Prairie Weather

After all, what kind of White House do we want?

The double fenced and heavily armed kind intended to keep a corrupt military dictator safe?

... Simply adding more fences and armed-camp features—making the White House more of a disheartening militarized bubble—could be counterproductive. It would be harder for a child outside to imagine getting inside by way of an election, or by any normal political means. A dog that was, instead, kept on a leash could have stopped Gonzalez. The issue here is basic competency, not super-spy technology. The Post also reported, in a story over the weekend, that, in 2011, Michelle Obama had to learn from an usher that someone had fired a semiautomatic rifle at the White House, and hit it. The Secret Service didn’t figure that one out for several days—agents had decided that the sounds of gunfire were just of a car backfiring, until someone on the staff came across broken glass. That time, Sasha was home. ...AmyDavidson/NewYorker

Over and over again we are substituting money and arms for that other thing:  "basic competency." Ferguson.  Afghanistan.  9/11.  Etc.

Ohio early voting

Ohio has a pretty good early voting period already on the books, so its loss of extended voting times isn't a tragedy.  But curtailing voting  is the result of blatantly partisan policy, not practical or other reasoning.  It simply makes it that much more difficult for the working stiff with family obligations and often two or three jobs to vote. 

The poisoned icing on the cake came with the 5/4 Supreme Court decision against an extension of early voting in Ohio.  And their decision suggests there may be more anti-voting issues in the future.

This comes from Ed Kilgore at Washington Monthly:

Election Law Blog’s Rick Hasen argues supporters of voting rights didn’t have the best case in Ohio, which still has a pretty robust early election program compared to other states. Hasen also fears the Ohio case could give SCOTUS a hook to issue a more sweeping repudiation of the claim that early voting is protected by constitution or statute. But the way the SCOTUS majority handled the case was, well, under-handed.

Attempts to make police more accountable

...The events in Ferguson should be a wake-up call to the federal and state governments to overcome those barriers and make a strong commitment to accountability.

State lawmakers should pass legislation requiring that investigations into deaths by police be automatically referred to an outside, neutral party, as Wisconsin has. They should also begin to systematically collect and disseminate data on the use of excessive force by law enforcement. States should update and intensify training for law enforcement personnel on community relations, biased policing, and de-escalation of violence techniques. (Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon [D] has announced the establishment of an agency to improve community relations, but its powers are limited to providing advice and it appears to have little ability to compel change.) ...AntonioGinatta,TheHill

Governor Nixon:  What we're looking for here is not better public relations efforts on behalf of the police but serious reform of the police, their weapons, their policies, their character, and their methods.

Reagan still in charge at NSA

U.S. intelligence agents have broad authority to spy on U.S. companies as long as they are “believed to have some relationship with foreign organizations or persons” — a description that could conceivably apply to any company with foreign shareholders, subsidiaries, or even employees—according to newly released government documents published this morning by the ACLU.

The trove, which includes documents from the NSA, Department of Justice, and Defense Intelligence Agency, confirms long-standing suspicions that the bulk of U.S. foreign surveillance operations are governed not by acts of Congress, but by a 33-year-old executive order issued unilaterally by President Ronald Reagan. ...TheIntercept

No input from Congress.  No review by Congress or the people they represent.  Just Ronnie.  I'd call that "executive privilege" gone bananas.

Would you still vote for Clinton after reading this?

America has a very, very poor record when it comes to Central America.  Over the decades, we have supported the far right in that area and have done so in spite of the manifest brutality of a succession of regimes.  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did nothing to better our relationship with those nations.  Her policies, added to our awful history of our relations with the Middle East should make us sit up and ask -- seriously -- what we mean by "America's interests."

Read Mark Weisbrot's commentary on Clinton's policy towards Central America and it becomes clear that Hillary Clinton is part of America's problems, not a solution.  Weisbrot, director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, writes in Al Jazeera that Clinton's own memoir opens a door on her (and successor John Kerry's) treatment of nascent democracy in Honduras.   Hillary Clinton just didn't like the democratically-elected Honduran president, Manuel Zelaya.  Her animosity seems to have been in large part personal.  A clip from a news report five years ago:

On June 2, Obama administration officials got a firsthand look at the brewing political battle when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton traveled to Honduras for an Organization of American States conference. Mrs. Clinton met with Mr. Zelaya, and he reportedly annoyed her when he summoned her to a private room late in the night after her arrival and had her shake hands with his extended family. ...NYT,6/09

Clinton writes about Honduras in her memoir, "Hard Choices."

The chapter on Latin America, particularly the section on Honduras, a major source of the child migrants currently pouring into the United States, has gone largely unnoticed. In letters to Clinton and her successor, John Kerry, more than 100 members of Congress have repeatedly warned about the deteriorating security situation in Honduras, especially since the 2009 military coup that ousted the country’s democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. As Honduran scholar Dana Frank points out in Foreign Affairs, the U.S.-backed post-coup government “rewarded coup loyalists with top ministries,” opening the door for further “violence and anarchy.”

