Two Democratic voices, speaking about the leak of a huge number of documents, showing profound corruption in the Afghanistan war:

Barack Obama: “I’m concerned about the disclosure of sensitive information from the battlefield that could potentially jeopardize individuals or operations.”

Dennis Kucinich: “We can no longer look the other way, or pretend that the war is something that is it not. Occupying Afghanistan does not help further the freedom of the Afghan people. It is not the leak of documents that endangers the lives of American troops and our allies, it is the belief that occupying Afghanistan will make us safer. Congress must say no to war funding, bring our troops home, and invest in the American recovery.”

Should we have worked to elect Dennis Kucinich President in 2008? Should we work to encourage him to challenge Barack Obama in 2012?

President Barack Obama made a speech today — July 24, 2010 — to the Netroots Nation conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. A video of that speech (with a recorded intercession by Rachel Maddow) has helpfully been made available by Netroots Nation but apparently without a transcript, and the White House has not (yet) posted either video or text of President Obama’s remarks on the whitehouse.gov website. To get President Obama’s appeal on the record for discussion, here’s a transcription of the remarks by Obama and Maddow:

President Barack Obama: I’m grateful for the chance to talk with all of you, because we meet at a difficult moment for America. Over the last 18 months we’ve been working to put our country back on the right path, to dig our way out of this recession, and begin building an economy that makes America more competitive and our middle class more secure. And while we’ve got a long way to go, I’m confident that America is once again moving forward.

Still, change has not come fast enough for too many Americans. I know that. It hasn’t come fast enough for me either. And I know it hasn’t come fast enough for many of you who fought so hard during the election. The fact is, it took years to get here. It’ll take time to get us out. We’ve known that since the beginning of our campaign. But I hope you take a moment to consider all we’ve accomplished so far.

[Rachel Maddow, recorded narration:

"Turns out that a lot of things that have happened in the last two years of this administration are the biggest or first or most important in generations:

• Wall Street reform agreement
• Health reform
• The stimulus bill. It didn't just throw a lasso around our entire economy and yank it back from the brink; it also pumped about a $100,000,000,000 into the crumbling embarrassment of our national infrastructure and transportation system
• Tax incentives for renewable and clean energy
• Unheralded but giant investment in science and tech
• Also expanded state kids' health insurance to cover another 4 million kids.
• The Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act
• A nuclear arms deal with Russia that would reduce both countries' arsenals by a third. An international way forward on that radical left-wing proposition of Ronald Reagan: a world without nuclear weapons.
• The Hate Crimes prevention act, also known as the Matthew Shepard Act
• Dismantled the scandal-plagued Minerals Management Service
• Overhauled the astonishing stupidity of the student loan system

The last any president did this much in office, booze was illegal. If you believe in policy, if you believe in government that addresses problems, cheers to that."]

Barack Obama: So in ways large and small, we’ve begun to deliver on the change we’ve fought so hard for. But we’re not done. We’re working to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. We’re working to close Guantanamo in a responsible way. And thanks to the heroism of our troops, we are poised to end our combat mission in Iraq by the end of August, completing a drawdown of more than 90,000 troops since I took office.

We’re moving America forward, and when we’ve come this far, we can’t afford to slide backward. And that’s the choice America faces this November. Between going back to the failed policies that got us into this mess, and moving forward with policies that are leading us out.

I don’t need to tell you that. What I’m asking you is to keep making your voices heard. To keep holding me accountable. To keep up the fight. Change is hard, but if we’ve learned anything these past 18 months, it’s that change is possible. It’s possible when folks like you remember that fundamental truth of our democracy: that change doesn’t come from the top down. It comes from the bottom up. It comes from the netroots, the grassroots, from every American who loves their country and believes they can make a difference.

We’ve done it before. We can do it again. Let’s finish what we’ve started. Thanks so much.

If you consider yourself a progressive American, Barack Obama is speaking to you. What’s your reaction?

When George W. Bush ignored science to push for the implementation of pre-determined policies, American liberals condemned the practice.

Before Barack Obama became president, he promised to respect the integrity of the scientific process and allow scientific results to inform our policies in an unperturbed fashion:

From landing on the moon, to sequencing the human genome, to inventing the Internet, America has been the first to cross that new frontier because we had leaders who paved the way: leaders like President Kennedy, who inspired us to push the boundaries of the known world and achieve the impossible; leaders who not only invested in our scientists, but who respected the integrity of the scientific process.

