Last year, Barack Obama pledged to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the American arsenal. He made great speeches about it. He earned the Nobel Peace Prize.

This year, with prize in hand, and speeches made, Obama wrote a federal budget with 7 billion dollars for building new nuclear weapons and inventing new technologies to make nuclear weapons even deadlier (“reliable”). Many people are asking, what’s the big deal?

I am astounded that so many people still need to have that question answered, but if they do need an answer, then those of us who care need to do more than shrug our shoulders and bemoan their ignorance. We need to help provide those answers.

For that reason, I’ll be working over the next few weeks to provide text, links and videos that show the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons. The United States is the only nation to ever use nuclear weapons, and so we Americans have a special duty to remember what has come as the result of our nation’s terrible invention – an invention that Barack Obama wants to make more powerful.

If you want to understand why that’s a problem, here’s a place to start: A sample of the testimony of survivors of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The National Prayer Breakfast which will be attended this morning by Barack Obama is in no sense national. It isn’t a governmental event organized by the nation as a whole. It’s a solely Christian event that represents only part of the American nation. The secretive group that organizes the event isn’t a national organization either: It’s called the International Foundation, and it has branches in countries all around the world.

The International Foundation is the legal name under which the organization does business in the United States. However, members of the International Foundation often use other terms to refer to their group: The Fellowship Foundation, National Fellowship Council, National Leadership Council, or just The Family. (For a good review of the work of the organization, check out The Family, written by Jeff Sharlett.)

One of the branches of the International Foundation is in the African nation of Uganda. A member of the International Foundation, David Bahati, organizes the Ugandan National Prayer Breakfast there. Bahati is a member of the Ugandan national legislature, where he proposed a law that, if passed, would make homosexuality a crime that could be punished by death. Bahati’s legislation would also allow the Ugandan police to put people in jail merely for the promotion of homosexuality. It isn’t a purely Ugandan effort, though, given the way that the International Foundation provides substantial financial support to Bahati’s group.

As the Ugandan campaign illustrates, the International Foundation is not a politically-neutral organization that merely promotes general religious worship. It attempts to use its connections to leaders in the federal government to promote Christianity above other religions, while advancing a consistently right wing political agenda in every nation where it has operations. As David Bahati is attempting to make homosexuality a crime punishable by death in Uganda, members of the International Foundation are working to preserve the criminalization of same-sex marriage here in the United States.

Barack Obama’s participation in the International Foundation’s meeting this morning is particularly troubling given his continued support for a government program begun by George W. Bush to funnel government money to religious organizations. President Obama has expanded Bush’s office of “faith-based” (religious) initiatives, and preserved a loophole that allows organizations receiving government funding to discriminate against employees on the basis of religion.

That’s a position that the International Foundation supports. Is Barack Obama seeking to gain admittance as a member of this extremist organization, or is he merely building a political alliance with the group?

Whatever Obama’s intentions, he is providing the International Foundation with the implicit support of the White House by attending the National Prayer Breakfast this morning. Obama’s presence helps the organization create the illusion that it is part of the United States government, when it is in fact registered as a tax exempt religious organization. The mixture of Church and State created by the National Prayer Breakfast’s pose as a governmental institution is so disturbing that the non-partisan group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has written letters to Obama and top congressional leaders this year, asking them not to participate in the theocratic event.

Postscript: The New York Times says of the International Foundation, “The Family has no identifiable Internet site, no office number and no official spokesman.” It seems that the New York Times isn’t able to do basic research: Manta lists the following information for the International Foundation:

204 Mount Oak Pl
Annapolis, MD 21409-5868
Phone: (410) 757-7115

The FEC has records of campaign contributions by employees of the International Foundation as well, providing us with the names of three employees:

Timothy Coe
Tara Jo Mann
Marty Sherman

Tara Jo Mann appears to be a close relative of Republican congressional candidate Tracey Mann.

