The larger fear is that Obama might be just another corporatist, punking voters much as the Republicans do when they claim to be all for the common guy.

Congratulations, Mr. Rich. With all your education, it has taken you two years longer than most of the people on this site to arrive at this conclusion. Obama is a corporatist. Or, as noted on HillaryIs44, an opportunist. He doesn’t care about the little guy or gal. Further, by his use of signing statements, a disturbing echo of the Bush Administration, he is on the road to becoming a “Unitary Executive.” I wonder if Mr. Rich feels ‘punked’ over that as well.

Let’s take a look at some of Mr. Rich’s observations leading him down disillusionment alley:

… [T]here is real reason for longer-term worry in the form of a persistent, anecdotal drift toward disillusionment among some of the president’s supporters. And not merely those on the left. This concern was perhaps best articulated by an Obama voter, a real estate agent in Virginia, featured on the front page of The Washington Post last week. “Nothing’s changed for the common guy,” she said. “I feel like I’ve been punked.” She cited in particular the billions of dollars in bailouts given to banks that still “act like they’re broke.”

But this mood isn’t just about the banks, Public Enemy No. 1. What the Great Recession has crystallized is a larger syndrome that Obama tapped into during the campaign. It’s the sinking sensation that the American game is rigged — that, as the president typically put it a month after his inauguration, the system is in hock to “the interests of powerful lobbyists or the wealthiest few” who have “run Washington far too long.” He promised to smite them.

…What disturbs Americans of all ideological persuasions is the fear that almost everything, not just government, is fixed or manipulated by some powerful hidden hand, from commercial transactions as trivial as the sales of prime concert tickets to cultural forces as pervasive as the news media.

Come on, Mr. Rich, it’s not such a long walk to realize why Wall Street has been protected with endless bailouts. Mr. Obama got more money from Wall St. than any other candidate. Rich must give Obama credit that he is doing some of the “rigging.” Rich still tries to pretend that Obama just can’t fight ‘the man.’ loathe to acknowledge that Obama is ‘the man.’ Certainly, he was elected by ‘the man.’

Where Rich tries halfheartedly to assail Republicans for disruptive town hall meetings, he must admit Democrats have unclean hands as well:

As Democrats have pointed out, the angry hecklers disrupting town-hall meetings convened by members of Congress are not always ordinary citizens engaging in spontaneous grass-roots protests or even G.O.P. operatives, but proxies for corporate lobbyists. (snip)

But the Democratic members of Congress those hecklers assailed can hardly claim the moral high ground. Their ties to health care interests are merely more discreet and insidious. As Congressional Quarterly reported last week, industry groups contributed almost $1.8 million in the first six months of 2009 alone to the 18 House members of both parties supervising health care reform, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer among them.

Then there are the 52 conservative Blue Dog Democrats, who have balked at the public option for health insurance. Their cash intake from insurers and drug companies outpaces their Democratic peers by an average of 25 percent, according to The Post. And let’s not forget the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, which has raked in nearly $500,000 from a single doctor-owned hospital in McAllen, Tex. — the very one that Obama has cited as a symbol of runaway medical costs ever since it was profiled in The New Yorker this spring.

Finally, Rich has a hallelujah moment when he points out that (D) or (R) after one’s name means less and less. It’s the character, stupid!

In this maze of powerful moneyed interests, it’s not clear who any American in either party should or could root for. The bipartisan nature of the beast can be encapsulated by the remarkable progress of Billy Tauzin, the former Louisiana congressman. Tauzin was a founding member of the Blue Dog Democrats in 1994. A year later, he bolted to the Republicans. Now he is chief of PhRMA, the biggest pharmaceutical trade group. In the 2008 campaign, Obama ran a television ad pillorying Tauzin for his role in preventing Medicare from negotiating for lower drug prices. Last week The Los Angeles Times reported — and The New York Times confirmed — that Tauzin, an active player in White House health care negotiations, had secured a behind-closed-doors flip-flop, enlisting the administration to push for continued protection of drug prices. Now we know why the president has ducked his campaign pledge to broadcast such negotiations on C-Span.

The making of legislative sausage is never pretty. The White House has to give to get. But the cynicism being whipped up among voters is justified. Unlike Hillary Clinton, whose chief presidential campaign strategist unapologetically did double duty as a high-powered corporate flack, Obama promised change we could actually believe in.

Rich cannot miss an opportunity to trash Hillary Clinton to the bargain. I was waiting for him to find some inane reason to drag her name into this, even though Obama has proven himself to be in bed with corporate interests ten times over. We’d be lucky to have her as President right now. No matter what, I can assure you he would not feel ‘punked.’

Still, Mr. Rich cannot hide from the truth although he does try to soft pedal it:

[Obama’s] first questionable post-victory step was to assemble an old boys’ club of Robert Rubin protégés and Goldman-Citi alumni as the White House economic team, including a Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, who failed in his watchdog role at the New York Fed as Wall Street’s latest bubble first inflated and then burst. The questions about Geithner’s role in adjudicating the subsequent bailouts aren’t going away, and neither is the angry public sense that the fix is still in. We just learned that nine of those bailed-out banks — which in total received $175 billion of taxpayers’ money, but as yet have repaid only $50 billion — are awarding a total of $32.6 billion in bonuses for 2009.

