Another socialist blog

Let me get this straight.  If Obama mentions that he is opposed by racists, that is “playing the race card” and out of bounds?  Doubletalk.  Obama is opposed by racists, and John McCain himself is a racist.  That doesn’t make Obama the perfect candidate, even among those of us who think racism needs to be a major issue in the campaign, but it does need saying and it needs to be said often and with heads held high.  Let the racists scurry for cover when the subject comes up; they will be running on their records.

I never really bought in to the police-are-heroes myth that flourished after September 11th. Here are a couple of cops that apparently didn’t sign on either. A New York cop, Patrick Pogan, attacked a bicyclist in the street, knocking him to the ground, and then arrested the victim. He claimed the bicyclist attacked him, but video of the incident proved he was lying.

Meanwhile, Ozark, MO police tasered a 16-year-old boy who had fallen from a bridge and was lying on the ground with a broken back. Their mommas must be proud.

The Iraqi government is sticking to its story on the whole sovereign-nation thing.  Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki had this to say during his meeting with Arab ambassadors in Abu Dhabi:

…I told you that we today search for the need to end foreign presence on Iraqi territory, restore full sovereignty, and get rid of all the international resolutions and sanctions imposed on us based on Chapter VII. Therefore, the idea, as announced in August, was an agreement on a declaration of principles and intents, which stipulated that the agreement between the two states should be based on full sovereignty, that this year will witness the last extension of the mandate of the international forces on Iraqi territory, and that Iraq should be liberated from the mandate of Chapter VII.

(Emphasis added.) So the Bush administration, which has said time and again that we’ll leave Iraq when the sovereign Iraqi government says they don’t need us, has two embarrassing turds in its punchbowl.

First, the Iraqis’ nominally elected government wants us out by a date certain, and Washington is in the awkward position of having to refuse to leave. The White House even fell back on denying the multiple press accounts of al-Maliki’s comments and suggesting there had been an error in translation.

Second, al-Maliki has talked about Iraqi sovereignty as if it were not something the Iraqis have, but rather something Iraqis hope to restore through negotiations with the U.S.  This sovereignty is what the U.S. claims to have bestowed on Iraq by invading their country in the first place.  Bush’s response is going to have a pretty package, but it’s going to boil down to “We gotcher sovereignty right here, pal.“

The late Jesse Helms famously ran a racist commercial against a black political opponent in 1990.

On the television commercial, the camera zones in on a white man’s hands, crumpling what apparently is a job rejection letter. The announcer then intones: ‘You needed that job and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota. Is that really fair?’

Those darn minorities, taking jobs from white boys. This would be, or should be, the lead in Jesse Helms’ obituary, just a shameful footnote in history. But the guy who wrote the ad, Charlie Black, is now chief strategist for John McCain.  Who would have thought McCain would turn a blind eye to racism?

Update: FAIR has a much more thorough list of some of Helms’ unrepentant racist and homophobic remarks, by no means all ancient history.

The official party line at Wal-Mart seems to be that educating people about HIV is bad.

Planned Parenthood of Central Washington was scheduled to hold an event at a local Wal-Mart on National HIV Testing Day where their Teen Council were simply going to stand outside of the store and hand out information about HIV prevention and testing. But the American Life League got a tip on the event, and urged their supporters to call and complain to the store, after which Wal-Mart succumbed and canceled the event.

The Senate still hasn’t approved the FISA bill legalizing warrantless spying.  You can still make a difference before the vote, and there will be several votes that will all matter.

And check out this hilarious cartoon starring Snuggly, the Security Bear.  “It’s not scary, it’s snuggly and secure!”

Think Barack Obama is the anti-Bush? Check out how well he agrees with George W on warrentless spying. In response to widespread outrage among his liberal supporters, Obama has issued a statement to explain his support for the FISA reauthorization bill that legalizes warrentless eavesdropping already done by the Bush administration, and gives immunity to telecom companies who colluded with the White House to break the law.