Thanks to our reader Tomas for pointing out yet another glaring piece of Obama hypocrisy in this year’s proposed federal budget. In the budget released yesterday, Obama, who last year got a Nobel Peace Prize for work on behalf of peace that he hadn’t actually done yet, has proposed a dramatic increase in spending on our nation’s nuclear weapons program.

As Obama is proposing cuts in domestic spending that he says we just can’t afford, he is calling for 7 billion dollars to be spent on making new nuclear weapons. These new nuclear weapons are supposed to be more reliable than the ones we already have. A reliable nuclear weapon is one that’s much more likely to hit its target, vaporizing huge civilian populations in foreign cities.

Last year, Obama said he was going to work to rid the world of nuclear weapons. Now, he’s spending money to build more nukes. The idea, apparently, is that the United States needs to build more nuclear weapons in order to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

The argument is like the claim of an alcoholic that he needs just one more stiff drink so that he can summon the courage to admit himself into an alcohol addiction recovery center. It seems that, upon becoming President, Obama became intoxicated by the aroma of plutonium wafting through the Oval Office.

When George W. Bush was President, we complained when Bush offered, year after year, record-breaking budgets for military spending. Now, for the second year in a row, Barack Obama is doing the same.

This year, Obama has proposed a Pentagon budget of $708 billion dollars, larger than anything Bush ever spent. It’s bigger than his record-breaking military budget of last year. Are we supposed to sit back and cheer, because it’s Barack Obama who’s brought us this puffed-up budget?

Unlike the one-time expenditure of 700 billion dollars in the Troubled Asset Relief Program bailout, the federal government won’t get any of the 708 billion dollars in defense spending this year. It’s gone for good, and we’ll get another bill of the same size, if not bigger, next year, and the year after that.

A significant degree of Barack Obama’s victory over the other top Democratic presidential candidates in 2008 can be attributed to his opposition to the invasion of Iraq back in 2003. Hillary Clinton could have easily topped Obama, if it weren’t for the vigorous opposition to her candidacy from large numbers of anti-war Democrats who never forgave her for voting in favor of the American invasion. Peace activists in 2008 thought they would be getting a President in Obama who would see things at least a little bit more their way.

That’s not what we saw in last year’s military budget, and it’s not what we’re seeing this year either. Last year, Democrats made excuses for Obama. Give him some more time to get settled into the Oval Office, they said, and then we’ll all see some real changes.

What are those Democrats going to say now? Will they acknowledge the failure of Obama to bring change, or will they change their ideology to suit their leader?

Ever the master of smooth timing, Barack Obama announced during his State of the Union Address last week that he was going to have nuclear power plants built all across the USA for clean, green energy. Little did he know that his nuclear green energy plan would be glowing green.

Today, less than a week after Obama’s announcement, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced a radioactive tritium leak at a nuclear power plant in Vermont at 300 percent of the federal safety standard. 27 out of the 104 nuclear reactors in the USA are now on record as leaking tritium. That’s a 25.9 percent leak rate. That’s just the number of leaks that have been officially registered. The NRC says it’s likely that many more tritium leaks from nuclear power plants exist.

Are you ready for some yummy tritium in your groundwater? Is this a plan for economic stimulus through rapid genetic mutation?

President Barack Obama releases a federal budget today that allows tax breaks passed in 2001 and 2003 to expire – for people who have an annual income of more than a quarter of a million dollars.

What would be so bad about that? Republicans said that tax breaks for wealthy Americans would improve the economy, but the economy with those tax breaks in place is in terrible shape. Why should Americans untouched by the current economic troubles, still earning more than $250,000.00, enjoy tax breaks?

President Obama this weekend met with Republicans in Congress and declared, “Nobody has been a bigger promoter of clean coal technology than I am.”

Dead coal miners.
Pools of toxic sludge.
Mountains blown apart.
Soot and carbon dioxide in the air.
Clean coal?!?

How can any environmentalist support Obama’s re-election in 2012?

John Yoo and Jay Bybee helped their boss, President George W. Bush, evade laws against torture, and now they’ll be evading responsibility themselves. Yoo and Bybee are going to be let off the hook.

