Really. Which is worse: that Maine Republican candidate for Governor Les Otten has pretty obviously copied President Barack Obama’s website theme…

… or that President Barack Obama has pretty obviously copied from the Republican Party platform on warrantless surveillance, state secrets, torture, the imbalance of power and anti-gay discrimination?

Ohio State Representative Ted Celeste made an appearance before a crowd of hundreds of Ohioans in front of the Statehouse building at noon today. In his speech, he reiterated the importance of a robust public library system in the state.

A transcription of his remarks:

Libraries rock!

You know, these are really very difficult times the state’s facing. My colleagues and I are trying to find a way to balance the budget, and in this kind of effort you expect everyone to give a little bit. And so it’s important for everyone to share the pain, but not to have libraries to go down the drain.

I want to tell you, you all have made an enormous impact. I have received 28,000 emails in the last 24 hours! I hope you’re sending copies of some of those e-mails to the governor, and the president of the Senate, and the speaker of the House, and telling them how important this is — because your message will be heard. Know that we’re talking to our colleagues in the House. My other colleagues in the House have heard your message loud and strong. Know that we’ll be there, fighting for libraries. We appreciate everything that you’re doing. My biggest thanks go to our libraries.

If State Rep. Celeste’s remarks about conversations within the Statehouse are accurate, then it sounds like the momentum is swinging toward the restoration of state funds for Ohio’s public libraries.

In spite of all the talk from President Obama and Democrats in Congress about how they are “committed” to overturning the Defense of Marriage Act, which legalizes inequality in order to discriminate against same-sex couples, there isn’t actually one single piece of legislation that would overturn the law. The President hasn’t sent legislation to Congress. Congress hasn’t written legislation.

So, how can the President and congressional Democrats say that they’re “committed” to overturning the Defense of Marriage Act? Maybe it’s in the same sense that same-sex couples are allowed to say that they’re committed to each other in private, but can’t make an official, public act of commitment in the same way that heterosexual couples can.

It doesn’t really take that much commitment for the President, or someone in Congress, to write legislation. All they have to do is assign an aide to sit down and write it for them, and do the required paperwork. Politicians in Washington D.C. write legislation all the time, for small matters as well as grand ideas.

For example, yesterday, Senator David Vitter introduced a resolution to designate March 31, 2010, as National Congenital Diaphragmatic Hernia Awareness Day. (Can you come up with some ideas for how to celebrate that holiday?) If Vitter can take time to write the National Congenital Diaphragmatic Hernia Awareness Day resolution, Democrats in Congress and Barack Obama can take the time to write a bill overturning the Defense of Marriage Act…

…unless they’re not as committed as they say they are.

We’re getting used to U.S. Representative Paul Broun promoting bizarre ideas, but a new amendment of his really takes the cake. Last week, Representative Broun offered an amendment to a commerce appropriations bill that would have forbidden any spending on a National Climate Service. The proposed National Climate Service will conduct research into climate change, but would have been stopped from doing so if Broun had his way.

It’s one thing to say that you don’t think that the available scientific evidence supports the conclusion that human-caused global climate change is taking place. You’d be wrong, but at least you’d be advancing a scientifically testable statement.

What Paul Broun has tried to do is much worse than that. Rather than try to argue that scientific evidence doesn’t support the idea of human-caused global climate change, Broun has simply tried to stop scientific research from taking place. His position on climate science is that the science itself ought to go away, because it keeps on interfering with his belief that human-caused climate change does not exist. It’s a position of willfull ignorance.

What’s even sadder than Paul Broun’s individual choice of ignorance in the face of crisis is that 160 other members of the U.S. House of Representatives chose to join Representative Broun in that choice. They voted for his amendment.

They weren’t all Republicans. Among them were the following 7 Democrats:

Dan Boren
Bobby Bright
Travis Childers
Nita Lowey
Walter Minnick
Harry Mitchell
Gene Taylor

The Democrats from these representatives’ districts would do well to rustle up some primary challengers for the 2010 election.

