Jeremy Gantz | RawStory.com 

Although he owes his current job in part to the Internet’s unique networking and communications tools – and his campaign’s unprecedented ability to raise money online – President Obama “rarely” reads blogs because he considers some of them misleading and simplistic.

The comment, made during a wide-rangingNew York Times interview aboard Air Force One, may surprise those who followWhiteHouse.gov’s own blog or those who followed his transition team’s blog.

Asked about his news consumption habits at the end of the interview, during which he acknowledged that the United States is not winning the war in Afghanistan, Obama said he “rarely reads blogs,” but reads newspapers – in their paper form – and weekly news magazines.

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CNN.com

Former Dallas, Texas, Mayor Ron Kirk, who is President Obama’s nominee to be the U.S. trade representative, owes nearly $10,000 in taxes. He’s the fourth Obama pick that has come under fire for tax issues.

Kirk’s tax returns for 2005, 2006 and 2007 were reviewed by the Senate Finance Committee as part of the vetting process, according to a report released by the committee Monday.

The committee found that Kirk failed to report as income $37,750 in honoraria collected for 16 speaking engagements at Austin College over those three years. One year, he deducted honoraria from four events as charitable donations though he hadn’t reported them as income, according to the committee report.

He also deducted too much for the cost of tickets to see the NBA Mavericks, reporting the entire $17,382 as business expenses, the report says.
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Peter Phillips | ProjectCensored.com 

The Barack Obama administration is continuing the neo-conservative agenda of US military domination of the world— albeit with perhaps a kinder-gentler face.  While overt torture is now forbidden for the CIA and Pentagon, and symbolic gestures like the closing of the Guantanamo prison are in evidence, a unilateral military dominance policy, expanding military budget, and wars of occupation and aggression will likely continue unabated. The military expansionists from within the Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Clinton, G. W. Bush administrations put into place solid support for increased military spending. Clinton’s model of supporting the US military industrial complex held steady defense spending and increased foreign weapons sales from 16% of global orders to over 63% by the end of his administration.

The neo-conservatives, who dominated the most recent Bush administration, amplified this trend of increased military spending. The neo-cons laid out their agenda for military global dominance in the 2000 Project for a New American Century (PNAC) report Rebuilding America’s Defenses. The report called for the protection of the American Homeland, the ability to wage simultaneous theater wars, to perform global constabulary roles, and to control space and cyberspace. The report claimed that in order to maintain a Pax Americana, potential rivals — such as China, Iran, Iraq, and North Korea — needed to be held in check. This military global dominance agenda required forward deployment of US forces worldwide and increasing defense/war spending well into the 21st century. The result was a doubling of the US military budget to over $700 billion in the last eight years. The US now spends as much on war/defense as the rest of the world combined, making Americans the highest war-tax payers in the world.

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Justin Raimondo | AntiWar.com 

I don’t, as a rule, endorse legislation: being  a libertarian and all, my faith in the ability of government action to have  any beneficial effect is exactly nil. However, in the case of the Executive  Accountability Act of 2009 [.pdf], I’m making an exception. This is because,  unlike most if not all legislation that seeks to regulate or otherwise shape  the behavior of ordinary people, the Executive Accountability Act regulates  the behavior of government officials, namely POTUS and his underlings – and  exacts severe penalties in case of violation.

Rep. Walter B. Jones,  Republican of North Carolina, has introduced  a bill that makes it a federal crime for a U.S. president or “an officer  or employee of the executive branch of the government” to “knowingly  and willingly” mislead Congress and the American people to gain authorization  for U.S. military action. The five-year statute of limitations, moreover, doesn’t  begin to run until the president leaves office.

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Afghanistan: A war without end.Justin Raimondo | 

AntiWar.com 

So, you thought it was all going to be different, did you, that we were in for a change – a Big Change? Well, the bad news, as Newsweek reports, is that the more things change …. 

