( Steven Rosenfeld, Alternet, April 25, 2103)
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Let’s look at 50 reasons, some large and some small, why W. inspired so much anger.

1. He stole the presidency in 2000.

3. He covered up his past.

4. He loved the death penalty.

8. He ignored warnings about Osama bin Laden.

12. Bush turned to Iraq not Afghanistan.

14. He flat-out lied about Iraq’s weapons.

19. Bush pardoned the Plame affair leaker.

22. The war did not make the U.S. safer.

23. U.S. troops were given unsafe gear.

31. He cut veterans’ healthcare funding.

44. Bush let black New Orleans drown.

48. Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld.

49. He’s escaped accountability for his actions.

[COMMENT by Lorenzo: Little Bush is certainly the most simple-minded man to sit in the White House during my lifetime, and most definitely, IMO, one of the worst and most evil of our presidents. But then there was Nixon, who was obviously insane and who had an "enemies list", which was very un-presidential. And now there is Obama with a "KILL LIST", which is very un-American. . . . The Empire is in obvious decline.]

This first interview was recorded about one year after the 9/11 events . . . well worth the time to watch.

(Robert Parry, AlterNet, March 10, 2013)
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Indeed, newly disclosed documents have put old evidence into a sharply different light and suggest that history has substantially miswritten the two scandals by failing to understand that they actually were sequels to earlier scandals that were far worse. Watergate and Iran-Contra were, in part at least, extensions of the original crimes, which involved dirty dealings to secure the immense power of the presidency. . . . Shortly after Nixon took office in 1969, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover informed him of the existence of the file containing national security wiretaps documenting how Nixon’s emissaries had gone behind President Lyndon Johnson’s back to convince the South Vietnamese government to boycott the Paris Peace Talks, which were close to ending the Vietnam War in fall 1968.In the case of Watergate – the foiled Republican break-in at the Democratic National Committee in June 1972 and Richard Nixon’s botched cover-up leading to his resignation in August 1974 – the evidence is now clear that Nixon created the Watergate burglars out of his panic that the Democrats might possess a file on his sabotage of Vietnam peace talks in 1968. . . . The disruption of Johnson’s peace talks then enabled Nixon to hang on for a narrow victory over Democrat Hubert Humphrey. However, as the new President was taking steps in 1969 to extend the war another four-plus years, he sensed the threat from the wiretap file and ordered two of his top aides, chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, to locate it. But they couldn’t find the file.  » Continue reading “Nixon Proven Guilty of Intentionally Increasing American Deaths in Viet Nam”

( Adam Serwer, MotherJones, Mar. 5, 2013)
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Yes, the president does have the authority to use military force against American citizens on US soil—but only in “an extraordinary circumstance,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a letter to Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) Tuesday. . . . “The U.S. Attorney General’s refusal to rule out the possibility of drone strikes on American citizens and on American soil is more than frightening,” Paul said Tuesday. “It is an affront the constitutional due process rights of all Americans.” . . . The letter concludes, “were such an emergency to arise, I would examine the particular facts and circumstances before advising the president of the scope of his authority.” . . . In a Google+ Hangout last month, President Obama refused to say directly if he had the authority to use lethal force against US citizens. As Mother Jones reported at the time, the reason the president was being so coy is that the answer was likely yes. Now we know that’s exactly what was happening. “Any use of drone strikes or other pre-meditated lethal force inside the United States would raise grave legal and ethical concerns,” says Raha Wala, an attorney with Human Rights First. “There should be equal concern about using force overseas.”

