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When the people fear the government, there is tyranny; When the government fears the people, there is liberty.  ~ Thomas Jefferson

 

Entries Tagged as 'Not an Obama Priority'

Maliki’s governing style raises questions about future of Iraq’s fragile democracy

December 23rd, 2010 · Iraq, Selling Out the US, War on Terrorism

By Liz Sly Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, December 22, 2010; 12:56 AM

BAGHDAD – When a series of giant billboards depicting the face of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki mysteriously appeared on a central Baghdad square several weeks ago, the response from Maliki’s office was swift and decisive. Police were dispatched to remove the posters, which echoed the displays that had been ubiquitous under Saddam Hussein.

If Iraq’s prime minister indeed has dictatorial tendencies, as his detractors allege, they do not include self-promotion of the Hussein variety. Maliki’s aides say the prime minister was furious, and they suspect the billboards may have been raised to discredit him at a critical moment in the negotiations for a new government – to fuel perceptions that he is another Iraqi strongman in the making.

Whether he is such a strongman is among the critical questions that loom over Iraq’s young and still-fragile democracy as Maliki embarked Tuesday on his second term as prime minister.

“He has the potential to be a dictator,” said Faleh Jabar, an Iraqi scholar who heads the Beirut-based Iraq Institute for Strategic Studies. “It’s my biggest fear, because that would destroy our democracy.”

The pugnacious, square-jawed Maliki has been credited with steering Iraq out of the chaos of sectarian war earlier in the decade. Now he is destined to lead Iraq beyond the scheduled departure of U.S. forces at the end of next year, into an era in which the U.S. role in Iraq will inevitably wane, along with the ability to shape the country’s political direction toward the democracy that formed a central justification for the war.

That Maliki has an authoritarian streak has been amply demonstrated over the past 4 1/2 years, critics say. Maliki, originally selected in 2006 as a compromise candidate assumed to be weak and malleable, has proved to be a tough and ruthless political operator who cannily subverted parliament to cement his authority over many of the new democracy’s fledgling institutions.

In his role as commander in chief of the armed forces, he replaced divisional army commanders with his appointees, brought provincial command centers under his control and moved to dominate the intelligence agencies.

The widely feared Baghdad Brigade, which answers directly to Maliki’s office, has frequently been used to move against his political opponents. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have accused him of operating secret prisons in which Sunni suspects have been tortured.

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Bowing to growing budget concerns, Obama announces 2-year pay freeze for federal workers.

November 29th, 2010 · Accountability, Economy, Federal Spending, Government

By Ed O’Keefe, Perry Bacon and Joe Davidson

Bowing to growing budget concerns and months of Republican political pressure on federal pay and benefits, President Obama today announced he would stop pay increases for most of the two million people who work for the federal government.

The freeze applies to all Executive Branch workers — including civilian employees of the Defense Department, but does not apply to military personnel, government contractors, postal workers, members of Congress, Congressional staffers, or federal court judges and workers.

“Getting this deficit under control is going to require some broad sacrifices and that sacrifice must be shared by the employees of the federal government,” Obama said in a speech Monday afternoon explaining the decision. He added, “I did not reach this decision easily, this is not a line item on a federal ledger, these are people’s lives.”

The freeze would take effect on Jan. 1, pending Congressional approval by the end of this year. The 2012 pay freeze will be proposed as part of fiscal 2012 budget proposals to be unveiled early next year.

The pay change will not impact bonuses for federal workers or when a federal worker is promoted to a new level of pay, meaning federal workers promoted in the next two years will receive a new level of pay, but not receive any additional annual raises.

Colleen M. Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said she disagreed with Obama’s decision.

The union “is mindful of our nation’s economic circumstances, but we are very disappointed with the White House’s position and intend to explore all of our options, including working with Congress to overturn it,” Kelley said. The union represents more than 150,000 federal employees nationwide.

John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, blasted the announcement, calling it “a superficial, panicked reaction to the deficit commission report.”

“This pay freeze amounts to nothing more than political public relations,” Gage said in a statement, suggesting government nurses, border patrol agents and other personnel are being unfairly targeted for Democratic election losses.

