what do you want obama to do during his last month in office?

as of today, one month to go. i'm guessing he won't do anything too crazy, but i'd love to be surprised.

declare himself president for life, send us all to FEMA camps, and unveil the New World Order

it will be an improvement over what will happen with Trump

"pardon Leonard Peltier" is the first thing that comes to mind.

hell, pardon a whole lot of people

Honestly? Sort Gitmo the fuck out pronto. He probably can't even if he wanted to, but still.. Free all people there and close shop. It's a relic disgrace.

Keep bombing seven countries, that's for sure.

Continue pardoning inmates who were slapped with incredibly long prison sentences for relatively low level drug violations, plz. This is fairly apolitical stuff, but would make all the difference to the people pardoned.

Create the Owyhee Canyonlands National Monument in SE Oregon. This is a remote and gorgeous area threatened by mining interests. The local ranchers are unhappy with the idea of more protections, but I'm pretty sure it won't kill them.

Any other new environmental protections he can put in place that won't be instantly overturned by Trump's minions.

Follow Eisenhower's example (see: "military-industrial complex" speech) and speak frankly about the systemic ills he sees in government and politics. Even if it does no good (see: "military-industrial complex" speech), it will establish his view of those problems, and lend that view his prestige as a revered figure.

prob the single best thing he could do is go ahead and appoint garland. i won't hold my breath, though.

appoint merrick garland even though it won't happen

pardon Manning

pardon Snowden

drone-bomb [redacted]

lock her up

pardon Manning

pardon Snowden

indict clapper for lying to congress while he's at this list

donuts in the parking lot

legalize it

^ reunite the choom gang on the white house lawn to burn one down for old times sake

another vote for confirming Garland

Apologize for expanding Dubya's surveillance and drone policies, enabling this next fuckshitter to go further.

I feel like he's got one last person to assassinate, but I can't quite put my finger on who.

Forgive all student loans.

appoint garland and pardon snowden, even though he won't do either

declassify the Russian hacking evidence

he really should appoint garland

legalize it

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Tuesday, December 20, 2016 10:40 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^ reunite the choom gang on the white house lawn to burn one down for old times sake

― carthago delenda est (mayor jingleberries), Tuesday, December 20, 2016 11:14 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i like this

Follow Eisenhower's example (see: "military-industrial complex" speech) and speak frankly about the systemic ills he sees in government and politics. Even if it does no good (see: "military-industrial complex" speech), it will establish his view of those problems, and lend that view his prestige as a revered figure.

― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Tuesday, December 20, 2016 9:15 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OTM

tell hilary voters what he really thinks of em

glue quarters to the floor of the oval office

another vote for confirming Garland

― frogbs, Tuesday, December 20, 2016 11:26 PM (yesterday)

he really should appoint garland

― flopson, Wednesday, December 21, 2016 2:11 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I suspect that anything obama does that skirts the boundaries of normal politics will just give trump an excuse to take things even further. this would be less of a concern if someone like mitt romney had won.

Second vote for drone strike, though Morbius and I almost certainly disagree on the target.

declassify the Russian hacking evidence

no comment

he is not doing anything in this thread, just so we understand "want"

light up on camera

I mean light one up

Forgive all student loans.
WTF is this shit

upper decker
The act of defecating in the upper tank of the toilet. When the next poor unsuspecting person flushes the toilet they get a bowl of beef stew. the upper decker is a weapon of terror and should only be used on people who deserve it.

the code

the dougie
the worm
the robot
the stanky leg

get das racist to reunite and book them as the headliner for Trump's inaugural ball

Send Trump to Guantanamo.

appointing Garland isn't asking much, not really a stretch imo compared to pardoning Snowden, that'll never happen

Huh

Burn down the White House

it's been done before

dab

We the People
A response to your petition on Chief Judge Merrick Garland:

Thank you for using the We the People platform to sign a petition regarding the Senate’s obstruction of President Obama’s Supreme Court Nominee, Chief Judge Merrick Garland.

