The New American Imperial President Model

This is long, but it is enlightening. I've been pro Obama since the beginning and anti Bush since his beginning. But if you are pro Obama, you really need to read this. We have some very questionable (bad) things going on now. I still like Obama. But we have some directions in this country that have got to be changed back. ASAP. Sooner. Before it's too late, if it's not already.

John Cusack Interviews Law Professor Jonathan Turley About Obama Administration’s War On the Constitution

I've always liked John Cusak going back to his first films back in the 1980s. I like his choices in films, I like his acting. I think he's talented and intelligent. His sister on Showtime's "Shameless" is as funny as she has always been. So obviously it runs in the family. "Gross Pointe Blank" is one of my all time favorite films on several levels and I as well liked his latest film, "The Numbers Station".

The American Administrations these past ten years have been doing what many of us have been doing, what I've been doing in my own mind. Thinking that the end of our efforts in using the Constitution is what is important. Where in reality it is the end in the meaning of the Constitution that is most important.

I think we've had the right intentions, but have become deluded through fear and intimidation, and that has got to stop. Not the fear and intimidation so much as our reaction to it. At some point you simply have to stand your ground and face the bad guys down and just say, No. If you get killed doing it, well that is Courage and if enough of us say No, it will change things. But if we are all afraid to stand and live (or die) for our belief in our country's foundations, in our Constitution, then how we will win out in the end?

We are too into never making a mistake, never losing ground, never having to wait or sacrifice for our ethics; and so in some ways we are losing. Losing our identity as a nation and as perceived by the world, and losing our credibility. We are losing our freedoms and our protections by and from, our own government. If, you really look around, there are some very scary things happening to our nation. But it's easier and less scary, to simply ignore... all of it. Just wonder for a moment, in twenty years time what will this country look like if we stay on this track?

Here is something to consider along this track, on what is or is not, torture:

Watch Christopher Hitchens Get Waterboarded (VANITY FAIR)

For anyone who thinks that "enhanced interrogation", that "waterboarding" is not torture, please drop by and I'll change your mind.

I'm going to post an interview shortly (below) that was put our by John Cusak that he posted back in September 2012. But first I want to set the tone for what the Bush and Obama Administrations have done to remove our criminality in changing the topic from "torture" to pretty much anything else, like "waterboarding", like "enhanced interrogation".

We have gone from "gutting" Nuremburg now ("you can't charge them as war criminals, they were just following orders"), to actually killing American citizens. It's mission creep and as the butler at Highclaire Castle said in a recent documentary on that famous house used in Downton Abbey, "Once standards go away, they don't come back."

This is rather ironic:

"If people let the government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny." - Thomas Jefferson.

We seem to agree with just about anything lately.

Yes these "enhanced interrogations" work to break down resistance, but at some point we have to ask ourselves, who are we? Cowards afraid of anything? Or people of principle who the world looks up to, even when it hurts?

What is water boarding like? See this 3 minute and twenty-second video with a volunteer.

Getting Waterboarded: Vanguard

From now on whenever you hear "enhanced interrogation" or "waterboarding", think in your mind, "Torture" with a capital "T". Because those are keywords hiding reality. The users of these words are doing the same thing people have done in saying they haven't had sex with someone because it wasn't intercourse, or they didn't love the person. So why should their spouse be upset? Or someone who says calories don't count because they ate some off of someone else's plate. It's simply ludicrous, it's twisting reality and that is something we cannot have in our leaders when it comes to abusing and killing people, especially American citizens; but that cannot be the only gauge of who we kill. In killing foreign enemies, terrorists, in killing them using indirect means such as drones, we are creating "collateral damage" in neutral foreign citizens, in innocents, even in children. We are also fostering new angers, new enemies.

Yes, I think drones are a useful tool, but perhaps we use them too much. And what will be the new awareness in this technology with other nations who are starting to use them? There are currently fifty other nations getting into the drone technology for Reconnaissance (defense) and attack (offense). In our abuses, others will us us as their model to get away with the same, or worse. Or use them against us. We need to sponsor new international laws on these devices, just like we did with other easily abused actions and technologies since the First Geneva Convention governing sick and wounded members of armed forces, signed in 1864.

