AT A.T.F., MEET THE NEW BOSS, YADA YADA. “Jones was appointed to chair the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee back in August of 2009, and was briefed in Gunwalker. According to Senator Charles Grassley’s June 15, 2011 congressional testimony attachment 4, the chair of AGAC (Jones) was a member of the Southwest Border Strategy Group and attended at least one briefing on Fast and Furious in October 2009. He appears to be complicit in the coverup, just like Melson.”

MEET THE NEW BOSS, YADA YADA: TPM: “Obama Mimics Bush on State Secrets”. Dan Froomkin calls it “Un-American.” Jake Tapper writes, “Meet Barack W. Bush.” What surprises me is that these people are surprised. It seemed obvious to me that Obama had no real commitment to civil liberties, and that talk to the contrary was just to fool the rubes.

Moe Lane, likewise.

MEET THE NEW BOSS, YADA YADA: The Words Have Changed, but Have the Policies?

It’s almost like this movie.

MEET THE NEW BOSS, yada yada.

MEET THE NEW BOSS, YADA YADA: A screenshot from Memeorandum last night.

DISAPPOINTMENT AT DAILYKOS: Meet the new boss, yada yada.

JAMES TARANTO: A new rendition of an old song. Meet the new boss, yada yada.

MEET THE NEW BOSS, YADA YADA: Obama preserves renditions as counter-terrorism tool. “The role of the CIA’s controversial prisoner-transfer program may expand, intelligence experts say. . . . the Obama administration appears to have determined that the rendition program was one component of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism that it could not afford to discard.” And “human rights” groups are already covering for Obama, something that has not escaped notice. More on that flipflopping here, complete with before-and-after statements. (Bumped).

MEET THE NEW BOSS, YADA YADA: Obama repeating Bush’s “boneheaded move” at the NSC?

HEH: Ted Rall: Look for Obama to be as devoted to war as Bush was. Meet the new boss, yada yada. If only these people had been smart enough to read InstaPundit before the election they wouldn’t be so surprised. And if only I had been smart enough to cash in on the t-shirt sales. . . .

UPDATE: Frank Rich will be buying the t-shirt soon, too! “I share these high hopes. But for the first time a faint tinge of Bush crept into my Obama reveries this month.” It won’t be the last . . . .

OBAMA FANS ARE unhappy with the Clintons’ high-profile role. Meet the new boss, yada yada . . . . Best bit:

“These are people who believe in this stuff more than Barack himself does,” said a Democrat close to Obama’s campaign. “These guys didn’t put together a campaign in order to turn the government over to the Clintons.”

I think over the next four years they’ll discover that there’s a lot of stuff they believe in more than Barack does.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Meet the new boss, yada yada:

While conservative senators have boasted recently about ditching the $1 million “hippie museum” earmark from a recent spending bill, they didn’t bother touching billions for Louisiana.

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), in fact, put out a press release late last night declaring Thursday as “our $12 billion day.” Indeed, Louisiana received $3 billion in home reconstruction aid that was dropped into the Defense spending bill late in negotiations. That bill cleared the Senate on Thursday. Louisiana will receive $7 billion of the $23 billion water resources development act money thanks to the resounding override of President Bush’s veto of that bill. And the Pelican State will receive $2 billion in defense funds for various military projects and installations in that state under the Pentagon spending bill.

But she got her pork the old-fashioned way, as the price for supporting Mukasey.

MEET THE NEW BOSS, YADA YADA: “Earmarks. Back-room deals. Cronyism. This is the kind of stuff the Democrats pledged to clean up during their ‘Culture of Corruption’ campaign swing in 2006. But members like Murtha — influential power-brokers addicted to the old ways — have very effectively prevented them from keeping their promises. At the beginning of the year, Murtha called the Democrats’ ambitious ethics-reform proposals ‘total crap.’ Thanks to guys like him, that’s what they’ve amounted to.”

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Meet the new boss, yada yada:

After promising unprecedented openness regarding Congress’ pork barrel practices, House Democrats are moving in the opposite direction as they draw up spending bills for the upcoming budget year.

Democrats are sidestepping rules approved their first day in power in January to clearly identify “earmarks” — lawmakers’ requests for specific projects and contracts for their states.

Rather than including specific pet projects, grants and contracts in legislation as it is being written, Democrats are following an order by the House Appropriations Committee chairman to keep the bills free of such earmarks until it is too late for critics to effectively challenge them. . . . What Obey is doing runs counter to new rules that Democrats promised would make such spending decisions more open.

