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A campaign to pardon NSA leaker Edward Snowden, launched in combination with a fawning Oliver Stone film about him, hasn't made any headway. The request spurred the entire membership of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, 13 Republicans and 9 Democrats, to send a letter to President Barack Obama urging against a pardon. "He is a criminal," they stated flatly.
Obama weighed in on the matter on Friday. During his European tour, he was interviewed by Der Spiegel—the largest newspaper in Germany, a country where Snowden is particularly popular. After discussing a wide range of issues, he was asked: Are you going to pardon Edward Snowden?
Obama replied: "I can't pardon somebody who hasn't gone before a court and presented themselves, so that's not something that I would comment on at this point."
Will the NSA's spying and Snowden's actions come to define Obama's legacy?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2016, @03:11AM
Obama made you cynical? Aren't you a lucky sack of shit. Bush era FBI put me on a terrorist watch list. America earned an enemy for life that day. Obama is just more of the same evil. FUCK AMERICA
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2016, @03:14AM
Trump hasn't done shit yet, but fuck him in advance. FUCK TRUMP
(Score: 3, Informative) by hemocyanin on Tuesday November 22 2016, @04:53AM
The TPP is apparently dead in the water, so that's pretty good.
Full Disclosure: I voted Stein, but I'm happy as a clam to see that Trump has managed to gut the GOP and the DNC.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday November 22 2016, @04:37PM
Also grateful for the TPP apparently dying.
Need more of this to happen to 'trade': give power back to the people... corporations have too much as it is.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Tuesday November 22 2016, @08:42PM
Yes! Exactly!
TUCK FRUMP!
ah..
TRUCK FUMP!
...
FUCK BETA!
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2016, @03:19AM
When Bush was elected, my friends and I joked about which country he would invade.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2016, @03:27AM
I told my friends Bush did 9/11 and then suddenly I had no friends.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday November 22 2016, @03:37AM
Face it! You didn't need friends like that!
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2016, @03:39AM
I don't need friends at all! Haven't made friends since. You can eat shit and die too.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday November 22 2016, @04:39PM
Wow... sounds like you need a friend.
Just don't come to me looking for one: you'd choke on my shit.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday November 22 2016, @05:02AM
Let us not forget that Gore ran as more hawkish than GWB, picked that mother fucking asshole neocon Lieberman as his running mate, and was a total corporatist tool. Sure, he did a lot of work to rehab his image in the 00s, but you never know, he may have been even more of a warmonger than GWB ("make no mistake" (*) GWB was another mother fucking asshole).
(*) I never really heard that phrase before GWB and I absolutely detest it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2016, @05:31AM
Yeah, I sat that election out (the libertarian candidate wasn't any great shakes and Nader was meh).
But the absolute worst aspect of Gore? Tipper!
No way in hell would I tolerate her turning the White House into a sorority.
The only good thing she did was get Zappa to testify before the senate.
(Score: 2) by Hawkwind on Tuesday November 22 2016, @05:12PM
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Tuesday November 22 2016, @05:57PM
The 2000 election, plus the 2008 election, should have taught Democrats a hard lesson about how not to run elections, and what does and doesn't work in getting Democrats elected to the White House (and also down-ticket races).
In 2000, as you point out, Gore was a corporatist tool, hawkish, and picked an asshole neocon for running mate. He also had a bitch of a wife who wanted to censor music. He also ran on an anti-gun platform. And he had a strong 3rd-party challenger (Nader). On top of all that, Gore simply wasn't well-liked or charismatic. Gore lost. It was close, he even won the popular vote, but he lost the election.
In 2008, Obama out-maneuvered Hillary in the primary and won there. He was extremely popular with young voters, and got them to actually show up to vote. He was charismatic, and gave great speeches. He promised government transparency, and wasn't obviously a corporatist tool. He wasn't a warmonger. Now of course, in hindsight not all this stuff was quite true, but this was the perception during the race. What happened? Obama won, and by a healthy margin too. And Democrats did well in general in that election, probably thanks to all the younger voters ticking (D) boxes after voting for Obama.
So now, in 2016, what does the DNC do? They sabotage the campaign of the guy who's popular with young voters, and try to force a candidate down our throats who's a warmonger, a corporatist tool, is not charismatic or well-liked, has a huge trail of scandals, and who picks a shitty center-right establishment and religious running mate, and what happens? She loses, just like in 2000. And she loses to probably the second most unpopular candidate ever to run for president (her being the first). And with her loss came a crushing defeat for Democrats across the board too. So the big question is: what the fuck was the DNC thinking? Was it being run by people too young to remember the 2000 and 2008 elections? They weren't that long ago.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Tuesday November 22 2016, @10:58PM
Maybe they knew things the public didn't.
<Conspiracy theory>
Like when it was Obama vs. Hillary, they new they can get Obama to toe the line so went with the candidate with the best chance of winning, but not so with Bernie.
</Conspiracy theory>
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday November 23 2016, @04:14PM
Sounds like a nice conspiracy theory, but I seriously doubt it's true; Hillary is obviously the candidate who'll toe the corporatist line the best.
More likely, they knew (and we didn't) that Obama would toe the line well enough for their purposes, and he was really popular, so they simply didn't do anything to interfere. Bernie was a different story, so they pulled out all the stops to keep him from winning.