It’s in this context that Obama can’t afford a defeat on health care. A bill will pass in a Democrat-controlled Congress. What matters is what’s in it. The final result will be a CAT scan of those powerful Washington interests he campaigned against, revealing which have been removed from the body politic (or at least reduced) and which continue to metastasize. The Wall Street regulatory reform package Obama pushes through, or doesn’t, may render even more of a verdict on his success in changing the system he sought the White House to reform.

President Obama has shown no signs that he wants corporate control to stop metastasizing. The advisors and moneyed interests with whom he surrounds himself offer ample evidence of that, which even Mr. Rich now admits.

Despite this Administration’s expending significant resources on smoke and mirrors, the realities that Mr. Rich alludes to are getting more and more attention. Change We Can Believe In has now been substituted with The Fix Is In.

Some of us knew that a long time ago.

“Let Women Wear the Hijab: The Emptiness of Obama’s Cairo Speech“:

I know many will gush over President Obama’s Cairo speech and I’m likely swimming against the tide of the media and my fellow Democrats and progressives. But reading the transcript, I was struck by two things:

1. Aside from a few platitudes, it is disappointingly weak on human rights and specifically women’s rights.

2. It betrays a naiveté, perhaps feigned, about how the Arab world works. [Susan's Note: Here at NoQuarter, we're all familiar with Obama's inexperience and lack of knowledge that lead to his dangerous naivete.]

I sometimes preface my posts by explaining that my Mideast perspective is that of an American-Lebanese-Christian-Jew who grew up in Muslim West Beirut at the height (or should I say depth) of the Lebanese civil war. The tumultuous and bloody intersection of religions and geopolitical interests is painfully real to me.

Yes, Obama is targeting the Arab ’street’ and global public opinion – but to the corrupt regimes that dominate that region of the world, his oration means virtually nothing. Repression and suppression will go on uninterrupted. And to those whose abiding hatred of Israel (and thus America) is absolute, Obama’s words will be seen as empty and hypocritical.

Egyptian blogger Hossam el-Hamalawy explains:

Right before he took off from DC, on what the media has been depicting as some “odyssey,” to address the Muslim World from Cairo, President Obama had described the 81-year-old Egyptian President Mubarak as a “force for stability.” This week Cairo and its twin city Giza have been a showcase of what this “stability” cost.

The capital is under occupation. Security troops are deployed in the main public squares and metro stations. Citizens were detained en masse and shops were told to close down in Bein el-Sarayat area, neighboring Cairo University, where Obama will be speaking. In Al-Azhar University, the co-host of the “historical speech,” State Security police raided and detained at least 200 foreign students, held them without charges in unknown locations.

Is there an overarching purpose to Obama’s speech? Is it to repair our image after eight years of a radical rightwing administration? Of course. But if the goal is to repair our image, then how about shunning the barbaric concept of indefinite detention? How about heeding the increasingly distressed calls of those who view the new administration’s actions in the realm of civil liberties as a dangerous, disturbing, and precedent-setting affirmation of Bush’s worst excesses?

Glenn Greenwald writes:

The White House is actively supporting a new bill jointly sponsored by Sens. Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman — called The Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act of 2009 — that literally has no purpose other than to allow the government to suppress any “photograph taken between September 11, 2001 and January 22, 2009 relating to the treatment of individuals engaged, captured, or detained after September 11, 2001, by the Armed Forces of the United States in operations outside of the United States.”

What kind of a country passes a law that has no purpose other than to empower its leader to suppress evidence of the torture it inflicted on people? Read the language of the bill; it doesn’t even hide the fact that its only objective is to empower the President to conceal evidence of war crimes.

That this exact scenario is now happening in the U.S. is all the more remarkable given that the President who is demanding these new suppression powers is the same one who repeatedly vowed “to make his administration the most open and transparent in history.” After noting the tentative steps Obama has taken to increase transparency, the generally pro-Obama Washington Post Editorial Page today observed: “what makes the administration’s support for the photographic records act so regrettable” is that “Mr. Obama runs the risk of taking two steps back in his quest for more open government.”

What makes all of this even worse is that it is part of a broader trend whereby the Government simply retroactively changes the law whenever it decides it does not want to abide by it.

Glenn has been documenting – and railing against – dozens of similar instances. I echoed his concerns in a recent post:

[...]

I wish I could quote Peter’s essay in its entirety. I have written an e-mail to him, requesting just that.

In the meantime, read all of “Let Women Wear the Hijab: The Emptiness of Obama’s Cairo Speech.”

Here is the full text of Obama’s speech.

For more blog reactions, check Memeorandum.com.

SusanUnPC’s April 8th note: When even Keith Olbermann lowers the boom — calling President Barack Obama’s decision “change you cannot believe in”, condemning Obama for going further than Bush in his expansion of invasive, extra-Constitutional powers — you know the Obama Administration is going to the “dark side,” as Jane Mayer describes in her esteemed book. Howard Fineman explains the administration’s amoral political calculus and its “newbie” problem, and refers to Mayer’s book. When Mayer is a guest on No Quarter Radio soon, we will ask her about this astonishing abandonment of key principles touted by Obama during his candidacy, when he said whatever it took. Question of the Day: Didn’t the Kossack crowd scream for Bush’s impeachment over precisely this issue? Why not threaten Obama with impeachment?

