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The candidate supported by progressives - President Obama - himself holds heinous views on a slew of critical issues and himself has done heinous things with the power he has been vested. He has slaughtered civilians - Muslim children by the dozens - not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations with drones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack. He has sought to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the power of Presidents - in secret and with no checks - to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has waged an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which was once a liberal shibboleth. He rendered permanently irrelevant the War Powers Resolution, a crown jewel in the list of post-Vietnam liberal accomplishments, and thus enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war even in the face of a Congressional vote against it. His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to amend the Freedom of Information Act (another crown jewel of liberal legislative successes) when compliance became inconvenient.

Presidents serve the institutional interests of the corporations behind them. A President McCain may have at least triggered a true progressive fight.

What amazes me most whenever I write about this topic is recalling how terribly upset so many Democrats pretended to be when Bush claimed the power merely to detain or even just eavesdrop on American citizens without due process.  Remember all that?  Yet now, here's Obama claiming the power not to detain or eavesdrop on citizens without due process, but to kill them; marvel at how the hardest-core White House loyalists now celebrate this and uncritically accept the same justifying rationale used by Bush/Cheney (this is war! the President says he was a Terrorist!) without even a moment of acknowledgment of the profound inconsistency or the deeply troubling implications of having a President - even Barack Obama - vested with the power to target U.S. citizens for murder with no due process. Also, during the Bush years, civil libertarians who tried to convince conservatives to oppose that administration's radical excesses would often ask things like this: would you be comfortable having Hillary Clinton wield the power to spy on your calls or imprison you with no judicial reivew or oversight?  So for you good progressives out there justifying this, I would ask this:  how would the power to assassinate U.S. citizens without due process look to you in the hands of, say, Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann?

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak addressed Egyptians today, but despite expectations he planned to announce his resignation - expectations created by statements of Egyptian government officials - Mubarak insisted he would not step down. Instead, he said he was transferring powers to Vice President Suleiman.

In March, 2002, American citizen Jose Padilla was arrested in Chicago and publicly accused by then-Attorney-General John Ashcroft of being "The Dirty Bomber."  Shortly thereafter, he was transferred to a military brig in South Carolina, where he was held for almost two years completely incommunicado (charged with no crime and denied all access to the outside world, including even a lawyer) and was brutally tortured, both physically and psychologically.  All of this -- including the torture -- was carried out pursuant to orders from President Bush, Secretary Rumsfeld and other high-ranking officials.  Just as the Supreme Court was about to hear Padilla's plea to be charged or released -- and thus finally decide if the President has the power to imprison American citizens on U.S. soil with no charges of any kind -- the Government indicted him in a federal court on charges far less serious than Ashcroft had touted years earlier, causing the Supreme Court to dismiss Padilla's arguments as "moot"; Padilla was then convicted and sentenced to 17 years in prison.

President Obama -- who has presided over lethal civilian-killing attacks in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Pakistan and Somalia -- announced: "we will not tolerate aggression across borders."  That instantly ranks among my favorite political statements ever.

President Obama signed legislation on Tuesday that raises the nation's debt ceiling and cuts trillions of dollars in spending. Keith speaks with former Vice President and Current TV Chairman Al Gore about what's next for the country. Al Gore says it's time for an "American Spring," a non-violent movement to take back the country from the right wing.

Andrew Sullivan's defense of President Obama's claimed power to have American citizens assassinated nicely reveals much of the illogic behind, and many of the dangers inherent in, America's Forever War. Let's examine it point by point.

If thousands of us hang in there day after day, week after week, we may be able to create a spectacular revolutionary experience that fires up the public imagination and eventually maneuvers Obama into doing something that he has so far not had the guts to do: agree to a bold, decisive stroke against the financial corruption of America. Now that would get the American people behind us and cheering us on from coast to coast. If we can achieve that, the sky will be the limit … further demands will follow and a new America will be born.

WARNING: Graphic and disturbing photos between 38:40 and 40:45. U.S. Army Ranger John Needham, who was awarded two purple hearts and three medals for heroism, wrote to military authorities in 2007 reporting war crimes that he witnessed being committed by his own command and fellow soldiers in Al Doura, Iraq. His charges were supported by atrocity photos which, in the public interest, are now released in this video. John paid a terrible price for his opposition to these acts. His story is tragic.  CBS reported obtaining an Army document from the Criminal Investigation Command suggestive of an investigation into these war crimes allegations. The Army's conclusion was that the "offense of War Crimes did not occur." However, CBS also stated that the report was "redacted and incomplete; 111 pages were withheld."  This video is placed with the context of Vice President, Dick Cheney, insistence that this nation's efforts "must go to the dark side;" which included ignoring the Geneva Conventions.  John's story is told, here, by his father, Michael Needham. It is produced in the spirit of the public interest and towards promoting justice and the rule of law.

