Missing The Effing Point!
I, as promised, have kept silent during the first days of our new President’s administration. I hoped, along with most of the rest of America, that we would see substantive change, even though I knew it would be far more socialist change that I personally would be able to stomach. Nevertheless, there were even deeper American issues that I really believed that President Obama would wish to address.
President Barak Obama changed his tune Wednesday, softening his "no prosecution, no way" stance on investigation and prosecution of members of the administration of former President George W. Bush who sanctioned torture of prisoners.
Obama caved to pressure from members of his own party who want blood — lots of blood — from the rotting corpse of the so-called Bush legacy.
Which begs the question: How did they change Obama’s mind?
Top US officials, not a "few bad apples" of low rank, were behind harsh military interrogation tactics that spread from Guantanamo Bay to Afghanistan to Iraq, a new Senate report said.
The Senate Armed Services Committee’s 261-page report, the fruit of its investigation into US treatment of "war on terror" detainees, is likely to stoke the ongoing debate over US techniques widely seen as torture.
President Barack Obama opened the door on Tuesday to possible prosecutions of U.S. officials who laid the legal groundwork for harsh interrogation of terrorism suspects during the Bush administration.
No wasting time digging up the past? So much for that.
President Barack Obama said Tuesday that his attorney general would determine whether anyone from the Bush administration broke the law by crafting a legal rationale for drastic, demeaning interrogations of terror suspects. On the surface, it was a pragmatic call: Let the Justice Department lawyers check it out.
President Obama says the government will not prosecute CIA interrogators who used harsh interrogation techniques amounting to torture but left the door open to prosecuting the top Bush administration legal officials who authorized them.
Obama should drop the talk of prosecutions. If bad legal advice were a crime, the prisons would be packed. And the hubris and disdain for the American tradition and international law of those officials is disheartening, but nothing has shown any other motive than a desire to protect their country and incarcerate those who attacked it.
Not many financial companies saw an opportunity in the economic meltdown. But large insurers did, and now they’re using it to lobby for a lucrative change they’ve sought unsuccessfully for years.
Industry estimates suggest a rather obscure change in federal law could be worth billions of dollars annually to insurers. Key lawmakers and Obama administration officials say they’re open to it, and industry lobbyists see the drive to overhaul financial rules in the wake of the meltdown as their best chance in a long time to achieve it.
President Barack Obama has moved to address another presidential campaign promise by urging the worldwide abolition of nuclear weapons. He made the point with notable drama as well as attention in Prague in the Czech Republic earlier this month.
The President explicitly linked this very positive proposal to support for new efforts to negotiate nuclear stability with Iran. That radical Islamic regime is engaging in very substantial long-term nuclear development, while denying that any weapons efforts are part of their program.
Not since the financially endowed Howard Hughes designed for the otherwise endowed Jane Russell the world’s first cantilevered, under-wired strapless bra — lifting her to prominence in his film, "The Outlaw" — has a "New Foundation" debuted with such global prominence.
Liberal commentators were recently having a great, big if indignant chuckle at the expense of all those tea party yo-yos who didn’t get it that President Obama had a tax cut in mind for them, and that, hey, it was conservatism that brewed the current mess.
There was a lesson in this, namely that at least some if not all pundits of leftist stripe are not infrequently outthought by people of far less pretentiousness, by men and women who understand, for starters, what’s headed our way under Obama’s agenda.