Once again, we’re still talking about this. What do you think of Obama’s Technology Plan that’ll open up government in unprecedented ways. Basically the complete opposite of Raygun.
http://venturebeat.com/2007/11…..y-officer/

I’d say you’re about 20-plus years OFF on the election cycle. What does “complete opposite of Raygun” — who last did his Mindless Big Boy Burger ‘Morning in America’ drivel for a political campaign in 1984 — have to do with Barack Obama’s Technology Plan in 2008. ??

Besides, you don’t want to cite Raygun’s “technology plan” – even in the negative – cuz he never had one. When his domestic advisors shook him awake and started talking to Raygun about the post-manufacturing, service-based economy, Ronnie Alzheimer’s said: “Service jobs? You mean like florists and hairdressers??” (change Depends)

Lotsa prickly feelings on the comments here after the 250-275 mark. But bringing up 100 percent IRRELEVANT stuff — just to make your chosen candidate look good — is how one gets blowback here. (Happens to me, too.) So don’t get mad. Just stay on point, wouldja?

Even though I’m not an Obama backer at the moment, I’ve been defending Obama around here because a lot of the criticism of him has been unfair and hypocritical IMHO, but can’t find much to defend in that roster of advisers.

Berman makes a statement that many of the other advisers were opposed to the Iraq Invasion from the start. I wonder why he didn’t name any of those people. Perhaps Berman was trying to counter the “inexperienced” critique of Obama?

Although, I would suspect Clinton’s adviser roster would make Obama’s look like a bunch of Cindy Sheehans. Since I probably won’t be able to spend time looking into that, I’ll probably have to assume Clinton’s staff would be much worse, which seems a safe bet, and on this issue, if the choice is between Clinton and Obama, Obama likely wins.

Strange to me how there’s been a sort of collective amnesia in much of the Netroots about Obama’s very clear and direct opposition to the Iraq Invasion since before it even happened. Thinking back to that time, it was quite unpopular to express that opinion as I found out many times just in social settings, let alone on TV as a politician. Regardless of who his staff is, I do get some comfort in knowing Obama had this opinion, and his ability to make decisions in the future without campaign considerations influencing what he says.

Yes, haven’t been thrilled with his wishy-washyness about it recently, but he sure seemed to have good decision-making at the outset all on his own. Can’t say that about our other “leading” candidate choices.

Is Ari Berman on crack, or just on Obama’s PR team?

And WTF is wrong with The Nation – are they hiring Patrick Henry grads from NPR’s reject pool for their fact-checkers?

I researched the names behind Berman’s list of “forward-thinking” Obama advisers (below) in 90 minutes with half a pizza, a glass of elderly nouveau beaujolais, SourceWatch, and a few neurons that listened to news in the late 70’s and survive to recall it.

Jeebus, I don’t know what’s sadder: The Nation paying someone to write such crap, or their subscribers actually believing it.

Berman:

Obama’s team includes some of the most forward-thinking members of the Democratic foreign policy establishment–Joseph Cirincione and Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress, the party’s leading experts on nonproliferation and defense issues, respectively, along with former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke and Carter Administration National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. Added to the mix are fresh faces who were at times critical of the Clinton Administration, like Harvard professor Samantha Power, author of “A Problem From Hell”, a widely acclaimed history of US responses to genocide. These names suggest that Obama may be more open to challenging old Washington assumptions and crafting new approaches.

More open than what? Darth’s coronary arteries?

Like Clinton, Obama has more than 200 foreign policy advisers. The campaigns have been dueling over who has the best bench. (Many people who have been linked with Obama are actually advising Clinton, her advisers say.) Obama’s advisers tend to be younger, more progressive–having opposed the war from the start–and more likely to stress “soft power” issues like human rights, global development and the dangers of failed states.

The word Obama advisers use most often to describe Clinton is “conventional.”

Uhh…Ari…

Let’s look at these indications that Sen. Suited Smile is “challenging old Washington assumptions and crafting new approaches.”

