Showing posts with label Barack Obama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Barack Obama. Show all posts
Prof. Gates: A surprising, unlikely arrest suspect
7/24/09
Gates in a photo in the Harvard Crimson, 2002
Skip Gates' arrest 7/21/09
Henry Louis ("Skip") Gates is not a man you'd expect to be in the middle of a confrontation with police, let alone the old-fashioned, unreconstructed "race war" which the wingnuts in the white blogosphere keep predicting.
Read his Wikipedia entry, which rightly describes Gates as a "public intellectual."
T
he foremost scholar of African-American literature in the U.S., his career has been studded with achievements: he was the first African-American Mellon Fellow; he was the recipient of a MacArthur ("Genius") Award; he revived scholarly and public interest in long-lost slave narratives and began a movement to preserve and archive literary artifacts of African-American life; he's built African-American studies departments at major universities and guided the careers of the specialty's most prominent teachers and scholars.
His hallmark has been his subtle and sophisticated explications of race in America and, in particular, in academia:
"Gates has argued that a separatist, Afrocentric education perpetuates racist stereotypes and maintains that it is 'ridiculous' to think that only blacks should be scholars of African and African-American literature. He argues, 'It can't be real as a subject if you have to look like the subject to be an expert in the subject,'[1] adding, 'It's as ridiculous as if someone said I couldn't appreciate Shakespeare because I'm not Anglo-Saxon. I think it's vulgar and racist whether it comes out of a black mouth or a white mouth.'" ([4] (Wikipedia)Physically, Gates is a small man, dapper, witty, and likable. In public intellectual debate, he typically exemplifies the triumph of reasonable discussion and humor over dogmatism and piety.
You can see what he's like if you you watch the PBS miniseries he
co-produced and hosted, African American Lives (2006) and African American Lives 2 (2008). (Gates learns through genealogical research and DNA testing that his ancestry is half white-European and also that he is descended from an Irish king called Niall of the Nine Hostages and from the Yoruba people of Nigeria.)In a graduate seminar I sat in on when he taught at Cornell, there were among us two students named Phil, one white, one African-American. On the first day, he turns to one of them and says, "I bet in all your classes you're always though of as 'Black Phil.' Well in here," he turns toward the other Phil with a smile, "you're going to be thought of as 'White Phil' and he's going to be just 'Phil.'" It was subtle, it was funny and everybody loved it, in particular White Phil for whom, I imagine, this acknowledgement of racial dynamics was a relief.
I'm sure that there are times when Skip Gates can be as nasty, grumpy, petulant and selfish as the next academic superstar. Especially when he's jet-lagged and locked out of his house. And one of his neighbors calls the police because she thinks he's breaking into his own house (good community watchdogging, but it's too bad she doesn't recognize her neighbors on sight.)
For the vast majority of us who only read about the incident -- i.e. everyone who wasn't there -- it's absurd to cast this single incident as a barometer of racial tensions in this country.
The online response to the incident from bloggers and anonymous posters on major newspapers' sites has been revealing, the NYTimes reports:
Many of the commentators identify themselves by race. Their remarks — raw, heartfelt, confused, and some perhaps offensive — are a remarkable snapshot of how people are viewing the same event through a racial lens.One online response I find particularly baffling is white people recounting of their own stories of police hostility and harassment as proof that the incident had nothing to do with race. Since they were falsely arrested and are white, they argue, false arrest is a universal American experience (um, scary, very scary) with no racial implications. Thus, they claim, by bringing race into the issue, Gates, and in turn President Obama, "played the race card," by which they mean that they spuriously brought race into an issue with divisive and demogogic intent.
"I believe Gates was disorderly and he is making this a racist issue. I find blacks far more racist than whites and will never miss a chance to play the race card." — "Pip", Reader Comments, The Boston Globe July 21, 2009, reported in WikiNewsAs a white person, I find these white people incredibly scary. They're akin to Holocaust deniers -- how, in the face of so much empirical documentation and moving personal testimony, can they claim that race isn't a genuinely ever-present issue in the lives of African-Americans?
"I hate the race card just as much as anyone else..."-- "bill," a Boston Globe reader who went on to say that he did think Gates was the victim of racial profiling. July 21, 2009, reported in WikiNews
They're like the people in that old diversity-training joke who say that we (our company, our country, our country club, etc.) had no problems with discrimination until they (Jews, people of color, queers, etc.) showed up. Or, as a commenter to The Washington Post named ravitchn wrote:
“O’Bama [sic] he has gone too far in being black; we whites will never trust him again.”The underlying assumptions about race in that statement are just f*cked on so many levels.