It’s a reminder of how much went wrong under George W. Bush, and how little reckoning there has been for it. With all of the serious crimes of the Bush White House, there has been no legal punishment of any high officials involved.

There hasn’t been much honesty about the problems either. Torture, massive spying, arbitrary detention, and deception in the creation of the Iraq War all have been swept under the rug. Bush and Cheney have never been asked to testify under oath. There has been no comprehensive congressional investigation.

All that, we were told when Barack Obama entered the White House, would be divisive. If we just avoided looking at these crimes, we were told, then Republicans and Democrats could come together to work on America’s problems.

We see how well that worked, with Obama spending most of the State of the Union Address begging Republicans to stop being so mean to him.

If you’ve followed Irregular Times coverage of Barack Obama over the past 10 months or so, you’ll have noticed an overwhelming barrage of criticism directed at the president. That’s not because we have a partisan axe to grind against President Obama, but rather because we feel that instead of countering the trends of the previous eight years, he’s done much to press the environmental, constitutional, and war failures of George W. Bush into some new canon of American governance.

Today I sat up and noticed two stories:

1. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee this next Tuesday, Pentagon officials will be presenting a plan to end the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy of discrimination against gay and lesbian Americans. This would represent, finally, an active step by the Obama administration to follow through on its campaign promise in this regard.

2. Barack Obama entered into an unscripted question-and-answer period with House Republicans that was like a tamer version of the British “Question Time” before Parliament. I would have preferred more roaring and more detail, but it’s a start. One of these days, we might get to see some actual debate.

These two developments don’t negate Barack Obama’s year of undercutting the environment, civil liberties and the peace movement. But they are two small steps back in the right direction, and I’m glad to see them. I hope to see more.

During the State of the Union Address, Barack Obama pledged to push for more oil rigs along America’s coasts. In doing so, he’s ignored the remarkable series of oil spills that have occurred over the last year, from the three month-long spill in the Timor Sea to the 4 oil spills Alaska suffered in just one month, with plenty of other oil spills in between.

President Obama seems to believe the oil industry PR claims that there’s nothing to worry about, that the oil companies know what they’re doing. A little chink in Obama’s oily army of denial may develop today, however, with the release of news about yet another oil spill in Alaska.

Another oil spill took place on Alaska’s north slope yesterday… on the very same pipeline that spewed 46,000 gallons of oil out onto the tundra just a few weeks ago. British Petroleum said it had taken care of the pipeline’s leaky problems. Apparently, they didn’t get quite right.

With Barack Obama leading the Democrats into the political territory of Drill Baby Drill, people living along huge new stretches of America’s coastlines will have to wonder if the oil companies drilling near their homes have got it quite right.

Yesterday in his State of the Union Address, President Obama threw down the gauntlet on the matter of the creation of a special commission to make recommendations about how to balance the budget. He noted that the Senate had failed to pass a legislative amendment to create a budget commission before, and suggested that if the Senate couldn’t create a commission, he would. Obama said,

“Even after paying for what we spent on my watch, we’ll still face the massive deficit we had when I took office. More importantly, the cost of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will continue to skyrocket. That’s why I’ve called for a bipartisan fiscal commission, modeled on a proposal by Republican Judd Gregg and Democrat Kent Conrad. This can’t be one of those Washington gimmicks that lets us pretend we solved a problem. The commission will have to provide a specific set of solutions by a certain deadline. Now, yesterday, the Senate blocked a bill that would have created this commission. So I’ll issue an executive order that will allow us to go forward, because I refuse to pass this problem on to another generation of Americans.”

In the Senate vote two days ago that Barack Obama was referring to: 16 Republicans, 1 independent, and 36 Democrats voted in favor of the budget commission. 13 Republicans, 1 independent, and 22 Democrats voted in opposition of the budget commission. Notice the pattern in this vote? Both Democrats and Republicans mixed it up, with some voting for, and some voting against. In total, though, 53 senators voted for the budget commission amendment two days ago.

