48 posts tagged “barack obama”

Sure, like most folks, I was happy to read about Obama traveling on Marine One, "manned" for the first time by an all-female crew.  Yeah, it's great to see women Marines getting the same opportunities as male Marines.

But how long, my people, how long before we go from this:

To this:

Pink Elephant!! (say with French accent: Zee Peenk Elayphont!)  It's assumed he's albino, and there's some concern that the African sun will shorten his life span.  That said, the little guy apparently already has a few techniques for protecting himself, like walking in Mama's shadow. Cute!

Late Night with Obama: I like having a president who can be trusted to go on the Late Show and just talk about stuff.  Sure, he got into a little hot water by comparing his bowling skills to "The Special Olympics."  So he apologized to the people who cared, and everybody else just kind of whistled and looked away, knowing they've said things like that, too, not with any intent to offend.  America may have gone overboard on the political correctness bandwagon.  Obama's "gaffe" got big play in the US media.  The BBC didn't even mention it.

Miss, Ms, Mrs?  Do you feel like we still have a problem with titles that denote a woman's marital status.  They apparently do in Europe.  I've definitely struggled over the years with establishing the fact that my husband and I have different last names.  (Four, four times the mortgage company had to redo the paperwork the first time we bought a house, because somebody couldn't get it through his/her head that I wasn't Mrs. Hubbicula.  Finally, I said, "I'm his wife, not his sister. Of course, we don't have the same last name."  As stupid as it was, that explanation worked.)  What about Miss, Ms, Mrs?  Do you think Ms denotes anything other than neutrality?  Do you think of yourself as one or the other?  

Ships colliding in the night: Okay, when a ship from one country and a submarine from another country run into each other, I figure these things happen.  They didn't know the other one was there.  When two US Navy vessels run into each other...that's just embarrassing.  Shouldn't we know where our own ships are?
 
And throw away the key: What a good deal for everyone that Jospeh Fritzl pled guilty to murder, so they can put him away for the rest of his life.  He probably did it for his own selfish reasons, but at least it spares his daughter from having to provide any further testimony about the 20+ years of imprisonment and sexual slavery he put her through.  I can't even imagine what things will be like for her two oldest children, who spent their entire childhood and adolescence in a sunless basement, witnessing their mother's abuse.

Where's my lunch?  Seriously, where is it? 

By now, perhaps you've heard that Chuck Norris has declared that right wing militant groups in the US are going to rise up and make him "President of Texas." "If," he says, "the state of the union continues to turn into the enemy of the state."  He adds: "…we've bastardized the First Amendment, reinterpreted America's religious history and secularized our society until we ooze skepticism and circumvent religion on every level of public and private life." 

Uh, dude, seriously?  Now, you've decided that if things get too bad in America you'll break Texas off into your own little fiefdom of religious nutjobbery? Didn't the religious right's henchmen help bring America to the brink of economic destruction? That didn't seem to worry you, but the threat of freedom of religion does? I'm calling Chuck Norris out as a pansy-ass chickenshit motherfucker.  Is Chuck afwaid of atheists?  Boo!  Is Chuck afwaid of freedom?  Does Chuck wake up in the middle of the night, terrified of a vision of America in which people are free and happy and unoppressed? (And where kids don't have to read the Bible in school?)  Also, you can have Texas, Chuck.  The BBQ is pretty good, but it's just not worth the hassle.

That one was wacky enough, but then I read that Pat Boone was also dreaming of being appointed president following an uprising of pseudo-religious militias.

What the fuck, Gus?  Have these ass clowns never heard of democracy?  We just had a national election to decide who'd be president and you numbnuts didn't even run.  You'll let Bush & Co. nearly destroy everything that makes America great, from our federally protected freedoms to our scientific innovations and our booming economy.  But put one black man with a decent intellect in the White House and all the sudden, you want to overthrow the government. 

Take note my people: this is why sane, secular, freedom-loving folks like you and me need to own guns.  I think I'm going to start a militia and call it The Flaming Liberals.  If there's going to be a war in America, I don't want the pseudo-Christian* rightwing nutjobs to be the only people who are armed.

*This is my new approach to calling these people out without insulting the actual Christians who may visit my blog. 

Rumors have been swirling around for weeks, but I almost cried when I heard the official news: Obama has poached nominated Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius as Health and Human Services Secretary. I'm not exaggerating. I almost cried. I feel like crying right now as I contemplate it.

It's not that I'm completely selfish. I know Obama needs good people in his cabinet and Sebelius is good people. I know the health insurance question needs someone smart and competent to tackle it, and she's both.

That said, I'm really upset, because we need her here.  When I was a kid, I remember going to a funeral for one of my favorite teachers and the pastor said, "Heaven must need her," and I said, "We need her more."  (Oddly enough, I did not get kicked out of church for that, but I did get called into the principal's office over it come Monday morning.)

Kansas needs her. Like every other state in the union, our economy is in bad shape, and we need good leadership to get us through. Unfortunately, Kansas is being called to sacrifice our good leadership to Washington, to a cause American is not yet fully committed to addressing. The fact that uninsured shlubs all over the country still say, "I don't want socialized medicine," tells me we're not ready to fix what's wrong with health care.