I really didn’t think that the new Democratic Congress would — could! — turn out to be worse than the Republicans. But this is just another case of my political expectations, despite their modesty, being disappointed.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Meet the new boss, yada yada.

House Democratic leaders pushing a promised lobbying overhaul are facing resistance from balky lawmakers and fending off accusations that a prominent member is flouting new ethics rules.

The Democratic leaders were forced to scrap a promise to double the current one-year lobbying ban after lawmakers leave office. Now, they are struggling to pass legislation requiring lobbyists to disclose the campaign contributions they “bundle” — collect and deliver — to lawmakers. Failing to deliver on both measures would endanger similar provisions already passed by the Senate.

Other House rules changes this year appear to have done little to alter business as usual on Capitol Hill. House Democrats voted along party lines on Tuesday to block the censure of one of their most powerful members, Representative John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania. He was accused of violating a new ethics rule that prohibits lawmakers from swapping pork for votes.

Still to come is a long-overdue report by a House committee considering the creation of an independent watchdog to monitor compliance with ethics rules. Democrats say the House is unlikely to endorse the idea, which the Senate has already rejected. . . . Some newly elected Democrats say they worry about potential perceptions that their party has failed to deliver its promised cleanup. “Many of the freshmen ran on a campaign of, as Speaker Pelosi would say, ‘draining the swamp,’ on ethics and ethics enforcement,” said Representative Ed Perlmutter, a first-term Colorado Democrat.

Those promises to produce the most ethical Congress in history are looking lamer and lamer. I’m beginning to think they never meant it at all. . . .

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Meet the new boss, yada yada yada:

Such is life in Washington, where members of Congress still don’t get it.

Voters sent a clear message last November when they flipped 30 seats in the House and another six in the Senate, handing control to Democrats. Congress’s love affair with pork-barrel projects — and the secrecy associated with them — was viewed as a defining factor in the election.

Yet today, six months after the elections, the Senate still has not enacted rules making earmarks transparent. Democrats have repeatedly rebuffed efforts by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) despite promises to govern more openly.

In the House, Democrats have had difficulty following a new set of earmark rules adopted earlier this year. When an intelligence spending bill came up last week, Democrats hadn’t even told the ranking committee Republican, Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), about pork projects in the bill, let alone other members or the public.

But the Democrats’ shenanigans aren’t nearly as surprising as some Republican failures on the issue. Shortly after the White House vowed to veto the pork-filled agriculture supplemental spending bill last Thursday, three Republicans — Reps. Greg Walden (Ore.), Mike Simpson (Idaho) and Denny Rehberg (Mont.) — not only spoke in favor of the bill, they condemned President Bush for opposing it.

Term limits, which I used to view with skepticism, are looking much more appealing.

MEET THE NEW BOSS, YADA, YADA:

I’m sure it’s only a matter of time until the ABA denounces as “contrary to the rule of law and our constitutional system of separation of powers” President Obama’s use of signing statements to voice constitutional concerns about legislation he signs into law. See ABA Task Force on Presidential Signing Statements and the Separation of Powers Doctrine, Report at 5 (July 24, 2006) (“ABA Task Force Report”). The President quietly issued another such signing statement on Tuesday, the fourth constitutional signing statement of his young presidency. . . . President Obama has issued more constitutional signing statements than President Bush had at this point in his presidency.

When Bush did it, it was a lawless practice, giving rise to the fierce moral urgency of replacing him with a Democrat . . . who’d do the same thing.

JACOB SULLUM: Obama on Warrantless Surveillance: As Bad As Bush? Worse?

Meet the new boss, yada yada. You were expecting a Chicago machine politician to show an enthusiasm for civil liberties?

MEET THE NEW BOSS, YADA, YADA:

In a New York Times Magazine profile of Robert Gibbs, the incoming White House press secretary, Mark Leibovich reveals that the Obama campaign emulated the “Bush model” of tight information control. Campaign manager David Plouffe acknowledged that they “talked a lot about the Bush model” inside the campaign and, like the Bush White House, sought to limit the spread of information internally so as to avoid the leaking that badly damaged the campaigns of Obama’s rivals.

There are other similarities. During the 2004 election, Dick Cheney famously kicked the New York Times off his campaign plane. Obama apparently did the same to three newspapers this fall–the Washington Times, the New York Post, and the Dallas Morning News–all of which had endorsed John McCain. At the time, the Obama campaign cited space concerns. But when Leibovich asked Gibbs whether reporters were kicked off the plane for considerations other than space, Obama’s spokesman first said “no” but later amended his response. “On occasion, yes,” Gibbs said, adding that such instances were infrequent. “I mean, were there occasions? Sure.”