Yesterday, U.S. Representative Emanuel Cleaver introduced H. Con. Res. 155, a resolution that begins with the complaint that, “Whereas the average person complains approximately 15 to 30 times per day, resulting in roughly 4,500,000,000 complaints spoken every day in the United States…”

Yes, it’s a resolution that supports the idea of a holiday called Complaint Free Wednesday. On this proposed holiday, everyone would try to stop complaining. But, the resolution itself begins with a complaint. Emanuel Cleaver introduced this resolution to complain about complaining.

The idea, I suppose, is that if people just stopped complaining, then they could go out into the world and actually accomplish something, instead of dwelling on negative thoughts. If Emanuel Cleaver is any measure, however, a complaint-free lifestyle is not the reliable path to accomplishment that H. Con. Res. 155 suggests it is. Emanuel Cleaver is not what you would call a high achiever in Congress. Cleaver has offered no substantive legislation this year, no positive solutions for the problems that most Americans deal with.

The three bits of legislation that Cleaver has introduced to the current session of Congress are:

1. His complaint about complaining
2. A bill to create a commission to talk about preparing a centennial memorial event in Missouri
3. A bill to ensure that insurers of tax-exempt municipal bonds are able to get reinsurance

Maybe the reason Emanuel Clever is introducing his resolution to complain about complaining is that he’s tired of his constituents calling his office to complain that he’s not doing a good job of representing them in Congress.

One of the less known problems with the Obama White House has to do with satellite spying against Americans. You would think that here, in the United States of America, a person could reasonable expect to step outside of his or her home without being watched by the police. In fact, we have a little thing called the Bill of Rights, which guarantees protection from that sort of thing - it’s called the Fourth Amendment, and it reads:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. “

I would hope that everyone could agree that people cannot be reasonably regarded as secure from unreasonable search when there are machines flying overhead, beyond the range of sight, snapping photographs of the people and things below, without any search warrant. Yet, that’s just what’s happening now, and Congress, Democrat and Republican alike, is failing to stop this abuse of our constitutional rights. Military spy satellites that were designed to snoop on the activities of foreign armies are now watching over the private activities of American citizens within the borders of the USA.

The problem was started under George W. Bush, but with the cooperation of Democrats in Congress, who helped pass the Protect America Act and the FISA Amendments Act, the laws that enable the satellite spying program to operate. However, Barack Obama cannot be said to be merely continuing this spy program that targets Americans. President Obama is seeking to expand its funding and operations.

At the hub of this satellite spy program is a Homeland Security organization called the National Applications Office. The NAO takes the information gathered through satellites, and coordinates the sharing of that information with local, state and federal law enforcement officials. So, the military conducts spying against Americans, without a search warrant, which is then made available even to local sheriffs to use as they will.

At the beginning of this year, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano promised to conduct a review of the threats to American civil liberties created by the spying program, and to present the review to members of Congress. Yet, according to members of Congress on relevant committees, no such review has taken place.

Furthermore, the Department of Homeland Security requested additional funding for the National Applications Office this year - but without even consulting congressional committees that are supposed to be conducting oversight of the NAO. How much funding did they ask for? That’s classified.

Yes, the Obama White House is seeking to expand unconstitutional, warrantless spying against Americans using military satellites, and they’re asking you to help pay the bill. But, Barack Obama and his aides won’t even let you know how much you’re being charged for the satellites that are spying on you.

These operations are so far into the territory of “unreasonable searches” that I would have expected a firestorm of outrage. However, corporate journalists aren’t reporting on the story. There are only handful of journalistic articles mentioning the National Applications Office, and none of them dig very far into the story. No professional journalists are connecting the dots. It’s up to little folks like us, here at Irregular Times, to look at the public record and try to put the pieces together.

(Pieces like the offhand comment by the New York Times back in April that spy satellites are being used to gather information about Americans’ telephone calls and emails - a reminder that spy satellites these days do a heck of a lot more than just take photographs)

I appreciate the opportunity to do some original investigation into an important issue, but it really shouldn’t be this way. The Associated Press ought to be all over this. The Washington Post ought to devote a team to the story. Sadly, such is the state of American journalism that we get more articles about President Obama’s love of cheeseburgers than about the Obama Administration’s continuation of George W. Bush’s electronic spying programs.

