BREAKING: Obama releases LFBC (Also: Panetta to take over the Pentagon, Petraeus to become CIA chief)

Posted: April 27, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: just because | 58 Comments

This just in.

The WH has released Obama’s long form birth certificate. That link will take you directly to the WH blog.

From CNN’s political ticker:

(CNN) – The White House released President Obama’s original birth certificate Wednesday.

The surprise release follows recent and sustained remarks by businessman Donald Trump, among others, that raised doubts as to whether the president was born in the United States.

Read it and weep, birthers/suckers:

Obama’s birth certificate [PDF]

Well timed, Obama. Very well, timed.

As I said yesterday in The War on Legitimate Dissent, this whole birther/secret Muslim explosion has been one huge distraction… and the President has just lobbed the ultimate pie in the face of the GOP.

Donald Trump, ever the blowhard, says he’s done his job… touche:

Speaking to reporters Wednesday, Trump said, “I have accomplished something nobody else has accomplished.”

“I want to look at it, but I hope it’s true,” he added. “He should have done it a long time ago. I am really honored to have played such a big role in hopefully getting rid of this issue.”

More from the CNN link:

Earlier Wednesday, White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer said the debate has been “really bad for the Republican Party.”

The so-called “birther” debate is “good politics” but “bad for the country,” said Pfeiffer.

White House spokesman Jay Carney is expected to speak more about the birth certificate Wednesday morning.

From the WH blog link at the beginning of this post:

The President believed the distraction over his birth certificate wasn’t good for the country. It may have been good politics and good TV, but it was bad for the American people and distracting from the many challenges we face as a country. Therefore, the President directed his counsel to review the legal authority for seeking access to the long form certificate and to request on that basis that the Hawaii State Department of Health make an exception to release a copy of his long form birth certificate. They granted that exception in part because of the tremendous volume of requests they had been getting. President Barack Obama’s long form birth certificate can be seen here (PDF):

Obama himself has spoken on the issue this morning. From the Guardian’s live blogging of Obama’s statement…

9.48am ET: Obama is now speaking at the White House.

“This isssue has been going on for two and a half years now, I think it started during the campaign,” says Obama, looking relaxed.

He says he’s been “amused and puzzled” by how long the rumours have persisted, despite many investigations and the release of the shorter version of his birth certificate. “And yet this thing just keeps on going.”

9.51am ET: “Normally, I would not comment on something like this,” says Obama. But he explains that, two weeks ago during the budget debate with Republicans in Congress, he found that the biggest news story was about his birth certificate.

(That was Trump’s fault: that was when he started raising the subject.)

9.52am ET: “We’re not going to solve our problems if we get distracted by carnival acts and sideshow barkers,” says Obama – an oblique reference to Trump, surely?

“We do not have time for this kind of silliness, we’ve got big stuff to do, I’ve got big stuff to do,” says Obama, before closing his statement, without taking questions from the White House press corps.

Oh that’s a great touch by Obama calling Trump a sideshow barker.

This morning is all bread and circuses, and the oligarchy scores again!

Also from the Guardian live blog… Donald Trump is a big fat liar, bringing the Clinton’s name into his birther shenanigans:

10.01am ET: More nonsense from Donald Trump earlier:

Why he didn’t do it when the Clintons asked for it, I don’t know.

That’s just a flat untruth. The Clintons never asked for Obama’s birth certificate to be published – although some suggest the origins of the birther argument came from the Clinton campaign during the 2008 primaries. Whether or not that is true, what is true is that the birthers set sail under their own wind long ago.

The only real political fight Obama has ever had was against Hillary. I’m sure the Clintons did their opposition research, but they’re both lawyers, they both endorsed him for president, and Hill became Obama’s secretary of state. The birthers took it upon themselves to demand Obama’s birth certificate past the point of any semblance of rationality. Trump just wants to bring the Clintons’ name into it because he doesn’t want to bear the egg on his face alone.

Incidentally, two other big announcements this morning, although unofficial — AP: Panetta to take over Pentagon, Petraeus picked for CIA chief.

From the link (USA Today):

CIA Director Leon Panetta will be named to succeed Robert Gates as secretary of Defense and Gen. David Petraeus will be nominated to replace him as CIA director, the Associated Press reports, quoting unidentified sources.