“The Pentagon is prepared to announce the deployment of 17,000 additional soldiers and Marines to Afghanistan as early as this week even as President Barack Obama is searching for his own strategy for the war. According to military officials during last week’s meeting with Defense Secretary Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon’s ‘tank,’ the president specifically asked, ‘What is the end game?’ in the U.S. military’s strategy for Afghanistan. When asked what the answer was, one military official told NBC News, ‘Frankly, we don’t have one.’ But they’re working on it.” 

He’s searching for strategy – at this late date? Isn’t this the same Barack Hussein Obama who told us Bush was neglecting the Afghan front, and that we had to redirect our efforts away from Iraq in order to invest more troops and treasure in Afghanistan, doing whatever it is we’re supposed to be doing there? Surely he had some kind of plan in mind.

And, by the way, what are we doing there? Frankly, nobody knows – least of all, apparently, President Obama. His generals are equally clueless. Maybe they ought to ask the outgoing President – Dick Cheney, I mean. After all, this war was launched by the Cheney-Bush administration, and the neocons who talked us into this clearly had something very specific in mind – now what was it?  

Oh yeah, now I remember: they were going to “transform” the entire region by first smashing Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, and then crushing Saddam Hussein: this was supposed to spark a general uprising extending from North Africa to the wilds of Waziristan, and usher in a new era of capital-’D' Democracy. 

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Ivan Eland | AntiWar.com

When you stop to think about it, people measure how well their lives are going not by their absolute state of being but by their situation relative to their expectations. For example, a poor person in a developing country may be ecstatic about getting a pair of shoes for the first time; in contrast, a billionaire may commit suicide after he loses $100 million in a down market.

The same is true for nations. The American elite has enjoyed the United States’ dominant status in the world since World War II and became thoroughly drunk with U.S. superiority in the last two decades after the demise of the Soviet Union left the country as the only superpower. This elite is resistant to accepting the reality that a multipolar world will soon be at hand.

This reality will arrive much sooner if the U.S. does not retract its informal overseas empire, reduce the bloated defense budget, and act with more humility overseas. Even before the U.S.-led global financial meltdown, the far-flung U.S. empire of overseas military bases, U.S.-dominated alliances, and profligate military meddling in other nations’ affairs was terribly overextended. The U.S. accounted for 20 percent of the world’s GDP but 43 percent of its defense spending.
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Geov Parrish | Eat The State

Last issue, ETS! began its comprehensive look at Barack Obama’s cabinet-level appointments thus far, examining his inner circle, his environmental picks, and his financial team. This issue, we turn to Foreign Affairs and Security (generally awful), and to Social Services (generally pretty good). Here’s to hope in the next four years–tempered with a strong measure of clear-eyed realism.

Foreign Affairs and Security

Dept. of Justice: Eric Holder will unquestionably be an upgrade over anything puked up for this post by the Bush administration; the former Clinton appointee opposes torture (now, anyway; in 2002 he urged the Bush administration to disregard the Geneva Conventions) and is generally more decent on civil liberties than his predecessors. (So are my living room drapes.) But in a measure of how deeply stench is rooted in both parties in DC, Holder has his own skeletons, ranging from his involvement in several dubious Clinton pardons (e.g., Marc Rich) to his post-Clinton private lawyering for corporate clients such as Chiquita, who he defended against accusations the banana giant funded Colombian paramilitary death squads that assassinated numerous union leaders. And don’t expect Holder to, you know, prosecute any of the Bush era scofflaws, from Dubya on down. He might want to work for Chiquita again some day. Welcome to our very own banana republic. Grade: D+

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Obama speaks to the Muslim world 

Justin Raimondo | Antiwar.com 

President Obama’s interview with al-Arabiya television is remarkable in several ways, but what strikes me the most is that it coincided with the first air strikes on Pakistan under his administration: 22 people were killed, including between four and seven Taliban/al-Qaeda bad guys.

In the Arabiya interview, Obama was at his charming best, and the easily charmed were bowled over. Andrew Sullivan, for example, fairly swooned, and announced it’s “about the same thing as inviting Rick Warren or supping with George Will: it’s about R-E-S-P-E-C-T.”

