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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (59016)	7/21/2009 7:19:09 PM
From: Broken_Clock	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

is this supportive of right wing or left wing views on war? original.antiwar.com NPR: ‘Murder’ a Controversial Concept by David R. Henderson, July 17, 2009 Author’s note: When I started to write an article criticizing NPR ombudsman Alicia C. Shepherd for refusing to admit that torture is torture, I found myself harping on the obvious. So instead I wrote the following. National Public Radio ombudsman Alicia C. Shepherd today stated that the concept of murder is not clear and, therefore, NPR will in the future refuse to use the term "murder." Instead, NPR will use the more neutral term "harsh techniques for ending people’s lives." Ms. Shepherd stated: "The problem is that the word ‘murder’ is loaded with political and social implications for several reasons, including the fact that murder is illegal under U.S. law and international treaties the United States has signed." Blogger Scott Horton criticized NPR’s refusal to use the word "murder." Horton wrote: "So in not using the word ‘murder,’ you are toeing the line the government put down and you are being hypocritical if you previously had used the word." Mr. Horton noted that the New York Times used the word "murder" in its reporting on the Communist Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s. Ms. Shepherd replied: "It’s a no-win case for journalists. If journalists use the words ‘harsh techniques for ending people’s lives,’ they can be seen as siding with the White House and the language that some U.S. officials, particularly in the Bush administration, prefer. If journalists use the word ‘murder,’ then they can be accused of siding with those who are particularly and visibly still angry at the previous administration." Ms. Shepherd added, "After all, murderers have feelings too." Many regular listeners of NPR objected to NPR’s unwillingness to characterize the involuntary taking of people’s lives as "murder." To that, Ms. Shepherd replied that she was "shilling for strong, credible journalism that is as objective as humanly possible." She also stated, "I believe that it is not the role of journalists to take sides or to characterize things." When asked if the sky is blue, she hesitated to say, adding, "Some people think it’s not." Ms. Shepherd added: "But no matter how many distinguished groups – the International Red Cross, the UN High Commissioners – say taking innocent life is murder, there are responsible people who say it is not. Former president Bush, former vice president Cheney, their staff, and their supporters obviously believed that killing terrorism suspects was necessary to protect the nation’s security. One can disagree strongly with those beliefs and their actions. But they are due some respect for their views, which are shared by a portion of the American public. So, it is not an open-and-shut case that everyone believes killing innocent people to be murder. Many in NPR’s audience obviously believe it is, but others do not." When asked how she would judge people to be responsible if she thinks a good journalist does not "characterize things," she did not answer. Ms. Shepherd ended with a plea for objectivity: "I hope that most NPR listeners would be willing to give some credence to an alternative viewpoint – a viewpoint that says journalists should strive to avoid taking sides and using loaded language in a contentious debate about the rightness or wrongness of murder." In other news, an NPR spokesman said there was no truth to the rumor that, henceforth, NPR would refer to tax increases as "revenue enhancements." [After writing this parody, I listened to Bob Garfield's excellent interview of Ms. Shepherd about the use of the word "torture." He came up with the same analogy with murder that I did. His best line (from 3:29 to 3:49) was the following: "NPR certainly has no difficulty calling murder 'murder.' It doesn't call it 'enhanced argumentation technique.' The terrorists call themselves 'freedom fighters,' but NPR calls acts of terror 'acts of terror.' In other respects, NPR hasn't taken a position against, you know, nouns. Why this one in particular?"] Copyright © 2009 by David R. Henderson. Requests for permission to reprint should be directed to the author or Antiwar.com.

To: koan who wrote (59016)	7/21/2009 7:44:32 PM
From: Broken_Clock	Respond to of 149317