The AP also reports that Ryan Crocker, the seasoned diplomat who was ambassador to Iraq during the Bush administration, is the top candidate to become new ambassador to Afghanistan.

And, the wheels on the oligarchy bus go round and round, round and round.

Yesterday, from the Obama 2012 campaign, via Jim Messina (h/t Joyce Arnold):

The most important aspect is this: Our campaign will be grounded in President Obama’s experience as a community organizer. This notion of ordinary people taking responsibility for the organization at the neighborhood level is not only the way to win, it’s also the way politics ought to work. Our campaign will be an example of innovation and efficiency, but it will also be an example of civic engagement at its best and most rewarding.

Isn’t that rich? Recycling the “community organizer” pitch? But, really I’m not surprised. Obama’s an excellent organizer and he is running on that indeed–it’s just that most people miss WHO it is that he is organizing for: Himself.

Not ordinary people.

Obama has offered his ostensible base–the American people– nothing but crumbs, bones, and insults, while catering to his real base, the one that will help bankroll his billion dollar re-election campaign — Wall Street. Yet, as evidenced by today’s well-timed WH dumps, this WH is “fired up and ready to go” to get Obama re-elected and confident they’ve got 2012 in the bag. All this bread and circuses has served him and the oligarchy well to that end.

Late Night Question: Will they carry the Torch?

Posted: April 26, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: abortion rights, black women's reproductive health, Reproductive Rights, Women's Rights | Tags: , | 6 Comments

I just read an astounding blog on the early fight for reproductive health rights by Eleanor Hinton Hoytt of  Black Women’s Health Imperative at RH Reality Check. Hoytt asks a question that I’ve wondered myself recently. Will young women fight so that all US women will have access to reproductive health and not just those with sympathetic parents and partners or money in the bank?  I know that Dr. Daughter is in the middle of the fight as an ob/gyn in a public hospital that serves many of Nebraska’s poorest women.  She’s in a state that works hard to prevent access to a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion in the first two trimesters and a state that has eliminated access to prenatal care for women who can’t prove citizenship. Youngest daughter and I live in a state with a whacked legislator that wants to criminalize abortion. How can you “murder” something that’s–at best–on life support and marginally human?  I worry that my youngest daughter doesn’t see the issue and the attacks by crazed religionists as completely central to any young woman who seeks to self-determine her life.   Hoytt’s story reminds me of the early days when women frequently shared how they came to realize that they were feminists and had a huge system to fight just to be recognized as a complete person.  But, again, her central thesis is a significant one and worth sharing.

I see the ‘passing of the torch’ as a common cause from a different perspective. I have heard the fears that some of the leaders of my generation have about the current generation. That they lack intensity; they refuse to listen and follow; they don’t have the urgency of NOW; and they have never lived without the power of their own agency or without control of their own body. When I see the young feminist of today, I see that their values are different, creativity is unlimited, and understanding of innovation amazing and astonishing. And, most of all, they have greater access and are most accepting of different races, ethnicities, socio-economic statuses and sexualities – this adds many more angels to the fight.

I’m happy that young feminists of today have had more opportunities to claim ownership of their bodies. I am happy that they don’t know the dark alleys, and I’m pleased that they are blogging, tweeting, and asking me to be their Facebook friend. And for many of them I meet, they want to share their stories with me and hear mine—they ask, what has kept me involved, passionate and angry for the past 30 years. I tell them my story and listen to theirs.  But most of all I ask them to believe that they may achieve what I have not in many ways.

I urge my other pre-Roe or “menopausal militia” leaders to recognize the differences in this generation’s struggles, understandings, desires and dreams. I believe that too often we see a different experience or opinion as a sparring point, but now, more than ever, we must see this as a broadening of our cause. Young feminists are not laser-focused on abortion, and that’s okay. Let’s accept their boarder reproductive justice agenda.

I was fortunate enough to become sexually active post-Roe, way post-birth control pills, and at a University that practically wanted to give you all the birth control pills and reproductive health information you could possibly need.  Planned Parenthood was accessible and free where I lived.  Still, when the religionists started pushing back, I felt the need to take to the streets, to letter writing, and to volunteer as a clinic escort.  I sent my two daughters straight to Planned Parenthood when the questions started and the needs were obvious.  I’m not getting the reason that any young woman should be complacent right now about the obvious attack on their rights. But right now, I’m seeing a 50/50 shot in my own sample of 2.

