Stephen Lendman - Obama Approves Draconian Police State Law

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Obama-Approves-Draconian-P-by-Stephen-Lendman-111216-863.html

December 16, 2011 By Stephen Lendman Obama supports draconian FY 2012 National Defense Authorization Act provisions. Justification given is national security and war on terror hokum. Obama Approves Draconian Police State Law - by Stephen Lendman On December 16, Obama's signature will head America closer to full-blown tyranny. Obama supports draconian FY 2012 National Defense Authorization Act provisions. Justification given is national security and war on terror hokum. Henceforth, anyone anywhere, including US citizens, may be indefinitely held without charge or trial, based solely on suspicions, spurious allegations or none at all. No reasonable proof is needed, just suspicions that those detained pose threats. Henceforth, indefinite detentions can follow mere membership (past or present) or support for suspect organizations.  Presidents now have unchecked dictatorial powers to arrest, interrogate and indefinitely detain law-abiding citizens if accused of potentially posing a threat. Constitutional, statute and international laws won't apply. Martial law will replace them if so ordered.

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Steven Rosenfeld - Obama Reverses Himself: Administration Won't Veto 'Global Battlefield' Indefinite Detentions Measure

By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet

Posted on December 14, 2011, Printed on December 15, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153450/obama_reverses_himself%3A_administration_won%27t_veto_%27global_battlefield%27_indefinite_detentions_measure

The Obama administration Tuesday reversed itself and said it would not veto a major 2012 defense bill that expands the American military’s authority to arrest suspected terrorists anywhere in the world—including Americans on U.S. soil—and hold them indefinitely without charge or the right to a civilian trial.

“We have concluded that the [defense bill’s] language does not challenge or constrain the President’s ability to collect intelligence, incapacitate dangerous terrorists, and protect the American people,” Press Secretary Jay Carney said in a written statement. “The President’s senior advisers will not recommend a veto.”

Only two weeks ago Carney told reporters that Obama stood by his veto threat. The reversal by the White House will now subject the president to an unprecedented lobbying campaign by retired generals, intelligence officers, and myriad civil rights organizations to reject the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act.

“If President Obama signs this bill, it will damage both his legacy and American’s reputation for upholding the rule of law,” said Laura W. Murphy, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “The last time Congress passed indefinite detention legislation was during the McCarthy era and President Truman had the courage to veto that bill. We hope that the president will consider the long view of history before codifying indefinite detention without charge or trial.”

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John MacArthur - President Obama Richly Deserves to Be Dumped

Published on Wednesday, December 14, 2011 by The Providence Journal (Rhode Island)

by John R. MacArthur

http://www.providencejournal.com/

As evidence of a failed Obama presidency accumulates, criticism of his administration is mounting from liberal Democrats who have too much moral authority to be ignored.

Most prominent among these critics is veteran journalist Bill Moyers, whose October address to a Public Citizen gathering puts the lie to our barely Democratic president’s populist pantomime, acted out last week in a Kansas speech decrying the plight of “innocent, hardworking Americans.” In his talk, Moyers quoted an authentic Kansas populist, Mary Eizabeth Lease, who in 1890 declared, “Wall Street owns the country.. . .Money rules.. . .The [political] parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us.”

A former aide to Lyndon Johnson who knows politics from the inside, Moyers then delivered the coup de grace: “[Lease] should see us now. John Boehner calls on the bankers, holds out his cup, and offers them total obeisance from the House majority if only they fill it. Barack Obama criticizes bankers as fat cats, then invites them to dine at a pricey New York restaurant where the tasting menu runs to $195 a person.”

As it happens, Moyers’s remarks anticipated the trenchant question posed in an interview by another prominent liberal, Barbara Ehrenreich, just after billionaire Michael Bloomberg and mayors of other cities cleared public spaces of Occupy Wall Street protesters: “Where in all this was Obama? Why couldn’t he have picked up the phone and called the mayors of Portland and Oakland and said: ‘Go easy on these people. They represent the anger and aspirations of the majority.’ Would that have been so difficult?” Well, yes, particularly if your principal occupation is shaking down bankers and brokers for campaign donations on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

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Stephen Lendman - Orwell and Beyond, Legislating Tyranny in America

By Stephen Lendman

Global Research, December 14, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28205

Obama won't prosecute CIA torturers, Wall Street crooks, other corporate criminals, lawless war profiteers, or other venal high-level civilian or government officials.

