“If anyone expects President Obama to roll back Bush’s illegally-gained dictator powers, they are smoking rope.”
- Mark Frauenfelder

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald reports:

It is absolutely false that the only unconstitutional and destructive provision of this “compromise” bill is the telecom amnesty part. It’s true that most people working to defeat the Cheney/Rockefeller bill viewed opposition to telecom amnesty as the most politically potent way to defeat the bill, but the bill’s expansion of warrantless eavesdropping powers vested in the President, and its evisceration of safeguards against abuses of those powers, is at least as long-lasting and destructive as the telecom amnesty provisions. The bill legalizes many of the warrantless eavesdropping activities George Bush secretly and illegally ordered in 2001. Those warrantless eavesdropping powers violate core Fourth Amendment protections. And Barack Obama now supports all of it, and will vote it into law. Those are just facts.

- Glenn Greenwald @ Salon: Link.

From the comments:

What really rubbed me the wrong way was how Obama in his statement says essentially trust me with these powers, I’ll use them responsibly.

- Hume’s Ghost: Link.

Via Boing Boing: Link.

Speaking of Barack Obama:

“Obama’s campaign, which could spend as much as $500 million ….”

Breaking an earlier vow, Senator Barack Obama announced that he will opt out of the public campaign-finance system, in order to be able to spend unlimited amounts of money in the last two months of his presidential campaign, rather than merely $84 million, the amount to which Senator John McCain will be limited under public-funding laws. “It’ll be like George Steinbrenner’s Yankees in the 90s,” Democratic consultant Chris Lehane said of Obama’s campaign, which could spend as much as $500 million, “against the 90s Kansas City Royals.”

- Harper’s Weekly Review: Link.

Via Boing Boing: Link.

“It is precisely Obama’s experiences in Hawaii, Indonesia, and Kenya that are soul-forming for a future global leader.”
- William Irwin Thompson

Thompson explains why he likes Barack Obama, and what’s wrong with Hillary Clinton and John McCane:

… We are now heading into a period of enormous cultural transformation, and Obama is the kind of soul that can instinctively feel and understand, indeed, articulate a new planetary civilization. Obama is not a messianic figure that we need fear as some crazed cult leader; he more simply, and more enduringly, embodies a paradigm shift in American political leadership. Hillary may scoff at him and claim that his years in an Indonesian Muslim elementary school do not count as foreign policy experience, because she is thinking as the technocratic policy wonk that she is. It is precisely Obama’s experiences in Hawaii, Indonesia, and Kenya that are soul-forming for a future global leader. Hillary and McCain are the old paradigm of politics: the Eastern technocratic manager and the sunbelt suburban Goldwater-Reagan reactionary calling for tax cuts and militarism to solve all problems with a hatchet or a bomb.

- William Irwin Thompson, 3/3/2008: Link.

Thanks, E.B.

“Anybody who’s half white and half black is considered black anyway. That’s one drop of blood.”

Philip Roth, interviewed by Spiegel:

SPIEGEL: What made you interested in Obama?

Roth: I’m interested in the fact that he’s black. I feel the race issue in this country is more important than the feminist issue. I think that the importance to blacks would be tremendous. He’s an attractive man, he’s smart, he happens to be tremendously articulate. His position in the Democratic Party is more or less okay with me. And I think it would be important to American blacks if he became president.

SPIEGEL: It could change society, couldn’t it?

Roth: Yes, it could. It would say something about this country, and it would be a marvelous thing. I don’t know whether it’s going to happen. I rarely vote for anybody who wins. It’s going to be the kiss of death if you write in your magazine that I’m going to vote for Barack Obama. Then he’s finished!

SPIEGEL: The discussions around Obama remind us of your figure Coleman Silk, the hero of “The Human Stain,” who is black with unusually light skin and then invents a Jewish biography. What we mean is the questions of belonging, of right and wrong behavior. Is Barack Obama black enough?

Roth: I know this discussion goes on, but I think it will disappear if he gets the nomination. The reality of his running will wash that away. Anybody who’s half white and half black is considered black anyway. That’s one drop of blood.

SPIEGEL: For whites to consider him black, yes. But the question is whether the blacks consider him black.

Roth: They will once the election goes on. If he gets the nomination.

- Philip Roth, Spiegel: February 08, 2008: Link.

Via FreeInternetPress.