1. “A front page article on the New York Times starts out with the sentence: “The budget that President Obama proposed on Thursday is nothing less than an attempt to end a three-decade era of economic policy dominated by the ideas of Ronald Reagan and his supporters.” Not so much.
Ronald Reagan, despite his carefully crafted “small-government” image, and all of the Republican presidents after him, were big-government Republicans. They all increased government spending as a portion of the nation’s GDP. In fact, in nominal terms, Reagan doubled the size of government. His ideological heir, George W. Bush, crowed about the benefits of small government, while turning on the spigot for the largest hikes in non-defense spending since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program. This spending included a $700 billion dollar bail out of banks, which included their partial socialization. So Obama’s spending is more of the same, rather than a sharp break with the past.
Taking a lesson from George W. Bush – and many presidents before him – Obama is using a crisis to justify doing other unrelated things. Bush used the tragedy of 9/11 to dupe the nation into an unrelated, unneeded, disastrous, and costly invasion of Iraq. Obama is using the economic meltdown to attempt to achieve expansion of government involvement in health, education, and energy. The $787 billion stimulus package plus all of this extra spending will bring the federal budget to $3.6 trillion in 2010. “
http://www.antiwar.com/eland/?articleid=14326
2. “Note that this sampling of professional freedom-haters hail from both ends of the so-called political spectrum, proving once again that there is little difference between Left and Right or Liberal and Conservative, and that the Republican and Democrat political parties are really just one big fraternal criminal gang of Republicrats.
And don’t kid yourself with political spin-ups and slippery snake oil rationalizations; universal social service is a form of slavery. So is military conscription. So is taxation. So is mandatory anything. The Thirteenth Amendment forbids involuntary servitude, not that any of our public masters care about this or any other inconvenient provision of what used to be the supreme law of this land.
One can only speculate, in this once-free society, how so many people have come to despise freedom so deeply.“
http://www.examiner.com/x-1449-Dallas-Libertarian-Examiner~y2009m2d24-Americas-human-traffickers
3. “ Convicted CIA Official Was Suspected of Sharing Woman with Russian Mole
CIA Director Porter J. Goss knew about the allegation when he hired Foggo to be the agency’s executive director, its third highest official, an aide said Thursday.
“http://blogs.cqpolitics.com/spytalk/2009/02/convicted-cia-official-was-sus.html
4. “
To some, an America without the impulse to do good seems like no America at all. And this makes realistic foreign policy a hard sell. Wilson labeled realism “selfish.” He replaced it with a “service” ethic that continues to dominate the American temperament. Faced with these realities, conservatives will have to figure out how to rehabilitate the language of national interests, safety, and modesty.
In 1793, Alexander Hamilton began his defense of President Washington’s neutrality proclamation by warning against “the treacherous phantoms of an ever craving and never to be satisfied spirit of innovation; a spirit, which seems to suggest to its votaries that the most natural and happy state of Society is a state of continual revolution and change—that the welfare of a nation is in exact ratio to the rapidity of the political vicissitudes, which it undergoes—to the frequency and violence of the tempests with which it is agitated.” If even Hamilton, one of the prime architects of the energetic executive in foreign affairs, saw the dangers of “change we can believe in,” how much harder ought today’s conservatives work to curb the enthusiasm of international zealots and busybodies?“
http://www.amconmag.com/article/2009/feb/23/00030/
5. First Gulf War in 1991:
“
What We Missed and Need to Remember Americans never saw images of even one of the 100,000 civilians killed in the aerial war, just coordinates of precision-guided strikes, the majority of which missed their marks.We never learned that the government’s goals had changed from expelling Saddam’s forces from Kuwait to destroying Iraq’s infrastructure. Or what a country with a destroyed infrastructure looks like — with most of its electricity, telecommunications, sewage system, dams, railroads and bridges blown away.
There were no photos or stories of the start of the ground war on Feb. 24, 1991, after Iraq had agreed to a Russian-brokered withdrawal. We never saw the “bulldozer assault” of Feb. 24-26, when U.S. soldiers with plows mounted on tanks and bulldozers moved along 10 miles of trenches, burying alive some 1,000 Iraqi soldiers. Or the night of Feb. 26, when allied forces cordoned off a stretch of highway between Kuwait and Basra, Iraq, incinerating tens of thousands of retreating soldiers and civilians, in an incident come to be called the “Highway of Death.”
