[ Posted Monday, March 30th, 2009 – 16:24 UTC ]
In the era of Michael Steele, Sarah Palin, and Bobby Jindal, it's pretty hard to stand out in the world of conservative lunatic ravings. But Andrew Breitbart's recent opinion piece in the Washington Times truly raises (lowers?) the bar for the rest of the field in right-wing Crazytown. His thesis is that liberal blog commenters are ruining things for the conservatives' attempts to have a nice online chat.
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[ Posted Sunday, March 22nd, 2009 – 15:02 UTC ]
I am an American citizen. Now, I truly belong.
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[ Posted Friday, February 27th, 2009 – 18:47 UTC ]
Barack Obama is moving Congress so fast, we're approaching warp speed. Consider the fact that neither presidents Reagan nor Clinton got their (much smaller) stimulus packages passed for over six months -- and Obama got his passed in mere weeks. And with Clinton and Reagan, that was a major party of their presidential legacy, whereas with Obama it is just the first item on a very long list of enormous changes to be made. Soon.
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[ Posted Thursday, February 26th, 2009 – 16:09 UTC ]
The District of Columbia is about to take a big step along the road to political relevance. They appear poised to receive a full vote for their "shadow" member of the United States House of Representatives. In a bargain which harkens back to the Missouri Compromise, Utah will also add a House member at the same time. Much has been said about this story in the past week, but everyone seems to be overlooking one good result which will come from the new arrangement: a tie will never again be possible in the Electoral College, at least not without a third-party candidate picking up at least one elector.
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[ Posted Thursday, February 19th, 2009 – 17:11 UTC ]
I find plenty of local elected officials seriously annoying, too, I should mention. As a matter of fact, I find the politics of a large segment of the population seriously annoying. Boy, they better stock up on blank citations, as they're going to have to write a lot of tickets for that one. I find certain movies seriously annoying. And don't even get me started on how seriously annoying television is (starting with "the news").
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[ Posted Monday, February 16th, 2009 – 16:35 UTC ]
Since it's the random Monday when we celebrate "Presidents' Day," and since it is the year of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, I'd like to take a moment to see whether any lessons can be learned from Lincoln in the Obama age. Lincoln and Obama seem linked together in our minds already (Obama encourages such, it must be noted), so I'd like to look back to Lincoln's First Inaugural Address and see what it has to say to us today.
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[ Posted Sunday, January 25th, 2009 – 22:32 UTC ]
The swearing-in ceremony itself, and the opening acts which proceeded it were the best thing, capped by Barack Obama's oath of office.
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[ Posted Saturday, January 24th, 2009 – 21:13 UTC ]
[Note: This page is nothing but my photos of the Inauguration and our trip to see it. For those with slow connections or slow browsers, be warned it may take a while to load. Part 5 of the Inauguration story will be posted later today. Thank you for your patience.]
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[ Posted Friday, January 23rd, 2009 – 18:13 UTC ]
Because Obama's Inaugural speech was indeed masterful. When he started speaking, I was thinking "which line will be the one everyone focuses on?" In other words, which line will be the "nothing to fear but fear itself" or "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country" moment? Both of those lines are from previous inaugurations, so what would be remembered from Obama's speech?
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[ Posted Friday, January 16th, 2009 – 16:49 UTC ]
Taking that last one first, the status in Washington is fast approaching Officially Freaking Out (in the tradition of acronym-crazy D.C., I will refer to this from now on as "OFO") as they contemplate the city being overrun by Inauguration visitors. To put this in perspective, Washington's population is around 600,000 people. Estimates of the crowd which has even now begun descending on the city range from one million up to three million. Three million people is five times the population of the city. For comparison, take the population of the town or city you live in and multiply it by five. Now picture that many out-of-towners arriving for an event. It's like Woodstock descending on a small town, in other words. Or, if you prefer, a Medieval siege. No word yet on where to park the catapults and trebuchets.
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