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Obama administration gives billions in stimulus money without environmental safeguards

November 29th, 2010 · Accountability, Deception, Democrats, Economy, Environment, Federal Spending, Obama's Scheme, Selling Out the US, Stimulus

By Kristen Lombardi and John Solomon – Center for Public Integrity
Sunday, November 28, 2010; 9:41 PM

In the name of job creation and clean energy, the Obama administration has doled out about $2 billion in stimulus money to some of the nation’s biggest polluters while granting them exemptions from a basic form of environmental oversight, a Center for Public Integrity investigation has found.

The administration has awarded more than 179,000 “categorical exclusions” to stimulus projects funded by federal agencies, freeing the projects from review under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. Officials said they did not consider companies’ pollution records in deciding whether to grant the waivers. They said that creating jobs quickly was an important part of the stimulus plan, and that past environmental violations should not disqualify a company from pursuing federal contracts for unrelated projects.

The projects include:

- An electrical-grid upgrade project in Kansas led by Westar Energy, the state’s largest coal-burning utility, which settled a major air pollution case by paying half a billion dollars in penalties and remediation costs. The Energy Department granted the NEPA waiver to Westar’s project, funded by a $19 million stimulus grant that was approved on the same day the settlement became official. Westar considers its “smart grid” project to be “our basic,standard, above-ground upgrade,” said Brad Loveless, the company’s environmental director. “From everybody’s perspective, there really wasn’t the potential for smart grid to have environmental problems.”

- A wind farm project in Texas, as well as an electrical-grid upgrade project in five additional states, undertaken by Duke Energy. The department granted the NEPA waiver to both Duke projects, funded by a combined $226 million in stimulus grants, even as the energy corporation continues its decade-long defense against two of the largest air pollution cases involving coal utilities in the nation’s history. “We’re basically adding communication infrastructure on top of what is already there so it is not disturbing the environment,” Duke’s Paige Layne said.

- A project to create clean-burning biofuel from seaweed led by chemical giant DuPont, which received $8.9 million in stimulus funds in February. That amount nearly equals the environmental fine DuPont paid in 2005 for hiding the dangers of its toxic chemical known as C8 from federal regulators for two decades. In a statement, DuPont stressed that it “has not applied for an environmental exclusion” for its project, but rather is “following the necessary process set forth by the Department of Energy.” It concludes, “Each project that we work on includes, by our own policy, a comprehensive and individualized product stewardship program.”

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Fed lowers economic expectations for 2011

November 24th, 2010 · Deception, Dissention, Economy, Federal Spending, Non-Transparency, Obama's Scheme, Selling Out the US, Tax Dollars

By Neil Irwin Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 24, 2010; 12:40 AM

Unemployment is set to remain higher for longer than previously thought, according to new projections from the Federal Reserve that would mean more than 10 million Americans remain jobless through the 2012 elections – even as a separate report shows corporate profits reaching their highest levels ever.

Top Federal Reserve officials project that the unemployment rate, now 9.6 percent, will fall only to about 9 percent at the end of 2011 and about 8 percent when the next presidential election arrives, in late 2012. The central bankers had envisioned a more rapid decline in joblessness in their previous forecasts, prepared in June.

The sober economic forecast comes despite signs that the recovery is picking up slightly. The Commerce Department said Tuesday that gross domestic product rose at a 2.5 percent annual rate in the three months ending in September, not 2 percent as earlier estimated. And there have been solid readings in recent weeks on job creation, manufacturing and retail.

The apparent contradiction reflects the brutal math that faces a nation trying claw out of a deep recession: Moderate growth, which would be fine in normal times, will do little to bring down sky-high joblessness, a reality reflected in the Fed’s forecasts.

Even as conditions are likely to remain miserable for job seekers for years to come, an extraordinary bounce-back is underway in the nation’s corporate sector, with profits rebounding 28 percent over the past year to an all-time high in the third quarter.

Businesses’ spending on compensation for employees, by contrast, rose only 7.6 percent.

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Petraeus warns Afghans about Karzai’s criticism of U.S. war strategy

November 15th, 2010 · Defense, War on Terrorism

By Joshua Partlow and Karen DeYoung  Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, November 15, 2010; 12:24 AM

KABUL – Gen. David H. Petraeus, the coalition military commander in Afghanistan, warned Afghan officials Sunday that President Hamid Karzai’s latest public criticism of U.S. strategy threatens to seriously undermine progress in the war and risks making Petraeus’s own position “untenable,” according to Afghan and U.S. officials.

