Obama vs. the Left + News Round-Up

Dude…I didn’t realize how good the soundtrack for Lost season 4 was.

News Round-Up

Tricky Dicks

The Supreme Court has ruled that Pakistani Javaid Iqbal (who oddly enough shares a name with a Supreme Court Justice in Pakistan) cannot continue his lawsuit against FBI Director Robert Mueller and former Attorney General John Ashcroft for keeping him in solitary confinement for six months based on his religious beliefs.

But the government argued that there was nothing linking Mueller and Ashcroft to the abuses that happened to Iqbal at a Brooklyn, N.Y., prison’s Administrative Maximum Special Housing Unit, and the court agreed.

“The complaint does not show or even intimate, that petitioners purposefully housed detainees in the ADMAX SHU due to their race, religion or national origin,” said Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion. “All it plausibly suggests is that the nation’s top law enforcement officers, in the aftermath of a devastating attack, sought to keep suspected terrorists in the most secure conditions available until the suspects could be cleared of terrorist activity.”

The court’s liberal justices — David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and John Paul Stevens — dissented from the court’s opinion.

“There is no principled basis for the majority’s disregard of the allegations linking Ashcroft and Mueller to their subordinates’ discrimination,” Souter wrote….

..

Iqbal was arrested at his Long Island home on Nov. 2, 2001, and charged with nonviolent federal crimes unrelated to terrorism. Two months later, he was moved to a holding facility in Brooklyn, where he was in solitary confinement for more than 150 days without a hearing, his lawsuit alleges.

He said he was subjected to physical and verbal abuse, including unnecessary strip searches. On the day he entered solitary confinement, he says, he was thrown against a wall, kicked in the stomach, punched in the face and dragged across a floor by federal prison officers.

He was cleared of any involvement in terrorism and was deported in January 2003 after pleading guilty to fraud and being sentenced to a year and four months in prison.

Religious and racial discrimination? All we were doing was locking up Arabs. What's discriminatory about that?

Congrats, Bush court. You’ve ensured that yet another group of slimeballs gets to experience no reprecussions for breaking the letter and the spirit of the law.

So when’s Obama’s pick getting seated again? As if it would matter.
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Here be Dragons

The Tamil Tigers have been “militarily defeated” as their rebel leader Velupillai Prabhakaran was killed. The rebel group was a secessionist organization fighting the Sri Lankan government since 1976. The Tamils are an ethnic minority that have had strained relations with the Sri Lankan Sinhalese majority since Sri Lanka gained independence. I think I first learned about the Tamils senior year of high school when we read a book called Anil’s Ghost.

Anyway, this supposedly puts an “end” to the civil war. FTA:

While Velupillai Prabhakaran (Ve-LU’-pi-lay PRAH’-bah-ka-ran) was a hero to some, his group was branded a terrorist organization by the U.S. and European Union, and it was accused of waging hundreds of suicide attacks, including the 1991 assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi by a female bomber. The rebels also forcibly recruited child soldiers.

Sri Lanka’s army chief, Lt. Gen. Sareth Fonseka, said on television that his troops routed the last rebels from the northern war zone Monday morning.

“We can announce very responsibly that we have liberated the whole country from terrorism,” he told state television…

..

Suren Surendiran, a spokesman for the British Tamils’ Forum, the largest organization for expatriate Tamils in Britain, said the community was in despair.

“The people are very somber and very saddened. But we are ever determined and resilient to continue our struggle for Eelam,” he said, invoking the name of the Tamils hoped-for independent state. “We have to win the freedom and liberation of our people.”…

..Full-fledged war broke out in 1983 after the rebels killed 13 soldiers in an ambush, sparking anti-Tamil riots that human rights groups say killed as many as 2,000 people. By the time the war ended, more than 70,000 had been killed.

I’m sure both the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan committed terrible atrocities. I don’t know when people will realize that taking up arms and trying to wage war against an institution or an ideal never works. What I do know is that the violence can’t be over and it’s a shame. Sri Lanka will still be a major spot for human rights abuses, civilian violence, and oppression…And the world merely looks on.

