Tag Archives: President Obama

Presidential War Is Unconstitutional, by Ivan Eland

Posted on November 29, 2016 | Leave a comment

President Obama is using the 2001 congressional authorization of war against al Qaeda to fight a war against a group in Somalia, al-Shabab, that wasn’t in existence back then. From Ivan Eland at antiwar.com:

The Obama administration has decided to stretch the 15-year-old congressional authorization for war against the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, or those harboring them, to include an illegal war against a group in Somalia – al-Shabab – that wasn’t even in existence at the time of the attacks in 2001.

In fact, as with many of its Islamist terrorist opponents worldwide – including the original al Qaeda, the perpetrator of 9/11 that arose from U.S. arming of Mujahideen guerrillas against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s and al Qaeda in Iraq, which arose to combat the US invasion there and morphed into ISIS – the United States inadvertently helped create al-Shabab in the first place. Al-Shabab did not arise until after 2007, long after 9/11, when the US sponsored an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia to wrest control of the country from a milder Islamist council. The more virulent al-Shabab was rose to attempt to repel this foreign invasion.

More generally, after 9/11, rather than following the congressional authorization and focusing like a laser beam on countering the original al Qaeda group and their patrons, the Afghan Taliban, the George W. Bush administration launched a general “war on terror,” which covered all terrorist groups of international scope, regardless of whether or not they focused on attacking US targets. In the end, this massive Bush administration violation of the narrow 2001 authorization led to illegal US drone wars and airstrikes in countries all over the Middle East and Southwest Asia, Somalia (against al-Shabab), Yemen (against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula), Pakistan (against the Pakistani Taliban), and Iraq, Syria, and Libya (against ISIS). The Obama administration then accelerated all these unconstitutional wars. Now Obama is trying shore up the already thin legal fig leaf, so that it can pass such travesties – which actually make Islamist groups more rabid each time the US intervenes – onto the incoming Trump administration. When Obama took office, he complained that he inherited from the Bush administration an economic meltdown and a military quagmire in Iraq, but he in turn is bequeathing a legal quagmire to his successor.

To continue reading: Presidential War Is Unconstitutional

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From Consequences To Compromise, from Zero Hedge

Posted on November 19, 2016 | Leave a comment

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-18/consequences-compromise

 

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Obama Sets New Record for Regulations – 81,640 Pages in 2016, by Joseph Jankowski

Posted on November 18, 2016 | 1 comment

Here’s an Obama record he will probably not brag about. Then again, he might. Just to give you some perspective, it would take you 600 times as long to read this year’s regulations than it would take you to read Prime Deceit. That’s assuming the regulations were the same page size as Prime Deceit’s, and that they were just as easy to read (not!). From Joseph Jankowski at planetfreewill.com:

The Obama Administration has just shattered the previous record for pages of regulations and rules published by the Federal Register in a single year.

According to a report by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Obama’s presidency produced 81,640 total pages of regulations and rules for 2016, surpassing the previous record the administration set in 2010 by 235 pages.

President Obama’s Federal Register added 572 pages on Thursday (Nov. 17) alone!

Clyde Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute warns that Obama’s manufacturing of regulations is not over. With the amount of time left in the year, the current pace of rule passage could bring many thousands of more pages.

“No one knows what the future holds, but at a pace of well over 1,000 pages weekly, the Federal Register could easily top 90,000 pages this year. The simple algebra says that at the current pace we’ll add 11,190 pages over the next 44 days, to end 2016 at around 92,830 pages,” said CEI’s Wayne Crews.

“This is astonishing and should be of great concern, and intolerable, to policymakers.” Said Wayne Crews. “It is remarkable enough that the all-time record has been passed before Thanksgiving.”

Crews called on President-elect Donald Trump to make good on campaign promises and cut regulations.

“President-elect Donald Trump could take a page from President Reagan, who brought page counts down from Carter’s 73,258 to as low as 44,812. We don’t need a pen and phone, we need a meat axe,” he said.

Regulatory reform is going to be a major focus of the Trump administration, according to the President-elect’s transition website.

The Trump administration’s efforts to combat the regulatory state “will include a temporary moratorium on all new regulation, canceling overarching executive orders and a thorough review to identify and eliminate unnecessary regulations that kill jobs and bloat government.”