Here are a few snippets from this rather long but fascinating interview. These are several pieces put together from different sections of the interview:

CUSACK: I hate to speak too much to motivation, but why do you think MSNBC and other so-called centrist or left outlets won't bring up any of these things? These issues were broadcast and reported on nightly when John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzalez and Bush were in office.

TURLEY: Well, there is no question that some at MSNBC have backed away from these issues, although occasionally you'll see people talk about –

CUSACK: I think that's being kind, don't you? More like "abandoned."

TURLEY: Yeah. The civil liberties perspective is rarely given more than a passing reference while national security concerns are explored in depth. Fox is viewed as protective of Bush while MSNBC is viewed as protective of Obama. But both presidents are guilty of the same violations. There are relatively few journalists willing to pursue these questions aggressively and objectively, particularly on television. And so the result is that the public is hearing a script written by the government that downplays these principles. They don't hear the word "torture."

They hear "enhanced interrogation." They don't hear much about the treaties. They don't hear about the international condemnation of the United States. Most Americans are unaware of how far we have moved away from Nuremberg and core principles of international law.

TURLEY: We appear to be in a sort of a free-fall. We have what used to be called an "imperial presidency."

CUSACK: Obama is far more of an imperial president than Bush in many ways, wouldn't you say?

TURLEY: Oh, President Obama has created an imperial presidency that would have made Richard Nixon blush. It is unbelievable.
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CUSACK: And to say these things, most of the liberal community or the progressive community would say, "Turley and Cusack have lost their minds. What do they want? They want Mitt Romney to come in?"

TURLEY: The question is, "What has all of your relativistic voting and support done for you?"
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CUSACK: But, see, that's a very tough principle to take, because everybody feels so rightfully loathsome about Bin Laden, right? But principles are not meant to be convenient, right? The Constitution is not meant to be convenient. If they can catch Adolf Eichmann and put him on trial, why not bin Laden? The principles are what separate us from the beasts.

I think the best answer I ever heard about this, besides sitting around a kitchen table with you and your father and my father, was I heard somebody, they asked Mario Cuomo, "You don't support the death penalty...? Would you for someone who raped your wife?" And Cuomo blinked, and he looked at him, and he said, "What would I do? Well, I'd take a baseball bat and I'd bash his skull in... But I don't matter. The law is better than me. The law is supposed to be better than me. That's the whole point."

---

Again, you can read the entire interview and I suggest you do, because I only scratche the surface here of the what all they address: John Cusack Interviews Law Professor Jonathan Turley About Obama Administration’s War On the Constitution

9/11 Was Not Just A Terrorist Attack - The Return of America the Great

9/11 was not just a terrorist attack. At very least, its effects were much more far reaching.

9/11 was an injection of poison that no one seemed to notice. That was the damage that was done, not just the lives lost. America was poisoned with a shot injected into the largest city of this once great country by those deluded with hate, by those who grew to hate us in part from our own actions over the past hundred years of our paying no attention whatsoever to what our actions were doing to those then third world nations of the world. We were injected with a poison that spread out rapidly, reaching across our country, and then spreading out to the world.

In modern pop culture terms it was like we were bit by a zombie and then we bit others conveying the poison to the world. The infection spread partly from fear of terrorism, but also from our own words and actions. America is rather new to the need to protect our homelands from terrorism and sadly, we reacted to it like children.

Fear is contagious and we helped to spread it. This was what FDR meant when he said, "Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself."

After 9/11 we were turned into a Zombie country. We were infectious, WE then were dangerous. We went to war against the nearest country that fit our need to kill; someone, anyone We did what was right before we were attacked. We should have cleaned up in Iraq in the 80s, not in 2003. We rightly went into Afghanistan in 2002 and attacked our attackers, Al Qaeda and their associates the Taliban. We nearly devastated them and the Taliban. But then we let Bin Laden escape to Pakistan. Why? Because, we weren't through satiating our revenge. You can blame the Bush Administration, they were the head of the pimple at that time that was America.