P.S. Do you remember this Boston Globe article about Hillary Clinton on October 11, 2007? “Clinton vows to check executive powers.” If but for the willful Obamabots’ delusions and caucus thuggery, we’d have a president who would stand up to the intelligence community because, for one thing, Hillary wouldn’t have a learning curve hurdle and already knows who’s who, while Obama, as always, thinks he can cover up his ignorance by charming people through doing their bidding. My hunch is that, to a one, the intel community has disdain for his ignorance and unctuous collusion.

Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer and friend of Larry Johnson’s, is a contributing editor to The American Conservative and a fellow at the American Conservative Defense Alliance. Originally published at Antiwar.com.

Those who hoped that the change promised by candidate Barack Obama would include repeal of the various acts that have stripped Americans of their constitutional rights should be disappointed.

Benjamin Franklin supposedly wrote, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” The citation is likely apocryphal, at least in terms of its attribution to Franklin, but it is useful shorthand for the unfortunate abandonment of many of the liberties guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution as a consequence of 9/11.

The trauma of 9/11 created an opportunity for those seeking to centralize executive power, an objective of recent presidents from both political parties. Many Americans initially accepted that there had to be some abridgment of fundamental liberties while fighting a multi-faceted and unconventional war against terrorism, but few realize just how much the constitutional rights that all citizens take for granted have been eroded. History also teaches us that once a right is suspended, in all likelihood it is gone forever.

The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 might well be described as one of history’s more spectacular euphemisms employed to gut a constitution, somewhat akin to Hitler’s “emergency act” in the wake of the Reichstag fire of 1933. It is better known as PATRIOT Act I. PATRIOT Act I became law six weeks after the fall of the Twin Towers and was followed by PATRIOT Act II in 2006. The two laws together diminish constitutional guarantees of free speech, freedom of association, freedom from illegal search, the right to habeas corpus, prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, and prohibition of the illegal seizure of private property. The First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments in the Bill of Rights have all been discarded or abridged in the rush to make it easier to investigate, torture, and jail both foreigners and American citizens. The PATRIOT Act also incorporates the Financial Anti-Terrorism Act of Oct. 17, 2001, which permits the freezing of assets and investigation of individuals suspected of being financial supporters of terrorism. “Suspected” is the key word, as there is no oversight or appeal in the process.

The Military Commission Act of 2006 (MCA) followed the PATRIOT Acts, creating military tribunals for the trying of “unlawful enemy combatants,” including American citizens. Unlike a civil or criminal court, the accused needs only a two-thirds vote by the commission members present to be convicted. The act permits the indefinite jailing of suspects in a military prison without being charged with a crime or given access to a lawyer. The government is not required to produce any normally admissible evidence at a commission hearing and can rely on hearsay or even information obtained overseas during torture to make its case. Detainees do not have access to any classified information used against them and cannot cross-examine or even know the identity of witnesses. The MCA suspends habeas corpus for anyone charged and forbids the application of the Geneva Conventions to mitigate conditions of confinement or to challenge the judicial process or verdict. The Geneva Conventions also cannot be invoked if the accused subsequently claims he was tortured or otherwise abused, protecting overly zealous interrogators from later charges of “war crimes.” The act was also designed to cover all cases that were pending, meaning that it was retroactive.

An executive order issued on July 17, 2007, which is still in effect, authorized the president to seize the property of anyone who “threatens stabilization efforts in Iraq.” As the administration’s own Justice Department decides what constitutes “threatening stabilization efforts,” the order can be used to go after any critic of the government. Most disturbing, the order does not permit a challenge to the information the seizure is based on, and it also permits the confiscation of the property of anyone who comes to the assistance of the suspected de-stabilizer.

The threat to civil liberties is real. Under the authority of the PATRIOT Act, the FBI requested more than 30,000 national security letters in 2007, and the number was surely higher in 2008. The letters enable the FBI to look at anyone’s personal information without any judicial oversight or showing of cause. Anyone who is presented with a letter and compelled to cooperate to provide information on a suspect cannot reveal that the letter has been received. Are there 30,000 terrorists roaming the United States? If there were, the country would surely be a bombed-out ruin by now. The government is instead using the security letters and the other tools provided by the PATRIOT Act legislation to look at people who are completely innocent of any wrongdoing, because it is convenient to be able to do so without the bother of having to go to a judge for a search warrant.

Sen. Barack Obama opposed the MCA and voted against it. He was not in the Senate when the first PATRIOT Act was passed, but he criticized the second version for its abuse of civil liberties before voting for an amended version. Candidate Obama ran on his record of opposition to the various pieces of legislation, noting consistently that they had authorized the abuse of authority by law enforcement and had abridged the rights of every American. Unfortunately, President Obama appears to have forgotten the principled positions he took as a senator and presidential candidate. After his inauguration, he moved quickly to publicly ban the CIA’s use of torture, a meaningless gesture in that the Agency had already abandoned the practice, but it now appears that he will do nothing to revoke Bush-era legislation like the MCA that he once strongly criticized. There is every indication that he will also endorse renewal of the PATRIOT Act when it expires at the end of the year, afraid that if he does not do so and there is a terrorist attack he will pay a significant political price. The Obama administration has also been silent about the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretaps and has invoked the “state-secrets privilege” in connection with a lawsuit by the Islamic charity al-Haramain in an apparent bid to prevent disclosure of the warrantless wiretap procedure.

