Some Good Points from Steve M.

From Steve M.'s blog today:  No More Mister Nice Blog

 I think I pretty much agree with him.

New Dog

I see that the Obamas got another dog.  I'm waiting to hear what Constitutional crisis this has caused.

Obama (and Bloomberg) Have Put Themselves in Bad Company

In the Bush/Cheney (or Cheney/Bush?) disastrous eight years, they used the phony claim of "saving lives" to justify torture.  It is embarrassing to see Barack Obama--and now Mayor Bloomberg--use the same false either/or argument:  Obama to justify the NSA's over-the-top surveillance, and Bloomberg to justify racist stop-and-frisk tactics.  If that's their argument, it tells me that they don't have a real argument, so they are resorting to an emotionally loaded euphemism like "saving lives" instead.

I expect as much from Bush/Cheney.  It's embarrassing and sad to have Obama using the same tactic.  Mr. President, you have put yourself in very bad company indeed.

Obama Can Do Better Than This

President Obama has pretty much continued the Bush policies in regard to prosecuting whistleblowers and defending unwarranted surveillance.  His recent pronouncements on the NSA and Snowden have been specious.  I expect more form him that this.  I agree with Kevin Drum of Mother Jones that Friday's speech treated us like five-year-olds.

After listening to all the tortured logic about privacy versus secrecy, I think the arguments are misplaced.  It's really about democracy.  Cutting through all the phony rhetoric, for me it boils down to two points:

• Our government rules with the consent of the governed.
• How can I give my consent if I don't know what you are doing (or--even more troubling--if you lie to me about what you are doing).

My understanding is that at least part of Snowden's motivation is that he thought Americans had a right to know what their government is doing.  We are now having a discussion about that.  We would not be having this discussion if Snowden hadn't done what he did.  For Obama to claim that we would have gotten here anyway is--as Drum says-- laughable.  We are having the discussion because Obama was forced into it.

This is not the high point of the Obama presidency, that's for sure.

Voter Suppression - Official GOP Policy Now

Governor Scott's attempt to suppress the Florida vote in the last election was stymied, but now the activist Supreme Court's ruling has re-energized the neo-Jim Crow efforts of the Republican Party.  This paragraph from today's New York Times story pretty much sums up the bald-faced nature of what Scott and the national Republicans are trying to accomplish.  Can't get the voters to agree with you?  Just eliminate more and more of them.

...Mr. Scott risks angering voters with perhaps little payoff, political strategists said. While securing the integrity of the vote is admirable, they say, there is no evidence that noncitizens in Florida are systematically voting. Last year’s attempt at unearthing noncitizens initially began with a pool of 182,000 names of potential noncitizens, and that was winnowed to a list of 2,600. Those named were sent to election supervisors, who found that many were in fact citizens. Ultimately, the list of possible noncitizen voters shrank to 198. Of those, fewer than 40 had voted illegally.

“It’s a solution in search of a problem,” said Steve Schale, who directed Mr. Obama’s campaign in Florida in 2008 and was a senior adviser in 2012....

"Solution in search of a problem" could be the offical motto of today's Republican Party.  How sad.