What's really shocking is the endless supply of incredibly racist comments posted anonymously -- and preserved for posterity -- on the websites of every major newspaper in the country. (The Plain Dealer's are atrocious.)
Why are some white people so afraid talking about race out loud, preferring to type out furtive insults at the tail end of any article about an African-American?
And why do we (other white people, people of color, journalists, newspaper advertisers, any other interested party) let them get away with it? But's that's a post for another day.
Meanwhile, it's ironic that Gates, a man whose professional achievements include conquering a prevailing academic shibboleth of racial determinism and preserving the multiplicity of African-American idea against reductivism, should be at the starting point of all of this.
Gates looked much like this when he was at Cornell in the mid-80s.
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Obama's first 100 days: the Facebook feed
4/30/09
The Facebook feed and the twitterstream are a real boon to parodists everywhere. Nothing deflates an important topic quicker than reducing it to one-liners and interpersonal relationships. Poke!
Slate.com offers this "100 days of Obama's Facebook news feed" by Slate political reporter Christopher Beam and assistant editor Chris Wilson.
Sorry if these snippets are too blurry to read: take a quick hop over to the Slate.com to read the entire piece without squinting.
Sins of Omission: Without any pretense of objectivity, Fox News ignores Obama's presser
4/29/09
What I did with Photoshop today ...
In the same way the GOP seems to be knowingly turning its back on mainstream America, Fox gave the White House the cold shoulder today, declining to broadcast Pres. Obama's press conference marking 100 days in office. (They chose instead to enrich our cultural landscape with episodes of "American Idol" and "Lie to Me.")
It's the first time that a major news agency declined to air a prime-time presidential press conference. Fox News did send reporters to the presser, but coincidentally, I'm sure, no members of the Fox press were invited to ask the president a question.
In the last 100 days, Fox has provided a forum for any vituperative wingnut desirous of attacking Obama, no matter how unfounded the accusation, unproven the conspiracy, or unkind the personal insult. (Take a look at FAIR: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and their monthly magazine, Extra!, for sustained and in-depth criticism of Fox News' tactics.)You can see numerous examples of Fox-sponsored mudslinging over the past 100 days in this video made by ThinkProgress.org. As the video's creators explain:
"On the first 100 days of the Obama presidency, the conservative movement has undergone a period of radicalization. From knee-jerk opposition to the President's policies, to petty insults and conspiracy theories aimed at smearing Obama, to the embrace of the radical tea party protests, the Republican party has responded by lurching further to the right."
Where are the Republicans headed with all the demagoguery? Nowhere good. During the last 100 days, as the Obama administration worked on bailouts and foreclosures and health care and equal pay and foreign policy and more, the GOP has decreased its support base and the damaged Americans' opinion of the Republican Party.
Still, in a two party system, lack of overall equilibrium is disturbing. If Republicans continue to stampede, frenzied as lemmings by paranoia and knee-jerk opposition to anything they didn't think of first, will they take the rest of the country with them of the cliff?
- The CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released today showed that only 31 percent of Americans approve of how Republican leaders in Congress are handling their jobs, down 13 percent from February.
- Millions of whites who voted against President Obama in November have changed their minds and now support him, according to a new national poll from Quinnipiac University.
- In a poll of registered voters conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press during the first two months of 2008, just 27% identified themselves as Republicans, the lowest percentage of self-identified Republican voters in 16 years of polling by the Center.
- The "Worst Media Moment of Obama's First 100 Days" is... Wednesday, April 29, 2009
- Rush calls Obama "cold" and "partisan" for commenting on Fox-sponsored tea parties Wednesday, April 29, 2009
- Limbaugh on Obama's view of American values: "We're not gonna waterboard Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, we're going to murder a million babies a year" Tuesday, April 28, 2009
- Limbaugh on Obama comment that Al Qaeda not constrained by constitution: "he's basically again saying 'Look, I kind of envy al Qaeda' " Tuesday, April 28, 2009
- Limbaugh on auto bailout: "Don Obama has made Don Corleone look like Daffy Duck" Tuesday, April 28, 2009
- Limbaugh, Beck assign political motives to response to swine flu Monday, April 27, 2009
- Limbaugh: Obama is "poison to prosperity" Monday, April 27, 2009
- Limbaugh says his friend believes "Obama is terrorist attack number 2; Obama is the follow-up to 9-11" Monday, April 27, 2009
- Limbaugh and friends speculate on who's really "running the show": Axelrod, Soros, King Abdullah, or Alinski? Monday, April 27, 2009
- Limbaugh on swine flu: "President Bamster is going to exploit it" Monday, April 27, 2009
(For more links to media watchdogs and critics, visit Stephen Macek's Media Criticism page. For more on Fox, see Robert Greenwald's "Out-Foxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism.")