We saw no coverage of dead Kurds and Shiites who, at Bush’s instigation and expecting his support, rose up against Saddam. Nor in the months and years after, the news of the Iraqi epidemic of birth defects, cancers and systemic disease.
We heard little about the 20,000 troops occupying Saudi Arabia after the war, the growing regional resentment for the destruction and death, injuries and insults of invasion and occupation. We never heard of the Saudi Muslim radical Osama bin Laden, his outraged protests, for which he was banished, wandering the region, recruiting young followers to avenge the desecration of Islam’s sacred sites.
As for our own, there were no images of returning coffins filled with U.S. service members, nor, in the days and months after the war, coverage of the war’s aftermath: The 200,000 troops who returned profoundly ill from Gulf War illness; the trauma, addiction and/or brain damage that caused veterans to kill their wives, family, fellow citizens, and/or themselves; and, of course, on Sept. 11, 2001, the tragic event used by the George W. Bush administration to launch a second war against Iraq.
There was no mainstream media coverage of the roots, just of the proclamations of them versus us, hatemongers versus freedom lovers, barbaric cowards versus civilized heroes.
…
Invasion and violence, like chickens, do come home to roost. We’re ready for a leader who grasps history’s complications and heeds its lessons and who won’t release us from one war only to tie us to another, and another.“
6. More censorship:
“Wikileaks discovered that the password for several pages on how to finesse reporters regarding Afghanistan at the Pentagon web site was “progress.” What a weak password. Anyway, they posted the documents, which give some insight into how the Department of Defense hopes to influence the public on the Afghanistan War.”
http://www.juancole.com/
7. Ugh:
“An academic in France has been sacked by the Ministry of Defence after questioning the official version of events surrounding the 9/11 attacks. He now reportedly plans to sue the government.
Aymeric Chauprade lost his job allegedly over the introduction to his latest book about political crises around the world, and more specifically, that the 9/11 attacks in New York City and Washington D.C. were an orchestrated “American-Israeli conspiracy”. The Defence Minister had strong objections to the material, so Aymeric had to go.
Jean Dominique Merchet, a French journalist, was the first to report on the sacking.
…
Defence Minister Herve Morin was reportedly outraged by the suggestions and demanded the academic’s sacking from his job at the French Military College in Paris, where Chauprade was teaching geopolitics.“
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12488
8. “Let’s just pause for a moment to consider how remarkable those statements are. One of the worst abuses of the Bush administration was its endless reliance on vast claims of secrecy to ensure that no court could ever rule on the legality of the President’s actions. They would insist that “secrecy” prevented a judicial ruling even when the President’s actions were (a) already publicly disclosed in detail and (b) were blatantly criminal — as is the case with the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program, which The New York Times described on its front page more than three years ago and which a federal statute explicitly criminalized. Secrecy claims of that sort — to block judicial review of the President’s conduct, i.e., to immunize the President from the rule of law — provoked endless howls of outrage from Bush critics.
Yet now, the Obama administration is doing exactly the same thing. Hence, it is accurately deemed “a blow to the Obama administration” that a court might rule on whether George Bush broke the law when eavesdropping on Americans without warrants. Why is the Obama administration so vested in preventing that from happening, and — worse still — in ensuring that Presidents continue to have the power to invoke extremely broad secrecy claims in order to block courts from ruling on allegations that a President has violated the law?
Obama defenders take note: this is not a case where the Obama DOJ claims more time is needed to decide what to do, nor is it even a case where the Obama DOJ merely passively adopted the Bush DOJ’s already filed arguments. Here, they have done much, much more than that. Obama lawyers have been running around for weeks attempting one desperate, extreme measure after the next to prevent this case from proceeding — emergency appeals, requests for stays, and every time they lose, threats of still further appeals, this time to the U.S. Supreme Court.
…
Yet here we have the Obama DOJ doing exactly this — not merely trying desperately to keep the Bush administration’s spying activities secret, and not merely devoting itself with full force to preventing disclosure of relevant documents concerning this illegal program, but far worse, doing everything in its power even to prevent any judicial adjudication as to whether the Bush administration broke the law by spying on Americans without warrants. As Obama’s hand-picked OLC chief put it: ”I’m afraid we are growing immune to just how outrageous and destructive it is, in a democracy, for the President to violate federal statutes in secret.”