As President Obama noted when he announced his nomination, Chief Judge Garland has more federal judicial experience than any Supreme Court nominee in American history. His 19 years on the federal bench, meticulous commitment to the law, and unimpeachable credentials prove that there is no one more qualified to immediately serve on the Supreme Court.

Many Republicans agreed too, judging him to be well-qualified in temperament, experience, and background. He is the exact kind of consensus nominee that the Senate GOP claimed they wanted the President to nominate. That’s why he was confirmed to the D.C. Circuit in 1997 in a strong bipartisan vote. And that’s why it is so deeply discouraging that Senate Republicans decided to wage a historic campaign of obstruction of his confirmation process.

Article II Section II of the U.S. Constitution is clear about the Senate’s duty to consider the President’s nomination. The Senate Republicans willfully abdicated that basic responsibility as elected representatives of the American people.

President Obama was proud to nominate Chief Judge Garland to the Supreme Court, and knows he will continue to serve our country with distinction on the D.C. Circuit.

-- The We the People Team

YOURE MISSING A LINE THAT SHOULDVE SAID "AND THAT'S WHY PRESIDENT OBAMA LISTENED TO YOU AND RECESSED-APPOINTED THIS GUY"

*sigh*

hey, everybody slept on this one

Joe Cirincione
‏@Cirincione
Oh good! @POTUS approved $350Billion nuke sub program we don't need before leaving. #ThanksObama

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-05/new-nuclear-armed-subs-win-pentagon-approval-before-obama-leaves

the military industrial complex is truly running this country, which is why I hope they find a way to murk trump

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/11/chelsea-manning-obama-commute-prison-sentence

that better not be a tease. but i'm betting it is

ditto

the audacity of hope

hope he does something about the waiting lists on death row tbh

anyone you have your eye on in particular?

i dunno i missed the draft this year

give the NSA expanded latitude on intercepted metadata

DONE

nobody cares about your phonecalls

if you don't care about the NSA conducting expanded domestic surveillance under Trump, then you haven't thought about it

it's not really at the top of my list of concerns, no

but then maybe I'm just cynically resigned to it since this all seemed inevitable following the Patriot Act. The combination of gov't interest and available technology was never going to be realistically constrained by legal barriers so I've just accepted it.

Go back and view Citizenfour again. Trump is just as vindictive as Nixon and if anything is less constrained by any trace of morality, which is really saying something. You may not be able to stop domestic surveillance abuse on your own or very quickly, but it is important to encourage more Snowden-like leakers and ACLU challenges. Just rolling over is no good.

Snowden is basically a traitor and an idiot imo and no I will not be watching CitizenFour again

That's one answer, I suppose.

wow dude

I don't think there is a legal solution to this tbh. and there isn't really a technological one either, as long as everybody wants phones that are connected to everything else and developed and sold to us by giant megacorporations.

xp

If you accept that the PATRIOT Act created a legal framework that changed the boundaries of the problem, why do you conclude there is no legal solution? Making a law is not impossible. What's harder is creating a political atmosphere where observing the law is demanded and enforcement is seen as a duty. You don't get there by 'just accepting' the abuse of privacy as inevitable.

because there is no broad support for repealing the legal framework established by the Patriot Act, and there isn't going to be. Generally speaking, powers granted to (or assumed by) the state are never curtailed or removed or given up, barring a total collapse of the state.

That generality has a grain of truth, but it is far from an ironclad rule.

the federal government has been gradually accruing greater and greater power since the republic's founding, that trend isn't going to be reversed, especially by an increasingly cowed and ignorant populace that prizes safety over the much more abstract "privacy"

Predicting the future by observing the present trend and drawing a straight line out to the horizon is almost always going to result in wrong conclusions.

xxp:
The DoD didn't have much choice in the matter of the Ohio-class replacement. The present ones are scheduled to start retiring in 2029, after a 45 year service life, so the contracts on who would do detailed engineering and building actually should have been signed last year.

