All of the excitement over Barack Obama's inauguration is, quite frankly, disgusting, sickening, and shortsighted. He's going to bring "Change!" to America, he's going to magically fix the economy, he's going to fix our foreign policy, he's going to fix the environment, he's going to do everything that everyone wants and more, and only at the low, low price of ever-increasing federal debt. Anyone who wanted actual change should have supported Ron Paul, who has consistently actually done what he's said. Sfortunatamente that ship has sailed, and I don't see a chance for a true candidate for change for a long, long time. I must deal with what we have now: an imposter of a candidate for change.
I had the pleasure of helping my class attempt to watch Obama's inauguration Tuesday. Because of a comment on a certain Slashdot article a short while back I discovered that the Senate had set up a website to stream the inauguration using Flash. When my professor ran into restrictions on every major news website she went to, I directed her to the Senate website. Of course, the webserver was painfully slow, so the speech was constantly rebuffering, and five or six minutes before class ended she said we could have left already.
So I left. I was starving, and I went to the Circle K just down the street and got myself a soda and candy bar and sat in the adjoining restaurant. Of course, it had a TV, and of course the TV was playing the inauguration. The group of people was two or three times larger than my class yet was much more muted. Perhaps out of awe, but I certainly appreciated the relative silence. For all of Obama's talk about change I really couldn't and can't see any, just a few superficial things he'll be doing differently.
And because of my inability to spot any real change in Obama's plans, I have to admit that I was surprised to read that Obama has lifted Ashcroft's restrictions on the Freedom of Information Act, and has also signed an order to close the U.S.'s prison at Guantanamo Bay within one year. These two bits of news ever-so-slightly tempered my distrust of and cynicism toward Obama, in part because I thought he might actually want to approach the Neverending War—excuse me, War on Terrorism—in a different manner, but mainly because I had stopped caring about Barack Obama in much the same way that I had stopped caring about George W. Bush when I became a minarchist in high school.
My cynicism and distrust were brought back in full force, however, when I returned from Publix this afternoon to find an altogether unsurprising article on Slashdot, bastion of nerd-intellectual news that it is: "Obama sides with Bush in spy case." The blurb handily summarizes—a first for Slashdot—the linked Threat Level article:
I don't know about you, but for all his talk of transparency and openness, I don't think that Obama will live up to much or any of it. He's in charge now, his party is in charge of the executive and the legislative—and when you and your coworkers or cow-orkers or cohorts or fellow mob-men and lawyers are in control of everything, it's really hard to do away with such a convenient thing as warrantless wiretaps. Of course, the cynic in me believes that even if the stay isn't a gesture of support for Bush, and even if Obama really does do away with the warrantless-wiretapping program, that there will still be widespread warrantless wiretapping—how's that for an alliteration?—but that it simply won't be public knowledge.
And just because you can request certain information from the government doesn't mean that you'll get it, and even if you get it, you might not necessarily be getting the actual information.
I do, however, see the administration's request for a stay as its taking the Bush administration's side because Obama voted for telecom immunity:
I had the pleasure of helping my class attempt to watch Obama's inauguration Tuesday. Because of a comment on a certain Slashdot article a short while back I discovered that the Senate had set up a website to stream the inauguration using Flash. When my professor ran into restrictions on every major news website she went to, I directed her to the Senate website. Of course, the webserver was painfully slow, so the speech was constantly rebuffering, and five or six minutes before class ended she said we could have left already.
So I left. I was starving, and I went to the Circle K just down the street and got myself a soda and candy bar and sat in the adjoining restaurant. Of course, it had a TV, and of course the TV was playing the inauguration. The group of people was two or three times larger than my class yet was much more muted. Perhaps out of awe, but I certainly appreciated the relative silence. For all of Obama's talk about change I really couldn't and can't see any, just a few superficial things he'll be doing differently.
And because of my inability to spot any real change in Obama's plans, I have to admit that I was surprised to read that Obama has lifted Ashcroft's restrictions on the Freedom of Information Act, and has also signed an order to close the U.S.'s prison at Guantanamo Bay within one year. These two bits of news ever-so-slightly tempered my distrust of and cynicism toward Obama, in part because I thought he might actually want to approach the Neverending War—excuse me, War on Terrorism—in a different manner, but mainly because I had stopped caring about Barack Obama in much the same way that I had stopped caring about George W. Bush when I became a minarchist in high school.
My cynicism and distrust were brought back in full force, however, when I returned from Publix this afternoon to find an altogether unsurprising article on Slashdot, bastion of nerd-intellectual news that it is: "Obama sides with Bush in spy case." The blurb handily summarizes—a first for Slashdot—the linked Threat Level article:
President Obama has publicly sided with the Bush administration on the question of whether the President should be allowed to establish warrantless wiretapping programs designed to monitor U.S. citizens. "Thursday's filing by the Obama administration marked the first time it officially lodged a court document in the lawsuit asking the courts to rule on the constitutionality of the Bush administration's warrantless-eavesdropping program."
I don't know about you, but for all his talk of transparency and openness, I don't think that Obama will live up to much or any of it. He's in charge now, his party is in charge of the executive and the legislative—and when you and your coworkers or cow-orkers or cohorts or fellow mob-men and lawyers are in control of everything, it's really hard to do away with such a convenient thing as warrantless wiretaps. Of course, the cynic in me believes that even if the stay isn't a gesture of support for Bush, and even if Obama really does do away with the warrantless-wiretapping program, that there will still be widespread warrantless wiretapping—how's that for an alliteration?—but that it simply won't be public knowledge.
And just because you can request certain information from the government doesn't mean that you'll get it, and even if you get it, you might not necessarily be getting the actual information.
I do, however, see the administration's request for a stay as its taking the Bush administration's side because Obama voted for telecom immunity:
The Obama administration is also siding with the former administration in its legal defense of July legislation that immunizes the nation's telecommunications companies from lawsuits accusing them of complicitity in Bush's eavesdropping program, according to testimony last week by incoming Attorney General Eric Holder.
That immunity legislation, which Obama voted for when he was a U.S. senator from Illinois, was included in a broader spy package that granted the government wide-ranging, warrantless eavesdropping powers on Americans' electronic communications.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Change has finally come to the United States, and it's never seemed so familiar.
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