To put into perspective what type of effect the regulatory state has on the American economy, a 2014 report by the National Association of Manufacturers found that regulatory costs on all firms exceed $2 trillion annually and disproportionally affect small businesses.

http://planetfreewill.com/2016/11/17/obama-sets-new-record-regulations-81640-pages/

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“If You Like Your Legacy…” from Zero Hedge

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Posted on November 16, 2016 in Humor

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Stay Alert, America: The Worst Is Yet to Come, by John W. Whitehead

Posted on November 15, 2016 | 1 comment

Nothing Donald Trump said during his campaign would lead anyone to believe he’ll halt or even curtail the US government’s long erosion of its citizens’ civil liberties. From John W. Whitehead at rutherford.org:

“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”—Philosopher George Santayana

Stay alert, America.

This is not the time to drop our guards, even for a moment.

Nothing has changed since the election to alter the immediate and very real dangers of roadside strip searches, government surveillance, biometric databases, citizens being treated like terrorists, imprisonments for criticizing the government, national ID cards, SWAT team raids, censorship, forcible blood draws and DNA extractions, private prisons, weaponized drones, red light cameras, tasers, active shooter drills, police misconduct and government corruption.

Time alone will tell whether those who put their hopes in a political savior will find that trust rewarded or betrayed.

Personally, I’m not holding my breath.

I’ve been down this road before.

I’ve studied history.

I know what comes next.

It’s early days yet, but President-elect Trump—like his predecessors—has already begun to dial back many of the campaign promises that pledged to reform a broken system of government.

The candidate who railed against big government and vowed to “drain the swamp” of lobbyists and special interest donors has already given lobbyists, corporate donors and members of the governmental elite starring roles in his new administration.

America, you’ve been played.

This is what happens when you play politics with matters of life, death and liberty.

You lose every time.

Unfortunately, in this instance, we all lose because of the deluded hypocrisy of the Left and the Right, both of which sanctioned the expansion of the police state as long as it was their party at the helm.

For the past eight years, the Left—stridently outspoken and adversarial while George W. Bush was president—has been unusually quiet about things like torture, endless wars, drone strikes, executive orders, government overreach and fascism.

Suddenly, with Trump in the White House for the next four years, it’s all fair game again.

Yet as Glenn Greenwald points out for The Washington Post, if Trump is about to inherit vast presidential powers, he has the Democrats to thank for them.

Unless Trump does another about-face, rest assured that the policies of a Trump Administration will be no different from an Obama Administration or a Bush Administration, at least not where it really counts.

For that matter, a Clinton Administration would have been no different.

In other words, Democrats by any other name would be Republicans, and vice versa.

This is the terrible power of the shadow government: to maintain the status quo, no matter which candidate gets elected.

War will continue. Surveillance will continue. Drone killings will continue. Police shootings will continue. Highway robbery meted out by government officials will continue. Corrupt government will continue. Profit-driven prisons will continue. Censorship and persecution of anyone who criticizes the government will continue. The militarization of the police will continue. The government’s efforts to label dissidents as extremists and terrorists will continue.

In such a climate, the police state will thrive.

The more things change, the more they will stay the same.

We’ve been stuck in this political Groundhog’s Day for so long that minor deviations appear to be major developments while obscuring the fact that we’re stuck on repeat, unable to see the forest for the trees.

This is what is referred to as creeping normality, or a death by a thousand cuts.

To continue reading: Stay Alert, America: The Worst Is Yet to Come

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The Office of the President of the United States, by Raúl Ilargi Meijer

Posted on November 3, 2016 | Leave a comment

A Hillary Clinton presidency would drag that office so far into the muck that restoration would probably be impossible. From Raúl Ilargi Meijer an antiwar.com:

Amidst the epic flood of political statements and media commentary that keeps on rolling in and on, there’s something that doesn’t seem to occur to most people, and it should. That is, the unfortunate but apparently inevitable discussion about all the unfortunate and/or illegal things that either candidate may or may not have done, must be seen in the light of the capacity in which -perceived- errors or even crimes are committed. It is essential to this issue.

What far too many people are far too eager to ignore is that everything Donald Trump may have done that may have been illegal or on the edge, he did as a private person, and most of what Hillary Clinton has done in that same category was as a representative of the American government and hence the American people. The demands and standards when it comes to behavior are much higher for people in representative government positions than they are for private citizens, and they are so for good reason.

One may try and argue that this is not fair, but that’s a moot argument. One may also argue that everyday news strongly suggests that Washington is the very place where moral standards seem to count least, but that is also moot. What others do today, or have done in the past, can never be an excuse for eroding the standards to which government officials should be held. If anything, it should be reason to hold all of them to higher standards going forward.

