From uExpress
By Ted Rall

I miss Bush.

Stop the presses and shut off the RSS feeds: the bashiest of the Bush-bashers is starting to appreciate the Exile of Crawford.

I haven’t forgiven George W. Bush for stealing two elections, starting two wars, bankrupting the treasury and doing his damnedest to turn the U.S. into a fascist state. He deserves one of hell’s hottest picnic spots for refusing to lift a finger to bring the 9/11 murderers to justice. Bush was stupid. He was vicious. He should be in prison.

He was the worst president the U.S. had ever had. Until this one.

On major issues and a lot of minor ones, Obama is the same as or worse than Bush. But Bush had an opposition to contend with. Obama has a compliant Democratic Congress. Lulled to somnolent apathy by Obama’s charming manners, mastery of English (and yes, the color of his skin), leftist activists and journalists have been reduced to quiet disappointment, mild grumbling and unaccountable patience.

I don’t care about window dressing. Sure, it’s nice that Obama is intelligent. But policies matter–not charm. And Obama’s policies are at least as bad as Bush’s.

Guantánamo was but the beginning of Obama’s betrayals. First he ordered the camp closed–not immediately but in a year. Now he’s expanding the U.S. concentration camp at Bagram–where 600 innocent men and children are being tortured–so he can send the 245 Gitmo prisoners there. In the Bush era, Gitmo POWs received legal representation. Obama has ordered that the POWs sent to Bagram not be allowed to see a lawyer.

Read more Sorry

From True Blue Liberal
By Walter Brasch

Some columns are easier to write than others.

This is one of them.

Providing all of my research were the “family values” Republicans.

This week, second term Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina disappeared for six days, leaving the state without a chief executive who could make decisions in an emergency. His Republican lieutenant governor didn’t know where he was, and had not been given any authority to make decisions in his absence. The state police said they had not been informed. His wife told the Associated Press she didn’t know where he was, wasn’t worried about him, and thought he was “writing something and wanted some space to get away from the kids” over the Father’s Day weekend. His senior aides said he was walking along the Appalachian Trail to “clear his head.”

But it wasn’t his head that he was clearing. When he returned, after first lying to a reporter for the Columbia State who caught up with him on his return to the Atlanta airport, he finally admitted he went to Argentina to meet with a long-time lover. His wife, who was not by his side when he held an early afternoon press conference, later said she and the governor had separated two weeks earlier. The State later produced e-mail love letters it had been keeping since December.

The rising young star of the Republican party who was seen as a presidential contender in 2012, the man who was head of the Republican Governors Association until the day after he acknowledged his extramarital affair, the man who had wanted to deprive his state of $700 million in federal stimulus funds as a political message to President Obama, the man who had established himself as a beacon for the sanctity of marriage and the values of the oh-so-pure Religious right, who a decade earlier as a congressman had strongly condemned Bill Clinton’s extramarital affair, was not only an adulterer, but for at least the second time had left his state at risk since there were no contingency plans of how to reach him in an emergency. Read the rest of this entry »

From The Progressive
By Matthew Rothschild

Finally, the Supreme Court has made a good decision on civil liberties.

The justices ruled when she was 13, Savana Redding had her rights violated when school officials insisted that she be strip-searched for the possession of—hold on here!—ibuprofen.

She had to strip to her underwear, then pull her bra and panties out and expose her privates. School officials found no drugs.

Savana called it “the most humiliating experience I’ve ever had.”

Ruling 8-1, the Justices concluded that Safford Middle School went too far.

That’s a welcome departure for the court, which has steadily increased the authority of school districts to intrude on the rights of students, with random drug testing of athletes and anyone in extracurricular activities. The court also has invited excessive monitoring of school newspapers.

For once, the court, almost unanimously, made a course correction.

The only dissenter was Clarence Thomas, who after sleepwalking through 18 years on the court, has finally settled on a role for himself other than that of Scalia’s second vote. And that is, to be even further to the right of Scalia. Earlier this week, Thomas was the sole member of the court who wanted to overturn the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Read more Drifting

From The Regressive Antidote
By David Michael Green

I’ve been having a hard time getting a fix on our new (though no longer quite so) president.

I know my friends on the left will think that’s just because I’m hopelessly naive. Ironically, I expect the good folks on the right (who exist along with that adjective mostly as a theoretical proposition, but you get the idea) would fully agree with this statement, perhaps the only thing in the world the left and right all have in common.

But even that agreement would be short-lived. For the former group, I’d be naive to see Barack Obama as anything but yet another agent of Capital, adding to the fine efforts of Reagan, Clinton and Bush in advancing yet further the interests of the American oligarchy.

