We’re only days into Barack Obama’s second term, and he’s in real danger of becoming all but irrelevant, of being remembered as an interesting but minor president whose principal importance was symbolic. Oh, don’t get me wrong — it was definitely stirring to hear Obama drop the tone of bogus bipartisan conciliation in a fiery and forthright inaugural address that was without any serious doubt the most “liberal” presidential speech delivered since the days of Lyndon B. Johnson. ... But don’t hold your breath waiting for any of that stuff he talked about to become reality.
Above quote by Sally Kohn open letter to President Obama Jan 26, 2013 via Salon.com
Don’t let me down, Obama! Your second inaugural address raised my hopes -- again. But I don't know how much disappointment I can take By Sally Kohn at Salon.com, Jan. 26, 2013
In America, if you commit a war crime and torture someone – nothing happens to you. But if you blow the whistle on this war crime – then get ready to go to jail.
On Friday, CIA whistleblower, John Kiriakou, was sentenced to 30 months in jail, for releasing classified information that exposed the CIA's use of waterboarding. Kiriakou is one of six current, or former, government officials, who've been slapped with criminal charges from the Obama administration for leaking classified information. That's more crackdowns on government whistleblowers than all other Presidential administrations combined.
We should not be jailing brave individuals who exposed war crimes in an effort to stop them. But, we should be locking up George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the rest of their ilk, who knowingly allowed the United States to become a nation that tortures. It will take a long time to heal the deep moral wounds these men inflicted on our nation.
Above news item and Quote from Thom Hartmann: On the News With Thom Hartmann: CIA Whistleblower Gets 30 Months in Jail for Releasing Classified Information on Waterboarding, and More via Truthout.org,Jan. 26, 2013
Thom Hartmann doesn't mention the fact that which maybe stopping Obama for prosecuting George Bush and the gang is that for one thing he and his administration does not want to roll back the power of the presidency which had been increased under Bush . Another reason is that Obama has committed during his time in office he has initiated his own War Crimes and Crimes against humanity and other crimes contravening international law but also has committed actions which are considered crimes under American law and that by doing so he has as president contravened the US constitution . Obama has been a disappointment on a number of levels .
But he has tossed a bone or two to the electorate such as permitting Gays to get married and to serve in the military openly and to allow women to serve in the military as equals to their male counterparts and he managed to get through a watered down version of health care .
But so far he has done nothing til the last couple of weeks about gun control or about rampant police brutality across the USA or helped minority groups such as Blacks and Latinos who are targeted by police and so are incarcerated disproportionately compared to white Americans while at the same time Obama did more to help out the wealthy on Wall Street than he did for average Americans who lost their jobs, their homes etc. all due to the Criminals on Wall St. and their massive international Ponzi schemes. Money talks and those without are ignored or put off with rhetorical nonsense.
Another incident of President Obama's betrayal of his supporters is Obama's attacks on Wikileaks and Julian Assange . As a candidate Obama pretending to support Whistleblowers and would enact laws to protect Whistleblowers when in fact he has been more aggressive going after whistleblower than the previous openly conservative regime of George W. Bush. So who's side is Obama on . The status quo it appears is more important than going after those who have committed war crimes. He has even put one of the architects John Brennan of the torture program and Drone Wars and Targeted Assassinations as the new head of the infamous rogue CIA.
Democracy Now! Obama's Dick Cheney
Published on 7 Jan 2013
DemocracyNow.org - Dubbed the assassination czar, presumptive CIA nominee John Brennan has played a key role backing some of the nation's most controversial post-9/11 policies from the secret drone war to wireless surveillance. Brennan was a rumored pick for the job when Obama was first elected in 2008, but was forced to withdraw from consideration amid protests over his role at the CIA under George W. Bush and his public support for the CIA's policies of so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" and extraordinary rendition.
We're joined by Marcy Wheeler, an investigative blogger with the website, EmptyWheel. Wheeler calls Brennan's nomination, "a testament to what kind of hard-nosed person Barack Obama has become and the degree to which his policies are really just a continuation of the Bush-Cheney policies."
Julian Assange revealed war crimes committed by the USA and Britain and is therefore considered by both nations as an enemy of both Britain and America. Both governments hide behind national security concerns to cover up crimes committed by them or committed in their name.
Obama's hope and change once again is mostly meaningless rhetoric and yet his staunchest supporters who should know better defend his criminal acts such as war crimes and crimes against humanity because somehow these wannabe progressives see these actions as necessary when Obama does them though they complained when Bush did them.
Assange: WikiLeaks film script leaked to WikiLeaks at Wral.com, Jan. 25, 2013
LONDON -- If you're making a movie about WikiLeaks, this is the kind of thing you probably see coming.
