Category Archives: President Obama

I Really Like the Inauguration Poem

There’s also two nice interviews with Richard Blanco.

One on the Newshour.

The other on NY Mag.

One Today.

 

Mitt Doesn’t Know What Hit Him

From another source:

Here’s the ad that proves it:

And Romney’s copycat response video?  Pulled because of violations.

Well done Republicans!

I’m enjoying this, Kevin.

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A Transformational President

It’s not just what he said today.  It’s everything about his presidency.

It’s recognizing just what Hillary and Tim Geithner could do.

It’s seeing so much of what Bill Clinton agreed to finally, slowly undone.

It’s Smart Power, not only abroad, but also in many ways, here at home.

I’m really proud of my president.  It’s been a long time since I have felt that way.

It’s still just sinking in.  A great man.  A great family.  I’m so proud.

This Really Tickled Me

Kwame Holman just said on the PBS Newshour that Obama blamed the Secret Service scandal “on a couple of knuckleheads”.  With a straight face.

🙂   LOL

One Constituency at a Time

President Obama may not make all of the people happy all of the time, but he is making some of them happy some of the time.

He’s going to El Paso tomorrow.  Hopefully, he will make a strong statement on immigration.  Sensible people know that, despite all of the Republicans poo-pooing what he did — killing OBL was something GWB and Cheney could never do.  Others know that repealing DADT was a big win.  (Others yet are still whining about it.)

President Obama is building a campaign stronger that it probably needs to be, but who could blame him?  I think we could handle a president like him for a long time.  Of course, I feel very certain that he will be re-elected — this presidential season is going to be the silly season.  I know old Joe will be old, but perhaps he won’t do a Cheney — mostly because he’s healthier — and we could have old Joe for a few years until Deval Patrick or Cory Booker are ready to be President.

A girl can hope, can’t she?

Killer First Lady

(Ok, I’m only linking to this silliness because I wanted to post this awesome pic.)

Basically, pedestrian-auto collisions have risen 0.4% and some people today blamed our First Lady for it.  Sort of. And then saw how silly they were being.

Michelle is awesome.

Hopey is not too bad either 🙂

Others not so much.

Why Can’t Michael Berry Check His Facts? Or is it That He Won’t?

Thanks to all of you who have sent an email to Michael Berry. Keep it up! He still won’t admit that he was wrong, or that he opportunistically politicized what was a very honorable ceremony.

Update:  Very clear photo of parents in front row here.

Second Update:  Just to make it clear:

For the feeble, this is a photo of the parents, just to show that they are the people in the front row.

Here’s Michael Berry contact info.  He’s a liar.  Let him know it.

Michael Berry read this email on the air not once, but twice, and he didn’t see anything wrong with it.  I’m thinking it is more of the “you made me think that about you so it’s your fault” sort of mind-game that he is known for.  It concerns the Medal of Honor Ceremony that was held today at the White House.  Before I get to nonsense of Michael Berry, let me just say that Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta is an honorable and very brave man and I hate that someone like Michael Berry, who never served, saw fit to denigrate what happened today.   That the denigration was a complete fabrication makes it even worse.  Michael Berry’s masculine insecurity knows no bounds.

Here’s Berry:

This Salvatore Giunta, this story I find the humility of the man, compared not just to Barack Hussien Obama, but compared to that class of clowns in the United States Congress, the humility of the man.  “I’m just an average soldier.”  That’s what he said.  And the woman on 60 Minutes with the cute accent said, “You’re average?”  “Yeah.””Well, who would be a great soldier, what about the great soldiers?”  “Yeah, image how great they must be.”  I mean that’s pretty strong, that’s really strong.

Humility is not a desirable attribute in talk radio, so it’s good to know that Berry recognizes it in his betters.  Berry goes on:

I said yesterday that he erroneously that he won the medal of honor.  You don’t win the medal of honor.  You receive it.  It’s my error, but there’s an email that came in, a veteran of the United States Marine Corps, Lance Corporal Clayton, and he wrote, “Michael, I had the honor of watching one of America’s true heroes receive the nation’s highest honor today.  Something that many people think you win, but it’s really not won like a trophy or prize, the medal of honor is not something someone sets out to receive, because the act of which it takes to get, it is typically so big that you do not survive, which is why there have been nine, I believe the last nine have been given to people posthumously.  I mean to the families.”

