© Reuters
President Obama is poised to sign an extension of the PATRIOT Act -- and normalize Bush-Cheney national security policies 
It isn't strictly accurate to say that Barack Obama once cared about civil liberties violations in the PATRIOT Act -- he has actually raised detailed objections to the decade old legislation at least twice. In 2005, then-Sen. Obama signed a letter laying out specific concerns that stretched to almost six pages. The next year, the former constitutional law professor took to the Senate floor, where he congratulated his colleagues for "a real, open, and substantive debate about how to fix the PATRIOT Act," and encouraged them to keep up their efforts: "I urge my colleagues to continue working on ways to improve the civil liberties protections after it is reauthorized," he said.