Snowden Obama is basically a traitor and an idiot imo

hiyioooooo

we're having challops for supper again?

Someone who posted recently is pathologically sick, and I'm not sorry for him.

Snowden is basically a traitor and an idiot imo

ACTOR ANALYSIS: rightwingers say this cuz they mean it and leftwingers say it cuz they want everyone to know they themselves were alarmed as far back as 2002

btw it's not morbs' phonecalls one would prefer the incoming fascist government not have access to but the phonecalls of all the BLM activists and leftwing democrats and DSA kids and people who don't particularly like donald trump and other assorted traitors and idiots shortly to be part of the vast ISIS conspiracy

but i agree that, and w yr reasons that, this isn't going away

dlh otm

ftr I didn't really consider Snowden a traitor (or an idiot) til he went to Russia

man c'mon

But you do consider him a traitor and or idiot now? What was he supposed to do, wait for the Feds to show up on his doorsteps? Xp

putin is for sure using him, but you've seen what we've done to whistleblowers. or chelsea manning.

a hero would have gone to jail. totally cowardly to conclude that "hmm, yes allowing myself to be used as a pawn in a geopolitical power struggle on behalf of an autocratic murderous regime is preferable to accepting punishment for knowingly breaking the law", he's Putin's toy now. Embarrassing tweets during the election too.

What was he supposed to do, wait for the Feds to show up on his doorsteps

yup. own yr shit.

outic otm

but he's cute!

I was offended when Joseph Gordon Levitt was cast

i was offended on behalf of poitras

https://m.popkey.co/a349a2/jWOlx.gif

'Own yr shit' does not compute imho. He'd have never released all this if it meant accepting a life in jail, and rightfully so. Of course he jumped at the first invitation (which of course came from Putin). I've yet to see evidence he's Putin's toy tbh. He managed to stay out the US' hands and continue to fight for his cause. I admire that.

dlh otm

― k3vin k., Thursday, January 12, 2017 2:24 PM (seventeen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

usually is imo

He'd have never released all this if it meant accepting a life in jail, and rightfully so

this is where the "idiot" part comes in

I didn't really consider Snowden a traitor (or an idiot) til he went to Russia

you mean when his travel docs were revoked midflight, you brainless Pelosi Dumbocrat? do you have a John Bolton mustache glued to your nitwit face?

ie not thinking through the consequences of your actions, misjudging priorities etc.

xp

oh look Old Man Insult Generator is here

I think he thought through the consequences very well, as he was already out of the country following the release.

Xp Old Man Insult Generator lmao

nobody cares about your phonecalls

i make hardly any, having only a landline, but i'm planning to attend a protest at a Trump hotel this weekend so ya never know

i was gonna make the same point without insulting you. he didn't really choose to end in russia, he was on his way to ecuador

lol @ oὖτις mouthing all the same dopey neocon talking points from 2013, congratulating himself for being "cynically resigned" to the idea of a tyrannical government, and insulting a guy who threw away the comforts of a pretty good life and condemned himself to possibly permanent exile from his home because he didn't want to spend the rest of his life in one of america's shitty inhumane prisons. not that i should've expected anything better from mr. "lol i've never even heard of that."

yup neocon, that's me

I just post what the NRO tells me to

Pure challops, but if we want more leaks, wouldn't it be helpful to broaden the base for who has access to data?

Btw I loved the implication in Stones Snowden, that the man mainly became paranoid out of jealousy because he feared government agents would spy on his girlfriend naked.

