After the election Kerry Eleveld wrote a piece for The Atlantic titled "Why Barack Obama Will Be a More Effective Liberal in His Second Term." "In response to their initial disappointment with the president's early performance, many progressives speculated that Obama was just waiting for a second term to be more liberal," he said. That was true. They were.
Eleveld continued: "A more likely explanation is that Obama was still finding his groove, figuring out which levers worked best for him in the context of governing the nation. And in some ways, he was still developing the courage of his convictions."
That, it turns out, was false. He wasn't.
You can't develop convictions that you don't have in the first place.
It's hard to remember now, more than six weeks later, but there was once a time (six long weeks ago) when liberal Democrats who naïvely chose to ignore Obama's consistently conservative first term, his consistently conservative career in the Senate, and his consistently conservative pre-politics career as a University of Chicago law professor, seriously believed that his reelection would lead to a progressive second term.
"It's time for President Obama to assume the Roosevelt-inspired mantle of muscular liberalism," Anthony Woods wrote in The Daily Beast. "This is his moment. He only has to take it."
It's his moment, all right. And he's taking it. But when it comes to Obama, liberals are once again guilty of some major wishful thinking. Obama's economic policies are closer to Herbert Hoover than Franklin Roosevelt.
"With re-election safely behind him, we hope Obama will be bolder in his second term," Peter Dreier and Donald Cohen wrote in The Nation.
Again with the Hope!
Change, not so much.
Puppet Masters
I'd really like to see the response of drone-strike supporters if we tried taking out the dangerous criminals in their cities with remote-controlled aerial bombings. 'Cause I don't think that would play well in most 'hoods.
Follow @SorensenJen on Twitter
Follow @SorensenJen on Twitter
© AllGov.com
Last month, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved an amendment attached to the Video Privacy Protection Act Amendments Act (which deals with publishing users' Netflix information on Facebook pages) that would have required federal law enforcement to obtain a warrant before monitoring email or other data stored remotely (i.e., the cloud).
The Senate was set to approve the video privacy bill along with the email amendment, which would have applied to a different law, the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act. But then senators decided for reasons unknown to drop the amendment.
© BBC
According to an official statement carried on the state news agency WAM, the arrests were made in conjunction with Saudi Arabia.
The cell had obtained "materials and equipments with the aim of executing terrorist operations", WAM said.
Those detained were reportedly both UAE and Saudi nationals and were members of what was termed a "deviant group".
The phrase "deviant group" is often used by authorities in Saudi Arabia to describe al-Qaeda members.
© Screengrab: YouTube
Syrian General Abdelaziz Jassim al-Shalal, head of the military police, making a statement about his defection.
Syrian General Abdelaziz Jassim al-Shalal, head of the military police, making a statement about his defection.
The head of Syria's military police has defected from the army and declared allegiance to the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.
Major General Abdelaziz Jassim al-Shalal was shown making a statement confirming his defection in a video broadcast on al-Arabiya TV late on Tuesday, saying he was joining "the people's revolution".
The defection came as a delegation of Syrian officials headed to Moscow on Wednesday to discuss proposals for ending the conflict following talks with the UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi in Damascus this week.
Wearing his uniform with a red insignia on the shoulder, Shalal spoke from a desk in a room in an undisclosed location. Some rebel sources said he had fled to Turkey. It was not clear when Shalal changed sides.
"The army has destroyed cities and villages and has committed massacres against an unarmed population that took to the streets to demand freedom," he said. "Long live free Syria."
© Mohammad Rasool Adil/AFP/Getty Images
Afghan police carry the body of a civilian into a hospital morgue after the suicide attack in Khost province.
Afghan police carry the body of a civilian into a hospital morgue after the suicide attack in Khost province.
The attacker struck when his vehicle was detained at a checkpoint a short distance from the east gate of the base in Khost province, also known to locals as "the old airport", the deputy provincial governor Abdul Waheed Patan told the Guardian.
"The security people stopped the bus at the checkpoint, but he kept going for a few more metres then detonated the explosives," Patan said by phone from Khost. "Two drivers who bring passengers from town to the area near the base, one civilian passerby and one security guard were killed."
The provincial police chief, General Abdul Qayoum Bakaizoi, confirmed the attack had happened at around 8am near one of two main gates to Forward Operating Base (FOB) Chapman.
The attack came almost exactly three years after a much more devastating suicide bomber hit US intelligence officers operating out of FOB Chapman. A Jordanian doctor and militant posing as a double agent, he killed the station chief and six other CIA employees as well as a Jordanian intelligence official.
A recent UNICEF report indicates that the vast majority of Gaza's children are struggling to cope with war trauma and PTSD. TRNN correspondent Jihan Hafiz reports from the most densely-populated and most routinely terrorised place on Earth.
"Haha, feeding the poor because they're hungry, that's funny!"
The charity's executive chairman Chris Mould condemned the UK government's austerity policies and urged Osborne to put himself "in other people's shoes".
He also said that if cabinet ministers had a "deeper understanding" of the causes of poverty, "they would choose to nuance their policy differently".
The Trussell Trust, which runs a network of 270 food banks across the UK, announced earlier that it expects to feed 15,000 Britons over the Christmas fortnight alone, almost double the number of people who turned to the organization last Christmas.
Harsh benefit cuts and low wages have added weight to the uneasiness of the lives of many low to middle income families in Britain.
"Fiscal cliff" is the US code word for "austerity measures"
The cliff is really just a trumped-up annual budget discussion. . . . The most likely outcome is a combination of tax increases, spending cuts and kicking the can down the road.Yet the media coverage has been "panic-inducing, falling somewhere between that given to an approaching hurricane and an alien invasion." In the summer of 2011, this sort of media hype succeeded in causing the Dow Jones Industrial Average to plunge nearly 2000 points. But this time the market is generally ignoring the cliff, either confident a deal will be reached or not caring.
The goal of the exercise seems to be to dismantle Social Security and Medicare, something a radical group of conservatives has worked for decades to achieve. But with the recent Democratic victories, demands for "fiscal responsibility" may just result in higher taxes for the rich, without gutting the entitlements.
Abby Martin Breaks the Set on the End of the World', ínterviews Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick about their documentary series, the Untold History of the United States, and looks at the Top 5 Surveillance Toys of Big Brother in 2012.
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