US PRESIDENCY AS ACCUMULATIVE ERROR

David Swanson, author of Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union has written a chilling piece of commentary on the state of the American presidency.

Below is an excerpt:

SECOND, I LOOKED AT THE POWER OF WAR. Our Constitution wisely placed it in Congress. It is now in the White House and growing ever stronger. President Obama has demanded and received a larger military budget than Bush ever had, plus a larger war budget on top of that, not to mention the secret budget for some of the spy agencies that engage in war. President Obama continues to insist on funding the wars off the books with so-called emergency supplementals. He's put bases into more nations. He's put more troops in the field. He's expanded the use of mercenaries and contractors. He's dramatically expanded the illegal use of drones to bomb Pakistan and other nations, resulting—among other forms of blowback—a man trying to set off a bomb in Times Square, a man whose father's job used to be guarding nuclear weapons. Obama's Pentagon is pushing hard to use drones in U.S. skies as well. Meanwhile, Obama has—in another badder than Bush innovation—formally authorized secret military action in dozens of nations. He's formally done away with habeas corpus and established the power to imprison people at Bagram and other sites completely outside any legal process. He's kept our death camp at Guantanamo open. President Obama has continued to assert the power to torture, and torture has continued. He's also continued to assert the power to kidnap or "rendition" people and send them to nations that torture. But, most disturbingly, Obama has largely replaced torture with murder. People we would have sought to capture two years ago, we now seek to murder instead. And Obama has claimed the power to assassinate anyone, including American citizens. And, needless to say, the warrantless spying programs and other violations of civil liberties roll on unquestioned, and Miranda rights may be at risk now too. And one reason to think things may be even worse than we know is that Obama has prosecuted more whistleblowers than any of his predecessors.

Read it all at Corrente: Obama Was Created By Our Failure to Impeach Bush

RESIGNATION OF A PRESIDENT

Alan Caruba writes in the Canada Free Press that now is the time to actively call for the impeachment or resignation of the current POTUS. While we agree that the list of concerns about Barack Obama is long and severe, we also realize that in the current political climate, the kool-aid nectar still flows freely among true believers of the Obama Blitz, serving a spacious terrain littered with nervy blind followers who deny all evidence of corruption no matter how keen the odor.

As this 44th American President continues to dismantle the engines of capitalism and personal liberty, flooding the statist coffers with phony dollars, killing jobs, the economy, the future, the successes of the past, while consistently bad-mouthing on foreign soil the nation he is sworn to protect, insulting our allies and cozying up to our enemies, secure behind glaring but secret flaws and persnickety details of an incendiary public life the media helped him hide in plain sight like so many brightly painted eggs scattered along the campaign trail...

HERE'S A QUESTION I would pose to you. If the Supreme Court can act within days to approve the sale of Chrysler to Fiat, why can it not act to hear cases filed months ago regarding whether President Obama is a “natural born” citizen of the United States? Why have some lower courts refused to hear such cases citing that the parties bringing them, citizens under the rule of the Constitution, have no “standing” to do so?

The Supreme Court is famous for trying to dodge such cases. The likelihood of impeachment is zero because Democrats control Congress and only one President ever resigned from office and that was Richard M. Nixon. It took an excruciatingly long time to reach that point as anyone who lived through the Watergate scandal will tell you. The nation was shocked to learn that a President engaged in a criminal enterprise while in office.

The question of preserving and protecting the Constitution would be hard to prove except in hindsight, but by then it would be too late for the nation, ruined by excessive, unjustified taxation and borrowing that threatens the collapse of the economy.

I would argue that a President who appoints over twenty “czars” to supersede the powers of the secretaries of various federal departments; people who are apparently exempt from Congressional approval or oversight, and people who apparently do not feel the need to hold press conferences to explain what they are doing, is distinctly unconstitutional.

It will be argued that there have been various such “czars” in the past, mostly particularly “drug czars” whose purpose was to oversee and coordinate efforts to address the nation’s problems with illegal drugs, but the imposition of people to virtually replace members of the President’s cabinet is unprecedented. Cabinet officers must receive the approval of Congress, but these “czars” have not.

Even the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, has been reduced to a mere figurehead as various personal envoys of the President have been authorized to act for him regarding sensitive diplomatic affairs, answerable presumably only to him. What we have is a President who is running the government through an invisible network of people who are not answerable to the citizens of the nation, yet granted powers to determine the extent of the rights of those citizens including how much compensation they may receive.

This is a President who has said during a C-Span interview that the government is out of money, but who is pressing forward for legislation to impose trillions in taxes on all energy use, who advocates the borrowing of tens of billions by the nation for a proposed healthcare “reform”, and who has already signed a so-called stimulus bill of nearly 9,000 items representing $700 billion that he deemed “imperfect.”

We have all watched the President in action since January 20, 2009 and what we have seen and heard has been constant criticism of America that has been an affront to our great history and our defense of human rights. He has done this in one foreign nation after another.

A speech in Cairo to the worldwide Muslim community President Obama distorted the facts of American history and conflated the deliberate murder of six million European Jews in the last century with the suffering inflicted on so-called Palestinians by their fellow Arabs; the result of repeated wars on Israel. No such comparison can be made and is by definition obscene.

Within months, “tea parties”, citizen protests, occurred from coast to coast and others are being planned for July Fourth. Not since the advent of the Civil War under threat of secession has a President faced such widespread opposition after taking office.

In State after State, resolutions are being passed in opposition to his proposed legislation and policies. An organization of “Oath-Keepers”, members of the U.S. military, the reserves, the National Guard, peace officers, and veterans, has emerged to say they will not blindly “follow orders” issued by this President that are contrary to the oath to uphold the Constitution they have taken.

This is a President whose Department of Homeland Security has defined as “extremist” anyone who criticizes or disagrees with his policies.

Americans who are fearful of the havoc President Barack Obama has let loose on this nation need to flood Congress with the demand that he be removed from office for his failure to protect, preserve, and defend the Constitution. Indeed, to conclusively prove he was constitutionally qualified to run for the presidency.

The White House has to hear from Americans calling on the President to resign.

Read it all.

Frankly, one of the most discouraging coup d'etats that this wicked administration has committed has been the usurping of the census mechanisms, grabbing controls for the executive branch and its sorry powers of "estimating people" whereas we favor the traditional method of an aggressive head-count. As many have pointed out, this power grab is a deception geared to overlooking massive illegal aliens of various stripes while packing the numbers aimed at boosting beyond their natural numbers certain preferred groups clamoring for tax and other stealth special interest favors.

This is highly irregular for our nation of laws, and needs to be stopped, but probably won't. After all, these smarty pants leftists are convinced that the US Constitution is mere yellow parchment, a quaint curio of the past, a surreptitious political document that failed. A debatably unAmerican Barack Obama, in this viewpoint, has come to sever America from her sordid past. End of story. All praise to Mister Obama...

Irreversible? More like fish in a barrel.