By David Swanson

The debate among progressive activists and commentators in recent weeks has tended to range from the leave-Obama-alone-and-he'll-fix-everything position to the stage-a-protest-at-Obama's-house-for-the-next-month position, including numerous stances in between those extremes. What all these positions share is acceptance of the incredible shift of power from Congress to the White House that we have seen in just the last eight years. It is in these concluding moments of the Bush-Cheney era that Congress's coffin is being constructed just outside our window, and I'm afraid that the peace and justice movement is picking flowers to bring to the funeral.

By Dave Lindorff

Before the odor of burned gunpowder has left the air of the Taj
Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, the US is lecturing India not to go off
half-cocked and attack Pakistan, simply because all of the attackers in
the terrorist assaults in that city arrived by boat, apparently from
neighboring Pakistan. US officials, including Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice, are calling on India to engage in a “transparent” and
“thorough” investigation into the attacks to establish who was
responsible.

How different this is from the American government’s response to the 9-11 attacks in the US!

http://www.unionsforsinglepayerhr676.org

Self-described as "one of the Democratic Party's leading political strategists," Celinda Lake has claimed that single-payer reform lacks meaningful popular support. Lake's research, done for the Herndon Alliance, has consistently supported reform based upon private health insurance. She and the Herndon Alliance are largely responsible for the notion that a single payer Medicare-for-all healthcare system is ‘not politically feasible.’

Lake’s findings are in sharp contradiction to numerous polls showing that single payer is enormously popular.

* In a New York Times/CBS News poll in February 2007, 64% said that the federal government should guarantee health insurance for all Americans.

Learn more here.

Unlike other bloggers, I haven't treated each Obama appointment as a litmus test on his administration. But after a series of appointments, a pattern is emerging, and it's not a good one.

Since the beginning of Democracy, the basic rule of politics has been "reward your friends and punish your enemies." George Bush considers it his greatest accomplishment:

“I would like to be a person remembered as a person who, first and foremost, did not sell his soul in order to accommodate the political process,” Bush said in the interview. “I came to Washington with a set of values, and I’m leaving with the same set of values.  And I darn sure wasn’t going to sacrifice those values.”

Unfortunately Obama's rule appears to be the opposite: reward your enemies and punish your friends.

Maya Schenwar has an excellent analysis of the Iraq Withdrawal Agreement on Truthout, especially the way Congress was frozen out of the entire process - even though the agreement includes security commitments that require Senate ratification as a treaty:

On the US side, negotiations on the pact have been cloaked in secrecy. The official English version of the final agreement was withheld - from the public and from Congress - throughout most of the past few weeks' negotiations. At a recent House Foreign Affairs subcommittee hearing on the pact, testifiers had to use a translated version supplied by Jarrar. Congressman Bill Delahunt, chairman of the subcommittee, criticized the administration's covert handling of the pact.

John Dean told Keith Olbermann the torturers couldn't be prosecuted because of the Detainee Treatment Act the Military Commission Act. But not all lawyers agree with John Dean on this point.

Transcript due shortly...

According to Corporate Media reports, passage of the U.S. Withdrawal Agreement by the Iraqi Parliament means U.S. forces will leave Iraq by 12/31/11 - unless our troops are brough home by 5/31/10 as promised by Barack Obama, or sent home one year after the Iraqi people vote in a referendum in July 2009.

As David Swanson rightly asks, why don't the American people - or even Congress - have a vote?

The curious thing, of course, about this brutal mission to continue imposing our system of democracy on Iraq by staying and killing for additional years is that their parliament voted, and our Congress covered its ears, closed its eyes, and hummed. Their media covered the ongoing negotiations, while ours watched Sarah Palin pardon turkeys.

Rachel Maddow was equally outraged: 

By David Swanson
The Iraqi Parliament has approved a treaty with the United States or rather its government or rather its lameduck president, although its lameduck president has already made clear his intention to "interpret" it to mean whatever the heck he wants, meaning that the new president will be free to do that or not as he and his progressive supporters or he and his neocon advisors see fit.
AFP reports:

The vote came after a flurry of last-minute negotiations in which the main Sunni parties secured a package of political reforms from the government and a commitment to hold a referendum on the pact in the middle of next year. Should the Iraqi government decide to cancel the pact after the referendum it would have to give Washington one year's notice, meaning that troops would be allowed to remain in the country only until the middle of 2010.

By Dave Lindorff

I am not a terrorist.

How can I prove this in these paranoid times? Easy. The New York
Department of Motor Vehicles took my $30 payment over the phone to
clear what they said was a record of my NY drivers license having once
been withdrawn, and informed the National Driver Register in Washington
that I’m a good guy deserving of a renewal of my Pennsylvania drivers
license.

Let me explain.

Statement from the Steering Committee for the Prosecution for War Crimes of President Bush and His Subordinates

Never before has a president pardoned himself or his subordinates for crimes he authorized. The closest thing to this in U.S. history thus far has been Bush's commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence. Bush is widely expected to follow that commutation with a pardon. Not only did Libby work for the White House, but he was convicted of obstruction of justice in an investigation that was headed to the president. Evidence introduced in the trial, including a hand-written note by the vice president, implicated Bush, and former press secretary Scott McClellan has since testified that Bush authorized the exposure of an undercover agent, that being the crime that was under investigation.

Juan Cole:

McClatchy reports that the Bush administration had deliberately not released the official English version of the security agreement it is negotiating with Iraq, fearing that extensive public debate on it in the US press might throw up criticisms that would be taken up by Iraqi parliamentarians, causing it to be rejected.

It is quite remarkable that this agreement, on which the fate of tens of thousands of American troops depends, has not been officially available to the American public or to Congress!

Actually Congress may have seen the agreement - they're just not saying. 

GWU Law Professor Jonathan Turley told Rachel Maddow Democratic leaders oppose prosecuting Bush's war crimes. Is he right?

At least one Democratic leader - Constitution subcommittee chair Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) - wants to stop Bush's pardons, launch a thorough Congressional investigation of Bush's crimes, and have President Obama's next Attorney General appoint a Special Prosecutor. Please urge your Representative to support Nadler's H.Res. 1531.

The Iraqi Parliament was supposed to vote today on the U.S. Withdrawal Agreement, but Sunnis demanded final ratification through a national referendum. The final vote is expected tomorrow.

Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki's ruling coalition appears to be assured of at least a slim majority in the 275-seat legislature. But the prime minister seeks a bigger win that transcends factionalism and sectarian divisions and reinforces the legitimacy of the pact, which could lead to full Iraqi sovereignty and close the bloody chapter that began with the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

We're now at about $8.4 trillion. Of that amount, Congress approved $0.7 trillion and required minimal oversight which it did not get. Meanwhile everybody's chattering about the car makers' request for $0.025 trillion. Who the hell cares about that at this point? What we should be doing is researching what the next word is after a million and a billion and a trillion ... What comes next? And what's the one after that? Then we could start calculating the interest so we properly inform our grandchildren in our suicide notes.