this war.  We will fund doctors, nurses, medical supplies, food, safe drinking water, schools, and rebuild homes, villages, and infrastructure.  We invite our allies and others to join us in that effort.

That will send the correct message to al-Assad and the rest of the world, better than any missile could: that of beating our swords into plowshares, and our spears into pruning hooks.

The Speech That President Obama Should Give

I'm now feeling about this president the same way I felt about President Carter: hope and change were in the air, and the time was right for a bold, strong person with vision to correct the erroneous course that the U.S. had been on.

Unfortunately, President Carter didn't get the job done while in office, although in his case, I am in awe of his post-presidency humanitarian efforts.  And it remains to be seen how former President Obama will perform after 2016. 

But I must observe that unlike Carter, President Obama will have a whole lotta rehabilitation to do to repair his reputation (think warrantless surveillance, drones, coddling Wall Street while the middle class tanked, focusing on the deficit rather than jobs, failing to prosecute known war crimes committed by his predecessor....)

Which leads me to a great post by David Atkins at the blog Hullabaloo.

If I were President, I would go on camera and say:

"You know, I want what the American people want. Like you, I want to increase the minimum wage. I want to boost jobs, increase incomes for middle class Americans, and fix our decaying infrastructure. I want to do something to stop the epidemic of gun deaths in this country. I want to invest in green jobs, move away from the old fuels that fund our enemies, slow down and stop climate change and make America the leader in the technologies of the 21st century. I want to invest in our children's education and stop students from taking on a lifetime of debt just to go to college.

 

Like you, I want to do all these things. But I'm not a king. I can't force Congress to put these bills on my desk. They have to bring them to me, and Republicans in Congress refuse to do so. I'm asking them directly: give me these bills. The American people want them. I got elected by a significant margin in order to get these things done that I talked about on the campaign trail.

 

I'm as aware as the American People that nothing is getting done in Washington. It's all bickering and no action. But that doesn't mean everyone is equally to blame. I'm trying to get these things done to bring relief to my fellow Americans. Most of my Democratic colleagues in the Senate are trying to do the same. But the House of Representatives is refusing to do its job. In fact, they're planning on taking America hostage--again!--refusing to pay the bills we've racked up unless we slash even more jobs and hurt our economy even worse than they hurt it already.

 

Enough is enough. I'm waiting for the House to act, and for Republicans in the Senate to stop filibustering every bill we put forward to help the American people. The Republican Senate Minority has already blocked twice as many bills during my Presidency than in any other Presidency. I've tried compromising, I've tried threatening, I've tried pleading. Nothing works. There's nothing to trade. The Republicans are so invested in trying to make my Presidency fail that they're will to let American go down with it.

 

They don't want to raise the minimum wage. They want to cut taxes for the rich. They don't want to invest in green jobs and infrastructure: they want to cut jobs and privatize our roads and bridges. They don't want to reduce the number of guns on our streets and in our schools; they want to increase them. They'd rather regulate women's bodies than regulate corporations that evade taxes and pollute our air and water. There's no compromise to be had there. Trust me, I've tried--though the press often pretends I haven't, I've tried as hard as anyone can. They just don't want the same things the American people do.

 

My message to the American People is this: you elected me to do a job and make your lives better. I'm doing all I can, but I can't do it alone. I need Congress--and Republicans in Congress especially--to do their jobs rather than cater to the interests of a few big corporations and the wealthiest Americans. Everything I can do alone, I'm doing. But I can't do the big things without some help. If you want change as much as I do, if you want to realize your and my hope for a better future, call up and email your members of Congress and tell them to do their jobs and send these bills to my desk."

Your Tax Dollars Pay for This

Via Rising Hegemon, in a post called At What Price?

There was never any doubt that eventually the moral vacancy of the US Drone program would be put in the starkest light:

An American military airstrike in eastern Afghanistan near the Pakistan border was reported to have killed 18 people, including at least one senior Taliban commander but also women and children, raising the thorny issue of civilian casualties for the third time in roughly a week.

Of those 18 reported deaths, 11 were children.

But I'm sure reportedly getting that one senior Taliban commander TOTALLY offsets killing 11 children. Another American success.
 

We kinda sorta turn our heads and pretend that the drone strike program is one of those necessary evils in a tough world where there are bad guys.

But you and I just killed some children.

No, we didn't pull the trigger ourselves but we are responsible nonetheless.  The truth is that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  So the mere existence of a drone strike program practically guarantees that it will be used...and there will be "collateral damage."

I.e. children.

 

Mandate for Change?

