Category Archives: Barack Obama

Rand Paul: ‘If You Like Your Privacy You Can Keep It’ (NHAHAHAHAHAHA!)

Barack Obama, Constitution, Homeland Security, Regulation, Terrorism, The State

It is not about calibrating the NSA’s infractions on the right to privacy, it’s about keeping that right.

Sen. Rand Paul’s description (the line above is my own) of the gist of Obama’s tweaks to the National Security Agency’s surveillance program should be punctured by maniacal, loud laughter, the kind used by your vintage movie villain: “NHAHAHAHAHAHA!” In essence, intimated Sen. Paul, Obama is promising that, “If you like your privacy you can keep it.”

On the odd occasion that he’s good, Rand is very good. “It’s not about who holds it,” he continued, “I don’t want them collecting the information.”

That’s all there is to it.

Then Paul went and spoiled it all by saying something stupid like, “Obama’s heart really is in the right place,” and that his “motives are not bad.”

Full Text of Obama’s Speech on his plans for “Surveillance With A Smile.”

POTUS Quits Pretending US Has A Constitution

Barack Obama, Constitution, Fascism, Federalism, Welfare

With my pen and phone I will free thee from want, promised the president. While I prefer not to pretend, as conservatives do, that the U.S. is still a constitutional republic; Obama could at least be polite about the poor thing, the Constitution, that is.

“We are not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we’re providing Americans the kind of help that they need,” President Obama told reporters before a meeting with his Cabinet Tuesday. “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone.”

Don’t the rules specify that you are supposed to wait on legislation?

Surveillance With A Smile

Barack Obama, Homeland Security, Regulation, The State

Barack wants to win Boobus back with his trademark bedside manners. The president still thinks that a slushy speech is all it’ll take to get Boobus Americanus to submit again—and who can blame Obama? It’s worked so far.

We’re talking about the “National Security Agency’s bulk collection of telephone data from millions of people.”

“In August, media-enabled megalomaniac Obama told a rapt press corps that, in his magnanimity, he’d be prepared to ‘jiggle’ his surveillance apparatus here and there to better allay unnecessary fears (‘provide greater assurances,’ as the president put it).” Recent contradictory court rulings (detailed in “Quacking Over Ducksters As Freedoms Go POOF”) have sped things up. The Dictator will issue his NSA decree tomorrow, Friday.

Via the AP:

On Friday, Obama will unveil a much-anticipated blueprint on the future of those endeavors. His changes appear to be an implicit acknowledgement that the trust he thought Americans would have in the spy operations is shaky at best. His focus is expected to be on steps that increase oversight and transparency while largely leaving the framework of the programs in place.
The president is expected to back the creation of an independent public advocate on the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which approves the bulk collections and currently only hears arguments from the government. And seeking to soothe international anger, Obama will extend some privacy protections to foreigners and increase oversight of the process used to decide on foreign leader monitoring.
In previewing Obama’s speech, White House spokesman Jay Carney said Thursday that the president believes the government can make surveillance activities “more transparent in order to give the public more confidence about the problems and the oversight of the programs.”

The offending party (BHO and his bandits) gets to nominate an advocate to advocate for the victim (the spied upon).

Sounds fair.

A Soldier In The Style Of ‘Stonewall’ Jackson

Barack Obama, Bush, Foreign Policy, Israel, Military, Nationhood, War

“A Soldier In The Style Of ‘Stonewall’ Jackson” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

“Barack Hussein Obama at war and George W. Bush at war: How does the 44th president of the United States differ from the 43rd?

If nothing else, former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has settled that question. Bush sent troops to fight futile battles without flinching; Obama did the same with some reservation.

Hardly a peacemaker, Obama questioned the mission in Afghanistan and was skeptical of the military brass’s motivation in securing for itself—to the detriment of the grunts on the ground—a long-term commitment to the theatre of war in that country.

Like Obama, 82 percent of Americans oppose the war the president is being panned for having embraced publicly, but agonized over privately. On Afghanistan, Obama is more aligned with the American people—and the truth—than the former defense secretary and his Republican champions.

This I say with reluctance. I awarded Barack Obama brownie points thrice in his tenure: for doing not a thing about the 2011–2012 protests in Iran, for ceasing the criminalization of cancer and AIDS patients for their medicinal use of illegal substances, and for breaking with Bush and his neocons in refusing to step on the Russian Bear’s claws. Obama scrapped the missile-defense shield in Russia’s backyard.

Yet this revelation in Gates’ ‘Duty,’ a book that hangs on one hook, has Republicans gurgling with pleasure. Limitless is the GOP’s zest and zeal for ignoring the negative right of the American people to be free of the Sisyphean (and Jacobean) struggle to save the world.

If anything, it sounds as though Gates might have had misgivings of his own about the missions in which his “soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines” were dying for nothing.

A bereft Gates tells of ‘evening sessions’ during which he’d write condolence letters ‘to the families of service members killed in action.’ There ‘probably wasn’t a single evening in nearly 4 1/2 years when I didn’t — when I didn’t weep,’ he confessed. Gates relates how focused he became ‘on the strain on our troops and on their families.’ After all, ‘they’d been at war for 10 years.’ ‘My highest priority,’ he averred in an interview with NPR, was ‘trying to avoid new conflict … in terms of recommending against intervention in Libya,’ and expressing ‘concerns about going to war in Syria, much less in Iran.’

It just seemed to me that some of the areas where we were looking at potential conflict were more in the category of wars of choice. And it was those that I was trying to protect the troops from.

Having fought for the survival of his people—and never to democratize or ‘save’ another—Ariel Sharon was far less of a study in contradictions than poor Mr. Gates. …

Read the complete column. “A Soldier In The Style Of ‘Stonewall’ Jackson” is on WND.

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