Tag Archives: Obama
Sherrod firing part of pathetic Obama pattern
Yesterday, the Obama Administration fired Shirley Sherrod, a USDA employee, because a right-wing smear artist released a speech from Sherrod that was edited to make it look like she was racist against white folks.
It goes without saying that Sherrod should be reinstated (Update: The Obama Administration has apologized to Sherrod). But there’s a larger story here.
It’s [...]
Judge overturns drilling moratorium
On Monday I wrote that oil companies were trying to overturn Obama’s moratorium on drilling wells deeper than 500 feet. Well, so far they’ve won:
A New Orleans federal judge lifted the six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling imposed by President Barack Obama following the largest oil spill in U.S. history. Drilling services shares jumped on the [...]
Innocent? Keep em locked up anyways
This is the kind of story that makes me question humanity:
Even in the context of America’s wretched civil liberties abuses over the last decade, the case of Mohamed Hassan Odaini stands out. He was 17 years old in 2001 when his father sent him from Yemen to study at a religious university in Raiwand, Pakistan, and [...]
Drill now, safety later
After Obama realized the BP spill was an unmitigated disaster rather than a tiny hiccup in an otherwise smooth operation, he ordered a halt to drilling all new wells deeper than 500 feet. He wanted time to asses the danger posed by new wells and our ability to respond to future mishaps.
Unsurprisingly, oil companies are [...]
Obama’s BP spill speech
(Read the transcript here)
I don’t want to spend too much time criticizing and nitpicking the President’s speech last night. After all, no amount of speeches will stop the oil leak or clean up the ocean and the coastlines. Obama did, however, miss an opportunity to move beyond generic campaign rhetoric about the American spirit and [...]
Illegal human testing
The moral catastrophe of the Bush years continues to reveal itself. According to a report by the Physicians for Human Rights, the U.S. government doctors experimented on suspected terrorists that we were torturing. The goal of their research? How to inflict the maximum amount of pain without killing the suspect:
The report cites agency guidelines for health [...]
The Pragmatist’s Ideology
The Obama Administration and its loyalists dismiss ideology as passé. They portray idealists – on both Left and Right - as rigid partisans unmoored from political reality. This criticism is neatly-distilled in Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope, where he says: “Values are faithfully applied to the facts before us, while ideology overrides whatever facts [...]
Obama maybe finally gonna be liberal?
It’s taken over a year, but President Obama may finally understand the essential truth of the current Republican party. Republicans will reflexively oppose anything he does, so there is little point in courting their support:
President Obama thinks Republicans will engage in a full battle over his Supreme Court nominee regardless of the person’s ideological leanings, [...]
Can we start the war crimes tribunal yet? Part 2
Back in April 2008, President Bush told ABC that he personally approved the torture of suspected terrorists in our custody. At the time, I wrote that Bush’s open admission of a war crime should have led to a war crime tribunal.
Well, that didn’t happen. (Big surprise, right?) And now Bush’s right-hand man, Dick Cheney is [...]
Roundup for Friday 2/12/10
Daniel Larison analyzes yesterday’s Iranian protests and concludes, “there is not much yesterday that happened in Iran that most people in the West should find encouraging.”
Ezra Klein thinks Obama could learn a few things from the Bush administration to help advance the Democratic agenda:
“In [Bush's] first year in office, he was using recess appointments and [...]