from mike whitney:
Barack Obama rode into office in January, 2008 on a wave of optimism. By the time the ballots are counted in Tuesday's midterm elections, Obama's personal approval ratings will have fallen to historic lows and he will be universally recognized as the man who brought ruin on the Democratic party.
While still popular among party loyalists, the president has become radioactive among independents--the critical group of “swing voters” who have fled Camp Obama en masse frustrated with both the lack of audacity and/or change. No one figured they were electing George W. Bush to a third term in office when they cast their vote for the inspiring senator from Illinois two years ago. But that's what they got. To say that supporters are disappointed in Obama's performance, is a gross understatement of the pessimism that's spread like Kudzu among the party faithful. People have become increasingly cynical as they realize that neither party provides a path to real structural change. The system is broken; Obama has merely exposed the rot at the heart of American democracy.
related: why i don't trust the tea party
US selection updates/post-mortem, part1:
court denies habeas corpus rights
from nytimes:
A federal appeals court ruled Friday that three men who had been detained by the United States military for years without trial in Afghanistan had no recourse to American courts. The decision was a broad victory for the Obama administration in its efforts to hold terrorism suspects overseas for indefinite periods without judicial oversight.
The detainees, two Yemenis and a Tunisian who say they were captured outside Afghanistan, contend that they are not terrorists and are being mistakenly imprisoned at the American military prison at Bagram Air Base.
But a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled unanimously that the three had no right to habeas corpus hearings, in which judges would review evidence against them and could order their release. The court reasoned that Bagram was on the sovereign territory of another government and emphasized the “pragmatic obstacles” of giving hearings to detainees “in an active theater of war.”
The ruling dealt a severe blow to wider efforts by lawyers to extend a landmark 2008 Supreme Court ruling granting habeas corpus rights to prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. A lower court judge had previously ruled that the three Bagram detainees were entitled to the same rights, although he had found that others captured in Afghanistan and held there were not.
A lawyer for the detainees, Tina Foster, said that if the precedent stood, Mr. Obama and future presidents would have a free hand to “kidnap people from other parts of the world and lock them away for the rest of their lives” without having to prove in court that their suspicions about such prisoners were accurate.
obamessiah updates:
video: barack obama's new world order*
from raw story:
According to a newly declassified document, the New York Times reports, a plan by former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sought to suspend habeas corpus during wartime, with the intention of imprisoning thousands of Americans indefinitely.
Hoover's plan was submitted to the White House twelve days after the start of the Korean War. Under the plan, approximately 12,000 people deemed as "potentially dangerous" to national security, 97% of whom were American citizens, would have been rounded up and sent to military prisons without due process.
