Any time bombs are used to tar­get inno­cent civil­ians, it is an act of terror.

An evil man who has used bombs to tar­get thou­sands of inno­cent civilians

“No coun­try on Earth would tol­er­ate mis­siles rain­ing down on its cit­i­zens from out­side its bor­ders,” Says Man Who Reg­u­larly Bombs Pak­istan and Yemen

reason.com

Appar­ently it’s big news on tech web­sites that the Pres­i­dent is going to start using Twit­ter. My take on it is, “Why did it take him so long?” With its 140 char­ac­ter limit, Twit­ter is the per­fect sound-bite deliv­ery sys­tem. It gives politi­cians a way to deliver mean­ing­less plat­i­tudes about hope and change directly to the suck­ers vot­ers with­out hav­ing to deal with the inef­fi­cien­cies of going through main­stream media stenog­ra­phers reporters.

Maybe the guy just enjoys get­ting awards for things he didn’t do.. Okay, first he gets the Nobel peace prize forty sec­onds after the elec­tion, before he even had a chance to break all his cam­paign promises about end­ing the wars — and cer­tainly before he got us all into a new one for no very good reason.

Now he gets a prize for trans­parency in gov­ern­ment. Oh, wait — you didn’t hear about that? No rea­son you should have, I sup­pose…

Pres­i­dent Obama finally and qui­etly accepted his “trans­parency” award from the open gov­ern­ment com­mu­nity this week — in a closed, undis­closed meet­ing at the White House on Monday.

The secret pre­sen­ta­tion hap­pened almost two weeks after the White House inex­plic­a­bly post­poned the cer­e­mony, which was expected to be open to the press pool.

[The Ulti­mate Answer to Kings]

At least gov­ern­ment has become more effi­cient in one way: they’re so good at mock­ing them­selves that there’s hardly even any need for any­one else to do it. This is right up there with Bush com­par­ing the “lib­er­a­tion” of Iraq with the Phillip­ine War of Independence.

Abuse of Power Gets a Pass, Report­ing It Gets Jail Time.

Here’s Glenn Green­wald on the Obama administration’s pros­e­cu­tion of NSA whistle­blower Thomas Drake, and it’s out­ra­geous tri­umphal­ism after win­ning an indictment.

As Green­wald writes, it’s now clear that Obama’s “Look For­ward, Not Back­ward” phi­los­o­phy applies only to high-ranking Bush admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials who abused their power and posi­tion. The peo­ple who risked their careers and free­dom to come for­ward to report on those abuses won’t be get­ting the same con­sid­er­a­tion. Or put another way: If you break the law to expand the power of gov­ern­ment at the expense of the peo­ple, you get a pass. But if you break the law to make gov­ern­ment more trans­par­ent and account­able, expect them to throw the book at you.

[The Agi­ta­tor]

Another exam­ple of how noth­ing has changed, regard­less of who occu­pies the White House.

No, It Isn’t.

Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), post­ing on Twitter:

“11 hours to review a 1000+ page spend­ing bill that spends nearly a tril­lion dol­lars? This is not Con­gress’ finest hour.”

Looks like Obama will also again be break­ing his pledge to post every bill on the web for the pub­lic to review for five days before sign­ing it. And this on the biggest and (by his mea­sure) most impor­tant bill he’s likely to sign in his presidency.

[The Agi­ta­tor]

Here we see the dif­fer­ence between a pres­i­dent who’s stu­pid and evil and one who’s smart and evil. It took Bush until Sep­tem­ber of his first year in office to get away with the “Patriot” Act, while Obama has pulled off his own ver­sion in February.

The More Things Change… Part IV.

Post­ing from: Philips­burg, MT

Num­ber of civil­ians killed in Iraq since Obama took office: 41
Ref­er­ence: Iraq Body Count database

Num­ber of coali­tion forces killed in Iraq since Obama took office: 8
Ref­er­ence: DoD Con­fir­ma­tion list hosted by icasualties.org

The above num­bers aren’t even nec­es­sar­ily up to date due to the lag in gath­er­ing and ver­i­fy­ing data before report­ing it, but it’s pretty clear that we’re not doing very well at leav­ing. Imag­ine what 16 months worth of this is going to look like. And that’s assum­ing the highly unlikely best-case sce­nario that Obama has been try­ing to weasel out of since he threw down that deadline.

