Pepper sprayed for public safety.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by taxwonk

He's the Commander-in-Chief. All he needs is a signature to shut it down. Congress and its purse strings are irrelevant. You don't need a budget appropriation to not spend money on something.

I don't particularly want to defend Obama on this issue, but I don't think you're right. Here is something I found in three seconds with Bing, looking for an explanation of the appropriations aspect:

Congress, rules keep Obama from closing Guantanamo Bay

Carol Rosenberg | The Miami Herald

The last two prisoners to leave the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay were dead. On February 1, Awal Gul, a 48-year-old Afghan, collapsed in the shower and died of an apparent heart attack after working out on an exercise machine. Then, at dawn one morning in May, Haji Nassim, a 37-year-old man also from Afghanistan, was found hanging from bed linen in a prison camp recreation yard.

In both cases, the Pentagon conducted swift autopsies and the U.S. military sent the bodies back to Afghanistan for traditional Muslim burials. These voyages were something the Pentagon had not planned for either man: Each was an “indefinite detainee,” categorized by the Obama administration’s 2009 Guantánamo Review Task Force as someone against whom the United States had no evidence to convict of a war crime but had concluded was too dangerous to let go. Today, this category of detainees makes up 46 of the last 171 captives held at Guantánamo. The only guaranteed route out of Guantánamo these days for a detainee, it seems, is in a body bag.

The responsibility lies not so much with the White House but with Congress, which has thwarted President Barack Obama’s plans to close the detention center, which the Bush administration opened on Jan. 11, 2002, with 20 captives.

Congress has used its spending oversight authority both to forbid the White House from financing trials of Guantánamo captives on U.S. soil and to block the acquisition of a state prison in Illinois to hold captives currently held in Cuba who would not be put on trial — a sort of Guantánamo North.

The latest defense bill adopted by Congress moved to mandate military detention for most future al Qaida cases. The White House withdrew a veto threat on the eve of passage, and then Obama signed it into law with a “signing statement” that suggested he could lawfully ignore it.

On paper, at least, the Obama administration would be set to release almost half the current captives at Guantánamo. The 2009 Task Force Review concluded that about 80 of the 171 detainees now held at Guantánamo could be let go if their home country was stable enough to help resettle them or if a foreign country could safely give them a new start.

But Congress has made it nearly impossible to transfer captives anywhere. Legislation passed since Obama took office has created a series of roadblocks that mean that only a federal court order or a national security waiver issued by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta could trump Congress and permit the release of a detainee to another country.

Neither is likely: U.S. District Court judges are not ruling in favor of captives in the dozens of unlawful detention suits winding their way from Cuba to the federal court in Washington. And on the occasions when those judges have ruled for detainees, the U.S. Court of Appeals has consistently overruled them in an ever-widening definition of who can be held as an affiliate of al Qaida or the Taliban.

Meanwhile, Defense Department General Counsel Jeh Johnson, the Pentagon’s top lawyer, believes that Congress crafted the transfer waivers a year ago in such a way that Panetta (and Robert Gates before him) would be ill-advised to sign them. (In essence, the Secretary of Defense is supposed to guarantee that the detainee would never in the future engage in violence against any American citizen or U.S. interest.)

In a strange twist of history, Congress, through its control of government funds, is now imposing curbs on the very executive powers that the Bush administration invoked to establish the camps at Guantánamo in the first place. Much of its intransigence is driven by the politics of fear: What if, for example, a captive is acquitted in a civilian trial because the judge bars evidence obtained by the military without benefit of counsel? When will another freed Guantánamo detainee attack a U.S. target or interest, such as when Abdullah al Ajami, who was transferred to Kuwait in 2005, blew himself up in a truck bomb attack in Iraq in 2008?

In the face of such public and political pressure — especially from Congress — Obama administration officials have waffled at several key moments. For example, Attorney General Eric Holder changed his mind on where to try five alleged 9/11 plotters at Guantánamo, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In November 2009, Holder announced that the trial would be held in a civilian courtroom in Manhattan; then, in April 2011, following strong resistance from congressional representatives and New York politicians, the White House abandoned this plan and instead announced that Pentagon prosecutors would bring a trial by military commission.

