The New York Times is currently featuring an article about upcoming elections in Afghanistan at the top of their RSS feed: Allies Ponder How to Plan Elections in Afghanistan.

The Times writer, Carlotta Gall, has obviously made an effort to balance optimism and pessimism about the situation in Afghanistan, and the article includes what was probably intended to be a very optimistic assessment by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who visited Kabul last Sunday.

"I am convinced that the additional military capability will certainly start to allow us to turn the tide."

 We Americans dwell in a consumer plutocracy, and the plutocrats don't even bother to be cute about it any more. Barack Obama, hailed by the geniuses of new media as a populist saviour, has surrounded himself with a team that was already bought and paid for by the financial services industry before they ever walked into the White House.

Larry Summers collected $5.2 million last year from his part-time job with a hedge fund.

$5.2 million for a part-time job!

One day per week!

"And just in case you ever get a big job in Washington, Larry, remember who your friends are!"

We're approaching the tenth anniversary of the Columbine massacre on April 20, and numerous articles about it have already appeared in the mainstream media. Almost all of them avoid discussing the role of the police.  

SFGate, April 30, 1999...

"Police involved in the investigation are most sensitive to criticism that they did not do enough in the first half hour of the shooting rampage to stem the carnage and confront the gunmen.

 Critics have included a fellow police officer, Westminster officer Randy Patrick, who three days after the shootings described the SWAT response as ``pathetic.''

Westminster police officials placed Patrick on nondisciplinary leave and ordered him to undergo a ``fitness for duty'' evaluation, a decision that was later rescinded."

 

Financial derivatives and their friends have disappeared so many trillions of dollars from banks that nobody even knows how many, and nobody is going to jail.

For Mr. Obama it's all more or less a joke, and he naturally chose late-night comedy as an appropriate venue for his "expert" opinion...

Here's the dirty little secret, though.  Most of the stuff that got us into trouble was perfectly legal.  

Now we know, since we heard it from Barack Obama, a "lawyer" who never tried a case in court or published an article in a legal journal.

Bloomberg calculates a total of $12.8 trillion in commitments and disbursements for the ongoing bailout of the banks, together with the Bush/Obama economic stimuli.

But since the two stimulus packages together only add up to $787 billion plus $168 billion for a grand total of $955 billion, slightly less than $1 trillion, it seems to me that the more salient figure is the total committed to bailing out the banks, which now amounts to $11.8 trillion.

New pledges from the Fed, the Treasury Department and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. include $1 trillion for the Public-Private Investment Program, designed to help investors buy distressed loans and other assets from U.S. banks. The money works out to $42,105 for every man, woman and child in the U.S. and 14 times the $899.8 billion of currency in circulation. The nation's gross domestic product was $14.2 trillion in 2008.

Does the House of Representatives ever bother to read the Constitution?

Article 1, Section 9, Clause 3...

No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.

And how do the federal courts interpret this clause?

U.S. v. Lovett...

Legislative acts, no matter what their form, that apply either to named individuals or to easily ascertainable members of a group in such a way as to inflict punishment on them without a trial, are 'bills of attainder' prohibited under this clause.

And in Cummings v. Missouri...

A bill of attainder, is a legislative act which inflicts punishment without judicial trial and includes any legislative act which takes away the life, liberty or property of a particular named or easily ascertainable person or group of persons because the legislature thinks them guilty of conduct which deserves punishment.

The stupid AIG bonus tax will probably never make it out of the Senate, but if it ever saw the light of day, the federal courts would nullify it in a New York minute.

Now, look.  I don't want to be pegged as a conspiracy theorist.  But I find what the Obama Administration has done over the past few days with regards to some important torture-related issues a little strange.

Glenn Greenwald has recently posted a very abstract jeremiad about our corrupt "establishment," with multiple concurring citations from Atrios, Paul Krugman, Matt Taibbi, Armando, (Big Tent Democrat on TalkLeft), and even Eliot Spitzer, recently returned from the dead by a collective realization that he was right about everything.

Our "establishment" is corrupt, and public outrage about the AIG bonuses is a very good thing, because it scares the corrupt "elite," and fear is the only force that can control those monsters.

This is only half right, as far as it goes, but it doesn't go quite far enough, and stops at a politically safe distance from the Oval Office, which is exactly where the buck is supposed to stop, and where Barack Obama continues to enable and support the most corrupt financial "establishment" since exactly the same corrupt "establishment" produced the Great Depression.

Under the screaming headline Obama's Katrina? with the equally screaming sub-title "The new president seems dangerously out of touch," the Wall Street Journal is running a story about...

A couple of parties in the East Room of the White House.

From Reuters...

Abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay has worsened sharply since President Barack Obama took office as prison guards "get their kicks in" before the camp is closed, according to a lawyer who represents detainees.

Abuses began to pick up in December after Obama was elected, human rights lawyer Ahmed Ghappour told Reuters. He cited beatings, the dislocation of limbs, spraying of pepper spray into closed cells, applying pepper spray to toilet paper and over-forcefeeding detainees who are on hunger strike.

The Pentagon said on Monday that it had received renewed reports of prisoner abuse during a recent review of conditions at Guantanamo, but had concluded that all prisoners were being kept in accordance with the Geneva Conventions.

Ghappour said he had spoken to army guards who, unsolicited, had described the pleasure they took in abusing prisoners, whether interrupting prayer or physical mistreatment. He said they appeared unconcerned about potential repercussions.

Unconcerned about potential repercussions!

 

Recently the Obama DoJ seriously misstepped by maintaining Bush's position on Mohamed et al. v. Jeppesen, invoking the state secrets privilege and attempting to get the case dismissed.  What followed was a great deal of rationalization and interpretation.  

Truth is alien to Barack Obama, but this doesn't mean he's a liar.

Someone who tells you that two plus two is three is only a liar if he can add. Obama can't add, but this doesn't mean he's stupid.

Stupidity is a failure to grasp the most obvious elements of reality, but in order to fail, you have to try. Obama doesn't try.

Obama dwells in a different realm from truth, and questions about him are typically undecidable.

An excellent example of Obama's spooky propensity for undecidability is his apparently naive belief in the willingness of Republicans to compromise with Democrats about taxes and spending.

How stupid is Barack Obama pretending to be?

No one will ever know for sure, or even develop a convincing argument one way or the other, because the otherwise universal law of non-contradiction does not apply to Barack Obama, and nothing about him ever has to be one way or the other.

So while Obama played dumb, and pretended to believe that Republicans would compromise with Democrats about taxes and spending, and zero Republicans actually compromised in the House of Representatives...

A grand total of three Republicans compromised in the Senate, for the trifling price of another $40 billion in tax cuts, so you can't really prove that Obama was wrong, and you can't really prove he was right.

Barack Obama isn't a man of either/or. He's a man of both/and, and if his famously bipartisan inclusivity just happens to include mutually exclusive alternatives, that's just tough luck for the rest of us, who dwell in a realm of stark alternatives.

We have a house, or we don't. We have a job, or we don't.

But while the rest of us lose jobs and houses, Barack Obama is still floating along in a warm and fuzzy world where everything is whatever he wants it to be at the moment, and if he wants to talk like a Harvard professor at press conferences while he also pretends to be so incredibly stupid that he thought Republicans would compromise with Democrats about taxes and spending...

It isn't really a problem for Barack Obama.

But it's a crushing problem for hundreds of thousands of the rest of us, who are losing our jobs and houses every week, while $9.7 trillion flows out of the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve into the bank accounts of exactly the same bank speculators who destroyed the American economy.