It’s not really a constitutional right if we all can’t access that right equally, is it?

So, how do we in the menopausal militia pass the torch?  Are there enough young activists out there to pick it up?

Obama’s Political Leanings (pssssttttt … he’s no liberal)

Posted: April 26, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, abortion rights, Barack Obama, Democratic Politics, Domestic Policy, Environment, Environmental Protection, Reproductive Rights, Republican politics, Republican presidential politics, right wing hate grouups, Surreality, Team Obama, The DNC, The Media SUCKS, the villagers, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, Voter Ignorance, We are so F'd, WE TOLD THEM SO, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , | 7 Comments

Time to trot out the Unity Pony

I’m having an interesting day reading all the links out there and discussions on several Ezra Klein blog posts. Some one should’ve noticed Obama’s hero-worship of Reagan during the primaries about three years ago. Some one should’ve read his books that were gleeful about past Republican policy initiatives. But no, we were too busy discussing other things to notice how far to the right Barrack Obama really is.

Here’s one of Klein’s posts that’s getting netplay now: The shocking truth about the birthplace of Obama’s policies. Some people just have not been paying attention at all.

President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican from the early 1990s. And the Republican Party he’s facing has abandoned many of its best ideas in its effort to oppose him.

If you put aside the emergency measures required by the financial crisis, three major policy ideas have dominated American politics in recent years: a health-care plan that uses an individual mandate and tax subsidies to achieve near-universal coverage; a cap-and-trade plan that attempts to raise the prices of environmental pollutants to better account for their costs; and bringing tax rates up from their Bush-era lows as part of a bid to reduce the deficit. In each case, the position that Obama and the Democrats have staked out is the very position that moderate Republicans staked out in the early ’90s — and often, well into the 2000s.

I’ve been saying for years–literally–that the Obama Health Care Plan was more conservative than Nixon’s and basically was grabbed from Lincoln Chaffe’s Heritage Plan in the 1990s which was later called Dolecare and then later morphed into Romneycare. That’s just Klein’s first example.  He also provides evidence on cap and trade which was supported by George H.W. Bush and Newt Gingrich when it was applied to ‘acid rain’ instead of  ‘global warming’.  He then moves to tax policies. Obama’s obvious proclivities to voodoo economics even showed up in the first stimulus which was top heavy with tax cuts and not big enough on job creation measures.  Klein doesn’t even touch the increasing military budgets and interventions, the GLBT and women’s rights issues that get bargained away, FISA, Gitmo, etc., etc., etc. …

Here’s Mark Thoma’s take on the Klein piece and a follow-up by Andrew Samick.  Samick considers Obama to be a Rockefeller Republican of all things.  I’d say Obama’s even more to the right than that because that’s pretty much the side of the Republican party that raised me. Rockefeller Republicans love Planned Parenthood among other things. Warren Buffet is a great example.  Hell, Charlton Heston loved Planned Parenthood.  I even heard him speak on population control issues in Omaha, Nebraska in the mid 1970s sponsored by–gasp!–Planned Parenthood.  The most interesting part is Thoma’s ending question.  Why are we moving so far to the right now?

What’s left unexplained is why movements to the right by both parties — and these aren’t marginal moves — haven’t alienated the middle of the road, swing voters that seem to make a difference in elections. I don’t think I have a good answer for why. In the present case, there is some voter remorse — Obama is far more conservative than many thought — but I don’t think that explains the larger trend.

The original Ezra Klein piece is here: ‘Obama revealed: A moderate Republican’.  Believe me, the conversation has gone viral with folks like The National Review (Be forewarned if you go there, it’s a  putrid thread.) on line taking the bait.  Booman  even twists himself into a world class logic pretzel trying to say this is good news because it means Obama’s policies are “mainstream”.  Joseph Romm at The Grist   discusses the climate policy even further.

In the climate bill debate of the past two years, Obama and the Democrats embraced Republican ideas in an effort to minimize or avoid the partisanship inherent in other approaches that had been explicitly rejected by Republicans, including a tax and a massive ramp up in clean energy funding, as I’ve argued.