Resettling in the United States those captives cleared for release has also become taboo. Soon after taking over in 2009, the Obama administration was considering resettling Guantánamo captives from China’s Uighur Muslim minority, whom the Bush administration had readied for release. (They were to be hosted by Uighur-Americans in Virginia.) But then, in the face of congressional objections, the White House lost its nerve. The United States instead scattered the Uighurs to Bermuda, Switzerland, and even the Pacific island nation of Palau; five more Uighurs remain at Guantánamo.

Factors besides Congress also contributed to the current Guantánamo stalemate. First, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that at least a fourth of the detainees the United States has released from Guantánamo were confirmed or suspected of later engaging in terrorism or insurgent activity. Opponents of closing Guantánamo immediately seized on these figures. (For its part, the Obama administration noted that most of those on the recidivist list were transferred before Obama took office, when the Bush-era Pentagon approved some 500 releases. Officials took fault with these big-batch transfers and claimed that the Obama administration’s individually fashioned, case-by-case system for release would yield better results.)

Second, over the past couple years a powerful al Qaida offshoot has taken hold in Yemen, the very country where the Obama administration had planned to transfer many detainees. Sending dozens of suspected terrorists back to a country besieged by a growing terrorist threat is hardly good politics or security policy.

Lastly, Obama’s executive order to close Guantánamo was undone by the burdensome bureaucracy of the task force, which sought to sort each captive’s Bush-era file. Each detainee’s case file contained competing and often contradictory assessments from the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s Office of Military Commissions, the Department of Justice, and myriad other offices, bogging down the review process. Time ran out before the task force could settle on a master plan to move the detainees out of Guantánamo in time for Obama’s one-year deadline.

Now it’s the war court — the military commissions that the Bush administration created to hear war crimes cases at Guantánamo, which were reformed by Obama through legislation — or nothing. And only two cases, both proposing military executions, are currently slated to go before the Guantánamo tribunals: those for the 9/11 attacks and for the October 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. To date, the war court has produced six convictions, four of them through guilty pleas in exchange for short sentences designed to get the detainees out of Guantánamo within a couple of years.

Still, in the Kafkaesque world of military detention, neither an acquittal at the war court nor even a completed sentence guarantees that a detainee gets to leave Guantánamo. Once convicted, a captive is separated from the other detainees to serve his sentence on a different cellblock. (Four are there today, only one serving life.) Once that sentence is over, as both the Bush and Obama administrations have outlined detention policy, the convict can then be returned to the general population at Guantánamo as an “unprivileged enemy belligerent.”

The doctrine has yet to be challenged. But if Ibrahim al Qosi, a 51-year-old Sudanese man convicted for working as a cook in an al Qaida compound in Kandahar, does not go home when his sentence expires this year, his lawyers are likely to turn to the civilian courts to seek a release order.

Guantánamo has largely faded from public attention. There is little reason to expect it to emerge as an issue in the upcoming presidential campaign season beyond the usual finger-pointing and slogans: Obama may blame Congress for cornering him into keeping the captives at Guantánamo rather than moving them somewhere else, and his opponents will no doubt argue that, by virtue of his wanting to close the facility in the first place, Obama is soft on terrorism. (“My view is we ought to double it,” Mitt Romney said about Guantánamo in a 2007 debate.)

Meanwhile, the detention center enters its 11th year on January 11. Guantánamo is arguably the most expensive prison camp on earth, with a staff of 1,850 U.S. troops and civilians managing a compound that contains 171 captives, at a cost of $800,000 a year per detainee. Of those 171 prisoners, just six are facing Pentagon tribunals that may start a year from now after pretrial hearings and discovery. Guantánamo today is the place that Obama cannot close.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by taxwonk

I was simply trying to answer Ty's question about what a Chicagoan means when he says someone is a Chicago pol.

I don't think that it is the same for Obama as it is for any other black man. POTUS should not look at the first term as little more than a platform from which to begin the race for a second term. That applies to black and white (as well as brown, yellow, or a Skittles rainbow of flavor). He has the office and has had it for almost four years. I wish he had used it more forcefully. I wish he had changed the discussion more.

I'll happily defend Obama over the last four years. Sure, he's not the greatest President ever, but what have we done lately to deserve a truly great President? We're out of Iraq, haven't started a new war, dialed back in Afghanistan, the economy doesn't suck as badly as the prior 8 years, there has been real progress on civil rights on multiple fronts, he got healthcare reform through, and he did it all in the face of an obstructionist, disloyal opposition, a deteriorating international, and especially European, economy, and the lowest tax rates since 1916.