If you listen to Berry, those last couple of sentences sound ad libbed.  I don’t think he got any such email — or — he didn’t clarify when he was reading and when he was editorializing.  The next sentence is why I think it’s the former:

This is the first living medal of honor winner since Vietnam.

I thought they weren’t “winners” but rather recipients.  Didn’t Lance Corporal Clayton just scold Berry for saying just that?  Smells fishy to me.

This being said the highest respect should be paid to those who do receive it, and all should honor that person.  Today while watching Staff Sargent Giunta stand there waiting, I couldn’t help but think about his family and question where they were, and why they weren’t there in the front row along with the soldiers that were with him during the altercation.

Lance Corporal Clayton, respectfully, they are in the front row.

That woman with the long blond hair in the front row?  That’s his wife.  The other people are his family.

At the end of the ceremony, the President started shaking the hands of all the congressmen in the front two rows and chatting it up with them.

Lance Corporal Clayton (or should I say Michael Berry?), the people the President was shaking hands with were Medal of Honor recipients.

But who cares?  It sounds good!  And it gets better!

It wasn’t until he reached the third row that he was actually to the point of where the family had been.

Wrong side of the room, idiot.

What’s this, more confusion about who is where?  That always works on RADIO.

I even notice that one of the family members was a World War II  vet and probably couldn’t see because of all the goons in front of him.

Let’s see.  President Obama acknowledges the families of the men Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta tried to save.  And who are the “goons” in front of them?  The Staff Sergeant’s family.

What can I say, it’s misdirection all around.

All the soldiers were further back, on a different side, back behind everyone else.

That everyone else being Medal of Honor “winners”.

I guess my question to you is, am I viewing this wrong?

Yes.

Is this just another show of how disrespectful he is toward the heroes of our nation, the true heroes of our nation?

No.

Should the families and soldiers been in the front, shouldn’t the families and soldiers been in the front, ahead of the others that he rubs elbows with every day and as a Marine this completely disgusts me.   But before any of those non-deserving should have been at least been the family, in my opinion.

The family of Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta was in front, so what is Michael Berry going on about?  The only people in front of his fellow soldiers were Medal of Honor recipients, so who is this guy — whoever it is — talking about?

Oh, it must be Michelle Obama and Secretary Gates, as you can see.  Right?

That’s seemingly the end of Berry’s “reading of the email” and now we are into Berry’s “own” thoughts:

And that’s so true.  Who put the United States Congressmen who’ve done exactly nothing on the front two rows and then there’s his family on the third row?

No one because they weren’t there.

And the family of the two soldiers who died and whose lives he was working to save, which is why he received the medal of honor, you put them back on the third row.

Because his family was in the first two rows.

They gave the ultimate measure of commitment to our nation and they’re on the third row, behind the Democrats in Congress.

No, they were behind the family of the man being honored.

If there is a more fitting example of the hubris and arrogance and lack of respect for every-day Americans than that photograph,

Which photograph would that be, Michael?  You said you got an email supposedly from someone who had watched the ceremony, not just looked at some picture.  You made an assumption, didn’t you Michael Berry, and you think you can sully every last thing this president does.  Well you can’t.

Congressmen on the first two rows, and the honest descent every-day families who’ve lost loved ones in Afghanistan at a ceremony to honor their loved ones, on the third row.  If there is a more fitting picture for what’s wrong in this country, I can’t imagine what it is.

This is what is wrong with this country.  People like Michael Berry.  There were no Congress people there, and had there been, and had they wanted to honor Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta, so what?  The people in the front rows were previous “winners” and military officials and the First Lady.

Just so you know, Michael Berry took no calls that whole hour, even though he spent most of it railing about the new topic de jure.  There’s a reason for that.

Lying Liars Lie, AMIRITE?

The Way it is Done

I watched and listened to President Obama tonight.  His address was quiet, sincere, heartfelt, and nothing like what W. did back on “Mission Accomplished” day.