Via Balloon Juice a couple days ago, we see an interesting observation:

In 2004, Bush beat Kerry 50.7% to 48.3%. In this year’s election, Obama beat Romney 50.8% to 47.5% (these numbers may change to numbers that are slightly more favorable to Obama as more votes are counted). Yet Bush had a mandate and Obama does not.

 

 

I get pretty sick and tired of double standards and hypocrisy and that kind of stuff.

 

Wouldn't it be nice if President Obama acted like he had a mandate and went full-court-press nuts for the next 4 years trying to do all the right thing(s) as though he had nothing to lose?  (e.g., taking on climate change, protecting social programs, universal health care, women's rights, gay rights, demilitarizing the U.S., etc....)

 

Wait, he doesn't have anything to lose.  What are they gonna do, vote him out?

 

 

Soaring Words...and Ultrarunning

Offered without additional comment--these words truly stand on their own merits:

I have never been more hopeful about America. And I ask you to sustain that hope. I'm not talking about blind optimism, the kind of hope that just ignores the enormity of the tasks ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. I'm not talking about the wishful idealism that allows us to just sit on the sidelines or shirk from a fight.

I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting.

America, I believe we can build on the progress we've made and continue to fight for new jobs and new opportunity and new security for the middle class. I believe we can keep the promise of our founders, the idea that if you're willing to work hard, it doesn't matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn't matter whether you're black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, able, disabled, gay or straight, you can make it here in America if you're willing to try.

I believe we can seize this future together because we are not as divided as our politics suggests. We're not as cynical as the pundits believe. We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions, and we remain more than a collection of red states and blue states. We are and forever will be the United States of America.

 

Source: President Obama's victory speech.

The link to Ultrarunning?  I just enjoyed a celebratory run, wherein I felt exactly this way:

"I feel my heart pumping hard, I want to think again of dangerous and noble things.  I want to be light and frolicsome.  I want to be improbable, beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings." -- Mary Oliver, 'Starlings in Winter'

President Obama got my vote, although I had plenty of reason to be disappointed about the last 4 years.  Mitt Romney was so gracious in defeat, and I believe the country would have been OK under him. 

But today I feel that the President, relieved of the burden of campaigning and facing re-election, will feel empowered to take some bold steps to improve this country.  Things like addressing climate change in a real way, a coherent energy policy, ensuring that women have agency over their own bodies, social and legal equality for all people, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, and a pulling back from the politics of war as a so-called instrument of peace.


 

What the President Said about Rape...

...is what the bride has been saying for years now.

President Obama went on the Leno show last Wednesday night and said this (courtesy of Firedoglake):

Rape is rape. It is a crime. And so, these various distinctions about rape and, you know — don’t make too much sense to me. Don’t make any sense to me. The second thing this underscores, though, this is exactly why you don’t want a bunch of politicians — mostly male — making decisions about women’s health care decisions. I — women are capable of making these decisions in consultation with their partners, with their doctors. And, you know, for politicians to want to intrude in this stuff, often times without any information, is a huge problem. And this is obviously a part of what’s at stake in this election. You’ve got a Supreme Court that — you know, typically a president is gonna have probably another couple of appointments during the course of his term. And, you know, Roe vs. Wade is probably hanging in the balance.
 

Bolding is mine.

I just don't see how there is even debate on this.  It simply mystifies me.  Any human being should have the inalienable right to control their own bodily autonomy, to include decisions about whether or not to be pregnant.  Duh!

I've been disappointed that Obama has not been nearly as progressive as I hoped and expected.  But he is clearly the better choice between the two tickets, if for no other reason than he will appoint sane people to the Supreme Court...which is probably much more of a lasting legacy than whatever policies and laws any administration enacts.

 

The Enemy of the Good...and Ultrarunning

Ran across this one at the blog Balloon Juice, and realized that this was the sort of low-information, reactionary response that drives me nuts:

The Last Four Years in One Quote

By mistermix September 25th, 2012

In an otherwise innocuous story about the new calorie labeling at MacDonalds, Dick Nigon of Sterling, VA is every Republican:

I did find one customer who had noticed the calorie labels: Dick Nigon of Sterling, Va. He and his wife, Lea, had stopped by McDonald’s after seeing an exhibit at the Renwick Gallery. Dick had ordered for the couple, noticed the calorie labels and liked them.
“I like that you have the information before you order,” he told me, when I asked about the labels. “It’s better than some kind of government health mandate in Obamacare.”

I told him that the calorie labels were, in fact, a government health mandate in Obamacare.