In short, I think Sebelius is going to Washington to waste four years fighting with a nation and a pair of political parties who don't yet think the Titanic is sinking. Obama is sending her down to man the pumps, because nobody wants to admit that there aren't enough life boats.

I mentioned on inauguration day how nice it was to hear President Obama acknowledge the contributions of "non-believers" to America.  Plenty of people have suffered religious persecution over the years, but here in the U.S., atheists have been perennially reviled.  Sometimes, it feels like everyone hates us and blames us.  Sure, when things go wrong, all kinds of religious and ethnic groups have gotten blamed at different times, but almost no one later chimes in to apologize for dissing atheists.  It's no longer as safe to trash talk people who believe in a different god than you do, but you can still get a free pass for insulting folks who don't happen to believe in a supernatural deity. 

In the 1950's, Americans were so afraid of "godless Commies" that we made "in God we trust" our official national motto and we stuck "under God" into the Pledge of Allegiance.  After 9/11, everywhere you went there were signs and bumper stickers that declared "God Bless America."  The thing is, none of that bothers me.  I don't care what Cosmic Muffin people believe in.  What hurt me after 9/11 was that America betrayed the things I believe in.

When you don't believe in a god, you pretty much have to settle for believing in people.  And I do.  I believe that humanity has incredible capacity for good, and no god gave it to us.  It's ours.  We created it.  We nurtured it.  People like Ghandi and MLK and Mother Jones helped us see that we had the power to make the world better. 

Making the world better, improving conditions for our fellow humans, that requires a commitment to freedom, because we need freedom to be happy.  When our government began detaining people without the benefit of habeas corpus, it left me feeling like Dick Cheney himself had walked into my church and taken a crap on the altar. Knowing that people were held without due legal process and prevented from contacting a lawyer, their families, or the media, that has been a vision of hell for me.  Imagine how you would feel if your brother/husband/father disappeared, and years later you learned that he'd been arrested and deported to a foreign country, where he had not yet been charged with a crime, or given any chance to defend himself.  You'd be angry.  You'd feel betrayed. 

That's what we've done at Guantanamo--defiled the very tenets of freedom this country was founded on.  Today at last, we are beginning the process of ending that mistake.  President Obama issued several executive orders that will set in motion the end of Gitmo detentions, impose a formal ban on torture, create an agency to oversee the review of all the individual cases on detainees, and delay a trial of a legal U.S. resident who has been held in a military brig as an enemy combatant.  In short, we are reaffirming our belief in our legal system.  Innocent until proven guilty.  The right to confront your accuser.  The right to a fair and swift trial.  I don't care where these prisoners came from.  If we arrested them and brought them under our jurisdiction, we owe them the same legal rights that we would expect to receive.

So if you ever wonder what sorts of things atheists do believe in, there's one.  I believe everybody deserves a fair shake and a chance to defend himself in a court of law. 

Today, with the closure of Gitmo on the horizon, it feels like Christmas and Purim and Diwali and Eid Al-Fitr and pretty much you-name-it religious festival all rolled up in one.   

I have no idea what I'm doing tonight.  We're going out for some dinner and then...wherever we end up.

For your inauguration party, though, I have a few musical offerings.

First up, the only social activism house party dance music I've heard.  Tom Morello as the Nightwatchman, doing Shake My Shit.  Because tomorrow, we have a lot of hard work to do.  Tomorrow, we're gonna have to rebuild our country.  Tomorrow, we're gonna have to make sacrifices.  But tonight, let's party.

Then, I've got the song I only half-jokingly suggested for Obama's campaign song.  Not necessarily that I agree with James Brown's lyrics, but that it's an awesome song.  Also, the very notion of Obama as funky is a riot.  You may notice his Kansas roots showing when he dances, because he seems to be doing a variation of the White Boy Overbite.

And last of all, AC/DC's Back in Black, which is what we're all hoping for the US economy--let's get it out of the red and back in black.

Hope everybody has fun tonight, and be safe!

Old preacher wins hands down.  Amen.  Amen. Amen.

Did a lot of folks look confused when the mediocre poet was reading?  Like they thought maybe it was a prayer.  A very boring one.

Holy shit.  We actually elected somebody who wants to give us a talking to at his inauguration.  I love that he's not going for the cuddly, but telling us we've got to get to work and be responsible.

I wonder if Bush is squirming when Obama mentioned that our ancestors had worked to hard and sacrificed to expand our freedoms, even if he didn't come right out and say that we'd backpedaled from those sacrifices in the last 8 years.

Oh, and did he just sneak in a reference to "levees"?

Nothing so satisfying as giving our all to a task.  The price and promise of citizenship.  It's nice to finally have our citizenship spoke of in terms of our obligations instead of our privileges.

ETA: and thanks, Mr. President, for acknowledging that "non-believers" are part of America, too. 

Woohoo!!!!!!!!!

Despite a little hitch in your basic "repeat after me," we've got ourselves a new president!

I wonder if he had that problem at his wedding, too.

YAAAAAAAAAAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!