What other country has two million people in thousands of prisons and jails in its own country? Who had secret prisons around the world? In Romania, in Poland, in Guantanamo? That poison we were injected with on 9/11 made us go crazy. Our own past with nonsense like our "War on Drugs", a war on many of our own citizenry, gave us a mindset that allowed us to be led into a "War on Terror". So we went into the longest war in our history in Afghanistan, a "war" that spread against a rag tag global group of terrorists and wannabees. We found a way to allow ourselves to torture prisoners, to terrorize individuals in a confined setting. We used things like "extraordinary rendition" to kidnap and torture and when that became too difficult to do, we found other countries who had brutal natures and we allowed them to do those things in our name.

The Bush Administration kept these things going for many of those years. Those secret prisons were shut down in 2006 and in 2009 it became official policy that we do not do that anymore, under a different administration. For years the flag draped coffins at Dover were banned to be photographed when America's children, killed in war, were brought home to their final resting place. The worst thing we can ever do, is to force ourselves away from facing that we are indeed at war. When at war you need it to be painfully obvious. Let that be a lesson to us.

Labeling so many things as "war" allowed us to think as you do in a war. In war we do things that are not normally allowed. Murder, is legal and not even called, "murder". The "Fog of War" includes killing the lame, women, old people, and children. It allows us to kill our own citizens, something that should never happen without due process and judicial interference. And we did that. We killed an American citizen with a missile in another country by first labeling him as traitor. His father even went to court to sue the country to keep it from happening, asking instead that he captured, to bring his son back, give him a trial as he was guaranteed by having been through all his life, a great thing, an American citizen. But in killing him we devalued what we are as Americans.

One of the great things about our Country, about being an American citizen, is the protection of our own country and in having due process, not presidential dictate leading to capital punishment. After we killed that American, we then killed his sixteen year old son, shortly thereafter and in the same manner, using a bomb delivered on the end of a missile.

Is this who we are now?

Is that America? Does that sound like America to you? Is this, what our once "Great Nation" is about now? All this because we were afraid? Because of Fear? When we are afraid does that give us the right to throw our long standing ethical principles, right out the window?

President Obama, as soon as he took office on January 22, 2009, put a stop to our torturing people around the world, on principle. Some people complain a lot about Pres. Obama and what he has done since coming into office. They have various considerations on how we should be rebuilding our economy, treating our citizens, and fighting (or even being in) a war. But the one thing the Obama Administration has been and is doing, is helping our country to heal itself after ten years of our longest war ever (other than our "War" on drugs and the American citizen).

Healing is difficult, it can be painful, but it is necessary.

Look, having a "War" on things is dangerous. That attitude alone is dangerous and we need to stop doing it. Legalizing Marijuana strangely enough, is one way to help end that mindset of having a "war" on something because it means an end to extraordinary actions against something that some only some people don't like. When it leads our own country into rationalizing actions against our own citizens, then we really have gone astray. Whether it is arresting someone in our own country for possessing even small amounts of Cannabis, or in blowing an American up in another country for terrorism and being a traitor, we need to make up our minds who we are and what we are allowed to do, in any circumstance.

As it helped lead us into our, out of context, "War on Terrorism", something that sounds good, feels good but counter-intuitively isn't good, it also led us into something else. Things like the "Tea Party", extremism in our country, the Republican Right taking over to the detriment of our country and even the GOP, their own party. But as things go these types of things tend to be cyclical and the pendulum can only swing so far to one extreme or the other before it either swings back, or simply breaks the mechanism. And we have been far too close to that for far too long now.

Being an American means something. It should mean something, anyway. It should mean something extraordinary and these last ten years and more we have diluted what it means to be an American. We need to stop that. We need to get back on the path and we need to heal. Not only ourselves within our own country, but also in how others view our country and its citizens. We need to get back to the business of being "Great" and not saying it. It's not just about our military power or our economy. It's also about our principles, our existence, our being a leader in doing things around the world, and within our own country. We need to decide what is "right" and stick to it.

