ur doing it wrong:

Oh dear...

Georgia congressman warns of Obama dictatorship

By BEN EVANS – 6 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — A Republican congressman from Georgia said Monday he fears that President-elect Obama will establish a Gestapo-like security force to impose a Marxist or fascist dictatorship.

"It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he's the one who proposed this national security force," Rep. Paul Broun said of Obama in an interview Monday with The Associated Press. "I'm just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may — may not, I hope not — but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism."

Broun cited a July speech by Obama that has circulated on the Internet in which the then-Democratic presidential candidate called for a civilian force to take some of the national security burden off the military.

"That's exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it's exactly what the Soviet Union did," Broun said. "When he's proposing to have a national security force that's answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he's showing me signs of being Marxist."

Obama's comments about a national security force came during a speech in Colorado about building a new civil service corps. Among other things, he called for expanding the nation's foreign service and doubling the size of the Peace Corps "to renew our diplomacy."

"We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we've set," Obama said in July. "We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded."

Broun said he also believes Obama likely will move to ban gun ownership if he does build a national police force.

Obama has said he respects the Second Amendment right to bear arms and favors "common sense" gun laws. Gun rights advocates interpret that as meaning he'll at least enact curbs on ownership of assault weapons and concealed weapons. As an Illinois state lawmaker, Obama supported a ban on semiautomatic weapons and tighter restrictions on firearms generally.

"We can't be lulled into complacency," Broun said. "You have to remember that Adolf Hitler was elected in a democratic Germany. I'm not comparing him to Adolf Hitler. What I'm saying is there is the potential."

Obama's transition office did not respond immediately to Broun's remarks.

Love it how he says he's not comparing him to Hitler only a sentence after comparing him to Hitler.

What a load of fear mongering bullshit. If that statement leads you to believe that Obama somehow wants a dictatorship, you're fucking out of your mind.

Did this guy also speak up when the MCA act of '06 was passed? I mean, shit, eliminating habeas corpus is a bit more serious and leans more towards a dictatorship than wanting a civilian national security force.

The HuffPost did a brief survey of right wing blogs' reactions the day after the election and they all kind of sound like that, except with even more suggestive calls to arms.

I at least appreciate that Rep. Paul Broun said that "It may sound a bit crazy and off base" before continuing with his insanity

Good to see all these Hitler references from these nutbags who'd do well to remember what platform the 1940 election was run on (despite the reality of what was already being done on the sly for the war effort) and also google "Prescott Bush, funding, Nazis."

Are the cops going to be blocking off Adams around 10 am everyday now till 1/20/09 when Obama needs to get to his office Jackson and Dearborn? This local president thing is kind of odd.

Not to mention that side street in Hyde Park where his residence is, where neighbors have to pass armed security daily.

6 square blocks of high security around his residence. my nutjob roommate tried to enter one of the high security areas in his car just to see if he could do it but was rebuffed

More election news....Democratic challenger Begich is now ahead by THREE(!!!!!!!!!!) votes in Alaska's U.S. Senate race. Begich was down by thousands at the end of election night, and historically, early and absentee votes in Alaska favored Republicans. NOT THIS TIME.

Still, the counting continues...

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/seattle...asp?source=mypi

A bigger pic would be nice.

Is it too late for Palin to hop on the ticket?

Funny in concept, but the results look kinda horrid. I think a good caricature/sketch of Obama as FDR would've looked better.

So is this Hillary's payment for not challenging the nomination all the way to the convention?

Insiders say he has a pretty good lock as Time's Person Of The Year.

That would be so sweet if Hills was SoS. I'd feel almost placated.

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if you try to place a bet on "obama as time man of the year" on intrade probably a hand just comes out of the computer screen and shoots you in the face

also, i dunno, i saw hillz ascending to the position of HBIC of the senate after this year, but i dunno maybe that's not how this stuff works

This is probably the best place to post this...

Nate Silver is cool and all...