“Well that changes things a bit,” he responded. “I thought this was more of a voluntary sort of thing. Now I’m not quite sure how I feel about it.”

What’s dumber: the notion that MacDonald’s would voluntarily tell customers the calorie count of their greasy-ass food, or the way that the mere mention of “Obama” changes his mind?


It continually mystifies me that people 1) have such negative, knee-jerk reactions to the mere mention of Obama and Obamacare, and 2) they keep taking anti-Obama stances against their own self-interest (e.g., supporting the Other Guy (Romney/Ryan) who want to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits). 

The in-laws are a classic example of this.  I love them dearly, but their minds are filled with the "fair and balanced" so-called "facts" that come from having Fox News on virtually every waking hour.  Having a solid and permanent social safety net in place for their old age should be their number one priority...yet they bash Obama whenever they can (FIL much more so than MIL, so maybe we're seeing some of that white male rage).

Make no mistake, I've been disappointed that President Obama has been less of a progressive than Candidate Obama seemed to be, but I can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.  A Republican victory would so bad, on so many levels--so bad.  I gotta remain in Obama's camp.

Of course, I must somehow link this theme to Ultrarunning.  Suppose I was thinking about entering a race, but some friends had told me that some of the rules imposed by the race director were oppressive and dictatorial. In fact, the mere mention of the race director's name elicited disdain from my friends, like "You don't want to run one of his races, do you?"

In fact, I did not know he was the RD, I just liked the race.  On the surface, I initially reacted a bit negatively to some of the so-called onerous rules, delved a bit deeper I could see that they actually benefited me as a runner--they were there for my protection and in the interests of the greater good. 

Maybe an imperfect example, but you get the gist.  THINK, people, don't just react or follow blindly what others tell you.

 

Staying Classy: Reagan vs. Romney

Via Rising Hegemon on 13 September, we see how a classy Republican handled a situation where the a serious military/political event was happening in the Middle East.  This is contrast to candidate Romney's foot insertion in an attempt to score political points over the murder of U.S. ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens:

 

In April 1980, President Carter ordered a raid to attempt to free the American hostages in Tehran...it failed spectacularly and tragically.

How'd Reagan react?

Reagan told a Los Angeles press conference, "This is a difficult day for all of us Americans. . . . It is time for us . . . to stand united. It is a day for quiet reflection . . . when words should be few and confined essentially to our prayers."
 

   

Due Process and the Constitution

First, this Brian McFadden cartoon (click to enlarge (I hope!)), or link here:

Then some somber words from a great leader in the middle of the last century, Winston Churchill:

"The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist."
 

All of this is part of a lengthy interview/discussion between John Cusack, actor and political activist, and Jonathan Turley, constitutional law professor, entitled Obama's Constitution, here. 

A couple more quotes, but you should really go read it yourself.  I for one an very uncomfortable with Obama's disregard of the Constitution when it's inconvenient to follow it...but weighing against that is the option of a Mitt Romney presidency.

CUSACK: And if he takes an oath before God to uphold the Constitution, and yet he decides it's not politically expedient for him to deal with due process or spying on citizens and has his Attorney General justify murdering US citizens — and then adds a signing statement saying, "Well, I'm not going to do anything with this stuff because I'm a good guy."– one would think we would have to define this as a much graver threat than good or bad policy choices- correct?

TURLEY: Well, first of all, there's a great desire of many people to relieve themselves of the obligation to vote on principle. It's a classic rationalization that liberals have been known to use recently, but not just liberals. The Republican and Democratic parties have accomplished an amazing feat with the red state/blue state paradigm. They've convinced everyone that regardless of how bad they are, the other guy is worse. So even with 11 percent of the public supporting Congress most incumbents will be returned to Congress. They have so structured and defined the question that people no longer look at the actual principles and instead vote on this false dichotomy.

Now, belief in human rights law and civil liberties leads one to the uncomfortable conclusion that President Obama has violated his oath to uphold the Constitution. But that's not the primary question for voters. It is less about him than it is them. They have an obligation to cast their vote in a principled fashion. It is, in my opinion, no excuse to vote for someone who has violated core constitutional rights and civil liberties simply because you believe the other side is no better. You cannot pretend that your vote does not constitute at least a tacit approval of the policies of the candidate.

I still gotta vote for him but issues like this make it very uncomfortable to do so.  I'm tired of the question always being reduced to settling for the lesser of two evils. 