Because the truth is that promoting science isnt just about providing resources – its about protecting free and open inquiry. Its about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology. Its about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when its inconvenient – especially when its inconvenient. Because the highest purpose of science is the search for knowledge, truth and a greater understanding of the world around us. That will be my goal as President of the United States.

Now the Los Angeles Times reports that scientists are being pressured by Obama administration appointees to change their results in order to streamline approval for environmentally destructive projects, just as they were pressured by the officials of the Bush administration:

“We are getting complaints from government scientists now at the same rate we were during the Bush administration,” said Jeffrey Ruch, an activist lawyer who heads an organization representing scientific whistle-blowers….

interviews with several scientists — most of whom requested anonymity because they feared retaliation in their jobs — as well as reviews of e-mails provided by Ruch and others show a wide range of complaints during the Obama presidency:

In Florida, water-quality experts reported government interference with efforts to assess damage to the Everglades stemming from development projects.

In the Pacific Northwest, federal scientists said they were pressured to minimize the effects they had documented of dams on struggling salmon populations.

In several Western states, biologists reported being pushed to ignore the effects of overgrazing on federal land.

In Alaska, some oil and gas exploration decisions given preliminary approval under Bush moved forward under Obama, critics said, despite previously presented evidence of environmental harm.

The most immediate case of politics allegedly trumping science, some government and outside environmental experts said, was the decision to fight the gulf oil spill with huge quantities of potentially toxic chemical dispersants despite advice to examine the dangers more thoroughly.

And the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Washington-based organization, said it had received complaints from scientists in key agencies about the difficulty of speaking out publicly.

“Many of the frustrations scientists had with the last administration continue currently,” said Francesca Grifo, the organization’s director of scientific integrity.

Will we react the same way to this news as we did when the president’s name was George W. Bush?

David Axelrod’s message to liberals who are upset about Barack Obama’s embrace of George W. Bush’s policies: You shouldn’t expect any better. “My admonition would be: Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good,” he said to them yesterday.

The top Obama advisor apparently believes that Barack Obama doesn’t need to do anything more to satisfy the liberals who were Obama’s base of support in the 2008 presidential election. He asks us to look for the “good”.

Barack Obama’s refusal to even consider single payer health care reform. Was that the good we’re supposed to be thankful for?

Obama’s support for expanded offshore drilling – is that good?

Is the “good” Axelrod was talking about the way that Obama sent his lawyers out to argue that homosexuality is akin to pedophilia, and to declare that the President has the right, as George W. Bush said, to keep secrets from the American people even when ordered by a court to share the information?

Breaking his promise for open government by covering up evidence of torture and refusing Freedom Of Information Act obligations is the good we’re supposed to be thankful for?

Is Obama’s work to give public money to support the “clean coal” hoax good?

How about Obama’s broken promise to reform the Office of Faith-Based Initiative’s corrupt system of religious patronage? How is that good?

Are we supposed to think it was good of Obama to continue George W. Bush’s policy of delaying endangered species protections?

Is keeping the prisons of Guantanamo Bay open good?

Is it good that Obama has organized kangaroo court military tribunals and declared that he embraces Bush’s belief that the President can keep people in prison without any criminal charge?

Are we supposed to categorize two record-breaking military budgets in a row as good?

Are we expected to place Obama’s opposition to marriage equality in the “good” column?

How about the continued expansion of government electronic surveillance of the American people? Is that good?

Really, what is this “good” that David Axelrod was talking about? Barack Obama has consistently worked against the liberal vision of what’s good, supporting a right wing version of morality instead.

When we liberals declare the withdrawal of our support from Barack Obama, we’re not making “the perfect the enemy of the good”. We’re merely being consistent in opposing the same old bad policies that we opposed under George W. Bush.

In 2005, Irregular Times responded to the Bush administration’s plans for lifetime detention without criminal charges or trial, writing an essay calling George W. Bush “The Quiet Dictator”:

It was revealed this week that the Bush Administration is planning to keep people as prisoners for their entire lives, even though there is no evidence that those people have committed any crime against the United States. The lack of evidence against these people is so striking that the American government does not even have enough grounds to bring them before a form of military tribunal that has been set up by George W. Bush precisely for the purpose of evading the standards of justice set by the United States Constitution….

