Obama General Discussion, vol. 3

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The public will ultimately see a photo of a dead Osama bin Laden, CIA Chief Leon Panetta told NBC's Brian Williams in an interview.

"The government obviously has been talking about how best to do this, but I don't think there's -- there was any question that ultimately a photograph would be presented to the public," according to a transcript of the interview. "Obviously I've seen those photographs. We've analyzed them and there's no question that it's Bin Laden."

"I think there's no question that there were concerns and there were questions that had to be debated about just exactly question kind of impact -- would these photos have," Panetta continued. "But the bottom line is that, you know, we got Bin Laden and I think we have to reveal to the rest of the world the fact that we were able to get him and kill him."

But the White House said Tuesday that they were still debating whether to release the photos.
I'm generally of the mind that it's better to rip the band-aid and get it over with, rather than drag it out.
 
(CNN) - Former President George Bush has declined an invite to join President Obama at Ground Zero Thursday to mark the death of Osama bin Laden.

The former president instead wishes to remain out of the spotlight, according to a Bush spokesman.

“President Bush will not be in attendance on Thursday. He appreciated the invite, but has chosen in his post-presidency to remain largely out of the spotlight,” said spokesman David Sherzer. “He continues to celebrate with all Americans this important victory in the war on terror.”

Obama’s visit to the primary target of the 9/11 attacks will come four days after he announced bin Laden had been killed by U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Obama will also meet with families who lost relatives during the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.

A senior Obama administration official added to CNN that Bush "was invited but is not able to come. Which we of course understand."
 
About 1 in 7 in U.S. Receive Food Stamps

Growth in the food stamp program appeared to reach a plateau in February — with 14.3% of the population relying on the safety net program
The dollar slumped to a three-year low against major currencies on Wednesday and its outlook darkened further as surprisingly soft economic data underpinned expectations that U.S. interest rates will remain low this year.
U.S. private employers added 179,000 jobs in April, coming in shy of economists' expectations, a report by a payrolls processor showed on Wednesday.

Meanwhile back at the train wreck called The Obama Economic Policy.
 
Thanks to Michelle, tonight, a young geek discovered his sexuality.

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I guess Clinton was invited too, but he had some previous commitment that he couldn't break

First Read - Did Obama fail to give enough credit?

Did Obama fail to give enough credit?
By Mark Murray

A "highly-placed" source close to George W. Bush gave this explanation to the New York Daily News' Tom DeFrank about Bush's decision not to attend today's Ground Zero event after Osama bin Laden's death:

"[Bush] viewed this as an Obama victory lap," a highly-placed source told the Daily News Wednesday.

[snip]

"He doesn't feel personally snubbed and appreciates the invitation, but Obama's claiming all the credit and a lot of other people deserve some of it," the source added.

"Obama gave no credit whatsoever to the intelligence infrastructure the Bush administration set up that is being hailed from the left and right as setting in motion the operation that got Bin Laden. It rubbed Bush the wrong way."

But did President Obama really claim all the credit -- and not give any to the intelligence infrastructure during the Bush administration?

Here's what Obama said in his speech Sunday night announcing bin Laden's death:

Over the last 10 years, thanks to the tireless and heroic work of our military and our counterterrorism professionals, we’ve made great strides in that effort. We’ve disrupted terrorist attacks and strengthened our homeland defense. In Afghanistan, we removed the Taliban government, which had given bin Laden and al Qaeda safe haven and support. And around the globe, we worked with our friends and allies to capture or kill scores of al Qaeda terrorists, including several who were a part of the 9/11 plot.
 
OMG

No, President Obama Didn't Have A Flag Removed From Ground Zero | Media Matters for America

One problem. It isn't true. Multiple photos show that the flag was on full display when Obama arrived at Ground Zero. Tapper's tweet was posted at 6:30 pm -- hours after the President had left. In all likelihood, Tapper was saying that the flag was being removed before his live shot for ABC World News when he made his tweet.

Doug Ross, in a post headlined, "WTF at WTC? Obama Has American Flag Removed From Ground Zero Site Moments Before Photo Shoot!":

This administration and, by extension, the Democrat Party are now so thoroughly divorced from the history, traditions and morals of America that we might as well admit the Marxist left has executed a successful coup d'état on this Republic.

