To this day, many people identify mid-2008 as the time they realized what type of politician Barack Obama actually is. Six months before, when seeking the Democratic nomination, then-Sen. Obama unambiguously vowed that he would filibuster “any bill” that retroactively immunized the telecom industry for having participated in the illegal Bush NSA warrantless eavesdropping program.

But in July 2008, once he had secured the nomination, a bill came before the Senate that did exactly that – the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 – and Obama not only failed to filibuster as promised, but far worse, he voted against the filibuster brought by other Senators, and then voted in favor of enacting the bill itself. That blatant, unblinking violation of his own clear promise – actively supporting a bill he had sworn months earlier he would block from a vote – caused a serious rift even in the middle of an election year between Obama and his own supporters.

Critically, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 did much more than shield lawbreaking telecoms from all forms of legal accountability. Jointly written by Dick Cheney and then-Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Jay Rockefeller, it also legalized vast new, sweeping and almost certainly unconstitutional forms of warrantless government eavesdropping.

In doing so, the new 2008 law gutted the 30-year-old FISA statute that had been enacted to prevent the decades of severe spying abuses discovered by the mid-1970s Church Committee: by simply barring the government from eavesdropping on the communications of Americans without first obtaining a warrant from a court. Worst of all, the 2008 law legalized most of what Democrats had spent years pretending was such a scandal: the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program secretly implemented by George Bush after the 9/11 attack. In other words, the warrantless eavesdropping “scandal” that led to a Pulitzer Prize for the New York Times reporters who revealed it ended not with investigations or prosecutions for those who illegally spied on Americans, but with the Congressional GOP joining with key Democrats (including Obama) to legalize most of what Bush and Cheney had done. Ever since, the Obama DOJ has invoked secrecy and standing doctrines to prevent any courts from ruling on whether the warrantless eavesdropping powers granted by the 2008 law violate the Constitution.

The 2008 FISA law provided that it would expire in four years unless renewed. Yesterday, the Senate debated its renewal. Several Senators – Democrats Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden of Oregon along with Kentucky GOP Senator Rand Paul – each attempted to attach amendments to the law simply to provide some modest amounts of transparency and oversight to ensure that the government’s warrantless eavesdropping powers were constrained and checked from abuse.

Just consider how modest these amendments were. Along with Democratic Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado, Sen. Wyden has spent two years warning Americans that the government’s eavesdropping powers are being interpreted (by secret court decisions and the Executive Branch) far more broadly than they would ever suspect, and that, as a result, these eavesdropping powers are being applied far more invasively and extensively than is commonly understood.

As a result, Wyden yesterday had two amendments: one that would simply require the NSA to give a general estimate of how many Americans are having their communications intercepted under this law (information the NSA has steadfastly refused to provide), and another which would state that the NSA is barred from eavesdropping on Americans on US soil without a warrant. Merkley’s amendment would compel the public release of secret judicial rulings from the FISA court which purport to interpret the scope of the eavesdropping law on the ground that “secret law is inconsistent with democratic governance”; the Obama administration has refused to release a single such opinion even though the court, “on at least one occasion”, found that the government was violating the Fourth Amendment in how it was using the law to eavesdrop on Americans.

But the Obama White House opposed all amendments, demanding a “clean” renewal of the law without any oversight or transparency reforms. Earlier this month, the GOP-led House complied by passing a reform-free version of the law’s renewal, and sent the bill Obama wanted to the Senate, where it was debated yesterday afternoon.

The Democratic Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, took the lead in attacking Wyden, Merkley, Udall and Paul with the most foul Cheneyite accusations, and demanded renewal of the FISA law without any reforms. And then predictably, in virtually identical 37-54 votes, Feinstein and her conservative-Democratic comrades joined with virtually the entire GOP caucus (except for three Senators: Paul, Mike Lee and Dean Heller) to reject each one of the proposed amendments and thus give Obama exactly what he demanded: reform-free renewal of the law (while a few Democratic Senators have displayed genuine, sustained commitment to these issues, most Democrats who voted against FISA renewal yesterday did so symbolically and half-heartedly, knowing and not caring that they would lose as evidenced by the lack of an attempted filibuster).