Liberals were doomed to be disappointed, for two reasons:  first, because Obama thinks he can get away with moving to the right, second, because Obama took money from telecom companies.  And disappointed they are:  Obama tarnishes his image as honest and sincere by dancing around the spying issue.  He claims the bill is a “compromise,” as if that made it OK to reduce your right to communicate privately.  But there’s no compromise, it’s a full surrender to the White House, and Obama is a liar.

The Bush administration’s secret war against Iran has already begun. Seymour Hersch reveals in the New Yorker that covert military operations, and covert “intelligence” operations, are already occurring. Armed Special Forces units are on the ground inside Iran, with orders to assassinate various “high value targets.” They are authorized to use “defensive lethal action,” which I imagine means killing any Iranians who have the temerity to defend themselves. The target list, the list of people to be murdered, was drawn up by the Vice President’s office, a fact Hersch reiterated in this Fresh Air interview.

The White House denies it.

“I can tell you flatly that U.S. forces are not operating across the Iraqi border into Iran, in the south or anywhere else,” U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan C. Crocker said Sunday during an interview on CNN’s Late Edition.

This is something Hersch must be used to by now. So far, he always turns out to be right: about the My Lai massacre, among other stories of American war crimes.

Key members of Congress approved $400 million in funding for the secret war. According to the article,

None of the four Democrats in the Gang of Eight—Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman John D. Rockefeller IV, and House Intelligence Committee chairman Silvestre Reyes—would comment on the Finding, with some noting that it was highly classified. An aide to one member of the Democratic leadership responded, on his behalf, by pointing to the limitations of the Gang of Eight process. The notification of a Finding, the aide said, “is just that—notification, and not a sign-off on activities.  Proper oversight of ongoing intelligence activities is done by fully briefing the members of the intelligence committee.” However, Congress does have the means to challenge the White House once it has been sent a Finding. It has the power to withhold funding for any government operation. The members of the House and Senate Democratic leadership who have access to the Finding can also, if they choose to do so, and if they have shared concerns, come up with ways to exert their influence on Administration policy.

In other words, they signed off. More to the point, if the Democratic Party had any intention of interfering with secret Presidential wars, they would have repealed the law authorizing covert wars in the first place.  And they would have impeached George W. Bush by now.

There has been a recent surge of violence inside Iran.

In the time-honored tradition of the Democratic Party, Barack Obama has been moving rightward ever since he clinched the nomination. Though bloggers and mainstream media like to say he’s moving “toward the center,” that’s not a direction.

• He criticized African-American men who are bad fathers and don’t take personal responsiblity for their families, an obvious attempt to appease whites who are, well, “uncomfortable” with African-Americans.
• Two Muslim women who attended Barack Obama’s event June 16 in Detroit were told they couldn’t stand behind the candidate, according to NPR. One was told her head covering was an issue, and another was told by an Obama volunteer that for political reasons they didn’t want Muslims appearing with him on TV.
• NPR reports Obama supported legalizing Bush’s illegal wiretaps and supported the right of states to execute rapists.

What the Democrats won’t say out loud is that they are going to take liberal voters for granted from now until election day. Obama, like Gore and Kerrey and Clinton and a long parade of other Democratic Party phonies, knows that the two-party system ensures that principled liberal voters now have nowhere else to go. Because there are no left third party candidates pulling the political center of gravity to the left, Obama is free to sprint to the right. Will you still recognize him by election day?

Pam’s House Blend mentions that Bill Clinton has been acting like an ass. Well, sure, he could be a better sport about his wife losing the primary elections. But I think if Democrats really want to make a change, they should dump center-right leaders like Bill Clinton altogether, rather than giving a damn about what he says or how he feels about it. This is the President who sided with racist conservatives on ending welfare, who drummed out gays from the military, who rejected single-payer national health care, supported the death penalty, supported censorship on the Internet, just to scratch the surface.

Even liberals, who have historically been too trusting, should have gotten the message by now.  Bill Clinton never was a liberal, and he’s no friend to liberals.  If you want things to get better, you have to stop going back to your abusive boyfriend.