The latest claim is even more insulting. You do not "support our troops" by denying the principles for which they are fighting. They are not fighting to consolidate authoritarian powers in the president. The "American way of life" is defined by our constitution and specifically the bill of rights. Moreover, the insistence that you do not intend to use authoritarian powers does not alter the fact that you just signed an authoritarian measure. It is not the use but the right to use such powers that defines authoritarian systems.

The almost complete failure of the mainstream media to cover this issue is shocking. Many reporters have bought into the spin of the Obama administration as they did the spin over torture by the Bush administration. Even today, reporters refuse to call waterboarding torture despite the long line of cases and experts defining waterboarding as torture for decades.

<snip>

There are also those who continue the longstanding effort to excuse Obama's horrific record on civil liberties by blaming either others or the times. One successful myth is that there is an exception for citizens. The White House is saying that changes to the law made it unnecessary to veto the legislation. That spin is ridiculous. The changes were the inclusion of some meaningless rhetoric after key amendments protecting citizens were defeated. The provision merely states that nothing in the provisions could be construed to alter Americans' legal rights. Since the Senate clearly views citizens as not just subject to indefinite detention but even to execution without a trial, the change offers nothing but rhetoric to hide the harsh reality.

  - Rick Santorum

I will concede that Obama is neither of the two men to whom you referred, but here's Charlie on the state of our economy:

What are we being asked to unite behind? Austerity. Sacrifice for thee, but not for them. A crippled middle class is being asked, quite seriously, to cripple itself further, and being told that this is all in the national interest. Our great national purpose is being defined, a little at a time, as giving up that which makes life merely economically tolerable for millions of our fellow Americans as a blood offering to The Goddamn Deficit, which has been transformed quite deliberately into an effective antidote to any kind of optimism. How dare all those families struggling to get by on Supplemental Security Income place all that debt on my grandchildren? Nothing has done more to reinforce the narrative of government's being an illegitimate vehicle through which to pursue simple economic justice than the notion that trying to achieve it in the present is a criminal betrayal of a golden future that -- cruelest of all jokes -- is being made impossible by the policies being advocated today.

And this has not been strictly a partisan project, either, although watching the various Republicans traipsing around Iowa trying to demonstrate how absolutely tough they'll be against the powerless is a rather vivid demonstration of the phenomenon. In their annual list of the nation's most overlooked stories, the editors of The New Republic shrewdly dug up a column by Walter Shapiro in which Shapiro pointed out that President Obama's fireside chat on the economy back on July 25 marked a turning point in our national conversation about what was done to our economy over the previous decade. The speech was a dead-assed appeal for a "balanced" approach to reducing the deficit.

[snip]

This was a moment, and the president's response to it was positively tone-deaf. Yes, I know, you campaign in poetry and you govern in prose. But there are all kinds of prose. A feed catalogue is prose, but so is Moby-Dick. Calvin Coolidge spoke in prose, but so did FDR. And, of course, we must never make the perfect the enemy of the good. But you know what else is the enemy of good? Timidity is the enemy of the good. Cruelty is the enemy of the good, and so are selfishness, bigotry, and ignorance. Why perfection is the only enemy of the good that ever seems worth fighting is a good question with which to launch the new year.

[snip]

There are now 146 million Americans who are ranked as "low-income" or "poor." Somebody really should do something about that. How we treat them in our politics is going to be the ultimate test of our moral credibility as a nation. Do we treat this situation as the national disgrace that it is, and commit ourselves as a nation to eliminating it? Or do we turn away from them, blame them for the malaise we feel in our lives, and drink deeply again from the supply-side, trickle-down snake oil? Do we look at the president -- a Democratic president -- and scream that this is no longer tolerable to us as a people? Or do we nod sagely and deplore the lack of civility and bipartisan cooperation in our government and hope that cooler heads will prevail, that the great national purpose of our age is to deprive ourselves further of what was supposed to be the promise of the country in the vague and futile hope that somehow, somewhere, things will get better down the line?

RawStory
BP sues Halliburton over $42 billion oil spill bill

LONDON (Reuters) - BP has called on contractor Halliburton to pay all costs and expenses it incurred to clean up the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, which the oil major previously put at around $42 billion.

Are we to figure is this like a fracture in the fabric of the oligarchy or something?

M

ost folks outside the Country world think of Dolly Parton as a caricature, and on some level, they're not wrong; if anything, I would suggest that the power of her performance lies partially in the dissonance between the perfect, plastic exterior and the inner doubt and strength which she reveals in song. But because the everywoman's dream glamour-self which she has chosen to take on as her own public persona is so up front and out there, it can preempt serious consideration of her music. And that's a shame, because the empowering, truly feminist songs which she has crafted over a long career represent a stellar body of work.

There's a reason why Dolly Parton is celebrated and covered by her peers: under all that glam and glitter is a genuine and perceptive soul, capable of capturing the universal poignancy in the small lives and big dreams of generations of girls and women struggling to break free of societal models. Here's some favorite folkcovers which strip away the rhinestones, the bleached blond hair, and the everpresent bustline, to reveal the true power of the songs, followed by a short bonus set of surprising covers from Parton herself. You'll never listen to Dolly the same way again.

Does the NDAA authorize the indefinite detention of citizens?

No, though it does not foreclose the possibility either. Congress ultimately included language in the NDAA expressly designed to leave this question untouched-that is, governed by pre-existing law, which as we explain below is unsettled on this question.

and further....

the NDAA clarifies that the government possesses detention authority as an option in cases involving members and non-member supporters of al Qaeda, the Taliban, and "associated forces."  The NDAA then goes on to impose certain requirements in cases involving a subset of that detainable group.  The important questions are: Who is in this subset? When must that categorization decision be made? What exactly is mandatory when a person does turn out to be covered? And can the government still find a way to use the civilian trial option instead? The answers to all of these questions make the mandatory detention provision a lot less mandatory than it used to be, and a lot less mandatory than people think.

Does the NDAA authorize the indefinite detention of citizens?

No, though it does not foreclose the possibility either. Congress ultimately included language in the NDAA expressly designed to leave this question untouched-that is, governed by pre-existing law, which as we explain below is unsettled on this question.

and further....

the NDAA clarifies that the government possesses detention authority as an option in cases involving members and non-member supporters of al Qaeda, the Taliban, and "associated forces."  The NDAA then goes on to impose certain requirements in cases involving a subset of that detainable group.  The important questions are: Who is in this subset? When must that categorization decision be made? What exactly is mandatory when a person does turn out to be covered? And can the government still find a way to use the civilian trial option instead? The answers to all of these questions make the mandatory detention provision a lot less mandatory than it used to be, and a lot less mandatory than people think.