Obama

Offered without comment: (h/t to MT)
The most intelligent thing I've read so far about Obama's speech Tuesday night, the one that included not a single mention of climate change, comes from Ezra Klein at the Washington Post. He's talking about the assumption that fear doesn't motivation people, only inspiration does. But that strikes me as depressing evidence of how unlikely we are to succeed. I simply don't believe you could've passed health care if you couldn't have talked about covering the uninsured, and I don't think stimulus would've worked without the spur of the unemployed. It's not that people wanted to hear about…
On the recent oil spill issue (possible disclaimer: I'm wondering about buying I bought some BP shares). I'm thinking about headlines like Obama Says He Would Fire BP CEO, Wants to Know 'Whose Ass to Kick'. [Update: both TB and H point out that this quote is taken well out of context; see the comments or http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/06/kicking-ass-white-house. So I have to partially retract my outrage. But only partially, because the main point still stands (who to blame?) as does the quote below -W] The real story here isn't hard to see: Obama is desperate not to get blamed for…
One more reason Barack Obama should change his slogan from "Change you can believe in" to "Token gestures and nice words so you can shut up for a while." Sorry, but he is a monumental and tragic disappointment who has squandered a truly historic oportunity. IMO
Some while ago - probably about 15 years ago - there was a good Steve Bell carton showing the US airforce dropping "ozone friendly" bombs on the ragheads (or the gooks, or the commies, or whoever the enemy was then). It was quite funny, unlike Obama, who isn't.
tags: obama, racism, America, Why Obama Is So Scary, humor, funny, satire, fucking hilarious, social commentary, cultural observation, Edward Current, streaming video Another one of my boyfriends, Edward Current, uploaded this video today, even though he filmed it in August 2009. It's another rip-snorter, but the last few seconds is the real capper .. those last few seconds might be the reason he waited to share it with us until now ..
(from here) By way of Maryn McKenna, we find that the Obama Administration has decided to massively cut the funding for the CDC's antimicrobial resistance and vaccination efforts. I thought this was the kind of anti-science bullshit that the Bush Administration did. From the IDSA (pdf): Under CDC's proposed budget, the agency's already severely strapped Antimicrobial Resistance budget would be cut dramatically by $8.6 million--roughly 50 percent. This vital program is necessary to help combat the rising crisis of drug resistance, a critical medical problem that the agency deems "one of the…
We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started... and know the place for the first time. -T.S. Eliot Yesterday, President Obama delivered his first State of the Union Address, and talked about a number of things that ranged from inspiring to disappointing. But one thing that didn't make it into the address was the rumor that NASA's Constellation program (including the Ares Rocket designed to launch crews) will lose their government funding. (Please note: what follows is my opinion, and I take responsibility for it.) If this actually…
I post some data analysis over at my other weblog. For example, today I looked at the relationship between food stamp usage and unemployment. The Census makes a lot of county-level data available, though it's often slapdash and disorganized. But using R I've constructed many data sets including most American counties. I don't post here much because I concentrate more on science in this space, and the 500 pixel width means that integrating scatter plots into a post seamlessly is pretty much impossible. But since readers of this weblog are much more liberal than over at GNXP Classic, I thought…
In the early days of the last US elections, Hillary Clinton's campaign was accused of deliberately darkening Barack Obama's skin in a TV ad. The implication was that by highlighting Obama's "blackness", Clinton's camp was trying to exploit negative associations that voters might have with darker skin. But you don't need editing software to do that - a fascinating new study suggest that people literally change the way they see a mixed-race politician, depending on whether the candidate represents their own political views. Liberal American students tend to think that lighter photos of Barack…
tags: satire, comedy, humor, president obama, teleprompter, ONN, Onion News Network, streaming video Imagine the crisis that occurred when President Obama's teleprompter unexpectedly stopped functioning during a family dinner. Fortunately, he is capable of remembering his script, unlike the moron who was in office one year ago.... Obama's Home Teleprompter Malfunctions During Family Dinner
People deride Americans for being politically sloppy thinkers, and for having short memories. This derision may be well deserved, but the flakiness of American citizens in relation to politics is perhaps easily explained. We are trained by the press to be airheads. President Barack Obama donned some of the strongest coat tails of any president in modern history, and despite the manufactured dissent that has been rather well executed by the Incredible Shrinking Party of No, his approval ratings stand at higher than usual for any president one year after election. Despite the expenditure of…
tags: Obama family, miserable Americans, comedy, humor, satire, funny, ONN, Onion News Network, streaming video This daring news interview with the nations' top thinkers comes right out and says what we've all mumbled under our breath to ourselves in the privacy of the unemployment line: the Obamas are too damned happy! They're so happy that it's downright unAmerican!
Sorry, I generally like the guy, and I can't quite yet let go of all my hopes, audacious or not, but Barak Obama has not done anything to deserve that yet.
This is DJ Michelangelo Signorile's interview with Pastor Steven L. Anderson of the Faithful Word Baptist Church in Temple, AZ. In this interview, the pastor proclaims that he prays for President Obama to die, calls for the execution of gays and says it is not be murder if a group of gays and lesbians were gunned down with a machine gun, or if the president were assassinated. Further, this man of god does not believe the murder of Dr. George Tiller was murder. Not only that, but this man then went on to attack his (gay) interviewer insisting he must be "molesting children" and saying that he…
YOU LIE!!!! Once again, Republicans have been caught at their own game. You all know there was a big shindig in DC on September 12th to protest the blackness of our president, the liberalosity of our congress, the intelligence of the new policies such as Cash for Clunkers and Saving the Economy's Ass and so on. Well conservative yahoos have been passing around, blogging, twittering, and jerking off to a photograph showing a ZILLION people at the Washington Mall. Clearly this photograph shows the BIGGEST gathering of Amerkan Cit-sins EVAH overwhelmingly indicating that The People ...…
This is really, really funny: Well, actually, it's not even a little funny... ... Well, actually, the punchline is the funniest thing I've see yet this year. I can hardly type I'm laughing so hard. Hat Tip Science Lover
tags: Obama, health care, AFL-CIO, Labor Day, politics, streaming video This is a clip of President Barack Obama speaking at the annual AFL-CIO Labor Day Picnic. In this clip he is addressing the cynics and naysayers regarding healthcare reform. If I am not mistaken, being poor, unemployed or homeless are felonies in the eyes of the GOP, so those Americans who dare commit such horrible crimes deserve nothing less than death.
tags: Obama, education, school, public school, politics, streaming video Nearly 24 hours ago, President Obama delivered a national address to students across the country to encourage them to work hard on their education. This speech, which ignited controversy among this nation's political conservatives and racists, was delivered to a group of students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, VA.
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not dead. Instead I've been working hard as a new surgical intern and sadly not finding the time to write for the denialism blog. However, now more than ever, it seems that we need to talk about the problem of denialism. Two major new issues for denialism have cropped up, and both are major new forms of political denialism. The first, I'll broadly describe as Obama-denialism. Obama is a muslim, Obama was not born in the US, there is a giant conspiracy involving the Hawaii Secretary of State, the Democratic Party and muslims worldwide to take over the…