He didn't shut down Gitmo? Yup, that sucks. But not half as much as the top twenty items on the Romney / Ryan to do list for their first hundred days. He's leaving a bigger debt? Yeh, well, don't count on the Rs to shrink that one.

I plan to vote for Obama, and give him a little money. No plans to beatify him.

[ThurgreedMarshall]

Originally Posted by taxwonk

Thurgreed, isn't that one of the points of the Atlantic article you posted that started all this off? It is something that all black people live with every day. Isn't part of what Obama is supposed to be doing living without showing that hesitation? He's the leader of the free world. If he won't stand up and say "no more" then who will?

I don't think you get it. That would be great. I would love that. But read the article again. We can fault Obama for being sensitive to racial issues as Coates did by calling him out on his treatment of Shirley Sherrod. His treatment of her was shameful. I won't excuse it. But I understand why it happened.

I don't want you to neglect parts of the article like this one: "The irony of Barack Obama is this: he has become the most successful black politician in American history by avoiding the radioactive racial issues of yesteryear, by being “clean” (as Joe Biden once labeled him)—and yet his indelible blackness irradiates everything he touches...No amount of rhetorical moderation could change this. It did not matter that the president addressed himself to “every parent in America.” His insistence that “everybody [pull] together” was irrelevant. It meant nothing that he declined to cast aspersions on the investigating authorities, or to speculate on events. Even the fact that Obama expressed his own connection to Martin in the quietest way imaginable—“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon”—would not mollify his opposition. It is, after all, one thing to hear “I am Trayvon Martin” from the usual placard-waving rabble-rousers. Hearing it from the commander of the greatest military machine in human history is another."

In short, "...when President Obama addressed the tragedy of Trayvon Martin, he demonstrated integration’s great limitation—that acceptance depends not just on being twice as good but on being half as black. And even then, full acceptance is still withheld. The larger effects of this withholding constrict Obama’s presidential potential in areas affected tangentially—or seemingly not at all—by race." The black community seethes (and apparently so do you), as Coates says, because he should be our hero and he should stand tall for what is right. But the black community understands that in order for him to be effective, he cannot do this because race is such a charged topic in the country that a black President who does so, even when he is in the right to do so, will be cutting himself off at the knees. Every single act following such an approach will be tainted with the assumption by the white electorate that he favors black people. And that would render him as good as powerless. I know it. Coates knows it. Sherrod knows it. And now you know it.

"But whatever the politics, a total submission to them is a disservice to the country. No one knows this better than Obama himself, who once described patriotism as more than pageantry and the scarfing of hot dogs. “When our laws, our leaders, or our government are out of alignment with our ideals, then the dissent of ordinary Americans may prove to be one of the truest expressions of patriotism,” Obama said in Independence, Missouri, in June 2008. Love of country, like all other forms of love, requires that you tell those you care about not simply what they want to hear but what they need to hear.

But in the age of the Obama presidency, expressing that kind of patriotism is presumably best done quietly, politely, and with great deference."

I think that last sentence is packed with meaning and emotion. Coates doesn't want it to be this way. He thought maybe it didn't have to be and like you, I suspect, hoped Obama was the one to change that. But it's just not possible--even the man who pulled off that wonderful speech after Jeremiah Wright's now famous sermon can't tell the country what it needs to hear in the way one would expect him to. I think Coates is saddened by this. He's conflicted about what he wants Obama to be and what he knows Obama can't be. That's why Coates' last three paragraphs are so powerful.

"In a democracy, so the saying goes, the people get the government they deserve. Part of Obama’s genius is a remarkable ability to soothe race consciousness among whites. Any black person who’s worked in the professional world is well acquainted with this trick. But never has it been practiced at such a high level, and never have its limits been so obviously exposed. This need to talk in dulcet tones, to never be angry regardless of the offense, bespeaks a strange and compromised integration indeed, revealing a country so infantile that it can countenance white acceptance of blacks only when they meet an Al Roker standard.

And yet this is the uncertain foundation of Obama’s historic victory—a victory that I, and my community, hold in the highest esteem. Who would truly deny the possibility of a black presidency in all its power and symbolism? Who would rob that little black boy of the right to feel himself affirmed by touching the kinky black hair of his president?