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Seder at the White House / Seder b'beit h'levon
4/11/09
From the White House blog:
NB: to find out who was gathered around the Obama's seder table, see Chicago Sun-Times columnist Lynn Sweet's "Ma Nishtanah in the White House."
Tip o' the kippah to Jill at Writes Like She Talks for pointing out that the Obamas and their guests are using the trusty old Maxwell House Haggadah. Used by millions of American Jews over the years, the free Maxwell House Haggadah began in the early 1920s to promote Maxwell House coffee when it became certified Kosher for Passover.
The seder at the White House appears to have been a somber, respectful, traditional seder.
But maybe next year, the Obamas could join the trend and host a more playful, child-oriented seder. Then Sasha and Malia can enjoy acting out the 10 Plagues with plastic frogs, fake blood, sunglasses (darkness) and marshmallows (hail). Like my kids.
Sure, it's goofy. But we had a good time.
And I did set a very nice table, as my mother would have said, with the nice china and tulips from my own garden.
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Inaugural Oddities, Part I
1/22/09
Even more than the first family's outfits and the Chief Justice's bungling of the oath of office, online America has been talking about the impact new media and social media have had on the way we experienced this inauguration. For two days, people have been talking about:
1. The sensational inauguration images made possible by the Photosynth application on MSNBC, which made it possible to browse your way around, zoom in and out of, and change the focal plan of images:
2. The "mindblowing numbers" Facebook and CNN released for their live streaming partnership today, which allowed Facebook users to provide live commentary on the CNN feed. According to Mashable, by 11:34 a.m. CNN:
-had served 13.9 million live video streams globally since 6amFacebook reported that as of 1:15 pm,
-had broken its all time total daily streaming record (from Election Day) of 5.3 million live streams.
1. 600,000 status updates were posted through the CNN.com Live Facebook feed
2. Facebook averaged 4,000 status updates per minute during the broadcast
3. 8,500 status updates were posted during the first minute of Obama’s speech
4. “Millions” of people logged into Facebook during the broadcast
3. Live streaming -- it failed according to Techcrunch (and my own experience):
Yesterday was supposed to be the day that live Web video streaming took on TV broadcasting. CNN.com alone served a record 21.3 million streams, with a peak of 1.3 million simultaneous streams. And Akamai reported a peak of 5.4 million simultaneous visitors per minute to the various news sites for which it hosts video, and more than 7 million simultaneous streams.I'd intended to watch online, but ended up in front of the living room tv, tweeting from my PDA.
With millions tuning in from their PCs to watch President Obama’s Inauguration speech, it was one of the biggest tests yet for live video streaming. But live streaming failed.
When it comes to big live events with millions of people watching at the same time, traditional TV broadcasters have nothing to worry about. Right now, the Internet breaks at about one million simultaneous streams. That is nothing when it comes to the audience size for historic events, or even a big football game.
4. Twitter didn't fail. It managed to keep up, sort up.
Twitter reported five times the normal tweet volume. Tweets containing “Obama” hit 35,000 per hour during his speech, and topped 150,000 for the day while @whitehouse_gov jumped on the scene with over 5,000 follows in the first day.
What aspects of the inauguration aren't people talking about? Stay tuned for Inaugural Oddities, part II.
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Morphing and change: 44 US Presidents - George Washington to Barack Obama
1/9/09
I find this video -- 44 US Presidents from George Washington to Barack Obama morphed to the music Boléro by Ravel -- absolutely mesmerizing.
Morphing is, in essence, movement. Paced to the hypnotic beat of Ravel's Bolero, this is a graceful (and thought provoking) example of what is still a relatively new form of of kinetic art. (There's a subsequent version of the same visuals set to Nirvana's Rape Me. Not as successful.)