This is the only way The Office of the President of the United States, and the US political system as a whole, can be expected to retain, or regain, the respect it badly needs to command, both domestically and on the international front. It is for this very reason that on the political scene, actors need to “do the right thing”, or “draw the consequences”, when the situation so demands. Respect for the office must always come before personal gain, or the whole edifice will crumble.

This also means that a president and his secretaries have much less room to move on their public statements on issues than ‘civilians’ do. And in that regard President Obama, though he seemed to be doing well, is now moving onto dangerous ground. On Monday, Obama seemed to back FBI director Jim Comey, or at least he refused to join his party in attacking Comey.

Note that the president can’t do anything even remotely perceived as attacking the head of the FBI. Not in public. And that would be true even if Comey were not his own appointment. The NY Post wrote:

While top Democrats are attacking James Comey, President Obama’s spokesman on Monday described the FBI director as a man of “integrity” and “good character” and said he is not trying to tilt the election. “I’ll neither defend nor criticize Director Comey,” said White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest. “The president doesn’t believe that Director Comey is intentionally trying to influence the outcome of an election. He doesn’t believe he’s secretly strategizing to benefit one candidate or one political party. He is in a tough spot.”

To continue reading: The Office of the President of the United States

 

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Total Desperation Sets In as President Obama Plays the Woman Card, by Michael Krieger

Posted on November 2, 2016 | Leave a comment

Perhaps Trump could neutralize the gender issue by saying that on odd days of the month, he gender identifies as a woman. Barring that, the Democrats are playing the woman card for all its worth. From Michael Krieger at libertyblitzkrieg.com:

With the neither the racist nor the Putin-puppet label sticking to Trump, team Clinton and its lobotomized surrogates have regressed back to square one: playing the woman card.

As I noted in a post earlier this week, a professor of linguistics at Berkeley just published an article at Time claiming (with zero evidence of course), that the Hillary Clinton email server scandal only exists because she is a woman. Here’s a brief snippet of what she said:

‘It’s not about emails; it’s about public communication by a woman’

I am mad. I am mad because I am scared. And if you are a woman, you should be, too. Emailgate is a bitch hunt, but the target is not Hillary Clinton. It’s us.

The only reason the whole email flap has legs is because the candidate is female. Can you imagine this happening to a man? Clinton is guilty of SWF (Speaking While Female), and emailgate is just a reminder to us all that she has no business doing what she’s doing and must be punished, for the sake of all decent women everywhere. There is so much of that going around.

It’s not about emails; it’s about public communication by a woman in general. Of course, in the year 2016, no one (probably not even The Donald) could make this argument explicitly. After all, he and his fellow Republicans are not waging a war on women. How do we know that? They have said so. And they’re men, so they must be telling the truth.

I know. It’s really hard to believe the above is real, but it is.

Moving along, President Obama himself is now getting in the mud.

Here’s what he had to say today in Ohio, according to NBC:

COLUMBUS, Ohio — President Barack Obama said Tuesday that sexism is to blame for the tight race for the White House, telling an Ohio crowd that “Hillary Clinton is consistently treated differently than just about any other candidate I see out there.”

Obama went on: “There’s a reason we haven’t had a woman president.”

Speaking specifically to “the guys out there,” Obama told them to “look inside yourself and ask yourself, if you’re having problems with this stuff how much of it is that we’re just not used to it?”

Yep, because the American public handily elected a black man twice, but somehow we all draw the line at a woman. Perhaps, just perhaps, the problem is with Hillary.

To continue reading: Total Desperation Sets In as President Obama Plays the Woman Card

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Why Is Obama Threatening Russia With World War 3 Right Before The Election?, by Michael Snyder

Posted on October 19, 2016 | Leave a comment

Starting World War III might tarnish the Great One’s legacy. From Michael Snyder at theeconomomiccollapseblog.com:

It sure seems like an odd time to be provoking a war with Russia. As I write this, we stand just a little bit more than three weeks away from one of the most pivotal elections in U.S. history, and Barack Obama has chosen this moment to strongly threaten the Russians. As I wrote about on Friday, Reuters is reporting that Obama is contemplating “direct U.S. military action” against Syrian military targets, and the Russians have already indicated that any assault on Syrian forces would be considered an attack on themselves. The rapidly deteriorating crisis in Syria has already caused tensions with Russia to rise to the highest level since the end of the Cold War, but now Obama is adding fuel to the fire by publicly considering “an unprecedented cyber covert action against Russia”. Apparently Obama believes that Russian hackers are interfering in the election and so he wants payback. The following comes from an NBC News article entitled “CIA Prepping for Possible Cyber Strike Against Russia“…

The Obama administration is contemplating an unprecedented cyber covert action against Russia in retaliation for alleged Russian interference in the American presidential election, U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News.

