“Join me as I wreck my last artifact of support for the war criminal-in-chief!”
“With a snowstorm bearing down on the capital, it approved a House-passed measure that allows the government to borrow more money to pay its bills through March 2015. President Barack Obama signaled that he would sign the legislation, so the Senate vote was the last hurdle to resolving the debt ceiling issue until after the November congressional elections. Wednesday’s result was a blow to tea party conservatives who oppose any kind of increase in federal borrowing. A dozen Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, joined Democrats to overcome a filibuster on a 67-31 procedural vote.”
http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/12/politics/senate-debt-ceiling/
“The Obama administration wants Congress to raise the debt limit in the next 16 days. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew sent a letter to Speaker John Boehner on Wednesday, saying the ‘best course of action would be for Congress to’ raise the nation’s debt limit ‘before February 7 to ensure orderly financing of the government.’ At the latest, Lew writes, Congress must lift the cap by the end of February. The debt limit is not the fiscal standoff it used to be. When Republicans first took the House, they demanded deep cuts to spending as a price for increasing the national borrowing limit. Last time they lifted the cap, they did it without concessions from Democrats and President Barack Obama.”
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/01/jack-lew-to-john-boehner-debt-ceiling-102488.html
“Predictably, President Obama has done nothing significant to diminish the National Security State. He presided over its expansion. Why should he want to undo it? It’s a big mistake, however, in understanding the National Security State (NSS) and what to do about it to focus on Obama. The issue concerning the NSS is much deeper than one man, one president and a few terms of office. Once we understand the NSS, we will see that it will only disappear in two cases. Either it falls when the American Empire falls, or it falls if Americans fundamentally rethink and change their entire government.”
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/01/michael-s-rozeff/the-national-security-state-2/
“Worse than Richard Nixon. An unprecedented abuse of powers. The most un-American president in the nation’s history. Nat Hentoff does not think much of President Obama. And now, the famous journalist says it is time to begin looking into impeachment. Hentoff sees the biggest problem as Obama’s penchant to rule by executive order when he can’t convince Congress to do things his way. The First Amendment expert still hews left on many issues, railing against former President George W. Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney, the prison at Guantanamo Bay and the National Defense Authorization Act.”
http://www.wnd.com/2014/01/liberal-icon-urges-obama-impeachment/
“The crux of this tactic is that US political leaders pretend to validate and even channel public anger by acknowledging that there are ‘serious questions that have been raised’. They vow changes to fix the system and ensure these problems never happen again. And they then set out, with their actions, to do exactly the opposite: to make the system prettier and more politically palatable with empty, cosmetic ‘reforms’ so as to placate public anger while leaving the system fundamentally unchanged, even more immune than before to serious challenge. This scam has been so frequently used that it is now easily recognizable.”
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/17/obama-nsa-reforms-bulk-surveillance-remains
“The president is at least as fond of passive constructions as Chris ‘Mistakes Were Made’ Christie. ‘Too often,’ Obama said, ‘new authorities were instituted without adequate public debate.’ But before the Snowden revelations, the American public didn’t know that the administration considered all Americans’ call records ‘relevant’ to terrorism investigations under section 215 of the Patriot Act–and Obama liked it that way. Still, Obama pointed out, his review group on NSA surveillance found ‘no indication that this database has been intentionally abused.’ In the speech, Obama congratulated himself for maintaining a ‘healthy skepticism towards our surveillance programs.'”
“FBI agents and CIA intelligence officials, constitutional law expert professor Jonathan Turley, Time Magazine, Keith Olbermann and the Washington Post have all said that U.S. government officials ‘were trying to create an atmosphere of fear in which the American people would give them more power’. And former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge admits that he was pressured to raise terror alerts to help Bush win reelection. Fear sells. This didn’t stop with Bush … politicians are still still fearmongering every chance they get. (Indeed, the biggest fearmongerers themselves quietly back terrorism). Sociologists have shown that fear of terrorism makes people stupid and malleable.”
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/01/fear.html
“Forty-two percent of Americans, on average, identified as political independents in 2013, the highest Gallup has measured since it began conducting interviews by telephone 25 years ago. Meanwhile, Republican identification fell to 25%, the lowest over that time span. At 31%, Democratic identification is unchanged from the last four years but down from 36% in 2008. Americans are increasingly declaring independence from the political parties. The general trend in recent years, including the 2012 election year, has been toward greater percentages of Americans identifying with neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party, although most still admit to leaning toward one of the parties.”
http://www.gallup.com/poll/166763/record-high-americans-identify-independents.aspx
“When the country elected Barack Obama, they thought they had kicked the coup plotters out of the White House and out of power. Yet the neocon legacy stayed intact: the secret Panopticon they built was inherited and expanded by Obama & Co. Indeed, Obama’s Justice Department has gone far beyond the Bush administration in their fierce prosecution of whistle-blowers and their brazen intimidation of the media. If anything like that had happened during the Bush years, Nancy Pelosi would’ve been at the head of a massive San Francisco demonstration where speaker after speaker would’ve denounced the ‘fascist’ Bush ‘regime.’ Today Pelosi is leading the charge against reining in the NSA.”
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2014/01/05/the-fight-of-our-lives/