Former Nasa astronauts who went to the Moon have told the BBC of their dismay at President Barack Obama’s decision to push back further Moon missions.
Jim Lovell, commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, said Mr Obama’s decision would have “catastrophic consequences” for US space exploration.

The last man on the Moon, Eugene Cernan, said it was “disappointing”.

Last month Mr Obama cancelled Nasa’s Constellation Moon landings programme, approved by ex-President George W Bush.

Nasa still aims to send astronauts back to the Moon, but it is likely to take decades and some believe that it will never happen again.

‘Moral leadership’

The astronauts spoke to the BBC at a private event at the Royal Society in London on Friday organised by the Foundation for Science and Technology.

They were joined there by the first man on the Moon, Neil Armstrong.

As the last astronaut to return to the Apollo 17 lunar module in 1972, Cernan was the last man to set foot on the Moon.

[Read more at BBC News]

Josh Gerstein over at Politico sent Threat Level his piece underscoring once again President Barack Obama is not the civil-liberties knight in shining armor many were expecting.Gerstein posts a televised interview of Obama and John Walsh of America’s Most Wanted. The nation’s chief executive extols the virtues of mandatory DNA testing of Americans upon arrest, even absent charges or a conviction. Obama said, “It’s the right thing to do” to “tighten the grip around folks” who commit crime.

When it comes to civil liberties, the Obama administration has come under fire for often mirroring his predecessor’s practices surrounding state secrets, the Patriot Act and domestic spying. There’s also Gitmo, Jay Bybee and John Yoo.

Now there’s DNA sampling. Obama told Walsh he supported the federal government, as well as the 18 states that have varying laws requiring compulsory DNA sampling of individuals upon an arrest for crimes ranging from misdemeanors to felonies. The data is lodged in state and federal databases, and has fostered as many as 200 arrests nationwide, Walsh said.

[Read more at Wired's Threat Level]

The Raw Story:

The American Civil Liberties Union has never treated the Obama administration with kid gloves, but with their latest ad buy it’s become increasingly clear that their patience for the continuance of some Bush-era policies has run quite thin.”What will it be Mr. President?” the ACLU asks in a full-page New York Times advertisement published Sunday. “Change or more of the Same?” The ad also features a portrait of Obama that morphs into Bush.

The ACLU’s images of the subtle transition between presidents is filtered and lacking in detail, and spans just four frames. However, it appears to be a take-off of a protest image that circulated Facebook and some progressive blogs late last year, showing a similar transition in eerie detail.

The ACLU’s full-size advertisement is below this text.

The ad specifically pressured the administration to hold fast to their decision to try the alleged 9/11 plotters in the judicial system and not by military tribunal as many Obama opponents have called for.

[Read more at The Raw Story]

He said he would bomb Pakistan and he has.

He indicated he would be willing to sacrifice men, women and children to assassinate leaders of those warring against American occupations and he has.

He said he would, and he did, send more troops to broaden the war against Pashtun Taliban, formerly the Reagan approved and recognized government of Afghanistan.

He has praised Americans for having fought the Vietnamese in their own country and keeps American troops in Iraq, though he called Iraq a “dumb war.” when seeking the votes of citizens no longer supporting that war.

He has praised European settlers for their westward march across America without acknowledging the death and suffering of the indigenous peoples of the continent whose nations the settlers from across the sea conquered

He pre-justified the week long massacre of Gaza, and kept silent during the chilling dispatch of four hundred Palestinian children along with over a thousand of their relatives and friends

While still a candidate, he signed on to giving hundreds of billions of dollars to bankers who favor, propagate and profit from wars.

We could have been pretty sure Obama would never condemn the industrial investment banks of Henry Ford, Rockefeller, General Motors, General Electric, IBM, Dupont, Joe Kennedy, Prescott Bush, Averell Harriman, Brown Brothers, J.P. Morgan, Chase Bank, Allen and John Foster Dulles, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Union Carbide, Westinghouse, Gillette, Goodrich, Singer, Eastman Kodak, Coca-Cola, ITT, and media magnates William Randolph Hearst, the UP Syndicate, the Chicago Tribune, and others for having backed Adolph Hitler and invested in arming the Germany of the Nazis up to superpower status, knowing full well (and in most cases pleased) that Hitler persecuted Jews and Communists.