Cirencione:

“He is a frequent commentator on proliferation and security issues in the media, and teaches at the Georgetown University Graduate School of Foreign Service.

“Mr. Cirincione worked for nine years in the U.S. House of Representatives: six years on the professional staff of the Committee on Armed Services and three and one-half years on the Committee on Government Operations, and served as staff director of the Military Reform Caucus under Congressmen Tom Ridge and Charles Bennett. He is the author of numerous articles on proliferation and nuclear weapons issues, the editor of Repairing the Regime (Routledge, 2000), the producer of the DVD, The Proliferation Threat, and the publisher and editor of the Internet site, ProliferationNews.org. He has held positions at the Henry L. Stimson Center, the U.S. Information Agency, the Center for Strategic and International Studies and previously at the Carnegie Endowment.

“He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He is an honors graduate of Boston College and holds a Masters of Science with highest honors from the Georgetown School of Foreign Service.” [1]

I can hear the Establishment quaking…

oh…wait..it’s the tinkle of ice in cocktail glasses

Now onto that grizzled Trotskyite Lawrence Korb:

Lawrence J. Korb, born July 9, 1939, in New York City, is a member of the Intellibridge Expert Network and Vice President and Maurice R. Greenberg Chair, and Director of National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Center for American Progress.

In 1981, Korb was Director of Defense Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and had served as an adjunct scholar for Federal budget analysis at the Institute since 1972. He was an adviser to the Reagan-Bush committee in 1980 and served as a member of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency transition team. In 1981, Korb was appointed as Assistant Secretary of Defense (Manpower, Reserve Affairs, Installations and Logistics) by Ronald Reagan and continued in that capacity until 1985. “In that position, he administered about seventy percent of the defense budget. His responsibilities included: recruiting and training the five million active duty reserve and civilian employees of the Department of Defense; maintaining the U.S. worldwide military base structure; and establishing supply, maintenance, and transportation policies for the land, sea, and air forces of the United States. For his service in that position, he was awarded the Department of Defense’s medal for Distinguished Public Service … In the past he has served as a Consultant to the Office of the Secretary of Defense and to the Office of Education. He was a member of the Defense Advisory Committee for President-Elect Reagan (1980), and a member of the Defense Issues Group for President-Elect George Herbert Walker Bush (1988). “[1][2]

Meet the new cold warrior. Same as the old cold warrior.

Now on for a look at that Hero of the Revolution Samantha Power.

(gotta love the name)

Samantha Power “is a professor of practice at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Her recent book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, was awarded the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction, the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award for general non-fiction, and the Council on Foreign Relations’ Arthur Ross Prize for the best book in US foreign policy.

“Prof. Power was the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy (1998-2002). From 1993-1996, she covered the wars in the former Yugoslavia as a reporter for the US News and World Report, the Boston Globe, and the Economist. She currently contributes to the New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. Prof. Power is the editor, with Graham Allison, of Realizing Human Rights: Moving from Inspiration to Impact (St. Martin’s, 2000). A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, she moved to the United States from Ireland at the age of nine. She is currently working on a book on the United Nations.” [1]

[snip]

“In 1996 she worked for the International Crisis Group (ICG) as a political analyst.”

* U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea – Board of directors

Lordy, lordy, lordy.

Now who got together to make that nice ‘ol ICG?

From 1993-98 Lynne A. Davidson as Senior Associate for Human Rights and Special Assistant to Ambassador Morton I. Abramowitz, … she helped to shape the original proposal for the International Crisis Group“. [1]

More on Abramowitz, the US Ambassador of Armaments – to the Taliban:

Presidents come and go but the continuity of U.S. policy is ensured by a small elite of policy-makers who remain outside party politics – and often outside public view. An influential member of this foreign policy establishment is Morton Abramowitz, whose career has involved him with both the Afghan mujahidin and Kosovo Albanian rebels. In 1986, as assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research in the Reagan administration, Abramowitz helped arrange delivery of the Stinger missiles. The collapse of the Soviet Union obliged U.S. policy-makers to redefine the “threat” justifying foreign intervention. The “war on terrorism”, launched by President Reagan in the early 1980s, was suffering by the end of the decade from a dearth of active terrorists. As president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the early 1990s, Abramowitz headed a project to develop a new U.S. foreign policy for the post-Cold War era. Rather than simply identifying “threats”, especially at a time when few threats could be seen, a successful new policy needed to combine promotion of U.S. interests with proclamation of American “ideals”.