 

I Miss Bill

Despite his moral failings, when Bill Clinton looks at me through the camera, I trust him. Here's a representative sample from his speech last night as he nominated President Obama for another term:

In order to look like an acceptable alternative to President Obama, they couldn't say much about the ideas they have offered over the last two years. You see they want to go back to the same old policies that got us into trouble in the first place: to cut taxes for high income Americans even more than President Bush did; to get rid of those pesky financial regulations designed to prevent another crash and prohibit future bailouts; to increase defense spending two trillion dollars more than the Pentagon has requested without saying what they'll spend the money on; to make enormous cuts in the rest of the budget, especially programs that help the middle class and poor kids. As another President once said – there they go again.
 

And his summation says it all:

My fellow Americans, you have to decide what kind of country you want to live in. If you want a you're on your own, winner take all society you should support the Republican ticket. If you want a country of shared opportunities and shared responsibilities – a "we're all in it together" society, you should vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
 

I miss Bill.  I really do.

 

More Like This, Please!...and Ultrarunning

Via Talking Points Memo (and a host of thousands of news outlets):

President Obama made history Wednesday, becoming the first sitting president to come out in support of legal same-sex marriage. In an interview with ABC News, Obama said, “I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.”

Guess what?  The sun still rose here Thursday morning.  What's not to like about people, just people, wanting to spend their lives with someone they love?  The gay folks in my family are not anarchists--they just want society and government to not intrude into the personal issues of whom they happen to love.  In other words, the freedom to be left alone.

The downside--and it's a big one--is that the President seems to have been expressing a personal opinion.  It remains to be seen to what extent the Federal government will move in this direction, since Obama stated that the issue should be left up to the states.

Ultrarunners are, by and large, the most open and friendly demographic I know.  One's sexual orientation or choice of partner matters not on the trail.  Nor does it matter in life.  It's just personal.

Plan B, a Liberal's Dilemma...and Ultrarunning

My fine Sunday hat is high in the air for my favorite guilty pleasure, blogger The Rude Pundit, whom all of you should be reading as a matter of daily routine, like brushing your teeth.

In his 8 Dec post, he's thumping President Obama, and rightfully so, starting with the decision to not make Plan B emergency contraception available to women under 17 without a prescription.  [see NOTE at the end of my post for more solid thinking on the subject, from Lindsay Beyerstein]

He nails the rationale: politics trumping science.  Somewhere in the White House, a staffer thunk these thoughts and they prevailed (bolding is mine):

If you think about it, of course HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruled the FDA's decision to allow the Plan B emergency contraception to be sold over-the-counter with no age restrictions. Can you imagine the Republican ads in 2012? "President Obama thinks it's okay for 13-year old girls to abort their children without parental consent," they'd lie. "Mitt Romney is pretty sure that's wrong." There's an election in less than a year. And your precious science and "facts" and "rights" have no place here.

The Rude Pundit would bet that some White House insider would say that it was more important to take abortion off the table as an issue in the presidential election, even if Plan B is a contraceptive, not an abortifacient, and, really, the anti-choice yahoos need to make a decision here on whether life begins at conception or at ejaculation. He bets that that insider would tell women of all ages not to worry, that the decision would be changed in a second Obama term, that that's just the way the world works.

 

The Rude One goes on to opine that the Obama administration is now most analogous to the meanderings of the TV series "The X-Files" in having no apparent direction, premise or end game:

The Obama administration now seems like a television series that has lost its plot thread. The Rude Pundit remembers watching The X-Files back in the day, believing that the mysteries and mythology would have a resolution by the end of its run, that the creators of the show knew the arc and knew the conclusion. So you'd get a great episode involving aliens and conspiracies in the government one week. And then the next week you'd get David Duchovny being beaten up by a talking ape. But you stuck with it, thinking that it would all pay off, that your loyalty would be rewarded.

 
But in the end, that happy revelation and closure were not to be.  It was all indeed a random, ad hoc goat rope.

You finally realized that you were being suckered, that there would be no satisfaction at the end, that the only goal was to make more money for Fox TV by staying on the air....So it is with the presidency of Barack Obama. Any time you attempt to say that you're sick of the cynical way the White House takes the left for granted, you're given a list of things that Obama has accomplished, as if somehow you were denying that he did those things. Yeah, he did accomplish an overhaul of the health care system that has benefited Americans in ways large and small. Yeah, he did get Osama bin Laden and is, at least to an extent, winding down the Iraq war. Yeah, yeah, fine, fine. But this isn't a case of what-have-you-done-for-me-lately.

