bodhi tree swaying

Back in September, I posted a graph of job losses covering the final fourteen months of Bush’s presidency and the first seven of Obama’s.

I’d ironically titled the post See how Obama is destroying the US because someone had put a poll on Facebook asking the question, “Is Obama destroying our country?” The answer choices were thoughtfully provided as:

– Yes
– No
– Only a little

If you look at the comments for that post you’ll see I was criticized as “partisan,” “misreading the statistics,” and that I “do not understand what is going on.” I was also told that “Hard times are coming and you will not be prepared.”

Of course I don’t have any advanced skills in analyzing the economy, but it seemed obvious that the trend was in the right direction and that …

Here’s the article, which was published on Newsmax, and then pulled. I got the text from Google’s cache:

Obama Risks a Domestic Military ‘Intervention’

Tuesday, September 29, 2009 10:35 AM

By: John L. Perry

There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America’s military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the “Obama problem.” Don’t dismiss it as unrealistic.

America isn’t the Third World. If a military coup does occur here it will be civilized. That it has never happened doesn’t mean it wont. Describing what may be afoot is not to advocate it. So, view the following through military eyes:

# Officers swear to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Unlike enlisted personnel, they do not swear to “obey the orders of the president of the United States.”

# Top military officers can see the Constitution they are sworn to defend being trampled as American

…

The kind of president we need…

is the kind of president capable of thinking in this way:

“My job is to help the country take the long view — to make sure that not only are we getting out of this immediate fix, but we’re not repeating the same cycle of bubble and bust over and over again; that we’re not having the same energy conversation 30 years from now that we had 30 years ago; that we’re not talking about the state of our schools in the exact same ways we were talking about them in the 1980s; and that at some point we say, ‘You know what? If we’re spending more money per-capita on health care than any nation on earth, then you’d think everybody would have coverage and we would see lower costs for average consumers, and we’d have better outcomes.’ ”

The statement, of course, is by President Obama …

Jon Stewart is concerned that Obama’s rhetoric so closely parallels that of George W. Bush, but Jason Jones says, “I guess when Obama says this stuff I don’t think he really means it. And that gives me hope.”

I’d have thought it was the other way around myself, but Jones’ version is funnier.

Brilliant clip from Stewart:

“Fox News: Really scared about what might happen; oblivious to what already has.”

I caught up on the inaugural speech almost 24 hours late due to a hospital appointment and a lack of television. I’d heard some of it on the radio but missed a chunk in the middle, and so it was only thanks to Bittorrent that I was able to download the video and see, if not the surrounding events, at least the botched swearing-in and the inaugural speech that followed.

I found the event itself very moving — the visuals definitely added to the sense of this being a momentous occasion — but wasn’t much impressed with Obama’s speech. Paul Krugman hits the spot in today’s NYT in describing one of the things I noticed as I was listening:

…in his speech Mr. Obama attributed the economic crisis in part to “our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age” — but I have no

…

Marc Randazza, A First Amendment attorney based in Florida, has a pertinent comment about Roberts flubbing the oath of office:

The news outlets are buzzing with criticism of Chief Justice John Roberts for flubbing Obama’s Oath of Office — but the critiques seem to be all about him nervously reversing a few words. These critiques miss the issue.

After he painfully, and tortuously, slogged his way through the Oath of Office, Roberts appeared to add his own little bit to it as he asked the President, “So help you God?”

Article II, Section I of the US Constitution reads, in pertinent part (with “he” referring to the President-elect):

Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States,

…

Thanks to William Harryman at Integral Options Café I can now finally place myself in one of those hip generational categories. I was born in 1961 (same year as Obama) and while I was definitely influenced by the protests and counter-culture of the hippies I was way too young to actually participate in any of that stuff and never felt I belonged in the baby Boomer generation.

I grew up with the ideas that sex before marriage was OK and that equality was to be striven for, but sex before marriage was by then so common that it wasn’t rebellious but status quo, and equality was already being legislated into existence in the form of sex and racial discrimination legislation. Again, these things were becoming part of the established way of doing things.

I wasn’t in rebellion against the boomers and so …

Georgia Representative George Broun is apparently worried that President-elect Obama will establish a Gestapo-like security force to impose a Marxist or fascist dictatorship.

“It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he’s the one who proposed this national security force,” Rep. Paul Broun said of Obama in an interview Monday with The Associated Press. “I’m just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may — may not, I hope not — but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism.”

Broun cited a July speech by Obama that has circulated on the Internet in which the then-Democratic presidential candidate called for a civilian force to take some of the national security burden off the military.

“That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did,”

…

From the Telegraph:

Fears are growing that Mr Obama, who will become America’s first black president following his inauguration next year, will be the subject of an assassination attempt.

The secret service is reported to have already investigated more than 500 death threats against Mr Obama during the presidential election contest. Last month, two neo-Nazi skinheads were arrested for conspiring to assassinate Mr Obama.

He is expected to be protected by a secret service detail with hundreds of close-protection agents. Over the past few weeks, the US government has also begun secretly testing a new ultra-secure presidential limousine able to withstand most bomb blasts and terror attacks. Details of his movements will be a closely guarded secret for all but his most senior aides.