I’ve wasted things in my life: money, time, opportunities, other people’s time, but I have never wasted as much money or as many lives as George W. Bush has.  The woman Margaret interviewed on the News Hour tonight just made me cry.  It reminded me of the one Iraqi student we’ve had in our program at school.  Iraq is cursed, she said.  Margaret said she hoped the woman was wrong.  It was heartbreaking.

The president addressed our nation well and all of the criticism — from both the left and the right — is uncalled for.  This president has had to walk a line few others have — perhaps none other has.  He’s doing a good job and his poll numbers are coming up — despite the spitefulness of people on both sides.

I still believe in Hope.  I still believe in Change.  I am also realistic and pragmatic.  It will take time.  How much time depends on this November.  We can go forward — pick up a stronger Democratic majority — or go backwards — return to the frivolous investigations and government shut downs brought about by divided government in the 1990’s.  Remember, when Dems took over in 2006, they didn’t shut things down.  The Republicans will if they have just a one seat majority.

I was proud of my president tonight — I’ve been proud of him for a long time now.  I am hopeful that the economy will start coming back in the next couple of months and that come November, we will see that the hate and anger directed toward him will be recognized for what it is.

Nixon in China

Robert Gates, telling Congress to cut it out.  Literally:

In a speech that was as welcome as it was remarkable, the Pentagon chief explained that the Congress, Department of Defense officials and defense contractors had allowed military spending to grow unchecked after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

Warning that this sort of budgeting without checks or balances is unsustainable, Gates called for a radical shift in direction.

“What it takes is the political will and willingness…to make hard choices — choices that will displease powerful people both inside the Pentagon and out,” Gates declared on Saturday, in a speech at the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas, where the current Secretary of Defense noted that the, like many military men, the commander of U.S. forces in Europe during World War II worried about excessive defense spending and warned about the threat posed by the “acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

Here’s a nice background article on President Obama’s first defense budget last year.

Both articles are worth the time to read them.

Conflict at KTRH, KPRC

Tune into local Houston stations KTRH or KPRC lately and you will hear the personalities crying about the national deficit or debt.  (The two are very different, but I have given up on trying to argue that, just like I have given up trying to explain the difference between economic vs. political ways to organize a state, i.e. the the socialist vs. democracy argument yadda yadda yadda).

According to Pat Shinn on KTRH this afternoon — the U.S. ranks 6th in debt to GDP ratio within the G8.  Sure there are ongoing talks with the Chinese (who manipulate their currency to keep their deficit where it is and you all who buy shit without looking where it is made contribute to it), but there are other countries — not Canada — that are in worse shit than we are.

Will this fact make any difference in the ongoing debate about the deficit/debt?  No.  Just like no one in the media — including every last person (except Pat Shinn) at KTRH and KPRC — will ever acknowledge that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — the most costly parts — were kept off the books until President Obama made the biggest transparency move of all:  putting the wars on the the books.  No one will ever acknowledge that — especially at KTRH or KPRC.

I also listened to Natalie this afternoon.  From what she said, everyone knows about the Houston connections to talk radio and Beck attacking Medina and there seems to be a lawsuit in the works.

Please look at Beck’s website.  The seed conspiracy is more of a dupe/snake oil thing than the ‘buy gold’ thing, but there it is.  And it’s all under KTRH’s URL.  It’s all entertainment, right?  Beck is also planning an event on August 28th this year.  He’s calling it, “Restoring Honor.”  But look closer and you will see that Beck gets his chunk of change before anything goes to the charity,

All contributions made to the Special Operations Warrior Foundation (SOWF) will first be applied to the costs of the Restoring Honor Rally taking place on August 28, 2010.

How charitable of the clearly well-compensated Beck.  It’s much like Hannity’s self promotion concerts.

And we go along and think this is discourse or something.  I never thought I would say it, but I hope AM radio dies — and soon.

In the meantime, President Obama has John Walsh on his team at this point.  Walsh even acknowledged — actually praised the pres for getting it passed  —  that the stimulus bill kept law enforcement officers employed.