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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: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday November 22 2016, @08:30PM
You're going to have to explain why you think Obama is "evil" and Romney is somehow not as bad. From my perspective, they're both corporatist, establishment tools, but at least with Obama we were more likely to get things like gay marriage and no overturning of RvW, whereas with any establishment Republican you're more likely to get a rollback on civil liberties since they always try to appease the stupid religious wackos to get their vote.
And how was McCain "insane"? Again, from my perspective, he's an establishment tool, and a war-hawk. All the establishment tools are war-hawks to some degree, Obama included, though he's been better than many others (namely Bush, and also Hillary).
2012 was a fairly rational election: people voted for Obama over Romney because Romney simply didn't offer anything better than what we already knew we were getting with Obama. Incumbents always have a big advantage this way: the devil you know vs. the devil you don't. It's elections like this year's where things are really up in the air, because there's no incumbent (aside from one candidate being from the same party as the outgoing President and getting his endorsement). And if you look at history, there's been very few elections where the sitting President was not re-elected. The last was in 1992, where GHWB lost to Clinton, before that was 1980 where Carter lost to Reagan, and before that was 1976 where Ford (who never won an election anyway) lost to Carter. 1968 doesn't really count since LBJ didn't run, and you probably have to go back pretty far before this for the next example.