Read the whole thing.

MEET THE NEW BOSS, YADA, YADA: Obama to delay repeal of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’. I’m guessing that this bodes poorly for a repeal of the Defense Of Marriage Act, too.

UPDATE: Brian Doherty: “Still, his apparent unwillingness to be bold on something he considers a matter of both justice and wise policy–and that he has clear political support on–should be disconcerting to his fans.”

And Gay Patriot is not amused.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Meet the new boss, yada, yada:

At this point, “Democrats are sidestepping rules approved their first day in power in January to clearly identify ‘earmarks’ — lawmakers’ requests for specific projects and contracts for their states — in documents that accompany spending bills,” The Associated Press reported Monday.

And there’s more unhappy editorializing here:

The new game that House Appropriations Chairman David Obey intends to play with budget earmarks this year is worse than the usual hide-and-seek. He is taking the whole thing underground, as though he is to be trusted as a one-man auditor for congressional pork. If this is to be the new ethic that Democrats promised, voters might want their ballots back. . . .

The result, then, is that the earmark projects will receive almost no public scrutiny and no congressional debate. This is precisely the kind of environment in which convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff thrived, the kind of place he fondly called the “favor factory.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi promised to drain this swamp, of course, but Democrats attached enough pork to the Iraq appropriations bill this spring to render that commitment a fraud. Neither the House nor the Senate has delivered on its promise to fully expose and limit the special-interest earmarks.

As budgetary gambits go, though, Obey’s is particularly insidious. It is what Democratic caucus chairman Rahm Emanuel last fall called “earmark abuse” when he introduced an amendment that sought to prohibit “the inclusion of earmarks and other provisions in conference reports without the language having first been in either the House or Senate legislation’s original language.”

That was when the Republicans were in charge. Now the Democrats run the bank, and it appears open for withdrawals again.

Could this kind of thing have any connection to the Democrats’ massive slide in the polls? Nahhh.

UPDATE: More backsliding here.

SO I GUESS THE HONEYMOON’S REALLY OVER: Keith Olbermann goes after Obama. Meet the new boss, Keith. Yada, yada.

NEW YORK TIMES: Obama Widens Missile Strikes Inside Pakistan.

Question: “Wouldn’t it have saved a lot of time if Obama had just asked W to be his War-on-Terror czar?” Meet the new boss, yada yada.

UPDATE: Obama Administration Still Defends State Secrets.

Plus this: “In the past, objecting to a Gitmo-Gulag comparison was evidence of a ‘withered moral sensibility,’ but I suspect we’re allowed to reject such false equivalencies now.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Heh: “Looks like we can schedule the Obama war crimes trial to run concurrently with Bush’s.”

Well, Fritz Hollings is already on board. . . .

Related thoughts at Dissenting Justice:

If progressives now believe that they overreached in condemning Bush, they should make this clear. If progressives simply wanted to drum Republicans out of power, they have made a mockery of the very values they claim to embrace.

Read the whole thing.

OBAMA’S NEW DEAL is sounding kinda familiar: “The Obama tax-cut proposals, if enacted, could pack more punch in two years than either of President George W. Bush’s tax cuts did in their first two years.” Meet the new boss, yada yada. But Jim Lindgren thinks it’s “smart policy.”

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: So much for promises that the new Democratic Congress was going to be different:

Move over Bridge to Nowhere. Congress is back in town, and clearly back to business even uglier than usual.

It takes hard work to come up with an earmark more egregious than that infamous Alaskan bridge, but California’s Dianne Feinstein is an industrious gal. Her latest pork–let’s call it Rambo’s View–deserves to be the poster child for everything wrong with today’s greedy earmark process.

The senator’s $4 billion handout (yes, you read that right) to wealthy West L.A. (yes, you read that right, too) is the ultimate example of how powerful members use earmarks to put their own parochial interests above national ones–in this case the needs of veterans. It’s a case study in how Congress uses the appropriations process to substitute its petty wants for the considered judgments of agency professionals. And it’s just the latest proof that, no matter how much outrage the American public might display over these deals–and no matter how often Congress promises to clean up its act–the elected have no intention of reforming the process. . . .

Given the recent uproar over Walter Reed, and Congress’s many calls that we do more for the men and women returning home wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan, you’d think no elected representative could possibly have the chutzpah to impede the VA’s considered attempts to inject efficiency into its facilities and provide better care for its constituents. Think ever so much again. It turns out the well-to-do in West L.A. consider the veteran’s center grounds their own little rolling, personal park, and they want it to stay that way–thank you very much.

Meet the new boss, yada yada.