(Stephen C. Webster, RawStory.com, February 15, 2013 )
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Professor Cornel West argued that President Barack Obama is, like Presidents George W. Bush and Richard Nixon before him, a “war criminal” uniquely responsible for the deaths of “over 200 children.” . . . West’s words were in response to a question about the administration’s seeming preference for killing terrorism suspects from the air rather than risking American lives to take them prisoner and hold them for an indefinite amount of time in military custody. A legal whitepaper obtained by NBC News recently exposed the Obama administration’s once-secret justification for the program, which authorizes a deadly airstrike if intelligence officials believe it may take out any “senior operational leaders” of al Qaeda or “associated forces,” even if that includes an American citizen. . . . “I think, my dear brother, the chickens are coming home to roost,” West told Smiley. “We’ve been talking about this for a good while, the immorality of drones, dropping bombs on innocent people. It’s been over 200 children so far. These are war crimes.” . . . Troublingly enough, West is right on the number: The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports that up to 216 children have died in three countries the U.S. is not formally at war with — Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia — as a result of suspected U.S. drone strikes starting in 2002 and dramatically escalating during Obama’s first term. Out of an estimated 451 total drone strikes during that period, over 300 were ordered by Obama against Pakistanis alone. The Bureau estimates that up to 4,643 people in all have been killed by drone strikes in those three countries. . . . Similarly, a United Nations committee said this month that “hundreds” of children have been killed by U.S. drone strikes since 2008, many which are personally approved by Obama, according to The New York Times. . . . “I think we have to be very honest, let us not be deceived: Nixon, Bush, Obama, they’re war criminals,” West said. “They have killed innocent people in the name of the struggle for freedom, but they’re suspending the law, very much like Wall Street criminals. The law is suspended for them, but the law applies for the rest of us. You and I, brother Tavis, if we kill an innocent person we go to jail, and we’re going to be in there forever.” . . . “I am not somebody who believes that the president has the authority to do whatever he wants, or whatever she wants, whenever they want, just under the guise of counter terrorism,” he said. “There have to be checks and balances on it.”

(Stephen C. Webster, RawStory.com, September 26, 2012 )
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“He’s gone beyond George W. Bush in drones, for example,” Nader told reporter Patrick Gavin. “He thinks the world is his plate, that national sovereignties mean nothing, drones can go anywhere. They can kill anybody that he suspects and every Tuesday he makes the call on who lives and who dies, supposed suspects in places like Yemen and Pakistan and Afghanistan, and that is a war crime and he ought to be held to account.” . . . President Obama’s own attorneys recognize that key portions of the U.S. drone bombing campaign in Pakistan and other countries are legally questionable, according to a report in The Wall St. Journal on Wednesday. That’s especially the case in Pakistan, which has stopped giving direct approval to U.S. drone strikes, but the bombs continue to fall anyway. . . . Casualty figures collected from media reports by the nonprofit New America Foundation show that between 1,877 and 3,177 people have been killed by drone strikes from 2004-2012, most of them being civilians. The vast majority of deaths reportedly happened during 2010, President Obama’s second year on the job. A study published this week by researchers at Stanford and New York Universities also claimed that only about 2 percent of the people killed in U.S. drone strikes were actual militants, saying at least 176 of those slain were children. . . . Nader added that Obama’s intellect and experience helped legitimize Bush’s “lawless war-mongering and militarism,” making him a “more effective evil” than Romney. However, he warned that the former Massachusetts governor is not to be trifled with either, calling him the greater of the two evils and warning that he’s “basically a corporation running for president masquerading as a human being.”

(Martin A. Lee, Alternet, August 10, 2012)
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Obama Administration sacrifices medical marijuana patients to political expediency.

Team Obama’s decision to crack down on the medical marijuana industry wasn’t motivated by public health concerns. The Justice Department green-lit a scorched earth campaign against medicinal cannabis in order to placate law enforcement and control the damage from the Fast and Furious scandal by deflecting attention to other matters.