Instead, expect him to sign into law (or at least tacitly approve) indefinite military detentions of US citizens allegedly associated with terrorist groups, with or without corroborating evidence.

Post-9/11, US freedoms and other democratic values dramatically eroded. Enactment of police state provisions in the FY 2012 National Defense Authorization Act comes closer to ending them entirely.

On December 5, the ACLU headlined, "Indefinite Detention, Endless Worldwide War and the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)," saying:

Enactment of this measure will authorize "the military to pick up and imprison people, including US citizens, without charging them or putting them on trial."

Secretly with no hearings, both Houses are rushing to complete a "joint version" before leaving for Christmas break. "Fundamental American values and freedoms are on the line." Given the stakes, they're perilously hanging by a thread.

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Danny Schechter - Bull Moose or Bull Shoot: Is Obama Changing His Stance Towards Wall Street?

By Danny Schechter

Author of The Crime of Our Time

Is Obama changing?

Many in the Occupy Wall Street Movement are patting their efforts on the back, and even claiming credit for what looks like a shift by President Obama towards a more engaged campaign discussing economic fairness.

The President’s speech in Kansas was modeled on remarks made by the Republican Bull Moose Teddy Roosevelt in 1910. There’s nothing like quoting a Republican for credible centrist positioning. (Note: he quotes TR, not FDR.)

Will he embrace GOP Pres Eisenhower’s warning about the Military Industrial Complex next? Unlikely.

Richard Eskow was quick to salute the new Obama:

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Eliot Spitzer - How to Turn the President's Nice Words into Action

By Eliot Spitzer, Slate

Posted on December 9, 2011, Printed on December 10, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153390/eliot_spitzer%3A_how_to_turn_the_president%27s_nice_words_into_action

On Tuesday, in Osawatomie, Kan., President Obama gave a glorious and powerful speech that was a testament to the enduring appeal of one of our greatest political figures: Theodore Roosevelt. The president harnessed the economic principles of the Progressive Era and applied them to the economic realities of today. He made an argument for a dynamic government that invests based upon principles of equity and opportunity for all; a government that fosters a genuine robust capitalism based on principles of true competition and market integrity. The difference between the president’s vision of government and that of his potential Republican presidential opponents is vast. The difference between the president’s speech and his own governance over the past three years is, unfortunately, only marginally smaller.

The president has tried to wear the mantle of several presidents recently: Truman, for his attacks on a do-nothing congress; Eisenhower for his careful centrism; Clinton, for his willingness to invoke executive authority when the legislative branch failed. Yet it is Theodore Roosevelt whom President Obama should stick with, Theodore Roosevelt whose passion and principles of true reform have the most relevance today.

Obama’s speech was a welcome tonic, an indication of a new direction that might be taken. So who deserves credit for nudging the president to change his focus and tone? Occupy Wall Street. The president’s speech—which might be viewed as the opening salvo of the presidential race—was defined by OWS. Growth, fairness, and opportunity have replaced deficit reduction as the central theme of American politics. I even wonder whether Judge Rakoff would have issued his wonderful opinion rejecting as inadequate the SEC-Citibank settlement without the foundation laid by OWS. Judge Rakoff’s opinion is the judicial analogue to OWS: a visceral statement of discontent; a judicial “I have had enough of this”—albeit in more modulated prose.

