http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/08-0
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It’s about the horrible policies, stupid
Delaware Libertarian
by Tyler Nixon
12/08/09
Obama is now convincingly a minority president. No, I don’t mean racially. I mean Obama now joins George W. Bush not only in the continuation of neocon foreign policies and big government profligacy, but (inevitably) that this is leading him to now consistently poll below 50% approval … and falling. The public’s fast-growing disapproval of Obama’s arrogant power-mongering should come as no surprise, except perhaps for the most oblivious and purely-partisan hopechangers now hunkering down in the bunker...
http://tinyurl.com/yasdz8k
The antiwar right: Our time is near
AntiWar.Com
by Justin Raimondo
12/09/09
Neocons like Reihan Salam are worried that Republicans will soon ‘begin to abandon the president en masse over Afghanistan.’ As well they might be: Salam, a self-described advocate of ‘a Pax Americana foreign policy,’ and a fellow at the New America Foundation — a corporate-funded let’s-promote-’new’-but-safely-conventional-ideas, formerly headed up by James Fallows — knows his enemies, and is preparing to meet them, albeit not head on. Before the battle is joined, however, he wants to define the enemy — in his own terms, of course...
http://tinyurl.com/ye4k9ku
So much for the peace presidency
Cato Institute
by Gene Healy
12/08/09
This Thursday, Barack Obama will swing by Oslo to pick up the Nobel Peace Prize — just over a week after he announced that he’d escalate the war in Afghanistan. Awkward. When Obama won the prize in October, you had to wonder whether the self-esteem movement, where every kid gets a trophy, had made its way from little league to the Nobel Committee. Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Jr. — and a guy running two wars, who’d been president for two weeks when nominations closed?
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=11034
My friend the president
Salon
by Glenn Greenwald
12/08/09
Over the past couple of days, Andrew Sullivan has linked to and published protests from various individuals who are quite angry that people ‘on the left’ are being so mean to President Obama, and several of them are so upset that they have decided they are ‘leaving the left,’ whatever that might mean. What’s most striking about these valiant defenses of Obama is how utterly devoid they are of any substantive points and how, instead, suffuse with weird, even inappropriate, emotional attachments they are. These objections are grounded almost exclusively in (a) a deep-seated conviction that President Obama is a good and just man who means well; (b) their own rather intense upset at seeing him criticized; and (c) a spitting ad hominem fury of the type long directed by Bush followers at any critics of their leader, and generally typical of authoritarian attacks on out-groups critics...
http://tinyurl.com/yl4ttex
The spending wars
The American Prospect
by Paul Waldman
12/08/09
When Rep. David Obey, chair of the House Appropriations Committee, recently proposed a surtax that would pay for the Afghanistan War, the collective response from most of his colleagues on both sides of the aisle was, ‘Are you nuts?’ Nancy Pelosi quickly put the kibosh on Obey’s ‘Share the Sacrifice Act,’ and all talk of funding the war has been banished. Meanwhile, Democrats have spent untold hours debating how to finance health-care reform, all while Republicans carp about how doing so is just too darn expensive, what with our ever-climbing deficit. We’ve become used to this contradiction in Washington. Wars just need to be fought; the defense budget just needs to keep growing; and we don’t really care what it costs...
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_spending_wars
Prop up the GOP by scaring Americans?
Fox News Forum
by Ellen Ratner
12/07/09
How is it that coverage of the healthcare reform debate has now moved off the front pages of two of our country’s major newspapers and has been reduced to nothing more than a brief summation in today’s editions of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times? With healthcare accounting for somewhere between one sixth and one seventh of our total economy, a weekend of Senators debating reform and the topic front and center as one of the major concerns cited by voters, it is amazing that the story is not at the top of the headlines. It is, however, one of the hot topics on talk radio debate and with the American public...
http://tinyurl.com/yd5zpy3
Supporting “acts of government” makes you guilty
Albuquerque Libertarian Examiner
by Kent McManigal
12/07/09
Face it; those who cheer the executioner are no different than those who cheer or defend the police, the military, or any government agency. Support of government can’t be justified...
http://tinyurl.com/yj76lmm
Informant: Thomas L. Knapp
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We've Ignored King on War
By Rusty Nelson
Dr. King's Nobel lecture is filled with memorable lines. It's incomprehensible to me that Obama could ignore or contradict so many great quotes in his own speech, although we're accustomed to lip service to King's memory from apologists for war.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24418.htm
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Obama
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Nobel+laureate
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Luther
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Bush+legacy
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Reihan+Salam
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=neocons
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=GOP
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Pax+Americana
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=New+America+Foundation
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Afghanistan
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=defense+budget
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=surtax
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=healthcare
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=John+Buell
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Tyler+Nixon
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=raimondo
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Gene+Healy
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Glenn+Greenwald
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Paul+Waldman
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Ellen+Ratner
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Kent+McManigal