Among the tidbits that almost no one has taken note of is that on Friday, the House Appropriations Committee Subcommittee on Homeland Security held a markup hearing on the 2010 fiscal year appropriations bill for the Department of Homeland Security. Norman Dicks, a member of that subcommittee, has co-authored H.R. 2703, a bill to completely defund the National Applications Office. It was hoped that Representative Dicks would use the occasion of the markup hearing to remove funding from the National Applications Office. However, Dicks chose not to do so.

The subcommittee suggests that it might be reducing the amount of funding for the National Applications Office to an amount that is somewhat less than what President Obama requested. However, as of this morning, the markup listings (here and here) of the Homeland Security programs with reduced or eliminated funding do not include the National Applications Office.

The trick is that the budget for the National Applications Office might have been reduced in the Homeland Security 2010 appropriations bill, but without any public sign that such a reduction has taken place. The funding for the National Applications Office is classified, after all. We the people of the United States of America are not allowed to know how much money is being spent to spy on us.

We’re supposed to simply trust that the House Appropriations Committee has made the reductions, and trust that the Obama Administration will get the message, and trust that the National Applications Office is only being used to spy against bad people. That trust has not been earned.

When our own government has established a program capable of using military agencies to spy against us with satellites flying in orbit over our neighborhoods, in violation of the Constitution and posse comitatus law, there is no reason for Americans to trust that everything is as it should be.

The only way that we can know that National Applications Office satellite spy operations targeting American citizens are not taking place is to pass the legislation introduced by Representative Dicks and Representative Jane Harman, H.R. 2703 and H.R. 2704, to completely eliminate the NAO’s funding and shut the office down for good.

So far, it seems that support for these bills among congressional Democrats is next to nonexistent.

Way back at the beginning of February, just a few weeks into his presidency, Barack Obama shocked his supporters by sending his lawyers into court in an attempt to maintain some of the extraordinary autocratic presidential powers created under George W. Bush. The case involved torture, kidnapping, illegal imprisonment, government secrecy, and Executive Branch dominance over the other branches of government. People had been kidnapped by agents of the Bush Administration, flown to secret prisons in foreign countries where they were tortured, without any trial through which they could defend themselves - and now, those people were suing the American government for compensation, and in order to expose the truth.

President Barack Obama opposed them. Obama’s lawyers declared that, as President, Obama could hide evidence of the extraordinary rendition, the kidnapping, imprisonment and torture of the plaintiffs. Obama could refuse to comply with a subpoena for information about these terrible abuses, his lawyers said, just because he’s the President. Obama could just declare the information a state secret, without providing any evidence to support the connection of the information to national security interests. Obama, like Bush before him, was claiming that the President could act without any Judicial Branch check on his authority.

It was plain as day that Barack Obama’s actions were not matching his rhetoric. Obama’s high minded speeches about change were being followed by Obama’s actions to preserve the worst abuses of power under George W. Bush. So, Obama’s supporters were faced with a choice: They could continue to support the ideals that had led them to support the 2008 Obama campaign, or they could continue to support Obama, the individual. The two were no longer compatible.

Most Obama supporters chose to support Obama, the individual, rather than to hold true to their ideals. Of course, they didn’t describe this decision in those terms. Instead, they came up with excuses for Obama. Prime among these was that Obama just needed more time to clean up the messes Bush had made. Just wait, they told us, and we’d see Barack Obama doing the right thing.

Now, months later, has Obama done what he promised? Has he changed course? Has he now moved to right the wrongs associated with extraordinary rendition under George W. Bush?

No. Not at all. Instead, President Obama is expanding his defense of George W. Bush’s attacks against the Constitution.

On Friday, Obama’s lawyers intervened again in a court case brought by people who had been kidnapped, imprisoned and tortured through Bush’s rendition program. This time, in the case Mohamed et al. v. Jeppesen, lawyers sent by Obama told the court that the legal rights of the plaintiffs should be disregarded. Obama’s assertion: Allowing information about the Bush Administration’s program of illegal imprisonment and torture through extraordinary rendition “would pose an unacceptable risk to national security”. Obama claimed extraordinary rendition as a state secret that no one could force him to reveal.

