Not a brainiac, Landesman first broke into public consciousness with a speech declaring that Obama is “the most powerful writer since Caesar.” The claim wasn’t as ludicrous as it first sounds—Landesman meant that the president was the most politically powerful person since Caesar who could also be thought of as a writer—but it was still pretty ludicrous.

“This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt,” Landesman said, “and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln.” Good thing he inserted that indispensable fudge word “arguably.” Obama is indeed the first president to have written his own books since Teddy Roosevelt, but only if you don’t count Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and, arguably, Bill Clinton. And Obama couldn’t be the first president to write his books really well since Lincoln because he, -Lincoln, didn’t write any.

Looks like Obama’s just as disappointing when it comes to culture as he is at everything else. My favorite is the “Principles of Civility” nonsense which now seem to be core NEA doctrine.

I won’t bother trying to come up with a list of American authors who probably couldn’t pass a civility test but are still considered pretty great. Because, well, I can’t think of one author considered pretty great who could pass a civility test.

In that case, the Obama administration has argued that warrantless tracking is permitted because Americans enjoy no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in their–or at least their cell phones’–whereabouts. U.S. Department of Justice lawyers say that “a customer’s Fourth Amendment rights are not violated when the phone company reveals to the government its own records” that show where a mobile device placed and received calls.

Those claims have alarmed the ACLU and other civil liberties groups, which have opposed the Justice Department’s request and plan to tell the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia that Americans’ privacy deserves more protection and judicial oversight than what the administration has proposed.

“This is a critical question for privacy in the 21st century,” says Kevin Bankston, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who will be arguing on Friday. “If the courts do side with the government, that means that everywhere we go, in the real world and online, will be an open book to the government unprotected by the Fourth Amendment.”

The rest.

Howard Zinn on Barack Obama, in The Nation.

I’ve been searching hard for a highlight. The only thing that comes close is some of Obama’s rhetoric; I don’t see any kind of a highlight in his actions and policies.

As far as disappointments, I wasn’t terribly disappointed because I didn’t expect that much. I expected him to be a traditional Democratic president. On foreign policy, that’s hardly any different from a Republican–as nationalist, expansionist, imperial and warlike. So in that sense, there’s no expectation and no disappointment. On domestic policy, traditionally Democratic presidents are more reformist, closer to the labor movement, more willing to pass legislation on behalf of ordinary people–and that’s been true of Obama. But Democratic reforms have also been limited, cautious. Obama’s no exception. On healthcare, for example, he starts out with a compromise, and when you start out with a compromise, you end with a compromise of a compromise, which is where we are now.

I thought that in the area of constitutional rights he would be better than he has been. That’s the greatest disappointment, because Obama went to Harvard Law School and is presumably dedicated to constitutional rights. But he becomes president, and he’s not making any significant step away from Bush policies. Sure, he keeps talking about closing Guantánamo, but he still treats the prisoners there as “suspected terrorists.” They have not been tried and have not been found guilty. So when Obama proposes taking people out of Guantánamo and putting them into other prisons, he’s not advancing the cause of constitutional rights very far. And then he’s gone into court arguing for preventive detention, and he’s continued the policy of sending suspects to countries where they very well may be tortured.

I think people are dazzled by Obama’s rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president–which means, in our time, a dangerous president–unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction.

With all due respect to Elouise Cobell, lead plaintiff in a recently settled lawsuit over American Indian trust funds (“U.S. to pay Indians $3.4B,” Dec. 9), I think the United States is continuing a policy of “Indians are not humans.”

During the course of this long-running, class-action litigation, it has been documented that the United States owes Indian people more than $137 billion for mismanagement of trust accounts. That was established just by the documents that were presented.

The original federal judge on this case was Royce Lamberth, who held at least three secretaries of the Interior in contempt for not producing thousands of additional documents. Also, during the course of this case, hundreds of relevant documents were found in the trash by Interior Department employees, who reported this to the court and to Interior Department officials.

To add insult to injury, the government is clearing its conscience by paying back 2.48 percent of the so-far known value of what the United States stole in the first place. Paying $3.4 billion on a known debt of $137 billion is a national disgrace; this needs to be known by all Americans. Cobell should have at least held out until all the documents were presented or a final calculation of the debt was determined.

In the words of a great Oglala Lakota statesman Chief Red Cloud: “The United States made us many promises, but they kept only one. They promised to take our land, and they took it.”

Bill Means is a board member of the International Indian Treaty Council.

