(A brief but admittedly tedious setup follows…please bear with me.)
Usually I have no opportunity whatsoever to partake in TV sports for a variety of reasons, though I do have an opportunity to do so from time to time on holidays involving family gatherings. Such an opportunity presented itself on Saturday before Easter, and I had the pleasure of watching the Butler Bulldogs defeat Michigan State to qualify for the Men’s NCAA Basketball championship game; later, we watched much of Duke’s win over West Virginia (it was such a shame that the team’s star player Da’Sean Butler, suffered the ACL injury – we wish him all the best).
(Of course, we now know that Duke defeated Butler last night and ended the Bulldogs’ Cinderella run for the title – congrats to everyone anyway…I should probably dislike “Coach K” and his bunch, but I really don’t.)
Returning to Saturday, though, I should note the following (and yes, I am late with this post, in case you’re wondering). Between the two games, CBS featured a filmed segment with CBS basketball analyst Clark Kellogg playing a game of “H-O-R-S-E” with President Obama (it was renamed “P-O-T-U-S” for the occasion – the requisite conservative ridicule is here). For the benefit of the uninitiated, I should point out that you have to keep making the same type of shot as your competitor. If you miss, you get a letter, and the first player to spell out the five-letter word loses.
(And by the way, though Obama won, I have a very hard time believing that a former player of Kellogg’s ability wouldn’t have beaten him if he weren’t playing the president, but it’s all show-biz anyway of course.)
Now that this setup is out of the way, I should tell you that this got me to thinking of the five “bricks,” or metaphorical bad shots, that this administration has put up over its term (here is my good progressive/liberal disclaimer: I support Obama – every time I wonder too much about him, I just say “Vice President Palin” to myself – but that doesn’t mean I can’t criticize him from time to time when I think he deserves it).
And for the purposes of this post, I’ll revert back to the way the game was originally supposed to be played.
H – As the New York Times told us yesterday (here)…
For more than 20 years, it was settled law, born of bitter experience, that the government may not eavesdrop on people in the United States without a warrant.
Until, that is, after the 9/11 attacks, when President George W. Bush ordered the National Security Agency to ignore the law. When The Times disclosed the spying in late 2005, Mr. Bush argued that the attacks changed everything: Due process and privacy were luxuries the country could no longer afford. Far too many members of Congress bought this argument. Others, afraid of being painted as soft on terror, refused to push back. In 2008, at the White House’s insistence, they expanded the government’s ability to eavesdrop without warrants.
Even that was not enough for the Bush administration, which insisted that targets of the earlier, illegal spying could not sue the government because what happened was “too secret” even to be discussed in court. The Obama administration has embraced the secrecy argument and has used it to block several cases.
Fortunately, it has not completely succeeded.
The chief judge of the Federal District Court in San Francisco, Vaughn Walker, ruled last week that the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was the law of the land for Mr. Bush and that when the government failed to get a warrant to wiretap, it broke the law. He also said that the government could not evade accountability with absurdly broad claims of state secrets.
…
Senator Obama promised repeatedly in the 2008 campaign to reverse Mr. Bush’s many abuses of power. This was one of them. President Obama should read this court ruling with chagrin and eliminate warrantless spying. It is also far past time to stop hiding behind spurious, often ludicrous, claims of national security.
And for a reminder on how we’ve achieved this sorry state, click here.
O – As reported here concerning Afghanistan…
Afghan President Hamid Karzai twice threatened to quit politics and join the Taliban if the West continued to pressure him to enact reforms, legislators said Monday.
Karzai issued the threat during a private meeting with Afghan lawmakers on the weekend. People at the meeting said they thought Karzai's comments were aimed at hardline members of parliament.
The comment is the latest in a string of outbursts that have drawn criticism from foreign backers. Last week, Karzai accused the UN and the international community of carrying out a "vast fraud" as part of a plot to deny him re-election.
White House spokesperson Robert Gibbs called the latest Karzai remarks troubling.
"On behalf of the American people, we're frustrated with the remarks," he told reporters on Monday.
The comments came to light as Karzai paid a visit to the Kandahar City area south of Kabul. It was his first visit to the volatile south in almost 15 months.
If this isn’t a clear message for us to get the hell out of the Afghan narco state and let Karzai sink or swim on his own (to say nothing of saving the lives of our people in the bargain), then I don’t know what is.
R – As TPM tells us here…
A long-awaited internal Justice Department report will essentially clear the lawyers who crafted the legal justification for the Bush Administration's torture policies, reversing the tougher findings of a draft version of the report, according to Newsweek.
The draft version of the Office of Professional Responsibility report recommended that John Yoo and Jay Bybee -- who served in the Office of Legal Counsel and are now a law professor at Berkeley and a federal appeals court judge in Nevada, respectively -- be referred to state bar associations for potential discipline for their role in writing memos that concluded torture was justified.
I realize that this came from the Justice Department of Attorney General Eric Holder and senior DoJ attorney David Margolis, but it has the imprimatur of the Obama Administration, so the president must share some measure of responsibility also.
S – As The Daily Kos tells us here…
The health care reform legislation that President Obama signed recently isn't only about insurance coverage -- there's also a renewal of $50 million per year for five years for abstinence-focused education.
Programs that receive this funding must "teach that abstinence from sexual activity is the only certain way to avoid out-of-wedlock pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and other associated health problems," according to the Department of Health and Human Services. To qualify, they must also teach that sex before marriage is "likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects." These are part of the "A-H definition," requirements for programs to receive abstinence funding under Title V of the Social Security Act.
…
After years of warning the Bush administration and social conservatives that abstinence-only education does not stop teens from having sex, nor does it prevent teen pregnancy, a new study by the Guttmacher Institute confirms what many have feared: that deliberately misinforming teens about sex can have serious consequences and that comprehensive sex education, in addition to the availability of contraception, is the best way to reduce teen pregnancy rates.
And why the Obama Administration apparently doesn’t recognize this is utterly beyond me.
E – As noted here…
President Barack Obama has made comprehensive energy reform a key issue of his presidency, with massive investments in clean energy, initial efforts to confront climate change, and a commitment to “ending our addiction to foreign oil.” Today, Obama announced a sweeping new offshore drilling policy, opening “vast expanses of water along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling” for the first time. This plan would also restore the ban on drilling in Alaska’s Bristol Bay and the West Coast. White House officials “pitched the changes as ways to reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil and create jobs,” the Associated Press reports. For years, however, Obama has correctly explained that new offshore drilling would do nothing to “reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil”…
The New York Times, among others, seems to favor this as a compromise of sorts with the “Drill, Baby, Drill” knuckleheads, though this has won Obama absolutely no favor with, say, Repug Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska or “The Orange One” from Ohio (here). And as noted by Daily Kos diarist Cedwyn here, the NIMBY chorus in the affected states is already tuning up.
So please, Mr. President, no more “air balls” when it comes to the big-picture problem resolution we elected you for. Maybe health care reform was a “bank shot off the glass,” if you will, and dropping into the Repug Maryland conference with the camera was a “jam,” to so speak (here). But from now until November 2012 at least, the “inside game” in the paint, as they say, is what matters, and those are the hardest points to score of all.
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