Weasel Zippers posted the story with the following headline:

Wow: Team Obama Removes American Flag From Ground Zero Moments Before Live Shoot...

Fire Andrea Mitchell:

What an absolutely pitiful little manchild Obama is. As if turning his back on Debra Burlingame (sister of Charles Burlingame who piloted the plane that went down at the Pentagon during 9/11) wasn't pitiful enough. Now we learn that the Obama regime had an American flag removed from the live shot of his photo op at Ground Zero today.

Michelle Malkin:

Does flying the American flag at Ground Zero now constitute "spiking the football???"
 
Daily Beast

Michelle Obama Invites Rapper to White House


Calling him “quite controversial,” the conservative website The Daily Caller is questioning First Lady Michelle Obama’s decision to invite the rapper Common to a poetry evening at the White House Wednesday. “His poetry includes threats to shoot police and at least one passage calling for the ‘burn[ing]’ of then-President George W. Bush,” Neil Munro writes. Obama’s office did not respond to a request for comment, but Munro invites readers to compare a sample of the Chicago MC’s “A Letter to the Law” with Emily Dickinson’s “I'm nobody! Who are you?” (Dickinson was recited at Laura Bush’s poetry night when she was first lady.) Actually, given the choice, we’ll take Common.

Michelle Obama | Burn Bush | Poetry | The Daily Caller
 
This is the story of the Obama Administration's prosecution of a man, Thomas Drake who exposed hundreds of millions in waste and abuse of the NSA's power to Congress.

What he may now spend 35 years in jail for:

“They had made me into an enemy of the state just by saying I was,” Drake says. The boxes in his basement contained copies of some of the less sensitive material that he had procured for the Inspector General’s Trailblazer investigation. The Inspector General’s Web site directs complainants to keep copies. Drake says that if the boxes did, in fact, contain classified documents he didn’t realize it. (The indictment emphasizes that he “willfully” retained documents.) The two documents that the government says it extracted from his e-mail archive were even less sensitive, Drake says. Both pertained to a successor to Trailblazer, code-named Turbulence. One document listed a schedule of meetings about Turbulence. It was marked “unclassified/for official use only” and posted on the N.S.A.’s internal Web site. The government has since argued that the schedule should have been classified, and that Drake should have known this. The other document, which touted the success of Turbulence, was officially declassified in July, 2010, three months after Drake was indicted. “After charging him with having this ostensibly serious classified document, the government waved a wand and decided it wasn’t so classified after all,” Radack says.

In April, 2010, Welch indicted Drake, shattering his hope for a reprieve from the Obama Administration. But the prosecution’s case had shrunk dramatically from the grand conspiracy initially laid out by Tyrrell. (Welch accidentally sent the defense team an early draft of the indictment, revealing how the case had changed.) Drake was no longer charged with leaking classified documents, or with being part of a conspiracy. He is still charged with violating the Espionage Act, but now merely because of unauthorized “willful retention” of the five documents. Drake says that when he learned that, even with the reduced charges, he still faced up to thirty-five years in prison, he “was completely aghast.”

Morton Halperin, of the Open Society Institute, says that the reduced charges make the prosecution even more outlandish: “If Drake is convicted, it means the Espionage Law is an Official Secrets Act.” Because reporters often retain unauthorized defense documents, Drake’s conviction would establish a legal precedent making it possible to prosecute journalists as spies. “It poses a grave threat to the mechanism by which we learn most of what the government does,” Halperin says.

When President Barack Obama took office, in 2009, he championed the cause of government transparency, and spoke admiringly of whistle-blowers, whom he described as “often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government.” But the Obama Administration has pursued leak prosecutions with a surprising relentlessness. Including the Drake case, it has been using the Espionage Act to press criminal charges in five alleged instances of national-security leaks—more such prosecutions than have occurred in all previous Administrations combined. The Drake case is one of two that Obama’s Justice Department has carried over from the Bush years.

Gabriel Schoenfeld, a conservative political scientist at the Hudson Institute, who, in his book “Necessary Secrets” (2010), argues for more stringent protection of classified information, says, “Ironically, Obama has presided over the most draconian crackdown on leaks in our history—even more so than Nixon.”

...