Obama has always proclaimed capitalism and the United States as, overall, “a force for good in the world.”

“Hope springs eternal.” is the saying often applied to circumstances that don’t appear to warrant hope.

Zen Buddhists, practicing a strict application of highly disciplined mind, understand “hope’ and “fear’ as two sides of the same coin.

Just as fear can have a negative function, hope can paralyze, can be made to substitute for action and can becloud accurate appraisal and decision making.

Both hope and fear anticipate something that has not yet happened. For example, hoping that a certain damn will not break is similar to fearing that it will.

Fear and hope, not unlike prayers evoked in their name, are retreats from endeavor, a postponement or avoidance of involvement. As does fear, hope lessens the awareness and attention so critical to decisive action.

Millions of progressives, even if not completely hooked by the campaign slogan of “change” hoped that Obama would be different. But, as the wise saying goes, “Hoping doesn’t make it so.”

Before the election our priority was getting a Democrat elected as America’s first black president, and we felt obliged to lay low so the rabid and ignorant right wing plurality out there would not associate Obama with criticism of America, or the peace movement which corporate media characterizes as appeasement and weakness. Immediately after inauguration Obama bombed Pakistan as promised (a promise most assuredly meant for the ear of the military complex).

During our present generation, the lies, misrepresentations and treachery of U.S. presidents (Obama now included), Congresses and a Pentagon subservient media cartel have caused a multi massive amount of Muslim children to fall in harms way of lethal U.S. military action in Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Pakistan and Yemen. This merely continues a century long history of vicious and cruel armed Western imperialism in Muslim lands: various sub-Saharan African colonies, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Syria, Jordan, Palestine and Iraq, since the Ottoman empire was sliced up for England and France with United States of America in profitable acquiescence.

Our hope was incredibly misplaced, that once in office, Obama would have acted contrary to his promises of bellicose intentions and as an exception to all his imperialist predecessors, that he had only pretended to be a hawk before an war indoctrinated electorate in order to gain office. A capitalist chief executive allowed to place the lives of children being slaughtered by U.S. military in poor Third World countries above the interests of Wall Street war profits would have no precedent.

Extremists fighting for justice in a world of U.S. military hegemony hold the millions of Americans limiting themselves to only hoping for a safer fate for foreign children, guilty and responsible as the Commander-in Chief Obama’s other officials of U.S. corporate governance.

Americans in general have a good amount of leisure but little or no interest in the crimes of their government abroad. Among them are many Americans who are personally disturbed or uncomfortable particularly about their awesomely powerful military taking the lives and limbs of children. But the greater part of pangs of conscience is devoted to hoping rather than any action at all. Those who seek news and information beyond that twisted on TV and in tabloids, will know of daily atrocities by the same boastful military that though having a large military facility less than three hundred miles from the Haiti earthquake zone did little more than block the aid coming into the Port-au Prince airport from other nations, disembarking its fine Navy hospital ship from Maryland only three days after the quake struck.

Since hope and fear are two sides of the same coin, obviously fear of retribution beyond that of 9/11 is more prevalent than the hope that our killing will cease.

This article was originally published by OpEdNews in February 2010.

The Republican National Committee plans to raise money this election cycle through an aggressive campaign capitalizing on “fear” of President Barack Obama and a promise to “save the country from trending toward socialism.”

The strategy was detailed in a confidential party fundraising presentation, obtained by POLITICO, which also outlines how “ego-driven” wealthy donors can be tapped with offers of access and “tchochkes.”

The presentation was delivered by RNC Finance Director Rob Bickhart to top donors and fundraisers at a party retreat in Boca Grande, Florida on February 18, a source at the gathering said.

In neat PowerPoint pages, it lifts the curtain on the often-cynical terms of political marketing, displaying an air of disdain for the party’s donors that is usually confined to the barroom conversations of political operatives.

The presentation explains the Republican fundraising in simple terms.