In the old, pre-Homeland, United States of America, a person had to be convicted of murder, by a jury of peers, in a public, open trial, on the basis of evidence without a reasonable doubt, and with the opportunity for fair representation and appeal to the justice system to rule out mistakes and prosecutorial fraud. Oh, but that was before The Homeland was created, and as we’re told over and over again, in the Homeland, everything changed.

At first, it was a scandal that the President of the United States had claimed the power to set up his own courts, outside of the judicial branch of government, to force people through military tribunals that would be little more than kangaroo courts. Now, it appears that Mr. Bush, the Master of our Homeland, has decided that he does not have to give prisoners any trial at all, ever. He can just lock them up, forever….

It is a sad day for those Americans who actually care about freedom, to see the American President give himself the power to convict people and punish them with life sentences without any need of evidence or even the formality of a show trial. This power is at the heart of totalitarianism, and now that George W. Bush has seized it, he is nothing more than a dictator….

The saddest thing of all is that most Americans just don’t care. So long as they are not taken prisoner, they don’t care if other people are. So long as they are not tortured, they don’t care if other people are. So long as they are able to live safely in their homes, they don’t care if other people, in other countries, are killed in their homes.

There is a new nonchalance in America about the withering of freedom. Freedom has now become an abstract concept for most Americans, something that is to be given only to some people, but not to others. Now, under the shadow of The Homeland, Americans seem to like the idea that only good people that the government approves of have the privilege of freedom. Gone are the days when freedom was regarded as a universal human right. Americans seem to want only security and vengeance.

It’s five years later and George W. Bush is no longer in the White House. But have matters changed? Barack Obama, the new Master of our Homeland, has agreed with the old Master that he does not have to give some prisoners any trial at all, ever. He, too, can just lock them up forever.

On what basis does Barack Obama justify his seizure of dictatorial powers? The Obama Administration says that the people it is imprisoning are suspected of providing support to “terrorist organizations.” But at the same time, the Obama administration’s own task force declared in 2010 that:

Notably, the principal obstacles to prosecution in the cases deemed infeasible by the Task Force typically did not stem from concerns over protecting sensitive sources or methods from disclosure, or concerns that the evidence against the detainee was tainted. While such concerns were present in some cases, most detainees were deemed infeasible for prosecution based on more fundamental evidentiary and jurisdictional limitations tied to the demands of a criminal forum….

Generally these detainees cannot be prosecuted because either there is presently insufficient admissible evidence to establish the detainee’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in either a federal court or military commission, or the detainee’s conduct does not constitute a chargeable offense in either a federal court or military commission.

In plain English, what does this mean? It means that the Obama administration is maintaining the Bush administration practice of detaining people without end when there is not sufficient evidence to actually convict them of terrorist acts, or terrorist support, or even terrorist affiliations.

The Guantanamo Review Task Force, consisting of officials from six branches of the Obama administration, was unanimous in making these declarations. In its unanimous report, the Guantanamo Review Task Force approvingly placed the following fig leaf over the indefinite detention of people who have insufficient evidence of guilt and whose conduct does not constitute a chargeable offense:

Significantly, the Executive Order does not preclude the government from prosecuting at a later date someone who is presently designated for continued detention. Work on these cases continues. Further exploitation of the forensic evidence could strengthen the prosecution against some detainees. Other detainees may cooperate with prosecutors. If either the Department of Justice or the Department of Defense concluded in the future that prosecution of a detainee held without charges has become feasible in a federal court or in a military commission, the detention decisions made in the course of this review would permit the prosecution to go forward.

You read that right: the Obama administration wants to keep these people locked up because one day some new evidence might come up that connects these people to prosecutable crimes, and just in case the government wants to keep them handy.

It is another sad day for Americans who care about freedom but see the American President give himself the power to punish people with a life in detention without any need for evidence, without even the formality of a show trial. Such power is still at the heart of totalitarianism, and now that Barack Obama has taken that power, we might as well call him what he is: a dictator.

American liberals long warned that George W. Bush was leading America toward dictatorship. But Barack Obama has taken the same dictatorial powers for himself. Bush may be gone, but the dictatorship is still here.

It’s now been 535 days since Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States. Since a time before Obama’s inauguration, federal law has required President Obama to appoint a Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. This board is charged with the responsibility of tracking the compliance of the executive branch of government with the provisions of the Constitution. The board is granted the ability to subpoena members of the government to testify and supply documentation, and it is granted access to classified information in order to carry out its work. Finally, the board is tasked with making regular reports to the U.S. Congress and the American public on the constitutionality of activities by a presidential administration.