I think back to the first time I wrote Shirley Sherrod, requesting an interview. Here was a black woman with every reason in the world to bear considerable animosity toward Barack Obama. But she agreed to meet me only with great trepidation. She said she didn’t “want to do anything to hurt” the president."

That part in bold italics is what this whole article is about. Remember, it's called Fear of a Black President. The article talks about Obama and his failings and triumphs, sure. But Coates' thesis is about us and what we are ready to accept and how that affects what we get from and out of our first black President.

TM

[ThurgreedMarshall]

Originally Posted by taxwonk

I was simply trying to answer Ty's question about what a Chicagoan means when he says someone is a Chicago pol.

I don't think that it is the same for Obama as it is for any other black man. POTUS should not look at the first term as little more than a platform from which to begin the race for a second term. That applies to black and white (as well as brown, yellow, or a Skittles rainbow of flavor). He has the office and has had it for almost four years. I wish he had used it more forcefully. I wish he had changed the discussion more.

I think that's kind of insulting to what he actually has accomplished in the face of some serious resistance under some unbelievably horrible circumstances.

TM

[ThurgreedMarshall]

Originally Posted by Did you just call me Coltrane?

I don't know what it means outside Chicago, but Rahm, Daley (and Blago) and all of Daley's cronies (white or black) are/were considered to be "Chicago" politicians. It's the mafia-like attitude of you pat my back I'll pat yours exchanges that have gone on for decades.

I think you're being naive if you think that that's all the Republican party is trying to conjure up in people's minds when they throw that term around so often at their rallies.

TM

[taxwonk]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

I don't see a reluctance specifically to upset the Democratic Old Guard in Chicago -- please go on -- nor do I think that makes one a Chicago politician. As Coltraine says, the term has a different significance.

I didn't mean he was just concerned about upsetting the old guard in Chicago. I meant that he has spent far too much of his time in office going along with the way it's always been done, and not pissing off too many people who have the money to get him re-elected, and not enough time changing what is just.plain.wrong.

[taxwonk]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

I don't particularly want to defend Obama on this issue, but I don't think you're right. Here is something I found in three seconds with Bing, looking for an explanation of the appropriations aspect:

First off, Congress isn't the executive branch. They can't enforce many of the appropriations cited, as a constitutional matter. Show me a single case in which a court has upheld Congress's assertion of authority to control spending on that sort of micro level.

Second, the crap about not releasing detainees because they present a threat to the United States is not a valid reason to detain them. If we can't try them, or if we can't win because they are denied counsel, evidence is not made available to the defendants, etc., is just that. Crap. The fact that we made enemies of these detainees is not a legally valid reason for keeping them indefinitely without trial. That is the main problem I have with the Obama administration in this matter.

If, as we claim in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are inalienable, and men are endowed with these rights by the Creator, then the appropriations games are without a valid legal basis. We managed to justify the placement of Japanese-Americans in internment camps during WWII. That didn't make it lawful or right. It just made us thugs and racists. This is the same sort of disgrace. The Obama who ran for President knew that. The man in the White House appears to have forgotten.

[taxwonk]

Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall

I don't think you get it. That would be great. I would love that. But read the article again. We can fault Obama for being sensitive to racial issues as Coates did by calling him out on his treatment of Shirley Sherrod. His treatment of her was shameful. I won't excuse it. But I understand why it happened.

I don't want you to neglect parts of the article like this one: "The irony of Barack Obama is this: he has become the most successful black politician in American history by avoiding the radioactive racial issues of yesteryear, by being “clean” (as Joe Biden once labeled him)—and yet his indelible blackness irradiates everything he touches...No amount of rhetorical moderation could change this. It did not matter that the president addressed himself to “every parent in America.” His insistence that “everybody [pull] together” was irrelevant. It meant nothing that he declined to cast aspersions on the investigating authorities, or to speculate on events. Even the fact that Obama expressed his own connection to Martin in the quietest way imaginable—“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon”—would not mollify his opposition. It is, after all, one thing to hear “I am Trayvon Martin” from the usual placard-waving rabble-rousers. Hearing it from the commander of the greatest military machine in human history is another."