At first look, the fluid morphing draws attention to features of our presidents' visages hitherto unnoticed (at least by me), (You'll find yourself thinking things like, "My god, his nose was HUGE" and "Well, HE could never have been elected in the age of television").
The video's final message -- "Change can happen" -- refers, of course, to the skin color of our newest president. But oddly enough, I found that the overall trajectory of the video led me to notice the similarities among these faces rather than differences.
For me, the visual differences between the faces of George W. Bush and Barack Obama are far less startling than the differences between, say, Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. Was there a morph that caught your eye that way?
It's a reminder that human beings tend to oversimplify identity. Yes, skin color is of signal importance in determining racial/cultural identity in America (as Obama's book makes clear). But it's certainly not the only or even the primary visual marker we could focus on.
Speaking genealogically, there are good reasons that Obama might look more like his 43 predecessors than you might expect. Obama and Bush are 11th cousins, sharing common ancestors Samuel Hinckley and Sarah Soole Hinckley of 17th century Massachusetts.
Obama's distant cousins also include Gerald Ford, Lyndon Johnson, Harry S. Truman, James Madison, Winston Churchill and Robert E. Lee. Scarily enough, Obama and Dick Cheney are 8th cousins, related through Mareen Duvall, a 17th century immigrant from France.
In terms of the visualization of information, morphing has tends to de-emphasize visual difference. If, on the other hand, you want an image that emphasizes Obama's differences from his predecessors, here it is:P.S. Want to try your hand at morphing? Try the online tool Morphthing.
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McSweeney's: White House Staff Memo in re: Jan. 20 transition
1/5/09
WHITE HOUSE STAFF MEMO REGARDING
THE TRANSITION ON JANUARY 20.
BY WENDY MOLYNEUX AND MIKE BOYLE
- - - -
To: allstaff@whitehouse.gov
Re: transition
All,
As you know, the date when we must be out of our offices is fast approaching. Here are a few helpful reminders in preparation for the changeover:
1. As of this morning, the red phone is again routed to the Kremlin, not Domino's. Please use a regular phone to place your lunch order.
2. The Monday Night Football Room has been converted back into the War Room. That is why the president is crying.
3. If Mr. Cheney has killed one or more members of your family, kindly recall that we gave you a Wii in exchange for your continued silence.
4. All staff is requested to sweep the residential rooms for hidden Bacardi bottles. Please give these bottles to the president, as he would like to throw them away personally.
5. So as to appear frugal, we will be burning $100 bills instead of $1,000 bills in the fireplaces.
6. Going forward, if you experience problems with the Xerox machine, please summon a technician—not a demon.
7. When the first lady is in her werewolf state, please do not let her out of her cage.
8. If Obama staff are in the White House prior to the transition, please refrain from eating babies in front of them.
9. Please remove skulls, scalps, and human bones from common areas.
10. A construction team will be closing up the hellmouth in the Oval Office. Please pardon our dust.
11. Please take home any leftovers from the fridge.
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Cokie Roberts tops poll for Most Inane Punditry of the 2008 campaign
12/22/08
"I know his grandmother lives in Hawaii and I know Hawaii is a state, but it has the look of him going off to some sort of foreign, exotic place ... He should be in Myrtle Beach, you know, if he's going to take a vacation at this time."Cokie Roberts, ABC's This Week, Aug. 10
By an overwhelming margin, Cokie Robert topped the polls in Media Matters for America's poll for Most Inane Punditry of the 2008 presidential campaign.
Roberts, NPR contributing senior news analyst and ABC political commentator, was critical of of then-Sen. Barack Obama for choosing Hawaii, the state of his birth, to take his August family vacation.
On the August 10 edition of ABC's This Week, Roberts criticized Obama for "going off this week to a vacation in Hawaii," which she said "does not make any sense whatsoever." Roberts repeated her criticism of Obama's vacation destination during the August 11 broadcast of NPR's Morning Edition, asserting that Obama's choice of Hawaii for his vacation "makes him seem a little bit more exotic."
"I hate to crush your buzz, but this is NOT a 'post-racist' society": Obama worries, part 2
12/12/08
About 3 weeks ago I wrote a blog post called Why am I so worried that Obama will be assassinated? Should I be? in which I confessed to being unable to stop myself from worrying that Obama might be assassinated.