President Obama is not just contradicting his progressive campaign promises and betraying many of the people who voted for him. As a lawyer, he surely understands that protecting the government’s questionably legal “rights” to monitor citizens completely subverts the rule of law, because it guarantees that there will be no accountability. Currently, judges who rule on the state-secrets issue are not themselves allowed to see the alleged classified information, meaning that there is absolutely no transparency to the process in which the government is asserting an extralegal privilege that is surely unconstitutional.

If the Obama administration is beginning to sound like the Bush White House, it should. To be sure, the new president is relying on the advice of many Bush administration holdovers like FBI Director Robert Mueller. Mueller asserts, without providing any evidence, that the tools provided by the PATRIOT Act have been effective in preventing terrorism, just as Bush-era intelligence chiefs claimed that torture and extraordinary rendition were essential to meet the terrorist threat. All such claims should be viewed with extreme skepticism, particularly as they are rarely backed up by any evidence. The government also often lies when it wants to make a case for some illegal action. Claims made in 2008 that the waterboarding of Abu Zubaida produced a flood of information that frustrated terrorist plots are now revealed to have been false. Zubaida confused his interrogators and sent them off on wild goose chases with information that was either deliberately deceptive or flat-out wrong. In reality, the government cannot cite a single instance where the use of draconian new legislation or illegal procedures like torture has either prevented a terrorist incident or led to the arrest of anyone who was ready, willing, and able to carry out a violent act.

Obama would have been wiser to ignore the experts and sit back and consider the broader picture. Does the creation of a monstrous Department of Homeland Security supported by a bloated defense and intelligence establishment really make sense in light of the threat that the U.S. actually faces? How did we arrive at a 400,000-name no-fly list and an NSA that has conducted hundreds of millions of interceptions of telephone calls without any oversight?

That a small group of terrorists holed up in an isolated and backward part of the world got lucky against an unsuspecting America on 9/11 is clear, but the odds of them repeating that spectacular success are minimal. More than seven years later, the actual vulnerability of international terrorism should be completely clear and the government should be telling the people the good news, that al-Qaeda is on its last legs and that the other Salafist terrorist groups that have a similar philosophy have been hounded and contained all around the world. There has been no successful terrorist action within the United States, and the appeal of jihadist terrorism is on the wane everywhere else. Its moment has passed.

In spite of the reduced threat, under Obama the business of fighting terrorism goes on with a change in the rhetoric but not in the policy, buttressed by an enlarged military budget to spread the cheer to Afghanistan and increased spending on intelligence. And there is no sign that the liberties that Americans have bartered away are about to be returned. Having an amorphous foreign threat hanging around is always good politics, as it can be used to divert attention from more serious problems at home. Having the mechanisms at hand to investigate an American citizen can also be useful when the critics become too loud. Those who feared that George W. Bush would give his successors unconstitutional tools that they would be reluctant to relinquish have apparently been vindicated.

The WSJ reports that GM’s Rick Wagoner and Fritz Henderson were summoned to D.C. on Friday, to the Treasury office of Steven Rattner, selected by PBO last month to head the Department’s auto-industry task force. Mr. Rattner “broke the news to Mr. Wagoner in person at his office at Treasury,” and then met with the temporary replacement, Mr. Henderson. Bloomberg confirms the Friday meetings in “GM’s Wagoner Steps Aside After Failing Obama Scrutiny.”

Below: Who knew about the Friday beheading — that bloody coup d’état! — before the story broke Sunday night? Who didn’t know? …

Surely seven people (and staff) knew Friday but, as with the leak-free message control during Obama’s campaign, nobody spilled the beans. Who knew? GM’s Wagoner and Henderson, Treasury’s Geithner and Rattner, the WH’s Obama, Emanuel, and perhaps Axelrod. Who was left in the dark until Sunday night? Michigan’s senators Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow? Michigan’s once-powerful House member John Dingell? (Dingell recently got kicked upstairs by Nancy Pelosi.) The 11th District’s Thad McCotter? (McCotter spoke Sunday night with John Batchelor and guests, including Larry Johnson, but was constrained by “embargoed” news.)

In fact, Obama didn’t tell four key Congressional members (Levin, Stabenow, Dingell and Sander Levin) until “a Sunday night conference call that he would grant unspecified additional aid to GM for 60 days and Chrysler for 30 days, according to a person familiar with the call,” reports the Detroit News.

Once again, the Unitary Executive Obama has circumvented the will of the people which is supposed to be expressed through their representatives and senators to Congress, as quaintly prescribed in the Constitution by our nation’s brilliant founders.

This is akin to Geithner’s “toxic assets plan,” announced Monday and issued by fiat. To which you might reply, “Well, he is the Treasury secretary.” And to which I’d retort, “But he sneakily is going to blow at least $1 trillion of your taxes, without having undergone (1) Congressional scrutiny and hearings; and (2) any legislation granting him such authority.