... but he's no Joe the Plumber.

prediction: another economics book that will be passed around the office as a must read.

i think obama's just giving clinton a compliment with this 'leak' but that nothing will come from it. which is probably for the best. she's a good senator

Nate Silver had a helluva year...he also predicted the Rays would be a great team, too. I hope he doesn't give up on the baseball stuff to pursue politics full-time.

I will buy anything Nate Silver puts out if it can be translated into Books On DVD format. Really what I want is like Mike Portnoy's Progressive Drum Concepts as hosted by

Nate Silver is such a weird looking dude.

And speaking of weird looking charcters...



Valerie Jarrett creeps me out.

He wouldn't look so weird if he didn't instantly revert to neutral face after every single expression. I was watching an interview with him and he would laugh occasionally and look normal, but those moments lasted for a second at most, and then he was back to the vacant gaze.

Hah! Totally accurate. That vacant, painfully nerdy, gaze is what does it.

I think it's also part of the appeal.

i might have to retract this. after reading more on the subject it looks she just might get asked (or already has). whether she accepts now seems to be the question.

Yup, yup - Nico Pitney @ HuffPo says she was asked...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/11/14/c...b_n_143810.html

I kind of like this. Yesterday, Rachel Maddow was going on about how odd it was, due to the fact her biggest differences with Obama during the primaries were on foreign policy. To me, that only seemed to make it more likely! His love for Team of Rivals (which I guess I'm going to have to read) seems to be materializing.

^ right

plus, if you look at all the other names that have been floating around for the position, you quickly notice that they all supported the war on iraq too. & yeah, team of rivals is looking like it just might make it onto the Christmas list this year.

Yes a compliment. Or is it really deal hatched during the primary, set in motion after the election? Then Biden dies in a train crash during his Friday ride home. Then Obama gets bitten by a rabid pound "mutt". And the President Pro Tempore of the Senate is executed, because, frankly, it's easy enough to simply shoot a Pres Pro Temp. And suddenly Hillary's plan goes according to her design.

Bwah Ha Ha Ha Ha!!!

So maybe it's not the change many envisioned, but I'm down with it:

Obama says he'll push for eight-team [college football] playoff

It'll never happen. Too much money invested in all of the other bowl games.

Have the other Bowl games.

The "Jack's Cardboard Warehouse Bowl" can still be played, it's just between teams that aren't in the top 8.

Obama Puts Radio Address On YouTube

Barak Obama
President-elect BARACK OBAMA's weekly radio address has gone video, too, with a video version of this week's talk posted at YOUTUBE and at OBAMA's transition site, CHANGE.ORG. The video was posted at 6a SATURDAY, hours before the tape was aired on the radio.

OBAMA, who used the first address to discuss Congress' deliberations over additional financial bailouts, said during his campaign that his administration would use Internet technology like YOUTUBE on a regular basis to communicate with the public.

See the first video version of OBAMA's radio address by clicking here.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

it's clearly a brilliant political ploy on his part. and he clearly didn't know what he was talking about when he expanded on his idea a bit

Interesting piece @ Salon.com re: the frontrunner to head Obama's director of national intelligence...at minimum, a bit troubling. Go to the article for all the embedded links.


Glenn Greenwald
Sunday Nov. 16, 2008 09:29 EST
John Brennan and Bush's interrogation/detention policies

(updated below)

Last Wednesday, I wrote:

It simply is noteworthy of comment and cause for concern -- though far from conclusive about what Obama will do -- that Obama's transition chief for intelligence policy, John Brennan, was an ardent supporter of torture and one of the most emphatic advocates of FISA expansions and telecom immunity.

Yesterday, Andrew Sullivan noted that observation but then linked to this post from James Gordon Meek of the Counterrorism blog, which reported that Brennan -- a top CIA aide to George Tenet during most of the Bush administration -- is a leading candidate to replace Mike McConnell and become Obama's Director of National Intelligence. Meek, not providing any links or citations, wrote: "Among many things Democrats like about the softspoken Brennan are his anti-torture views" (emphasis added). Andrew is right when he says: "They both can't be right."

