Catching Up With Reality

October 22, 2013

Barack-ObamaFoggy and chilly again this early Tuesday on California’s north coast as we move swiftly through another work week — just think, Friday is now a day closer.

And President Obama has a work week cut out for him, too, but there’s absolutely no weekend waiting for him. He’s catching flak-shit from just about all sides, even behind him, as a woman nearly passes out during a hat-in-hand speech yesterday.

Dreams are as good as we hope they are, right?
Obama was discussing the Affordable Care Act, but in reality, he could have been describing any one of a list of recent shit: “There’s no sugarcoating it.”
Not at all.

And all those problems with ACA’s exchange-website malfunctions, highly-noted since the program began at the start of this month, just might be a red flag on the flagship of Obama’s presidency. Americans are reading between the lines: A Washington Post–ABC News poll conducted Oct 17 to 20 and released Oct. 21 found that 56 percent of those surveyed believed the “website glitches” are “part of a broader problem with the health care law.”
Apparently, Obama’s people knew about the problems beforehand thanks to the best professional, a fractional cfo,in charge of all the financial aspects but let it open anyway — the whole discourse, right now, is in a wait-and-see mode — time will tell.

Meanwhile, Obama is also trying to spin the shenanigans of his nit-twitted NSA as they have been caught spying on the whole known world.
Via the Guardian:

The White House conceded on Monday that revelations about how its intelligence agencies have intercepted enormous amounts of French phone traffic raised “legitimate questions for our friends and allies”.
In a statement released after a phone call between Barack Obama and his counterpart, François Hollande, the White House made one of its strongest admissions yet about the diplomatic impact of the disclosures by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

“The president and President Hollande discussed recent disclosures in the press – some of which have distorted our activities, and some of which raise legitimate questions for our friends and allies about how these capabilities are employed,” the White House said in a statement.
“The president made clear that the United States has begun to review the way that we gather intelligence, so that we properly balance the legitimate security concerns of our citizens and allies with the privacy concerns that all people share.
The two presidents agreed that we should continue to discuss these issues in diplomatic channels.”

Before Obama’s call, the White House responded to the claims in Le Monde by saying that the US “gathers foreign intelligence of the type gathered by all nations.”

Ha!

I guess the heat is on — the NSA is a wild dog unleashed.

Meanwhile, again — Obama’s most-favorite style of war, the use of drones, has caught flak from the UN and Amnesty International, which claim the use of drones is illegal and more innocent civilians are being killed than the US reports. Drone on…
From the BBC:

Amnesty said it reviewed nine recent drone strikes in North Waziristan and found a number of victims were unarmed.
In a separate report looking at six US attacks in Yemen, Human Rights Watch says two of them killed civilians at random, violating international law.
Drone warfare has become common in the US pursuit of al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Last week, a UN investigation found that US drone strikes had killed at least 400 civilians in Pakistan, far more than the US has ever acknowledged.
UN special rapporteur Ben Emmerson accused the US of challenging international legal norms by advocating the use of lethal force outside war zones.

In the report, Will I Be Next? US Drone Strikes in Pakistan, the rights group named several victims who, it says, had been unarmed and “posed no threat to life”.
In October 2012, 68-year-old grandmother Mamana Bibi was killed in a double strike as she picked vegetables in the family’s fields while surrounded by her grandchildren, said the report.
It said US President Barack Obama’s pledge earlier this year to increase transparency around drone strikes had not been fulfilled.
“This secrecy has enabled the USA to act with impunity and block victims from receiving justice or compensation.
As far as Amnesty is aware, no US official has ever been held to account for unlawful killings by drones in Pakistan,” the report said.

Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch said in its report that six US drone attacks in Yemen killed 82 people, including at least 57 civilians.
It added that two of the strikes killed innocent people indiscriminately.

So beyond just politics, Obama is up to his neck in explanations — even today as the jobs data from September, delayed due the government shutdown, comes out and we’ll see how far we’re in the shitter.
Sometimes, reality works non-wonders.

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