And that’s just Iraq. What about Afghanistan? Pakistan?

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

Yes­ter­day in Iraq, Barack Obama’s respon­si­bly leav­ing army block­aded a vil­lage, invaded a fam­ily home at 2:00 in the morn­ing, and gunned down a mother and father in the bed they shared with their 9 year old daugh­ter. (The girl, besides being orphaned, was also wounded by the gunfire.)

On Fri­day, in Afghanistan, Barack Obama’s army forged peace by troop­ing into Lagh­man province, sur­round­ing houses in a vil­lage, and then launch­ing a raid where they killed 16 civil­ians — 2 women, 3 chil­dren, and 11 men — with gun­fire and pre­ci­sion bombs dropped from planes.

On Fri­day, in Pak­istan, Barack Obama’s army forged peace by fir­ing mis­siles repeat­edly into houses in sev­eral vil­lages in the Waziris­tan region. Barack Obama’s mis­siles killed twenty-two peo­ple, about 15 of them civil­ians and at least 3 of them chil­dren. The idea was to help cre­ate the con­di­tions for a last­ing peace.

Every one of these deaths is blood on Barack Obama’s hands. Every one of these peo­ple who were killed, were killed on Barack Obama’s orders and in the name of his war pol­icy. Because Obama wants to wash his hands of the United States government’s war on Iraq and its war on Afghanistan, every day that he delays get­ting out, com­pletely — delays get­ting out in the name of exit strate­gies and cen­tral fronts and respon­si­bil­ity — which is to say, delays that hap­pen because he is still con­vinced that, with the right sort of grad­u­al­ist pol­icy, he can some­how try to win wars that should never have been fought — is another per­son who is killed so that Barack Obama, after being elected as a peace can­di­date, can adopt and pro­long the col­los­sal, cat­a­strophic mis­takes of a dis­as­trous fail­ure of a pre­de­ces­sor, so that he won’t come off as being soft on national defense.

I am impressed. Obama seems to be expand­ing the United States’ mess beyond where Bush left it. And yet this man was elected in large part on the sup­port of those who want these wars to end.

Please. Please. Please. Think about how this hap­pened. Enough with the feel-good dra­mat­ics. It is well past time to THINK.

[Enjoy Every Sand­wich]

A bit of real­ity for those fools who believed that the can­on­iza­tion inau­gu­ra­tion of Saint Barack the Obames­siah was going to change any­thing about the real­i­ties of the Evil Empire.

The War Nerd: Hamas Ain’t No Hezbol­lah. What’s going on in Gaza now is pretty easy to under­stand if you think a lit­tle bit about the way mil­i­tary trends have been going in the past century-but you also have to be will­ing to take a cold look at how wars work these days, when there’s no such thing as those “purely mil­i­tary” […] [EXILED ONLINE — MANKIND’S ONLY ALTERNATIVE]

An inter­est­ing view on what’s going on in Gaza. One thing’s cer­tain: the Israelis are act­ing just like Amer­i­cans these days.

New at Rea­son: Nick Gille­spie Makes Three Pre­dic­tions About Barack Obama’s Amer­ica.

Will Barack Obama be a game-changer in Amer­i­can life when he takes office in Jan­u­ary? Or will he be more of the same that we’ve seen over the past eight years? And will we stop using the term game-changer?

Nick Gille­spie prog­nos­ti­cates. Read all about it here.