Well, he rescinded wet foot dry foot.

when i was in high school my (private) position on friends' parents who had decamped for canada in the late 60s was that this was craven and self-serving and that a patriotic enemy of the war ought to have demonstrated himself as only such by remaining to be jailed, but later i started to think, wait, fuck the war, and fuck jail

but canada is not russia. on that point tho: putin used snowden, but what he used more was the embarrassing fact that the united states files everything its citizens say, kinda the same way he used the embarrassing fact that the united states has reached a point of political breakdown at which it is capable of allowing a small minority to elect an obvious fascist, and tbh my position on both is p much

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_qMagfZtv8

by adducing Radiohead you undercut your argument

i didn't want to imply i'd moved on entirely from high school

idiot bones

I wish it was the sixties, I wish I could be happy
I wish, I wish, I wish that something would happen

can't believe guy didn't want to go to jail, what an idiot

This thread you guys wtf happened

Loretta Lynch + James Clapper = Trump's East Germany

xp
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggodEBYL9MU

Crut wins everything

wasn't expecting to be reminded of that classic track when i clicked on this thread. a bonus.

vinyls to get from my parents' house

http://www.safetyandhealthmagazine.com/articles/15172-osha-agrees-to-pursue-standard-on-workplace-violence-prevention-for-health-care-social-services#.WHfRqTPuUXJ.twitter

I think he thought through the consequences very well, as he was already out of the country following the release.

he went straight to hong kong with the conviction they would defy their own extradition treaty with the us

he's a principled and brave young man with some blind spots, now stuck in a shitty situation, deserving of empathy

What are you talking about? He's breathing free in a modern, developed democracy! Good for brave, principled young men that there are such countries left in this world. Huzzah.

Anyway back on fucking topic

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2017/01/the-further-adventures-of-james-comey-straight-shooting-man-of-nonpartisan-integritude

Here’s the thing: Obama should fire Comey. He should explain exactly why he’s being fired. Every day Comey remains the FBI Director helps to normalize a stolen election. And if the alleged downside is that Trump could appoint a director who’s a mendacious hack who would let Republicans do whatever they want, I have some news: we already have one.

The more I think about the fact that Obama has *not* fired this guy, and that Comey hasn't even offered his resignation, the more I think there really are about 3 other layers of fishy, stinky, rotten awful shit going on. Beyond the obvious 3 layers you just thought of as soon as you read that.

Chelsea Manning to be freed in May

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/17/us/politics/obama-commutes-bulk-of-chelsea-mannings-sentence.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0

so pleasantly surprised!

Yeah this is great

So is Assange gonna surrender himself now, or was that a wishful thinking from a clickbait headline I didn't actually click?

I'm losing hope for the Owyhee Canyonlands National Monument being set aside. Trump will do zero for the environment, so there are just a couple of days left.

Lets see if Assange puts his money where his mouth is now :) https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/819630102787059713

Xxp

btw, from last week

@Snowden
Mr. President, if you grant only one act of clemency as you exit the White House, please: free Chelsea Manning. You alone can save her life.

Noob question: Can Trump overturn this, since she's not freed by immediate effect?

NYT:

Until recently the military discharged transgender soldiers. In June, Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter changed that policy and said it would instead provide treatment for them, eventually including such surgery if doctors said it was necessary.

But President-elect Donald J. Trump mocked that change as excessively “politically correct,” raising the possibility that he will rescind it.

Even if he does, Ms. Manning will soon no longer be subject to the military’s control.

wow – out in five months

with all sincerity: THANKS, OBAMA!

Leonard Peltier next?

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/819630102787059713

O RLY

Lets see if Assange puts his money where his mouth is now :) https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/819630102787059713

my guess is assange doesn't give a fuck about manning but needed an excuse to be extradited under his new bff president trump

umm, i don't think anyone saw this happening. assange likely assumed it wouldn't

Oh I fully agree iatee. If anything he tried to hardman to look favorable. Xp

i predicted it

there was a report a few weeks ago (last week maybe?) that Obama was seriously considering it, so I saw it coming. I don't think Assange was bluffing.

gonna be fun to see "progressives" line up to complain about this

https://twitter.com/owillis/status/821468232276148225

who the fuck is oliver willis

what a weird position to have

I don't know either but he's Verified™

I have no idea who Oliver Willis is and don't really care that he thinks Manning is a traitor since I think his opinion is as meaningless as my opinion that this is a good thing for the Obama administration to have done. What I do care about is that a black dude said The Wrong Thing on Twitter and apparently has a bunch of white people making fun of his appearance for it. So basically, as far as I can tell everyone needs to check themselves and shut the fuck up.