This board and these powers do not fill a hypothetical need. Just yesterday, the National Security Agency acknowledged the existence of a program called Perfect Citizen in which the United States Military is putting surveillance devices in computer networks across the domestic USA to snoop on Internet traffic. Of course, the National Security Agency denies that the Perfect Citizen program is planning to spy on Americans using these devices — which is odd, considering that they are being deployed domestically — and proclaims that its efforts are purely for purposes of “research and development.” The military-industrial corporation assigned the $100 million Perfect Citizen contract, Raytheon, tells the media that “We have no info on this” — which again is odd, considering that the Wall Street Journal obtained a Raytheon e-mail in which the corporation declares that “Perfect Citizen is Big Brother.”

What does the operation called Perfect Citizen have to do with the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board? A lot. First of all, the NSA didn’t even acknowledge the existence of Perfect Citizen until Wall Street Journal investigators uncovered details about the program. If the Wall Street Journal hadn’t stumbled across the information, we might never have known about this domestic military surveillance program. But since the NSA is under the authority of the executive branch and the President of the United States, then the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board would have had the power to uncover this program and report on its activities to the Congress and the public. It doesn’t stop there. In 2010, after the disclosure of the program’s existence, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board would have had the power to assess the claims of the NSA that Perfect Citizen is just a hypothetical program.

The board would have been able to do these things if it had been constituted as it should have been in 2009. But for 535 days now, Barack Obama has ignored federal law and failed to nominate even one member to sit on the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board. The Board remains nonexistent. The Board’s oversight functions are going undone. Because the board has not been filled and does not exist, it cannot carry out these investigative and reporting functions on programs like Perfect Citizen. We’re lucky we even know that the program exists. We have no idea what other Obama administration programs are out there that may be violating our constitutional rights. And when programs like Perfect Citizen do come to light, there’s no way to assess the accuracy of the NSA’s protestations that this is all just “research” and we don’t have to worry our purty little heads none.

The ongoing lack of a Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board is not only a violation of federal law, but is also a violation of the trust placed in a candidate who told us on the campaign trail that unlike his predecessor, he would restore the rule of law and obey the Constitution. This is not the Change we were promised.

I just received a letter in the mail from Tim Wildmon, President of the American Family Association. I get a little cheer in my heart when such letters come. For one thing, I know that the fundamentalist and theocratic AFA just frittered away a little bit of its budget on printing and mailing costs. For another thing, I get an opportunity to learn a little bit more about what makes the fundamentalist theocratic heart beat as it does.

In today’s letter, Mr. Wildmon declares that in a 2001 “radio he bemoaned the fact that the Warren Supreme Court ‘never entered into the issues of redistribution of wealth.’”

The “he” in that sentence is President Barack Obama. I happen to have previously transcribed that 2001 interview, a joint interview by Chicago Public Radio moderator Gretchen Helfrich of both Illinois state senator Barack Obama and constitutional expert Dennis Hutchison. You can listen to the entire interview here if you don’t believe me.

This is actually what Barack Obama said:

Dennis Hutchinson: The federal constitution doesn’t provide any warrant for intervention.

Barack Obama: Exactly. So, what’s interesting is that suddenly, a whole bunch of people start bringing these claims to state courts…

Dennis Hutchison: The idea that you could use the due process clause for redistributive ends, socially, that would be stable I think was an astonishing assumption in the mind of litigators about what they could accomplish over time, and it just didn’t last very long.

Barack Obama: And it essentially has never happpened. If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples. So that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be okay.

But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society, and to that extent as radical as people tried to characterize the Warren court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can’t do to you, it says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted.

One of the I think, the tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change and in some ways we still suffer from that.

In that quote Barack Obama does not bemoan the fact that the Warren Supreme Court “never entered into the issues of redistribution of wealth.” He used the word “ventured,” to start off with a triviality. More substantially, Obama bemoaned that activists spent their energies trying to get the Warren Supreme Court to do so, rather than engaging in grassroots activism to enact change outside the courts, which he thinks would have been a better idea. Barack Obama’s 2001 idea regarding the Supreme Court and redistribution of wealth was actually the opposite of what Tim Wildmon says it was.

If you don’t get the point yet, let’s look at what else Barack Obama said in the very same interview:

Moderator Gretchen Helfrich: Let’s talk with Karen. Good morning, Karen, you’re on Chicago Public Radio.

