Thousands rallied against NSA’s domestic and international surveillance on Saturday by marching to the Capitol and calling for closer scrutiny of the agency as more details of its spying are leaked.
Holding signs that said “Stop mass surveillance,” “Thank you, Edward Snowden” and “No NSA mass spying,” and chanting slogans like “no secret courts,” the protesters gathered under a blue sky to hear various speakers.
Craig Aaron, head of the group Free Press, said “this isn’t about right and left — it’s about right and wrong.”
Demonstrators came from across the United States. Some wore tape across their mouths and masks, and dressed up as cameras. Others carried signs plastered with images of Snowden, and a giant blue and white parachute that read “constitutional rights not NSA mass spying.” Groups of protesters chanted slogans like, “They say wiretap, we say fight back,” and “Hey hey, ho ho, the NSA has got to go.” One person dressed up as Obama, held an “Obamacam” and posed in front of a model drone.
Obamacare, Benghazi, IRS, NSA, race baiting, Solyndra, moral preening, Fast and Furious, Pigford, etc., ad nauseum. President Transparency, Moral Preener in Chief, Victim in Chief, President Asterisk, etc., ad nasueum.
America is going through a transformation, on a scale that few people now realize. The last such fundamental change was from the rural and agrarian society of the Founding era (America 1.0) to the urban and industrial society which is now coming to an end (America 2.0).
That transition was disruptive and painful, but ultimately led to a better America.
We are now making a similar transition to a post-industrial, networked, decentralized, immensely productive America, with a more individualistic, voluntarist, anti-bureaucratic culture (America 3.0).
Today’s political regime is like legacy software, built for an earlier world.
Institutions of the 20th Century welfare state that once looked permanent are crumbling. The old operating system has been kludged so many times it won’t work much longer. It has to be replaced.
The time-worn liberal-progressive wisdom is simple: See a problem, create a government program to fix it.
Obamacare, Benghazi, IRS, NSA, race baiting, Solyndra, moral preening, Fast and Furious, Pigford, etc., ad nauseum. President Transparency, Moral Preener in Chief, Victim in Chief, President Asterisk, etc., ad nasueum.
The U.S. individual health insurance market currently totals about 19 million people. Because the Obama administration’s regulations on grandfathering existing plans were so stringent about 85% of those, 16 million, are not grandfathered and must comply with Obamacare at their next renewal. The rules are very complex. For example, if you had an individual plan in March of 2010 when the law was passed and you only increased the deductible from $1,000 to $1,500 in the years since, your plan has lost its grandfather status and it will no longer be available to you when it would have renewed in 2014.
These 16 million people are now receiving letters from their carriers saying they are losing their current coverage and must re-enroll in order to avoid a break in coverage and comply with the new health law’s benefit mandates––the vast majority by January 1. Most of these will be seeing some pretty big rate increases.
President Obama claims that Republicans are busy probing “phony scandals.” But the sheer number of scandals suggests that misbehavior, abuse of power, and possibly corruption are not something being dreamed up by the GOP, but a defining characteristic of the Obama administration.
President Obama (in)famously said, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan” under the Affordable Care Act. As it turns out, not so much. Hundreds of thousands of Americans, it turns out, are receiving letters telling them that their existing coverage just isn’t good enough to satisfy the strict rquirements of the Obamacare law, and that they’ll have to sign up for new policies. Those new policies come with new stipulations, and new price tags. Which is to say, it doesn’t matter if you like your health care plan, since you probably can’t keep it.
No act of Congress can buy Obama any kind of credibility and no amount of bombs will put the mom jeans back on the naked emperor. It’s too late for that.
The recurring argument that Iran is watching Syria and that its nuclear program hangs in the balance is hot air.
Iran knows that Obama isn’t trying to bomb Syria because he really believes that WMD use is a red line. Its leaders know that the proposed attacks, like the arms being supplied to the rebels, are part of Obama’s support for the Sunni opposition at the behest of the Sunni oil states who have a death grip on Washington.
The message from the attacks won’t be that America takes human rights atrocities seriously. Sudan, Rwanda and countless other genocides make a mockery of that. The message will be that the Saudis can still call in the United States Air Force and Navy to clear the way for their regional objectives.
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Obama’s political palace corps still insists on selling Americans on the myth of his competence. That is the confidence trick they want to pull off with the help of Congress. It is a trick that will not be played on Assad or Putin or the rest of the world, instead it will once again be played on the American people.
In an essay for the NYT Sam Tannehaus argues that President Obama “holds office at a time when the presidency itself has ceded much of its power and authority to Congress.” No, really. This is what he says. It is, frankly, a rather bizarre claim.
A few years ago–I think this was at Division of Labour–I asked readers to go to RandomCountry.com, spin for a Random country, and then make the case for war with that country. With the prospect of military adventures in Syria on the horizon, it’s a good time to play again! So here’s how you play.
