Wiretapping: President Barack O'Bush

Cartoons of the day: Google and privacy

But, of course, it is not only Google:

Many, many, big brothers!

Big brother is watching you!

The commentary in text is here

Barack O'Bush stays on course with wiretapping. Screw privacy!

Not a good way to start a week: the radio-alarm kicked in with NPR's Steve Inskeep talking with retired congressman, Lee Hamilton.  In a measured pace, Hamilton referred to Obama's foreign policies not being that much different from Bush's.  Half-asleep still, I pick up the local paper, which screams in its headlines that the Obama administration wants to expand wiretapping--which began under Bush.

I was sure that Glenn Greenwald would have said something about this; he does:

What these Obama proposals illustrates is just how far we've descended in the security/liberty debate, where only the former consideration has value, while the latter has none.  Whereas it was once axiomatic that the Government should not spy on citizens who have done nothing wrong, that belief is now relegated to the civil libertarian fringes.  Concerns about privacy were once the predominant consensus of mainstream American political thought. 

Greenwald notes that America is no different from Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates (and India too?) that demand:

full, unfettered access to all communications.  Amazingly, the administration had the temerity to condemn the UAE's ban on Blackberries on the ground that it impedes "the free flow of information," but in response, the UAE correctly pointed out how hypocritical that condemnation was:

Yousef Al Otaiba, the UAE Ambassador to the United States, said [State Department spokesman P.J.] Crowley's comments were disappointing and contradict the U.S. government's own approach to telecommunication regulation.

Not a good beginning to a week, which is also the beginnings of a new academic year.
And, here is how Greenwald ends his commentary:

What makes this trend all the more pernicious is that at exactly the same time that the Government is demanding greater and greater access to what you do and say, it is hiding its own conduct behind an always-higher and more impenetrable wall of secrecy.  Everything you do and say must be accessible to them; you can have no secrets from them.  But everything they do -- including even criminal acts such as torture, assassinations and warrantless surveillance -- is completely off-limits to you, deemed "state secrets" that not even courts can review in order to determine their legality.

Well, renew your ACLU membership, and fight for civil liberties that, yes, the Constitution guarantees us.

Corruption, and the government NOT at work :-)

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Very depressing: Bush/Cheney era lives on

People laughed Ralph Nader off when he often compared the two major parties as tweedledum and tweedledee. Watch this video and think about Nader's remarks:

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Via Glenn Greenwald, who writes:

Several weeks ago, I noted that unlike the Right -- which turned itself into a virtual cult of uncritical reverence for George W. Bush especially during the first several years of his administration -- large numbers of Bush critics have been admirably willing to criticize Obama when he embraces the very policies that prompted so much anger and controversy during the Bush years. Last night, Keith Olbermann -- who has undoubtedly been one of the most swooning and often-uncritical admirers of Barack Obama of anyone in the country (behavior for which I rather harshly criticized him in the past) -- devoted the first two segments of his show to emphatically lambasting Obama and Eric Holder's DOJ for the story I wrote about on Monday: namely, the Obama administration's use of the radical Bush/Cheney state secrets doctrine and -- worse still -- a brand new claim of "sovereign immunity" to insist that courts lack the authority to decide whether the Bush administration broke the law in illegally spying on Americans.

The fact that Keith Olbermann, an intense Obama supporter, spent the first ten minutes of his show attacking Obama for replicating (and, in this instance, actually surpassing) some of the worst Bush/Cheney abuses of executive power and secrecy claims reflects just how extreme is the conduct of the Obama DOJ here.

FISA fiasco

Excerpt from Joan Walsh at salon.com:
What an interesting week: I came back from vacation to find the two presumptive presidential nominees running away from their bases. Suddenly John McCain is evading, not embracing, the media, limiting access and getting testy with the very people whose formerly friendly coverage made him a popular "maverick." Meanwhile Barack Obama is complaining that his "friends on the left" just don't understand him – he's not moving to the center, he is "no doubt" a progressive, just one who now supports the scandalous FISA "compromise" and Antonin Scalia's views on gun rights and the death penalty, no longer plans to accept public campaign funding, and wants to make sure women aren't feigning mental distress to get a "partial-birth" abortion (the right's despicable term of choice; the correct phrase is either late-term or third-trimester abortion.) .....

I've admired Obama, but I never confused him with a genuine progressive leader. Today I don't admire him at all. His collapse on FISA is unforgiveable.