This Bloomberg paragraph explains in part why Rick Wagoner was forced out:

“It’s very hard for the government to write a big check without giving some evidence of change,” Casesa said. “This will also give the government moral authority with the other stakeholders to make them sacrifice.”

The WSJ goes further:

The Obama administration used the threat of withholding more bailout money to force out General Motors Corp. Chief Executive Rick Wagoner, marking one of the most dramatic government interventions in private industry since the economic crisis began last year. [...]

[NOTE THIS, readers.] The move also indicates that the Treasury Department [GEITHNER] intends to wade more deeply than most observers expected into the affairs of the country’s largest and oldest car company.

So, Obama forced the chairman of a major private company to resign. (Some news is “embargoed” until midnight ET. We will update.) Geithner? He knew this morning — of COURSE he knew (see WSJ quotes above and below) but held it during Meet the Press and Gregory, unlike Russert, has no nose for blood in the water. By the way, I never thought I’d cry out for Tim Russert, but, damn, was he needed as David Gregory played softball with Geithner, who’s obviously graduated from a quickie two-week master’s degree in Media Management from David Axelrod. For example, the back-and-forth on the toxic assets plan was as placid as a lullaby duet.

Update: Hot Air’s Allahpundit adds another dimension:

If you want taxpayer money, you’re going to have to do things The One’s way. And if you don’t want taxpayer money, TurboTax Tim might swoop in and make sure you do things The One’s way anyway. [...]

Oddly enough, when Rasmussen polled the public in December, only 14 percent thought a GM run by the feds would outperform a GM run by the private sector. Exit question: Ever get the feeling that Obama’s not quite the centrist pragmatist Christopher Buckley thought he’d be? (Emphases mine.)

(Susan’s Note about the conservative Christopher Buckley’s public support of Obama: This is a depressing instance of the unintended consequence of voting based primarily on compensatory white guilt.)

There are more news flashes via Memeorandum from major news outlets. Here’s more Bloomberg:

“General Motors Corp. Chief Executive Officer Rick Wagoner will step down after more than eight years running the largest U.S. automaker, people familiar with the situation said.

“The Obama administration asked Wagoner, 56, to leave the company and he agreed, said an administration official who declined to be identified before the move was announced. The likely replacement, unless the government hires from outside the company, would be Chief Operating Officer Fritz Henderson, said John Casesa, managing partner at New York-based consulting firm Casesa Shapiro Group.”

And here’s more WSJ:

An administration official confirmed that Mr. Wagoner was asked to step down to make way for ongoing restructuring within the company. Mr. Wagoner will be replaced, at least on an interim basis, by Frederick “Fritz” Henderson, the company’s chief operating officer.

Mr. Wagoner was asked to step down on Friday by Steven Rattner, the investment banker picked last month by the the administration to lead the Treasury Department’s auto-industry task force. Mr. Rattner broke the news to Mr. Wagoner in person at his office at Treasury, according to an administration official. Afterward, Mr. Rattner met one-on-one with Mr. Henderson, who will fill in as GM’s CEO.

GM didn’t immediately return calls for comment. One longtime GM board member, Kent Kresa, declined to comment when reached by phone Sunday night.

The ouster comes as President Barack Obama prepares to give billions of dollars more in aid to struggling auto makers GM and Chrysler LLC, but only if all sides—including unions and bondholders—show that they are ready to sacrifice.

President Obama plans Monday to lay out the administration’s interim conclusions on the companies’ viability and the many steps that need to be taken to return the companies to health. The president is likely to hold off on granting the companies $21.6 billion in new loans to preserve leverage in negotiations, particularly with the thousands of bondholders who hold a total of about $28 billion in GM debt.

In remarks Sunday, Mr. Obama said that he intends to extract “a set of sacrifices from all parties involved—management, labor, shareholders, creditors, suppliers, dealers.” The industry, he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” must “take serious restructuring steps now in order to preserve a brighter future down the road.” The two companies “are not there yet,” he added.

Mr. Wagoner’s removal shows that the sacrifices could cut deep. The departure of the company’s top executive promises to further shake up a company that has already been through considerable change over the past six months. The 56-year-old executive had been scrambling to craft a global strategy aimed at maintaining leadership in the global sales chase with Toyota Motor Corp., and making big profits in emerging markets. … Read all.

Adds Bloomberg in “GM’s Wagoner Steps Aside After Failing Obama Scrutiny “:

[...]

Wagoner became a symbol of the failing U.S. auto industry in recent months after flying to Washington via corporate jet to ask for aid. Since taking over in 2000, he presided over $82 billion in losses during the past four years and yielded GM’s title as the world’s top-selling carmaker to Toyota Motor Corp.

His exit caps an unsuccessful five-month push to win U.S. aid without losing his job. Forced to work for $1 a year and cede most of his corporate perks, he had said he wouldn’t resign unless compelled. On March 27, 129 days after Congress’s first hearing on the future of GM, he got that call.

[...]

“On Friday I was in Washington for a meeting with administration officials,” Wagoner said in a statement. “In the course of that meeting, they requested that I ‘step aside’ as CEO of GM, and so I have.”

Henderson, 49, was tapped by Wagoner to become COO a year ago after serving as chief financial officer. He previously ran GM’s operations in Asia and Europe.