oliver willis is a nincompoop

very pleasantly surprised by obama's commutation of her sentence. what he put manning through was cruel and unjust and this implicitly acknowledges that

that kind of pile-on reminds me why i never tweet and it's part of why the internet has ruined everything.

just don't express regret that a whistleblower isn't going to be kept in solitary confinement until she successfully attempts suicide on twitter is my trick to avoided internet pile-ons

I also don't know who oliver willis is but he does have 58k followers who are presumably pretty left-wing, so it's not like it's just 'pile on random black dude'

Oliver Willis being a nincompoop doesn't justify thinly-veiled racism thrown at him by randos on Twitter.

he's obviously wrong but it's just the typical internet OTT response which is pretty eyerolling at best.

and at worst, yes what DJP said

This pile-on was instigated by Glenn Greenwald, btw.

Him and the others at intercept does this to women and poc all the time.

not really. willis is a well-known punching bag at this point

i definitely hate-read his timeline from time to time but i stopped tweeting mean things at him when i turned 20

Really. Greenwald retweeted him twice, then the racist abuse piled up. So yeah.

and how racist were the GG tweets?

well I guess we learned why JD suddenly cares about oliver willis' opinion on this matter

I vaguely remember Willis being an Internet Somebody back during Bush's second term, but haven't paid attention to him since maybe 2006.

and how racist were the GG tweets?

― Supercreditor (Dr Morbius), 17. januar 2017 23:23 (twenty-eight seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

They were just retweets. He didn't put on a single word, didn't in any way ask for people to do what they did.

He don't have to. And he knows what happens, it's the same thing that always happens.

retweeting peoples vile tweets is a crime

i know that in the court of public wokepinion that is evidence enough to convict greenwald of being worse than trump, but believe it or not journalists (even the "good" ones) mock/hate RT other people all the time. i didn't think disavowing the racist BS that random people spew was necessary on ilx but if it makes you happy, fred, then here you go

no kev, you misunderstand freddy b, gg specifically retweeted willis because he wanted a racist pile-on, but he is cunning enough not to be explicitly racist himself, because he is crafty

i find it quite troubling that fred, posting from a continent currently experiencing increased right-wing and anti-semitic sentiments, seems to always find a way to have unkind words for this particular gay jewish journalist. but that's none of my business

willis works for media matters, which is damning enough w/o the dumb tweets

xp

get that Fred's a punching bag, but c'mon.

These Europeans are all the same.

The sensitivity surrounding Greenwald and his #Putincept...

Which is a hashtag used by Oliver Willis. Yeah, he can be pretty tiresome. And he's definitely wrong about Chelsea Manning. People have flaws, some are way too soft on the IC, and some turn a blind eye to racist/sexist harassment from their followers. I didn't bring up what happened to Oliver Willis, I just pointed out it was instigated by Greenwald, and that he must have expected this kind of thing would be happening. Both things accurate. Calm down guys.

obviously i was being facetious with my post. i think even fred got that

Also, #EuropeisNotaCountry.

i said continent. my joke post is airtight

Obama also pardons Oscar Lopez Rivera

https://www.lawfareblog.com/obama-right-chelsea-manning

Paul Ryan and Bob Menendez both blasting the Manning commutation, so let's commend Obama for uniting them in bipartisan shitheadism.

Judith Miller
‏@JMfreespeech
Obama commutes sentence of Chelsea Manning. How many people died because of manning' leak?

@tinyrevolution
It's not that Judith Miller thinks it's BAD to publish things that get people killed. It's that she's competitive.

http://www.mccoveychronicles.com/2017/1/17/14303388/willie-mccovey-pardon-president-obama

Big surprise, because I don't really remember this ever happening in the first place.

Lol: Lol: http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/314783-assange-lawyer-conditions-not-met-for-assange-manning-extradition-offer