Since you honestly believe in the democratic process, everything that follows as a result of yesterday’s election is now on your conscience. Take ownership. If you feel so strongly about the platform that you’ve supported, it is your responsibility to be outraged when the democratic process and the leader you’ve selected doesn’t deliver. 

Now, I’ve been watching you my whole life and I know that’s not going to happen. You only give a shit when it’s convenient. The likelihood that you’ll ever be called out for supporting a mass murderer is minimal, so you’re safe to scuttle away back into your blanket of apathy where consequences fly safely overhead. Don’t worry about the wars or the gays or women, daddy is going to take care of all of that for us.

Congratulations, you voted. Now fuck off. 

ernestsewell:

But you go ahead & vote for him, and let me know how all that CHANGE FORWARD works out for your jailed asses…..

———————————————————————-

A lone appeals judge bowed down to the Obama administration late Monday and reauthorized the White House’s ability to indefinitely detain American citizens without charge or due process.

Last week, a federal judge ruled that an temporary injunction on section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 must be made permanent, essentially barring the White House from ever enforcing a clause in the NDAA that can let them put any US citizen behind bars indefinitely over mere allegations of terrorist associations. On Monday, the US Justice Department asked for an emergency stay on that order, and hours later US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit Judge Raymond Lohier agreed to intervene and place a hold on the injunction.

The stay will remain in effect until at least September 28, when a three-judge appeals court panel is expected to begin addressing the issue.

On December 31, 2011, US President Barack Obama signed the NDAA into law, even though he insisted on accompanying that authorization with a statement explaining his hesitance to essentially eliminate habeas corpus for the American people.

“The fact that I support this bill as a whole does not mean I agree with everything in it,” President Obama wrote. “In particular, I have signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation, and prosecution of suspected terrorists.”

A lawsuit against the administration was filed shortly thereafter on behalf of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges and others, and Judge Forrest agreed with them in district court last week after months of debate. With the stay issued on Monday night, however, that justice’s decision has been destroyed.

With only Judge Lohier’s single ruling on Monday, the federal government has been once again granted the go ahead to imprison any person “who was part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners” until a poorly defined deadline described as merely “the end of the hostilities.” The ruling comes despite Judge Forrest’s earlier decision that the NDAA fails to“pass constitutional muster” and that the legislation contained elements that had a ”chilling impact on First Amendment rights”

Because alleged terrorists are so broadly defined as to include anyone with simple associations with enemy forces, some members of the press have feared that simply speaking with adversaries of the state can land them behind bars.

“First Amendment rights are guaranteed by the Constitution and cannot be legislated away,” Judge Forrest wrote last week. “This Court rejects the Government’s suggestion that American citizens can be placed in military detention indefinitely, for acts they could not predict might subject them to detention.”

Bruce Afran, a co-counsel representing the plaintiffs in the case Hedges v Obama, said Monday that he suspects the White House has been relentless in this case because they are already employing the NDAA to imprison Americans, or plan to shortly.

“A Department of Homeland Security bulletin was issued Friday claiming that the riots [in the Middle East] are likely to come to the US and saying that DHS is looking for the Islamic leaders of these likely riots,” Afran told Hedges for ablogpost published this week. “It is my view that this is why the government wants to reopen the NDAA — so it has a tool to round up would-be Islamic protesters before they can launch any protest, violent or otherwise. Right now there are no legal tools to arrest would-be protesters. The NDAA would give the government such power. Since the request to vacate the injunction only comes about on the day of the riots, and following the DHS bulletin, it seems to me that the two are connected. The government wants to reopen the NDAA injunction so that they can use it to block protests.”

Within only hours of Afran’s statement being made public, demonstrators in New York City waged a day of protests in order to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Although it is not believed that the NDAA was used to justify any arrests, more than 180 political protesters were detained by the NYPD over the course of the day’s actions. One week earlier, the results of a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the American Civil Liberties Union confirmed that the FBI has been monitoring Occupy protests in at least one instance, but the bureau would not give further details, citing that decision is “in the interest of national defense or foreign policy.”

Josh Gerstein, a reporter with Politico, reported on the stay late Monday and acknowledged that both Forrest and Lohier were appointed to the court by President Obama.

People still like Barack. I guess I must just be blinded by all the killing and torturing to feel the same way. Call me crazy, maybe. 

(via disobey)

disobey:

“Well, the question, I think, that people have got to ask themselves when they get into that booth is not what Obama has become, but what have we become? That is, what’s left of our values if we vote for a person that we believe has shielded war crimes or violated due process or implemented authoritarian powers. It’s not enough to say, ‘Yeah, he did all those things, but I really like what he did with the National Park System.’”

—

John Cusack

Note: I’ve posted several snips from this piece already. There are more to come. This is the conversation that we’re not having. Hence, the oversnippage.