What would you say if the police came into your neighborhood to confront reported criminals, killed a few – and also managed to knock off 18 or so bystanders? Would you say this shows the policerespect the neighborhood?

All the sweet talk won’t drown out the protests of the elected president of Afghanistan, who wants us to stop bombing his people too. Yet, truth be told, Obama’s honeyed words are alluring:

“My job is to communicate the fact that the United States has a stake in the well-being of the Muslim world, that the language we use has to be a language of respect. I have Muslim members of my family. I have lived in Muslim countries.” ”Al-Arabiya: The largest one.” ”Obama: The largest one, Indonesia. And so what I want to communicate is the fact that in all my travels throughout the Muslim world, what I’ve come to understand is that regardless of your faith – and America is a country of Muslims, Jews, Christians, non-believers – regardless of your faith, people all have certain common hopes and common dreams.”

Even as he was speaking, American drones were snuffing out lives and his generals were planning a wider war. That seems to be the signature Obama style: cool, calm, and collected as he talks out of one side of his mouth, while he’s giving the order to kill out of the other. If that doesn’t scare you, then you’ve probably had a little too much of that sweet-tasting Obama-brand Kool-Aid.

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Anne Gearan | AP.com 

Emerging from his first Pentagon briefing as president, Barack Obama said Wednesday that his administration faces “difficult decisions” about Iraq and Afghanistan. But the new commander in chief offered no further details about his plans as the U.S. carries on wars in both countries.

“Our efforts to continue to go after extremist organizations that would do harm to our homeland is uppermost on our minds,” Obama told reporters after spending about two hours at the Defense Department’s headquarters.

Obama underscored that troops and their families have his support and said the U.S. military has carried out its mission under enormous pressure.

For both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama is in the midst of hearing from military commanders and advisers about how best to proceed.

The White House said earlier Wednesday that Obama’s review of how to wind down the war in Iraq will conclude soon.

At the Pentagon, Obama met with the four military service leaders, one more step toward fulfilling his promise of withdrawing all combat troops from Iraq. He has called for a 16-month withdrawal of troops from Iraq; he did not answer a reporter’s question about that matter.

“We’re going to have some difficult decisions that we’re going to have to make surrounding Iraq and Afghanistan,” the president said.

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Full interview below the fold Read the rest of this entry »

Andrew Ross Sorkin | DealBookBlog.NYTimes

Timothy F. Geithner, President Obama’s nominee to be Treasury secretary, is testifying before the Senate Finance Committee at his confirmation hearing on Wednesday.

As president of the New York Federal Reserve since 2003, Mr. Geithner has been a central player in building the vast bailout plans that the government has extended to Wall Street firms and other troubled financial institutions, such as the giant insurer American International Group. After his nomination, it was disclosed that Mr. Geithner failed to pay more than $34,000 in taxes for Social Security and Medicare when he was a senior official at the International Monetary Fund from 2001 to 2003, including a small payment in 2004 after he left.

The Senate Finance Committee hearing began at 10 a.m. in Washington, with opening statements from Senator Max Baucus, the committee chairman, and Senator Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican.

DealBook is live-blogging the hearing, with the most recent posts on top.

1:30 p.m. | More on taxes: “What did you think you were doing” when you signed this document? That’s what Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican, asked Mr. Geithner as he waved a document called a “Tax Allowance Application” that Mr. Geithner had filled out — incorrectly, as it happens — while working for the International Monetary Fund. Mr. Geithner acknowledged that the language of the document was clear but said it was an honest mistake, albeit one he repeated multiple times.
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Infowars.com

See the entire Starbucks press release here.

Starbucks wants to make it easy to join Obama’s proposed paramilitary brown shirt volunteers. “Starbucks will honor each person who pledges with a free tall brewed coffee beginning Wednesday, Jan. 21 through Sunday, Jan. 25. The goal of the effort is to raise pledges in excess of one million hours of service from all over the country,” a Starbucks press releases states.