Sometimes being that kind of a country is difficult, it can be painful. Lives can be lost over it. But we have in the past been the kind of country that can "take it on the chin" and continue on, even through difficult times, and continue doing what is right.

Which kind of country do you want us to be?

During these past ten years we have at times been, in contemporary parlance a, "chicken shit" country. Literally, we have been scared of our own shadows. Remember the colored, "Shades of Danger" alerts that we stopped using in 2011? As it turned out, we only needed them for feeling all fuzzy safe. The Bush administration had pushed us into an old fashioned Texas style retribution and we all know that revenge destroys both the deserving and the undeserving. It can also make one into the other.

But now we are painfully trying to leave that juvenile opiate of war and the mindset of retribution behind. Shouldn't we now finally go back to being the kind of country we were once again? Shouldn't we allow this healing process that the Obama Administration is trying to help us with, happen? To return to being once again that great nation that we once were?

We have evolved during this process. We are a different country now than we were in 2000. We have entered the 21st Century as a country at war and we need to stop that and become a country that is on the forefront of delivering peace. Of advocating Peace. If we want to be at war then we need to be at war against those who are fighting a war against us. But it is not toward our own citizens. It is not toward those who use recreational drugs. It is not toward terrorists. Terrorists require police actions, intelligence operations, not full scale war actions. Going to war in Iraq when any "war action" was really in Afghanistan, was simply ludicrous.

War against terrorism is a concept that may very will never end. Those wannabees who wish to be terrorists can simply do so. But do they deserve a war? Maybe so, but do WE deserve it? No. Surely we can handle them with smaller, less devastating actions that will not destroy those innocents nearby them as "collateral damage" and create new terrorists in their wake because of our killing their relatives and loved ones, as inadvertently as it may be.

Jeh Johnson, the Defense Department's General Counsel, the head Lawyer for the Defense Department, went out this past week for the Obama Administration to say just this. He spoke at Oxford University in Britain and said that wars against something like terrorism can go on forever and we need to find an end to it. He said that we are fighting against a new kind of thing and that at some point we need to call an end to the "war" actions.

"How will this conflict end. It is an unconventional conflict against an unconventional enemy, and will not end in conventional terms." - Jeh Johnson

At some point he said, this will have to be turned over to police and intelligence agencies, and the sooner the better.

America is finally coming back into its own. We are striving to return to being the once great nation we had been and perhaps in the end, we will become an even greater nation than before.

A lot of what I'm talking about here falls under a single word: Honor. War gives a wink and a nod to acting in dishonorable ways, and that has to stop. We have to acknowledge our past actions but then we have to move on to heal from them.

But we have to allow it to happen, we have to let it happen, and we have to support those who are trying to do this hard work. We have to want it and embrace the change as well as a embrace a different, more mature way of being and looking at things. We have to be brave, to persevere through adversity and no matter what, we have to not allow those fear mongers who have spoken out for so long and have led us astray, to influence us, ever again.

In the end, we have to be Honorable. We have to face it, to admit it, that we were not at some points in these past ten years. And then we have to move on to build ourselves a better way of being, under any situation.

This, is America.

Make that mean something once again. Allow America to again come into its own and to remain so from here forward, no matter what.

An Inconvenient GOP Truth

THIS IS SERIOUSLY DISTURBING:

I have to say, from what I've been seeing in recent years, since Newt Gingrich came to power back in the 90s really, the Republican party has been getting shadier and shadier until they are a sad shadow of a once great party. Don't believe me? Check it out yourself then. First of all I want to say that Rachel Maddow, Rocks! Thanks for pointing this all out to me. I knew some of it before but it helps to have it all brought together to see it more clearly.