For more on the case, you can find the typically stupid AP report at The Denver Post, in which Salazar and Obama pat themselves on the back for ripping off American Indians to the tune of 43.6 billion dollars. And that’s using the absurdly low estimate given by the Associated Press, which should probably have at least another 100 billion dollars added to it. (The problem being that the Department of the Interior refuses to even tally exactly how many tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars the US government has outright stolen over the last century.)

More Hope and Change to come.

In stark contrast to that other Nobel winner’s speech.

Twenty years later I had been on my own in the city a long time and was working as a translator in a manufacturing plant. I would get up at five a.m.; work began at six-thirty. Every morning the loudspeaker blared the national anthem into the factory yard; at lunch it was the workers’ choruses. But the workers simply sat over their meals with empty tinplate eyes and hands smeared with oil. Their food was wrapped in newspaper. Before they ate their bit of fatback, they first scraped the newsprint off the rind. Two years went by in the same routine, each day like the next.

In the third year the routine came to an end. Three times in one week a visitor showed up at my office early in the morning: an enormous, thick-boned man with sparkling blue eyes—a colossus from the Securitate.

The first time he stood there, cursed me, and left.

The second time he took off his windbreaker, hung it on the key to the cabinet, and sat down. That morning I had brought some tulips from home and arranged them in a vase. The man looked at me and praised me for being such a keen judge of character. His voice was slippery. I felt uneasy. I contested his praise and assured him that I understood tulips, but not people. Then he said maliciously that he knew me better than I knew tulips. After that he draped his windbreaker over his arm and left.

The third time he sat down but I stayed standing, because he had set his briefcase on my chair. I didn’t dare move it to the floor. He called me stupid, said I was a shirker and a slut, as corrupted as a stray bitch. He shoved the tulips close to the edge of the desk, then put an empty sheet of paper and a pen in the middle of the desktop. He yelled at me: Write. Without sitting down, I wrote what he dictated—my name, date of birth and address. Next, that I would tell no one, no matter how close a friend or relative, that I… and then came the terrible word: colaborez—I am collaborating. At that point I stopped writing. I put down the pen and went to the window and looked out onto the dusty street, unpaved and full of potholes, and at all the humpbacked houses. On top of everything else this street was called Strada Gloriei—Glory Street. On Glory Street a cat was sitting in a bare mulberry tree. It was the factory cat with the torn ear. And above the cat the early morning sun was shining like a yellow drum. I said: N-am caracterul—I don’t have the character for this. I said it to the street outside. The word CHARACTER made the Securitate man hysterical. He tore up the sheet of paper and threw the pieces on the floor. Then he probably realized he would have to show his boss that he had tried to recruit me, because he bent over, picked up the scraps and tossed them into his briefcase. After that he gave a deep sigh and, defeated, hurled the vase with the tulips against the wall. As it shattered it made a grinding sound, as though the air had teeth. With his briefcase under his arm he said quietly: You’ll be sorry, we’ll drown you in the river. I said as if to myself: If I sign that, I won’t be able to live with myself anymore, and I’ll have to do it on my own. So it’s better if you do it. By then the office door was already open and he was gone. And outside on the Strada Gloriei the factory cat had jumped from the tree onto the roof of the building. One branch was bouncing like a trampoline.

The rest.

Update: Walter Russell Mead on Obama’s Nobel speech:

Barack Obama’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize was a carefully reasoned defense of a foreign policy that differs very little from George Bush’s. He is winding down one war, escalating a second, and stepping up the pressure on Iran. He is asserting America’s sovereign right to unilateral action in self defense while expressing the hope that this right will not need to be exercised.

If Bush had said these things the world would be filled with violent denunciations. When Obama says them, people purr.

The rest.

I was never on the Obama wagon, not even remotely, because I kinda got the feeling he’d be the same old sack of shit dressed up in a new suit.  That said, he’s even managed to underwhelm my expectations.

It’s his abattoir now.

• “This process deals with the idea of elemental transmigration: the decomposition and composition of matter into other forms. The images of war are part of the leaves, and live inside and outside of them. The leaves express the continuum of war.”
• Abu Ghraib and the Stanford Prison Experiment.
• “In terms of collective drama, we can say that the horror for the 4,000 victims of dying in those towers was inseparable from the horror of living in them — the horror of living and working in sarcophagi of concrete and steel.”
• 911: Thomas Hirschhorn.
• “Obama is an enormous gift to the Empire.”
• Fringe, Coils, a Demon and a Small Political Allegory.
• I am Barack Obama’s Political Prisoner Now.