In reaction to Obama’s challenge last night, the U.S. Senate today organized another vote on another amendment, introduced by Senator Sam Brownback, to create a commission (to be entitled the Commission on Congressional Budgetary Accountability and Review of Federal Agencies). This time, the even fewer senators voted in favor of the commission: Just 51.

The tally this time was much more partisan: 37 Republicans, 1 independent, and 13 Democrats for; with 3 Republicans, 1 independent, and 45 Democrats against.

Notice the odd little turnabout? The Democratic President asked for a budget commission, and then the Republicans promoted it and the Democrats voted against it. The Commission proposed by Brownback wasn’t the quite sort of Commission earlier proposed by Conrad. Details.

It’s a remarkable tally in another way because in the State of the Union Address last night, Obama practically begged members of both houses of Congress to put aside party differences to create a Commission. Obama said that Americans are, “tired of the partisanship and the shouting and the pettiness. They know we can’t afford it. Not now.”

The Senate reacted by moving showing less support for Obama’s legislative agenda today, and by acting in a more partisan manner as it did so. Obama’s pleading failed to convince even Senate Democrats to stand together, and provoked Senate Republicans who had supported practically the same commission idea a couple of days ago into knee jerk reaction.

This quick and sharp rejection right after the State of the Union speech, which is usually a tool a President can use to regain political strength, suggests that Barack Obama’s authority is rapidly disintegrating. Making speeches, which has been Obama’s strongest political ability, doesn’t seem to help him any more.

If this trend continues, the Congress will soon eclipse the White House in political power. In the abstract, that would be a great thing. Under George W. Bush, there was too much concentration of power in the Executive Branch. In the context of this year, however, the dwindling of the White House under Barack Obama looks very bad for the Democratic Party, as the Republicans threaten to take back both houses of Congress this November.

Of course, the Democrats, even with the Presidency and strong majorities in both the House and Senate, have failed to advance a strong progressive agenda. With groups like the Blue Dog Coalition and the Democratic Leadership Council pulling the Democratic Party to the right, progressives have held a minority of seats in Congress, even as Democrats have had a majority.

In spite of McCain-Palin’s loss last year, the right wing never really lost its grip on power, and it looks like 2010 may be a year in which their politics of fear and greed comes surging back to grab absolute power in the open.

What wasn’t in Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address last night may be as telling as what was in it.

The absences that come to the top of my mind:

- Closing Guantanamo
- A renewed pledge to end, or even reform, government spying against Americans (no “surveillance” “spying” “wiretap” “warrantless” language)
- Oil spills, or any other form of pollution
- Endangered species
- No repeat of the broken promise to end religious discrimination by the government’s religious projects (faith-based initiatives)

What else was missing from the speech that you might have expected a year ago?

As an environmentalist, the thing that stands out most about Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address tonight is his commitment to promote increased government funding for the “clean coal” hoax, and to allow even more offshore drilling for oil and gas along America’s coasts. It’s the kind of thing that I would have expected to hear from a State of the Union Address by George W. Bush.

I’d like to hear from other environmentalists about their reaction to this statement from President Obama. How are you reacting to this unequivocal stand with the dirty energy industry? Is it something you’re willing to accept, or does it break your trust in Obama for good?

A couple days ago, I asked for readers’ suggestions of some phrases that Barack Obama tends to use in his speeches, so that I could include them on some bingo cards for tonight’s State of the Union address. Today, I’ve completed the cards, which you can grab by clicking on the pictures below.

Here’s how it works: Grab a bunch of pennies for markers, and lay your bingo card out in front of you. Then, at 9:00 Eastern Time this evening, tune into the President’s State of the Union Address, available on the classic 3 TV networks, news channels, and NPR radio, as well as online from WhiteHouse.gov. Whenever Barack Obama uses a phrase you have on your bingo card, place a penny on the appropriate square, and if you get a diagonal or straight line across the card, bingo – you win the game.

I’ve also included a blank bingo card for you to fill in, if you like, with your own predictions about careworn phrases President Obama will use for his speech tonight.