Read More: Politico

The new Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) and the fiscal year 2011 defense budget request have arrived. Unfortunately, they miss the mark: The QDR vastly expands the military’s missions, and the budget responds in kind by expanding for the fourteenth consecutive year.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates argued that the two documents were “shaped by a bracing dose of realism” with regard to risk and resources. I respectfully disagree. The QDR’s risk assessment piles on missions like a short-order cook stacks pancakes at IHOP, setting no priorities between near-term challenges and long-term requirements. And the budget continues to accommodate such a limitless agenda. The bottom line: This lack of discipline will broaden the country’s defense requirements and expand military spending in ways that will make establishing budget and mission discipline in the future even more difficult.

The lack of budget discipline deconstructed.

First, some context: The $708 billion defense budget request is higher than at any point in our post-World War II history. It is 16 percent higher than the 1952 Korean War budget peak and 36 percent higher than the 1968 Vietnam War budget peak (in constant dollars).

Gates argues that the budget plan “rebalances” spending by putting an emphasis on the near-term challenges of counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and stabilization operations. Indeed, it does request funding for special forces, unmanned aerial vehicles, and other equipment useful in the prosecution of the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the current budget plan makes no effort at prioritizing these near-term commitments against funding for longer-term commitments. Instead, it increases funding for both near-term and long-term programs and activities…

[continues at at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists]

There’s actually a message at the end of the video … enjoy (the video was directed by Ron Howard):

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama has signed a one-year extension of several provisions in the nation’s main counterterrorism law, the Patriot Act.

Provisions in the measure would have expired on Sunday without Obama’s signature Saturday.

The act, which was adopted in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, expands the government’s ability to monitor Americans in the name of national security.

Three sections of the Patriot Act that stay in force will:

Authorize court-approved roving wiretaps that permit surveillance on multiple phones.

Allow court-approved seizure of records and property in anti-terrorism operations.

Permit surveillance against a so-called lone wolf, a non-U.S. citizen engaged in terrorism who may not be part of a recognized terrorist group…

President Obama’s made-for-TV health summit probably didn’t change many minds. And it certainly didn’t produce any bipartisan breakthroughs on Thursday. But it did clarify some of the biggest differences between Republicans and Democrats.

The 18 Republicans who attended the all-day meeting at Blair House, just across from the White House, were polite, but firm. The bills passed by the Democratic House and Senate last year are simply too big for them, and for the American people, to swallow.

“We’ve come to the conclusion we don’t do comprehensive well,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Republican from Tennessee. “Our country is too big, too complicated, too decentralized for Washington; a few of us here, just to write a few rules about remaking 17 percent of the economy all at once.”

But Democrats were just as firm in response. They’ve tried addressing problems in health care piece by piece.

“The evidence shows that incremental reform not only does less, it costs more,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon.

[Read more at NPR]

Barack Obama is not inept, greedy or stupid and he isn’t one of  “us”.

He rose from obscurity to power with his top economics adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the co-founder of David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission and he travels in the same circles as other members of the super-secret Skull & Bones Society at Yale University, who pretend to be running for president every four years.

The decision to have Obama preside over the greatest financial calamity since the Great Depression was made five years ago; the November election was a formality. (Why Joseph Biden will be the Next Vice President of the United States)

To believe otherwise, is to ignore the Bradley/Palin effect and the decision by John McCain to wait until his concession speech to shed the image of a nasty “grumpy old man.”

In September 2008, when the Obama campaign seemed to be slumping and their candidate’s long-standing lead in the polls had evaporated, the senator’s supporters openly worried that a potential victory might be slipping away. Then, providence joined the campaign: the failure of the giant investment bank Lehman Brothers followed by a global financial meltdown in the month of October.

And, “speaking of change”, escalating the war in Afghanistan and Iraq and his policies on Guantanamo, state secrets, renditions, executive power, bail-outs and the stimulus packages are for the most part identical to those of George W. Bush.

However, the policies at the Federal Reserve have changed…inexplicably, monumentally and historically:

As of October 2008, the men behind the Federal Reserve, all connected to the House of Rothschild, are no longer giving up what’s left of their real wealth so the middle class can live the American Dream, a nightmare for the planet.