My statement about Brennan was based on several pieces of compelling evidence. First, there is this detailed New Yorker article on Bush's secret interrogation programs by Jane Mayer, unquestionably one of the nation's best and most reliable reporters on these matters. She wrote:

Without more transparency, the value of the C.I.A.’s interrogation and detention program is impossible to evaluate. Setting aside the moral, ethical, and legal issues, even supporters, such as John Brennan, acknowledge that much of the information that coercion produces is unreliable. As he put it, “All these methods produced useful information, but there was also a lot that was bogus.

Mayer explicitly identified Brennan --with whom she spoke concerning these programs -- as a "supporter."

Then there is Brennan's December 5, 2005 appearance on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, in which he vehemently defended the Bush administration's use of rendition -- one of the key tools to subject detainees to torture:

JOHN BRENNAN: I think over the past decade it has picked up some speed because of the nature of the terrorist threat right now but essentially it's a practice the United States and other countries have used to transport suspected terrorists from a country, usually where they're captured to another country, either their country of origin or a country where they can be questioned, detained or brought to justice. . . .

MARGARET WARNER: So was Secretary Rice correct today when she called it a vital tool in combating terrorism?

JOHN BRENNAN: I think it's an absolutely vital tool. I have been intimately familiar now over the past decade with the cases of rendition that the U.S. Government has been involved in. And I can say without a doubt that it has been very successful as far as producing intelligence that has saved lives.

MARGARET WARNER: So is it -- are you saying both in two ways -- both in getting terrorists off the streets and also in the interrogation?

JOHN BRENNAN: Yes. The rendition is the practice or the process of rendering somebody from one place to another place. It is moving them and the U.S. Government will frequently facilitate that movement from one country to another. . . .

Also I think it's rather arrogant to think we're the only country that respects human rights. I think that we have a lot of assurances from these countries that we hand over terrorists to that they will, in fact, respect human rights.

And there are different ways to gain those assurances. But also let's say an individual goes to Egypt because they're an Egyptian citizen and the Egyptians then have a longer history in terms of dealing with them, and they have family members and others that they can bring in, in fact, to be part of the whole interrogation process.

Even when CBS News -- for which Brennan was serving as an intelligence analyst -- was reporting on the dreadful case of Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen whom the Bush administration abducted at JFK Airport and rendered to Sryia for 10 months to be tortured only for it to then be revealed that he had no connection whatsoever to terrorism, Brennan was defending the rendition program:

CBS NEWS: Despite Arar's experience, this former counterterrorism official says "rendition" does have its place.

Mr. JOHN BRENNAN (CBS News Terrorism Analyst, Former Director, National Counterterrorism Center): I think it allows us to have the option to move a person who is involved in terrorism or terrorism-related activities to a country where they can be effectively questioned or prosecuted.

In November, 2007, Brennan -- in an interview with CBS News' Harry Smith -- issued a ringing endorsement for so-called "enhanced interrogation tactics" short of waterboarding:

SMITH: You know, this all becomes such a giant issue because the president has gone on record so many times saying the United States does not torture. If we acknowledge that this kind of activity [waterboarding] goes on, you know, what does that mean, exactly, I guess?

Mr. BRENNAN: Well, the CIA has acknowledged that it has detained about 100 terrorists since 9/11, and about a third of them have been subjected to what the CIA refers to as enhanced interrogation tactics, and only a small proportion of those have in fact been subjected to the most serious types of enhanced procedures.

SMITH: Right. And you say some of this has born fruit.

Mr. BRENNAN: There have been a lot of information that has come out from these interrogation procedures that the agency has in fact used against the real hard-core terrorists. It has saved lives. And let's not forget, these are hardened terrorists who have been responsible for 9/11, who have shown no remorse at all for the deaths of 3,000 innocents.