Karen: Hi. The gentleman made the point that the Warren Court wasn’t terribly radical, my question is, with economic changes. My question is, is it too late for that kind of reparative work economically and is that that the appropriate place for reparative economic work to take place?

Helfrich: You mean the Court?

Karen: The Court. Or would it be legislation at this point?

Barack Obama: You know, maybe I’m showing my bias here as a legislator as well as a law professor, but I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. You know, the institution just isn’t structured that way.

You just look at very rare examples during the desegregation era the court was willing to for example order, you know, changes that cost money to a local school district. The court was very uncomfortable with it. It was very hard to manage, it was hard to figure out. You start getting into all sorts of separation of powers issues, you know, in terms of the court monitoring or engaging in a process that essentially is administrative and takes a lot of time. You know, the court’s just not very good at it and politically it’s very hard to legitimize opinions from the court in that regard.

So I think that although you can craft theoretical justifications for it legally, you know, I think any three of us sitting here could come up with a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts, I think that as a practical matter our institutions are just poorly equipped to do it.

If you had any shred of a doubt about what Barack Obama meant, he cleared it up for you in that exchange, declaring that the Supreme Court is not structured to bring about redistribution of wealth, that the court would not be good at it, that politically such a move would be very hard to legitimize and that even if you wanted such a thing the Supreme Court would be poorly equipped to do it.

Tim Wildmon’s assertion about Barack Obama’s 2001 radio interview is clearly, demonstrably wrong. Speaking of “wrong,” there’s something that the Bible declares to be wrong. Exodus 20:16 states it flat-out: “Thou shalt not bear false witness”.

Either Tim Wildmon never actually looked up the quote he inverted, in which case he is bearing false witness against Barack Obama by falsely asserting himself to be knowledgeable on the matter he uses to condemn the president, or Tim Wildmon actually did the research, came across the words you just read above, and knowingly twisted Barack Obama’s words to falsely condemn him. In either case, Tim Wildmon has committed a sin against his own purported value system.

Which value does Tim Wildmon hold more highly? The value of scoring political points against a partisan opponent, or the value of being truthful in accusation?

Let’s find out. Today I’m sending a letter in the mail directly to Tim Wildmon. It reads:

July 6, 2010

Dear Mr. Wildmon,

In an “Action Letter” dated July 2010, you wrote of Barack Obama in 2001 that “in that same radio interview he bemoaned the fact that the Warren Supreme Court ‘never entered into the issues of redistribution of wealth.’”

This is a false accusation. The radio interview (which you may listen to or read an online transcription of via http://wp.me/pdWLh-4VX) actually demonstrates, in no fewer than three passages including the very one you partially quote, that Barack Obama articulated the opposite position. The then-state-senator declared in the radio interview that due to practical difficulties, political considerations and constitutional restraints involving the separation of powers, it would have been a bad idea for the Warren Court to have “ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth.” Far from bemoaning the Warren Court for failing to redistribute wealth, Barack Obama bemoans the strategy of activists who tried to convince the Warren Court to redistribute wealth.

Exodus 20:16 reminds Christians that “thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”

I hope that you have not made this false claim knowingly, although in such a circumstance you have made the false assertion of having the authority to make such a factual assertion. I encourage you to issue a public retraction of this false claim at the earliest opportunity and to all those who received your accusation in the mail or otherwise.

This would be the Christian thing to do. I look forward to your response.

I’ve just put the letter in the mail, and I’ll share with you not only any response I receive, but also whether Tim Wildmon chooses to repent for his episode of bearing false witness.

The first sign that things aren’t right with the draft National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace is that it’s being organized through the Department of Homeland Security. Who thought of trying to combine the concepts of “trusted” and “Homeland Security”?

The idea of the NSTIC is that the Internet isn’t trustworthy and secure, and so people need to have a means for engaging in online activities. So, there will be created an Identity Ecosystem which will allow just one login procedure to access a broad number of services ranging from email to bank accounts and health records.