[Hit and Run]

Here are the pre­dic­tions from the arti­cle, which goes into con­sid­er­ably more detail and is worth reading:

1. America’s polit­i­cal and pun­dit class will go through a clin­i­cal bout of ide­o­log­i­cal amne­sia that will be dizzy­ing and appalling for those of us with mem­o­ries of life before Jan­u­ary 2009.
2. The Cul­ture Wars will be reignited and, as always, the main casu­al­ties will be chil­dren, the truth, gays, and that evilest excres­ence of cap­i­tal­ism since nov­els, nick­elodeons, comic books, and video games. And Obama, like Bill Clin­ton, will be far more con­ser­v­a­tive on this sort of thing than any­body on either side wants to admit.
3. Lib­er­als and con­ser­v­a­tives will con­tinue to try and define every­thing in terms of right and left when the proper lens, now more than ever, is choice ver­sus control.

My own pre­dic­tion is some­what sim­pler: Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans will reverse all their posi­tions (again), and noth­ing will actu­ally change.

Obama-Mania.

Larken Rose has penned yet another essay in his TMDS series (The Most Dan­ger­ous Super­sti­tion: the belief in imposed author­ity). He explains what col­lec­tivism is, why it always leads to vio­lence, and why Obama, McCain, and every other Repub­li­can and Demo­c­rat can­di­date are all collectivists.

[End the War on Free­dom]

It’s a good, and lengthy, arti­cle that cov­ers some of the same ground as The Road to Serf­dom. The fol­low­ing is from his conclusion:

Bar­rack Obama is a col­lec­tivist. Despite the usual window-dressing
and euphemisms which con­ceal the true nature of what he advo­cates,
he is, in every way, an advo­cate for the idea that every indi­vid­ual–
and all wealth–is the prop­erty of the col­lec­tive, as rep­re­sented
by “gov­ern­ment.” In other words, he believes in communism.

So should every­one vote for John McCain? No. Mr. McCain is also a
col­lec­tivist. In fact, with very rare excep­tions, ALL Demo­c­rat and
Repub­li­can politi­cians are col­lec­tivists, as they have been for
many decades, even back when they were feign­ing con­cern about the
“spread of com­mu­nism.” So why did I focus on Obama? Because, unlike
Mr. McCain, Mr. Obama seems to have a lot of enthu­si­as­tic sup­port
from well-meaning, albeit mis­guided, Amer­i­cans. As with Bill
Clin­ton, Mr. Obama makes the advo­cacy of wide­spread gov­ern­ment
vio­lence, theft and oppres­sion sound both noble and use­ful. It is
not.

So if all of the above was not intended to make you vote for
someone–and it cer­tainly was not–then what is being sug­gested?
Intel­lec­tual hon­esty. First, I want peo­ple to under­stand what the
self-proclaimed “lead­ers” are actu­ally propos­ing, because it is not
“hope,” or “change,” or “progress,” or any of the other vague, feel–
good rhetoric being fed to the gen­eral pub­lic. It is what EVERY
gov­ern­ment “leader” always pro­poses: more power for the state, less
free­dom for the peo­ple. They pre­tend to have the purest motives for
it, but the means to their goals will ALWAYS be less free­dom for
you, and more power for them.

After peo­ple real­ize that, next I want them to be hon­est about
their OWN beliefs and agenda. If, for exam­ple, you sup­port any of
the col­lec­tivist redis­tri­b­u­tion plans and pro­grams pitched by both
major par­ties, then I sim­ply ask that you drop the cha­rade, set
aside the euphemisms and obfus­ca­tions, and do it openly and
hon­estly. If you believe that there is some­one some­where whose
sup­posed “need” enti­tles him to what my time and effort have
pro­duced, with or with­out my con­sent, then pick up a gun, come to
my house, and take it from me your­self. Don’t hide such destruc­tive
evil behind elec­tions, leg­is­la­tion, and polit­i­cal rhetoric. Do it
openly and hon­estly, or don’t do it at all. If you give your vote
to ANY col­lec­tivist, you are just as guilty of rob­bing me, and
rob­bing a cou­ple hun­dred mil­lion other peo­ple, as if you had done
it your­self. But in addi­tion to being a thief, you’d also be a
fraud and a cow­ard, because you lie (maybe even to your­self) about
what it is you advo­cate, and don’t have the spine to go do it
yourself.