In other world news, Obama met with Irsaeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today and told him it’s time to start talking peace again.

"Get your hand off my ass, Obama."

FTA:

“We have seen progress stalled on this front, and I suggested to the prime minister that he has a historic opportunity to get a serious movement on this issue during his tenure,” Obama said. “That means that all the parties involved have to take seriously obligations that they have previously agreed to.”

Added Obama: “I think that there is no reason why we should not seize this opportunity and this moment.”

Netanyahu said he was ready to resume peace talks with the Palestinians immediately but said any agreement depended on their acceptance of Israel’s right to exist. It was not immediately clear in the way he phrased the response whether Netanyahu was demanding that as a precondition for talks.

Palestinians offered praise for Obama but expressed disappointment with Netanyahu’s remarks.

Netanyahu “did not mention a commitment to a two-state solution, and we need to see American action against this policy,” said Nail Abu Redden, an aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who visits the White House on June 28.

Saeb Erekat, the top Palestinian negotiator, issue a similar assessment:

“Mr. Netanyahu failed to mention the two-state solution, signed agreements and the commitment to stop settlement activity. He said he wants the Palestinians to govern themselves. The question to Mr. Netanyahu is, ‘How can I govern myself while your occupation continues everywhere in the West Bank and Gaza, and how can I govern myself under your wall, roadblocks and settlement activities?'”

It looks like the only way they’ll ever work together is if Iran becomes a common enemy.

You know, I can’ twait until we meet a race of aliens that is truly just evil and bad. Then we can unite together AND be totally justified in killing things.

Ba-ROCK or Not

Checking in after 5 months

People may notice a lot of Barack Obama criticism on this blog. I want to make clear that I do not watch Fox News, listen to Rush Limbaugh, nor do I have Ann Coulter’s mug plastered on my walls. I voted for Obama. I believe in progression, change, and social responsibility. I also believe in our responsibilities to watch our leaders and make sure they’re sticking to their ideals.

Obama, predictably, isn’t sticking very much to his.

Politico blogger Josh Gerstein talks about how Obama’s making enemies on the left as well as the right.

He has pushed gun control to the back burner, used the state secrets privilege to try to quash lawsuits over warrantless wiretapping, opposed a “truth commission” to investigate alleged torture and sought to deny some legal protections to detainees in Afghanistan.

And he’s made clear he’s in no rush to do immigration reform or repeal the military’s ban on openly gay servicemembers.

A growing number of organizations, bloggers and pundits, many of whom kept quiet about slights in Obama’s first few months, are now going public with their disillusionment.

“On torture, change we wanted to believe in feels like more of the same,” the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch said in a joint statement Friday.

“I have a sickeningly familiar feeling in my stomach, and the feeling deepens with every interaction with the Obama team on [gay] issues. They want them to go away. They want us to go away,” the Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan wrote last week, dismissing Obama’s pledge to end the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy as “toilet paper.”

Maddow accused Obama of doing a “blatant 180” on military commissions. On issues like the wiretapping suits, some critics have suggested Obama is even worse than Bush.

I’m not going to join the growing group of left loons and anarchists who claim Obama will betray us all and continue this country on a path of ruination…

But almost half a year into his presidency and I don’t feel that much better about my government than I did under Bush.

Why do we only elect people who seek to serve themselves?

I’ll be happy if Obama tosses out the states secret privilege, stops illegal detainment of world and national citizens, gives every detainee left a fair trial, allows government officials and torturers, including Cheney and Rumsfeld, to be sued and/or prosecuted and stops amping up the funding to kill innocent people abroad.

So it looks like I’m not going to be a proud patriot anytime soon.

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I’ll leave you with an understanding of religion as compared to trilogies that I found on Reddit (note: are there better social media sites out there? The buzz on Reddit is pretty tiresome).