For regressives, on the other hand, I’m a fool-and-a-half not to see Obama for the “socialist”, “communist” or even “fascist” (they can’t quite seem to get their ideological slanders straight), that he plainly is.

The folks on the right are insane, of course. But that’s hardly news. They are also increasingly desperate to find anything to hit this guy with. “He gave the Queen an iPod!” He bowed to the Saudi King!” “He went to a play!” Wow. Apart from everything else, I must say I appreciate their willingness to cling so heartily to their own little adventure in political suicide by each week reminding the tens of millions who didn’t get it the first time around why the last eight – if not thirty – years have been so harrowing. Thanks for the public service, guys. The world will certainly be a better place without you!

A lot of the critique from the left is pretty legitimate, I would say, notwithstanding the continuing possibility (or, many would say, total fantasy) that the president is playing three-dimensional chess, while we mere mortals continue to perceive him in the context of our grossly limited Flatland of a mere two. In other words, it remains at least technically possible that Obama is a true progressive, but he’s just strategically far ahead of the rest of us, and therefore realizes that he can actually accomplish a heckuva lot in eight years, but only if he resists the pressure to throw long passes on every down, and instead moves both incrementally and cleverly. Sanity through the back door, you might call it, and god knows the American public isn’t famous for quickly recognizing good ideas when they see them.

Read more Rhetoric

From Salon
By Michael Lind

Picture, if you will, an America apparently like our own. A country like ours bogged down in war on two fronts and suffering from the greatest economic slump since the Great Depression of the 1930s. An America indistinguishable from ours in every respect except that when you turn on the nightly news you see the face of President John Sidney McCain …

OK, Rod Serling as host of “The Twilight Zone” probably would have said it better. But seriously — where would we be in the summer of 2009, if in last November’s election John McCain rather than Barack Obama had been elected president of the United States?

“No difference!” would be the answer of those alienated populists and leftists for whom Republicans and Democrats are merely different tentacles of the same Bilderberger or Trilateral Commission octopus. Certainly from the perspectives of socialists or libertarians — or fascists or Islamic theocrats — the consensus shared by America’s two parties seems much greater than their differences. But from the vantage point of mainstream American politics, the differences between the Obama administration and a hypothetical McCain administration would have been real and can be vividly illustrated by counterfactual history.

Let’s start with foreign policy. Within the framework of U.S. geopolitical primacy shared by both parties, Barack Obama has departed significantly from the foreign policy of George W. Bush in both substance and style. With respect to substance, he is fulfilling his campaign promise to draw down U.S. involvement in Iraq cautiously while increasing resources for the fight against bin Laden’s jihadists and their Taliban supporters, who, unlike Saddam Hussein, planned or suborned the 9/11 attacks.

Read more McCain

From The Raw Story

Iran’s under-fire President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Tuesday sat side-by-side with world leaders at a summit in Russia, defiantly proclaiming the age of empires had ended and attacking the United States.

In a show of confidence after the worst riots in his country in a decade, Ahmadinejad made no mention of the violence or his hotly disputed reelection victory in his address to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).

“The international capitalist order is retreating,” the controversial president told world leaders, including Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and China’s Hu Jintao, in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg.

“It is absolutely obvious that the age of empires has ended and its revival will not take place.”

A broadly-smiling Ahmadinejad, wearing a dark suit and as usual no tie, earlier shook hands with a beaming Medvedev before the leaders went into the second day of the summit.

Whether Ahmadinejad — who has a habit of stealing the limelight at such events — would turn up had become a source of intrigue after he postponed his planned arrival on Monday following unrest over his disputed election victory.

Read more Ahmadinejad

From Tom Dispatch
By Tom Engelhardt

Let’s face it, even Bo is photogenic, charismatic. He’s a camera hound. And as for Barack, Michelle, Sasha, and Malia — keep in mind that we’re now in a first name culture — they all glow on screen.

Before a camera they can do no wrong. And the president himself, well, if you didn’t watch his speech in Cairo, you should have. The guy’s impressive. Truly. He can speak to multiple audiences — Arabs, Jews, Muslims, Christians, as well as a staggering range of Americans — and somehow just about everyone comes away hearing something they like, feeling he’s somehow on their side. And it doesn’t even feel like pandering. It feels like thoughtfulness. It feels like intelligence.

For all I know — and the test of this is still a long, treacherous way off — Barack Obama may turn out to be the best pure politician we’ve seen since at least Ronald Reagan, if not Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He seems to have Roosevelt’s same unreadable ability to listen and make you believe he’s with you (no matter what he’s actually going to do), which is a skill not to be whistled at.

