To eliminate the likely possibility of saying things that could come back to bite me professionally (or God forbid politically) this will be my last blog post. I’ve just been muttering to myself here and based on the quality of recent legislation and its effect on my investments I’m likely to just come off as unhinged. So, so long, good luck and buy gold!!!
WASHINGTON - Even as it pulls back from harsh interrogations and other sharply debated aspects of George W. Bush ’s “war on terrorism,” the Obama administration is quietly signaling continued support for other major elements of its predecessor’s approach to fighting Al Qaeda .
In little-noticed confirmation testimony recently, Obama nominees endorsed continuing the C.I.A. ’s program of transferring prisoners to other countries without legal rights, and indefinitely detaining terrorism suspects without trials even if they were arrested far from a war zone.
The administration has also embraced the Bush legal team’s arguments that a lawsuit by former C.I.A. detainees should be shut down based on the “state secrets” doctrine. It has also left the door open to resuming military commission trials.
I'm sure Obama is just doing this to be nice; give Bush something for his tattered legacy to cling to.
I'm sure it wasn't that he knew all along that most of the rhetoric against these polices wasn't in any way realistic.
(Fast forward to the last minute)
Fox News certainly has its biases but I cannot think of anything it's done that approaches this.
Does the traditional media know it's best days are behind it; that it now has nothing to lose by coming out of the closet, dropping that phony mask of objectivity, and letting their leftist sympathies out for the world to see?
Could someone please explain to me how the 4th estate is in any way doing it's job by collectively fellating the leader of the 2nd?
As someone who came from Racine and lived in Milwaukee for a good while during the presidential race I was certain that some journalist somewhere would notice that the Democratic presidential nominee came from the state with probably the greatest possible embarrassment potential. For my entire life I heard stories of hilarious Chicago corruption from the corpse resurrection machine politics of “Da Mare” to the authoritarian antics of junior (shutting down Meigs fields with airplanes still in flight). Instead journalists were so enamored with Obama they failed to pay any mind to the banging of pots and pans in the guest house out back.
Now on the eve of the fanciest ball since Camelot, Blago the monkey boy is on the loose spitting applesauce and pissing his pants for the world to see. Eager to quiet this embarrassment and maintain the narrative that Blagojevich is some sort of unfortunate outlier unreflective of Obama and Illinois as a whole, stories proclaiming the futility of nominating Roland Burris abound. These stories hinge on the misinformed belief that the Illinois secretary of state can refuse to certify Blagojevich’s replacement, not understanding or choosing not to acknowledge that the secretary of state’s powers are merely ministerial. Unless the nomination happened counter to state statute, which no one is suggesting it did, the Illinois secretary of state must certify. Harry Reid’s insistence that the Senate can choose to not seat Burris due to Article 1 Section 5 is again is again, mistaken.
The net effect of all of this is that this controversy will go on long after Obama’s inauguration and the media’s attempts to staunch the resulting bleeding will be put to a Goebbels-like test. Their lack of integrity will be repeatedly demonstrated as one freakish product of the incestuous union of political power and special interests reveals itself after another.
Enjoy! I know I will.
While I do honestly wish Obama the best and will wait to judge him on his actual actions as President, his Reagan-esqe margin (330+ electoral votes? wowza!) of victory could embolden him and quasi-Marxists in the Democratic Party to abandon the pragmatism that made Clinton so politically successful and move directly on:
1.) Withdrawing from Iraq without appropriately considering security implications.
2.) Implementing confiscatory tax rates on the “rich” (is that 150k or 250k?) that will cause a flight of capital into tax shelters limiting economy sustaining investment and tax revenue.
3.) Implementing carbon cap ‘n trade that will slow the economy, produce negligible environmental benefits and vastly subsidize a poorly understood and poorly regulated carbon market.
4.) Begin to transition private 401k assets into the Social Security Administration.
Well that’s all that comes to mind right now. Off to my sure to become workers paradise!
Just 14 percent of the stories about John McCain, from the conventions through the final presidential debate, were positive in tone, according to a study released today, while nearly 60 percent were negative — the least favorable coverage of any of the four candidates on the two tickets.
The study, by The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, a nonpartisan journalism watchdog organization, examined 2,412 stories from 43 newspapers and cable news shows in the six-week period beginning just after the conventions and ending with the final presidential debate.
[...]
Obama’s numbers, in fact, are in line with past presidential candidates around the same time periods in the 2000 and 2004 races. It’s McCain’s coverage that has been extraordinarily negative in tone.
On the plus side this election has pretty much revealed mainstream "journalism" for the fraud it is. The argument moves from whether the institution is in the tank to what newsources are most dishonest about their motives.
This is damning:
If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as president of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography.
That isn't Sen. Obama's fault: His job is to put his best face forward. No, it is the traditional media's fault, for it alone (unlike the alternative media) has had the resources to cover this story properly, and has systematically refused to do so.
Why, for example to quote the lawyer for Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., haven't we seen an interview with Sen. Obama's grad school drug dealer -- when we know all about Mrs. McCain's addiction? Are Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko that hard to interview? All those phony voter registrations that hard to scrutinize? And why are Sen. Biden's endless gaffes almost always covered up, or rationalized, by the traditional media?