How come you never post right wing controversial items? === Mainly because the right wing now has no power, no credibility and is not running the country now. The D's are. These decisions are "D"ecisions now. It should remind us more generally that when a society's operations become broadly fraudulent and unreal, authority and legitimacy wither. This is analogous to the position Barack Obama now finds himself in. He was elected as the politician most trusted in America to change the fraudulent and unreal operations of the US government. Don't bother protesting that all politics is necessarily unreal and fraudulent. If it were so, you'd have to argue that the US Constitution was wholly a fraud, as well as Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton and the rest. It only has strong tendencies in that direction. (The Declaration of Independence was itself a direct strike against the fraud and unreality of British royal governance in America.) As president, Barack Obama is faced with the essential fraudulence and unreality of the US economy. Notice that, as ominous as they are, the wars in iraq and Afghanistan have generated only minimal protest so far in the early Obama period, despite the fact that they are not operationally different from their conduct under Bush. There is no protest because, for now, a consensus exists that our troops are in these places for perceived reasons -- to keep Mideast oil supply lines open... to keep Islamic maniacs busy in their own backyard instead of on US territory... to keep Iran in a vise... to maintain the American "empire" (take your pick). There's something there to appeal to a broad majority of US voters. Unlike Vietnam, Iraq and Afstan are not perceived as out-and-out frauds. But the economy is. Since September of 2008, when Hank Paulson began shoveling bail-outs to the very banks who screwed the world on fraudulent and unreal securities, and left American society comprehensively bankrupt, the consensus has only deepened on the perception of an historic swindle. And so far, President Obama has positioned himself as chief enabler to further swindling. One need look no further than the rulings this past spring of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) as authorized by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC, an official government agency, created 1934), which have allowed the biggest banks to pretend that the fraudulent paper in their vaults does not have to be recorded as a loss on their books. The US economy is now dying a slow and painful death because it had become based on activities that had nothing to do with producing real wealth. Instead, it became dependent on rackets, that is, behavior geared to getting something for nothing. These rackets are often summarized under the acronym FIRE (for finance, insurance and real estate), a system set up to strip-mine profits from the wish commonly labeled "the American Dream" -- itself largely a product of televised advertising and propaganda. The end product of all that was the doomed economy of suburban sprawl, an infrastructure for daily life with no future in a world defined by fossil fuel scarcity. The unraveling of debt at every level now is directly related to the mis-investments made in that way of life. By now, it's self-evident that the "change" voted for in November's election was too horrifying to articulate. It still is. The suburban sprawl economy was all we had left. Now it's gone and we're stuck with all its deleveraging after-effects -- the worst case of "buyer's remorse" since the fall of Nazi Germany. Thus, the only "change" that President Obama can really work for is the health care system, which is a life-and-death matter. The sordid rackets so ostentatiously infecting the system boil down vividly to lives ruined and bankrupted, and a system more frightful to deal with than disease itself. Probably the baseline truth is that health care will end up being rationed one way or another. It's another prime symptom of population overshoot, and a reminder that life is tragic. As another blogger put it so nicely last week on the web (sorry, but I forget who or where), this isn't a "recession," it's a collapse. The excellent DMITRY ORLOV has outlined the process very nicely in his book "Reinventing Collapse" about the parallels between the demise of the Soviet Union and the prospects for demise of the US as currently constituted. Mikhail Gorbachev presided over the Soviet collapse. He must have been a leader of very subtle abilities. Not only did he survive to enjoy a busy second act of life with a Nobel Prize in his pocket, but he accomplished a nearly bloodless transition in a society long-conditioned to bloodletting as the primary political act. Here in the USA, where we have had over two hundred years experience with peaceful power transitions -- even during the convulsions of 1860-65 -- the outcome this time might not be so appetizing. It would be one of the supreme ironies of history if it turned out that the US was incapable of ending its most self-destructive rackets peacefully and bloodlessly, while the Russians shucked off its Soviet racket like an old sweater. The way I see it, Mr. Obama just doesn't have much time before his authority and legitimacy slough off and he is left with only his genial smile. The "hope" vested in him will end up in a Museum of Lost Hopes, along with the integrity of TV news and the rectitude of the medical profession. And funding for that museum will be cut by President Sarah Palin, representing Naziism US style -- i.e. Naziism without the brains. kunstler.com --Kunstler

To: koan who wrote (59016)	7/21/2009 7:56:01 PM
From: Broken_Clock	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

supportive of right wing, left wing or an imperial presidency no matter which party is in power? rawstory.com 9/11 decision allows judges to toss civil suits they disfavor Share on Facebook BY STEPHEN C. WEBSTER Published: July 21, 2009 Updated 6 hours ago Report: Iqbal case cited by lower courts 500 times in just two months In just two short months, a little-noticed case involving a former detainee’s lawsuit against two Bush administration officials may have become what one attorney called “the most significant Supreme Court decision in a decade” affecting U.S. civil litigation. Decided in May, Ashcroft v. Iqbal has already been cited over 500 times by lower courts, The New York Times reported on Tuesday. The lawsuit, which named former Attorney General John Ashcroft and former FBI Director Robert Mueller, stemmed from the alleged torture and humiliation of a Pakistani man, arrested in New York City in November, 2001. In a 5-4 decision, the court found that the two Bush administration officials could not be sued without evidence that they ordered the abusive treatment. Stephen B. Burbank with the University of Pennsylvania Law School told the Times, “[The Iqbal decision] is a blank check for federal judges to get rid of cases they disfavor.” Thomas C. Goldstein, an attorney with Washington, D.C. law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, echoed Burbank’s sentiment, calling Iqbal, “the most significant Supreme Court decision in a decade for day-to-day litigation in the federal courts.” The suit was brought by Javaid Iqbal, a Pakistani man who was working as a cable technician on Long Island. He was arrested in November 2001 on suspicion of fraud involving a bank card. Iqbal was transferred to a high-security prison, where he was kept in solitary confinement and subjected to daily humiliations and abuse, his lawyers argued. Six months later he was deported to Pakistan. Believing he was abused purely because of his Muslim faith, Iqbal sued former attorney general John Ashcroft and former FBI Director Robert Mueller, accusing them of instigating his harsh treatment. The Bush administration moved to have the suit thrown out, countering that Iqbal’s arrest was perfectly legal, and even if it had not been the two officials could not be legally pursued for doing their jobs. Ginsburg: The court “messed up the federal rules” After an appeals court gave Iqbal a partial victory, moving the case to the high court’s docket, the Supreme Court sided with the administration, ruling that “Iqbal’s pleadings were insufficient to allow his suit against former Attorney General John Ashcroft and former FBI director Robert Mueller, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in his majority opinion,” noted the American Bar Association. As for its application to civil litigation, “[the] Iqbal decision now requires plaintiffs to come forward with concrete facts at the outset, and it instructs lower court judges to dismiss lawsuits that strike them as implausible,” reported the Times. It also severely limits the plaintiff’s right to discovery, which can often be costly to a defendant but immensely valuable to determining the cause of the plaintiff’s damages. Departing Justice David H. Souter sided with the minority in this case, expressing dismay in his dissent and suggesting the decision could “upend,” said the Times, the federal civil litigation system. He argued that complaints should be accepted “no matter how skeptical the court may be,” so long as the accusations are not “sufficiently fantastic to defy reality as we know it.” “[Claims] about little green men, or the plaintiff’s recent trip to Pluto, or experiences in time travel,” he said, should be the bar for disqualification. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg agreed, suggesting the court had “messed up the federal rules” for civil suits. The Supreme Court’s decision may be read here (PDF link). With AFP.