Over on blogher the post began attracting more readers and comments (13!) from people who shared my worries and wanted to talk about why. Just yesterday *.Lee wrote:
Like many, in my lifetime, I never, ever thought that I would see a black man in the Oval Office. ... I couldn't be more pleased and proud as to what that says about America, but there is the shadow of worry in my heart as well. I didn't think that the country was 'ready' for a woman or a black man as President. I was wrong. ... And no doubt, as the old adage goes, a black man has to work twice as hard to be considered half as good... and no doubt, there will be those who will never be ready, and will never accept this historic event.
It's a thought I have every time I hear someone gush about how the election was "color-blind" and racism is dead, how this is a brave new world of equal opportunity and love among brothers.
Not where I live. And I'm pretty sure, not where you live, either.
I haven't wanted to dim the afterglow or undermine the enormity of Obama's achievement, but I'm considering making bumper stickers saying, "I hate to crush your buzz, but this is NOT a 'post-racist' society."
I'd be feeling better about race in America if Obama's election didn't feel like such an anomaly.
I'd feel better about the safety of the Obama family if at any time during the 44 years since the Civil Rights Act, we'd seen a steady increase in the number of African-Americans elected to serve in our federal government.
But in fact there have only been three black senators since the post-Reconstruction period -- and one of them was Barack Obama. (His current seat was once held by Carol Mosely Braun, the only African American woman to have served in the senate).
OK, it's partly an issue of demographics. To be elected by a statewide electorate, any African-American candidate needs a lot of white votes. Even in the states with the highest African-American population, black people are still outnumbered by white people by two to one.
But the problem is more than a shortage of numbers. It's a shortage of narratives. Our national imagination is bereft of stories and images of capable, competent African-American in public office. Oh, praiseworthy African-American politicians exist -- it's just that no one has been singing their praises.
Just after Ohio Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones died, I tuned into a local NPR station discussion of who might take over her congressional seat and how that might be decided. One caller in particular stuck in my mind, a citizen who had been sought out by WCPN's "The Sound of Ideas" (9/10/08).
"In this entire mix, somehow it is completely forgotten that there are roughly 200,000 voters out in the eastern fringe of the 11th district that are white voters," said Marta Kirsch of Pepper Pike. "What I'm not hearing, not seeing, it has never been broached, is the possibility of nominating a white person for this job. There seems a disequity in that and it's very uncomfortable for me."
Fmr. Rep. Louis Stokes fielded her question with more patience that I would have, pointing out that the unique demographics of Ohio's 11th District make it the only Ohio district to elect ever elect an African-American Congressperson -- the first was Stokes himself, and the second was Tubb Jones, his handpicked successor (Jones succeeded by Marcia Fudge). Otherwise, Stokes said, it is unlikely that any African-Americans would have been elected to Congress from Ohio.
After the show ended I was haunted by the bald-face bias in the caller's complaint. She clearly did not believe that an African-American congressperson would look after the interests of the white minority in his/her district. It wasn't clear whether she thought an African-American congressperson would be unwilling to act on behalf of white constituents or unable.
The ludicrous implication is that white politicans can be trusted to act in the best interest of African-American constituents, but not the converse. If white people perceive Obama as the exception is due entirely to the man's formidable knowledge of government, his intelligence and authority.
Still I'd rather be launching our first African-American First Family, with its 2 little girls, into a much more tolerant and trustworthy world.
Our country desperately needs more images of and stories about competent, intelligent, creative and commanding Africa-Americans -- in government and everywhere else. We need to elect them, and then we need to brag on them.
If a college-educated liberal Democrat has that sort of biased understanding of the impact of race on leadership ability, I shudder to think what her opposite number (poorly educated, conservative and/or Republican?) imagines when she get a mental picture of an African-American leader.
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The definition of "too clever by half": Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R) hangs up on Obama
12/1/08
There's no fooling this keenly vigilant member of the House Foreign Relations Committee. Forget diplomacy -- she's not even going to TALK to you until she's sure you know the secret handshake.
After all, imagine the calamity should a member of the US House of Representatives make a fool of herself on the radio. Compared with that horror, dissing the president-elect and his chief of staff is clearly the lesser evil.
I'm just wondering after that how "constructive" her subsequent discussion of foreign affairs with Obama could really have been
The BBC reports
 Ms Ros-Lehtinen thought the call was a prank |
US Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen thought she was being hoaxed when a man who sounded a lot like Barack Obama called her - so she hung up on him.In fact, the man at the other end of the line was indeed President-elect Obama himself...."I thought it was one of the radio stations in South Florida playing an incredible, elaborate, terrific prank on me," Ms Ros-Lehtinen told the Miami Herald newspaper....
