Contributors

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Hey, wait a minute...!

I've had a lot of angry people tell me in the last two years that Barack Obama is a terrorist loving socialist. Now we have this? And in my own backyard?

The warrant for the raid on Kelly's apartment, in the 1800 block of Riverside Avenue, sought notebooks, address books, photos and maps of Kelly's travels to the Palestinian territories, Colombia and in the United States on behalf of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.

The warrant also sought any information about efforts to support FARC, a guerrilla organization in Colombia, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Hezbollah, the political and paramilitary organization based in Lebanon.

Apparently there were raids in Obama's home town of Chicago as well.

In Chicago, the FBI raided a condo of Hatem Abudayyeh, director of the Arab American Action Network, said Tom Burke of the National Committee to Free Ricardo Palmera, a Colombian revolutionary imprisoned in Colorado. Burke, who was given a subpoena, said he is a member of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, as are some other raid subjects.

Burke said the group "advocates for socialism in the U.S." and opposes U.S. military intervention abroad. "Chicago and Minneapolis are two of the places we are bigger," he said.

I was under the impression that President Obama, as a freedom hating socialist, would in attendance at such a place with Bill Ayers running the meeting. Instead, he's arresting all of these advocates for socialism on suspicion of having terrorist ties? Could it be that I was right all along, not only about his place on the political spectrum (see: Dwight D. Eisenhower) but also about the infinitesimal influence of the actual left wingers of this country?

Take a look at this piece from World Socialist Web Site.

Of a piece with the Times’ decision to bury its news report on the raids in a perfunctory article on its inside pages, the editorial sends a clear signal to the Obama administration and the police/security agencies. The Times has no problem with the use of police-state methods to suppress antiwar sentiment and will not make an issue of the attacks carried out on Friday. This amounts to a tacit endorsement of the FBI raids.

Even the "Traitor Times" is now part of the police state? Where's Ann Coulter when I need her? Sheesh....

Some of you bitched at me and assured me that the Obama and the radical left were one and the same. In fact, I was told quite clearly that the radical left was running our government. And yet, he is now arresting them? He sure has a funny way of showing his loyalty...

Frankly, I'm stumped. Anyone care to help me out on this one?

21 comments:

last in line said...

You used to have an opinion of your own on the "police state methods" our government uses. What's your opinion of the raids as well as the methods they used to gather information?

blk said...

Obama is trying very hard to run this country for the middle 80% of us. He tried to get the Republicans on board for health care, but they figured it was better to hand Obama a failure rather than pull together to make this country a better place to live.

Obama broke his campaign promise on mandates for health care, there's no public option, Gitmo is still open, and on and on, so the left wing of the Democratic party is very disappointed.

Obama is leading straight down the middle: he's a technocrat more interested in making the country function well, helping sick people keep their health care, keeping people in their own homes, getting people back to work, and putting the economy back on track, rather than running some ideological train wreck down our throats.

Pretty much everything the Republicans say is calculated only to spur their base into action and demoralize the Democrats. They have no interest in making this country work, they just want to regain power.

And for what? To restore the same failed polices that brought us the Depression of the Thirties, the savings and loan fiasco during the Reagan years and Bush's real estate market crash. It's pretty much a disaster every time the Republicans gain control over the last century, with one notable exception: the Eisenhower years.

And why was that? We'd just gone through a terrible war, and everyone was used to pulling together to make this country a better place. Now the Republican party is run by a bunch of shills and quitters like Rove and Palin. They've scared guys like McCain -- who used to be like one of those Eisenhower Republicans -- into being callow clones of themselves.

oojc said...

Hee Hee, Mark's really got them on this one. Guess what? Newsflash: Obama's not a liberal.

Tess said...

Mark--I know you stopped calling them names but there's no other explanation for people that think the Barack Obama is a socialist. They're crazy. I have no problem admitting it. Their own fear has overcome them to the point of irrational behavior. They're not going to listen to anything you say because they are programmed to think that you lie about everything. It's nice that you have this blog but what's the point? You're not going to get through to them and you don't have enough liberals that post here to offer more insight.

BLK should be a staff writer here by the way.

6Kings said...

"Obama is leading straight down the middle: he's a technocrat more interested in making the country function well, helping sick people keep their health care, keeping people in their own homes, getting people back to work, and putting the economy back on track, rather than running some ideological train wreck down our throats." - blk

Ha ha ha...good one. I guess it is opposite day right?

Haplo9 said...

Standard Mark MO - throw crap against the wall and hope it sticks to something.

Here's a difficult question for you: when Obama is criticized these days, is it primarily for his economic policies, or for his police/military/war on terror policies? Which policies are the tea parties focused on? Which are the Republicans focused on?

>Obama's not a liberal.

You know, I could kind of agree with you when it comes to war on terror type stuff - he has mostly continued what W did. When it comes to economics? Only in fantasyland.

>he's a technocrat more interested in making the country function well, helping sick people keep their health care, keeping people in their own homes, getting people back to work, and putting the economy back on track, rather than running some ideological train wreck down our throats.