In short, "...when President Obama addressed the tragedy of Trayvon Martin, he demonstrated integration’s great limitation—that acceptance depends not just on being twice as good but on being half as black. And even then, full acceptance is still withheld. The larger effects of this withholding constrict Obama’s presidential potential in areas affected tangentially—or seemingly not at all—by race." The black community seethes (and apparently so do you), as Coates says, because he should be our hero and he should stand tall for what is right. But the black community understands that in order for him to be effective, he cannot do this because race is such a charged topic in the country that a black President who does so, even when he is in the right to do so, will be cutting himself off at the knees. Every single act following such an approach will be tainted with the assumption by the white electorate that he favors black people. And that would render him as good as powerless. I know it. Coates knows it. Sherrod knows it. And now you know it.

"But whatever the politics, a total submission to them is a disservice to the country. No one knows this better than Obama himself, who once described patriotism as more than pageantry and the scarfing of hot dogs. “When our laws, our leaders, or our government are out of alignment with our ideals, then the dissent of ordinary Americans may prove to be one of the truest expressions of patriotism,” Obama said in Independence, Missouri, in June 2008. Love of country, like all other forms of love, requires that you tell those you care about not simply what they want to hear but what they need to hear.

But in the age of the Obama presidency, expressing that kind of patriotism is presumably best done quietly, politely, and with great deference."

I think that last sentence is packed with meaning and emotion. Coates doesn't want it to be this way. He thought maybe it didn't have to be and like you, I suspect, hoped Obama was the one to change that. But it's just not possible--even the man who pulled off that wonderful speech after Jeremiah Wright's now famous sermon can't tell the country what it needs to hear in the way one would expect him to. I think Coates is saddened by this. He's conflicted about what he wants Obama to be and what he knows Obama can't be. That's why Coates' last three paragraphs are so powerful.

"In a democracy, so the saying goes, the people get the government they deserve. Part of Obama’s genius is a remarkable ability to soothe race consciousness among whites. Any black person who’s worked in the professional world is well acquainted with this trick. But never has it been practiced at such a high level, and never have its limits been so obviously exposed. This need to talk in dulcet tones, to never be angry regardless of the offense, bespeaks a strange and compromised integration indeed, revealing a country so infantile that it can countenance white acceptance of blacks only when they meet an Al Roker standard.

And yet this is the uncertain foundation of Obama’s historic victory—a victory that I, and my community, hold in the highest esteem. Who would truly deny the possibility of a black presidency in all its power and symbolism? Who would rob that little black boy of the right to feel himself affirmed by touching the kinky black hair of his president?

I think back to the first time I wrote Shirley Sherrod, requesting an interview. Here was a black woman with every reason in the world to bear considerable animosity toward Barack Obama. But she agreed to meet me only with great trepidation. She said she didn’t “want to do anything to hurt” the president."

That part in bold italics is what this whole article is about. Remember, it's called Fear of a Black President. The article talks about Obama and his failings and triumphs, sure. But Coates' thesis is about us and what we are ready to accept and how that affects what we get from and out of our first black President.

TM

I see your point (and Coates's) but it saddens and sickens me. I guess maybe what we need are enough whites willing to throw a brick through the mirror we use to gaze upon ourselves when we congratulate our America for being so "post-racism." The cruelest irony of all is the racism inherent in that thought: that black people in this country are dependent on a white culture to defend them, because they can't get acceptance to do it for themselves.

[taxwonk]

Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall

I think you're being naive if you think that that's all the Republican party is trying to conjure up in people's minds when they throw that term around so often at their rallies.

TM

It has nothing at all to do with Republicans. The issue is one of Obama's relationship with his own party. One of the oldest tenets of Chicago politics is "you dance with the one what brung you." It's not the Republicans that Obama caters to that discourage me, it's the white Democrats.

But I think, Thurgreed, that you have convinced me that this isn't going to change in my lifetime. And I can't fault Obama for disappointing me on the biggest fronts. I'll be supporting him for what he has achieved and praying for the day a black president doesn't need to apologize for the color of his skin.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by taxwonk

I didn't mean he was just concerned about upsetting the old guard in Chicago. I meant that he has spent far too much of his time in office going along with the way it's always been done, and not pissing off too many people who have the money to get him re-elected, and not enough time changing what is just.plain.wrong.

I think what you are saying is that he is basically a moderate. I agree with that.