Jack Balkin, a liberal law professor at Yale, agrees that the increase in leak prosecutions is part of a larger transformation. “We are witnessing the bipartisan normalization and legitimization of a national-surveillance state,” he says. In his view, zealous leak prosecutions are consonant with other political shifts since 9/11: the emergence of a vast new security bureaucracy, in which at least two and a half million people hold confidential, secret, or top-secret clearances; huge expenditures on electronic monitoring, along with a reinterpretation of the law in order to sanction it; and corporate partnerships with the government that have transformed the counterterrorism industry into a powerful lobbying force. Obama, Balkin says, has “systematically adopted policies consistent with the second term of the Bush Administration.”

...

Drake’s case also raises questions about double standards. In recent years, several top officials accused of similar misdeeds have not faced such serious charges. John Deutch, the former C.I.A. director, and Alberto Gonzales, the former Attorney General, both faced much less stringent punishment after taking classified documents home without authorization. In 2003, Sandy Berger, Clinton’s national-security adviser, smuggled classified documents out of a federal building, reportedly by hiding them in his pants. It was treated as a misdemeanor. His defense lawyer was Lanny Breuer—the official overseeing the prosecution of Drake.

Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor who served in the Bush Justice Department, laments the lack of consistency in leak prosecutions. He notes that no investigations have been launched into the sourcing of Bob Woodward’s four most recent books, even though “they are filled with classified information that he could only have received from the top of the government.” Gabriel Schoenfeld, of the Hudson Institute, says, “The selectivity of the prosecutions here is nightmarish. It’s a broken system.”

...

Mark Klein, the former A.T. & T. employee who exposed the telecom-company wiretaps, is also dismayed by the Drake case. “I think it’s outrageous,” he says. “The Bush people have been let off. The telecom companies got immunity. The only people Obama has prosecuted are the whistle-blowers.”

I wonder who I may vote for President in 2012, and things like this remind me that there's one foreign-policy/surveillance state consensus in Washington, and Obama is just another face of it.
 
I had to look up the Bono thing, because I thought Native Son was just some gibberish about gun control.

This is a great link about the last 72 years (!) of bullshit about the debt ceiling. Short version: a kerfluffle happens virtually every single time.
 
Tomorrow it will have been 60 days since the Libya Operation started. :whistle::shh:
 
By Matt Viser, Boston Globe Staff May 17



Cornel West, a Princeton University professor and leading black intellectual, is harshly criticizing President Obama, a candidate he once supported but now calls “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats.”

West, a former Harvard University professor, said during an interview with the website Truthdig posted yesterday that the president has not been true to his race.

“I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men,” West said. “It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white…When he meets an independent black brother, it is frightening.”

The White House did not have an immediate comment. West did not respond to messages left at his office.

Republicans have questioned Obama’s origins — to the point where he felt compelled to release his long-form birth certificate to prove he was born in Hawaii — but West also uses Obama’s past to draw into question the president’s racial bearings.

“Obama, coming out of Kansas influence, white, loving grandparents, coming out of Hawaii and Indonesia, when he meets these independent black folk who have a history of slavery, Jim Crow, Jane Crow and so on, he is very apprehensive,” West said. “He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination. It is understandable.”

West is a professor at Princeton's Center for African American Studies and is the author of "Race Matters." He was a professor at Harvard, but left in 2002 amid quarrels with then-president Lawrence Summers.

West also recounts personal slights — that his phone calls didn’t get returned, and that he couldn’t get a ticket with his mother and brother to the inauguration.

It is not the first time West has raised questions about Obama. Last year, during an interview with NPR, he said he wished the president were more “Martin Luther King-like.”
 
oh Cornell ... i like you, i enjoy you when you're playing Black Yoda ... but questioning someone's blackness or claim to that label is about as appropriate as questioning Obama's American-ness. it's all so 20th century.

yes, i think Obama's experience is quite different from a black person growing up on, say, the south side of Chicago (like, say, Michelle Obama), but i think we're putting a limit on what it means to be authentically black in America. there is no singular, monolithic experience, and you'd think someone as florid and able to grasp complexity would see that. perhaps he's saying that Obama, himself, is uncomfortable around black people from a different background, and, well, fair enough. lots of white people make me uncomfortable. :shrug: even some gay people too.
 
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