The Obama Project@WindonWater.net

I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting for him to say exactly this…. my favorite parts highlighted. You can read the entirety of the letter here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/04/AR2009020403174.html?nav=rss_opinion%2Fcolumns

In recent days, there have been misguided criticisms of this plan that echo the failed theories that helped lead us into this crisis — the notion that tax cuts alone will solve all our problems; that we can meet our enormous tests with half-steps and piecemeal measures; that we can ignore fundamental challenges such as energy independence and the high cost of health care and still expect our economy and our country to thrive.

I reject these theories, and so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change. They know that we have tried it those ways for too long. And because we have, our health-care costs still rise faster than inflation. Our dependence on foreign oil still threatens our economy and our security. Our children still study in schools that put them at a disadvantage. We’ve seen the tragic consequences when our bridges crumble and our levees fail.

Every day, our economy gets sicker — and the time for a remedy that puts Americans back to work, jump-starts our economy and invests in lasting growth is now.

Now is the time to protect health insurance for the more than 8 million Americans at risk of losing their coverage and to computerize the health-care records of every American within five years, saving billions of dollars and countless lives in the process.

Now is the time to save billions by making 2 million homes and 75 percent of federal buildings more energy-efficient, and to double our capacity to generate alternative sources of energy within three years.

Now is the time to give our children every advantage they need to compete by upgrading 10,000 schools with state-of-the-art classrooms, libraries and labs; by training our teachers in math and science; and by bringing the dream of a college education within reach for millions of Americans.

And now is the time to create the jobs that remake America for the 21st century by rebuilding aging roads, bridges and levees; designing a smart electrical grid; and connecting every corner of the country to the information superhighway.

These are the actions Americans expect us to take without delay. They’re patient enough to know that our economic recovery will be measured in years, not months. But they have no patience for the same old partisan gridlock that stands in the way of action while our economy continues to slide.

Seriously – it’s going to be a long, unpleasant 4 years if our discourse can’t elevate past “oh look! Obama did something that Bush did and liberals whined about! Let’s go kick some liberals in the teeth” versus “Oh look! obama did something better than Bush did! Let’s go rub it into the faces of the conservatives that Bush lost!”

There are plenty of things worthwhile talking about – and we are all going to have our differing points of view. For instance – I’m not convinced that there’s any way at all for Obama supporters and liberals (not all the same thing) to see eye to eye on the recovery package (conservatives want more tax cuts, liberals want more spending, and depending if they are Obama supporters specifically, or liberals generally, there may be differences on kinds of spending desired). But that’s an ideological difference worth having, without claiming a priori, that anyone doing it differently than how your ideology dictates, is “screwing everything up.” Etc.

As someone who hasn’t been on the liberal side of the fence until Obama became my favorite candidate, this back and forth is wearying, depressing, and really uninviting. Personally – as an Obama supporter, I am genuinely appreciative of the President’s effort to change the tone of dialogue.

Is this what we’ve been reduced to? Years of Clinton/Bush fighting has reduced us to being fundamentally incapable of civil discourse – only able to receive news that suits our own ideas, incapable of even giving real respect to one another? Seems to me the bible spoke about this tendency in people to seek only what they want to hear. I’m sure the Apostle Paul was speaking on more spiritual matters when he said in 2nd Timothy

4:3 For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears;

4:4 And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.

… but I’m also sure that spiritual conditions affect every other condition. This way we have of dealing with one another is unhealthy, a sickness, no less so than the unhealthy greed and lack of discipline/self-restraint that landed us into this economic mess. If we (liberals/Obama supporters) are angry with Bush for not listening to opposing points of view, how much more should we be doing better? And if we (conservatives) are angry for hypocritical posturing just to pile on to a beleaguered presidency, how much more should we avoid continuing in the same vein? In other words – must we continue this dance? No one seems to be having fun with it – I certainly am not.

Apologies for the judgmental tone of this post, but I mean every word of it, just the same.

QT

Remember that saying? That was early hip hop/r & b. Don’t know if white people talked about the flip side – I think the mainstream term was “B” side, from which you also got “B” movies (I think). Anyway…

I quoted on this blog and elsewhere, with some bemusement, about some whites who were clearly either racist, ignorant, or both, but who were voting for Barack Obama. I recalled with a good deal of approval, the Ohio man who thought Obama was a muslim, but was leaning toward voting for him anyway. (And this was BEFORE the financial meltdown!) I quoted somewhere the couple who proudly declared that they were “voting for the n*gg*r”. Change comes slow – and people are who they are. I appreciated all the stories like that. These, after all, are the white folks who won’t be easily integrated – but who will, it seems, be able to live comfortably in a pluralistic world, just the same.

OK, but that’s me looking at white people. What’s on the flip side? As is always true – there is no equivalence here – there is no racism against whites in this video – but having said that – this video is not safe for work…

Jay-Z My President is black Remix LIVE 1-18-09 from pleasedontstare.com on Vimeo.

H/T Ta Nehisi Coates

QT

A wonderful retrospective from Mark Schmitt

Those speeches of last winter and spring make up probably the most sustained, successful, and memorable verbal performance in American politics since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats or perhaps since Abraham Lincoln. Having worked as a speechwriter, it was astonishing to see one man, in the midst of intense, competitive campaign activity, deliver so many superb and deeply personal speeches, something few politicians manage to do more than once or twice a year. Barack Obama is president because of those speeches, something that cannot be said of any president before him in the television age, and few before that. For months it seemed the strongest case against Obama was that his politics consisted of “just words.”

***
And yet, the president has moved on. Through the course of the campaign, his words slowly came down to earth, from inspiring and cocky to the mundane and practical. As the “gathering clouds” of the economic crisis became too dark to ignore, he accelerated his move from inspiration to work. His words no longer serve the purpose of pulling us up but of naming and giving order to the work to be done: roads, the electric grid, ending torture, restoring America’s place in the world.

The speeches are over. We’ll miss them. What a joy it was to live through that period, and we can only hope that its light shines on the presidency it gave birth to.

Mark gives voice to a nagging sense that has been tugging on me; fully answering why I found Obama’s Inaugural speech pitch perfect, while so many found it flat. The days of Obama’s soaring speeches are over – and the national stage may not give him any further opportunities to soar as he had. We now must attune our ears to the stirring sound of a call to service, to hard work, to sacrifice. We have a miry sludge to march through – and at every step we will march one plodding step at a time. This isn’t pretty, and the words to push us through will likewise will seldom be so.

It was a wonderful time, and I hope to own a dvd of those amazing speeches that got us this far. But I think for the next four years, we will have to adjust to a much more down to earth Presidential tone.

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

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