Eric Holder, Obama’s embattled attorney general, was under mounting pressure from Congress to explain the botched “Fast and Furious” sting operation, in which 2,000 assault rifles and other firearms were sold to suspected traffickers for the Mexican drug cartels. It was intended as an intelligence-gathering ploy, but U.S. agents lost track of most of these weapons. . . . By early October 2011, there were calls for a special prosecutor to investigate whether Holder had perjured himself during testimony before Congress. Right-wing pundits described the scandal as “Obama’s Watergate.” The ATF announced a major shake-up at the top of the bureau. A chorus of disgruntled sheriffs and other G-men clamored for Holder’s resignation. The attorney general was losing support among law enforcement rank-and-file. . . . But Holder had an ace up his sleeve, and he played it at a crucial moment. . . . Ever since California voters approved Proposition 215, which legalized marijuana for medical use in 1996, law enforcement lobbyists had been urging the federal government to enforce prohibition and choke off the burgeoning industry. . . . On October 7, the same day Holder wrote a detailed letter to Rep. Issa, defending his handling of the Fast and Furious affair, four federal prosecutors in California held a hastily organized press conference in which they threw down the gauntlet and announced the start of a far-ranging crackdown that would nearly decimate the Golden State’s medical marijuana industry. . . . Within 10 months, close to half of California’s 1,400 dispensaries would shut down as the DEA waged an all-out vendetta against what Proposition 215 had unloosed. The drug police weren’t just going after the bad apples; they were going after every apple in the barrel. Cannabis dispensaries abiding by state law were raided by federal agents. Federal prosecutors threatened to seize property from landlords who rented to medical marijuana facilities. The feds also threatened municipal officials who sought to implement state medical marijuana regulations. Federally insured banks and credit card companies refused to service marijuana-related enterprises. . . . Medical marijuana proponents were stunned by the ferocity of the Obama administration’s assault on the industry in California and elsewhere. . . . It’s not as though Americans were dropping like flies because of medical marijuana abuse. More than a million Californians had gotten a doctor’s recommendation to use cannabis, and no fatalities or problematic health patterns attributable to the herb had emerged since the passage of Proposition 215. . . . Team Obama’s decision to crack down on the medical marijuana industry wasn’t motivated by public health concerns. The Justice Department green-lit a scorched earth campaign against medicinal cannabis in order to placate law enforcement and control the damage from the Fast and Furious scandal by deflecting attention to other matters. . . . Medical marijuana facilities were red meat for cops and an easy payday for narcs who were aching to take down pot-selling storefronts throughout the Golden State and beyond. Desperate to shore up support among law enforcement, Holder, a longtime marijuana foe, threw the drug war dogs the perfect bone on October 7, 2011. It was a politically expedient decision designed to protect the attorney general’s bureaucratic position. . . . Marijuana’s illegality has long been a useful vehicle for Machiavellian public officials.

(George Lakey, Nation Of Change, 3 Aug 2012)
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I see no signs of a revolutionary situation in Norway.  Students of revolution keep an eye on the perceived legitimacy of a nation’s leadership, and Norwegians are enormously confident that their little ship in a big global sea is being steered well.  . . . The United Kingdom is a different story.  The legitimacy of the nation’s leadership is definitely in trouble.  The mass media shout the stories of the irresponsibility of the 1 percent and the politicians they corrupt.  The government is a coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats and is enthusiastic about enforcing austerity, running down the National Health Service and education system, forcing English university students to pay more for what used to be free education and opening new coal mines.  Homelessness is already up by an estimated twenty-five percent. . . . One way that government’s hold on to their legitimacy is to have an opposition party that holds out hope that, if it is elected, things will dramatically improve.  That used to work in the U.K., as in the U.S. . . . While students of revolution need to pay attention to trends in legitimacy, another key question is this: Can the present leadership solve the biggest problems facing society? . . . Arguably the biggest problem is climate change.  While the British 1 percent is allowing some sensible policies, like electrifying the railways and increasing wind farms, there is no sign that it has the will really to take the necessary steps.  When you add together declining legitimacy, the inability to address climate change and the absence of a hopeful alternative within the institutional framework, you have conditions for the opening of a revolutionary situation over the next 10 years in the U.K. . . .       . . . How about the U.S.? » Continue reading “Is Revolution On The Way?”

Congress will debate and vote on a bill — the so-called “Defense Appropriations Act” — that will make us less safe by dumping over $600 billion into preparations for war.  Combined with military spending in other departments, this is 57% of all federal discretionary spending.

Included in the bill is $88 billion for continued war right now in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Pretending those wars are over doesn’t stop the flow of funds — which are needed for such domestic human needs as education, healthcare, and clean energy.

Moving our representatives toward decent spending priorities is a long-term project.  But should they pass this bill, we can at least force them to begin some military cuts.  We can insist that they keep the bipartisan ban on military sponsorships of NASCAR and other sporting events — and vote for budget-cutting amendments being proposed by Rep. Barbara Lee.

You’ll remember that Barbara Lee was the only member of Congress who voted against the Sept 14, 2001, blank check to George Bush for endless military adventure known as the “2001 Authorization to Use Military Force.”

Please forward to everyone you know this recent comment from Rep. John Lewis, the legendary civil rights activist:

“War is obsolete. It cannot be used as a tool of our foreign policy. It’s barbaric. … If I had to do it all over again, I would have voted with Barbara Lee. It was raw courage on her part. So, because of that, I don’t vote for funding for war. I vote against preparation for the military. I will never again go down that road.”

Tell your Representative to support good amendments but reject the full bill.