Think about the implications of this argument. If exposing American methods of extraordinary rendition really would create a risk to national security, that would mean that the government, under Obama, is still engaging in extraordinary rendition, or plans to in the future.

Is this what Obama supporters voted for? Did they work to elect a new President in order to see that President defend the policies of George W. Bush?

Barack Obama is charismatic. He has a pleasant demeanor. When he gives speeches, he speaks of high ideals.

The President of the United States is not, however, the Speaker-in-Chief. The President is the chief executive. It is the deeds, not the words, of the President that matter.

Obama’s deeds are matching Bush’s deeds, and it’s not because Obama hasn’t had enough time to get it right, or is too busy with the economy. President Obama is taking extra time to uphold the politics of fear established under President Bush.

People who voted for Barack Obama in 2008, if they are to be honest, need to stop denying the problem. They need to make a moral choice: They need to decide whether they will accept the rotten ideas of George W. Bush simply because they are now embodied in the more stylish person of Barack Obama.

There are some who are choosing to remain true to their ideals, rather than following the amoral Obama cult of personality. Among these people is Ben Wizner, attorney with the ACLU. Responding to Friday’s action by Obama’s lawyers, Wizner made the following observation:

“The Obama Administration has now fully embraced the Bush administration’s shameful effort to immunize torturers and their enablers from any legal consequences for their actions. The CIA’s rendition and torture program is not a ’state secret;’ it’s an international scandal. If the Obama administration has its way, no torture victim will ever have his day in court, and future administrations will be free to pursue torture policies without any fear of liability.”

Obama supporters, are you okay with this or not? If not, what are you going to do about it?

This week, Rep. André Carson of Indiana added his name to the growing list of members of the House of Representatives who formally support H.R. 104, John Conyers’ bill to establish an independent investigative commission, complete with subpoena power, to look into the torture, extraordinary rendition and surveillance without warrants that took place during the presidential administration of George W. Bush — and some of which continues to take place under President Barack Obama.

Click here to read the text of H.R. 104 for yourself, then check here to see if your member of the House has cosponsored the legislation to establish the investigative commission. If your member of Congress is not on the list of supporters, get his or her contact information and get on the horn with your demand pressure kind advice on the subject.

Yes we can! Hope! Change! Discrimination against gays and lesbians! Oops. Who let the truth out of the barn?

Every week, Barack Obama takes another step away from the politics of hope that he promised America would define his presidency, and moves our nation deeper, back into the shadows of the politics of fear. One week it’s government spying on law-abiding citizens. The next week it’s torture.

This week, it’s discrimination against gays and lesbians. President Barack Obama has sent his lawyers into court to ask that the rights of gays and lesbians to equal protection under marriage law be denied a while longer. There’s a lawsuit seeking to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act, and Obama is using his power as President to quash that lawsuit.

As generally offensive as it is for Obama to defend inequality in the law, Obama’s specific arguments against marriage equality add a new level of stench to the effort.

Obama’s lawyers equate same-sex marriage with child marriage and incest between cousins. They say that the Defense of Marriage Act doesn’t deny anyone’s right to equality under the law, because it gives the states the option of whether to respect those rights. They even argue that there’s no discrimination against same sex couples anyway, because homosexuals have just as much right to marry someone of the opposite sex as anyone else.

This is the kind of garbage we expected to see from the White House under George W. Bush. Americans were led to believe that the Obama presidency would be different. This is not different. This is not change.

Though I’m heterosexual, and am happily married, this is personal to me. I’m friends and neighbors with same-sex couples who want their relationships to have equal legal status as marriage. I don’t think that it’s a decent thing to look the other way, just because it’s not me personally who is being discriminated against.

I also cannot conclude that Obama’s arguments in this case are an anomaly. I remember Obama’s embrace of anti-gay bigot Donnie McClurkin. I remember Rick Warren. Obama has a long history now of embracing those who hate gays and lesbians.

So, as I look forward to the 2012 presidential election, I realize that Barack Obama has long since lost my vote and earned my opposition. I’ll be looking for a real progressive running against Obama.

Re-elect Obama? No we can’t.