Okay, then. Next time perhaps the President's office should just email her.Mr Obama was calling to congratulate her on her re-election, and to say that he looked forward to working with her ... on the House of Representatives Foreign Relations Committee.
After a minute or so, Ms Ros-Lehtinen cut Mr Obama off, telling him she was not fooled by the hoax ...
Shortly afterwards, Mr Obama's Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel called Ms Ros-Lehtinen back to persuade her to take the call, but she hung up on him as well.
It was only when Howard Berman, a fellow member of her committee, called her that she was persuaded to take the call.
...Mr Obama then called her back, and was amused by the incident ...The pair then had a constructive discussion about foreign affairs, according to the congresswoman.
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Why am I so worried that Obama will be assassinated? Should I be?
11/20/08
I saw this postcard in last Sunday's PostSecrets, and it struck a chord. Yes, somewhere high on my list of habitual worries is the fear that Obama will be assassinated even before he takes office.
I'm certainly not alone. Hillary Clinton raised the spectre of assassination in May when she seemed to suggest that she was staying in the Democratic primary race in case Obama, like Bobby Kennedy, was assassinated before the election.
"For many black supporters, there is a lot of anxiety that he will be killed, and it is on people's minds," Melissa Harris-Lacewell, a Princeton University professor of political science and contemporary black culture, told the Washington Times. "You can't make a prediction like this — like he has 'a 50 percent chance of getting shot.' But the greater his visibility and the greater his access to people, there is a danger," she said.
The New York Times reported "a hushed worry on the minds of many supporters of Senator Barack Obama, echoing in conversations from state to state, rally to rally: Will he be safe?" The Times quoted Obama supporters who were considering not attending rallies or voting for their candidate because they "feared that winning would put him in danger."
And when Obama celebrated his victory in Grant Park, Chicago, it was from behind bulletproof glass 12 ft. high and 3 inches thick. Michelle Obama, running mate Joe Biden and his wife Jill were under instructions not to stray from the line-of-fire protection zone outlined by lasers.
So is Obama actually at greater risk for assassination? Or do we just perceive him to be because we're still grappling with the unforgettable lesson of 1968, that our most promising leaders -- especially racial pioneers -- are destined to be martyrs?
Obama himself has consistently downplayed the security risk. “I made a decision to get into this race. I think anybody who decides to run for president recognizes that there are some risks involved, just like there are risks in anything,” Obama was quoted in The New York Times. On the campaign trail he typically told concerned supporters,“I’ve got the best protection in the world. So stop worrying.”
Obama also depredated comparisons with President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy which increased when Caroline Kennedy and Sen. Ted Kennedy joined him on the campaign trail.“I’m pretty familiar with the history,” Mr. Obama said. “Obviously, it was an incredible national trauma, but neither Bobby Kennedy nor Martin Luther King had Secret Service protection.”
Indeed, the assassination of Senator Kennedy in 1968 prompted Congress to authorize protection of major presidential and vice presidential candidates. (Source: New York Times)
I take some small comfort in the fact that Obama's Secret Service team has been personally as well as professionally committed to Obama's safety. The New York Times reported that although initially reluctant to accept Secret Service protection, "Obama had grown fond of the agents who surround him, inviting them to watch the Super Bowl at his home in Chicago and playing basketball with them on the days he awaits the results of an election."
The actions taken by the Secret Service suggests that in this political climate, there's no such thing as too careful. Among the more recentlnews from the agency:
Be good. And if you can't be good, be careful.Technorati tags:
McCain may (or may not) have been a maverick, but Obama is THE Renegade
11/11/08
According to the website Jossip.com ("the gossip's gossip sheet"), the Obama family has been assigned "The Best Code Names in History of White House."
The Obama family has already been given delightfully awesome nicknames, and by "nicknames" I mean code terms the Secret Service uses to refer to members of the family, although since this shit is already leaked on the Internet it's not so much a "code" now and just more of an "awesome nickname," so my original point stands.
• Barack Obama: Renegade
• Michelle Obama: Renaissance
• Malia Obama: Radiance
• Sasha Obama: Rosebud
They're darling names, aren't they?
Read Jossip.com's whole post here.
(hattip to MarketingProfs.)
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