Right now, he and his people are picking off the last Republican moderates via a little party-switching and some well-crafted appointments, and so driving that party and its conservative base absolutely nuts, if not into extreme southern isolation. In this sense, his first Supreme Court pick was little short of a political stroke of brilliance, whatever she turns out to do on the bench. Whether the opposition “wins” (which they won’t) or loses in any attempt to block her nomination, they stand to further alienate a key voting bloc, Hispanics. Now 9% of voters, Hispanics went for Obama in the last election by a staggering 35-point margin. Next time their heft might even bring solidly red-state Texas closer to in-play status in the two-party system. In other words, the president has left his opponents in a situation where they can’t win for losing.

Read more Obama

From Salon
By Joe Conason

Acts of madness like the killing of George Tiller and Stephen T. Johns can be too easily dismissed as the work of disturbed individuals and then subsumed in the usual rumble of recrimination between left and right. But if we are to understand the deeper implications of those acts of murder, what must be examined is their origin in the shadow world of white nationalism.

Nobody knows more about the movements that spawned the alleged gunmen than Leonard Zeskind, who has spent most of a lifetime observing, analyzing and opposing racism and anti-Semitism in America and abroad. Now he has distilled those hard and dangerous decades of work into “Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement From the Margins to the Mainstream,” a magisterial new book that explains how and why racial hatred became and remains a significant political force in American society.

To Zeskind, the most recent attacks only represent the latest stage in a long wave of extremist violence dating back to the early 1980s, marked by assassinations, bombings, bank robberies and other crimes that were largely ignored by the mainstream media because they often occurred in distant rural locations. “The reason we’re talking about this incident,” he said “is because it happened in Washington, D.C., at the Holocaust Museum, instead of somewhere in the backwoods of Montana.”

According to Zeskind, “the level of racist and anti-Semitic violence was much worse during the Reagan era, back in the ’80s, when we had the Order, which killed [Jewish radio host] Alan Berg, and certainly in the ’90s when Clinton was president, when we had Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing, the Aryan Republican Army robbing banks, the Phineas Priesthood shooting people. Those years saw much more of these kind of attacks than what we are seeing right now.”

Read more Assassination

From The LA Times
By Bill Maher

President Obama should just join the cast of “I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!” It’s not that farfetched; he’s been on everything else.

I’m still a fan, but there’s a fine line between being transparent and being overexposed. Every time you turn on the TV, there’s Obama. He’s getting a puppy! He’s eating a cheeseburger with Joe Biden! He’s taking the wife to Broadway and Paris — this is the best season of “The Bachelor” yet!

I get it: You love being on TV. I love my bong, but I take it out of my mouth every once in a while. The other day, I caught myself saying to a friend, “Don’t tell me if he’s fixed the economy yet, I’m Tivo-ing it.”

Remember during the campaign when John McCain attacked Obama for acting like a celebrity and we all laughed at the grumpy old shellshocked fool? Well, it turns out he was right. Sorry, senator. I’m sending a nice gift basket of high-fiber muffins your way.

It’s getting to where you can’t turn on your TV without seeing Obama. Who does he think he is, Dick Cheney? Come on, sir, you don’t have to be on television every minute of every day. You’re the president, not a rerun of “Law and Order.” Save some charisma for a rainy day. Taking strangers from a TV show on a tour of your house? We have that show; it’s called “Cribs.” And letting reporters ask you questions like “You like to be the one who picks out the shaving cream, don’t you?” Or as it’s called today, “journalism.” I was willing to give the guy the benefit of the doubt until I saw him take Brian Williams into his bedroom, and at the end of the bed there was a teleprompter and it said, “Who’s your daddy?”

Read more Obamathon

From The Regressive Antidote
By David Michael Green

When I hear big old fat white male bloviators like Newt Gingrich or Rush Limbaugh calling Sonia Sotomayor “racist”, just one thought comes to mind: Why are these regressives endorsing her to be the next associate justice of the Supreme Court?

I mean, since when did racism become a problem in their circles?

Since when wasn’t it perfectly acceptable?

Indeed, since when was it not a political tool of choice for winning power, if not a preferred lifestyle?

Do you remember the lovely Limbaugh leading the charge for civil rights, back in the Sixties? Remember how he stood side-by-side with Martin Luther King, getting fire-hosed, going to jail, and marching until he had blisters on his blisters, all for the cause of fighting racism in America?

You don’t? Funny, neither do I.

I do remember, however, that he once said this: “You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray [the confessed assassin of Martin Luther King]. We miss you, James. Godspeed.”

Read more Sotomayor