Howard Schmidt, Cybersecurity Coordinator for President Obama, introduced the NSTIC last Friday, writing:

“The NSTIC, which is in response to one of the near term action items in the President’s Cyberspace Policy Review, calls for the creation of an online environment, or an Identity Ecosystem as we refer to it in the strategy, where individuals and organizations can complete online transactions with confidence, trusting the identities of each other and the identities of the infrastructure that the transaction runs on. For example, no longer should individuals have to remember an ever-expanding and potentially insecure list of usernames and passwords to login into various online services. Through the strategy we seek to enable a future where individuals can voluntarily choose to obtain a secure, interoperable, and privacy-enhancing credential (e.g., a smart identity card, a digital certificate on their cell phone, etc) from a variety of service providers – both public and private – to authenticate themselves online for different types of transactions (e.g., online banking, accessing electronic health records, sending email, etc.). Another key concept in the strategy is that the Identity Ecosystem is user-centric – that means you, as a user, will be able to have more control of the private information you use to authenticate yourself on-line, and generally will not have to reveal more than is necessary to do so.”

The Department of Homeland Security is accepting comments for the draft version of effort to centralize online information… but there’s a catch: You need to log in and create an account in their system before you can leave a comment.

Here’s the comment I would have left about the proposal, if it weren’t for the requirement to give Homeland Security my email address:

“Remembering different account information is a privilege, not a problem. It’s a security protection to individuals, both from hackers and from government surveillance, to have highly idiosyncratic, decentralized, personally improvised systems of multiple sources upon which online identity is founded.

The proposed system may, strictly speaking, be voluntary, but only in the sense that a driver’s license is voluntary. A driver’s license is now required for access to a huge number of places and services, and isn’t just about driving any more. Please, let’s work on methods to make individually-controlled, multiple and separate online identities more secure.”

This weekend, at a meeting of leaders from the world’s most economically powerful nations, President Barack Obama took a moment to talk about the war in Afghanistan. “There has been a lot of obsession around this whole issue of when do we leave,” he said, with a sense of irritation.

Obsession – is that a fair way to characterize Americans’ concern with the question of when their country’s military will leave Afghanistan? American soldiers have been in Afghanistan now for almost nine years. It’s been over eight years since we were told that the Taliban had been defeated. Yet, the Taliban are still growing stronger, and American policies for creating a solid, alternative, more friendly government there still don’t make much sense. Both the Afghan government we’ve established and our own system of military occupation have proved to be at the same time corrupt and thoroughly incapable of controlling most of Afghanistan.

President Obama says that he doesn’t think about when to take the American military out of Iraq because he’s focused on pondering “how do we make sure that what we’re doing there is successful, given the incredible sacrifices that our young men and women are putting in”. However, American plans for success now include reintegrating much of the Taliban into the American-established Afghan government. I don’t think that most American soldiers in Afghanistan believed that their “incredible sacrifices” were directed toward bringing the Taliban back into a governing coalition.

When I hear Obama talk about this supposed “obsession” with when to finally get the American military out of Afghanistan, I get a picture of President Obama camping out for two years in a condemned building he inherited from George W. Bush, promising to restore it to a sound condition. Like Bush, Obama keeps on spending more money on the building, year after year, but every time one thing is repaired, something else falls apart. There’s a large crew in that building, listening to it sway and creak around them, without any more confidence than when they started that it won’t collapse completely on their heads.

That feeling that it’s time to get out of that building, I wouldn’t call it obsession. I’d call it profound concern.

A year ago today:

* Iraq suffered bombings and Barack Obama refused indefinite detainees at the base in Bagram, Afghanistan the right of habeas corpus.

* Someone wrote us to declare that Barack Obama “is 50% white, 44% Arab and 6% Black.”

* Republican Governor Mark Sanford dealt with the aftermath violating his marriage vows after being confronted with proof of his adultery and after spending a career in office denying other people the right to get married.

* Anti-torture rallies popped up around the country from coast to coast.

Today, Baghdad reacts to another bombing. Bagram detainees still have no habeas corpus rights. I just got an e-mail in which someone referred to our president as “Osambo.” Republican Representative Mark Souder deals with the aftermath of violating his marriage after being confronted with proof of his adultery and after spending a career in office denying other people the right to get married. There are no anti-torture rallies anywhere in the country.

Well, one thing’s changed, but it isn’t for the better.

Around Washington DC, there is bipartisan consensus that because “the military is subordinate to the civilian command,” President Barack Obama was right to fire General Stanley McChrystal for his insubordination. What keeps America from falling completely into the structure of a warlord nation is the strict rule that elected representatives set policy and the military is constrained to follow that policy.

Why is the consensus in some circles around Washington, DC that when it comes to the repeal or maintenance of the discriminatory Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy, “you ultimately have to listen to the military authorities”? I have the suspicion that in this case a substantive position generated the procedural stance.