Officials said Petraeus expressed “astonishment and disappointment” with Karzai’s call, in a Saturday interview with The Washington Post, to “reduce military operations” and end U.S. Special Operations raids in southern Afghanistan that coalition officials said have killed or captured hundreds of Taliban commanders in recent months.

In a meeting Sunday morning with Ashraf Ghani, who leads the Afghan government’s planning on transition, Petraeus made what several officials described as “hypothetical” references to an inability to continue U.S. operations in the face of Karzai’s remarks.

The night raids are at the heart of Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy and are key to his hopes of being able to show significant progress when the White House reviews the situation in Afghanistan next month.

Officials discounted early reports Sunday that Petraeus had threatened to resign. But “for [Karzai] to go this way, and at that particular stage, is really undermining [Petraeus's] endeavors,” one foreign diplomat in Kabul said. “Not only his personally, but the international community.” Several officials in Washington and Kabul requested anonymity in order to discus the issue.

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Debt-reduction proposals add fuel to criticism of government workforce

November 14th, 2010 · Accountability, Change of Power, Economy, Federal Spending, Government, Tax Dollars

By Joe Davidson Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 11, 2010; 7:12 PM

If federal employees didn’t read the handwriting on the wall when Republicans won the House last week, they shouldn’t miss the red lights that began flashing with the release of sweeping proposals to rectify the nation’s finances.

The recommendations, by Alan K. Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, and Erskine Bowles, who served as White House chief of staff in the Clinton administration, would hit federal employees hard, freezing their pay and reducing their numbers.

Everyone, inside and outside of government, would take a blow under their controversial suggestions. And the proposals are by no means final. The draft documents released Wednesday by Simpson and Bowles, co-chairmen of the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, represent only their ideas. There’s no guarantee the commission will adopt their plan in the panel’s final report, which requires approval by at least 14 of the 18 members. Some members of Congress wasted no time in blasting the blueprint.

Yet the report indicates a shift in the atmosphere surrounding the federal workforce. With their bipartisan pedigree, offered by two men who aren’t gunning for quick headlines, the draft proposals give an increased level of support and legitimacy for some of the points Republicans have made about federal pay and staffing.

For months, GOP lawmakers have called for cutting or freezing the size of the federal workforce and employees’ compensation. These calls have fueled an image of bloated, budget-busting feds that sharply conflicts with the public service motivation that really drives them, especially those who could earn much more in the private sector.

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Obama’s deficit commission proposing to reduce the annual cost-of-living increases in Social Security.

November 10th, 2010 · Deception, Greed, Non-Transparency, Obama Nominees, Obama's Scheme, Selling Out the US, Social Security

By ANDREW TAYLOR – The Associated Press
Wednesday, November 10, 2010; 1:24 PM

WASHINGTON — Leaders of President Barack Obama‘s bipartisan deficit commission on Wednesday proposed reducing the annual cost-of-living increases in Social Security, part of a bold plan to control $1 trillion-plus budget deficits.

The proposal also would set a tough target for curbing the growth of Medicare and recommends looking at eliminating popular tax breaks, such as mortgage interest deduction.

As proposed, the plan by Chairman Erskine Bowles and former Sen. Alan Simpson, R-Wyo., doesn’t look like it can win support from 14 of the commission’s 18 members to force a debate in Congress. Bowles is a Democrat and was former President Bill Clinton‘s White House chief of staff.

Cuts to Social Security and Medicare are making some liberals on the panel recoil. And conservative Republicans are having difficulty with options on how to raise tax revenue. The plan also calls for cuts in farm subsidies, foreign aid and the Pentagon’s budget.

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Obama heralds Indonesia’s political, religious diversity in latest outreach to Muslims

November 10th, 2010 · Deception, Ethics, Foreign Policy, Non-Transparency, Obama's Scheme, Selling Out the US, Terrorism from Within, Terrorist Threat, Treason

By Scott Wilson Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 10, 2010; 12:02 AM

JAKARTA, INDONESIA – Speaking before thousands in the city that helped raise him, President Obama on Wednesday cited this country’s transition from dictatorship to democracy as a model in an Islamic world often governed by unelected autocracies.

He also praised Indonesia – the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation – for a “spirit of tolerance that is written into your constitution, symbolized in your mosques and churches and temples, and embodied in your people,” a quality worthy for all the world to emulate.