In the same interview, Brennan even defended -- or at least justified -- Michael Mukasey's refusal to say whether waterboarding was "torture," on the ground that by doing so, Mukasey would be admitting that the President broke the law (as though that is a valid reason for a prospective Attorney General to refuse to opine on a legal matter):

But I think Judge Mukasey is in a very difficult position right now as the attorney general nominee, to be asked whether or not this is torture. And if torture, then, is unconstitutional or illegal, they're asking whether or not waterboarding is illegal and whether or not the individuals, which includes the president and others--if it was used, who authorized and actually used this type of procedure may be subject to some type of judicial action.

And in July, 2008, NPR attributed Obama's reversal on FISA and telecom immunity to the fact that he was relying on the advice of Brennan, an emphatic supporter of those policies:

What's important here is Obama's reference to the information he's received. He's advised on intelligence matters by John Brennan, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Like many intelligence professionals, Brennan says the FISA program is essential to the fight against terrorism. By adopting Brennan's view, Obama improves his standing with the intelligence community. For someone looking ahead to a presidential administration, that's important.

In fairness, Brennan, over the last couple of years, as he's become more attached to Obama's campaign, has several times said that waterboarding specifically is wrong, that it is "inconsistent with American values and it's something that should be prohibited." In a 2006 PBS interview, he said that "the dark side has its limits"; that "we're going to look back on this time and regret some of the things that we did, because it is not in keeping with our values"; and, to his credit, he urged that there be much greater openness in debating policies such as eavesdropping and interrogation.

As I noted the other day, Obama is going to have a wide panoply of advisers and, especially now before they're appointed, it's important not to draw unwarranted conclusions or to believe the endless parade of gossip about who is going to be appointed to what positions. Still, Brennan has been and continues to be an extremely important adviser for Obama on intelligence issues. His views on past administration conduct are, in many important instances, clearly disturbing and bear watching.

* * * * *

Last month, I interviewed Harper's Scott Horton regarding a piece he had written on the efforts of several PBS officials, including Jay Rockefeller's wife (the CEO of Washington's PBS affiliate) to block broadcast of the documentary Torturing Democracy, which compellingly documents how virtually all of the torture and other illegalities and abuses of America's interrogation programs were authorized and ordered at the highest levels of the Bush administration (of which waterboarding is but one small example).

That documentary is now available to be viewed in its entirety online -- here -- and I can't recommend it highly enough. Though it includes a few standard documentary tactics that I could do without (ominous music, grave-toned narration, black-and-white up-close photos of the villains), it is an extraordinarily well-documented account of America's torture program over the last seven years and, most informatively, the role that top Bush officials played in those programs. Notably, most of the sources on which it relies are former U.S. military and Bush administration officials who waged courageous though ultimately unsuccessful battles to halt these programs.

I'm particularly amazed that someone could be aware of this set of facts -- could know that our highest government officials deliberately and knowingly authorized torture techniques that are war crimes under both U.S. law and international treaties to which we are a party -- and still argue, as so many do, that it would be wrong to hold these political officials accountable for the laws they systematically violated. It's easy to say how horrendous one finds torture to be. But those who simultaneously advocate that American political leaders should be immunized from the consequences of their criminality -- that, in essence, we should refrain from enforcing these laws -- are proving that those are empty words indeed.



UPDATE: The aforementioned James Gordon Meek, who is the Washington correspondent for The New York Daily News, sent me a reply this morning by email, which is posted here. My response to him is also posted there.

Thank God I'm not the only one who finds Nate Silver completely creepy.

And the person he's reminded me of has been this guy from The Larry Sanders Show:

good call. good actor/character too

I've said it before, I'll say it again:

GOD DAMN I love this guy and his use of technology!

I bet in the next version of Microsoft Office you will no longer need to add "Obama" to the dictionary.

Funny with all the talk about technology that there are several articles about how Obama will likely have to give up his Blackberry once he becomes President.

Yeah, what's the deal? Presidents aren't allowed to e-mail in private, I guess.

And he'll have to give up the SOMB.

No more Weezer and dick pictures for him.

Hmmm...election a couple of weeks ago, some "out of sight" time for Obama, and another bumping spree. When was the first LOPP infestation, shortly after the Dem Convention or around the Republican Convention? I think Obama is a LOPPer!