The Justice Department Memo: Some Non-Hysterical Balance

Michael Tomasky:  …. I’ve now read the DoJ white paper that justifies the killing of US citizens. It’s certainly not something that makes the breast swell with pride. But it does make me wonder what I would do in this situation, and I can’t honestly come up with easy answers. While I don’t condone what the Obama administration is doing here, I’m also suspicious of high-horse denunciations, because I think the question of whether an American forfeits his due process rights when he joins an enemy army is a complicated one.

…. There’s no doubt that a sentence like “the president has the power to order the assassination of American citizens” sounds positively despotic. However, these are people who have gone off and joined Al Qaeda. If an American citizen of German descent had gone back to heimat Germany in 1934 and joined the Nazi Party and worked his way up such that he was involved in the plotting of attacks against American soldiers, and Roosevelt had order him killed, no one would have batted an eye in 1940s America…..

…  I’ve never been a hard-line civil libertarian. My civic-republican instincts cut against that, because I feel that citizenship confers not just rights but responsibilities….. There’s always the possibility of the case where we might find out too late, and a large number of Americans could die. Presidents live with that responsibility every day. If that responsibility were mine, I can’t honestly say what I’d do, and I don’t think anyone can.

Read the full post here

did you get the memo?

TPM: ….. In a new strategy memo by press secretary Ben LaBolt, Obama’s re-election team ripped into the GOP field as too conservative to win over the middle on issues ranging from taxes to immigration:

From economics to immigration, the Republican field have embraced policies that the American people oppose. The campaign to win the Republican nomination has become a campaign to win the hearts and minds of the Tea Party. They would return to policies that have been tried before and done nothing to improve economic security for the middle class, rewarding special interests who can afford to pay for lobbyists instead of looking out for working families.

While the President is fighting to create jobs and put money in the pockets of middle class Americans, the Republican candidates have proposed extending tax breaks for large corporations and tax cuts for the wealthiest while allowing special interests to write their own rules.

The Republican candidates universally want to repeal the protections that the President put in place to prevent another financial crisis and instead allow banks to write their own rules….

…. America’s future will be defined by the success of our middle class, but the Republican candidates are positioning themselves as champions for large corporations and special interests whose plans would leave working families in the lurch.

Read the full memo here

Thanks desertflower

hmm…..

TPM: The ongoing scandal surrounding a lewd tweet sent from Rep. Anthony Weiner’s Twitter account took yet another turn for the weird Thursday as alleged e-mails between the person who first noticed the photo and conservative media guru Andrew Breitbart were leaked.

Breitbart first reported the Weiner story Saturday on his site Big Government using a screengrab from the person in question, Twitter user “@patriotusa76,” who lists his name on his account as Dan Wolfe and said he captured the image from Weiner’s feed before it was deleted. Weiner has said his account was hacked and a number of liberal blogs have pointed to Wolfe – who had a history of crudely taunting Weiner online – as a person of interest.

….The Smoking Gun published emails today from Dan Wolfe, AKA “patriotusa76,” at least one of which listed Breitbart as a recipient. In the first email, Wolfe tips off Breitbart to the screengrab as well as key details of the story and promises at the end that “we have more.”

In the second email, Wolfe appears agitated and warns that he will be in big trouble if unspecified details about his role in the incident leak….

More here

Thank you Fred 😉

night everyone

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President Barack Obama takes the stage during the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast in Washington, May 12. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

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