Starbucks wants to “make it easy to participate in the President-elect’s call for national service.” Back in September, the Christian Science Monitor reported that Obama plans to “leverage volunteerism in communities across the country” and make government “cool again.”Fortunately, a lot of people are beginning to realize government is never cool, as the founders warned a couple hundred years ago. 

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Geov Parrish | EatTheState.org 

The Obama spin machine has spent much of the last two months telling America that Barack Obama’s administration will draw from a wide ideological range of leaders. In turn, corporate Beltway media, taking this pledge to mean that Obama will appoint some Republicans, has been broadly supportive of Republican appointments like Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton. (Hey, we’re talking ideology here, not who they caucus with.)

But there’s one ideology that has been conspicuously absent from Obama’s appointments — not just in the Cabinet positions, but in the dozens of sub-Cabinet posts that have been announced thus far. Obama has appointed exactly zero progressive Democrats (no, that’s not an oxymoron)–nobody who was right about Iraq, or right about the economic bubbles and the hazards of deregulation and free trade, for example. Obama’s appointments thus far suggest a badly needed return to reality-based policy-making in Washington; but they also suggest a very cautious, conservative approach from what corporate pundits like to call the “center.” It’s an establishment-friendly, corporate-friendly antithesis to almost anything that could be construed as change.
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The Raw Story

Andrew McLemore

Published: Sunday January 4, 2009

If you don’t get punished, you didn’t go anything wrong, right?

That’s the message Vice President Dick Cheney gave in an interview with CBS’ Bob Schieffer on Sunday, suggesting that a president’s actions are legal if those actions didn’t result in his impeachment.

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Paul Joseph Watson | Infowars.com 

It’s par for the course for Obama and Biden, the men who promised “change” but in every step of their preparations for assuming office have pursued nothing but continuity, to acknowledge that they will protect criminals in the Bush administration from prosecution for authorizing torture, a complete violation of both the U.S. constitution and the Geneva Conventions.

When asked by ABC host George Stephanopoulos if top level Bush administration officials would be prosecuted for mandating prisoner abuse, Biden said that he and Obama would be “focusing on the future,” adding “I think we should be looking forward, not backwards.”

Such rhetoric goes to the very heart of the gigantic con job the “Obama change” hoax has wrought upon millions of befuddled Americans who naively presumed that voting for the lesser of two evils would result in anything other than more evil.

Perhaps Göring, Ribbentrop and the rest of the Nazis prosecuted at Nuremberg for their war crimes were following the wrong line of defense when they claimed they were merely “following orders,” they should have just proclaimed that the world should be “looking forward not backwards” and according to the Biden/Obama view of justice, they would have got off scot free.

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Carol Lee, Nia Malika Henderson | Yahoo.com 

Liberals are growing increasingly nervous – and some just flat-out angry – that President-elect Barack Obama seems to be stiffing them on Cabinet jobs and policy choices.

Obama has reversed pledges to immediately repeal tax cuts for the wealthy and take on Big Oil. He’s hedged his call for a quick drawdown in Iraq. And he’s stocking his White House with anything but stalwarts of the left.

Now some are shedding a reluctance to puncture the liberal euphoria at being rid of President George W. Bush to say, in effect, that the new boss looks like the old boss.

“He has confirmed what our suspicions were by surrounding himself with a centrist to right cabinet. But we do hope that before it’s all over we can get at least one authentic progressive appointment,” said Tim Carpenter, national director of the Progressive Democrats of America.

OpenLeft blogger Chris Bowers went so far as to issue this plaintive plea: “Isn’t there ever a point when we can get an actual Democratic administration?”

Even supporters make clear they’re on the lookout for backsliding. “There’s a concern that he keep his basic promises and people are going to watch him,” said Roger Hickey, a co-founder of Campaign for America’s Future.