Obama will outline his ideas for GM at a briefing later today, giving the biggest U.S. automaker 60 days to devise a plan that cuts deeper and makes more changes.

“The bailout loans aren’t hugely popular and that’s creating an issue for Obama,” said Jeremy Anwyl, CEO of Edmunds.com in Santa Monica, California, which tracks vehicle pricing and consumer behavior. “One way to make the loans more palatable is to be able to say the person responsible is no longer with GM.”

GM had said it will shed 47,000 jobs globally in 2009 and plans to close five assembly plants. Executives said the Detroit-based automaker will focus on four U.S. brands, down from eight, and eliminate thousands of dealers.

Rescue Plan

Wagoner oversaw those plans to meet the terms of the rescue unveiled on Dec. 19 by then-President George W. Bush, after Congress balked at a bailout for GM and Chrysler LLC. CEO Robert Nardelli will stay at Chrysler and must complete a planned alliance with Fiat SpA within 30 days, an Obama administration official said.

Obama’s task force pointed to GM’s failure to win concessions from bondholders, a step needed to cut the automaker’s debt and ensure future viability, as one reason the government needed a new plan.

GM’s latest debt exchange offer, made March 24, wasn’t likely to win bondholders’ approval because it’s less lucrative than the terms the U.S. required for the company to keep the first $13.4 billion in loans, a person briefed on the talks said. The bondholders didn’t seek Wagoner’s dismissal, the person said.

The government will push for even deeper cuts in debt now, the administration official said.

Tumbling Shares, Bonds

GM tumbled 87 percent in New York Stock Exchange composite trading last year, the most among the 30 stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The shares gained 21 cents, or 6.2 percent, to $3.21 on March 27, extending a 66 percent rally since GM said March 12 that it wouldn’t need a $2 billion payment by tomorrow to survive as originally forecast. ….

Postscript #1: John Batchelor discussed the firing of Wagoner Sunday night with Larry Johnson on his nationally syndicated radio show via Los Angeles’s KFI-AM (podcast up ASAP). The scheduled topic was the White House meeting with the nation’s top bankers, but the agile Mr. Batchelor leaped on the breaking news about GM’s Rick Wagoner, and plumbed his guests for their reactions, as well as netting Rep. Thad McCotter as a special guest.

Postscript #2: Here is an earlier NoQuarterUSA post that featured McCotter’s floor speech earlier this month. Larry Doyle’s wife discovered it, and e-mailed me the video link. Here’s that video:

Here is his House site URL: Thad McCotter

Mon. A.M. Update / Postscript #3: CALL and e-mail your Senators and your House, and DEMAND CONGRESSIONAL OVERSIGHT AND THE RIGHT TO HAVE LEGISLATION so that Tiny Tim cannot RULE this country by fiat.

Who knew we’d ever be calling up our members of Congress and demanding they craft legislation?

But, unless we do, we might as well think of PBO as Hugo Chavez and/or Fidel Castro with his brother Tiny Tim Raoul Castro.

THIS BLOG’s header says it all:

Isn’t it amusing. The left kicked and screamed about Bush/Cheney’s “unitary executive” for years! Will they hold PBO to the same standards?

FYI: Guess which Democratic primary candidate told the Boston Globe that one of the first things to take care of was to rescind Bush’s unitary executive signings. Can’t guess?

…….
…..
….
…
..
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Hillary Clinton.

PBO has expanded Bush’s power.

See NoQuarterUSA’s previous stories on the unitary executive signing statements issued by Bush — and now being employed by a small cabel in the White House and Treasury department.

It appears that President Obama is finally going to make good on his campaign promise to lift the restrictions on stem cell research for federally funded projects. Monday may be the day when President Bush’s Executive Order will be reversed. In the meantime a little Devil called the Dickey-Wicker Amendment could toss a monkey wrench into the mix.

It’s a complicated story, but basically the amendment banning federal fund use for embryonic stem cell research was attached as a rider to the 1996 appropriations bill for the Department of Health and Human Services. Congress has continually renewed some version of the ban. The only human embryo research currently conducted is in the private sector. (For more detail on the complex politics of stem cell research see here and here .)

So even if the President signs a new Executive Order will that little devil drag it down?

Democratic Representative Diana DeGette of Colorado is paying attention. She believes that Congress will approve a bill that would make Obama’s executive order law. This would make it more difficult for future administrations to oppose the use of stem cells. (Executive orders can pass back-and-forth like 4 years per move chess games.) But what about the Dickey-Wicker amendment? Can it just be dumped? Not if the “culture of life” legislators have anything to say about it.

In the meantime, some of our leading stem cell researchers are at NIH, and top experts at other sites depend on federal grants to implement their promising projects. They don’t want to wait another day.

Stay tuned!

Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), the longest serving Democratic senator, is criticizing President Obama’s appointment of White House “czars” to oversee federal policy, saying these executive positions amount to a power grab by the executive branch.

In a letter to Obama on Wednesday, Byrd complained about Obama’s decision to create White House offices on health reform, urban affairs policy, and energy and climate change. Byrd said such positions “can threaten the Constitutional system of checks and balances. At the worst, White House staff have taken direction and control of programmatic areas that are the statutory responsibility of Senate-confirmed officials.”