The scale of US presidential security is already on a different scale to that for British Prime Ministers with huge …

In case I haven’t mentioned this recently, my daughter shares a name with our president-elect. Her birth name, and current middle name, is Bereket, which is Amharic for “blessing.”

The name “Barack” also means “blessing” and is Swahili.

So both are essentially the same name, but in different languages.

I hope they get to meet.

The picture, by the way, is from a little after 4AM on the day of her birthday. She’s a morning person. Unlike her father.

From The Telegraph (I put the two most important ones first). Hat-tip to JennFields.

• He uses an Apple Mac laptop

• He has read every Harry Potter book

• He collects Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian comics

• He was known as “O’Bomber” at high school for his skill at basketball

• His name means “one who is blessed” in Swahili

• His favourite meal is wife Michelle’s shrimp linguini

• He won a Grammy in 2006 for the audio version of his memoir, Dreams From My Father

• He is left-handed – the sixth post-war president to be left-handed

• He owns a set of red boxing gloves autographed by Muhammad Ali

• He worked in a Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop as a teenager and now can’t stand ice cream

• His favourite snacks are chocolate-peanut protein bars

• He ate dog meat, snake meat, and roasted grasshopper while living in

…

Judith Warner:

Two images will forever stay in my mind to mark this epoch-breaking Election Day. One is that of Jesse Jackson’s face, drenched in tears, in Chicago’s Grant Park on Tuesday evening.

And the other is a photo that ran in The Times on Wednesday. In it, a black mother and daughter sit on the floor of a church in Harlem. The mother, Latrice Barnes, having heard of Obama’s victory, is doubled up in tears; her daughter, Jasmine, is reaching a tentative hand up to soothe her. To me, she looks like the future, reaching out to heal the past.

Tears to Remember – Judith Warner Blog – NYTimes.com

Further to the post in which I draw attention to conservatives that rejoice in Obama’s grandmother’s death, this is from a flyer by the Westboro baptist Church, which regularly pickets funerals to tell us how much they (and their god) hate homosexuals:

Westboro Baptist Church
3701 SW 12th St. Topeka, Kansas 66604
785-273-0325
www.godhatesfags.com

NEWS RELEASE
WBC to picket the funeral of Madelyn Payne Dunham, – pursuant to the picketing laws of Hawaii or Kansas or, etc., wherever burial occurs, – in religious protest and warning to the living; to wit: “Prepare to meet thy God.” Amos 4:11.

Yes. Dying time is truth time, and reflection time, and time for meditating on the weighty issues of life: getting right with God, life, death, Heaven, Hell, sin, righteousness, judgment to come, etc. Obama says his grandmother Dunham raised him, and, her “influence on

…

I can just see the Onion headline now: “Barack Obama, Dalai Lama announce merger.”

I’m guessing this was taken at the time HH was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Anyone know for sure?

I want to make sure I can find this easily in the future, so I’m posting it here:

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

It’s the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen; by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the very first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different; that their voice could be that difference.

It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled – Americans who …

A brief mention of Obama’s grandmother, Madelyn Dunham’s, passing was posted on Lucianne.com a right-wing “news forum”. The comments became so toxic that the site owner had to remove them.

Conservatives rejoiced. Conservatives implied that her death had been “conveniently timed” to help Obama win the election. That she’d been killed to boost him in the polls. A MsMontana commented, “R.I.P. old woman…you deserve it.”

I have to say I fear for America. Where is all this poison going to go now that Obama’s been elected? Is it just going to dissipate as people find that Obama is a likable, honorable, and talented president? Or are these people so out of touch that they’ll continue to adopt a poisoned view of everything about him?

Because they lost the election, and because of the nature of hatred, some of the poison will be …

There was a lot of coverage a few weeks back about research showing that people with a tendency to experience anxiety are more likely to favor right-wing political views. To put it bluntly, Republicans scare easily.

That’s amply demonstrated in a post that the excellent Mahablog links to, in which Jonah Goldberg purports to write from 2012, reporting on Obama’s failed presidency. It’s a bizarre, even hysterical, piece of writing in which, apparently, Obama’s administration will be damaged by Biden making bizarre statements:

…he told the Russian foreign minister he’d “rather punch a nun in the throat” than cooperate on an Iranian nuclear deal, the Obama administration knew they had a problem on their hands.

The strange comments and behavior kept coming: at an international summit on child poverty, he accused the Dalai Lama of issuing a “brain fart,” he phoned Supreme Court

…

WoodMoor Village Zendo flags up this disgusting piece of smug McCarthyism. Sanchez (is that the name? does a fantastic job of exposing McCain spokesman Michael Goldfarb’s vile trick of guilt by association, in which he claims that Obama has a “long history” of associating with anti-semites, but is unable to name a single one. I’m sure a certain segment of the extreme right, who see refusing to provide answers to questions as a badge of honor amongst their leaders, will be waving their hats in the air over this, but for any reasonable person this has to turn them away from the McCain campaign of smears and innuendo.