New Year Blah, Blah, Gitmo

So I had a pretty rad 2011 and unlike most (it seems like everyone has a shitty year every year and hope the next will be way more radtastical but they don't ever do anything to change to actively and positively change their lives and  instead start each new year passed out on dingy apartment carpeting with vomit and pizza stuck to their face) was not trying to boot it off the ship in favor of this shiny new car smell 2012.  But, so be it, new car smell and all, what's up 2012?!

And since I've been chained up in a dungeon of long, brown hair, and estrogen for most of the last week I finally got to peep some news today and what should I find but:

Obama to name new consumer watchdog


Haraz N. Ghanbari / AP

Richard Cordray talks with reporters after stepping off Air Force One at Cleveland Hopkins Airport in Cleveland, Ohio, Wednesday, Jan. 4, 2012. In a defiant display of executive power, President Barack Obama on Wednesday will buck GOP opposition and name Cordray as the nation's chief consumer watchdog. Outraged Republican leaders in Congress suggested that courts would determine the appointment was illegal. (AP Photo/Haraz N. Ghanbari)

Well hot damn!  For all you folks who didn't think Obama was Jesus here ya go.  Stickin' it to the big banks and the republicans.  Except, if the president had any balls it would've been his original choice, Elizabeth Warren, instead of some brosty from Ohio I've never heard of and it would've been handled a couple years ago.  But, hey, sounds like the republicans and Wall Street are scared of this guy so yee ha!  Good going.
 
But then, longing to bask in the glory of 2011 I rewound my news coverage and found this:
 

Close Obama Says Bill Breaks With Our Values, Signs It Anyway

By Conor Friedersdorf  (The Atlantic)

Though he pledges not to take them himself, why is the president empowering his successors to take actions that he admits are un-American?


For many liberals, the ACLU fulfills a role akin to a canary in a coal mine: it's beyond the capacity of the average citizen to monitor every piece of legislation that might impact civil liberties, but when the organization starts freaking out it's taken as a credible signal that our rights are in peril. As America turned its calendars from 2011 to 2012, we witnessed that kind of moment. "President Obama's action today is a blight on his legacy because he will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law," said Anthony D. Romero, the ACLU's executive director. "The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield." Warnings are seldom so dire.


And from the Washington Post:

“I have signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation, and prosecution of suspected terrorists,” Obama said. “I want to clarify that my Administration will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens. Indeed, I believe that doing so would break with our most important traditions and values as a Nation.”


On New Years Eve (you couldn't have waited one more day?) Obama signs a defense bill, he previously threatened to veto, that allows the military to indefinitely incarcerate American citizens suspected of terrorism without trial.  After he signs it he says it breaks with our core values as a nation and that his administration won't do it (phew, crisis over).  So besides taking a giant shit on the end of my awesome 2011, the spineless, run of the mill, liar caving to money and power politician, president Obama obliterates American civil rights, not to mention human rights, and then admits it?  I'm truly stunned.  Isn't that terrorism?  Does this mean we can hold congress and the president at Guantanamo and elect a whole, fresh government?  That could work.  Rabble-B