Well, I am glad someone is pointing it out. Our system of Checks and Balances have been sorely thwarted over the past 8 years. Sadly, Obama has demonstrated that he is all too willing to maintain what Bush has done (FISA, States Secrets, Extraordinary Rendition, to name a few), and as Senator Byrd points out, is expanding the power of the Executive Branch:

While it’s rare for Byrd to criticize a president in his own party, Byrd is a stern constitutional scholar who has always stood up for the legislative branch in its role in checking the power of the White House. Byrd no longer holds the powerful Appropriations chairmanship, so his criticism does not carry as much weight these days. Byrd repeatedly clashed with the Bush administration over executive power, and it appears that he’s not limiting his criticism to Republican administrations.

Byrd also wants Obama to limit claims of executive privilege while also ensuring that these White House czars don’t have authority over Cabinet officers confirmed by the Senate.

“As presidential assistants and advisers, these White House staffers are not accountable for their actions to the Congress, to cabinet officials, and to virtually anyone but the president,” Byrd wrote. “They rarely testify before congressional committees, and often shield the information and decision-making process behind the assertion of executive privilege. In too many instances, White House staff have been allowed to inhibit openness and transparency, and reduce accountability.”

The West Virginia Democrat on Wednesday asked Obama to “consider the following: that assertions of executive privilege will be made only by the president, or with the president’s specific approval; that senior White House personnel will be limited from exercising authority over any person, any program, and any funding within the statutory responsibility of a Senate-confirmed department or agency head; that the President will be responsible for resolving any disagreement between a Senate-confirmed agency or department head and White House staff; and that the lines of authority and responsibility in the Administration will be transparent and open to the American public.”

Senator Byrd spoke out on this very thing in regard to Bush:

I must say, though, if Senator Bryd had been paying attention, he would have been well aware that transparency was never high on Obama’s list. This president who has provided no legislative papers, no datebooks, no college transcripts, no graduate transcripts, no authentic birth certificate. To expect any transparency now is almost laughable. If it wasn’t so disturbing…

So far, Obama has not chosen to distinguish himself from some of the more egregious decisions Bush has made, as noted above. There is still time for him to do so:

Obama faces a decision as early as next week on whether to support a claim of executive privilege made by former President Bush in refusing to allow Karl Rove, the former deputy White House chief of staff, to be deposed by the House Judiciary Committee on the White House’s role in the 2006 firing of nine U.S. attorneys.

Bush claimed “absolute immunity” for top advisors in resisting such subpoenas, by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, filed a lawsuit over the issue. The case is on appeal, and the Obama administration is scheduled to file a motion next week laying out its stance on the issue.

I am glad Senator Byrd is speaking out on behalf of the Constitution. I am glad he is trying to keep Obama’s attempt to expand Executive Powers.

How I wish Senator Byrd had stood with the people of his state this summer (Senator Rockefeller, too). How I wish he had been moved to listen to the majority of people during the Primaries who made their voices clear. How I wish he had supported with his vote the person who would not have participated in these Executive power grabs. But no. Despite his relationship with Hillary Clinton (and her husband), despite two-thirds of his state going for Clinton, he picked Obama. And now he is beginning to see what we saw. Now he is beginning to see the power grabs, the lack of transparency, the move away from Checks and Balances. Now he is beginning to see. I fear it is too little, too late…

In one of his first acts as president, Barack Obama is planning to lift a rule that prevents federal money from going to international family planning groups that counsel women on abortion or perform the procedure. [This will help women worldwide.]

Obama’s repeal of the abortion aid policy is one of several executive actions he will take soon after his inauguration today, according to Obama transition aides. He is also considering lifting Bush administration restrictions on federally funded stem cell research. …

Then there’s this story from a pro-life publication with a chilling title: “Bioethicist: Obama Letting Congress Kill Bush Stem Cell Policy Smacks of Politics.” Obviously the “bioethicist” is opposed to stem cell research but, like me, he sees Obama as choosing the cowardly route of putting the onus on Congress, not on himself.

I have a strong hunch that President Obama is vacillating due to pressure from the powerful black ministers who brought him busloads of votes as well as his cozy alliances with conservative mega-church ministers like Rick Warren. It’s just a hunch. Surely those religious leaders are also pressuring Obama on the abortion rule. So, I’m a skeptic, and I believe in Obama’s “change” when I see him actually bring about change. The first way I will see his “change” is when he has some guts and nerve, and overrides Bush’s executive orders. Passing the buck to Congress is an “easy out” for a man who campaigned vigorously promising reversals on stem cell research.

I checked the new White House Web site — do check out this site! — and confirmed that President Obama has signed no Executive Orders or Proclamations:

Now for my January 18th piece, which Ani asked me to republish. Why? It’s important. If Obama passes this off to Congress, it’s a “tell,” as they say in poker. If Obama comes through, I’ll begin to change my mind about his character — as in, maybe he has some. Character, I mean. Although he’s going to have to come through with a lot more before I ever become a fan. A whole hell of a lot more.

As so many readers said here the other day, if Hillary had been sworn in today, she’d have already rescinded Bush’s Executive Order on stem cell research, as well as that affecting women around the world.

ORIGINAL STORY: As the great political thinker Mae West once said, “An ounce of performance is worth pounds of promises.”