Obama received a warm welcome from the crowd of about 6,500 at the University of Indonesia, particularly when he spoke in Indonesian, as when he recalled buying satay and bakso from street vendors or referenced the national motto, “Bhinneka Tunggal Ika,” or “Unity in Diversity.”

“We are two nations which have traveled different paths. Yet our nations show that hundreds of millions who hold different beliefs can be united in freedom under one flag,” Obama said.

The speech was cast by White House officials as part of the president’s continuing outreach to Muslims, an effort he began last year in Cairo by calling for a “new beginning” between the United States and Islam.

But Muslim views of Obama around the world have worsened in several countries since then, and in the United States, a recent Pew Research Center poll found that nearly one in five Americans thinks the president is a Muslim, in part because of the time he spent here as a child. Obama describes himself as a practicing Christian.

The president’s efforts to mend relations with the Islamic world were partly overshadowed by the reopening Tuesday of a rupture between the United States and Israel, a development that reflected his administration’s struggle to strike a balance that satisfies either side in the Middle East conflict.

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Fort Hood marks massacre anniversary

November 6th, 2010 · Deception, Democrats, Homeland Security, National Security, Non-Transparency, Obama's Scheme, Selling Out the US, Terrorism from Within, Terrorist Attack, Treason

Victims, heroes remembered at Fort Hood.

By Ann GerhartWashington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 6, 2010; 1:02 AM

Until Friday, there was only one outward symbol at Fort Hood of the chaos and carnage that erupted there on Nov. 5, 2009. The wreaths of ribbons and flowers hung on a fence surrounding Building 42003 at the massive Army post in Texas. They were placed there by a wife who became a widow that day.

Now there is a 6-foot-tall granite memorial, unveiled at a ceremony on the one-year anniversary of the massacre, the worst at a U.S. military installation. Inscribed with the names of the 13 slain when a soldier opened fire as they waited to do paperwork before a deployment, the marker has taken its place near the post’s memorials to those killed in war – more than 500 in the past five years.

“Our home was attacked . . . not in a distant battlefield but right here . . . and American heroes sacrificed their lives,” Gen. William Grimsley, Fort Hood’s commanding general, told about 1,000 people gathered Friday morning for the ceremony, according to the Associated Press.

Grimsley and Army Secretary John M. McHugh presented awards to more than 50 soldiers and civilians – some of whom had been shot themselves – who rushed to aid the wounded. Some recently relived the horror, when they testified at a hearing for Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who is charged with multiple counts of murder. Some spent much of the past year in Afghanistan and Iraq, returning a few weeks ago.

“It’s a chapter in this Army that no matter how many tears may fall, [they] will never, ever be washed away and will be part of our history forever,” McHugh said, the wire service reported.

While military officials kept their remarks focused on sacrifice and resilience, others used the shooting anniversary to renew their criticism of a Defense Department they say still is not adequately alert to extremists developing in its ranks.

Hasan, 40, an Army psychiatrist, alarmed colleagues with talk of whether his patients could be prosecuted for war crimes. He sent more than a dozen e-mails in the months before the shooting to radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi, an American citizen now targeted by the United States for assassination.

The department “still refuses to even use the words ‘radical Islam’ in their report on the attack or recommendations on how to prevent future attacks,” said Rep. John Carter, the Texas Republican whose district includes Fort Hood. “That does not instill confidence in Congress that the DoD is taking the necessary steps to protect our troops.”

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Democrats’ enthusiasm gap on full display as Obama refers to economy as driving a car.

November 1st, 2010 · Accountability, Democrats, Dissention, Economy, Obama Exposed, Selling Out the US, Unemployment

  • 8,000 of 60,000 still sleeping behind the wheel of Obama’s “Car” as he tries to convince them that the other 52,000 people are Trick-or-Treating.  Now that is SCARY!!

By Nia-Malika Henderson Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 1, 2010; 1:46 AM

CLEVELAND -  President Obama‘s last midterm campaign appearance Sunday summed up the plight of his party – he spoke in a half-full arena, in a deep blue part of a GOP trending swing state, where a governor is locked in a tight contest, and a Democratic Senate candidate has been given up for dead.

Two years ago, Obama drew a crowd of 60,000 in this same city two days before Election Day. On Sunday, about 8,000 showed up to see the president and Vice President Biden – maybe church service and trick-or-treating kept people from coming out, aides and supporters said.

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