From Diana Johnstone’s Fool’s Crusade, Pluto Press, 2002, p. 9:

Abramowitz continued to act from behind the scenes as an eminence grise for [US Secretary of State] Albright. He helped found the high-level International Crisis Group, a chief policy designer fro Bosnia and Kosovo. He was omnipresent behind the scenes of the Kosovo drama, both in making policy and in shaping elite business, government, and media opinion. He acted as an advisor to the Kosovo Albanian delegation at the Rambouillet talks, whose programmed breakdown provided the pretext for NATO bombing.

Nice blowback ya got there, Mr Ambassador.

“Ms. Davidson received the State Department’s Superior Honor Award in 1993, 2002 and 2005, Exceptional Performance Awards from the Central Intelligence Agency in 1998, 1999 and 2000, and the Director of Central Intelligence’s Director’s Award in 2001. She was educated at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.” [1]

Job well done in Langley’s eyes.

Looks like Prof. Power found her policy soul-mates.

And the Chicago Machine Tool had his chosen for him.

The Audacity of Smoke.

PS Edward S. Herman dissects Power in Z

Samantha Power can identify with Holbrooke because they both follow the U.S. party line on worthy and unworthy genocides. As the United States was directly involved in the great Vietnam genocide, as its leaders were part of the “joint criminal enterprise” with Indonesia in East Timor, and as they were mainly responsible for the “sanctions of mass destruction” and those 500,000 dead children whose deaths were “worth it” for Albright, Samantha Power evades these cases. Thus the Vietnam war, in which millions were directly killed by U.S. forces, does not show up in Power’s index or text. Guatemala, where there was a mass killing of as many as 100,000 Mayan Indians between 1978 and 1985, in what Amnesty International called “A Government Program of Political Murder,” but by a government installed and supported by the United States, also does not show up in Power’s index. Cambodia is of course included, but only for the second phase of the genocide—the first phase, from 1969-1975, in which the United States dropped some 500,000 tons of bombs on the Cambodian countryside and killed vast numbers, she fails to mention.

[snip]

A major U.S.-encouraged and supported genocide occurred in Indonesia in 1965-66 in which over 700,000 people were murdered. This genocide is not mentioned by Samantha Power and the names Indonesia and Suharto do not appear in her book’s index. She also fails to mention West Papua, where Indonesia’s 40 years of murderous occupation would constitute genocide under her criteria, if carried out under different auspices. Power does refer to East Timor, with extreme brevity, saying that “In 1975, when its ally, the oil-producing, anti-Communist Indonesia, invaded East Timor, killing between 100,000 and 200,000 civilians, the United States looked away.” [17] That exhausts her treatment of the subject, although the killings in East Timor involved a larger fraction of the population than in Cambodia, and the numbers killed were far larger than the grand total for Bosnia and Kosovo, to which she devotes almost a third of her book

She also misrepresents the U.S. role in East Timor—it did not “look away,” it gave its approval, protected the aggression from any effective UN response (in his autobiography, then U.S. Ambassador to the UN Daniel Patrick Moynihan bragged about his effectiveness in protecting Indonesia from any UN action), [18] and greatly increased its arms aid to Indonesia, thereby facilitating the genocide. And her pal Richard Holbrooke was also on the front line in servicing this genocide.