The homicide rate in Honduras, already the highest in the world, increased by 50 percent from 2008 to 2011; political repression, the murder of opposition political candidates, peasant organizers and LGBT activists increased and continue to this day. Femicides skyrocketed. The violence and insecurity were exacerbated by a generalized institutional collapse. Drug-related violence has worsened amid allegations of rampant corruption in Honduras’ police and government. While the gangs are responsible for much of the violence, Honduran security forces have engaged in a wave of killings and other human rights crimes with impunity.

Despite this, however, both under Clinton and Kerry, the State Department’s response to the violence and military and police impunity has largely been silence, along with continued U.S. aid to Honduran security forces. In “Hard Choices,” Clinton describes her role in the aftermath of the coup that brought about this dire situation. Her firsthand account is significant both for the confession of an important truth and for a crucial false testimony.

First, the confession: Clinton admits that she used the power of her office to make sure that Zelaya would not return to office. ...Weisbrot,AlJazeera

Well, that took care of Zelaya and that pesky, self-determining democracy.  Back to cruel dictatorship, drugs, murder, and children forced into exile.  Wait, you're still trying to find some good reason for Clinton to act as she has?

The question of Zelaya was anything but moot. Latin American leaders, the United Nations General Assembly and other international bodies vehemently demanded his immediate return to office. Clinton’s defiant and anti-democratic stance spurred a downward slide in U.S. relations with several Latin American countries, which has continued. It eroded the warm welcome and benefit of the doubt that even the leftist governments in region offered to the newly installed Obama administration a few months earlier.

Clinton’s false testimony is even more revealing. She reports that Zelaya was arrested amid “fears that he was preparing to circumvent the constitution and extend his term in office.” This is simply not true. As Clinton must know, when Zelaya was kidnapped by the military and flown out of the country in his pajamas on June 28, 2009, he was trying to put a consultative, nonbinding poll on the ballot to ask voters whether they wanted to have a real referendum on reforming the constitution during the scheduled election in November. It is important to note that Zelaya was not eligible to run in that election. Even if he had gotten everything he wanted, it was impossible for Zelaya to extend his term in office. But this did not stop the extreme right in Honduras and the United States from using false charges of tampering with the constitution to justify the coup. ...Weisbrot,AlJazeera

You'd still vote for Hillary?  Not me.  But she has secured the support -- money and votes -- from the "right-wing Latin American lobby, including Floridian Cuban-Americans and their political fundraisers."  Same old same old.

I'd like to know more about the shiv she stuck in the Obama White House when she turned on Zelaya -- even though the administration in which she served apparently had supported Zelaya and the democratic movement in Honduras.

___

The Republicans, it's reported this morning, are going after Clinton starting now.

"Obama is the rare politician who finds telling whoppers difficult...

"... and he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, hide some of his concerns about where this all is leading," writes John Cassidy in a clear analysis of Obama/ISIS/60 Minutes."

Probably Obama shouldn't have blamed the intelligence agencies.  Or rather, he was right to blame the intelligence agencies but should have kept himself in the mix.  Still...

If Obama didn’t resolve the contradictions and ambiguities that bedevil the U.S. relationship with Syria, he can hardly be faulted. For now, at least, those contradictions can’t be resolved. In deciding to expand the U.S.-led assault on ISIS to targets inside Syria, the President is hitting and hoping. The hitting involves trying to destroy some of ISIS‘s command-and-control infrastructure, disrupting its lucrative oil business, and cutting its supply lines. The hope is that, eventually, these military attacks will destroy the group’s internal cohesion, and that, meanwhile, something will turn up to resolve the broader Syrian nightmare.

“What we also have to do is, we have to come up with political solutions in Iraq and Syria in particular, but in the Middle East generally, that arise in an accommodation between Sunni and Shia populations that right now are the biggest cause of conflict, not just in the Middle East, but in the world,” Obama told Kroft.

And no, just for the record, he didn’t say that would be easy, either. ...Cassidy,NewYorker

What we need is a grown-up, serious intelligence capability -- something we haven't had for years and years.  We've been coasting along on the sense that we're so strong we can afford a few gaffes and mistakes and misinterpretations.  And Iraqs and Afghanistans.

But we can't.  We're being adolescents in a grown-up world.  We won't play unless we're in charge.  You may have noticed that we've long since lost the admiration of the rest of the world, settling for our allies' weary tolerance and the rest of the world's skepticism, making up for the deficit with an ever more shrill homegrown nationalism -- adjusting our flag pins and repeating the notion that we're the best country in the world.

Maybe one of the reasons so many hate Obama is that he's dealing with that reality, not with his detractors' fantasy of who we are.