Category: Obama Administration
Pull the Plug, Mr. Murdoch
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| Categories: News, Talk Radio, cabletelevison, Obama Administration, media policy, healthcare policy Link: http://gawker.com/5332558/whats-bad-for-the-gop-is-good-for-fox-news
Rupert Murdoch
Chair and CEO
The News Corporation
1211 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10036
Dear Mr. Murdoch:
The speech President Obama gave about health care last night was one of his best to my ears. It has been a long summer for us progressives, and some of us had begun to wonder if the candidate we worked so hard to elect had somehow lost his moxie or, in the words of New York Times columnist Frank Rich, we had been punked.
Since our politics spring from very different experiences, I have no idea how you view the president’s performance. But since you gave him your endorsement, I assume you saw something in the man that speaks of greatness.
Last night’s speech demonstrated for me that Obama still understands that change must come, and it must come under his watch. But I must confess that when South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson shouted “You lie,” to the president’s claim that health care reform would not extend coverage to undocumented immigrants, I held my breath while the president took his measure of the man and stood his ground.
Our Muslim Roots
I haven’t yet heard President Obama’s address to the Muslim world from start to finish. Instead, I caught sound bites and longer passages on the radio of a car I was driving yesterday across mountainous terrain. What I pieced together from three different public radio stations was refreshingly candid and at the same time sensitive to all.
As with his earlier address on race in America while still a candidate for election, the president treads where no other U.S. politician has dared to go. Unlike other presidents, Obama can speak of Islam from the familiarity of having lived in the world’s largest Muslim nation (Indonesia) and his paternal connections to the religion in Kenya.
Isn't it cinematic?
| Categories: Barack Obama, Economics, Obama Administration, Education Funding, gay marriage, Entertainment I’m wondering—was I the only blogger to watch both the Academy Awards and the president’s prequel State of the Union Address? Two different worlds, of course, but often they conflate in the mind of this electronic onlooker, especially when you throw in the Obama Administration’s first state dinner with all those fancy gowns.
My reaction when I heard about timing of the dinner was, “They’re going to miss the Oscars.”
Beyond Slogans
| Categories: Bill Clinton, John McCain, Al Gore, Economics, Pennsylvania, Obama Administration, Education Funding It’s not the New Deal. Or the New Frontier. Or the Great Society. Or, heaven help us, the Reagan Revolution. But I’m hoping after last night’s news conference, the passage of a stimulus package in the Senate and today’s rollout of a new TARP bailout that this is the Real Deal—a viable plan to restore some rationality to our economic life together as a nation.
Perhaps after the debacle of the last presidency it’s too easy to give President Obama high marks for engaging in a fruitful discussion of economics, foreign policy and, yes, even A-Rod’s steroid use. (He’s concerned about the message it sends to children.) For showing his understanding of the dynamics of Congressional politics, for using one of his vice president’s gaffes to make a point that no program’s perfect. This give and take went on for a full hour before he thanked the media and a heavy foot could be heard coming down from the podium as he strode off.
A Not-so-great Depression
| Categories: President Reagan, President Carter, Economics, Obama Administration If bound and published, the stories of the early part of my parents’ marriage might be titled “Tales of the Great Depression.” Like the dreams of most people, theirs were thrown to the wind when the economy fell apart.
The crash of 1929 cost my mother her scholarship to a Chicago conservatory, and she went home to Alabama a year short of graduation. “If I hadn’t met your daddy, I’d have starved to death,” she liked to say. She had been living in a boarding house and wringing out a living teaching piano lessons when someone fixed her up with a young pharmacist from Georgia.
Not that pharmacy was his first choice. Daddy had dreamed of a career in professional baseball, and he would have much preferred the outfield to standing behind the counter in his father’s store. But the economy dictated a practical profession, one to which he turned out to be well-suited.
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