David Bromwich - The Strange Bipartisanship of 2009, 2011, and 2013

On June 1, in Minneapolis, the president spoke some words to supporters that ought to have left them slack-jawed. As Devin Dwyer wrote at Jake Tapper's excellent blog, Political Punch, President Obama said last Friday that "if he wins a second term the GOP 'fever' of opposition to tax hikes for deficit reduction may break." Why would the fever break? Fever is the Republican condition. Look at what they did to President Carter over the Iran hostage crisis, and what they did to President Clinton over the assault weapons ban. Has no visitor who entered the Oval Office listened to Fox Radio for half an hour in the last four years?

Obama in the same speech referred back to the better days of a Republican Party that dwelt (with whatever admixture of opportunism) somewhere in the precincts of reality: "John McCain believed in climate change. John believed in campaign finance reform. He believed in immigration reform. I mean, there were some areas where you saw some overlap." Well, but what has been the record of John McCain on all of these issues since 2009? The example proves too much.

"In this election," Obama conceded, "the Republican Party has moved in a fundamentally different direction. The center of gravity for their party has shifted." Why not say that their center of gravity has become the far right, and that the far right now controls the party with no scope for disagreement? What ought to follow from that perception is that 2012 feels like a fight because it is a fight. Obama, however, drew the opposite conclusion: "I believe that if we're successful in this election," he told his followers, "that the fever may break, because there's a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that." What evidence can he show of any continuity with a Republican tradition of common sense?

Read More:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-bromwich/bipartisanship-in-2009-20_b_1571727.html

Adrian Salbuchi - Obama's Total War Doctrine: Intense and Constant Psychological Warfare. "Total War" against All Countries

President Obama promised change, but there's little of it in his war policies, which are harsher than those of George W. Bush. US drone bombings often target not just "terrorists" but all "military-age males in a strike zone as combatants." "Unless there is explicit posthumous intelligence proving otherwise", that is. As an extensive recent report in The New York Times explains, for all practical purposes Obama is applying what can best be described as a Total War Doctrine, bringing government, military and media propaganda PsyWar under one strategy.

The concept of "Total War" - war involving not just the military but all civilians irrespective of age or sex, together with the entire infrastructure of a country - became a horrible reality during the 20th century, driven for the most part by steering scientific discoveries and technological progress towards unlimited use in warfare. Total War is very much alive today and is being spearheaded by the United States and its Allies. This is being abetted on all fronts by US, European and global mainstream media that willingly oblige. 

Read More:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31265

Tom Engelhardt - Praying at the Church of St. Drone

Be assured of one thing: whichever candidate you choose at the polls in November, you aren’t just electing a president of the United States; you are also electing an assassin-in-chief.  The last two presidents may not have been emperors or kings, but they -- and the vast national-security structure that continues to be built-up and institutionalized around the presidential self -- are certainly one of the nightmares the founding fathers of this country warned us against.  They are one of the reasons those founders put significant war powers in the hands of Congress, which they knew would be a slow, recalcitrant, deliberative body.

Thanks to a long New York Times piece by Jo Becker and Scott Shane, “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will,” we now know that the president has spent startling amounts of time overseeing the “nomination” of terrorist suspects for assassination via the remotely piloted drone program he inherited from President George W. Bush and which he has expanded exponentially.  Moreover, that article was based largely on interviews with “three dozen of his current and former advisers.”  In other words, it was essentially an administration-inspired piece -- columnist Robert Scheer calls it “planted” -- on a “secret” program the president and those closest to him are quite proud of and want to brag about in an election year.

Read More:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175551/

Rady Ananda - Celeb Bono Partners with Monsanto, G8, to Biowreck Africa

At the G8 Summit held two weeks ago at Camp David, President Obama met with private industry and African heads of state to launch the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, a euphemism for monocultured, genetically modified crops and toxic agrochemicals aimed at making poor farmers debt slaves to corporations, while destroying the ecosphere for profit.

And Bono, of the rock group U2, is out shilling for Monsanto on this one.

It’s phase 2 of the Green Revolution. Tanzania, Ghana, and Ethiopia are the first to fall for the deception, with Mozambique, Cote d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso and other African nations lining up for the "Grow Africa Partnership," under Obama’s "Global Agricultural Development" plan.

In Obama Pitches India Model of GM Genocide to Africa, Scott Creighton writes:

Read More:

http://foodfreedomgroup.com/2012/05/29/u2-bono-monsanto-africa/

Paul McGeough - Republicans Plot to Steal White House

There's a fiendish cleverness in perpetrating a fraud in broad daylight, at the same time as you tell the people that it must be done to guard against - you guessed it - fraud.

The reality of voter fraud in the US is that it is virtually non-existent. It has been known to happen, but studies reveal its probability is less than that of being struck by lightning - just 0.0009 per cent in Washington State and a very remote 0.00004 per cent in Ohio.

So welcome to the state of Florida, where the state emblem is the hanging chad. Remember, it was here that just 537 votes in the recount drama of 2000 threw the presidency to George W. Bush.

Nothing can be left to chance. Like about 20 other Republican-controlled states, Florida has gone all out to stifle the likely Democratic vote before the presidential poll in November. Using the Bush rule of thumb, a tweak to the law that shaves the Democratic vote by just a few hundred at elections where about 10 million get to vote, is halfway to throwing the outcome.

Read More:

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/republicans-plot-to-steal-white-house-20120602-1zofk.html

Alexander Cockburn - There’s a Cancer on the Presidency, Called Barack Obama

Never trust a president who claims he reads himself to sleep with the help of Marcus Aurelius. That was Bill Clinton, who claimed this thundering imperial bore never strayed far  from his hand.

