The new normal 2017

Click to enlarge.   Source: Tom Tomorrow.

On the other hand, read What Trump Is Quietly Accomplishing by David A. Graham for The Atlantic.

Tom Tomorrow’s 2015 in review

GOP in Senate acknowledges global warming

Source: Tom Tomorrow | The Nation

Tom Tomorrow’s 2014 in review

“We tortured some folks”

For more, click on War Crimes: Is Obama Looking for a Bailout? by Jeff Bachman for TruthDig.   Hat tips for the link and the cartoon to Bill Harvey.

 

Tom Tomorrow on our fiscal cliffhangers

A vote for the “idea of Obama”

The cartoonist Tom Tomorrow used to draw cartoons showing the disconnect between the actual Barack Obama and the “idea of Obama” in the minds of his core supporters.   The “idea of Obama” is a cautious progressive who favors peace, civil liberties, full employment and health insurance for all.   Even though, in my opinion, this view does not reflect reality, I’m glad that a majority of voters apparently favor the “idea of Obama,” or at least think it is better than the alternative.

As Glenn Greenwald wrote the other day:

The greatest and most enduring significance of Tuesday night’s election results will likely not be the re-election of Barack Obama, but rather what the outcome reflects about the American electorate.  It was not merely Democrats, but liberalism, which was triumphant.

To begin with, it is hard to overstate just how crippled America’s right-wing is.  Although it was masked by their aberrational win in 2010, the GOP has now been not merely defeated, but crushed, in three out of the last four elections: in 2006 (when they lost control of the House and Senate), 2008 (when Obama won easily and Democrats expanded their margins of control), and now 2012.  The horrendous political legacy of George Bush and Dick Cheney continues to sink the GOP, and demographic realities – how toxic the American Right is to the very groups that are now becoming America’s majority – makes it difficult to envision how this will change any time soon.

Meanwhile, new laws to legalize both same-sex marriage and marijuana use were enacted in multiple states with little controversy, an unthinkable result even a few years ago, while Obama’s late-term embrace of same-sex marriage seems to have resulted only in political benefit with no political harm.  Democrats were sent to the Senate by deeply red states such as Indiana, Missouri and North Dakota, along with genuinely progressive candidates on domestic issues, including Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts and Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, who became the first openly gay person elected to the Senate.  As a cherry on the liberal cake, two of the most loathed right-wing House members – Rep Joe Walsh of Illinois and Allen West of Florida – were removed from office.

via Glenn Greenwald

The actual differences between Obama and Mitt Romney were less than their campaign rhetoric indicated.  I think both candidates are aligned with Wall Street and the military-industrial complex, both accept perpetual warfare as a necessity which supersedes the Bill of Rights.  Within that basic framework, Obama will try to appease poor people, minority groups and feminists while Romney would have scapegoated them.

In their campaign speeches, Obama and Romney were very different.  We might have been back in the days of Johnson versus Goldwater.  The election outcome was highly significant as an indicator of what the voters want, although not necessarily of what they’re going to get.

I think that President Obama’s priority is to make a Grand Bargain with the Republicans on balancing the federal budget, which will involve compromising Social Security, Medicare and other historic Democratic social safety net programs.

But maybe I am wrong (which I certainly have been in the past) and the President’s supporters are right.  Either way it is important for Americans to let their elected representatives know what they think about important issues—preserving Social Security, not going to war with Iran, preventing Wall Street banks from gambling with the U.S. economy.

Due process and death warrants

I never thought I would live to see the day when the President of the United States would claim the right to sign death warrants on his own sole authority.  Even less did I think that a Democratic President who called himself a liberal would claim such a right.

President Obama claims the right to order “targeted killings” of terrorists on his own authority.  “Targeted killing” is Orwellian language.  According to the New York Times, Barack Obama defines a terrorist as any military-age male in a kill zone, unless there is intelligence demonstrating he is not.  That’s not what I would call targeting.  The President has justified the killing of unidentified people based on suspicious behavior, or based on proximity to such people, because “they are probably up to no good.”  Drone strikes have been ordered on funeral services of people who’ve been killed by previous drone strikes.

Many of us Americans are all right with that because we assume that the only people who are going to be targeted for death are brown-skinned men with Muslim names.  I think that is a naive assumption—aside from the consideration that brown-skinned men with Muslim names have as much right to live on this planet as white-skinned men with Anglo-Saxon names.  It is also naive to think that killing tribal people in places like Yemen or Pakistan’s Waziristan region will make the United States safer, rather than merely more hated.

Do you think I’m exaggerating?  This is from an article in England’s The Observer newspaper.

Amos Guiora knows all about the pitfalls of targeted assassinations, both in terms of legal process and the risk of killing the wrong people or causing civilian casualties.  The University of Utah law professor spent many years in the Israel Defence Forces, including time as a legal adviser in the Gaza Strip where such killing strikes are common.  He knows what it feels like when people weigh life-and-death decisions.

Yet Guiora – no dove on such matters – confessed he was “deeply concerned” about President Barack Obama’s own “kill list” of terrorists and the way they are eliminated by missiles fired from robot drones around the world.  He believes US policy has not tightly defined how people get on the list, leaving it open to legal and moral problems when the order to kill leaves Obama’s desk.  “He is making a decision largely devoid of external review,” Guiroa told the Observer, saying the US’s apparent methodology for deciding who is a terrorist is “loosey goosey”.

Indeed, newspaper revelations last week about the “kill list” showed the Obama administration defines a militant as any military-age male in the strike zone when its drone attacks.  That has raised the hackles of many who saw Obama as somehow more sophisticated on terrorism issues than his predecessor, George W Bush. But Guiora does not view it that way.  He sees Obama as the same as Bush, just much more enthusiastic when it comes to waging drone war.  “If Bush did what Obama has been doing, then journalists would have been all over it,” he said.

via The Observer.

 Ta-Nehisi Coates, who writes a web log for The Atlantic, pointed out the problem with this.

Has there ever been a point since America’s inception when someone, somewhere, wasn’t plotting our downfall?  I have great difficulty perceiving a time when this won’t be true.  And so drone strategy comes to self-replicate.  We bomb your village.  You declare war on us for the bombing.  We deem you a terrorist and bomb again.  Rinse.  Repeat.

The Obama administration considers any military-age male in the vicinity of a bombing to be a combatant.  That is an amazing standard that shares an ugly synergy with the sort of broad-swath logic that we see employed in Stop and Frisk, with NYPD national spy network, with the killer of Trayvon Martin.

Policy is informed by the morality of a country. I think the repercussions of this unending era of death by silver bird will be profound.

via Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Who’s afraid of domestic surveillance drones?

When I first saw this Tom Tomorrow cartoon, I thought it was funny, but I didn’t put it in a post because it was satiric, exaggerated and not to be taken literally.  After all, flying American killer robots have only killed people in wedding parties in foreign countries, and then only occasionally and unintentionally.  On the other hand it is U.S. policy to target mourners at funerals for those killed by other drones.  Click on U.S. again bombs mourners by Glenn Greenwald, whose link is in my Best Blogs menu.

And as for the problem with use of military drones by American police, click on Congress Should Ban Armed Drones Before Cops in Texas Deploy One and Don’t Let John Yoo Talk You Into Domestic Drone Use by Police by Conor Friedersdorf.

Those who do not learn from history…

Tom Tomorrow’s 2010 in crazy