But Klein makes an effective case that it simply didn’t matter how reasonable or centrist or business-friendly a strategy environmentalists and progressive politicians pursued (or might have pursued). The Republicans simply were committed to stopping Obama from appearing bipartisan.

The Dems keeps getting suckered by Republicans the way Charlie Brown keeps getting suckered by Lucy. But the difference is that the GOP’s strategy wasn’t even a secret.

Ah, here’s the deal. Romm ties back to Thoma’s question. Why all this goose stepping to the right?  Easy.  It was the Republican strategy of say not to everything.  They had to go further right to say no.  Now, we’re in policy measures that are from John Birch Society land. Finally, the Democratic Congress said no more compromises when Planned Parenthood went on the chopping block. They also decided to get what they could get done before Boehner took over the house.  We saw a few last minute Democratic Policies get passed but it was only due to the folks in Congress. Obama just went along because, hell, a win is a win, right?

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell told The New York Times in March 2010, “It was absolutely critical that everybody be together because if the proponents of the bill were able to say it was bipartisan, it tended to convey to the public that this is O.K., they must have figured it out.” Why? As McConnell blurted out right before the 2010 midterm elections, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

Obama kept proposing “conservative” policy at the onset. The Republicans announced they would sabotage it from the get go.  This is something we complained about and pointed out here and elseblog for years.  Obama’s opening policy moves were always a compromise position for real Democrats.  He never was worried about putting policy out there with a real Democratic stamp on it because issues aren’t important to him. This President  desperately wanted to pass anything with his name on it that would be called success.  I frequently argued he wanted to makes sure there was a Health Plan that went through just to show he could do it when the Clintons couldn’t do it. He threw the Democratic plans over board almost immediately including the wildly popular single payer option.  Dumping women’s access to private insurance with access to abortion was his final compromise maneuver to pass the silly thing.  He’s thrown policies to the wind that have been basic Democratic Platform staples every chance he’s been in office. The Republicans were never going to act satisfied and were going to keep goosestepping further right. It was their announced strategy.  He was more than willing to go right along with them because his proclivities are rightish anyway and he just wants the win.

So, my big question is why didn’t these folks see this coming all along like we did?  Then a follow-up, what good does all this discovery now do three years too late?

Of course, if you read the Republican blogs, they’re still screaming Obama’s a socialist and Klein’s a fool.  If you hit the partisan Democrats, the pretzel logic maneuvers are as obvious as Booman’s trying to find the sunny side up.

I’ll I can say is we told them so.  Follow that up by a we are so f’d.

Hate Crimes and Political Dynamics

Posted: April 26, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Crime, GLBT Rights, Violence against women | Tags: , , , | 22 Comments

We’ve run a lot of blog posts on GLBT bullying recently.  We’ve never focused directly on the incredible numbers of hate crimes that are aimed specifically at the transgender community.  An unfortunate incident in Baltimore provides an opportunity to specifically look at the bullying and assault that this community endures.  There’s a crime story playing out in the MSM that has brought some public attention to transgender victims of hate crimes.  We’re beginning to find out more of the details on the beating of Chrissy Lee Polis in a McDonald’s bathroom in Baltimore, Maryland.  It’s a touchstone story because there are issues of race involved also.  This story involves two groups of people that have historically been victims of hate crimes.

Chrissy is a white woman in trans.  Her two attackers were both black teenage girls.  One was 14 and the other was 18. Video of the crime was captured by an employee on a cell phones and has made its way to the internet.  (Warning: This is an extremely violent video.)  There is also a video interview at the Baltimore Sun–posted below–of Chrissy Lee speaking about her attack and the incredible bigotry encountered by the transgen community. The police are taking the crime quite seriously and McDonald’s has issued statements condemning the crime.  Chrissy is recovering from her physical injuries. That’s the good news.

By Sunday evening, a Facebook page titled “Chrissy Lee Polis” with a picture of the McDonald’s arches had more than 800 people who “liked” the page. Many of the posters on the page pledged their support and provided words of comfort, and several identified themselves as transgender.

One poster, Robyn Webb, has a teleconferencing company, TG Works, that is collecting funds to help pay for Polis’ medical bills and help her relocate. Polis, who has not had a job or a stable place to stay for the past two years, has said she has been living with friends in the area.