Before I get into this, it's only fair that I point out there are two sides to every "story" but not to facts. However, the GOP side of this fact twisting, is so much worse than their opponents, that it is a marked reality worth noting. Too many times I have run down Fox News "truths" only to find they are not what they seem and fall quickly apart. To be sure, once in a while they hit the bullseye, but it is nothing in comparison to what I will detail here.

Here's the facts....

It seems that when Bush Jr. didn't like a report, they quashed it. The US Report "Patterns of Global Terrorism" from the US State Department came out for 2003 as it had for twenty years. I've read it myself in the past. Bush kept saying how good they had done in the fight against terrorism and how it was down.

The 2004 report then came out to say that terrorism was higher than it had ever been in their twenty years of reporting. And so Bush killed the report, explaining it off as a need to reevaluate the criteria the report was using. They did that time and time again.

From the Seattle Time report:

"But other current and former officials charged that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's office ordered the report, "Patterns of Global Terrorism," eliminated weeks ago because the 2004 statistics raised disturbing questions about the Bush's administration's frequent claims of progress in the war against terrorism.

"Instead of dealing with the facts and dealing with them in an intelligent fashion, they try to hide their facts from the American public," charged Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst and State Department terrorism expert who first disclosed the decision to eliminate the report in The Counterterrorism Blog, an online journal."

There is now a different report that has replaced it. But what had happened was that the old report was buried within the newer style report to make the Bush Administration not look so bad. This reminds me of what the USSR used to do in using "disinformation". They were the experts in it and taught the British (or they learned how to do it in combating the Soviets) and we learned as we had so much of that type of thing, from the British.

From Wikipedia:

"Disinformation is intentionally false or inaccurate information that is spread deliberately. For this reason, it is synonymous with and sometimes called black propaganda. It is an act of deception and false statements to convince someone of untruth. Disinformation should not be confused with misinformation, information that is unintentionally false.

"Unlike traditional propaganda techniques designed to engage emotional support, disinformation is designed to manipulate the audience at the rational level by either discrediting conflicting information or supporting false conclusions. A common disinformation tactic is to mix some truth and observation with false conclusions and lies, or to reveal part of the truth while presenting it as the whole (a limited hangout)."

I don't have to make this stuff up. If you ever watch the news, you've gotten the GOP's disinformation. If you watch Fox News, you probably no longer notice it, since they seem to deal in some severe nonsense much of the time. The GOP would call it, "Truth", or maybe, "Spin", but Stephen Colbert has labeled it, "Truthiness": "a quality characterizing a "truth" that a person claims to know intuitively "from the gut" or because it "feels right" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts."

Now, when a year earlier it the education department found that the Bush's push for using Charter Schools had those children showing they were falling behind public school kids, suddenly the Department of Education cut back on the data it collects about charter schools.

When mass layoffs were shown to be happening, the Bush administration decided to stop publishing information about it (The Washington Post, January 3, 2003 U.S. Drops Report on Mass Layoffs; Data Helped States Track Patterns of Industrial Demise).

This sounds very 1984 to me. If you don't like what is being said, kill it so no one reads it.

When the US Tax Policy Center's report said that Romney's plan DOES raise Middle-Class Taxes, Romney's people came back to say "Romney camp slams tax group analysis as "misleading, deceitful" (10/18/2012 The Hill - Erik Wasson). When the unemployment rate when down to 7.8% recently, the Republicans came back with doubting job numbers following these strong reports...from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (The Huffington Post, Luke Johnson 10/05/2012). What happened to the days when political parties would try to figure out how to spin numbers? Now they either try to eliminate them as the Bush administration had done, or deny their validity, which is a travesty against this country.

I am seeing a very anti American trend in the Republican party where they will lie, cheat and steal apparently (Nixon notwithstanding, not like they have a history of this or anything), to look good and win elections. It's a horrible thing to do to a nation you have been elected to office to serve. It is underhanded, it is dirtying the authority and reputation of the American Government. It is biting the hand that feeds you, whipping the children in your care, kicking the dog, poisoning the roses, slapping Mickey Mouse in a mousetrap, or kicking John Wayne in the balls.