1. Spin for a Random Country.
2. If you already know a lot about that country, explain why we should bomb it.
3. If you don’t already know a lot about that country, read the country’s Wikipedia page and CIA World Factbook page. Then explain why we should bomb it
Over at Buzzfeed, John Ekdahl has a must-read article up about “14 Principled Anti-War Celebrities We Fear May Have Been Kidnapped.” Where, he asks, are the Sheryl Crows, Bruce Springsteens, Sean Penns, George Clooneys, Janeane Garofalo, and Barbra Streisands of the world who were never shy about voicing super-patriotic dissent against Bushitler’s war machine?
Ah, remember those fall 2012 days when the liberal commentariat was assuring us that a vote for Obama was a vote for truth?
As is the custom, we are learning about this latest intrusion into what used to be protected by the Fourth Amendment not because the Obama administration is voluntarily kick-starting some “debate,” but because “a senior intelligence official” leaked inside information to a motivated investigative reporter. In fact (and also as is the custom), we don’t know for sure the Constitution-bending legal theory the government is using
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The president’s smug lies, like National Intelligence Director James Clapper’s bald-faced untruthing in front of Congress, suggest a National Security culture accustomed to doing and saying anything without fear of adverse consequences.
Critics of the president are convinced that Barack Obama will do lasting damage to the U.S. I doubt it.
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Each new “historic” speech is by now mostly history repeating itself as farce. The Victory Column oration gave way to a flat vignette at the Brandenburg Gate. The Cairo speech follow-ups were mostly confusion about Egypt and Syria, without the fictions of the West’s underappreciated debts to Islam. The second Trayvon Martin aside on racial look-alikes was even more disturbing that the first. I don’t think Obama’s advisors will allow him to proclaim any more “deadlines,” or “red lines,” or any sort of lines at all in the Middle East.
Aside from Obama himself, no one in the post-Benghazi, -AP, -NSA, and -IRS scandal era references the president any longer as the former “professor of constitutional law.” In Obama’s case even the inflated title has become an oxymoron.
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If anyone were to repeat the Obama reform mantra of 2008 — a new transparency, an end to lobbyists, no more revolving doors — it would incur laughter.
When we recount Fast and Furious, Benghazi, the IRS mess, the AP/James Rosen affair, or the NSA disclosures, we think not of modern scandals per se, but rather in historical terms: which prior administration was more corrupt and dishonest — Nixon’s or Grant’s? Is that comparison fair to either of them? Did Obama, in compensation, give us Reconstruction or an opening to China? Has he accomplished as much as Harding?
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The president’s signature achievement? He has established a precedent that the president can play all the golf he wishes without being caricatured as a distracted would-be aristocrat.
If we learned anything about Barack Obama in his first term it is that when he starts repeating the same idea over and over, what’s on his mind is something else.
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In a recent Journal op-ed, “Obama Suspends the Law,” former federal judge Michael McConnell noted there are few means to stop a president who decides he is not obligated to execute laws as passed by Congress. So there’s little reason to doubt we’ll see more Obamaesque dismissals of established law, as with ObamaCare’s employer mandate. Mr. Obama is pushing in a direction that has the potential for a political crisis.
It may be that Obama’s description of the importance of whistleblowers went from being an artifact of his campaign to a political liability. It wouldn’t be the first time administration positions disappear from the internet when they become inconvenient descriptions of their assurances.
Obama’s vision for lobbying transparency has similarly been discarded along the way, but the timing here suggests that the heat on Obama’s whistleblower prosecutions has led the administration to unceremoniously remove their previous positions.
I’d like to hear from some representatives of the Hispanic community. How do they feel about President Obama driving a wedge deeper and deeper between blacks and Hispanics? Is he just arrogant enough to think that the Democrats can count on their votes in 2016, no matter what? Is he right? Why is it okay to make a Hispanic guy an Enemy of the State for defending his own life against an attacker?
Since 2006, Congress has sought to condition military aid to Egypt depending on its progress on democracy and human rights, but included a waiver that an administration can use for national security reasons. Then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice executed the waiver during the Mubarak years, even though the Bush administration had a robust human-rights agenda.
Both Clinton and John F. Kerry, the current secretary of state, have also signed similar waivers, even though Congress demanded that the secretary of state certify that Egypt was maintaining the peace treaty with Israel and “supporting the transition to civilian government including holding free and fair elections; implementing policies to protect freedom of expression, association and religion, and due process of law.”
Kerry’s waiver, signed in May, was done so quietly it was not even announced. Human rights groups have denounced the waivers as undermining support for democracy in Egypt.
In other words, Congress handed possible leverage to the administration, and the Obama administration has declined to use it.
Pres. Obama: Greatest recruiter for libertarianism, best gun salesman, Moral Preener in Chief, President Asterisk, President Big Brother, Crony Capitalist in Chief, BushObama, Obamaworld, President Drone, Golfer in Chief, Comedian in Chief, Plutocrat in Chief, Phony in Chief, Black Mascot of Wall Street, Obama Thugocracy, Statist in Chief, President Daddy, President Clunker, President Chicago Way, President Philosopher King, Constitutional Law Professor in Chief, President Food Stamp, Crony in Chief, Idiot in Chief, President Shakedown, ….