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James Petras - Obama Raises the Military Stakes -- Confrontation on the Borders with China and Russia

By Prof. James Petras

Global Research, December 10, 2011 http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28144

Introduction After suffering major military and political defeats in bloody ground wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, failing to buttress long-standing clients in Yemen, Egypt and Tunisia and witnessing the disintegration of puppet regimes in Somalia and South Sudan, the Obama regime has learned nothing: Instead he has turned toward greater military confrontation with global powers, namely Russia and China. Obama has adopted a provocative offensive military strategy right on the frontiers of both China and Russia . After going from defeat to defeat on the periphery of world power and not satisfied with running treasury-busting deficits in pursuit of empire building against economically weak countries, Obama has embraced a policy of encirclement and provocations against China, the world’s second largest economy and the US’s most important creditor, and Russia, the European Union’s principle oil and gas provider and the world’s second most powerful nuclear weapons power. This paper addresses the Obama regime’s highly irrational and world-threatening escalation of imperial militarism. We examine the global military, economic and domestic political context that gives rise to these policies. We then examine the multiple points of conflict and intervention in which Washington is engaged, from Pakistan , Iran , Libya , Venezuela , Cuba and beyond. We will then analyze the rationale for military escalation against Russia and China as part of a new offensive moving beyond the Arab world ( Syria , Libya ) and in the face of the declining economic position of the EU and the US in the global economy. We will then outline the strategies of a declining empire, nurtured on perpetual wars, facing global economic decline, domestic discredit and a working population reeling from the long-term, large-scale dismantling of its basic social programs.

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Kevin Drum - Next Year's Big Bout: Real Obama vs. Fantasy Obama

By Kevin Drum | Mother Jones  Tue Dec. 6, 2011 

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/12/next-years-big-bout-real-obama-vs-fantasy-obama

---

In the LA Times today, Spike Dolomite Ward lays out Barack Obama's essential political problem for all the world to see. The recession hit her family hard, she lost her health insurance, and then she got cancer: [1]

Fortunately for me, I've been saved by the federal government's Pre-existing Condition Insurance Plan, something I had never heard of before needing it. It's part of President Obama's healthcare plan, one of the things that has already kicked in, and it guarantees access to insurance for U.S. citizens with preexisting conditions who have been uninsured for at least six months.

…Which brings me to my apology. I was pretty mad at Obama before I learned about this new insurance plan. I had changed my registration from Democrat to Independent, and I had blacked out the top of the "h" on my Obama bumper sticker, so that it read, "Got nope" instead of "got hope." I felt like he had let down the struggling middle class. My son and I had campaigned for him, but since he took office, we felt he had let us down.

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Washington's Blog - The Real Reason for Obama’s Threat to Veto the Indefinite Detention Bill (Hint: It’s Not to Protect Liberty)

By Washington's Blog

Global Research, December 5, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28055

Obama Wants to Veto the Indefinite Detention Bill Because It Would Hold the U.S. to the Geneva Convention

I – like everyone else – am horrified by the Senate’s passage of legislation that would allow for indefinite detention of Americans.

And at first, I – like many others – assumed that Obama’s threat to veto the bill might be a good thing. But the truth is much more disturbing.

As former Wall Street Street editor and columnist Paul Craig Roberts correctly notes:

The Obama regime’s objection to military detention is not rooted in concern for the constitutional rights of American citizens. The regime objects to military detention because the implication of military detention is that detainees are prisoners of war. As Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin put it: Should somebody determined “to be a member of an enemy force who has come to this nation or is in this nation to attack us as a member of a foreign enemy, should that person be treated according to the laws of war? The answer is yes.”

Detainees treated according to the laws of war have the protections of the Geneva Conventions. They cannot be tortured. The Obama regime opposes military detention, because detainees would have some rights. These rights would interfere with the regime’s ability to send detainees to CIA torture prisons overseas. [Yes, Obama is still apparently allowing "extraordinary renditions" to torture people abroad.] This is what the Obama regime means when it says that the requirement of military detention denies the regime “flexibility.”

The Bush/Obama regimes have evaded the Geneva Conventions by declaring that detainees are not POWs, but “enemy combatants,” “terrorists,” or some other designation that removes all accountability from the US government for their treatment.

By requiring military detention of the captured, Congress is undoing all the maneuvering that two regimes have accomplished in removing POW status from detainees.