By Glenn GreenwaldHere again, we see one of the principal and longest-lasting effects of the Obama presidency: to put a pretty, eloquent, progressive face on what (until quite recently) was ostensibly considered by a large segment of the citizenry to be

When many cynics thought it impossible, the President reaches an all-new low in his abysmal civil liberties record

Few issues highlight Barack Obama's extreme hypocrisy the way that Bagram does. As everyone knows, one of George Bush's most extreme policies was abducting people from all over the world -- far away from any battlefield -- and then detaining them at Guantanamo with no legal rights of any kind, not even the most minimal right to a habeas review in a federal court. Back in the day, this was called a "Bush's legal black hole." In 2006, Congress codified that policy by enacting the Military Commissions Act, but in 2008, the Supreme Court, in Boumediene v. Bush, ruled that provision unconstitutional, holding that the Constitution grants habeas corpus rights even to foreign nationals held at Guantanamo. Since then, detainees have won 35 out of 48 habeas hearings brought pursuant to Boumediene, on the ground that there was insufficient evidence to justify their detention. Immediately following Boumediene, the Bush administration argued that the decision was inapplicable to detainees at Bagram -- including even those detained outside of Afghanistan but then flown to Afghanistan to be imprisoned. Amazingly, the Bush DOJ -- in a lawsuit brought by Bagram detainees seeking habeas review of their detention -- contended that if they abduct someone and ship them to Guantanamo, then that person (under Boumediene) has the right to a habeas hearing, but if they instead ship them to Bagram, then the detainee has no rights of any kind. In other words, the detainee's Constitutional rights depends on where the Government decides to drop them off to be encaged. One of the first acts undertaken by the Obama DOJ that actually shocked civil libertarians was when, last February, as The New York Times put it, Obama lawyers "told a federal judge that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush's legal team." . . .

This week, the president of wicked-Catholic Portugal announced that he's ratifying a law that legalizes gay marriage, even though he doesn't want to, because liberal lawmakers would just overturn his veto. Oh, to have that problem in your government! I was excited to hear the news, of course, but how quickly a little reflection turned into embarrassed head-shaking about how far behind this country is. I don't know about you, but as you may know, when I get moody about the ridiculous discriminatory laws against homos here, I make maps of weird stuff I can legally bone or marry. The longer the US holds out on this equality thing, the more wrong these are going to have to get. Today's: There are, you'll probably not be surprised to learn, three times as many states with no direct prohibitions against the sexual assault of an animal (according to the Animal Legal Defense Fund) as there are states that allow gay marriage.

Truthout is publishing chapter eight of my new book "War Is A Lie." I should explain where it fits in the overall argument I've made. The book strives to make a comprehensive case against the very idea that there can ever be a good or just war, any more than there can be a good slavery or a just rape. While Americans often turn against particular wars after cheering for them, many people maintain the fantasy that there could be a really good or necessary war next month. This delusion helps to keep around what President Eisenhower 50 years ago this week called the military-industrial complex, which is itself a large source of pressure for more wars.

Pfc. Bradley Manning, who has been imprisoned for nine months on charges of handing government files to WikiLeaks, has not even been tried let alone convicted. Yet the military has been treating him abusively, in a way that conjures creepy memories of how the Bush administration used to treat terror suspects. Inexplicably, it appears to have President Obama's support to do so.

Numerous people have argued that one potential benefit from the death of Osama bin Laden is that it will enable the U.S. Government to diminish its war commitments in that part of the world and finally arrest the steady erosion of civil liberties perpetrated in the name of the War on Terror (as though any of that is the government's goal).  By contrast, I've argued from the start that the bin Laden killing is likely to change nothing of any significance, except that -- if anything -- the resulting nationalistic pride, the vicarious sensations of power and strength, the substantial political benefits for the President, and the renewed faith in military force would be more likely to intensify rather than arrest these trends.  But that was definitely a minority opinion.