What is socialism, anyway?

In case anyone was wondering whether Obama is a socialist and wanted to know what socialism really is, this interview is a pretty good place to start:

Meet the New Boss...Same as the Old Boss, part 3

Meet the New Boss...Same as the Old Boss, part 2

The San Francisco Chronicle reports on a filmmaker who has been placed in that Kafkaesque world of the watch lists for flyers:

Nearly every time Poitras travels abroad - which is often - she's stopped on her departure or return by U.S. airport security, who subject her to tough questioning and have forced her to miss flights.

Of course, the most egregious aspect of this egregious assault on her civil liberties is that the US government won't actually admit that she is on any sort of list at all, which is par for the course.

We can take great satisfaction in Obama undid all the onerous assaults on human rights that the Bush regime instituted in the name of the war on terror. Oh wait...Never mind.

Not that this is surprising. Obama gave a clear clue before the election of his views on such matters as civil liberties and execute power when he voted for the FISA bill. But I am curious as to why so many liberals who were rightly outraged at Bush's egregious policies in the "war on terror" are willing to give Obama a pass when he continues those same policies.

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! ran a story a few days ago about the Obama administration's role in the oil spill fiasco:

An extensive new investigation into the Obama administration’s handling of the BP oil spill disaster reveals that it was government mismanagement, delays and absence of oversight that allowed the crisis to spiral out of control. In the article "The Spill, the Scandal, and the President," Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson writes, "Though George W. Bush paved the way for the catastrophe, it was Obama who gave BP the green light to drill." Dickinson explores how Interior Secretary Ken Salazar kept in place the oil industry-friendly environmental guidelines that Bush had implemented and ultimately let BP, an oil company with the worst safety record, to get away with murder.

Dickinson in the interview points out that the Obama administration's role in this includes the following:

Ken Salazar, in the first year in office, put a record number—a record number of acres up for lease in the Gulf. So, while they were taking, you know, drilling out of view of national parks on land and scaling back the oil shale development, they were throttling up offshore oil drilling to record levels without doing the substantive reform that would have been required to make MMS something other than a candy store for the oil companies.

The fact that Obama was throttling up offshore oil drilling to record levels is not surprising--he had come out publicly in favor of more offshore drilling before this disaster hit.

Sierra Club

I resigned from the Sierra Club ten years ago and never looked back. I realized that, despite their reputation as a progressive environmentalist organization, they did not represent a truly independent and critical voice of environmental concerns; rather, I found that they were frequently in bed with too many political interests that tainted their objectivity. I found this devastating critique of the Sierra Club thus to be completely on target, and I was glad to hear that I was not the only one who felt this way about that organization.