Obama’s Claims About Cracking Down on Medicare/Medicaid Fraud Are Bogus

President Barack Obama is out and abroad stumping like mad for his embattled health insurance “reform” plan, claiming now that his administration will “crack down” on $100 billion in annual “waste and fraud” in the Medicare and Medicaid systems. This new tough rhetoric is meant to win over some of the conservative opposition that sees all government programs as inherently wasteful, inefficient and corrupt. But the claim itself is bogus.

Graham Tries To Cut Deal With White House On Guantanamo Closure

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told the White House on Sunday that there is only one way to close Guantánamo Bay: by abandoning civilian 9/11 trials.

Graham said Sunday that if the White House agrees to try self-professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-conspirators in military tribunals, he will help the president get the votes needed to close the Guantánamo Bay prison facilities.

How Are Recess Appointments Like Filibusters?

We’ve grown used to hearing “progressives” urge Obama to make laws with signing statements and executive orders. The treaty he’s using to occupy Iraq never went to the Senate for ratification. His list of Americans to assassinate was never authorized by Congress. The Fourth Amendment and habeas corpus are not as dearly treasured as people pretended they were when doing so could make a Republican president look bad. But recess appointments is a new one.

White House Repeats Pentagon Lies About Guantanamo “Recidivists”

What is to be done about the idiocy that has spread, like a poisonous but imperceptible gas, from the Pentagon to Congress, and is now wafting through the White House, deranging all it touches? As it travels, this dismal infection transforms statistical impossibilities into magic numbers, which appear, to the uninformed observer, to confirm the most shameless lies of former Vice President Dick Cheney: that Guantánamo was teeming with hardcore terrorists, who couldn’t wait to “return to the battlefield.”

Bipartisan Group Of Lawamkers Introduce Bill To Block 9/11 Trial

A bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced legislation Tuesday to prohibit the Department of Justice from prosecuting self-professed 9/11 mastermind and four other co-conspirators in federal court. The bill, sponsored by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), would restrict the Justice Department from using funds to pay for a trial within the U.S. court system. Graham and other lawmakers in want the alleged 9/11 perpetrators to be tried before controversial military commissions.

Can The White House Control The Media?

Now that one of every four Americans gets the news online, a communications authority wonders if the White House is still able to control the news. “The transformation of media has not only undermined the imperial institutions of the mainstream media; it has undermined the imperial Presidency,” writes Ken Auletta, a media authority, in the January 25th The New Yorker.

Obama Administration Unveils System To Prevent Loss of White House E-mails

Pursuant to a settlement reached between the National Security Archive and the White House Executive Office of the President (EOP), the White House today issued a letter describing critical aspects of the EOP unclassified network e-mail preservation and archiving system now used in the White House. Among other specifics, the letter describes:

Success of Afghanistan Troop Surge Doubted

“There isn’t the slightest possibility that the course laid out by Barack Obama in his Dec. 1 speech (at West Point) will halt or even slow the downward spiral toward defeat in Afghanistan,” writes Thomas Johnson in the current “Foreign Policy” magazine. And for emphasis, he adds the word “None.”

Govt Official Fired For Writing Critical Op-Eds About Gitmo Military Commissions

So much for the First Amendment.
Morris Davis, the retired Air Force Colonel who served as the Chief Prosecutor of the Military Commissions at Guantánamo from September 2005 until his resignation in October 2007, has just lost his job at the Congressional Research Service (a branch of the Library of Congress) for writing, in his personal [...]

Congress Won’t Vote On Single-Payer Health Care

Congressman Anthony Weiner, D-New York, has agreed with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi not to have a floor vote on his Medicare for All bill. A press release from Congressmen Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, and House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (sponsor of HR 676, a single payer bill) opposing it helped tip the scale.