Obama Promises Disappear from Web

Most mentally retarded people I've met are quite aware that they're significantly less smart than the average person, and have internalized it quite well. Have you ever seen an 8-year-old burst into tears because the rest of his class can read, but he can't, no matter how hard he tries?

Unfortunately, self-delusion generally isn't one of the ways mental retardation presents.

You make it sound like Halliburton just wrote a check to the DOJ to make the problem go away. Big companies don't need to write checks--they have hostages.

Put yourself in a DOJ prosecutor's shoes. You've got evidence of illegal conduct. You can't pin it on anyone specific, but you know the company overall engaged in the conduct. What do you do?

Do you randomly prosecute the CEO, simply by virtue of his position, for activity you can't directly pin on him? If you do this, watch every multi-national rush to re-incorporate in Switzerland.

Do you shut down the company, in the process putting tens of thousands of innocent people out of work in the midst of a shitty economy, punishing shareholders who had nothing to do with the illegal activity, and destroying a local economy?[1] All for what? To prove a point?

No, you don't do any of these things. You do exactly what the DOJ did in this case: force them to make a $55 million "donation" to the National Wildlife Fund, pay a token $200k fine, and let them go on with a stern warning. That's just the nature of law enforcement in a globalized economy, where multi-national corporations can "vote with their pocketbooks" and have countries compete to see who can be the most lax about law enforcement.

[1] E.g. consider the criminal indictment and subsequent dissolution of Arthur Andersen, and its impact on Chicago. While most of the personnel moved to other accounting firms in the city, losing the global headquarters of a $10 billion/year giant in the industry was not a good thing for the local economy.

It appears that you are referring to the people the US is holding in Gitmo.

Uh, an issue here is the "lawful" part: A claim is that the whole Gitmo thing is part of the US military fighting a war. The Gitmo people are prisoners of war or some such. So, they are not to be handled in the US legal system. So, for how they are being handled, "lawful" in the US legal system makes little or no sense.

For "torture", the US military claims not to use torture. Okay. Maybe water boarding is torture, but apparently it does no physical harm and, so, maybe is not really torture.

In broad terms, many well informed people, e.g., D. D. Eisenhower, understood very well that the US military in times of war does things on battlefields that would be totally unacceptable against US citizens inside the US. E.g., Ike was very reluctant to send the Army to Little Rock. So, one broad lesson is that (1) the US legal system and law enforcement inside the US are one thing and (2) what the US military does outside the US to enemies of the US is a very different thing. In particular, Gitmo is just not like a US prison or a county jail. Asking if Gitmo is "lawful" is like asking about the wings on hogs.

I don't say this because I like Obama or liked W or Cheney.

For W and Cheney, they got us into foreign wars that were good candidates for "absurd foreign adventures" and didn't get us out. There's "Occupy a country, pull down a statue, now what? Do you know what I mean?" or some such from just retired Marine four star General J. "Mad Dog" Mattis.

For Obama, my first time really torqued off was his early 2008 interview with the SF Chronicle (off and on on YouTube -- once when on I typed in a full transcript which I still have) where he said that he wanted to use carbon cap and trade to ratchet up the charges on coal fired electric generating plants to "bankrupt" the plants. From some DoE reports, at the time that was 49% of our electric power and about 23% of all our energy. Outrageous. He'd need a crash program in nuke construction to make up the difference. He also said that of course "electric rates would skyrocket".

So, what was he doing? Best I can tell, he was waving a smell of raw meat to get some greenies up on their hind legs. And he was building a consensus to throw money at green projects, please some greenies in business, and get back some campaign donations. For shutting down coal plants, likely the EPA has been slowly shutting down some of the older plants the owners didn't want to upgrade to cleaner burning. There I would be more concerned about NOx emissions, that cause acid rain, than CO2 (that plants like!).

So, my reading is that mostly he has just played politics with the greenies: Give them a little smell of what they want, throw some money their way, pretend to be doing what they want, and otherwise do essentially nothing.

E.g., in Mideast Arab Spring politics, he doesn't want to appear to be on the side of either secular dictators or the radical Islamists. So, in Libya he did something but apparently mostly (set aside Bengazhi) not enough really to entangle the US. Apparently in Syria he trained a few rebels to use some Russian missiles -- again, appearing to fight the dictator but not getting the US entangled. Now the US DoD has given him a list of options for more in Syria; my guess is that he will take none of the options but continue to find ways to posture. For actually influencing the outcome in Syria, I suspect he will do nothing. Of course, I don't see a good outcome in Syria -- it looks like either Al Qaeda or back to Assad as the Mediterranean branch of Iran.

Maybe in Egypt he did or enabled something productive: Uh, it appears that from the deal between Sadat and Begin at Camp David, the US heavily funds the Egyptian military. Sooooo, net, the Egyptian military is nearly a branch of the US DoD! Sooooo, the US essentially has a big veto and say-so in Egypt. So, after a year of Morsi and his true believers messing up the economy, there was enough discontent in the streets to let the military dump Morsi and set up an interim techocrat government and then hold elections. If this works out, good. If Obama played a significant role, also good.

My explanation for nearly everything Obama does is he just wants to play politics or be a political leader. So, pick some issues, appear to be for some and against others. For each side, make some statements and maybe some weak actions and otherwise do next to nothing.

When would he actually do something? Maybe when about 70% of the voters really wanted it. Otherwise he will just say things and do little things that make his base feel good.

My take is that basically he is indifferent and cynical about government and, instead, is willing just to play feel good politics. E.g., "bankrupt" the coal plants is just feel good nonsense to please some greenies and not something he's actually going to do.

So, as an engineer, to me one place he fails is (1) see a serious US problem, (2) analyze the problem, (3) find a good direction, (4) explain the problem and direction to the American people and build a consensus to solve the problem, (5) move on with a solution. Instead he just plays politics until some other forces get maybe 70% approval for some action and then steps in front of the crowd as the leader.

In part playing such politics can generate political capital that can be used for something definite.

It seems to me that such leadership looks weak to the voters and, as a result by now, is costing him political capital.

One place where maybe 70% of the people will get torqued at him is the Trayvon Martin matter: So, again, Obama hasn't done much, and since it really isn't necessarily a Federal issue he didn't have much to do. But he has said some things that appear to please his base. And his buddy the AG has said some more such things. Apparently so far their actions have amounted to next to nothing except one might guess that some of the rioting that has happened since the jury decision was stimulated or encouraged by some of what Obama and his AG did say. Sure, that can mean that some dumb people rioted for no good reason so blame the dumb people; still, the statements were not good.

One danger of Obama is that many problems in the US are permitted just to fester, e.g., the economy, energy planning, immigration, health care reform, etc. instead of receive serious attention. A second danger is that if there were a serious problem, would he be a good and serious leader?

One piece of good news is that Obama seems to be going along with the plan to put the DHS in the old DC Saint Elizabeth's Psychiatric Hospital. Sounds fully appropriate to me. Hope that the TSA is one of the first inmates. Sad part is that they want to spend $4.5 billion moving in.

Also apparently constitutional scholar Obama failed to notice how the NSA tracked mud over the Fourth Amendment and, again, let that problem just fester until the sh!t hit the fan.