Brian Deese, special assistant to president Obama for economic policy, in his first government position, shuffles back and forth from the West Wing to the Treasury Department rewriting the rules of American “capitalism” as he dismantles the US Housing, Automobile Industry and the American Dream. (The 31-Year-Old in Charge of Dismantling G.M., David E. Sanger)

Deese’s First Rule: Withdraw Credit and Liquidity:

Causing spending to fall even further, forcing companies to cut back on inventory and staff – Creating even more unemployment…263,000 jobs eliminated bringing the total to 39 million Americans who are no longer working or looking for work. (The September Employment Rate is 90%)

And that’s before the recently announced “planned three-year budget freeze on government discretionary spending.”

The Federal Reserve Act of 1913

One of the most important domestic acts in the nation’s history took the power to create money from the people and gave it to the robber barons of our filtered history books in theory for profit.

The Federal Reserve was instrumental in the development of America into a world power.

The United States, in its first decades, was a land of small farms and nearby towns with few cities of any consequence. The young nation seemed far more interested in becoming a successful experiment in democracy, rather than an economic power.

A central bank, necessary for a consumer society, large cities, a common medium of exchange, and a mechanism to regulate that medium were greeted with hostility, since many of the nation’s leaders disdained the urban life.

Anyone who spoke against the “Creature from Jekyll Island” by G. Edward Griffin was silenced.

Presidents Garfield and McKinley, outspoken champions of “sound” money and opponents of a central bank, were suspiciously silenced permanently.

The conflict between rural values and urban reality ended when Woodrow Wilson “unwittingly ruined his country” and signed into law the legislation that put “the growth of the nation . . . and all our activities in the hands of a few scoundrels (men).”

Once those scoundrels got control of the supply of money in the Franklin Roosevelt Administration, they began to buy government securities at the rate of ten million dollars a week for 10 weeks, and created one hundred million dollars in new (checkbook) currency, which alleviated the critical famine of money and credit, and the factories started hiring people again.” (Secrets of the Federal Reserve, Eustace Mullins)

Now those scoundrels remain in control of the supply of money in the Barack Obama Administration, they are making generous interest payments to the banks for “parking” their TARP and other government taxpayer bailout money, which is aggravating the critical famine of money and credit, and the factories started laying people off (263,000 people in September bringing the total to 39 million Americans who are no longer working or looking for work).

One of the more absurd notions that found its way into the history books and the writings of economic experts, is that somehow these Robinhood barons (swindlers and scoundrels of history) were made wealthier by manipulating the Monopoly money they created out of “thin air” used to “alleviated the critical famine of money and credit” so the factories could start hiring people again and finance our consumer society.

In 1910, the men behind the Federal Reserve Rockefeller, Kuhn, Loeb and Morgan, all connected to the Rothschild’s global financial empire, owned or controlled one-sixth of the world’s real wealth—gold, silver and raw materials—not the fiat currency we call money.

And their real wealth, where is it now?

Used up, as in consumed, by the middle class so former members of the Third Estate (serfs and slaves) could have houses, cars, RVs, TVs and DVDs—the affordable things we take for granted which put the planet, according to theGEO4, a massive United Nations Report, at the “unknown points of no return.” (Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité – Providence, Miracle or What Really Happened)

The swindler’s and scoundrel’s wealth, not yours or mine, was eventually “cut, mined and hauled away,” so that Americans could “trash the planet” with that cheap stuff until October 2008.

Money control, Gustav Stolper wrote in “This Age of Fables” is, “the supreme and most comprehensive of all governmental controls and the 1838 quote:

“Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws” (Incorrectly attributed to Mayer Amschel Rothschild who died in 1812).

Reflects the “maxim” of the House of Rothschild.

However, “money lenders of the Old World” cannot be talking about profits unless you believe The Rothschilds didn’t understand that they were about to give up $500 trillion of real wealth in exchange for $500 trillion pieces of worthless fiat currency.

