As disappointing as Obama has been on civil liberties and foreign policy, Democratic apologists have been able to argue that he's been helpful on the economic justice front. But over at Salon, Matt Stoller takes a closer look, and makes The progressive case against Obama:

This split represents more than money. It represents a new kind of politics, one where Obama, and yes, he did this, officially enshrined rights for the elite in our constitutional order and removed rights from everyone else (see “The Housing Crash and the End of American Citizenship” in the Fordham Urban Law Journal for a more complete discussion of the problem). The bailouts and the associated Federal Reserve actions were not primarily shifts of funds to bankers; they were a guarantee that property rights for a certain class of creditors were immune from challenge or market forces. The foreclosure crisis, with its rampant criminality, predatory lending, and document forgeries, represents the flip side. Property rights for debtors simply increasingly exist solely at the pleasure of the powerful. The lack of prosecution of Wall Street executives, the ability of banks to borrow at 0 percent from the Federal Reserve while most of us face credit card rates of 15-30 percent, and the bailouts are all part of the re-creation of the American system of law around Obama’s oligarchy.

...For sure, Obama believes he is doing the right thing, that his policies are what’s best for society. He is a conservative technocrat, running a policy architecture to ensure that conservative technocrats like him run the complex machinery of the state and reap private rewards from doing so. Radical political and economic inequality is the result. None of these policy shifts, with the exception of TARP, is that important in and of themselves, but together they add up to declining living standards.

A shining example of the dehumanization of inmates, from Salon: Bloomberg’s disregard for Rikers

When asked about what would happen on Rikers Island — New York’s main prison complex – during the storm, Bloomberg responded, “Jails are secure … Don’t worry about anyone getting out.”

He did not consider that the journalist was in fact asking about the well-being of the near 17,000-strong inmate population, incarcerated on water-locked landfill.

Imran Khan is one of the most popular politicians in Pakistan. (His former career as a cricket star probably helps.) Like any sensible person, he is opposed to the Obama administration's practice of drone murder. This seems to marked him for harassment by the administration, as Glenn Greenwald reports: US detention of Imran Khan part of trend to harass anti-drone advocates (the Guardian)

There are several obvious points raised by this episode. Strictly on pragmatic grounds, it seems quite ill-advised to subject the most popular leader in Pakistan - the potential next Prime Minister - to trivial, vindictive humiliations of this sort. It is also a breach of the most basic diplomatic protocol: just imagine the outrage if a US politician were removed from a plane by Pakistani officials in order to be questioned about their publicly expressed political views. And harassing prominent critics of US policy is hardly likely to dilute anti-US animosity; the exact opposite is far more likely to occur.

Michelangelo Signorile (Huffington Post Gay Voices) reports on Romney's dumbfoundingly ignorant take on gay marriage and parenthood: Romney: 'Some Gays Are Actually Having Children. It's Not Right on Paper. It's Not Right in Fact.'

Romney hadn't even previously fathomed that gay people had children. Boston Spirit magazine reported last month that when gay activists met with him in his office in 2004, as Romney was backing a failed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage in the state, Romney remarked, "I didn't know you had families." Julie Goodridge, lead plaintiff in the landmark case that won marriage rights for gays and lesbians before the Supreme Judicial Court, asked what she should tell her 8-year-old daughter about why the governor would block the marriage of her parents. According to Goodridge, Romney responded,"I don't really care what you tell your adopted daughter. Why don't you just tell her the same thing you've been telling her the last eight years."

This came up on Facebook, and I thought it worth a quick post here. From time to time you may see e-mail or files with a date of December 31, 1969. What the heck?

The explanation is that many computer systems measure time as the number of seconds since January 1, 1970 12:00 am UTC. (Sort of. Leap seconds make it complicated. See the wik's article on "Unix Time" for the gory details.)

So a time of "0" indicates that date and time -- which in any U.S. timezone, would have been the night of December 31, 1969. (UTC, for most practical purposes, is "Greenwich Mean Time", and so is a few hours ahead of the U.S.)

And if your file doesn't have valid time information attached to it, or your e-mail has a garbled Date: header, the system will treat it as 0, and claim that it's from the dawn of the 70s.

So now you know. And knowing's half the battle.

It looks more and more like rather than "hope and change", the final legacy of the Obama administration will be the final slide of the U.S. into an imperial presidency, where the man or woman in the White House wields unaccountable life-and-death power over the people of the world. Glenn Greenwald reports: Obama moves to make the War on Terror permanent

What has been created here - permanently institutionalized - is a highly secretive executive branch agency that simultaneously engages in two functions: (1) it collects and analyzes massive amounts of surveillance data about all Americans without any judicial review let alone search warrants, and (2) creates and implements a "matrix" that determines the "disposition" of suspects, up to and including execution, without a whiff of due process or oversight. It is simultaneously a surveillance state and a secretive, unaccountable judicial body that analyzes who you are and then decrees what should be done with you, how you should be "disposed" of, beyond the reach of any minimal accountability or transparency.

Today's despicable Republican politician: Indiana U.S. Senate candidate Richard Mourdock, who last night declared in a debate that if a rapist impregnates his victim, well, that's "something God intended":

All three [Mourdock, Joe Donnelly (D), and Andrew Horning (L)] said they were anti-abortion. But Mourdock went the further, putting himself in territory near Missouri GOP Senate candidate Rep. Todd Akin, the anti-abortion congressman who infamously asserted that women don't get pregnant from "legitimate rape."

"The only exception I have to have an abortion is in the case of the life of the mother," said Mourdock, the Tea Party-backed state treasurer. "I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize life is that gift from God. I think that even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen."

Whether this was a deliberate attempt to suppress the vote of just a huge screw-up, the fact that our electoral system is this unreliable is unworthy of a great nation.

Error-Filled Instructions Are Sent to Ohio Voters

A Republican-run election board in a northern Ohio county sent out voting instructions to several precincts with the wrong date for Election Day and an incorrect description of the polling place location, leading state Democrats to suggest foul play in a presidential race that could be decided in a handful of states like Ohio by tiny margins.