There’s a big difference between Homeland Security and security in your home. When there’s a satellite high up in the sky watching to see what you do every time you step outside your home, you may not feel secure, but the Homeland, that great big nationalist dream, feels all cozy and safe just at the thought of it.

At the beginning of this week, I advised that Americans keep track of the cosponsorship of a pair of bills in the House of Representatives: H.R 2703 and H.R. 2704. These two bills would defund and disintegrate the National Applications Office.

The National Applications Office coordinates the sharing of information gathered through satellites. In some instances, that’s not a big deal. Sharing information about the movement of hurricanes is useful, and clearly in compliance with the Constitution’s limitations of searches and seizures.

When military spy satellites originally deployed against foreign targets are turned to watch the movements of Americans within U.S. borders, however, that is an unreasonable search, and forbidden by the Fourth Amendment in the Bill of Rights. When such searches are performed without search warrants, they are doubly unconstitutional. Yet, that’s just the sort of satellite spying against Americans that the National Applications Office is coordinating. The information gathered from those spy operations is forwarded on to all sorts of government agencies, including state, and even local, law enforcement agencies.

That’s right - Sheriff Goober on down at the Podunk Police Station can now get military satellite images of what the people in his town are up to, without even trying to prove with a search warrant that there’s any reason to suspect anyone of a crime.

When U.S. Representative Jane Harman introduced H.R. 2703 and H.R. 2704, it was in order to put this kind of unconstitutional spying against Americans using satellite technology to an end. Representative Harman is one of the few members of Congress who receive classified intelligence briefings, and what she has been told about the spying activities of the National Applications Office has her deeply concerned.

Sadly, the rest of the Democratic Party doesn’t seem to give a damn. President Barack Obama has been pushing for increased funding for the satellite spying operations the National Applications Office deploys against Americans. And Democratic cosponsorships for H.R. 2703 and H.R. 2704? There’s only one - Representative Norman Dicks has cosponsored H.R. 2703, and hasn’t even bothered to cosponsor H.R. 2704.

That’s it. The rest of the Democrats in Congress (and the Republicans too) are happy to continue allowing the federal government to violate the 4th amendment, engaging in Big Brother spy operations in the sky. Is that what people thought the Democratic Party stood for? Continuing George W. Bush’s attacks against the Constitution?

Looking at the dirty business conducted by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee yesterday, it’s no surprise that the committee chair, Jeff Bingaman, decided to censor the normal live webcast of the committee. If Americans could have watched the servile catering to fossil fuel lobbyists by several of the committee’s Democrats, they might have questioned the narrative of the 2008 election, that the Democrats would bring hope and change to Washington D.C.

It wasn’t just the way that four Democratic senators on the committee - from inland states - joined with Republicans to pass an energy bill amendment to expand offshore drilling in waters near Florida’s tourist beaches. Democrats supported other amendments favoring the fossil fuel industry, and opposing environmental concerns, as well. They voted in a second amendment offering yet more oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, and another amendment that creates a special loophole allowing the federal government to buy energy products from Canada’s tar sands - one of the dirtiest sources of energy on the planet. Currently, a law forbids the government from purchasing energy from sources that result in greenhouse gas emissions at a rate higher than ordinary petroleum. Yesterday, Senate Democrats on the energy committee helped to roll back that restriction.

Looking back to the 2008 election, I seem to remember that the Republicans, with their drill baby drill message of an America that hugs fossil fuels, lost. They lost the presidency. They lost seats in Congress. The old oil economy was rejected by voters, who supported candidates promising a new focus on sustainable energy.

Why, then, are the Democrats in Congress now acting like Republicans, and supporting dirty old energy interests? Do they really think voters won’t notice?

I wrote with hope yesterday morning about the possibility that New York State Senator David Valesky might change his position on a bill to legalize same-sex marriage from opposition to support. This morning, that hope has turned to tatters.

Two Democratic Party senators, Hiram Monserrate and Pedro Espada (who has been accused of not even living in his senate district), supported a Republican effort yesterday to oust the senate’s Democratic leadership and replace it with a Republican one. Monserrate and Espada are still Democrats, but they’re voting with the Republicans to help the Republicans run the show.