During the last 100 years, those swindlers and scoundrels were able to distort the structure of relative prices; generate misallocations of labor and capital throughout the economy; rationalize new governmental interventions in the face of the market “instability” manipulate the patterns of and the profits from international trade which resulted in the Industrial Revolution, the Great Depression, the stagflation of the 1970s, the dot-com and the housing market bubbles and unprecedented prosperity for the middle class.

Would we have a financial crisis to go with our environmental crisis if Wilson hadn’t ruined the country when he gave away the people’s right to print their own money and we had our own bank?

No.

North Dakota is the only state in the union to own its own bank. The Bank of North Dakota (BND) was established by the state legislature in 1919 specifically to free farmers and small businessmen from the clutches of out-of-state bankers and railroad men.

The state of North Dakota, one of only two states (along with Montana) expected to meet its budget in 2010. North Dakota was also the only state to actually gain jobs in 2009 while other states were losing them. Since 2000, North Dakota’s GNP has grown 56 percent, personal income has grown 43 percent and wages have grown 34 percent. North Dakota in 2009, had a budget surplus of $1.3 billion, the largest it ever had – in a state with a population of 700,000. (The North Dakota Model for Capitalizing Community Banks, Ellen Brown)

North Dakota, a land of small farms and towns more interested in remaining a successful experiment in democracy rather than an economic power.

At this point, it is advantageous to consider the efforts of writer Andrew Hitchcock:

“The Rothschilds have been in control of the world for a very long time, their tentacles reaching into many aspects of our daily lives, and are the hidden hand behind all the social cataclysms in history: The French and American Revolution, the Civil War, World Wars, the Industrial Revolution, the Federal Reserve (and our consumer society).”

John Sherman, a Rothschild protégé in a letter sent to New York bankers on June 25, 1863 in support of the then proposed National Banking Act, wrote:

“The few who understand the system, will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favors that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantages…will bear its burden without complaint, and perhaps without suspecting that the system is inimical to their best interests.” (World War II And Pound, 1940-1945: The Anti-Semite Revealed, Ellen Cardona)

In other words, the “few that understand the system”, without a 20th century environmental perspective of the middle class “trashing the planet”, would not be capable of comprehending a system that would put the planet at the “unknown points of no return” because the environmental damage and pollution was the goal and not the unintended consequences of the Industrial Revolution and our consumer society.

The Federal Reserve isn’t evil because they print our money and make us pay interest on it; they are evil because they are in a metaphysical war with mother-earth (Gaea).

October 2008 marked the last day the “lender of last resort” would give up what’s left of their real wealth, used to con us into shopping for useless toxic stuff, to weaken their opponent, mother-earth. (Ominous Signs Are Aligned: Not A Particularly Good Sign (11-09))

Robert Singer writes for  disinfo, The Market Oracle and The Peoples Voice.

Georgia Power still plans to increase rates next year to finance two new nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle despite billions of dollars in federal loan guarantees announced Tuesday by the Obama administration.Georgia Power spokesman Jeff Wilson said any savings the utility will see from the federal loan backing won’t occur until January 2012. That means ratepayers will see their electric bills rise by an average of $1.30 a month in 2011 as planned, he said.

The Obama administration said the nuclear plant near Augusta had been selected to receive more than $8 billion in federal loan guarantees. The expansion at Vogtle will mark the first nuclear power plant construction in the United States in nearly three decades.

The two new reactors are scheduled to be completed in 2017 at a price tag of $14 billion.

Last year, the Georgia Legislature approved a bill allowing Georgia Power to begin charging ratepayers for the expansion at Plant Vogtle some six years before the first of the two new reactors is set to go online. Under the bill, which was signed into law by Gov. Sonny Perdue, the rates will gradually step up until ratepayers are paying an additional $9.10 a month in 2017.

The new law allows Georgia Power, a subsidiary of Southern Co., to begin to collect some $1.6 billion in financing and shareholder equity costs early.

[Read more at the AP]

She’s frightening. Mark, that is frightening stuff. Frightening. First of all, president don’t declare war. Anybody knows that in high school. Congress has to declare war. To declare war on Iran, I don’t think the most far right, Middle East hawk will talk about declaring war on Iran, a country with 70-some million people, with an advanced air force. … Why does she talk like that? Is Michael Ledeen, a real hawk, writing this stuff for her? I don’t know anyone as far right as that, besides him.

