The Obama Project@WindonWater.net

The Bahá’í calendar is more appropriately called the “Badi” or “wonderful” calendar. It is wonderful, because one of the Prophets of the Bahá’í faith designated, for each day, each month, and even each year, an Attribute of God – providing a personal reflection for every day. In the Bahá’í understanding attributes of God are also known as “Names of God” and so have the effect of invoking the Creator of all the Worlds. Hence, besides being a personal reflection, each birthday is a personal invocation.

The Badi calendar began in 1844, and consists of 19 months of 19 days each. It adds four or five intercalary days to complete the year. The largest unit of the Badi calendar is the Kull-i-Shay – a period of 361 years – which themselves are divided into 19 year divisions, each called a Váhid (unity).

Here is Barack Obama’s birthday translated into the Baha’i Calendar: http://www.geocities.com/queentiye74/BarackObamaBahaiBirthday.pdf

QT

Submitted to Change.gov: http://citizensbriefingbook.change.gov/ideas/viewIdea.apexp?id=087800000005At9

The United States needs to make an infrastructure investment in broadband – such that broadband access is available free to every citizen – far exceeding the limited bandwidths offered by our cable systems.

I blogged on this myself: http://www.windonwater.net/index.php?topic=179.0

I have a hard time imagining any so called diplomat being so ungracious – he comes across like a madman foaming at the mouth.

QT
More on Palestinian Territories
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Blogger Lee Stranahan, over at Bob Cesca’s blog, once posited the emergence of a new kind of political classification – “Obamacrats” he called them, and loosely defined them as people who had more in common with Obama’s outlook than with any particular wing of the Democratic party.

As a rule, this blog doesn’t deal specifically with politics, but this phenomenon is interesting enough that I’m willing to track it. John Heilemann, in an article in New York magazine, echoes Lee’s thoughts:

http://nymag.com/news/features/all-new/53380/index1.html

The political implications of this network are impossible to overstate. “They have basically invented their own party that is compatible with the Democratic Party but is bigger than the Democratic Party,” the Republican media savant Stuart Stevens, who helped to elect George W. Bush twice, argues. “Their e-mail list is more powerful than the DNC or RNC. In essence, Obama [was] elected as an independent with Democratic backing—like Bernie Sanders on steroids.”

(emphasis mine)

He”s making a larger point than that, of course. It’s a 4 page article, of which I’ve quoted less than one paragraph. But this core idea is one I think is worth watching.

QT

http://www.breakingchristiannews.com/articles/display_art.html?ID=6233

(Washington, DC)—In a first for presidential inaugurations, Congressman Paul Broun of Georgia joined the Reverends Rob Schenck of Faith and Action and Patrick J. Mahoney of the Christian Defense Coalition, both based in Washington, DC, in a prayer service inside the US Capitol today that included anointing the doorway President-Elect Barack Obama will pass through on his way to the platform to be sworn in as the 44th president of the United States on January 20.

I’ve embedded the video of the prayer service on the Wind on Water.net site: http://www.windonwater.net/index.php?topic=178.msg857#msg857

QT

Before Barack entered politics – before the birth of his first daughter, he and new wife Michelle, sat down for an interview with Le Monde. It’s an amazing piece, moving, intimate. It is a very nice story. Here from ABC’s Jake Tapper, are some of the excerpts:

President-elect Obama, who turned 35 that year, describes growing up with a single mother and absent father, and says, “I think that in a certain way, I’ve tried all my life to fabricate a family through stories, memories, friends or ideas. Michelle’s family life was different, very stable with two parents, a stay-at-home mom, a brother, a dog, that kind of thing. They’ve lived in the same house all their lives. And I think that in a certain way we complement each other, we represent two common models of family life in this country. One very stable and strong, another that frees itself from the constraint of a traditional family, travels, separates, is very mobile.”

“Sometimes, when we’re lying together,” he says, “I look at her and I feel dizzy with the realization that here is another distinct person from me, who has memories, origins, thoughts, feelings that are different from my own. That tension between familiarity and mystery meshes something strong between us. Even if one builds a life together based on trust, attentiveness and mutual support, I think that’s it’s important that a partner continues to surprise.”

“It’s not every day that a girl from the South Side of Chicago meets someone who speaks Indonesian, who has traveled and has seen many fascinating things,” she says. “It gave him a rather rare dimension in my higher middle-class work environment. Usually, these people are all cast from the same mold, but he came from elsewhere. He had a high level of conversation, while still remaining an average guy. He had an impressive curriculum, but was very down to earth and liked playing basketball. That’s what I found attractive in him. Our relationship was first a friendship. It took off from there.”

Mr. Obama seems more sure that he will, in fact, enter politics.

“What concerns me the most are children and the way they are treated,” he says about why he will pursue a career in public office. “As an African-American, I am very concerned about children from poor neighborhoods, the problems they deal with, the total lack of a stable environment to enable them to grow and develop.

There’s more. So do click and read.

QT

Every year or so we get another story about police brutality toward blacks.  Yet another unarmed man shot in the back – and the news media playing it really quietly. I’m doing my part to raise the profile:

Crossposted at Wind On Water.net

QT

Here’s Scientific American:

You’re not supposed to kick a guy when he’s down.

Of course, in reality, when he’s down is the perfect time to kick him. He’s closer to your feet, for one thing. But the particular kicking I have in mind should be thought of as tough love. These kicks at the freshly defeated McCain-Palin ticket, as I write in early November, are an attempt to knock some sense back into the group of my fellow Americans who seem determined to ignore or even denigrate valuable scientific research because it’s something outside the realm of Joe the Plumber’s daily activities.

Then came the coup de graceless. On October 24 vice presidential candidate Governor Sarah Palin took on what looked through her designer eyeglasses like silly pork-barrel spending by the U.S.: “Some of these pet projects, they really don’t make a whole lot of sense, and sometimes, these dollars, they go to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit-fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.” Never mind that fruit-fly research has brought us modern genetics and molecular biology. The particular earmark in question was some $211,000 to a laboratory in Montpelier, France, with long experience studying ways to protect olive trees from fruit flies. And the little pests are threatening California’s olive crop—with a retail value estimated in 2005 at $85 million. So this money might be looked at by anybody with business savvy as an investment. I kid you not. Oh, and strike three.

Strike three – as in, the article starts off with two strikes before the one I quoted.  I thought this was the most dramatic one, so its the one I picked.

We need to go a lot further though – we need to make it s that Joe the Plumber gets it why science is important.   And who better to bring that idea to the foreground than a president who is unafraid to be a spiritual human being AND a fact-based one?

QT

I’ve never seen this before.  Both a wonderful moment in history, and a gift of the YouTube age.

H/T Bob Cesca

BTW – the “Mr. President” that they are addressing there is not Bush, but Cheney, in his capacity as President of the Senate.

QT