In other words, Obama successfully relied on Senate Republicans (the ones his supporters depict as the Root of All Evil) along with a dozen of the most militaristic Democrats to ensure that he can continue to eavesdrop on Americans without any warrants, transparency or real oversight. That’s the standard coalition that has spent the last four years extending Bush/Cheney theories, eroding core liberties and entrenching endless militarism: Obama + the GOP caucus + Feinstein-type Democrats. As Michelle Richardson, the ACLU’s legislative counsel, put it to the Huffington Post: “I bet [Bush] is laughing his ass off.” (Read more)

the neocons have a big problem: the American people are not only sick of war, they are sick of the neocons. The same people who told them Saddam had “weapons of mass destruction” stashed beneath his palace, who told them the Iraqis would greet us with showers of rose petals instead of bullets, who reassured them that the war would somehow pay for itself with Iraq’s oil revenues, who insisted Gen. Shinseki was wrong when he said it would take hundreds of thousands of US soldiers to occupy Iraq — these very same people, who should have been long ago discredited and relegated to the Index of Proscribed Pundits, are back retailing the same tired old canards, only this time directed at Iran. Their problem is that nobody believes them — except, of course, in Washington, D.C., world capital of criminal cluelessness.

Washington is different from the rest of the country — and I’m not just talking about real estate values. In the Real America, nobody believes you can spend more than you can take in — in Washington, however, spending more than you take in is not only possible, it’s mandatory. Outside the Beltway, ordinary Americans want to subject the Pentagon to radical spending cuts, and would prefer not to have to cut Grandma’s Social Security so that the military contractors who contribute so much to our incumbent politicians have plenty of tax dollars to spend on presents this Christmas: in Washington, however, real defense cuts are “off the table.” Out in the heartland, the very idea of another war horrifies ordinary folks — in Washington, it gives them a hard-on.

This is the Great Divide, and it is this great yawning chasm that has given the neocons their power: for while a malignant dwarf like Bill Kristol, the little Lenin of the neocons, may inspire revulsion in the average American, in Washington he’s a respected and powerful figure, one whose lust for combat — albeit from a safe distance — counts for much in determining what course our foreign policy will take. In such a town, David “Axis of Evil” Frum, who has “spent his career,” as conservative columnist Timothy Carney put it, “singing odes to war and purging those who wanted peace,” is considered a “moderate” — because he’s calling for tax hikes in order to pay for his favorite pastime.

If we allowed the soldiers in the field to vote on who should be the next Secretary of Defense, President Obama’s first choice, former Republican senator Chuck Hagel — a Vietnam veteran and the recipient of two Purple Hearts, whose work at the Veterans Administration during the Reagan years endeared him to vets — would win hands down. In Washington, however, as the Washington Post averred, he’s outside the “mainstream,” a “fringe” character who’s well to the “left” of our bipartisan let’s-go-to-war-at-the-drop-of-a-hat “consensus.”

It’s a sad commentary on the Washingtonian mindset that a foreign policy “realist” like Hagel is considered the 21st century equivalent of Abbie Hoffman, but these people live in a bubble where the outdated “left-right” paradigm still dictates our political choices. Yet the majority of Republicans out in the country support Hagel’s basic position — caution, retrenchment, paring down the Pentagon — the very stances Hagel is being pilloried for by the likes of Lindsey Graham.

That Washington is America’s Bizarro World was vividly dramatized when Sen. Dan Coates attacked Hagel for — wait for it — being “disrespectful of the military“! What this can mean when applied to a two-time winner of the Purple Heart, a Vietnam vet who was severely wounded in action and spent his entire time at the VA fighting for vets, is beyond me — but, then again, I don’t live inside the Beltway.

We know what this is about: it’s about the fanatic supporters of Israel’s current extremist government demanding absolute fealty to Tel Aviv. The “Emergency Committee for Israel” is running television ads in the Washington, D.C. area screeching that “Hagel is not an option.” They get to determine what America’s options are, don’tcha know — and that’s been true for too long. (Read more)

Adding to the general confusion about exactly what they stand for, the Log Cabin Republicans took out a full-page ad in Thursday’s New York Times, urging President Obama to reconsider his possible selection of Republican Chuck Hagel for the position of Secretary of Defense.

The gay Republican group, which by association and voting behavior accepts the GOP’s default position that (openly) gay people are second-class citizens not deserving of the same civil rights as “normal” human beings, is apparently miffed that Hagel — in time-honored Republican tradition — made a homophobic remark in 1998 about James C. Hormel, President Bill Clinton’s choice for ambassador to Luxembourg, calling him “openly aggressively gay.”