Institutions, scientists, and states’ governors across the nation are giddy with anticipation that President Barack Obama will strike Bush’s stem cell executive order. Twenty-one Nobel Laureates wrote a letter to PEBO last month; the letter organizer said that “he feels sure the incoming president will be receptive.” Writes a San Francisco Chronicle reporter in “Californians optimistic Obama will reward state” on January 18, 2008:

[O]ne of the most high-profile initiatives the incoming administration supports is stem cell research. That would reverse eight years of Bush opposition – and no region is better positioned to benefit than the Bay Area.

The UCSF Mission Bay project in San Francisco is the state’s stem cell research hub, and throughout Silicon Valley and the East Bay, research scientists are already bracing for a funding boom. …

There are stories like this across the nation.

Those stories also come from Atlanta, Georgia, which is counting on an infusion of funding for its research facilities which, of course, also means new jobs, new tax revenues, and all the benefits that state governments accrue from a growing industry like stem cell research. (See the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s “Stem cells could be big business for state.”) Then there are the hundreds of thousands who suffer from debilitating diseases who are counting on Obama’s promise of immediate action. We recall that Obama attacked John McCain for not strongly supporting the research. And we note that Obama’s transition team promised lightning-fast action.

But then there came Obama’s statements to CNN’s John King today — the same day that those hopeful stories in San Francisco, California and Atlant, Georgia were published.

The REALITY: Obama is backtracking on rescinding Bush’s executive orders and instead, he told King today, he prefers that Congress pass a bill, which will take, oh, how many months and/or years?

So much for an “ounce of performance”:

Here is CNN’s and The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin discussing the POWER that Barack Obama will have as of noon, January 20, 2009, to undo Bush’s stifling restrictions on stem cell research, abortion counseling, and other important issues to millions of Americans:

But, instead, here’s what Obama told John King today. I’ll title this section this way:

Well, you know …

KING: You will have the power at the end of that parade to, at the stroke of a pen, lift the federal ban on embryonic stem cell research. There may be the votes to do it in Congress now, but you don’t have to wait, you could do it in your first few minutes in office, will you?

OBAMA: Well, you know, if we can do something legislative, then I usually prefer a legislative process because those are the people’s representatives. 

And I think that on embryonic stem cell research, the fact that you have a bipartisan support around that issue, the fact that you have Republicans like Orrin Hatch who are fierce opponents of abortion and yet recognize that there is a moral and ethical mechanism to insure that people with Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s can actually find potentially some hope out there, you know, I think that sends a powerful message.

So we’re still examining what things we’ll do through executive order. But I like the idea of the American people’s representatives expressing their views on an issue like this. …

Blah, blah, blah.

“I like the idea of the American people’s representatives expressing their views on an issue like this. …”

TRANSLATION: “I am passing the buck so I don’t have to take any heat from any religious leaders. And to HELL with the millions of people who voted for me in good part because stem cell research restrictions were what they expected– KNEW and had GOOD FAITH — that you would undo.”

California and Georgia, you can sit and wait. Boy, can you imagine the feelings of all of the people who were interviewed for those news stories in today’s San Francisco Chronicle and “Atlanta Journal-Constitution?

Obama just knocked the breath right out of them.

How about people like Amy Comstock Rick, interviewed for CNN’s article that accompanied the above video, “Obama may reverse Bush policies on stem cells, drilling, abortion,” which was written in December 2008, while there was still reason to HOPE that Obama would act quickly and decisively:

Obama is expected to use his executive authority to reverse Bush’s order limiting the types of embryonic stem cell research that can receive federal tax dollars.

Advocates for those suffering from a host of diseases — including diabetes, Parkinson’s disease and spinal cord injuries — are eagerly awaiting the Bush-era restrictions to be lifted.

“We have every reason to believe — if not on Day One, then in the very near future — they will be issuing an order rescinding this policy,” said Amy Comstock Rick, president of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research.

Ms. Comstock Rick, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait. And given how inefficient the Democratic Congress is, you’re very likely going to have to wait quite a long time. Which is nuts, when Obama could undo this with the stroke of his pen. I’m sorry for you, Ms. Comstock Rick. I bet you voted for Obama expecting that he’d act very quickly for you. You counted on him. And why not? He gave you every reason to “hope” that there would be “change,” didn’t he? But, as those of us who scrutinized his history very closely came to find out, for Barack Obama those are often mere words to use to win elections. Because winning is the prize. Governing, not so much.

We were excoriated for our opposition to Sen. Obama. Yet, we felt compelled to warn people this is that was going to happen.

Now, if stem cell research is important to you — as it is to me because I have conditions from which such advances would be meaningful — please write to President Obama immediately, and DEMAND that he fulfill his campaign promises.

The AFP has a story, “Obama wants Congress to act on lifting stem cells ban” as does Politico.com, “Obama may not lift stem cell limits.”

Now there’s change for you.

Not.

Oh I love this quote from the AFP article cited above:

If the research could yield hope for victims of degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, “I think that sends a powerful message,” [Obama] said.

Isn’t that touching. A powerful message. What in the hell about the millions of people whose lives could be changed for the better?

Who in the hell cares about a “powerful message”?

People want their lives back!

Show some guts, would you?