The Birthers were back in force at the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville.

The high-profile resurgence of the Birther claims on cable television provoked much self-satisfaction from liberals as the latest evidence of the influence of wingnuts on conservative politics.

But there’s an inconvenient truth liberals are going to have to confront: The Birthers began not on the right, but on the left.

Investigations for my new book, Wingnuts, revealed that the Birther conspiracy theory was first concocted by renegade members of the original Obama haters, Party Unity My Ass, known more commonly by their acronym, the PUMAs. They were a splinter group of hard-core Hillary Clinton supporters who did not want to give up the ghost after the bitter 50-state Bataan Death March to the 2008 Democratic nomination.

Read more of John Avlon’s article in the Daily Beast

I don’t know if you’ve looked at the news lately, but apparently we’re in some kind of economic recovery. You’d probably have to be reading the news to know about it, because no one that I know is experiencing the effects, and economic indicators that affect people without stock portfolios don’t seem to indicate that anything is getting better. To anyone paying attention, we’re in far more danger of total economic collapse than we were two years ago.

Full Article at Black Sun Gazette

We’re going on two years of the global economic crisis that has rocked our society to its foundations. All the conventional wisdom of the post-war era about the eradication of social inequality and class conflict under the auspices of continual capitalist development has been exposed as a propagandist deception.

Any illusions that people had in the ability of capitalism to solve the world’s problems has rapidly evaporated. Even as conditions worsen, the contradictions of our system are laid bare.

Full Article at Black Sun Gazette

By Thomas Frank at USA Today:

Body scanners that look under airline passengers’ clothing for hidden weapons could be in nearly half the nation’s airport checkpoints by late 2011, according to an Obama administration plan announced Monday.

The $215 million proposal to acquire 500 scanners next year, combined with the 450 to be bought this year, marks the largest addition of airport-security equipment since immediately after the 9/11 attacks. There are only 40 body scanners in a total of 19 airports now.

“It’s a move in the right direction,” aviation-security consultant Douglas Laird said. “We need to scan all passengers.”

The push for more scanners accelerated after the failed Christmas Day attempt to bomb an airliner near Detroit. Suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded Flight 253 in Amsterdam after walking through a metal detector with powder explosives hidden in his underwear, authorities say. Police allege he tried to trigger an explosion by igniting the powder, which caught fire but did not cause any serious damage before Abdulmutallab was subdued by the crew and passengers.

Privacy advocate Marc Rotenberg called the scanners “a deeply invasive intrusion” that would inconvenience millions of innocent travelers with screening that takes longer than metal detectors. “We’ll have another Homeland Security Department program for the war on terror used almost exclusively on Americans,” said Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Laird said the administration should emphasize installing body scanners in major European airports “because that’s where the threats come out of.” European countries such as the United Kingdom and the Netherlands are adding the scanners. Countries such as Germany and Italy are considering the technology, which creates black-and-white images of passengers under their clothing…

[continues at USA Today]

Last week, I wrote about a revelation buried in a Washington Post article by Dana Priest which described how the Obama administration has adopted the Bush policy of targeting selected American citizens for assassination if they are deemed (by the Executive Branch) to be Terrorists.  As The Washington Times‘ Eli Lake reports, Adm. Dennis Blair was asked about this program at a Congressional hearing yesterday and he acknowledged its existence:

The U.S. intelligence community policy on killing American citizens who have joined al Qaeda requires first obtaining high-level government approval, a senior official disclosed to Congress on Wednesday.

Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair said in each case a decision to use lethal force against a U.S. citizen must get special permission. . . .

He also said there are criteria that must be met to authorize the killing of a U.S. citizen that include “whether that American is involved in a group that is trying to attack us, whether that American is a threat to other Americans. Those are the factors involved.”