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Paul Craig Roberts - The Obama Regime Has No Constitutional Scruples

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Obama-Regime-Has-No-Co-by-paul-craig-roberts-111205-601.html

December 5, 2011 By paul craig roberts Under AUMF, the executive branch has total discretion as to who it detains and how it treats detainees. Moreover, as the executive branch has total discretion, no one can find out what the executive branch is doing, who detainees are, or what is being done to them. Codification brings accountability, and the executive branch does not want accountability. During an interview with RT on December 1, I said that the US Constitution had been shredded by the failure of the US Senate to protect American citizens from the detainee amendment sponsored by Republican John McCain and Democrat Carl Levin to the Defense Authorization Bill. The amendment permits indefinite detention of US citizens by the US military.  I also gave my opinion that the fact that all but two Republican members of the Senate had voted to strip American citizens of their constitutional protections and of the protection of the Posse Comitatus Act indicated that the Republican Party had degenerated into a Gestapo Party. These conclusions are self-evident, and I stand by them.

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Bill Quigley - 20 Ways the Obama Administration Has Intruded on Your Rights

By Bill Quigley, AlterNet

Posted on November 30, 2011, Printed on December 4, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153283/20_ways_the_obama_administration_has_intruded_on_your_rights

The Obama administration has affirmed, continued and expanded almost all of the draconian domestic civil liberties intrusions pioneered under the Bush administration. Here are twenty examples of serious assaults on the domestic rights to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, the right to privacy, the right to a fair trial, freedom of religion, and freedom of conscience that have occurred since the Obama administration has assumed power. Consider these and then decide if there is any fundamental difference between the Bush presidency and the Obama presidency in the area of domestic civil liberties.

Patriot Act

On May 27, 2011, President Obama, over widespread bipartisan objections, approved a Congressional four year extension of controversial parts of the Patriot Act that were set to expire. In March of 2010, Obama signed a similar extension of the Patriot Act for one year. These provisions allow the government, with permission from a special secret court, to seize records without the owner’s knowledge, conduct secret surveillance of suspicious people who have no known ties to terrorist groups and to obtain secret roving wiretaps on people.

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The European Union Times - Obama Issues Ron Paul “Kill Order” As Russia Prepares For War

The European Union Times - 2011-11-30

http://www.eutimes.net/2011/11/obama-issues-ron-paul-kill-order-as-russia-prepares-for-war/

The Federal Security Service (FSB) is reporting today that the “secret letter” sent to Prime Minister Putin by Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda contains a warning that United States President Barack Obama has issued an executive-level “kill order” against US Congressman Ron Paul over fears this charismatic politician, who many believe could capture the Republican Presidential 2012 nomination, is about to expose to all Americans what can only be described as the largest mass theft in human history. The “kill order” is a metaphor for silencing down congressman Ron Paul in the mass media as if he doesn’t exist.

According to this report, Prime Minister Noda first became aware of this “kill order” after a private meeting with Obama at last weeks ASEAN Summit meeting in Indonesia when the American President expressed his “unconstrained joy” over the toppling of the Greek and Italian governments in bloodless coups by EU banksters who installed to run these countries unelected former Goldman Sachs executives.   

Not known to many Americans is that the giant global investment firm Goldman Sachs put Obama into office by being its top donor and after winning the Presidency put so many of its former executives into the US government it is known as the “Wall Street Cabinet.”

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Andrew Levine - The Lessons of Obamamania

November 30, 2011

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/11/30/the-lessons-of-obamamania/

by ANDREW LEVINE

Ten years ago in America, War Party fervor was on the rise, the media was in tow, and many a liberal was on board.  Thus began the Bush-Cheney era, one of the darkest moments in American history.  Those years seem like only yesterday, probably because on matters of substance – keeping the perpetual war machine going, undermining personal freedoms and the rule of law, encouraging environmental indifference while courting ecological disaster, and making the world safe for the corporate “persons” who own our duopoly party system — the Obama administration has been more or less continuous with George W. Bush’s.

What seems unreal was that brief interlude, begun just four winters ago as the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries loomed, and lasting into the summer of 2009, when liberal hearts and minds succumbed to the belief that Barack Obama would put an end to decades of Reaganite (neolibleral) depredations, and that we could then take up where the New Deal and Great Society left off.  That Obamamaniacal moment now seems a lifetime away.