Webb thought the incident should be prosecuted as a hate crime.

The police report does not provide a motive, but it quotes one of the suspects saying that the fight was “over using a bathroom.” In the report, officers said the teens accused Polis of going into the wrong one.

Many transgender individuals face public accommodation issues, Webb said.

I don’t want to make this a crime story post.  I want this to be about what Chrissy and her community face daily.  What specifically got me interested in writing about this attack was a thoughtful blog piece by Melissa McEwan at Shakesville as well as a promise I made to a reader who asked that we blog about the bullying of transgens specifically.  It’s unfortunate that Chrissy’s attack is the reason for this discussion.  I was not aware that some right wing blogs had been using the story as a way of attacking the black community. This is awful and Melissa takes the opportunity to rightly changes the frame.

I almost don’t know where to begin discussion of this incident. It’s so terrible—and yet to be shocked by a crime of this nature against a trans woman is a privilege. I am horrified and I am profoundly sad and I am angry—because this shit doesn’t happen in a void. I am relieved that Polis is physically okay, but my heart hurts for the lingering psychological effects she may experience. And I ache for members of the trans* community, and their loved ones, who have yet another pointed reminder of the hatred and fear felt by so many cis people, socialized in a trans*-hostile culture that rigidly forces people into a gender binary and lazily relies on gender essentialism and arbitrarily privileges cisgenderedness.

And I am depressed that, because Polis is white and her attackers are black, white racists are using this incident to engage in despicable racism—which is, whether effectively or intentionally, just a way of silencing discussion of cis privilege.

What is unusual about this crime is that it has made its way to the public arena, because hate crimes against transgender individuals tend to go unreported.  Additionally, transgen violence is overrepresented in crime statistics given the number of transgen individuals.  Crimes against this community occur frequently because there are several dynamics at play.  Here are some statistics to think about.

Transgender people are often targeted for hate violence based on their non-conformity with gender norms and/or their perceived sexual orientation. Hate crimes against transgender people tend to be particularly violent. Our best estimates indicate that one out of every 1,000 homicides in the U.S. is an anti-transgender hate crime.  This estimation is based on data collected by the national organizers of the Transgender Day of Remembrance and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  Organizers of the Transgender Day of Remembrance track the number of transgender people killed each year in hate-based attacks using media articles, community reports and other publically available data.  By this count, they estimate that at least 15 transgender people are killed each year in hate-based attacks, although we believe the number to be higher based on transgender people’s common fear of going to the police and widespread misreporting.  The Federal Bureau of Investigation estimates approximately 14,000 homicides in the country each year.  Based on these figures, we can estimate that approximately one out of every 1000 homicides in the U.S. is an anti-transgender hate-based crime.

Many victims of Transgender hate-based crime are blacks.  The Southern Poverty Law Center has placed special emphasis on these hate crimes since 2003.  This is one of the reasons that this is so important to take this dynamic back from right wing blogs that are perversely making this a racial issue.  It is not.  I want to quote from one of their articles written by Bob Moser called ‘Disposable People’ to make this point.  This article starts with a narrative about one young victim named Stephanie Thomas who began life as Stephen Thomas.

In some cases, the details remain too murky to say for certain whether these murders were hate-motivated. But all 27 have at least one of the telltale signs of a hate crime — especially the sort of extreme brutality, or “overkill,” that was all too evident in the bullet-torn bodies of Stephanie Thomas and Ukea Davis.

“The overkill is certainly an indicator that hate was present,” says Jack Levin, a criminologist at Northeastern University who has written several books about hate crimes and murder.

“When you see excessively brutal crimes, and you know the victim is gay or black or Latino or transgender, you have to suspect that hate was a motive. There’s a sense of outrage in these crimes that someone different is breathing or existing.”

One reason it’s so tough to prove that anti-transgender murders are hate crimes is that so few are ever solved. Of the 27 murders in 2002 and the first nine months of 2003, arrests had been made in only 7 — fewer than one-third — at press time. The general “clearance rate” for murders is almost twice as high, around 60%.

“The police are very slow in solving murders committed against marginalized Americans, whether they’re black, Latino, gay, prostitutes or transgender,” Levin says.