Although Blair emphasized that it requires “special permission” before an American citizen can be placed on the assassination list, consider from whom that “permission” is obtained:  the President, or someone else under his authority within the Executive Branch.  There are no outside checks or limits at all on how these “factors” are weighed.  In last week’s post, I wrote about all the reasons why it’s so dangerous — as well as both legally and Consitutionally dubious — to allow the President to kill American citizens not on an active battlefield during combat, but while they are sleeping, sitting with their families in their home, walking on the street, etc.  That’s basically giving the President the power to impose death sentences on his own citizens w

[Read more at Salon]

Lawyers for President Obama have been working behind the scenes to prepare for the possibility of one, and maybe two Supreme Court vacancies this spring.

Court watchers believe two of the more liberal members of the court, justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, could decide to step aside for reasons of age and health. That would give the president his second and third chance to shape his legacy on the Supreme Court.

Last week, when Obama took the nearly unprecedented step of criticizing the court’s opinion in a major campaign finance case during his State of the Union speech, some believed he was showcasing for the American people that presidential elections, and Supreme Court nominations count.

“With all due deference to separation of powers,” the president said, ” last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections. I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities.”

Doug Kendall, of the progressive Constitutional Accountability Center, said the president’s message was clear: “President Obama’s spirited reaction to Citizens United at the State of the Union indicates he fully understands the importance of the federal judiciary and the ability of the Supreme Court to stand in the way of his administration’s agenda.” …

[continues at ABC News]

Dr. Paul is referring to Anwar al Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico and is now a Muslim cleric in Yemen.  Apparently Anwar is well on his way to become the first U.S citizen on the CIA’s official target list.

Game Change provides more evidence of the Clintons’ shocking behavior during the 2008 campaign.

The inevitable grumbling and grunting about the use of unattributed quotations in Game Change, the engrossing new campaign book by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, has been accompanied by a more or less grudging general admission that nobody cited in these pages has so far complained of being misrepresented. To this suggestive point I would add, from comparatively limited experience, that where the authors discuss anything that I know about, they have it right. In fact, what they say is often less sensational than what they might have said.Surely this is particularly true of the most notorious rapid-response operation in modern political history: the infamous Clinton team and its eager outriders and propagandists. I am astonished at how relatively little attention this has received. If the book is to be believed, then the following things occurred:

1) After his wife’s third-place showing in the Iowa caucuses, Bill Clinton telephoned Sen. Edward Kennedy in pursuit of an endorsement and, according to Kennedy’s own account as given to a friend, said of then-Sen. Barack Obama: A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.

[Read more at Slate]

If you voted for marijuana as a CitizenTube question, then your vote didn’t count. Yes, questions about marijuana were the most popular in the CitizenTube voting Monday afternoon.

But YouTube, in a gutless move, decided at the last minute not to present the highest ranked questions to the President. Initial reports that the President had ignored the marijuana questions were inaccurate; YouTube took pot, the top vote getter, out of the running.

President Obama never even got an opportunity to answer the most popular question of all.

Wait, what? “We’ll let you vote, but don’t expect it to actually MEAN anything.”

If they were going to ignore the questions that got the most votes, then why, exactly, did YouTube ask viewers to go to the trouble of voting? And why did they go through the motions of counting those votes, if they were good for bupkis, nada, zilch?

Read More of Steve Elliott’s article in Toke of the Town

Tension between the US and Iran heightened dramatically today with the disclosure that Barack Obama is deploying a missile shield to protect American allies in the Gulf from attack by Tehran.

The US is dispatching Patriot defensive missiles to four countries — Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Kuwait — and keeping two ships in the Gulf capable of shooting down Iranian missiles.

Washington is also helping Saudi Arabia develop a force to protect its oil installations.

American officials said the move is aimed at deterring an attack by Iran and reassuring Gulf states fearful that Tehran might react to sanctions by striking at US allies in the region. Washington is also seeking to discourage Israel from a strike against Iran by demonstrating that the US is prepared to contain any threat.

Read More: Global Research

While the capitalist media is treating Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address as some kind of “political pivot,” I didn’t hear much of the unexpected.

There was the usual economic nationalism, call for tax breaks for people who already have money, and stoking the flames of war while telling damned lies.

Full Article at Black Sun Gazette