Obama insists he hasn’t abandoned the goals that made him feel to some like a liberal savior. But the left’s bill of particulars against Obama is long, and growing.

Obama drew rousing applause at campaign events when he vowed to tax the windfall profits of oil companies. As president-elect, Obama says he won’t enact the tax.

Obama’s pledge to repeal the Bush tax cuts and redistribute that money to the middle class made him a hero among Democrats who said the cuts favored the wealthy. But now he’s struck a more cautious stance on rolling back tax cuts for people making over $250,000 a year, signaling he’ll merely let them expire as scheduled at the end of 2010.

Obama’s post-election rhetoric on Iraq and choices for national security team have some liberal Democratseven more perplexed. As a candidate, Obama defined and separated himself from his challengers by highlighting his opposition to the war in Iraq from the start. He promised to begin to end the war on his first day in office.

Now Obama’s says

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Leonard Doyle |theindependent.co.uk

Before Hillary Clinton has been formally offered the job as Secretary of State, a purge of Barack Obama’s top foreign policy team has begun.

The advisers who helped trash the former First Lady’s foreign policy credentials on the campaign trail are being brutally shunted aside, as the price of her accepting the job of being the public face of America to the world. In negotiations with Mr Obama this week before agreeing to take the job, she demanded and received assurances that she alone should appoint staff to the State Department. She also got assurances that she will have direct access to the President and will not have to go through his foreign policy advisers on the National Security Council, which is where many of her critics in the Obama team are expected to end up.

The first victims of Mrs Clinton’s anticipated appointment will be those who defended Mr Obama’s flanks on the campaign trail. By mocking Mrs Clinton’s claims to have landed under sniper fire in Bosnia or pouring scorn on her much-ballyhooed claim to have visited 80 countries as First Lady they successfully deflected the damaging charge that he is a lightweight on international issues.
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TheNewAmerican.com 

Zbigniew Brzezinski, a senior adviser to President-elect Barack Obama on matters of national security and foreign policy, was the featured speaker at Chatham House in London on November 17, 2008. The title of his lecture was “Major Foreign Policy Challenges for the Next US President.” Although Chatham House events are known to attract “the great and the good” of England’s political, financial, and academic elites — as well as many of its top media representatives — there has been virtually no word as to what Brzezinski had to say in any of the world’s press.

Type “Brzezinski” and “Chatham” into your Internet search engines and you will come up with … virtually zilch, nada, nothing.The esteemed Times of London had only this to say on November 16, the day before the lecture: “Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Democrat former national security adviser … will give an address tomorrow at Chatham House, the international relations think tank, in London.” No report on the event the day after — or since. Ditto for the Telegraph, the BBC, and other British media. Same for the U.S. media: no reports in the New York Times, Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CNS, CNN, Fox, etc.

This is but the latest example of the hermetic seal known as the “Chatham House Rule,” which states:
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Jeremy Scahill | Alternet.org 

U.S. policy is not about one individual, and no matter how much faith people place in President-elect Barack Obama, the policies he enacts will be fruit of a tree with many roots. Among them: his personal politics and views, the disastrous realities his administration will inherit, and, of course, unpredictable future crises. But the best immediate indicator of what an Obama administration might look like can be found in the people he surrounds himself with and who he appoints to his Cabinet. And, frankly, when it comes to foreign policy, it is not looking good.

Obama has a momentous opportunity to do what he repeatedly promised over the course of his campaign: bring actual change. But the more we learn about who Obama is considering for top positions in his administration, the more his inner circle resembles a staff reunion of President Bill Clinton’s White House. Although Obama brought some progressives on board early in his campaign, his foreign policy team is now dominated by the hawkish, old-guard Democrats of the 1990s. This has been particularly true since Hillary Clinton conceded defeat in the Democratic primary, freeing many of her top advisors to join Obama’s team.

“What happened to all this talk about change?” a member of the Clinton foreign policy team recently asked the Washington Post. “This isn’t lightly flavored with Clintons. This is all Clintons, all the time.”

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