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Obama Is Watering Down Regulations More Than Bush, Study Shows

Nov. 30 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama, criticized by Republicans for slowing job growth by over regulating, has weakened proposed rules at a greater rate than President George W. Bush, according to a new study.

The White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs changed 76 percent of agency rules submitted for review under Obama, compared with 64 percent under his Republican predecessor, according to the study from the Center for Progressive Reform. Obama also has ignored requirements that he disclose documents exchanged between OIRA and federal agencies, the report said.

“We are disappointed because we thought President Obama had great potential,” Rena Steinzor, president of the center, a Washington-based research group that supports health and environmental rules, said in an interview. “He promised us he would be transparent, but he is just as bad as Bush.”

The scope of government regulation has emerged as a major issue in the 2012 presidential race and on Capitol Hill. Republican presidential candidates have accused Obama of stifling job creation by imposing rules on business, and House Republicans have vowed to rein in proposed regulations on everything from the environment to health care to banking.

Industry Dominates Meetings

In a Nov. 9 presidential debate focused on the economy, Texas Governor Rick Perry said “it’s the regulatory world that is killing America.” Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota said, “Our biggest problem right now is our regulatory burden.”

The regulatory affairs office’s 1,080 meetings over the past decade have been heavily dominated by business interests, according to the study. Industry representatives made up 65 percent of meeting participants, compared with 12 percent representing public interest groups.

Of the top 30 groups that met with OIRA over the decade, 17 were from industry, including the American Chemistry Council, Exxon Mobil Corp. and the American Forest and Paper Association. Only five were environmental groups, including the National Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club.

Groups that met with OIRA were 29 percent more likely to get a rule changed than those who were not, according to the study released yesterday.

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Steven Wishnia - Obama Granted Fewer Requests for Clemency Than Any Other President in the Last Century

Wednesday 23 November 2011

by: Steven Wishnia, AlterNet 

http://www.truth-out.org/obama-granted-fewer-requests-clemency-any-other-president-last-century/1322328265

 President Barack Obama’s Nov. 21 pardons of three marijuana offenders are extremely unlikely to indicate any shift in the White House’s pot policies. The three had already served their sentences.

More important is his commutation of crack dealer Eugenia Jennings’ sentence, the first clemency request Obama has granted since he took office. Groups that advocate eliminating the difference between penalties for crack and powder cocaine pointed to her case as an example of the system’s injustice.

"Her case screamed out for commutation,” said Kara Gotsch of the Sentencing Project in Washington, DC.

Jennings, 34, of Alton, Illinois, will be released next month after serving 10 years in prison. A mother of three children, she was diagnosed with cancer earlier this year. Convicted of selling slightly less than a half-ounce of crack (actually, trading it to an undercover informant for designer clothing), she received a mandatory minimum sentence of 21 years and eight months because she had two previous convictions for selling about a gram of crack.

“Now is that fair? It’s not,” the judge who sentenced her in 2001 stated, “Your whole life has been a life of deprivation, misery, and whippings, and there’s no way to unwind that. But the truth of the matter is it’s not in my hands. As I told you, Congress has determined that the best way to deal with people who are troublesome is we just lock ‘em up.”

Jennings was not eligible to have her sentence reduced under the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, a long-sought reduction in the penalties for crack cocaine. The previous law, enacted in 1986 at the peak of the panic about crack, set a five-year minimum sentence for possession of five grams of the drug (then worth less than $500), the same penalty as for half a kilogram of powder cocaine (then worth more than $8,000). The results were that federal prosecutors primarily went after small-timers. In 2005, more than 55 percent of federal crack defendants were street-level dealers.

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Dave Lindorff - Time for Obama to Act to End Police-State Violence Against the Occupiers

Monday 21 November 2011

by: Dave Lindorff , This Can't Be Happening [3] | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/time-obama-act-end-police-state-violence-against-occupiers/1321974759 

The growing number of video clips and photos showing police in Darth Vader-like riot gear assaulting peaceful demonstrators with everything from tear gas and mace to truncheons, point-blank shots with beanbags and rubber bullets, and of course the ubiquitous fist and club, have made a bad joke out of claims that America is either the land of the free or the home of the brave.