Most certainly view with profound suspicion a president who professes to be  guided in his conduct in grave moral matters by Augustine and Aquinas, two very different characters. Just as civilization would have profited if the rope lowering St Paul to the ground from that tower in Damascus had broken fifty feet up, a death in the cradle for Augustine would have spared humanity much horror from his poisonous doctrines on original sin and other matters.

Aquinas was a different matter. A jovial fellow, among other things he loved fresh herring, and when he was dying he asked for some. At this point a fishing boat in the Mediterranean hauled an unprecedented netful  of herring and the unexpected catch was slated for a while as the second miracle required for Thomas’ canonization.

The excellent, astounding  New York Times story by Jo Becker and Scot Shane published on May 29 and vigorously discussed on this site by Ralph Nader, says that Obama decided to take personal control of the White House’s secret and unconstitutional death list after reading Augustine and Aquinas. “A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he believes that he should take moral responsibility for such actions. And he knows that bad strikes can tarnish America’s image and derail diplomacy.” Notice how the paragraph devolves rapidly  from moral duty to pr.

Read More:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/06/01/theres-a-cancer-on-the-presidency-called-barack-obama/

Karl Grossman - Nuclear Rubberstamp Commission

The resignation last week of the chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is another demonstration of the bankrupt basis of the NRC. Gregory Jaczko repeatedly called for the NRC to apply "lessons learned" from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant disaster in Japan. And, for that, the nuclear industry -- quite successfully -- went after him fiercely.

The New York Times, in an editorial over the weekend, said that President Obama's choice to replace Jaczko, Allison Macfarlane, "will need to be as independent and aggressive as Dr. Jaczko."

That misses the institutional point.

The NRC was created in 1974 when Congress abolished the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission after deciding that the AEC's dual missions of promoting and at the same time regulating nuclear power were deemed a conflict of interest. The AEC was replaced by the NRC, which was to regulate nuclear power, and a Department of Energy was later formed to advocate for it.

Read More:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karl-grossman/nuclear-regulatory-commission-chairman_b_1549012.html

Ray McGovern - The Moral Challenge of ‘Kill Lists’

In an extraordinary article in Tuesday’s New York Times, “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will,” authors Jo Becker and Scott Shane throw macabre light on the consigliere-cum-priestly role that counterterrorist adviser John Brennan provides President Barack Obama 

At the outset, Becker and Shane note that, although Obama vowed to “align the fight against Al Qaeda with American values,” he has now ordered the obedient Brennan to prepare a top secret “nominations” list of people whom the President may decide to order killed, without charge or trial, including American citizens.

The authors understate this as “a moral and legal conundrum.” It is, in fact, a moral and legal impossibility to square “kill lists” for extrajudicial murders with traditional legal and moral American values.

Enter the legal consiglieres. Attorney General Eric Holder and Harold Koh, the State Department’s top lawyer, seem to have adopted the retro (pre-1215) practices of their immediate predecessors (think Ashcroft, Gonzales, Mukasey) with their extraordinary ability to make just about anything “legal.”

Even torture? No problem for the earlier trio. Was not George W. Bush well-armed with the perfect squelch, when NBC’s Matt Lauer asked him about waterboarding in November 2010?

Lauer: Why is waterboarding legal, in your opinion?

Read More:

http://consortiumnews.com/2012/05/30/the-moral-challenge-of-kill-lists/

Gavin Aronsen - No Disclosure, Please, We're Contractors

Earlier this month, the Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee approved the Keeping Politics Out of Federal Contracting Act [1] (KPOFCA), which would prohibit the government from forcing federal contractors to disclose campaign spending and lobbying expenditures as a condition for keeping their contracts. In response, 14 watchdog groups are urging senators [2] to block the bill, condemning it as a "pay-to-play" political maneuver that would make it easier for corporations to peddle influence in the shadows.

The bill is the latest chapter in a debate over transparency for the companies that rake in more than $536 billion [3] in federal contracts annually. In April 2011, the Obama administrationdrafted an executive order [4] (PDF) that would have required corporations bidding on federal contracts to disclose any political spending greater than $5,000, including money given to dark-money groups such as the Chamber of Commerce that do not disclose their donors. Following staunch opposition from Republicans and the Chamber, President Obama hasn't acted on the order [5].

Meanwhile, a rider attached to the 2012 Omnibus Appropriations bill preempted the order by prohibiting the government [6] from requiring corporations to reveal their political spending as a precondition to bid on federal contracts.

Read More:

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/05/federal-contractors-campaign-disclosure-kpofca

Robert Scheer - Hope Burning

So now we have Rambo Obama, a steely warrior who, according to a lengthy leaked insider account in The New York Times, hurls death-dealing drones at anyone who threatens the good old USA. Including children. Those children are presumed guilty by virtue of proximity, and the Times plays along, not even modifying a targeted terrorist with the word “alleged,” as once had been the paper’s convention: “When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises—but his family is with him—it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.”

Obama as the cool triggerman is an image useful to White House operatives as they buff the president’s persona for the coming election. But what it reveals is the mindset of a political cynic whose seductive words cloak the moral indifference of a methodical executioner. Forget Harry Truman, who obliterated the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or Lyndon Johnson, who carpet-bombed millions in Vietnam. The Democrats have got themselves another killer, one whose techniques are as devastatingly effective, but brilliantly refined.

The story obviously was planted in The New York Times to benefit the Obama political campaign. Otherwise, why would the president’s former chief of staff, William Daley, and three dozen current and past intelligence insiders provide the newspaper with the most sensitive details of national security decision-making?

Read More:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/hope_burning_20120531/