(via theamericanbear)

I recall Mr. Cusack being very outspoken and supportive of Obama during his 2008 campaign. I’m really quite happy to see that he’s taking an honest look at the situation four years later. I wish more people had the courage to do the same thing. 

hipsterlibertarian:

According to those officials, the White House is now holding daily “high-level” meetings about ways to aid the various rebel factions in the Syrian Civil War, as well as contingency planning for their own military action to seize Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal.

War with Syria coming soon sooner?

The war drums have become simple background noise to our happy, everyday American life. 

Thrum, thrum.

Thrum, thrum. 

And nobody seems to give a fuck.

(via laliberty)

disobey:

Over a million Iraqis are dead from America’s war.

That sentence is a cognitive litmus test. Some people’s immediate reaction is, “That can’t be right,” because the United States couldn’t do that. Or because crimes on that scale don’t still happen. Or because they do happen, but only in horrible places that the United States hasn’t rescued.

One million is a “Grandpa, what did you do to stop it?” number. It’s a number that undeniably puts the American state among history’s villains. Those who are not willing or able to accept this are physically unable to retain the fact that over a million Iraqis are dead. Their brains expel it like a foreign germ.

Noam Chomsky once wrote that the “sign of a truly totalitarian culture is that important truths simply lack cognitive meaning and are interpretable only at the level of ‘Fuck You,’ so they can then elicit a perfectly predictable torrent of abuse in response.”

That pretty much sums up the how the media reacted to the one million figure in 2007 when it was announced by the British polling firm Opinion Research Business (ORB). (In fact, the firm estimated 1,220,580 Iraqis had died, confirming and updating a separate study done the year before by researchers from Johns Hopkins University and published in the Lancet medical journal.)

Take Kevin O’Brien, deputy editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Upon receiving a media advisory about the findings from ORB, whose clients include the British Conservative Party and Morgan Stanley, this was his response: “Please remove me from your mailing list and spare me your transparent propaganda.”

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

“WE DON’T do body counts,” Gen. Tommy Franks once famously answered a reporter’s question about civilian casualties. He’s not alone.

Amid all the somber reflections last month about the end of the Iraq War, a specific number of how many Iraqis had died was rarely given. Reporters often described the tally of Iraqi casualties as an “untold number,” a somber-sounding phrase that reflects the same level of journalistic effort used for finding the death toll of squirrels in a forest fire.

This line from Reuter’s Mary Milliken was typical: “[T]oday was about remembering the untold number of Iraqis and nearly 4,500 Americans who died in the war.”

How many Americans died, Mary? Nearly 4,500. And how many Iraqis? Oh, you know, lots. A whole bunch.

“Untold number” implies that there are no available estimates of just how many Iraqis died. In fact there are two: an organization called IraqBodyCount (IBC) has tallied about 110,000 deaths, based on media accounts andhealth ministry records. IBC admits that its total is surely too low since occupying armies and sectarian civil wars are not known for meticulous bookkeeping, but it disputes the higher figures from ORB and Johns Hopkins.

Methodology debates aside, there are numbers on hand to describethe Iraqi death toll. They are “untold” only by reporters like Kevin O’Brien and Mary Milliken.

The silence around numbers is not so much a conspiracy as a reflection of the fact that some information is simply incompatible with the American imperial mindset.

Consider a different grisly number from a previous decade: According to the United Nations Children Fund, 500,000 Iraqi children died in the 1990sdue to United Nations sanctions (rammed through by the U.S.) that barred medicines and other basic necessities from entering the country.

In 2000, the UN humanitarian aid coordinator resigned to protest the sanctions, two years after his predecessor had done the same. Both of these life-long diplomats later used the word “genocide” to describe the American policy.

If you are ignorant of or forgot this information, you are not alone. So did the people who planned the Iraq War. There is no other way to explain the fact that America’s war and occupation strategy rested on the expectation that its soldiers would be greeted as liberators by the parents of half a million dead children. (The sanctions, by the way, weren’t imposed in the Kurdish north, the only part in Iraq that did not offer massive resistance to the U.S. occupation.)

It’s not by chance that many of the most committed antiwar activists are revolutionaries of one stripe or another. We are able to process and comprehend the staggering evil been done to Iraq because we are radicals. And vice versa.

Revolutionaries face the ironic conventional wisdom that because we want to see society radically transformed, we are ends-justifies-the-means fanatics who think nothing of how much blood might be spilled in the process.

But it was then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright who said of the deathsof 500,000 Iraqi children that “the price is worth it.” And it is current Defense Secretary Leon Panetta who used the exact same phrase recently regarding the second invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Those are the words of a fanatical order that anyone should be proud to oppose with all of their being.