Oil-soaked Republican politicians should be careful before they applaud yesterday’s ruling to stop the deep water drilling moratorium, at least if they’re interested in being logically consistent. Judge Martin L.C. Feldman ruled that the moratorium must be halted because there is no reason to believe that because the BP Deepwater Horizon suffered an incident, other deep water rigs are at a similar risk.

Implicitly, this ruling assumes that there were no problems system-wide with deep water drilling to place other rigs at a similar risk of catastrophic failure (It’s an assumption I disagree with after having read of the multiple regulatory exemptions granted to the Deepwater Horizon.). If you applaud the ruling, then it’s inescapable that the oil spill was entirely the fault of BP (and accomplice Halliburton).

If these oil-soaked Republican politicians applaud the ruling, they can’t continue to go around wildly blaming Barack Obama and Big Government for the oil spill with any consistency. Expect them to continue to go around wildly blaming Barack Obama and Big Government anyway.

I’m glad that I was beyond the reach of the news this Father’s Day, because if I had listened to the news on Sunday, I know I would have been left with the same sore feeling I get every year.

I’m not a perfect father, because I’m not a perfect person. I don’t have quite the resources to be around every day for my children, because I’m out there working to keep a roof over their heads. When I’m home, I give my kids all the attention I can.

Does that sound like an excuse?

Maybe it does to Barack Obama, who chose to title his Father’s Day speech this year: No Excuses. Like he did last year, President Obama chose to spend Father’s Day telling fathers how rotten they are.

On Mother’s Day, Obama wrote an official proclamation declaring that, “Generations of mothers have labored tirelessly and selflessly to support and guide their children and families.” On Father’s Day, however, Obama scolded American fathers that “there is no excuse for failing to meet their obligations.” Obama also “gave a nod to the single mothers picking up the slack,” opening up his speech with the statement that “We can all agree that we’ve got too many mothers out there forced to do everything all by themselves. They’re doing a heroic job, often under trying circumstances.”

Hey, Mr. Obama, it’s called Father’s Day for a reason. It’s a day of appreciation for fathers – not for mothers. We’re supposed to get a chance to relax and enjoy being with our families without being nagged at, told that we’re not good enough.

If Obama wants attack American fathers, I suppose that’s his right. Can his advisors please tell him to stop doing it on Father’s Day? Let him declare October 3rd to be National Fathers Are Lousy Bums Day. Let him make January 10 into Mothers Are Better Than Fathers Day. On Father’s Day, though, I just don’t want to hear the complaining.

(Tip of the pen to qs)

The Defense Department calls its new unit FICOR — the Foreign Intelligence and Counterintelligence Operation Records. But the military group describes the data it will collect through intelligence and data mining operations:

“Social Security Number (SSN), address, citizenship documentation, biometric data, passport number, vehicle identification number and vehicle/vessel license data… [from] Federal, state, local, and tribal entities, foreign intelligence agencies, educational and research institutions, foreign governments and open source literature.”

Data collected from “federal, state, local, and tribal entities” including a person’s “Social Security Number (SSN)”? How foreign does that sound to you?

Military spying on Americans? No, that’s not Change I Can Believe In. It’s more of the same. Read up on the Bush-era TALON program, a military program that spied on law-abiding American citizens without their knowledge and without a warrant, solely on the basis of their political activity (For the younger among you who may not have heard of this thing called a “warrant,” see the increasingly quaint document known as the U.S. Constitution, Amendment 4. See also “freedom of assembly and petition,” Amendment 1). Read especially the part of the 2007 Defense Department brief in which the military explicitly indicates it will keep the data and restart the program in the future:

DoD to Implement Interim Threat Reporting Procedures

DoD’s Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) will close the TALON Reporting System effective Sept. 17, 2007, and maintain a record copy of the collected data in accordance with intelligence oversight requirements.

To ensure there is a mechanism in place to document and assess potential threats to DoD resources, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Americas’ Security Affairs will propose a system to streamline such threat reporting and better meet the Defense department’s needs.

In the interim, until this new reporting program is adopted, DoD components will send information concerning force protection threats to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Guardian reporting system.

It was hiding there in plain sight: no, the military never planned on keeping TALON shut down at all. But the military has a new Commander in Chief. Barack Obama could have stopped this domestic military surveillance. But he went right along with it. That’s not Change. It’s more of the same.