[ThurgreedMarshall]

Originally Posted by taxwonk

It has nothing at all to do with Republicans. The issue is one of Obama's relationship with his own party. One of the oldest tenets of Chicago politics is "you dance with the one what brung you." It's not the Republicans that Obama caters to that discourage me, it's the white Democrats.

I think we're thinking about two different things. I'm focused on how Romney and Palin and other Republicans use the label "Chicago politician" on the stump and at rallies. It's all part of the same "he's not from the heartland, he wasn't born here, his base is made up of welfare recipients, he's urban, he's not like us," commentary that is a roundabout way of saying, "he's the urban black man your mother warned you about."

I understand what it means when you, Coltrane and others from Chicago use it.

Originally Posted by taxwonk

But I think, Thurgreed, that you have convinced me that this isn't going to change in my lifetime. And I can't fault Obama for disappointing me on the biggest fronts. I'll be supporting him for what he has achieved and praying for the day a black president doesn't need to apologize for the color of his skin.

It's depressing. But in order for him to get anything done, he needs to put white people at ease. And that's made harder by the Limbaughs and others who are constantly try to turn him into that nightmare black man in the back of so many white people's minds. Can you imagine if Obama's actions after the Zimmerman incident had been what you wanted them to be? Forget getting re-elected. Could he have gotten anything done in office?

Anyway, let's drop it. I don't belong over here anyway.

TM

[taxwonk]

Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall

I think we're thinking about two different things. I'm focused on how Romney and Palin and other Republicans use the label "Chicago politician" on the stump and at rallies. It's all part of the same "he's not from the heartland, he wasn't born here, his base is made up of welfare recipients, he's urban, he's not like us," commentary that is a roundabout way of saying, "he's the urban black man your mother warned you about."

I understand what it means when you, Coltrane and others from Chicago use it.

It's depressing. But in order for him to get anything done, he needs to put white people at ease. And that's made harder by the Limbaughs and others who are constantly try to turn him into that nightmare black man in the back of so many white people's minds. Can you imagine if Obama's actions after the Zimmerman incident had been what you wanted them to be? Forget getting re-elected. Could he have gotten anything done in office?

Anyway, let's drop it. I don't belong over here anyway.

TM

Yeah. It's Romney saying "all you need to do is look at me; you don't need to see MY birth certificate." I wonder if Bobby Jindal has been frisked or thrown out of the convention center yet?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by taxwonk

First off, Congress isn't the executive branch. They can't enforce many of the appropriations cited, as a constitutional matter. Show me a single case in which a court has upheld Congress's assertion of authority to control spending on that sort of micro level.

To the contrary, I don't think anyone questions Congress's power to deny money to the Executive Branch. That was what Iran-Contra was all about, e.g.

Second, the crap about not releasing detainees because they present a threat to the United States is not a valid reason to detain them. If we can't try them, or if we can't win because they are denied counsel, evidence is not made available to the defendants, etc., is just that. Crap. The fact that we made enemies of these detainees is not a legally valid reason for keeping them indefinitely without trial. That is the main problem I have with the Obama administration in this matter.

If, as we claim in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are inalienable, and men are endowed with these rights by the Creator, then the appropriations games are without a valid legal basis. We managed to justify the placement of Japanese-Americans in internment camps during WWII. That didn't make it lawful or right. It just made us thugs and racists. This is the same sort of disgrace. The Obama who ran for President knew that. The man in the White House appears to have forgotten.

On the one hand, I agree. On the other hand, Fred Korematsu was a US citizen, not a foreign national captured on a battlefield. Japanese (and German and Italian) POWs were held in camps until the war ended. There are no easy answers here, and Congress has frustrated some of the hard answers.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by taxwonk

Yeah. It's Romney saying "all you need to do is look at me; you don't need to see MY birth certificate." I wonder if Bobby Jindal has been frisked or thrown out of the convention center yet?

Still, you have to be impressed with the patriotism of the Republican convention - red floor, blue chairs, white delegates.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall

To be sure, he has flaws, but he's a fucking politician. And the politician you're looking for either no longer exists in today's reality, or never actually did.

TM

exactly. The biggest disappointment for those that thought Obama could walk on water is that he can't. He still has done a very good job. He should stand up to the fringe right more perhaps, even let the country shut down, ala Bubba, but he got HCR through (which I'm against) and that is a major piece of legislation that has been failing since I've been voting.