Julian Assange says he has obtained a leaked copy of the script for "The Fifth Estate," a DreamWorks film about the maverick computer expert and his famed secret-busting site. In a speech before the Oxford Union debating society earlier this week, Assange said his unauthorized sneak peek has left him convinced the film is a hit piece.
"It is a mass propaganda attack against WikiLeaks, the organization (and) the character of my staff," he said, adding that the movie – the opening scenes of which Assange described as taking place in Tehran and Cairo – also hyped Western fears over the Islamic Republic's disputed atomic energy program.
"It is not just an attack against us, it is an attack against Iran. It fans the flames of an attack against Iran," he said.
A DreamWorks spokeswoman declined to comment on Assange's claims.
In a telephone interview late Friday, Assange said that the film's plot revolves around a fictional mole in Iran's nuclear program who discovers that the country has nearly finished building an atom bomb and will soon be in a position to load it onto ballistic missiles. The film has the informant fleeing to Iraq when WikiLeaks publishes his name among its massive trove of classified material.
Assange says the whole story is "a lie built on a lie," claiming that the U.S. intelligence community generally believes that Iran stopped comprehensive secret work on developing nuclear arms in 2003, and that, in any case, the world had yet to see evidence of a case in which WikiLeaks had exposed a CIA informant.
"They tried to frame Iran as having an active nuclear weapons program. Then they try to frame WikiLeaks as the reason why that's not known to the public now," Assange said, comparing the movie to Kathryn Bigelow's "Zero Dark Thirty," another film whose artistic liberties with recent history have drawn allegations of political bias.
Assange declined to say where he got the script, although he hinted that he had been supplied with several copies of it over time. He also declined to say whether the script would be posted to the WikiLeaks website, saying only that "we are examining options closely."
"The Fifth Estate" stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Assange and Daniel Bruhl as Daniel Domscheit-Berg, an early Assange ally who eventually fell out with WikiLeaks.
The film is due for release in November, and in a statement earlier this week director Bill Condon was quoted as saying that those behind the movie want "to explore the complexities and challenges of transparency in the information age" and "enliven and enrich the conversations WikiLeaks has already provoked."
Assange made his comments to the Oxford Union on Wednesday via videolink from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he has been holed up for more than six months in a bid to avoid extradition to Sweden as part of a long-running sex crimes case.
In speeches Obama is a crusading liberal-progressive in reality he is on the right of the Democratic party who just wants to please everybody and therefore please no one or at least very few.
Obama's greatest hits in inaugural speech mostly borrowed from FDR, JFK and Lyndon Johnson.
He says he's ending decade long war and yet the wars will continue but possibly re-branded to appease liberals and wannabe progressives as he orders more attacks on more nations all in the name of American hegemony.
Obama is still not going after those who have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity who served under George W. Bush mainly because he has adopted most of Bush' policies .
Obama was lip-synching too That big "liberal" speech sure sounded terrific — but it's almost too late for Obama to redeem his presidency By Andrew O'Hehir Salon.com, Jan. 26,2013
The star of last Monday’s big show was also lip-synching, in a sense, mouthing the lyrics to greatest hits from the songbook of Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. It sounded great, especially to those of us who voted for him despite grave misgivings. But was it real?--------
We’re only days into Barack Obama’s second term, and he’s in real danger of becoming all but irrelevant, of being remembered as an interesting but minor president whose principal importance was symbolic. Oh, don’t get me wrong — it was definitely stirring to hear Obama drop the tone of bogus bipartisan conciliation in a fiery and forthright inaugural address that was without any serious doubt the most “liberal” presidential speech delivered since the days of Lyndon B. Johnson. ... But don’t hold your breath waiting for any of that stuff he talked about to become reality.
Presidents almost invariably have a more difficult time enacting major policy initiatives in their second terms. They may have been personally set free from short-term political consequences, but no one else in Washington shares that liberation. As the months pass toward another electoral cycle, second-term presidents look more and more like lame ducks. The likelihood that Obama will go into the history books as a “transformational figure” who reshapes American politics has dwindled to nearly nothing, if it ever existed in the first place.
...Obama has never shown the slightest inclination to rein in the exaggerated executive powers of the Bush-Cheney era, or the super-secret surveillance powers of the post-9/11 national security state. He may have ended the practices of torture and rendition and closed at least some of the CIA’s secret prisons, but we really can’t know any of that for sure. What we do know is that he has ramped up the drone wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, and has claimed the right to kill any civilians he doesn’t like, including American citizens, anywhere in the world, on secret evidence and on his sole authority. Most of the president’s liberal defenders, who would have been outraged had George W. Bush done those things, have shrugged this off...