Scott Olson, a veteran of America's Iraq War, suffered a severe brain injury that nearly killed him, and left him with difficulty speaking, thanks to a shot to his head by an attacking police officer in Oakland who was firing teargas canisters from a gun-like weapon. Olsen is lucky to be alive and will hopefully recover over time. A comrade, veteran Kayvan Sabehgi, who was retreating from advancing police that same night with his hands tucked in his pockets, can be seen being chased and so brutally beaten [4] by another attacking thug cop that he had to be hospitalized for treatment of a lacerated spleen (although the cops left him writing in agony in a cell for hours before sending him to the hospital).

Old women, pregnant mothers-to-be, and even children have been hit with pepper spray, teargassed and terrorized by police goons in New York, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Sacramento, Dallas, Chicago, Boston and elsewhere in what is almost certainly a coordinated attack on the Occupy Movement being run out of Washington.

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William Pfaff - Why Does Obama Suddenly Want a War With China?

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/why_does_obama_suddenly_want_a_war_with_china_20111122/

Posted on Nov 22, 2011

By William Pfaff

One might think that a bitter Central Asian war in Afghanistan, spilling into Pakistan, with no sign of ending, and an as yet ambiguous military commitment to a defeated and incompletely reconstituted Iraq, now overshadowed by Iran and the Arab Awakening across the Middle East, would be enough for President Barack Obama to cope with.

He was, after all, elected to reduce American military commitments. He was going to end things in Iraq, fight the “right war” in Afghanistan, which Gen. David Petraeus told him could be wound up in a year. Unaccustomed to generals as he might have been, he surely did not expect “Af-Pak” to turn into a permanent activity and a source of income for the Pentagon and the American arms industry.

Why then does he now want a war with China? No one seems to have made much of this in American press reports and comment, but others have noticed, most of all in China. His journey to Asia this month proclaimed a Pax Americana for Asia—which as such is absurd. The effort is likely to become just the opposite: a steadily deepening and costly engagement in suppressing China’s attempt to reclaim the Asian preeminence it held for more than a thousand years.

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[Video] Russian Reporter Gives Obama the Middle Finger on National Television

via Russian Television:

Russian news anchor shows Obama the middle finger - November 21, 2011 Vidéo mirrorthis2010 sélectionnée dans Actualité

In the footage, Tatyana Limanova, an award-winning senior newsreader at the channel, can be seen briskly reading out an item about how Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has just assumed the rotating chairmanship of the Asia Pacific Cooperation organisation. She is then heard to say that the post "has (previously) been held by Barack Obama" before mechanically and unambiguously raising her left arm and showing the camera her raised middle finger in an offensive gesture that is sometimes known as "flipping the bird."

The channel, which goes out to 120 million people across Russia, has declined to comment. But sources close to it have tried to defuse the row by claiming that the newsreader had believed she was off camera at the time and merely providing a voice-over for a report. According to the same storyline, the rude gesture was intended for studio technicians who had been trying to put her off her stride.

Richard Eskow - Will Obama and Capitol Dems Betray the Middle Class, Seniors and the Poor?

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Super-Collusion-Will-Obam-by-Richard-RJ-Eskow-111112-212.html

November 12, 2011 By Richard (RJ) Eskow The President and Congressional Democrats are about to betray everything Democrats once stood for. It's a terrible mistake to ask the Americans who were wounded most by deficit-causing behavior to carry so much of the cost of fixing it. And to propose cuts to Medicare and Medicaid simply to preserve low tax rates for the wealthy is nothing less than a moral obscenity. Two new reports suggest that the President and Congressional Democrats are about to betray everything Democrats once stood for. Under pressure from Barack Obama, Democrats on the "Super Committee" have sketched out an appalling "compromise" proposal that would almost certainly doom both their 2012 electoral chances and his own. They'd have it coming. Their draft plan literally takes crutches away from poor people to protect tax breaks for the wealthy.

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