More recently, November 1, 2012 The New York Times reported, "Nonpartisan Tax Report Withdrawn After G.O.P. Protest". One of our most prestigious research groups, the group who does the research for Congress, The Congressional Research Service (how paranoid is THAT?), made an economic report stating that, "there is no correlation between top tax rates and economic growth, a central tenet of conservative economic theory". This is from Congress's own nonpartisan Think Tank. As Rachel Maddow put it about the CSR, "they are nothing but the facts and their integrity is unimpeachable."

See also: Nonpartisan Tax Report Withdrawn After G.O.P. Protest

So, the entire theory and plan that Mitt Romney and once President George "W" Bush and the Grand Old Party have been shoving down our throats for decades, is false! There really is no higher authority on this topic and what did they do? Senate Republicans raised concerns about the paper's findings and wording and they got the CRS to pull their report, against the advice of the agency's economic team leadership.

In part the report had stated that, "There is not conclusive evidence ... to substantiate a clear relationship between the 65-year steady reduction in the top tax rates [that is lowering the tax rates on millionaires and billionaires] and [creating] economic growth." There is not evidence if you cut taxes on the rich that it enhances our economic growth.

Gee, no kidding. But then, finally one and for all, proof.

The trouble is, this pretty much shoots down Romney's entire campaign. Without this, what is he? A hot bag of wind. He may have had a life in business, but he has not run a country, not the United States of America. For that, you need a real brain and a diverse set of tools, not just business. Because you are dealing with people and families in ways you frankly, never had before. There are cares and concerns as president you simply do not have as a CEO, or an investment banker. War for instance, as the Commander in Chief, isn't just about how many ships you have, or listening to the Joint Chiefs of Staff; it's also about politics. Maybe rushing in with a fleet will win a war, but perhaps you shouldn't do that because of Russia's position today. It's not all just about business.

But even if it were, Romney it would seem, has no clue what he is doing if he thinks that keeping tax rates low on his friends and himself will help our country in any way whatsoever.

This is the whole basis of the Republican party and why so many Republicans make a never raise taxes pledge to Grover Norquist.

This tampering with reports is a very scary thing. It's very 1984. It's very USSR. It's very, UnAmerican.

Look, the way to be great, to become great is to deal with your detractors. In handling not hiding from our criticisms, we hone ourselves, make ourselves better, stronger. The way to fail, to become poor in spirit and action, is to avoid criticism, to hide. The Republican party in trying to survive and look good is killing itself. When you make mistakes, when you are found to be wrong, you do not hide from it, you FIX IT. You work harder to find a better way. You do not squash your enemies, you let them strengthen you because you have to find new ways, you have to find ways to fix your problems.

What I'm seeing in the GOP is a party on its deathbed, a party that is fearful, who are going to become panicked and could at some point, become destructive. THINK about it. Haven't you ever seen a person be this way? They eventually self-destruct and that's what I'm seeing. You need to open up, not shut down. Face your fears, mistakes, and failures. Become the great party you once were and don't let these little people of spirit, these extremists, this religious fanatics be the mainstay of your party. Just STOP. Remake yourself.

I wish you well. You are an American institution. I want you to succeed. At least, I want you to be a vibrant, healthy party that does things for America for the best of civic reasons and not for self-serving, kiss the ass of the rich, type people who are deluded into thinking the earth is only 6,000 years old. Come ON! Get it together guys! Well, that's all I can offer you. The rest my friends is up to you. What do YOU want your GOP to be? This dying behemoth or a Grand Old Party, renewed?

There it is. Someone had to say it.

For that report, you can find it, here. The nice people at The Rachel Maddow Show, have put it up on their website. Because you can't find it on the U.S. Governments' website. Why is that?

It is called, "Congressional Research Service: Taxes and the Economy: An Economic Analysis of the Top Tax Rates Since 1945" (pdf)

There are also two articles linked on that page by Steve Benen: "When the GOP suppresses inconvenient truths" and, "'This has hues of a banana republic."

I hear you there brother....