On both national security and Obama’s handling of the economy, you can’t claim his hands were tied. He absolutely had the power to set a progressive new course and didn’t use it – unless, that is, you want to take the cynical position that no president these days truly possesses the power to stand up against Wall Street and the big corporations. ... As Paul Krugman has consistently reminded us, Obama made clear choices at every step in his response to the financial and economic crisis, and chose to leave control of financial policy in the hands of the same Wall Street geniuses who brought us to the brink of apocalypse.
Throughout his career, Obama has been a cautious, calculating politician. Even when he has adopted the rhetoric and manner of a more prophetic and progressive leader, he has deliberately steered away from the kind of far-reaching liberal policy agenda he now claims to be embracing. ...Those instincts have helped him repeatedly win elections, bedevil opponents and bewilder supporters. But he’s no longer running for anything, and the beginning of the end of his presidency is at hand. Will he be remembered as a president who changed America, or just as an amorphous symbol of changes that were happening anyway? Is it too late for him to sing the song for real?
Obama's betrayal of his progressive supporters has led not just to disappointment but skepticism and cynicism there are few if any politicians one can trust.
Don’t let me down, Obama! Your second inaugural address raised my hopes -- again. But I don't know how much disappointment I can take
By Sally Kohn at Salon.com, Jan. 26, 2013
Sure, I had friends from Illinois progressive circles who warned me that, no matter the rhetoric, you were a proven centrist at heart. They shouted and waved their hands. But I didn’t listen. I was enthralled and excited and brimming with hope.
Never before had there been a candidate for president who was neither a banker nor a politician’s son but a community organizer. Never before had there been a candidate for president who talked about racial justice and equality and opportunity with the same passion and urgency I recognize in my friends and fellow activists. Never before had there been a candidate for president who so robustly defended the role of government and the idea that we are all in it together, America’s sense of collective responsibility inextricably bound with our value for individual liberty. You even took the left-wing movement chant, Si se puede!, and adapted it for your own campaign slogan! At times, your sentiments and ideals seemed as if plucked from my own heart.
Your words raised my hopes. But your actions have let me down.
I’m not sure what has depressed me the most. First you abandoned the progressive priorities on which you campaigned, from closing Guantanamo to prosecuting bank fraud to addressing climate change. Then you embraced reactionary policies, from drone strikes to spending cuts to record deportations of immigrants. Then, just when you might think that those first two were a potentially brilliant rope-a-dope strategy to divide and conquer conservative opposition so that you had the political capital to stand firm on other issues, you failed to recognize the entrenched nature of the more-extremist-than-ever Republican Party and got rolled over and over again.
...But then, bookended by the Lincoln Memorial and the Capitol building, standing firmly in the shadow of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr. before you, you sent my hopes soaring yet again with your inaugural address. In my lifetime, I have never heard and may never hear a more powerful and persuasive articulation of why we band together as individuals to form the national community we call government. You reminded us all that the responsibility of a nation is not just to its wealthiest citizens but to its most vulnerable, and that the tradition of America, what has made us great, is not the few born into privilege and preserved as such through history but the many born to far less greatness who are able to persevere and prosper — that this arc of progress and opportunity for all is what makes America truly great. And you seemed to commit yourself to fighting the great fights of our generation — to protect our planet, to ensure basic rights and recognition for immigrants and gay families, to eradicate poverty and gender inequality, to protect the safety net for everyone who needs it.
Mr. President, my hopes are high. You have made me yet again proud to be an American and proud to have cast my vote in your favor. And I will do my part to fight along with you for the dazzling vision of justice and fairness and the common good that you dangled before the nation’s eyes on your second inauguration. But I cannot be let down again. I don’t know how much more disappointment I can take. I’m tired of signing e-pledges to have your back — and then you back down. If you fight, I’ll fight. But if you back down again, you’ll lose me.
But every damn time — from health care to the stimulus to the tax cuts to the debt ceiling –time and time again, I swore it would be different. That this time you would stand up for single payer or stand firm against the Keystone pipeline or make clear once and for all that entitlement cuts are off the table. Every damn time I got my hopes up. And most of the time I was disappointed. Not because I don’t understand the pragmatism and compromise necessary in politics, but because you seemed to loosen your grasp on the core principles and promises that must go hand-in-hand with such compromise.
So let’s be honest, by the time your re-election campaign came around, I had fully collapsed like a deflated balloon into the yawning chasm of your enthusiasm gap. Publicly, I tried to deny that such an enthusiasm gap even existed because I was trying to convince myself more than anyone else that my hope had indeed still been kept alive.
and so it goes,
GORD.
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