“When more than one of those characteristics is present in a victim” — usually the case in anti-transgender murders — “they really don’t act quickly. They’re much more likely to form a task force and offer a reward when the victim is a straight, middle-class college student.”

When it comes to hate crimes that stop short of murder — assaults, harassment — it’s virtually impossible to gauge the extent of the problem. The reason is simple: the victims of anti-transgender hate crimes almost never report them.

Here is a link to a 2007 study that compares hate crime rates against groups that are protected by hate crime legislation and those that are not. Violence against the transgen community is clearly a problem.

A close analysis of hate crime rates demonstrates that groups that are already covered by hate crime laws, such as African Americans, Muslims, and Jews, report similar rates of hate crime victimization as lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals, who are not currently federally protected. On average:

• 8 in 100,000 African Americans report being the victim of hate crime
• 12 in 100,000 Muslims report being the victim of hate crime
• 15 in 100,000 Jews report the victim of hate crime
• 13 in 100,000 gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals report being the victim of hate crime

Currently hate crimes based on gender expression are not covered in federal hate crime legislation. This omission persists despite evidence that transgender individuals experience a similar number of hate crimes as some other protected groups, with an average of 213 hate crimes per year.

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The War on Legitimate Dissent

Posted: April 26, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: just because | 60 Comments

April 25, 2011, WH Egg Roll. Clearly this president has always been at war with Easter. (Reuters)

I wasn’t even going to dignify this Fox News/Drudge-generated distraction, but then I read the following snippet from Salon’s Alex Pareene — White House war on Easter: Party, but no proclamation?

From the link:

Sure, the White House had its annual “egg roll” on the lawn, with tens of thousands of children and a giant rabbit and general Easterness, but without a White House proclamation how could anyone have known yesterday was Easter? As Fox Nation commenter “jfitz” writes: “He gives his flock a happy Ramadanadingdong, but shows little regard for Easter. Why give his slight a second thought. After all, he is not of our culture.”

Then there’s this, via CNN:

“Well I’ve been told very recently, Anderson, that the birth certificate is missing,” Trump told CNN’s Anderson Cooper Monday. “I’ve been told that it’s not there or it doesn’t exist. And if that’s the case it’s a big problem.”

And this, via Politico:

“I heard he was a terrible student, terrible,” Trump told the Associated Press in an interview, a claim he’s made in the past but one he doubled down on by suggesting he’s probing that area of the president’s life.

“How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard? I’m thinking about it, I’m certainly looking into it. Let him show his records,” he said, without providing backup for his claim.

Trump added, “I have friends who have smart sons with great marks, great boards, great everything and they can’t get into Harvard.”

“We don’t know a thing about this guy,” Trump said. “There are a lot of questions that are unanswered about our president.”

The lengths these idiots will go to “discredit” Obama on such xenophobic, puerile, and irrelevant grounds is apparently endless. The assorted nitwits that make up the “secret Muslim”/birther contingent are not discrediting Obama.

They are fueling his re-election campaign and helping to bring disgruntled Dem voters back into the Dem column for 2012.

I cannot in good conscience vote for Obama after he’s normalized GOP/Bush policies and made them par for the course, but I can certainly understand why people feel tempted to vote for him out of spite or sympathy after watching these phony baloney attacks on his citizenship, religion, and culture.

On the other hand… inane though his birther rhetoric is, Trump hits on a kernel of truth when he says we don’t really know much about this president. Obama was never properly vetted in any meaningful or substantive way. Americans were sold change. No more Bush Clinton Bush Clinton. Obama was the antidote to the inevitability of a Clinton third term.

What Americans got instead of a return to the dreadful peace and prosperity of the nineties was the third Bush-Cheney term.

Given that Trump has a history of donating to Democrats (as the Center for Responsive Politics report at the link illustrates), the only conspiracy theory here that seems remotely worth considering is whether or not David Axelrod and Donald Trump are ultimately working for the same team.

The symbiotic relationship between the birthers and the corporate media keeps the irrelevant questions about Obama’s background front and center while legitimate scrutiny of the president goes largely unanswered and unaddressed. This works to the oligarchy’s advantage. Instead of asking the critical questions–for instance, why is President Obama, the much ballyhooed “expert” in constitutional law, presuming Bradley Manning to have “broken the law” before proven guilty–the WH press Corps gives us this:

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