Power engages in a similar suppression and failure to recognize the U.S. role in her treatment of genocide in Iraq. She attends carefully and at length to Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical warfare and killing of Kurds at Halabja and elsewhere, and she does discuss the U.S. failure to oppose and take any action against Saddam Hussein at this juncture. But she does not mention the diplomatic rapproachement with Saddam in the midst of his war with Iran in 1983, the active U.S. logistical support of Saddam during that war, and the U.S. approval of sales and transfers of chemical and biological weapons during the period in which he was using chemical weapons against the Kurds. She also doesn’t mention the active efforts by the United States and Britain to block UN actions that might have obstructed Saddam’s killings.

The killing of over a million Iraqis via the “sanctions of mass destruction” is unmentioned by Samantha Power. Again, the correlation between exclusion, U.S. responsibility, and the view that such killings were “worth it” from the standpoint of U.S. interests, is clear. There is a similar political basis for Power’s failure to include Israel’s low-intensity genocide of the Palestinians and South Africa’s “destructive engagement” with the frontline states in the 1980s, the latter with a death toll greatly exceeding all the deaths in the Balkan wars of the 1990s. [19] Neither Israel nor South Africa, both “constructively engaged” by the United States, show up in Power’s index.

Power is concerned about genocide in Iraq today and wrote recently on how to bring it to a halt (“How to stop genocide in Iraq,” Los Angeles Times, March 5, 2007). But nowhere does she mention that the mass killing that has taken place in Iraq traces back to the U.S. invasion in violation of the UN Charter; nowhere does she mention that the killing has grown in parallel with the occupation and occupation policies; nowhere does she mention Fallujah and other cases of mass killing for which her leaders are responsible; and nowhere does she hint at the possibility that the United States has stimulated ethnic conflict as part of a divide and rule strategy. When Bush claims to be “surging” in the interest of stability and to reduce conflict, Power never contests this or suggests some alternative explanation. Somebody better informed on Iraq like the exile Sami Ramadani writes that “It is hard not to presume that what he [Bush] means by an exit strategy is to install a client regime in Baghdad, backed by US bases. The Iraqi people will not accept this, and the west should be alerted to the fact that US policy objectives will only lead to wider regional conflicts, rather than to full withdrawal.” [20] Samantha Power cannot formulate or admit such a critical analysis.

When Power talks about “atrocities” it is always indigenous forces that engage in them, not the U.S. occupation.

Clinton just isn’t capable of the magnitude of change that Obama is envisioning. He has the capacity to totally change the game.

Talk about delusions of grandeur. The Republicans aren’t much in the mood to ‘totally change the game’ except in ways they want.

Doesn’t Obama recognize the utter failure of the Republicans?

And the utter futility of deal-making with them. Obama sets himself and the nation up for a fools errand.
There is no deal to be made, and he will not fight them, leaving us few options.

“So we have a deficit to close. We have walls – barriers to justice and equality – that must come down. And to do this, we know that unity is the great need of this hour….” Barack Obama 1/20/08

Barack blithers another sequence of nonsequiturs. Yes, there are barriers to justice and equality. No, the problem is not a “lack of unity.” In fact, the problem is too much unity. The loyal opposition is too long on loyalty and way short on opposition. JMHO.

I agree. It’s as though he wants to unite Right and Wrong, Democrats and Republicans. That’s idiotic. Why isn’t he leading the political fight to say the Republicans are terribly terribly wrong and they’ve royally ruined things and we have to be rid of their philosophy and their leaders and their policies, so we can replace them?

Doesn’t Obama recognize the utter failure of the Republicans?

Anyone, including yourself and all the other regulars at this site, who follows politics as closely as we do here, knows that Barack Obama does not endorse the policies pursued by Ronald Reagan.

Once a candidate has said he’s for this that and the other, so that he has positions all over the political map, then what is one supposed to think that candidate stands for? Am I supposed to be gaga because he says things I like, and leave it at that? Should I wonder when he also says things Republicans like?

People seem to think John Edwards is a phony and hypocrite. But, I wonder, just what does Obama stand for. What does he value aside from a nice suit?

I prefer Edwards any day.

So long as “unity” does not mean compromise.

Some people say the Republicans consider ‘unity’ to mean rape and they aren’t going to take it laying down.