Hagel has since apologized for what he termed the “insensitive” comment, adding that it does “not reflect my views or the totality of my public record, and I apologize to Ambassador Hormel and any LGBT Americans who may question my commitment to their civil rights. I am fully supportive of ‘open service’ and committed to LGBT military families.”

His apology was accepted by the Human Rights Campaign, who referred to him as an “ally.”

But the selectively indignant group doesn’t stop there… it ups the ante by throwing in some foreign policy concerns — “Chuck Hagel: Wrong on gay rights, wrong on Iran, wrong on Israel,” reads the ad. “Tell President Obama that Chuck Hagel is wrong for Defense Secretary. Help us create a stronger and more inclusive Republican Party.”

Conservatives believe Hagel has not pledged sufficient allegiance to Israel, pointing to his assertion that there is a powerful “Jewish lobby” that intimidates legislators. (While few would contend that AIPAC is not a powerful lobby, the preferred term — says the suddenly-all-for-political-correctness crowd — is “pro-Israel” lobby.) “I’m a United States senator.” he reasoned. “I’m not an Israeli senator.” [emphasis added] (Read more)

Men with honor have no place in politics.

Just recently in the presidential election, for example, I followed Intrade.com’s election markets. Here, the odds are formed by people betting their own property on the outcome. They have every incentive to extract every possible amount of truth out there so that they can make their money work for them.

I figured that the markets knew more than the blabberheads on television. This way I could ignore all election coverage. One guy would win, and it would probably be the one Intrade said would win, and then the whole thing would end. I would have used my time during the season doing actual productive things, rather than listening to the dopes on television who pretend to know what they do not.

It turns out, of course, that Intrade was right. Obama won. Romney never really had a serious chance, despite what every Republican operative claimed even up to the last minutes before the election was called. Intrade might have been wrong, of course, but it turned out to be more right than every expert.

My strategy of following the markets over the pundits worked. That’s generally true of markets: They are more correct than any individual. Not always, but most of the time.

It further turns out that I’m not alone. Even Washington Post energy reporter Brad Plumer wrote, “I’ll confess, I spent a good chunk of the 2012 campaign clicking on Intrade.com several times a day to see where the House, Senate, and presidential races stood. All those traders betting on the eventual outcome, I figured, could provide a more accurate synopsis of the race than reading endless blog posts and tweets.”

He points out that Intrade predicted 49 out of 50 state races as well. (Read more)

Note: White men were the only group not specifically addressed on Obama’s re-election website.

* Obama owes re-election to Greek voters who chose fiscal bankruptcy. The problems in Europe distracted from bigger problems here in the US and created the illusions of recovery (or at least stability)

On MSNBC’s Morning Joe program this morning, which focused on Monday’s night presidential debate, the former right-wing Congressman and current host Joe Scarborough voiced an eloquent and impassioned critique of President Obama’s ongoing killing of innocent people in the Muslim world using drones. In response, Time Magazine’s Joe Klein, a stalwart Obama supporter, offered one of the most nakedly sociopathic defenses yet heard of these killings. This exchange, which begins at roughly the 7:00 minute mark on the video embedded below, is quite revealing in several respects.

. . . .

(1) Klein’s justification – we have to kill their children in order to protect our children – is the exact mentality of every person deemed in US discourse to be a “terrorist”. Almost every single person arrested and prosecuted over the last decade on terrorism charges, when asked why they were willing to kill innocent Americans including children, offered some version of Joe Klein’s mindset.

. . . .

Leaving aside the sociopathic, morally grotesque defense of killing 4-year-olds with a “joystick from California”, Klein’s claims are completely false on pragmatic grounds. Slaughtering Muslim children does not protect American children from terrorism. The opposite is true. That is precisely what causes the anti-American hatred that fuels and sustains terrorism aimed at Americans in the first place, as even a study commissioned by the Rumsfeld-era Pentagon recognized almost a decade ago.

. . . .

This exchange is a perfectly vivid expression of the Obama legacy. Here we have a standard Democratic/progressive pundit who is one of the media’s most stalwart Obama fanatics defending indiscriminate slaughter of Muslim children. Meanwhile, it’s left to a former right-wing, Gingrich-era congressman to raise objections, call for more public scrutiny, and cite the moral and strategic dangers, one of the very few commentators on MSNBC – the progressive network – who has ever voiced such passionate criticism of Obama’s ongoing killings. (Read more)