Why did they make this switch, betraying their own political party? Monserrate and Espada are opponents of marriage equality, and it’s become increasingly clear that the majority of New York state senators would vote to legalize same-sex marriage. Monserrate and Espada think that the integrity of the Democratic Party matters less than denying homosexual residents of New York State equal rights. So, a new majority has been achieved in the senate, not of Democrats, not of Republicans, but of bigots.

With angry state Democratic politicians making acting like this, just in order to deny people their rights, what does it mean to be a New York State Democrat any more? It would be great to see a third party in New York State organize as a progressive alternative to the disintegrating Democrats.

In New York State, the drive to pass marriage equality legislation is bearing good fruit. It isn’t just moving toward legislative success, with passage in the state Assembly, and a vote to come this month in the state Senate. The movement is also breaking open public discussions of the status of non-heterosexuals in New York. People are talking about ideas in a new way, and hearing voices they hadn’t paid attention to before.

Those people include politicians. Last week, I referred to a group of five Democrats in the New York State Senate who were planning to vote against equal marriage rights. This week, it appears that one of those Democrats may be peeling away from that group of resistance. David Valesky has stated that he’s changed from opposition to open consideration of marriage equality.

The reason for this change? He’s met with constituents who are being discriminated against by New York’s current, outdated marriage restrictions. Valesky is seeing these people in person, as they are, not the freaks he might otherwise imagine them to be. One can see by his statements that Senator Valesky is also learning to understand the debate not as about granting rights to same-sex couples, but as a matter of equality, in which the rights people already have need to be respected in the law.

Activism in favor of same sex marriage seems to be working. Keep it up, New York.

Search Representative Mary Jo Kilroy’s House website for references to “jobs,” and you’ll find 54 web pages. Search Rep. Kilroy’s House website for references to “FISA,” and you’ll find nothing. When I asked candidate Kilroy last summer for her position on the FISA Amendments Act, she said she had no position.

That’s odd, considering what a large issue surveillance, search and seizure without a warrant was in last year’s Congress. Last year, the House and Senate passed the FISA Amendments Act, a bill that permits the President to blow past the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and spy on Americans without a warrant. Earlier this year, that’s exactly what the Obama administration did. Liberal Americans howled when George W. Bush did it. But now, apparently, IOKIYBO.

The continued warrantless search and surveillance of Americans makes the issue current and germane. That’s why, when she took office, I wrote a letter to Representative Kilroy, the member of Congress for the 15th District of Ohio in which I reside. It took three months, two more letters, and repeated contacts with Kilroy’s office, but yesterday I finally received a response.

These were my requests for information to Representative Kilroy, verbatim from the final letter I sent to her office after others went unanswered:

1. Whether you support or oppose the warrantless search and surveillance authority granted under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.

2. Whether you plan to take any legislative action regarding the provisions of the FISA Amendments Act during the 111th Congress, and if so, what action that might be.

3. Whether you plan to cosponsor H.R. 104, a bill to create a national investigative commission on presidential war powers and civil liberties, including authority to investigate practices of warrantless search and surveillance.

Her one paragraph of substantive response:

Should the issues surrounding FISA return to debate in the House, I will work to protect civil rights and ensure that our liberties are respected. I do not sit on the committee of jurisdiction that would handle any FISA related issues, but should any bill related to FISA reach the House floor, I will be sure to keep your concerns in mind.

On point 1, Mary Jo Kilroy gives a non-answer: nowhere in that paragraph does she indicate a specific position regarding the warrantless search and surveillance authority granted under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. She writes that if the issues return to debate, “I will work to protect civil rights and ensure that our liberties are respected,” but that could mean anything. Indeed, those who voted FOR the FISA Amendments act used those very phrases. I have no more of an idea what Mary Jo Kilroy believes as a member of the House of Representatives in June of 2009 than I did when Mary Jo Kilroy gave me her non-response as a candidate in August of 2008.

On point 2, Mary Jo Kilroy is actually quite clear: she will not originate any bill regarding the FISA Amendments Act.

On point 3, Rep. Kilroy refused to respond entirely.