Here's a crazy idea - while Obama may well be interested in doing all those things, the primary effect of his policies will be to make those things worse than they were before. Thus, many people oppose him. He suffers from the same delusion as Mark and most liberals like him - that you can acquire the wisdom to tweak parts of the economy just so in order to create the outcomes you desire. Yet you only succeed in making things worse, and then presume that since your ideology can't be wrong, you didn't do it hard enough. Fortunately, >50% of Americans still see though that, despite Mark's (being a teacher) best effort.

Tess said...

Haplo9--How do you know all of this? Do you have a Crystal Ball? It sounds to me like wishful thinking. I don't see any evidence that GOP policies have improved anything. They made the economy bad in the 1980s and nearly destroyed it in the 00s. The past 30 years have shown me failure due to conservative policies (Reagan, Bush II) and success due to liberal policies (Clinton). Define "tweak" parts of the economy.

Haplo9 said...

Tess:
Where did I say that GOP policies would be the magic elixir that would cure everything? Voter revulsion at the Democratic agenda does not equal enthusiasm for whatever the GOP is selling. Certainly 2000-2006 should have taught a lot of people that the GOP cannot be trusted with the levers of power either. It's just that the Democrats ratcheted up the terrible enough to make the Repubs look good in comparison.

>The past 30 years have shown me failure due to conservative policies (Reagan, Bush II) and success due to liberal policies (Clinton).

Care to elucidate which policies you refer to? Hopefully, you aren't engaging in the partisan's pastime - "hey, Clinton was a Democrat, so every policy enacted during his tenure was 'liberal'! The makeup of Congress is irrelevant!"

>Define "tweak" parts of the economy.

The belief that you can pass a law that will make certain things better and yet not have negative side effects. Call the arrogance of a technocrat. Consider:

The home tax credit merely took demand for housing from the future to stimulate present sales. Unsurprisingly, demand for housing crashed down when the credit ended. How did spending that taxpayer money help anything?

Ditto for the cash for clunkers.

The health care overhaul, while it would be a stretch to say it is merely a tweak, has just begun to have its negative side effects. We see premiums rising as a result of the law, certain coverages being dropped by insurance companies, and nearly weekly we discover new things in the bill that have nothing to do with healthcare. Not to mention the federal power grab that the individual mandate represents.

To some extent, this is politics. Politicians will emphasize the benefits of whatever law they are pushing, and avoid talking about the tradeoffs, whether or not they have some conception of what those tradeoffs are. That doesn't make it any less of a shame that we voters fall for it.

Angela said...

[We see premiums rising as a result of the law]

My premiums have gone up every year for the last 12 years. It wouldn't make any difference if a health care law was passed or not. They would still go up.

Federal power grab? It seems to me the government just handed the insurance companies millions of new customers which means more power for them-not us.

Mark Ward said...

Hap, I think you are confusing unintended consequences and tradeoffs which are two different principles in economics. UI would fall under incentives and how people respond to them.

And Angela is correct. Premiums were going to rise no matter what the government did.

Tess said...

Haplo9-I don't see where the Democrats have "ratcheted up the terrible." Our economy was falling fast and they stopped the skid. We might not be back in perfect shape but we are a damned sight better than we would be had nothing been done. Much of the "horror" of the Democrats is baseless and feeds a frenzy of irrationality. As Mark said awhile back, it comes from a lot frustration and fear that are in people's lives. These are emotional reactions that have nothing to do with the facts on the ground.

rld said...

What are the facts on the ground?

oojc said...

I think one major one would be the where GDP was when Obama took office and where it is now.

Damn Teabaggers said...

We might not be back in perfect shape but we are a damned sight better than we would be had nothing been done.

She's right guys. Let's not forget that had the Democrats done nothing, unemployment would have skyrocketed to...

...eight percent.

jeff c said...

There's absolutely no evidence that you can't point to, DT, that would prove your statement. Unless you have magically built a time machine and alternate universe viewer. The consensus was that we did the best we could with what we had and doing nothing would've been worse.

sw said...

yeah well your consensus sucks jeff c.

Damn Teabaggers said...

There's absolutely no evidence that you can't point to, DT, that would prove your statement. Unless you have magically built a time machine and alternate universe viewer.

Precisely. Which makes this,

The consensus was that we did the best we could with what we had and doing nothing would've been worse.

equivalent to, "We're taking the word of the same people who warned back before they "did the best they could with what they had" that if they did nothing, unemployment would skyrocket to eight percent.

So... you can claim what I'm saying is complete and utter bullshit, and I won't argue a peep. All I'll do point out that it is bullshit in precisely equal measure to how much bullshit it was Back when it was originally fearmongered.

Or are you claiming that the original perpetrators of that bullshit line "magically built a time machine and alternate universe viewer"? They must have stepped into the wrong alternate universe, huh?

juris imprudent said...

UI would fall under incentives

WTF?

You been reading some economix?

Mark Ward said...

I meant UC...just a typo.

juris imprudent said...

Unintended consequences should not come as a surprise to any incentive based system. You get what you create an incentive for. The shock usually is that the morons writing law don't understand this, and it is thus an unintended consequence (at least to them).

Mark Ward said...

Right, I agree. Tradeoffs are related but definitely different animal all together.