The Rude Pundit wants to believe that there's an ideology at work, a path, if you will, to what Obama wants to achieve as a president. And, no matter what you say about Republicans in Congress blocking his way, it seems that, often, even when it's purely executive branch matters, there is no ideology at work, either - just political calculations, as with the Plan B decision, or the continuing concentration of power in the executive, as with indefinite detention and drone assassinations.

When he ran the first time, Obama created a narrative about the nation and its possibilities. That narrative has been abandoned for the sake of expediency, out of fear of the right, with barely any nods towards it anymore. He might say that the exigencies of the contemporary political and economic and foreign policy landscapes have forced changes in the storyline, but that the goal is ultimately the same. We just need to keep believing him. And, c'mon, liberals, what choice do you have?

The link to Ultrarunning is that in our sport we have simplicity and consistency.  Sure, there sometimes is a whiff of the woo factor, of superstitions and luck, of habit or hunch trumping logic.  But in the end, we Ultrarunners are a practical lot.  We deal with fact and science, with what has been proven to work, either through our own "experiment of one" or through the collective hive mind that has run literally millions of trail miles and shared the results via blogs like mine, the Ultralist, or the print voice of the sport, UltraRunning Magazine.

I like to think that thinking Ultrarunners are as appalled as I am by the Plan B decision and by the political expediency of the current administration.

 

[NOTE promised in para 2 above.  C'mon: the stated reason to not make it over the counter to under 17s (and to keep it behind the counter for over-17s) is this, from blogger Lindsay Beyerstein:

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius concedes that Plan B has been shown to be safe and effective when used as directed. She claims she is overruling the FDA because the company that asked to sell it over the counter didn't produce evidence that girls under 17 "can understand the label and use the product appropriately."

By that logic all over the counter medication should be banned because people under 17 might buy it.

Plan B is not difficult to use. Plan B One-Step is a single dose in a single tablet.

It is effective for 72 hours after unprotected sex. If it is taken too late, it won't work. That's it.

Besides which, a kid who can't figure out how to take 1 pill in 3 days is really not ready to be a parent.

The FDA lets kids buy Tylenol over the counter, despite the fact that surprisingly small overdoses can kill. The instructions on cold medicine and allergy pills are more complicated than the instructions on Plan B. The FDA trusts young women to treat their own yeast infections with OTC fungicide, a process that requires much greater reading comprehension, dexterity, and tenacity than taking a single pill.

   

 

Examining My Head

From the 60 Minutes interview on CBS on Sunday night, 8 May (last page), with President Obama.

OBAMA: As nervous as I was about this whole process, the one thing I didn't lose sleep over was the possibility of taking bin Laden out. Justice was done. And I think that anyone who would question that the perpetrator of mass murder on American soil didn't deserve what he got needs to have their head examined.

I'm trying to unpack this quote and keep getting hung up on the word "deserve." I'm not a proponent of capital punishment, but I would have to concur with the President that in an eye-for-an-eye world that if ever there was a crime deserving of death, bin Laden deserved to die. What an awful creature he was.

However (and there's always a big however)...our legal system has gone beyond mere eye-for-an-eye retribution. Every accused person, from a street punk to a mass murdering terrorist, deserves a fair trial via the legal system, and not vigilante justice. My opinion is that nobody--even bin Laden--deserves summary execution. Especially when it appears that we could have captured him.

Otherwise we have a two-tiered system of justice: one tier for the really bad guys, in which we can conveniently serve as judge, jury and executioner when it's expedient to do so. And the other tier for your regular accused folks. And who would be the gatekeeper for opting for one over the other?

We're the United States of America. We're the good guys. We stand for the rule of law, innocent until proven guilty, and fair trials.

I am not fond of slippery slopes. And two sets of justice certainly qualifies.  So I guess I need my head examined.


(NOTE: I don't know what happened in the compound in the small-unit action when bin Laden was confronted by the Navy Seals. The Seals may have had no choice but to shoot him. But it sure sounds like the default approach going in was to assassinate him rather than take him alive, presumably because the latter approach would be more inconvenient.)

 

Unilateral Wars

From the never-disappointing blog, Lawyers, Guns & Money, a post called "Death and Taxes,", by Paul Campos. 

This goes along with a previous post of mine, euphemistically called Kinetic Military Action (as though a war by any other name isn't really a war), about how the expenditure of millions of dollars--when we theoretically are BROKE--was scarcely acknowledged, much less vigorously debated:

I suspect James Madison et. al. would be appalled to discover that it would eventually become much harder for presidents to pursue even the most modest aspects of their preferred domestic policies than it would be for them to launch, with no congressional participation of any kind, unilateral wars against nations that hadn't attacked America, and posed no threat to our security.