Current and former officials with direct knowledge of the situation say the CIA has been asked to deliver options to the White House for a wide-ranging “clandestine” cyber operation designed to harass and “embarrass” the Kremlin leadership.

The sources did not elaborate on the exact measures the CIA was considering, but said the agency had already begun opening cyber doors, selecting targets and making other preparations for an operation.

Somebody should tell Obama that he is not playing a video game. A cyber attack is considered to be an act of war, and the Russians would inevitably retaliate. And considering how exceedingly vulnerable our cyber infrastructure is, I don’t know if that is something that we want to invite.

At the end of last week, Vice President Joe Biden also publicly threatened the Russians…

On Friday, Vice President Joe Biden met “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd for an interview that has raised serious concern in Russia.

Without bothering to question the authenticity of the claims, Todd took the allegations of Russian hacking at face value, opening his interview with a loaded question: “Why haven’t we sent a message yet to Putin?”

After a moment of stunned silence, Biden responded, “We’re sending a message. We have the capacity to do it and it will be at the time of our choosing, and under the circumstances that will have the greatest impact.”

When Todd asked if the public will know a message was sent, Biden replied, “Hope not.”

The Russians firmly deny that they had any involvement in the hacking, and so far the Obama administration has not publicly produced any firm evidence that the Russians were behind it.

Perhaps the Obama administration privately has some evidence, but at this point they have not shown that evidence to the American public.

To continue reading: Why Is Obama Threatening Russia With World War 3 Right Before The Election?

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Is Obama Juicing Government Spending to Get Hillary Elected? by Jim Quinn

Posted on October 16, 2016 | Leave a comment

One record Obama will establish: the national debt has gone up more in his eight years than for any other president. Now, he might be spending a little extra just to make sure Cankles gets elected. From Jim Quinn at theburningplatform.com:

During the last year of his reign of error, our beloved Nobel Peace Prize winner, Obama ran out of government accounting gimmicks to falsely proclaim Federal deficits have been falling. His legacy of debt accumulation will go down in history as the last dying gasps of a crumbling empire built upon Keynesian delusions, political corruption, and a Deep State establishment hellbent upon retaining power at the cost of global war and financial collapse.

The entirely fabricated government propaganda data point known as the Federal deficit skyrocketed by 34% in fiscal 2016 (Federal year is Oct. 1 to Sept. 30). The reported deficit in FY15 was a mere $438 billion. Obama and his brain dead minions had boasted about such a small deficit. The country has been in existence for 227 years and Obama had the balls to boast about “achieving” the 8th highest deficit in our history. Just for some context, the savior also led the country to the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th highest deficits in the country’s history. Bumbling Bush achieved the 7th highest in the glorious year of 2008.

The $149 billion surge in the reported deficit to $587 billion is a national disgrace and happened during a year in which we supposedly aren’t waging any real wars. Even with artificially suppressed interest rates, interest on the national debt went up by $30 billion. The Obamacare abortion has caused healthcare spending to soar, blowing a hole in the Federal budget. Remember Obama bloviating about Obamacare not adding one dime to the national debt? He was right. It’s adding trillions of dimes to the national debt. But, at least every family in America has gotten that promised $2,500 savings in their annual premiums. Right?

Another reason for the surge in the reported deficit is the little accounting trick the Obama administration has been playing for years. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are insolvent zombie Federal Agencies. With the suspension of mark to market accounting in March 2009, Wall Street banks and these bloated pig agencies were free to fraudulently value the mortgages on their balance sheets.

Poof!!! Wall Street bank profits miraculously recovered. Fannie and Freddie began reporting tens of billions in fake profits. They then pretended to pay these fake accounting profits to the Treasury, thereby “reducing” the reported deficits. Last year Fannie and Freddie ran out of fake profits and are now losing money again. And the establishment wonders why the peasants are revolting.

What is more fascinating is the virtual halt in Federal revenues. They grew less than 1% in FY16. How could that be? The corporate mainstream media, the government apparatchiks, and our esteemed leader Obama assure us the economy is growing, unemployment is a minuscule 5%, and everything is coming up roses. Vote Hillary to keep prosperity growing. If the economy was growing, corporate profits would be higher, leading to more taxes paid to the government.

To continue reading: Is Obama Juicing Government Spending to Get Hillary Elected?

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What Passes for Journalism, from The Burning Platform

Posted on October 14, 2016 | 1 comment

http://www.theburningplatform.com/2016/10/13/what-passes-for-journalism/

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